Suddenly there was a new sound, even stranger, of a woman or a boy, I couldn’t tell, calling from where the track out of Bourani disappeared into the trees. It was a chanted sound, a triphthong hauntingly prolonged, an echo of the horn’s echo. Eia. Eia. The man dropped his arm and turned and went a pace or two to the north. I saw him raise his yard-long horn, a narrow crescent with a flared end. He called back; and the other call came back at once, so that the echoes of the two calls intermingled. Eia. Eia.
Like the man I was watching the trees to the north, the dark tunnel where the track disappeared.
A running girl appeared; and I thought at first by the apparent whiteness of her skin—the torch did not shift to her—that she was also naked. I thought too, with increasing shock, that it was Lily. If she had gone very quickly round the back of the house… but then I could distinguish a white chiton, and dark hair. A wig? The girl had a slim body, the right height. She ran towards the sea, between Apollo and myself on the terrace. Then a third figure appeared behind her. Another man, running from out of the dark tunnel through the trees. The girl was being chased. I flashed a look round. Conchis sat exactly as before, as if he disapproved sternly of this interruption.
The nymph-girl ran through the beam of light that shone on Apollo and had almost reached the seaward side of the clearing when several things happened. Apollo blew his horn again, but this time it was a single wild note, sustained then abruptly ended. He struck a new pose, his hand pointing at the satyr-man, who stopped at the sound. Simultaneously a much stronger beam shone out from directly underneath me. Someone else was standing under the colonnade. The beam moved, caught up the still running figure of the girl, her white back and her black dishevelled hair and her seemingly near-exhausted legs, as she plunged into the trees. She disappeared. The light went out for two moments. And then, in a brilliant coup de théatre, it went on again, and standing there, exactly in the place where the first girl had disappeared, a place where the ground rose a little, was yet another, the most striking figure of all. It was Lily, but metamorphosed.
She had changed into a long saffron chiton. It had a thin blood-red hem where it ended at the knees. On her feet were black buskins with silver greaves, which gave her a grim gladiatorial look, in strange contrast to her bare shoulders and arms. The skin was unnaturally white, the eyes elongated by black makeup, and her hair was also elongated backwards in a way that was classical yet sinister. Over her shoulders she had a quiver. In her left hand she held a long silver painted bow. Something in her stance, as well as her distorting makeup, was genuinely frightening.
She stood, cold and outraged and ominous for a long second, and then she reached back with her free hand and with a venomous quickness pulled an arrow out of the quiver. But just as she began to fit it to the bow string, the beam tracked like lightning back to the arrested man. He was standing, darker-skinned, in a black chiton, spectacularly terrified, his arms flung back, and his head averted. It was a pose without realism, yet effectively theatrical. The beam swept back to the goddess. She had the bow at full stretch, the horn blew again, the arrow went. I saw it fly, but lost its flight in the abrupt darkness as the torch flicked off again. A moment later it shone on the man. He was clutching the arrow—or an arrow—in his heart. He fell slowly to his knees, swayed a second, then slumped sideways among the stones and thyme. The torch lingered a moment on him, then went out. Apollo stood impassively, surveying, a pale marmoreal shadow, like some divine umpire, president of the arena. The goddess began to walk, a striding huntress walk, towards him, her silver bow slung like a rifle over one shoulder. As she came near, into the diffuse beam of weak light, he held out his hand. They stood like that, facing me, hand in hand, Apollo and his sister, Artemis-Diana. The beam went out. I saw them retreat into the dark penumbra of the trees. Silence. Night. As if nothing had happened.
I looked back at Conchis. He had not moved. I tried to understand. I tried to think what connection there was between the elderly man on the road by the hotel, the “pre-haunting,” and this scene. During the telling I thought I had grasped the point of the caractêre of de Deukans; Conchis had been talking of himself and me; the parallels were too close for it to be anything else. And discouraged every kind of question… how unable I was to judge him… very few friends and no relations… but what had that to do with what had just happened?
Plainly it was meant to be mythical, but it had awakened in me vague memories of Oscar Wilde—the Wilde of Salomé—and of Maeterlinck; something Germanic, fin de siècle, had floated over it all. It was also an attempt at the sort of scandalous evocation mentioned in Le Masque Francais.
There was some very nasty, some very perverse, drift in Conchis’s divertimenti. The naked man. What were they doing now, inside those trees? Because the girl acted one thing for an hour, there was no reason why she shouldn’t act something else, anything else, the next. I remembered wryly that she had said “I am called.” I had given it a spiritualistic significance; but it had a normal other meaning—for actresses.
I felt, irrationally, betrayed; and envious and jealous of those other mysterious young men who had appeared from nowhere to poach in “my” territory; and walked off with the prize. I tried to be objective, content to be a spectator, to let these weird incidents flow past me as one sits in a cinema and lets the film flow past. But even as I thought that, I knew it to be a bad analogy.
I went and stood behind her empty chair.
“Very strange.”
Conchis didn’t answer. I moved round the table, to where I could see his face. His eyes were open, but his stare to the south was fixed, and for a moment I was frightened. I said urgently, “Mr. Conchis?” and touched his shoulder. He looked up then, for all the world like a man coming out of a trance.
“Are you all right?”
“I fell asleep. I apologize.” He shook his head as if to wake himself up.
“But your eyes were open.”
“A kind of sleep.” He smiled at me, one of his smiles that was intended, flagrantly, to make me wonder what he really meant.
I smiled warily back. “Or a kind of mystification?”
He stood up and took my arm, then walked me silently to the western end of the terrace—probably, I guessed, to give the man with the arrow in his heart time to decamp. He breathed deeply for a moment, facing the distant mountains, his hand on my elbow. Then he said, “I am rich in many things, Nicholas. Richer even in some than I am in money.”
“I realize that.”
“Richer in forgotten powers. In strange desires.” He pressed my elbow lightly, then let go of it. His face was inscrutable, but his tone aroused old suspicions in me. Young men, young women. Perhaps I should soon find myself asked to take part in some kind of orgy, some sexual fantasy; and I knew that if I was faced with it, joining in or not, I might not know what to do—sexually or morally. A double lack of savoir vivre. I was out of my depth; I had a quick self-protective need to be debunking, English. I lit a cigarette; put on a smile and a light voice.
“I saw your 'visitor' meet her boyfriend over there.” There was a long pause; in the shadow his eyes were like black phosphorus. “An uncensored rendezvous with Apollo.” Still he forced me to go on. “I have no program, Mr. Conchis. I don’t know.” More silence. I said rather desperately, “I just feel I’d enjoy it more if I knew what it all meant.”