After a few moments more of this platitudinous chat we bowed and went our ways. He expressed a hope that we might meet again during the remaining two days of his stay and have a longer conversation. But I took very good care that we didn’t.
At last Saturday came. I had done the two extra duties during the week to clear my Sunday, and was thoroughly exhausted with the school. As soon as the morning lessons were over and I had snatched a quick lunch I headed towards the village with my bag. Yes I told the old man at the gate—a sure method of propagating the lie—I was off to Hydra for the weekend. As soon as I was out of sight of the school I cut up through the cottages and round the back of the school onto the path to Bourani. But I didn’t go straight there.
I had speculated endlessly during the week about Conchs, and as futilely as endlessly. I thought I could discern two elements in his “game"—one didactic, the other aesthetic. But whether his cunningly mounted fantasies hid ultimately a wisdom or a lunacy I could not decide. On the whole I suspected the latter. Mania made more sense than reason.
I had wondered more and more during the week about the little group of cottages at Agia Varvara, the bay east of Bourani. It was a wide sweep of shingle with a huge row of athanatos, or agaves, whose bizarre twelve-foot candelabra of flowers stood facing the sea. I lay on a thyme-covered slope above the bay, having come quietly through the trees, and watched the cottages below for any sign of unusual life. But a woman in black was the only person I saw. Now I examined it, it seemed an unlikely place for Conchis’s “assistants” to live. It was so open, so easy to watch. After a while I wound my way down to the cottages. A child in a doorway saw me coming through the olives and called, and then the entire populalion of the tiny hamlet appeared—four women and half a dozen children, unmistakably islanders. With the usual peasant hospitality they offered me a little saucer of quince jam and a thimbleful of raki as well as the glass of cistern water I requested. Their men were all away far to the south, fishing. I said I was going to see o kyrios Conchis, and their surprise seemed perfectly genuine. Did he ever visit them? Their heads all went back swiftly together, as if the idea was unheard of. I had to listen to the story of the execution again—at least the oldest woman launched out into a welter of words among which I heard “mayor” and “Germans"; and the children raised their arms like guns.
Maria, then? They saw her, of course? But no, they never saw her. She is not a Phraxiot, one of them said.
Then the music, the songs in the night? They looked at one another. What songs? I was not surprised, Veiy probably they went to bed and woke with the sun.
“And you,” asked the grandmother, “are you a relation of his?” They evidently thought of him as a foreigner.
I said I was a friend. FIe has no friends here, said the old woman, and with a faint hostility in her voice she added, bad men bring bad luck. I said he had guests—a young girl with fair hair, a tall man, a younger girl so high. They had seen them? They had not. Only the grandmother had even been inside Bourani; and that was long before the war. Then they had their way and asked me the usual series of childish but charmingly eager questions about myself, about London, about England.
I got free in the end, after being presented with a sprig of basil, and walked inland along the bluff until I could climb onto the ridge that led to Bourani. For some time three of the barefoot children accompanied me along the seldom-used path. We topped a rocky crest among the pines, and the distant flat roof of the house came into sight over the sea of trees ahead. The children stopped, as if the house was a sign that they should go no further. I turned after a while and they were still wistfully standing there. I waved, but they made no gesture in return.
27
I went with him and sat in his music room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. All through tea I had waited for some indication on his part that he knew I had seen the girl—as he must have known, for it was obvious that the nocturnal concert had been given to announce her presence. But I intended to follow the same course of action as I had over the earlier incident: to say nothing until he gave me an opening. Not the slightest chink had appeared in our conversation.
Conchis seemed to me, no expert, to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to “interpret,” to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played—I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool, shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions. It was the first time I had heard him play great music, and I was moved as I had been by the Bonnards; moved in a different way, but still moved. The mystery of the old man dwindled, and his humanity rose uppermost. It came to me as I listened that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. Conchis had spoken of meeting his future, of feeling his life balanced on a fulcrum, when he first came to Bourani. I was experiencing what he meant; a new selfacceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. It was an awareness of a new kind of potentiality, one very different from my old sense of the word, which had been based on the illusions of ambition. The mess of my life, the seffishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice. It was certainly not a moment of new moral resolve, or anything like it; I suppose our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be; for all that, it felt like a step forward—and upward.
He had finished, was watching me.
“You make words seem shabby things.”
“Bach does.”
“And you.”
He grimaced, but I could see he was not unpleased, though he tried to hide it by marching me off to give his vegetables their evening watering.
An hour later I was in the little bedroom again. I saw that I had new books by my bedside. There was first a very thin volume in French, a bound pamphlet, anonymous and privately printed, Paris, 1932; it was entitled De la communication intermondiale. I guessed the author easily enough. Then there was a folio: Wild Life in Scandinavia. As with The Beauties of Nature of the week before, the “wild life” turned out to be all female—various Nordic-looking women lying, standing, running, embracing among the fir forests and fjords. There were lesbian nuances I didn’t much like; perhaps because I was beginning to take against the facet in Conchis’s polyhedral character that obviously enjoyed “curious” objects and literature. Of course I was not—at least I told myself I was not—a puritan. I was too young to know that the having to tell myself gave the game away; and that to be uninhibited about one’s own sexual activities is not the same as being unshockable. I was English; ergo, puritan. I went twice through the pictures; they clashed unpleasantly with the still-echoing Bach.
Finally there was another book in French—a sumptuously produced limited edition: Le Masque Français au Dix-hnitième Siècle. This had a little white marker in. Remembering the anthology on the beach, I turned to the page, where there was a passage bracketed. It read: