In spite of this drawback, however, Spanish Harbor is a pleasant place, and the strangers continue to come. There is no hotel, but all round the bay stand tall old houses of white adobe, houses that turn their backs to the street and their windows to the sea; and these houses the strangers rent. The water in the bay is a clear jade color, very different from the deep true Mediterranean to be seen from the roof-tops; but though many of the English bathe there daily, they all employ in addition a shallow tin pan. What the other inhabitants do is not so certain; quite possibly they just have a sponge-down; but then the islander, as young Foley observed, is not like your Anglo-Saxon.
It was a remark he made frequently, and there was nothing odd in that. But what was exceedingly odd was the fact that, unlike most of his compatriots, Maurice Foley spoke not in sorrow, but in admiration. He admired the islanders’ indolence, their lack of public spirit; he approved beyond measure their extremely individual attitude towards the sanctity of human life, which indeed they seemed to create and to destroy with equal insouciance; he liked their indifference to the suffering of animals. All that, he said, was excellent. It gave him great pleasure, he said, as he looked out over the island in the evening cool, to reflect that not one single inhabitant thereof was thinking about municipal reform.
To reflections such as these, and to very many others, the English on Spanish Island lent first a polite, then a perfunctory ear. They had their own affairs to attend to, and most of the men were over 35. At that age, however agreeable the reminder of one’s own salad days, one does not wish to re-live them. So Cotterill offered no objections, but simply returned to his painting, and the other two artists did likewise. There were always artists at Spanish Harbor, just as there were always one or two couples politely supposed to be on honeymoon. For the colony, though without either a lending library or an English tea-room, had certain compensatory advantages. It was widely tolerant. You took one of the white houses and did as you pleased in it. No one asked questions. In all the island only four persons played bridge. They were originally only three, and the fourth had to be specially imported. On Sunday mornings, when business was slack, Cotterill sometimes played draughts with the waiter at the big café, and at the other café, the little one, where business was slack all the week round, a tall Scot called MacIntyre played chess with the proprietor. For exercise one swam, and at night, on the stone quay, the islanders sometimes danced to the music of a concertina.
One other point must be mentioned. Wherever, between an island and the mainland, a steamer plies daily, the inhabitants of the island will gather on the jetty to watch her come in; but at Spanish Harbor, where the boat calls only twice a week, this is not so. Not a step — such is the strength of their indolence — not a step do the islanders stir. And thus it happened that the first time Cotterill saw the Foleys was not till the Sunday after their arrival, when he and the waiter were sitting over their draughts at one of the café tables. The Foleys approached, wavered, and finally sat down, so that the game had to be suspended and Cotterill was annoyed. Most people at Spanish Harbor would have had the manners to wait...
They were brother and sister, the boy about twenty-two, the girl perhaps five years older. They had the same nose and forehead, the same short upper lip; but the difference in coloring was so startling that no one would have thought of calling them alike. Maurice Foley was almost an albino; his hair, of the palest ash-blond, showed perceptibly lighter than the skin of his temples. Nor was this in any way due to sunburn; on the contrary, his skin, exceptionally fair and smooth, looked as though it would flush easily but tan scarcely at all. His sister was dark. Dark hair, dark eyes, a clear brown complexion. With a little more color, thought Cotterill, she might have been lovely. And as the thought passed through his mind, she reached up and pulled towards her a spray of climbing geranium, so that the dark scarlet petals lay close against her cheek; and Cotterill’s thought was justified. Then her brother spoke, she let the branch spring back, and a moment later their drinks appeared.
It does not take long, on Spanish Island, for the original inhabitants to know all, or all they want to know, about any newcomer. In the course of the next few days it was rapidly established that Miss Foley’s name was Diana, that she and her brother had no other relations, and that they were traveling about Europe (as they had traveled for the last three years) in search of a climate which should at once soothe Maurice’s nerves and stimulate his genius. For Maurice Foley was a poet; he had published two books of verse and a lyric tragedy. No one on Spanish Island had ever heard of them, but he himself said they were good. (The Scotsman MacIntyre, on the other hand, to whom Miss Foley lent the works, said they were bad; but then MacIntyre had been brought up on Burns, with a side-glance towards Shakespeare.) There was also, just to complete the picture, a rumor of an unhappy love affair, but whether Diana’s or Maurice’s nobody seemed to know.
Like all other visitors, the Foleys took a tall white house with a terrace over the bay. In addition to the terrace, it had a garden of orange trees, for it was one of the oldest on the island; and here, with the help of a very old woman called Carmena, Diana Foley set up house. She dusted the big bare rooms, and filled them with flowers; she went daily to the market (the old woman attending) and bought figs and grapes and peculiar-looking fishes. It was charming to see her; she moved down the line of stalls with such grave attention, now pausing to consult with Carmena, now hurrying on after a distant patch of color, and all the while trying to hide her pleasure, to look matronly and severe, so that the stall-holders should not cheat her. They did cheat her, of course, but with a charm almost equal to her own — dropping a spray of pink geranium on the short-weight olives, or gratuitously plucking an aged but still sinewy hen. Miss Foley didn’t care. She had eaten table d’hôte for three years on end, and her fingers itched for a frying pan.
In these mild pleasures Maurice naturally took no part. His life was full already. In the morning he wrote poetry, in the afternoon took his siesta, and at night wandered out to mingle with the islanders. He had, it will be remembered, a very high regard for them; but the sentiment was not reciprocated. The islanders, so far as they admired anything, admired physical beauty, physical strength, and the ability to carry liquor. They liked Cotterill, for example, because he could drink all day and walk straight in the evening. They liked MacIntyre for his diving, and Diana Foley for her elegance. But Maurice Foley had albino hair and boneless limbs; after two glasses of wine he began to chatter like a monkey; and, worst of all, he feared the water. He bathed sometimes, but he could not swim. So the islanders watched him with veiled contemptuous glances, and when he tried to address them feigned either deafness or imbecility.
But Maurice’s sensibility was purely subjective. He continued undismayed, and whenever there was dancing always went down to the bay. He fell in, of course, and was vigorously fished out; but though the profits were inordinate (his sister, in a panic, disbursing nearly five pounds), the islanders were scarcely pleased at all. They disapproved of people who fell in during the dancing; the time for rescues was in the morning, when there was nothing to be interrupted; and they were also repelled by the limp and pallid appearance presented by the rescued. Another person who was not pleased was Cotterill. Miss Foley’s largesse, in its unexampled prodigality, had completely upset his statistics.