This went on for some time and was like a kind of game between them, like those games where something in the tone of voice identifies an object. I realise now that Mister Bowles was seeking, as usual, to impose himself on us and on the studio, establish his way of seeing things as the dominant one, the essential reality. His way of responding to the unfamiliar and daunting. On this occasion he was clearly failing. He could find no way of looking at this clutter of objects, no governing principle to account for their presence there – and he is a man who needs governing principles, I think, more than most. (Now, with the night silent beyond my shutters, in my area of inviolate lamplight, I remember again the stealthy hush in his room, the head, the revolver, the notebook. A governing principle there too, if I can find it.)
The performance was brought to an end by Lydia asking if we would like a drink. There was German wine or Greek brandy. We both asked for wine. All the time Lydia was out of the room, Mister Bowles was moving restlessly about. He made some desultory remarks to me but my mind was not on his words. I noted the movements of his body, stiff, not ungraceful exactly, but inhibited, as if he felt a need for more room. His manner of touching things too was strange, unduly tentative. It was as though they might change texture or shape in his hands. It was not mere clumsiness, nor did it seem like that contained violence which often gives awkwardness to men's movements. It came to me then, Excellency, that Mister Bowles is not really at home in the world. It came to me with the force of a revelation. We are alike. I knew it from the beginning. Outwardly so dissimilar, yet we are deeply alike. So strong was this feeling that I experienced a violation, almost, of my own privacy and separateness. Doubtless we have come to it by different roads. In my case it is the trade of informing which has lost me the world. The role of informer severs in time all bonds. All action peters out except observing, interpreting. I am like a spent swimmer whose eyes and mind still register everything -everything, hue of sky, refractions and reflections of the water, line of the horizon – but who knows, throughout all this, that he is in the wrong element. (I can look downwards, too, to the deep place where I shall presently drown.)
Mister Bowles has lost the world too, by courses which I can only guess at. He has lost, or perhaps he never had, essential familiarity with things, ease, custom. So of course he simulates, but badly, and this gives him a strange sort of dignity, power even, he imposes himself. Like a critical visitor. Or like a god, a minor god. A god would not, after all, move at ease among the inhabitants and artefacts of this world. He would be characterised by just this kind of hampered grace.
Lydia came back with the wine, in tall glasses. I sipped mine, still absorbed in my pure perception of Mister Bowles. He was standing with Lydia now. She was showing him the painting on the easel. They were close together, and had obviously ceased to be aware of me. I went through into the living-room, where I had earlier noticed some grapes in a bowl on the sideboard. A handful of these I took to the window, and I stood there eating, looking out.
From here I could look inland, over the double row of acacia trees lining the avenue, to the white climbing houses of the town and the summits of Maron and Amphissa. Leros beyond, far off, but glowing clear in the morning light. The town, the whole island, was present to my mind, held in the protracted pang of its existence. For a few moments, standing there, my heart expanded with happiness. The cold wine, the sweet grapes, the indifferent beauty of the world, my recent apercue about Mister Bowles, all combined to reconcile me. My clammy fears receded. I felt tenderness for those two standing together in the next room. More than tenderness. Love, Excellency. Love for them severally and together. And for all the people on the island, whatever the race or creed. As I finished the grapes there were tears in my eyes. I found a small piece of halva on the sideboard and paused briefly at the door to eat it, before returning to the studio.
'You have captured,' I heard Mister Bowles saying gravely, 'the very essence of the landscape there.'
They were still standing before Lydia 's painting. I approached and looked closely at it again: white houses on the lower hillside, the Byzantine dome of Aghios Giorgos, cloaked shepherds, goats; the whole bathed in calmly radiant light.
'Yes, by Jove, you have caught it,' Mister Bowles said, and it was true. Lydia had secured the landscape as effectively as if in some invisible noose. Or net. As always she had been faithful to the form and substance of things. As always she had failed to register what for me is the essence: the effects of a light so clear that it verges on the hallucinatory, cancelling those very perspectives that Lydia works so hard to achieve; the constant, half-surprised, half-acquiescent stirring of landscape and people into myth.
'I must confess,' Mister Bowles said, 'that I like paintings that grapple squarely with reality. Not try to dodge it, you know.'
Lydia did not reply at once. She is not, after all, accustomed to talking about painting in terms of a wrestling match or a scrummage on the rugby field. Again I have the feeling that the Englishman's words belie him in some way. Is he simply a moralist, or does this praise of robust realism mask a sensibility he feels to be discreditable, unmanly?
'Well,' Lydia said, 'I believe myself that art should stay close to nature. That is the source of everything. These people in Paris now, Matisse and the Fauves, you know, they are causing quite a stir at the moment, but it is only a succès de scandale, it will fizzle out.'
'I am not familiar with them,' Mister Bowles said.
'Colour for colour's sake,' Lydia said. 'You can't found a movement on that.'
Mister Bowles nodded. His face expressed disapproval of these undisciplined Parisians. 'Balance,' he said. 'Self-control. I have always understood these things to be fundamental. They are the classical virtues.'
'Of course,' Lydia said, 'mere imitation is not… You must try to seize the essential nature of things, but the way is through attention to what is there, what is out there.' She made a gesture towards the window.
Have you noticed, Excellency? Capture. Catch. Grapple. Seize. It is astonishing. Neither of them can talk about art for two minutes without using some such word. Odd, in extolling the classical virtues of balance and moderation, and opposing the exuberance of the colourists, odd that they should themselves use such frankly violent terms, words denoting assault and ravishment. I deal in reality myself, Excellency. Reality and illusion, their intimate blending. I have not attempted to disguise from Your Excellency that my reports have not been entirely factual. But my effects are patiently and lovingly contrived – not imposed. To talk about truth as something that can be marched up to and arrested seems solemnly mad to me. Like one of your gendarmes trying to take Proteus into custody. You are left with something in your hands but not what you wanted. Lydia grasps her subjects too firmly, nothing has freedom, there is no potential for movement or change. The spectator also is immobilised.
The violent apprehension of reality… We were still standing in front of the painting. Light flooded over us and over the room, evenly, impartially. Light filled my mind, drained, filled. The painting before me, a tract of land, an area of the mind, experience 'seized' for ever, no possibility of change; Mister Bowles, immobilised at last in this room of disturbing multiplicity, himself another objet trouvé; myself transfixed among unreadable signs and portents; and Lydia, Circe with the wand of her will, capturing our essences, stilling us for ever in these arbitrary shapes. Homeric shadows touched my mind. As before I felt the need to break out, assert autonomy of movement, speech. I said, 'You do not heighten reality by idealising it, Lydia, if that is what you mean. And I suspect it is. It is idealisation that does violence, not experiment, because it consumes its subject. It is dangerous in all departments. In love, in art, in politics. Conscious distortion is better.'