Then from the house I heard the bell. It rang three times. I looked at my watch—teatime. The bell rang again; quick, quick, slow, and I realized it was sounding the syllables of my name. I shouted—”Coming!” My voice echoed, lonely, ridiculous. I began to walk back.
I ought, I suppose, to have felt frightened. But I wasn’t. Apart from anything else I was too intrigued and too bewildered. Both the man and the whey-faced girl had looked remarkably English; and whatever nationality they really were, I knew they didn’t live on the island. So I had to presume that they had been specially brought; had been standing by, hiding somewhere, waiting for me to read the Foulkes pamphlet. I had made it easy by falling asleep, and at the edge of the gulley. But that had been pure chance. And how could Conchis have such people standing by? And where had they disappeared to?
For a few moments I had let my mind plunge into darkness, into a world where the experience of all my life was disproved and ghosts existed. But there was something far too unalloyedly physical about all these supposedly “psychic” experiences. Besides, “apparitions” obviously carry least conviction in bright daylight. It was almost as if I was intended to see that they were not really supernatural; and there was Conchis’s cryptic, doubt-sowing advice that it would be easier if I pretended to believe. Why easier? More amusing, more polite, perhaps; but “easier” suggested that I had to pass through some ordeal.
I stood there in the trees, absolutely at a loss; and then smiled. I had somehow landed myself in the center of an extraordinary old man’s fantasies. That was clear. Why he should hold them, why he should so strangely realize them, and above all, why he should have chosen me to be his solitary audience of one, remained a total mystery. But I knew I had become involved in something too uniquely bizarre to miss, or to spoil, through lack of patience or humor.
I picked up Time and the pamphlet. Then, as I looked back at the dark, inscrutable carob tree, I did feel a faint touch of fear. But it was a fear of the inexplicable, the unknown; not of the supernatural.
As I walked across the gravel to the colonnade, where I could see Conchis was already sitting, his back to me, I decided on a course of action—or rather, of reaction.
He turned. “A good siesta?”
“Yes thank you.”
“You have read the pamphlet?”
“You’re right, it is more fascinating than any historical novel.” He kept a face impeccably proof to my ironic undertone. “Thank you very much.” I put the pamphlet on the table.
Calmly, in my silence, he began to pour me tea.
He had already had his own and he went away to play the harpsichord for twenty minutes. As I listened to him I thought. The incidents seemed designed to deceive all the senses. Last night’s had covered smell and hearing; this afternoon’s, and that glimpsed figure of yesterday, sight. Taste seemed irrelevant—but touch… how on earth could he expect me even to pretend to believe that what I might touch was “psychic”? And then what on earth—appropriately, on earth—had these tricks to do with “traveling to other worlds”? Only one thing was clear; his anxiety about how much I might have heard from Mitford and Leverrier was now explained. He had practiced his strange illusionisms on them; and sworn them to secrecy.
When he came out he took me off to water his vegetables. The water had to be drawn up out of one of a battery of long-necked cisterns behind the cottage, and when we had done that and fed the plants we sat on a seat by the Priapus arbor, with the unusual smell, in summer Greece, of verdant wet earth all around us. He did his deep-breathing exercises; evidently, like so much else in his life, ritual; then smiled at me and jumped back twenty-four hours.
“Now tell me about this girl.” It was a command, not a question, or rather a refusal to believe I could refuse again.
“There’s nothing really to tell.”
“She turned you down.”
“No. Or not at the beginning. I turned her down.”
“And now you wish… ?”
“It’s all over. It’s all too late.”
“You sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?”
There was a silence. I took the step; something that had nagged me ever since I had discovered he was a doctor; and also to shock his old man’s mocking of my young man’s fatalism.
“As a matter of fact I have.” He looked sharply at me. “By syphilis. I managed to get it early this year in Athens.” Still he observed me. “It’s all right. I think I’m cured.”
“Who diagnosed it?”
“The man in the village. Patarescu.”
“Tell me the symptoms.”
“The clinic in Athens confirmed his diagnosis.”
“No doubt.” His voice was dry, so dry that my mind leapt to what he hinted at. “Now tell me the symptoms.”
In the end he got them out of me; in every detail.
“As I thought. You had soft sore.”
“Soft sore?”
“Chancroid. Ulcus molle. A very common disease in the Mediterranean. Unpleasant, but harmless. The best cure is frequent soap and water.”
“Then why the hell…”
He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the ubiquitous Greek gesture for money, for money and corruption; I suddenly felt like Candide.
“Have you paid?”
“Yes. For this special penicillin.”
“You can do nothing.”
“I can damn well sue the clinic.”
“You have no proof that you did not have syphilis.”
“You mean Patarescu—”
“I mean nothing. He acted with perfect medical correctness. A test is always advisable.” It was almost as if he were on their side. He shrugged gently: what was, was.
“He could have warned me.”
“Perhaps he thought it more important to warn you against venery than venality.”
I hit my thigh with my clenched fist. “Christ.”
We fell silent. In me battled a flood of relief at being reprieved and anger at such vile deception. At last Conchis spoke again.
“Even if it had been syphilis—why could you not return to this girl you love?”
“Really—it’s too complicated.”
“Then it is usual. Not unusual.”
Slowly, disconnectedly, prompted by him, I told him a bit about Alison; remembering his frankness the night before, produced some of my own. Once again I felt no real sympathy coming from him; simply his obsessive and inexplicable curiosity. I told him I had recently written a letter.
“And if she does not answer?”
I shrugged. “She doesn’t.”
“You think of her, you want to see her—you must write again.” I smiled then, briefly, at his energy. “You are leaving it to hazard. We no more have to leave everything to hazard than we have to drown in the sea.” He shook my shoulder. “Swim!”
“It’s not swimming. It’s knowing in which direction to swim.”
“Towards the girl. She sees through you, you say, she understands you. That is good.”