The incident did improve our popularity however. I no longer had the feeling we might be thrown into prison at any moment. This had not been an idle fear. Only seven years earlier the great Phidias, the designer of the Parthenon itself, had died in prison.
Now within the space of a fortnight two remarkable things happened. Messengers arrived from the north. There was great excitement in the city. We thought the long awaited penetration into Greece from the Balkans had occurred. We were wrong. It was the Delphic Oracle. The prophecy was that a continuation of the war would prove the ruination of Athens, a disaster to Sparta, and to the whole of Greece. This was the meaning, it was said, of the great roaring bird which had appeared in the sky at the time of the solstice.
Nobody in Athens had ever referred to the day when we had flown directly over the city. Many tens of thousands of persons must have seen our plane. Yet not a soul had said a word about it. To mention it was to court ill-luck apparently, to tempt providence, to give substance to the portent. Now the meaning was made known. The oracle’s words had far more effect than I would have expected. The discussions that went on in the Agora, in the hall of Poikile, had every aspect of rationality about them. Yet not far beneath the surface there was a deep instinctive belief in the supernatural. The old beliefs were not very far away, just as the Middle Ages were not really very far away from twentieth-century Britain.
An important effect for us personally was that our standing was enormously improved. The very reason for our previous unpopularity, Morgan’s uncompromising advocacy of peace, was now the word of the oracle. Why I wondered had the oracle spoken in this fashion? None of us could recall any mention of it in classical literature.
With our newfound popularity there was a lot of music making. Alex had suddenly lost his inhibitions about playing in front of people. I guessed it might be the girl with whom he was now living, a Corinthian of great beauty, named Lais. She was taller than most of the Greek girls, fair like many of them. This was something that had surprised me, how much fairer the general population was than I’d expected. It was of course the Dorian strain which had come in from the north a century or two earlier. Anyway Alex had got himself a succulent specimen, and good luck to him, I thought. At about that time he developed a passion for Hungarian gypsy music. It proved surprisingly popular with everybody. We used to bash away at the stuff. Somehow Alex got them all whirling around like dervishes.
I played my part adequately but without real gusto. I was now seriously worried by the fact that we still heard nothing at all from the outside. It scarcely seemed credible. And there was a second queer thing.
Soon after the episode of the yacht we tried out our radio receiver. Not a sound could we get on it. Convinced the electronics had gone wrong we switched on the transmitter. Whereupon we almost blew the receiver. One afternoon I set out on a long walk. About ten miles from Athens I turned on the transmitter which I had managed to bring with me without attracting notice. On my return to Athens I found Morgan had easily picked up my transmission. Of course it was one thing to pick up a transmission from only ten miles away and quite something else to receive signals from stations a thousand miles or more away. But the transmitters back home were vastly more powerful than our little piece of equipment. It could all be explicable in terms of a lowered sensitivity of the receiver. But it could be something quite different.
The others had not been through the strange experiences of August and September in quite the way I had. Probably for this reason I was more sensitive to the situation than they appeared to be. My fear was that another gross shift had taken place. It looked to me as though the juxtaposition of different worlds and different times might have come to an end. Those different worlds might have come together for a brief spell and then separated again. It could be that we had managed to transfer ourselves from the twentieth century to the fifth century B.C., and now there was no simple retreat. It could be our naval friends would never appear off the coast of Crete, not in this world anyway. Otherwise it seemed to me quite impossible to explain our continued isolation from the outside world.
These thoughts filled my mind. I was in a stormy, gloomy mood as the time for our visit drew to an end. As it turned out the weather itself was stormy, the seas rough, and there would have been no possibility of our putting out in the small yacht. We had heard nothing further about it so presumably it was still in the hands of the shipbuilders. I was hardly worried about this aspect of the matter. Our main reason for leaving by sea had been to avoid disturbing the people here too much. If they wanted to take an awkward line that was just too bad. Now we should just have to wait until the external world arrived here, if it ever did. If there was no external world now, then there was little point in our putting to sea.
More and more as the days passed an explosion boiled up inside me. I tried to get it all out of my system, in long fierce sessions at the piano. Our house was not large and these violent sessions soon became wearying to my companions. Increasingly I thought of moving somewhere by myself, to some place where I could play to myself, not always to an audience. Another thing, I was becoming fed up with always being odd-man out. There was Morgan and Anna who made a pair, Alex and his girl friend, and myself, alone. Somehow it didn’t fit.
Chapter Twelve: Largo Appassionato
The others greeted the suggestion that I might go off for a few weeks to get some composition done with an ill-disguised enthusiasm. The question was where to go. I wanted space. In summer when it would be possible to spend much of the day outdoors these small houses would be fine. Now in winter it was altogether too cramping. Yet where was I to get space? The city was obviously overcrowded, everywhere. We started to make inquiries. The solution came in a curious way.
My stormy sessions at the piano had not passed unnoticed. There was the madness of Dionysus in it. And the dances, the gypsy music, the gay music I somehow contrived to play for our numerous visitors, was also the music of Dionysus. I was told of a temple to the god some fifteen miles down the peninsula. It was said to be in a pleasant spot overlooking the sea. Why did I not go there if I wanted to be alone? I could take two slaves, or rather two servants, to see to my needs. To the Greeks it was a logical solution.
I visited the temple. Space there certainly was. I had no quarrel with the site, only with the winds that blew there. Yet there was plenty of wood, colossal quantities of it, within easy range. It would be easier to build magnificent fires here than it was in the city. All in all the solution seemed a possible one.
The transition from the city to the temple was made smoothly and easily. I was once again amazed by the ease with which the piano was transported. The middle-aged couple came with me. It was from them, during the coming months, that I gradually acquired reasonable proficiency in the language. Isolated down the coast there was nobody else to speak to. Not that I had any overriding desire to talk but the practical matters of everyday life had to be attended to. There were the fires to be built in the right places, tables where I could write, and so on.