Doctor Hogan was the first to see me. 'Hello, Basil,' he said. 'Come and join us.'
'This is Mrs Marchant,' Lydia said. 'She is travelling in this part of the world. Basil Pascali, one of the fixtures of the island.'
'Slightly more mobile than that, I hope,' I said, bowing to Mrs Marchant, who is a woman of about fifty, with narrow grey eyes and a very full underlip. I sat down next to her with Lydia on the other side of me. I was curious about Mrs Marchant. There is no cruise ship in at present, Excellency. She must be travelling alone and independently. Not so unusual for a woman these days as it used to be, but all the same…
'You are lucky to be living here,' she said. Her accent was American. From the folds of her person, released by this little stirring of enthusiasm, came odours of warm, scented crepe.
'Oh, Basil is a gentleman of leisure,' Doctor Hogan said. He is a genial fellow, but like the others, thinks of me as an idle sponger. Amusing. A fixture of the island. An unfortunate phrase, in view of my predicament. Lydia, however, knows me better than the others. She knows my feelings for her, though these have never been expressed in words. She senses my sufferings.
'It is such a spiritual landscape, so infused with spirit,' Mrs Marchant said. 'Anyone who lives here, as you do, must be touched with spirit, you cannot be immune.'
'Spirit,' Herr Gesing said, before I could reply, 'Yes, meine Dame, but what is this spirit, I ask you, this word that people talk about so…'
'Freely?' I suggested, back to my old game of completing Herr Gesing's thoughts for him.
'Freely, ja'
His voice was thickened with the wine he had been drinking. Before Mrs Marchant could reply, Lydia looked up and said, 'Ah here you are, Anthony.' The tall figure of the Englishman was standing silently before us. First name terms, Excellency. We had not seen him approach. He must have come from above, by way of the steps. In those first few moments I looked at Lydia 's face, rather than at him, and saw on it a look of vivid expectation. There was something vulnerable, exposed, about her expression. I was reminded of her devotional look in the studio. In spite of her worldliness, she trusts people with her feelings, trusts their good will, as children do. Very dangerous.
'Sorry I'm late,' Mister Bowles said. They had arranged to meet, then. He sat down on the other side of Lydia.
'By spirit I was referring to the higher feelings,' Mrs Marchant said. 'AH that is not material. Our moral sense. Our sense of beauty for example…'
Herr Gesing said brusquely, 'Spirit is Geist, no? It is not feeling, it is movement. Through all history it is working. Like a turbine. Not the machine, you understand, the energy principle. Hegel, it was Hegel, who -'
'Energy principle?' Lydia broke in. 'What does that mean? You're as bad as Basil, the other day, defending free experimentation. That's another kind of energy principle, I suppose. None of you will look at what is before your eyes. I believe in things. You talk as if the world was empty. All these energy principles and swirling movements in history. It is simply opening the floodgates.'
'Floodgates to what?' Doctor Hogan said.
'To the irrational.'
'Floodgates?' Herr Gesing said.
I could not recall the German for this, so attempted to convey the idea by gesture and explanation.
'Ah, die Schleusen,' Herr Gesing said. 'Do you know Stefan George?
Auf die Schleusen
Und aus Rusen
Regnen Rosen
Güsse Flüsse
Die begraben'
'Good God,' Mister Bowles said, presumably in some sort of reproof or embarrassment at this public display.
'The irrational isn't outside somewhere, waiting to flood in,' Doctor Hogan said. 'You are doing the same thing as our friend here, creating abstractions.'
'That is true,' Monsieur Chaudan said, inclining his head politely. 'It is not separated. The rational and the irrational, ils habitent le même corps.'
'The same body,' Doctor Hogan said. 'That is somehow a frightening idea. Like running from a demon to your own safe room, and locking the door, and finding the demon locked in with you.'
Mister Bowles cleared his throat. 'Was it a profitable practice?' he said suddenly. 'The one you gave up, I mean.' The question came oddly, at this juncture. At first I interpreted its severely practical tone as a protest against the general nature of the conversation, which he was perhaps finding uncomfortably literary; but I realised almost at once that in fact it marked the degree to which Mister Bowles had been impressed by the sacrifice of material interest the doctor had made by settling here all those years ago.
It took Doctor Hogan, engaged as he was in the conversation with Chaudan, several moments to understand what Mister Bowles was driving at. Then he said, 'Yes, reasonably so. Why do you ask?'
'Well, I am a practical man,' Mister Bowles said. 'These things have to be taken into account when we are making decisions. We can't just throw everything overboard.'
'That depends on the nature of the cargo and the state of the weather.' The doctor looked away from Mister Bowles towards his wife, who was sitting opposite. They smiled at each other.
'Yes, but just a minute,' Mister Bowles said. He was obviously intending to press the matter further, but at this point, quite audibly, though distant, we heard the sound of male voices chanting. It came from somewhere above us, in the main part of the town.
'Now what is that?' Mrs Marchant said.
'Tomorrow is Saint Alexei's Day,' I explained to her. 'He is the Patron Saint of the island. A local saint, you know. They don't bother about him anywhere else. They have the custom here of bearing him in effigy around the town, on the evening before. Then he is left in the church all night.'
'That sounds mighty interesting,' Mrs Marchant said.
With a very unattractive disregard for the present trend of the conversation, and in particular for Mrs Marchant, who was waiting to hear more of Saint Alexei, Herr Gesing now abruptly returned to his former topic. 'No, no,' he said loudly, 'Geist is to Gischt related, the white of the sea. Always moving. Perhaps also it is to Gäscht related, that is in the bread, to make it rise up. Again, you see, the movement, the fermending. Verstehen Sie?'
'Fermenting,' I said.
'The French word does not signify anything of that kind,' Monsieur Chaudan said, looking at Herr Gesing coldly.
The German raised his face of a plump hawk. 'Not surprise,' he said. 'Your language is poor in many ways. Wiedergeburt, for example, you have no word for Wiedergeburt.'
'Rebirth,' I said.
'Rebirth, ja. In French there is not this idea. So, there is not this possibility.'
'What I mean is,' Mister Bowles said to the doctor, totally ignoring Herr Gesing, 'we must keep a firm hold on reality. You know, both feet on the ground. I suppose a lot depends on nationality, really.'
There was a certain crassness in this that made me look quickly at Lydia, but her face reflected no consciousness of it. The doctor smiled at Mister Bowles, but not with great warmth. 'You do not have the look of a realist,' he said, 'if you will forgive my saying so. And I don't think, myself, that the English are such a realistic people as all that. Not like the French, for example.'
'I can't agree with you,' Mister Bowles said stiffly.
'We have no words for stupid abstractions, ca c'est vrai,' Monsieur Chaudan said to Herr Gesing in a tone of anger. 'Stupid and dangerous also. On n'en a pas besoin. We don't need them.'