She nodded, then stared out to sea and I knew that she was not unmasking at all. I began to feel exasperated; foiled.
“Are we talking about telepathy?”
“Telepathy and—” She broke off the sentence, and she shook her head.
“And?”
“I cannot say any more.”
She opened out her sunshade, as if she was thinking of going away. It had little black tassels that hung from the ends of the ribs.
“Why not?”
“Maurice would be angry. He would know.”
I gave an unbelieving sniff. I thought, then said, “Are you his mistress?”
She looked very genuinely shocked. “That is very impertinent. Very rude.” She turned her back on me and I grinned—at her skill, and remembering that naked “brother,” at her nerve.
“I just want to know where I am.”
“That was…” she dropped her voice and the wind almost carried the words away… “completely uncalled-for and most disgusting.”
Suddenly she stood up and began to walk quickly away over the shingle, towards the path that led up to the house. I ran after her and blocked her way. The sun had come out again. She stopped, her eyes down, then she looked up at me, hotly, apparently very near anger.
I said, “I am not disgusting.”
She burst out. “Why must you always know where you are? Why have you no imagination, no humor, no patience? You are like a child who tears a beautiful toy to pieces to see how it is made. You have no imagination… no poetry.” Her eyes stared at me intensely, as if she was going to cry. “That is why you are so treacherous.”
I spread the towel out before her feet, and knelt on it. Then looked up at her. “I beg forgiveness.”
“You make me angry. I want to be your friend and you make it so difficult.” She half turned away. But her voice was softer.
“Difficult to be friends if I can’t really know who you are.”
I sat back on my haunches. With a swift change of mood she lowered her shade and tapped me lightly on the shoulder with it.
“I deserve a knighthood now?”
“You deserve nothing now.”
She turned completely, as if she wanted to laugh; as if the effort of playing this “serious” exchange had exhausted her gravity. She ran, little stumbling steps, her skirt lifted with one hand, towards the jetty. I got up and lit a cigarette, and then went to where she was strolling up and down. There was more wind on the jetty, and she kept on having trouble with her hair; charming trouble. The ends of it floated up in the sunshine, silky wings of living light. In the end I held her closed sunshade for her, and she tried to hold her hair still. Her mood had veered abruptly again. She kept on laughing, fine white teeth catching the sunlight, hopping, swaying back when a wave hit the jetty end and sent up a little spray. Though once or twice she caught my arm, there was no physical coquettishness about her. She seemed absorbed in her game with the wind and the sea. A pretty, rather skittish schoolgirl in a gay striped dress.
I stole looks at the sunshade. It was newly made. I supposed a ghost from 1915 would have been carrying a new sunshade; but somehow I believed it would have been more authentic, though supernaturally less logical, if it had been old and faded.
Then the bell rang, from the house. It was that same ring I had heard the weekend before, in the rhythm of my own name. Lily stood still, and listened. Wind-distorted, the bell rang again.
“Nich-o-las.” She looked mock-grave. “It tolls for thee.”
I looked up through the trees.
“I can’t think why.”
“You must go.”
“Will you come with me?”
“I must wait.” The bell rang again. “You must go.”
I stood undecided. “Why must you wait?”
“Because it did not toll for me.”
“I think we ought to show that we’re friends again.”
She was standing close to me, holding her hair from blowing across her face. She gave me a severe look.
“Mr. Urfe!” She said it exactly as she had the night before. The same chilly over-precise pronunciation. “Are you asking me to commit osculation?”
And it was perfect; a mischievous girl of 1915 poking fun at a feeble Victorian joke; a lovely double remove; the linguistic-dramatic equivalent of some complicated ballet-movement; and she looked absurd and lovely as she did it. She pushed her cheek forward, and I hardly had time to touch it with my lips before she had skipped back. I stood and watched her bent head.
“I’ll be as quick as I can.” I handed her back her sunshade; gave her what I trusted was both a hopelessly attracted and a totally unduped look.
Turning every so often, I climbed up the path. Twice she waved from the jetty. I came over the steep rise and started through the last of the thirmed trees towards the house. I could see Maria standing by the music-room door, at the bell. But I hadn’t taken two steps across the gravel before the world split in half. Or so it seemed.
A figure had appeared on the terrace, not fifty feet away, facing and above me. It was Lily. It couldn’t be her, but it was her. The same hair blew about in the wind; the dress, the sunshade, the figure, the face, everything was the same. She was staring out to sea, over my head, totally ignoring me.
It was a wild, dislocating, disactualizing, shock. Yet I knew within the first few seconds that although I was obviously meant to believe that this was the same girl as the one on the beach, it was not. But it was so like her that it could be only one thing—a twin sister. There were two Lilies in the field. The night before, the nymph, was explained. But I had no time to think. Another figure appeared beside the Lily on the terrace.
It was a man, much too tall to be Conchis. At least, I presumed it was a man; perhaps “Apollo” or “Robert Foulkes”—or even “de Deukans.” I couldn’t see, because the figure was all in black, shrouded in the sun, and wearing the most sinister mask I had ever seen: the head of an enormous black dog, or jackal, with a long muzzle and high pointed ears. They stood there, the possessor and the possessed, looming death and the frail maiden. There was almost immediately, after the first visual shock, something vaguely grotesque about it; it had the overdone macabreness of a horror-magazine illustration. It certainly touched on some terrifying archetype; but it shocked common sense as well as the unconscious.
Again, I had no feeling of the supernatural, no feeling that this was more than another nasty twist in the masque; a black inversion of the scene on the beach. That does not mean I was not frightened. I was, and very frightened; but my fear came from a feeling that anything might happen. That there were no limits in this masque, no normal social laws or conventions.
Two things happened in the moments I stood there. Maria came towards me; and the two figures swiftly withdrew, as if to avoid any chance of her seeing them. Lily’s doppelganger was pulled back imperiously by the black hand on her shoulder. At the very last moment she looked down at me, but her face was expressionless.
I began to run back towards the point on the path where I could see down to the beach. I flung a look over my shoulder. The figures on the terrace had disappeared. I came to the bend from which I could see down, from where, not half a minute before, I had watched the Lily on the beach last wave. The jetty was deserted; that end of the small cove was empty. I ran further down, to the little flat space with the bench, from where I could see almost all the beach and most of the path up. I waited in vain for the mounting bright dress to appear. I thought, she must be hiding in the little cave, or among the rocks. I turned and began to climb swiftly back towards the house.
Maria was still waiting for me at the edge of the colonnade. She had been joined by a man. I recognized Hermes, the taciturn donkey-driver. He could have been the man in black, he had the right height; but he looked unruffled, a mere bystander. I said quickly in Greek, mia stigmi, one second, and walked indoors past them. Maria was holding out an envelope, but I took no notice. Once inside I raced up the stairs to Conchis’s room. I knocked on the door. No sound. I knocked again. Then I tried the handle. It was locked.