When I wakened, the sun was setting and the clearing was swimming in red light and rusty violet shadows. The columns burned as if they were internally on fire, holding the core of me sunset, it appeared, some while after the sky had cooled and the stars became visible, a trick of architectural positioning that won my awe and envy. I was making a mental note to ask her who had been responsible for the columns, and jumped when she spoke to me, softly and hoarsely, almost seductively, from just behind my chair-thereby promptly making me forget to ask any such thing.
"Come into me house, now. We will dine soon."
I got up, saying something lame about imposing on her, though we were far beyond that stage.
"Always," she said to me, "you apologise. There is no imposition. You will be gone tomorrow."
How do you know? 1 nearly inquired, but prevented myself. What guarantee? Even if the magic food did not change roe into a swine, perhaps my poisoned dead body would be carried from the feast and cast into the sea, gone, well and truly, to Poseidon's fishes. You see. I did not trust her, even though 1 was somewhat in love with her. The element of her danger-for she was dangerous in some obscure way-may well have contributed to her attraction.
We went into me house, which in itself alerted me. I had forgotten a great curiosity I had had to look inside it. There was a shadowy unlit entrance hall, a sort of Roman atrium of a thing. Then we passed, she leading, into a small salon that took my breath away. It was lined, all over, floor, ceiling, walls, with the sea-green marble the columns were made of.
Whether in good taste or bad I am not qualified to say, but the effect, instantaneous and utter, was of being beneath me sea. Smoky oil lamps of a very beautiful Art Nouveau design hung from the profundity of the green ceiling, lighting the dreamlike swirls and oceanic variations of the marble, so they seemed to breathe, definitely to move, like nothing else but waves. Shoes on that floor would have squeaked or clattered unbearably, but I was barefoot, and now so was she.
A mahogany table, with a modest placing for eight, stood centrally. Only one place was laid.
I looked at it. and she said,
"I do not dine, but that will not prevent you."
An order. I considered vampires, idly, but mainly I was subject to an infantile annoyance. I had looked for the subtraction of the mask when she ate. without quite realizing it, and now this made me very conscious of the mask for the first time since I had orginally seen it.
We seated ourselves, she two places away from me. And I began to feel nervous. To eat this meal while she watched me did not appeal. And now the idea of the mask. unconsidered all morning, all afternoon, stole over me like an incoming tide.
Inevitably, I had not dressed for dinner, having no means, but she had changed her clothes, and was now wearing a high-collared long grey gown, her mother's again, no doubt It had the fragile look of age. but was very feminine and appealing for all that. Above it, the mask now reared, stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.
The mask. What on earth was I going to do, leered at by the myopic soulless face which had suddenly assumed such disastrous importance.
Kleia waddled in with the dishes. I cannot recall the meal, save that it was spicey, and mostly vegetable. The wine came too, and I drank it. As I drank the wine, I began to consider seriously, for the first time (which seems very curious indeed to me now), the reason for the mask. What did it hide? A scar, a birthmark? I drank her wine, and I saw myself snatch off the mask, take in the disfigurement, unquelled, and behold the painful gratitude in her eyes as she watched me. 1 would inform her of the genius of surgeons. She would repeat, she had no money. I would promise to pay for the operation.
Suddenly she startled me by saying: "Do you believe that we have lived before?"
I looked in my glass, that fount of wisdom and possibility, and said, "It seems as sensible a proposition as any of the 3thers I've ever heard."
I fancied she smiled to herself, and do not know why I thought that; I know now I was wrong.
Her accent had thickened and distorted further when she said,
"I rather hope that I have lived before. 1 could wish to think I may live again."
"To compensate for this life?" I said brutishly. 1 had not needed to be so obvious when already I had been given the implication on a salver.
"Yes. To compensate for this."
I downed all the wisdom and possibility left in my glass, swallowed an extra couple of times, and said, "Are you going to tell me why you wear a mask?"
As soon as I said it, I grasped that I was drunk. Nor was it a pleasant drunkenness. I did not like the demanding tone 1 had taken with her. but I was angry at having allowed the game to go on for so long. I had no knowledge of the rules, or pretended I had not. And I could not stop myself. When she did not reply, I added on a note of ghastly banter, "Or shall I guess?"
She was still, seeming very composed. Had this scene been enacted before? Finally she said, "I would suppose you do guess it is to conceal something that I wear it."
"Something you imagine worth concealing, which, perhaps, isn't."
That was the stilted fanfare of bravado. I had braced myself, flushed with such stupid confidence.
"Why not," I said, and I grow cold when I remember how I spoke to her, "take the damn tiling off. Take off die mask, and drink a glass of wine with me."
A pause. Then, "No," she said.
Her voice was level and calm. There was neither eagerness nor fear in it.
"Go on," I said, the drunk not getting his way, aware (oh God) he could get it by the power of his intention alone,
"please. You're an astounding woman. You're like this island. A fascinating mystery. But I've seen the island. Let me see you."
"No," she said.
I started to feel, even through the wine, that I had made an indecent suggestion to her, and this, along with the awful cliches. 1 was bringing out, increased my anger and my discomfort.
"For Heaven's sake," I said. "Do you know what they call you on Daphaeu?"
"Yes."
"This is absurd. You're frightened-"
"No. I am not afraid."
"Afraid. Afraid to let me see. But maybe I can help you."
"No. You cannot help me."
"How can you be sure?"
She turned in her chair, and all the way to face me with the mask. Behind her, everywhere about her, the green marble dazzled.
"If you know," she said, "what I am called on Daphaeu, are you not uneasy as to what you may see?"
"Jesus. Mythology and superstition and ignorance. I assure you, I won't turn to stone."
"It is I," she said quietly, "who have done that."
Something about the phrase, the way in which she said it, chilled me. I put down my glass, and in that instant, her hands went to the sides of the mask and her fingers worked at some complicated strap arrangement which her hair had covered.
"Good," I said, "good. I'm glad-"
But I faltered over it. The cold night sea seemed to fill my veins where the warm red wine had been- I had been heroic and sure and bold, the stuff of celluloid. But now I had my way, with hardly any preliminary, what would I see? And then she drew the plastic away and I saw.
I sat there, and then I stood up. The reflex was violent, and me chair scraped over the marble with an unbearable noise.
There are occasions, though rare, when the human mind grows blank of all thought. 1 had no thought as I looked at her. Even now, I can evoke those long, long empty seconds, that lapse of time. I recollect only the briefest confusion, when I believe she still played some kind of hideous game, that what I witnessed was a product of her decision and her will, a gesture- After all, Pitos had done this very thing to illustrate and endorse his argument, produced this very expression, the eyes bursting from the head, the jaw rigidly outthrust, the tendons in the neck straining, the mouth in the grimace of a frozen, agonised scream, the teeth visible, the tongue slightly protruding. The gorgon's face on the jar or the oven. The face so ugly, so demented, so terrible, it could petrify.