CHAPTER XXXIV

All Nepenthe had stood by the side of the grave--all, save only Mr.

Keith. He remained at home. And this was rather odd, for it is the

right thing to attend people's funerals, and Mr. Keith prided himself

upon always doing the right thing. It was his boast to pass for a

typical Anglo-Saxon, the finest race on earth, when all is said and

done; and he used to point out that you could not be a typical

Anglo-Saxon unless you respected yourself, and you could not respect

yourself unless you respected simultaneously your neighbours and their

habits, however perverse they might sometimes appear. Now a funeral,

being unavoidable, cannot by an prestidigitations of logic be called

perverse. All the more reason for being present. But for a strange

twist or kink in his nature, therefore, he would have been on the spot.

He would have turned up in the market-place to the minute, since he

prided himself likewise upon his love of punctuality, declaring that it

was one of the many virtues he possessed in common with Her Majesty

Queen Victoria.

He disliked funerals. For all his open mind and open bowels, Mr. Keith

displayed an unreasoning hatred of death and, what was still more

remarkable, not the least shame in confessing it.

"The next interment I purpose to attend," he would say, "will be my

own. May if be far off! No; I don't care about funerals and the

suggestion they convey. A cowardly attitude? I think not. The coward

refuses to face a fact. Death is a fact. I have often faced him. He is

not a pretty fellow. Most men only give him a shy glance out of a

corner of their eye. It scares them out of their wits and makes them

say all sorts of snobbishly respectful things about him. Sheer

flummery! It is with Death as it is with God--we call them good because

we are afraid of what they can do to us. That accounts for our

politeness. Death, universal and inevitable, is none the less a

villainous institution. Every other antagonist can be ignored or bribed

or circumvented or crushed outright. But here is a damnable spectre who

knocks at the door and does not wait to hear you say, 'Come in.'

Hateful! If other people think differently it is because they live

differently. How do they live? Like a cow that has stumbled into a dark

hole, and now spends its time wondering how it managed to get such a

sore behind. Such persons may well be gladdened by the approach of

death. It is the best thing they can do--to depart from world which they

call a dark hole, a world which was obviously not made for them, seeing

that they are always feeling uncomfortable about one thing or another.

Good riddance to them and their moral stomach-aches."

Mr. Keith professed never to feel uncomfortable. Oh, no! He had no

moral stomach-aches. Unlike other folks, he "reacted to external

stimuli in appropriate fashion," he cultivated the "function of the

real," he always knew how to "dominate his reflexes." His neural

currents were "duly co-ordinated." Mr. Keith was in love with life. It

dealt fairly with him. It made him loth to bid farewell to this

gracious earth and the blue sky overhead, to his cooks and his books,

his gardeners and roses and flaming cannas; loth to exchange these

things of love, these tangible delights, for a hideous and everlasting

annihilation.

That was why, having got rid of the committee of exasperating buffoons,

he was now prolonging breakfast far beyond the usual hour. The meal was

over at last; and still he felt disinclined to move. Those people had

disquieted his composure with their mephitic rant about philanthropy;

they had almost succeeded in spoiling his morning. And now this

funeral! Would he go into the house and do some reading or write a few

letters? No. He could not write letters just them. He was not feeling

sufficiently Rabelaisian. Epicurus was his God for the moment. In a

mood of heathen wistfulness he lit a cigar and leaned back in the chair

trying to recapture his serenity.

It was his favourite corner of the domain--a kind of projecting spur or

platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines. Near at hand, on a

slightly lower level, rose a group of flame--like cypresses whose

shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a

lake of pearl. The milky sheen of morning, soon to be dispelled by the

breeze, still hung about the water and distant continent--it trembled

upon the horizon in bands of translucent opal. His eye roved round the

undulating garden, full of sunlight and flowers and buzzing insects.

From a verbena hard by came the liquid song of a blackcap. It gave him

pleasure; he encouraged the blackcaps, delighting in their music and

because they destroyed the spiders whose troublesome webs were apt to

come in contact with his spectacles. The gardeners had severest

instructions not to approach their nests. It was one of the minor

griefs of his life that, being so short-sighted, he could never

discover a bird's nest; no, not even as a child. Memories of boyhood

began to flit through his mind; they curled upwards in the scented

wreaths of his Havana....

The golden oriole's flute-like whistle poured down from some leafy

summit in a sudden stream of melody. A hurried note, he thought;

expressed without much feeling--from duty rather than inclination; not

like the full-throated ease of other orioles in other lands he knew.

And so were the nightingales. They profited by his hospitality for a

day or two and then, uttering a perfunctory little tune, some

breathless and insincere word of thanks--just like any human

visitor--betook themselves elsewhere, northwards.

Northwards!

He glanced into the mazy foliage of the pine tree overhead, out of

which a shower of aromatic fragrance was descending to mingle with the

harsher perfume of the cypress. How they changed their faces, the

conifers--so fervent and friendly at this hour, so forbidding at

nighttime! Rifts of blue sky now gleamed through its network of

branches; drenched in the sunny rays, the tree seemed to shudder and

crackle with warmth. He listened. There was silence among those

coralline articulations. Soon it would be broken. Soon the cicada would

strike up its note in the labyrinth of needles--annual signal for his

own departure from Nepenthe. He always waited for the first cicada.

Northwards!

To his little place in the Highlands, at first. The meager soil and

parsimonious culture, the reasonable discourse of the people, their

wholesome disputatiousness, acted as a kind of purge or tonic after all

this Southern exuberance. Scotland chastened him; its rocks and tawny

glinting waters and bleak purple uplands rectified his perspective. He

called to mind the sensuous melancholy of the birches, the foxgloves,

the hedgerows smothered in dog-roses; he remembered the nights, full of

fairy-like suggestion and odours of earth and budding leaves--those

wonderful nights with their silvery radiance, calm and benignant,

streaming upwards form the luminous North.

Then, after strolling aimlessly elsewhere, on sea or land, visiting

friends--no matter whom or where--he would return to Nepenthe to indulge

his genius to the full in the vintage bacchanals. He owned a small

plantation that lay high up, among the easterly cliffs of the island.

It produced that mountain wine which was held to be the best on

Nepenthe. The vines grew upon a natural platform, surrounded by rugged

lava crags that overhung the sea.

Hither he was wont to repair with certain of his domestic staff and

three or four friends from out of his "inner circle," to superintend

the pressing of the grapes. There was a rude structure of masonry on

the spot--a vaulted chamber containing winepress and vats and hoes and

other implements of the husbandman's time-honoured craft; a few chairs

and a table completed the furniture. Nobody knew exactly what happened

up here. People talked of wild and shameless carousals; the rocks were

said to resound with ribald laughter while Mr. Keith, oozing paganism

at every pore, danced faun-like measures to the sound of rustic flutes.

Certain it was that the party often got riotously tipsy.

So tipsy that sometimes their host was unable to be moved down to his

villa. On such days he was put to bed on the floor between two wine

barrels, and the chef hastily advised to come up with some food and a

portable kitchen range. In earliest morning he would insist upon

tottering forth to watch the sun as it rose behind the peaks of the

distant mainland, flooding the sea with golden radiance and causing the

precipices to glitter like burnished bronze. He loved the sunrise--he

saw it so seldom. Then breakfast; a rather simple breakfast by way of a

change. It was on one of these occasions that the chef made a mistake

which his master was slow to forgive. He prepared for that critical

meal a dish of poached eggs, the sight of which threw Mr. Keith into an

incomprehensible fit of rage.

"Take those damned things away, quickly!" he commanded. It was the

celebrated artist's one and only LACHE.

As a rule, however, he did not sleep on the spot. Peasants, climbing to

their work on the hillsides in the twilit hour of dawn, were wont to

encounter that staggering procession headed by Mr. Keith who, with

spectacles all awry and crooning softly to himself, was carried round

the more perilous turnings by a contingent of his devoted retainers.

He found it pleasant to live like this. And now another spring was

nearing to its end. For how many more years, he wondered.... That

confounded funeral....

There was a rustle at his back. The southerly breeze had struck

Nepenthe on its morning ripple over the Tyrrhenian, setting things

astir; it searched a passage through those mighty canes which sprouted

in a dank hollow where the rains of winter commingled their waters. The

leaves grew vocal with a sound like the splash of a rivulet. Often had

he listened joyfully to that melody which compensated, to some small

degree, for the lack of the old Duke's twenty-four fountains. Legendary

music! Now it made him sad. What was its burden? MIDAS HAD ASSES' EARS.

Midas, the fabled king, whose touch turned everything to gold. And

gold, and jewels--of what avail were these against the spectre?

The gardeners, moving with bare feet among the sinuous paths, were

quick to perceive that a cloud had fallen upon his spirit. They divined

his moods with the tactfulness of natural sympathy. On some

horticultural pretext one of them drew near and craftily engaged his

thoughts and conversation. At last he said something that made him

smile. One or two more appeared upon the scene, as if by accident. It

was evident that the master needed cheering up. They began to tell him

the fairy-tales he loved; tales of robbers and witches and

pirates--grand old tales that never wearied him. To arouse his interest

they joked among themselves, as though unaware of his existence. One of

them, and then another, sang some wild song of love and war which he

had picked up while wandering with his flocks among the craggy hills of

yonder mainland. He was laughing now; outdoing their songs and stories.

It kept him young--to unbend, to play the fool in company such as theirs

and relax the fibres stiffened by conventionality; it refreshed him to

exchange the ephemeral for the eternal, the tomfoolery of social life

for Theocritus and his deathless creatures. How fair it was, this

smiling earth! How blithely the young voices went aloft!

They failed to drown those other strains, vagrant wraiths that now

floated upwards over fields and houses on the tepid wings of the

sirocco--fragmentary snatches, torn from the brazen measure of the

municipal band as it marched with the funeral procession. He cursed the

sounds from the bottom of his heart. They reminded him of that infamous

apparition, of all he most ardently desired to forget. His laughter

died down. Wanly he looked at his mirthful pagans, the embodiment of

joys. Yes; these were his distractions, his playmates, his elixir of

life, his antidote against the only disease, the only sin, crime, vice

which he recognized on earth--a vice none the less, because it happened

to be the inevitable--the vice of old age. And all the time that pallid

swarm came crowding on: messengers from the inexorable spectre. He felt

them creeping about with ghostly tread, blighting the radiance of his

life, tainting the very air he breathed. Hateful intruders! They wailed

among his lilies. The garden was full of their horrid footsteps.

In their presence Mr. Keith began to experience an uncomfortable

sensation, a kind of chill--as though something evil had stepped between

himself and the brave light of the sun. It was a fleeting feeling which

he would have diagnosed, in other people, as perilously akin to a moral

stomach-ache.

CHAPTER XXIX

Only one other person on Nepenthe found cause to complain of the

municipal music. It was Mr. Heard. Altogether, he was not greatly

edified by this, the first funeral of its kind he had ever witnessed. A

rowdy-dowdy business, he called it. The music was too lively and

blatant for so solemn an occasion; the gorgeous vestments of the

clergy, the loud chattering among the mourners, the violent gestures

that accompanied Torquemada's well-meant and carefully prepared oration

(Don Francesco, a born speaker, would have done it better, but the

defunct was no friend or even client of his)--all these things savoured

slightly of irreverence. Everyone was talking and laughing as they

marched along. It was more like a polonaise than a funeral. In his

African period the sight of such a burial would have affected him

unpleasantly. But Mr. Heard was changing, widening out.

"These people live gaily," he said to himself. "Why not? A funeral is

supposed to be nothing but a friendly leave-taking. Why not be cheerful

about it? We are all going to see each other again, sometime,

somewhere. I suppose...."

The problem gave him no trouble whatever.

He found himself walking side by side with Mr. Eames who ventured to

remark, in a seemly whisper, that he attended the funeral not so much

out of respect for the lamented lady--every cloud, he fancied, had a

silver lining--as because he hoped to gather, from among so

representative a concourse of natives and foreigners, the "popular

impression" of yesterday's eruption, with a view to utilizing it in

this appendix on RECENT VOLCANIC PHENOMENA OF NEPENTHE.

"Really?" replied the bishop. "A chapter on Volcanic Phenomena? It is

sure to be interesting."

Mr. Eames warmed to his subject.

It might be made interesting, he agreed, but for his own ignorance of

geology. As it was the business gave him a vast deal of trouble.

Monsignor Perrelli had dealt with geological matters in a fashion far

too summary for present-day requirements. The old scholar was not to

blame, of course, seeing that geology was quite a modern science; but

he might at least have been a little more painstaking in his record of

those showers of ashes and lapilli which were known to have covered the

island from time to time. His account of them was lamentably defective.

It was literally bristling with--with--with lacunae, which had to be

filled up by means of laborious references to contemporary chronicles.

Altogether one of the most unsatisfactory sections of an otherwise

admirable work....

"I wish I could help you," said Mr. Heard.

"I wish you could. I wish anyone could. There was that young Jew,

Marten, who understood more about these things than most people. A

coarse little fellow, but quite a specialist. He promised to supply me

with an up-to-date statement, accompanied by a map of the geological

structure of the island. I said to myself: Just what I wanted! Well,

this confounded statement has never reached my hands. Now I fear he has

left the place. Gone away altogether. Didn't have the decency to say

good-bye or leave his address. Too bad. Who knows when the next

mineralogist will turn up? These fellows are not as common as

blackbirds. Meanwhile I have to rely on my own efforts. It's wonderful,

by the way, how much a person can pick up of odds and ends of

information when forced, by a hobby of this kind, to delve into

recondite departments of knowledge which he would otherwise not have

dreamt of exploring. One grows quite encyclopaedic! Minerals, medicine,

strategy, heraldry, navigation, palaeography, statistics, politics,

botany--what did I know or care about all these things before I stumbled

on old Perrelli? Have you ever tried to annotate a classic, Mr. Heard?

I assure you it opens up new vistas, new realms of delight. It gives

one a genuine zest in life. Enthralling!"

And thereupon the bibliographer fell silent, all at once. He had

succumbed, yet again, to his besetting sin: talking too

enthusiastically to outsiders of what was nearest his heart. Why on

earth should a globe-trotting bishop be bothered about the mineralogy

of Nepenthe? It was absurd: tactless of him.

He tried to atone for the blunder by some mundane trivialities.

"What are you doing afterwards?"

"Going up to see Mrs. Meadows."

"Are you? Do remember me very kindly! Or perhaps--no. Better not. Fact

is, she cut me dead two days ago. At least, it looked uncommonly like

it. I confess I was rather upset, because I'm not conscious of having

done anything to annoy her. Indeed, I've always felt a kind of weakness

for Mrs. Meadows; there is something so fine and womanly about her.

Will you try to find out what it's all about? Thanks. Perhaps she may

not have noticed me. She was walking very fast. And I must say she was

not looking herself at all. Not at all. White and scared. Looked as if

she had seen a ghost."

The bishop was troubled by these words.

"Is that so?" he asked. "You alarm me. I think I'll be off this minute.

She is my cousin, you know; and I've been rather concerned about her

lately. Yes; I won't wait for the end of this funeral; I'll be off!

Perhaps we shall meet this evening. Then I can tell you her news. As to

deliberately cutting you--don't you believe that for a minute."

"I shall be down here about seven o'clock...."

"People like her," thought Mr. Heard, as he fell out of the procession.

He would make a point of having a good long chat, and perhaps stay to

luncheon.

He dreaded the coming heat of midday. It was quite warm enough already,

as he climbed slowly upward by the short cuts that intersected the

driving road, availing himself of every little patch of shade that fell

from trees or cottages athwart the pathway.

The country seemed deserted, the funeral ceremony having attracted all

the natives from far and near. Yet one figure was moving rapidly up the

road in front of him. Muhlen! Even at this distance he was

recognizable; he looked, as usual, overdressed. What was he doing

there, at this hour? Mr. Heard remembered seeing him go up, once

before, at the same time of the day.

He called to mind what he had heard from Keith in the boat. He was

quite prepared to believe that this man lived on blackmail and women;

that was precisely what he looked like. A villainous personality,

masquerading under an assumed name. The sight of the fellow annoyed

him. What business had he to transact up there? Retlow! Once more he

began to puzzle where he had heard that name. It conjured up, dimly,

some unpleasant connotation. Where? Long ago; so much was clear. For a

brief moment he felt on the verge of remembering. Then his mind became

blank as before; the revelation had slipped away, past recall.

He was glad to enter the shady garden of the villa Mon Repos. Old

Caterina sat, sphinx-like, on the stones at the house entrance. There

was some knitting-work on her lap, with brown wool and curiously shaped

needles; one foot rested on the base of the cradle, which she rocked

from time to time. At his approach she rose up, stark and hieratic,

without a trace of a friendly smile on her countenance. Was the lady

indoors? No, she was out. Out! Where? There was a definite but

enigmatical movement of her withered brown arm; it appeared to embrace

the universe. And when would she be back? No reply whatever. Only a

slight upward movement of the eyes, as much as to say: God knows!

"I'll wait," thought Mr. Heard.

He walked past the forbidding hag who seemed to exhale a positive

hostility towards him, and entered his cousin's sitting-room. He would

wait. He waited. He glanced through a pile of illustrated newspapers

that lay about. And still he waited. The room looked different somehow;

almost untidy. There were no rouses about. An hour passed. And still no

sign of his cousin.

Out. Always out. What could this mean? Where could she be? It was all

rather mysterious and unsatisfactory.

At last he took out his watch. Ten minutes to one! No use waiting any

longer. He scribbled a hasty note, left it on the writing-table, and

walked into the garden past the impenetrable Caterina, who barely

deigned to glance up from her knitting. He would look for a carriage,

and give himself the luxury of a drive down. It was too hot to walk at

that hour.

Strolling along he espied a familiar courtyard that gave upon the

street; Count Caloveglia's place. On an impulse he entered the massive

portal which stood invitingly ajar. Two elderly gentlemen sat

discoursing in the shade of the fig tree; there was no difficulty in

recognizing the stranger as Mr. van Koppen, the American millionaire, a

frequent visitor, they said, of Count Caloveglia.

A bronze statuette, green with age, stood on a pedestal before them.

"How kind of you to come and see me!" said the Italian. "Pray make

yourself as comfortable as you can, though these chairs, I fear, are

not of the latest design. You are going to do me the honour, are you

not, of sharing my simple luncheon? Mr. van Koppen is staying too."

"Very good of you!"

"Delighted to make your acquaintance," said the millionaire. "Keith was

talking about you only yesterday--such nice things! Do stay. Count

Caloveglia has been touching on most interesting subjects--I would come

from the other end of the world to listen to him."

The Count, manifestly shy of these praises, interrupted by asking:

"What do you think of that bronze, Mr. Heard?"

It was an exquisite little thing.

Perfect to the finger-tips and glowing in a lustrous patina of

golden-green, the Locri Faun--so-called from the place of its

discovery--was declared to be stamped with the hall-mark of individual

distinction which the artificers of old Hellas contrived to impress

upon every one of the rare surviving bronzes of its period. It was

perhaps the finest of the whole group. No wonder the statue had created

wild excitement among the few, the very few, discreet amateurs who had

been permitted to inspect the relic prior to its clandestine departure

from the country. And much as they might deplore the fact that it was

probably going to adorn the museum of Mr. Cornelius van Koppen, an

alien millionaire, not one of them found it in his heart to disapprove

Count Caloveglia's action. For they all liked him. Every one liked him.

They all understood his position. He was a necessitous widower with a

marriageable daughter on his hands, a girl whom everybody admired for

her beauty and charm of character.

Mr. van Koppen, like all the rest, knew what hard times he had gone

through; how, born of an ancient and wealthy family, he had not

hesitated to sell his wonderful collection of antiques together with

all but a shred of his ancestral estates, in order to redeem the

gambling debts of a brother. That amounted to quixotism, they declared.

They little realized what anguish of mind this step had cost him, for

he concealed his true feelings under a cloak of playful worldliness.

Excess of grief, he held, is an unlovely thing--not meet to be displayed

before men. All excess is unlovely. That was Count Caloveglia's classic

point of view. Measure! Measure in everything.

People revered him, above all else, for his knowledge in matters of

art. His connoisseurship was not one of mere learning; it was

intuitional. Astonishing tales were told of him. By the sense of touch

alone, and in the dark, he could appraise correctly any piece of

plastic work you liked. He had a natural affinity with such things.

They held it quite likely that the blood of Praxiteles or his compeers

may still have flowed through his veins--certain at all events, that

there hung about his person the traditions of the versatile colonists

on the shores of Magna Graecia who, freed by legions of slaves from the

trivial vexations which beset modern lives, were able to create in

their golden leisure those monuments of beauty which are the envy and

despair of our generation. On all that concerned the history and

technique of ancient bronzes, more especially, he was FACILE PRINCEPS

in the land, and it was hinted, after the sale of his property, that

Count Caloveglia would not be low to retrieve the fortunes of his

family by putting into exercise those talents for metal-working of

which, as a gifted boy, he had already shown himself to be possessed.

In this they were disappointed. He spoke of these things as "sins of

his youth," professing an invincible distaste, in these later years,

for the drudgery of work. He called himself an old dreamer. There was a

shed, it is true, attached to the house, a shed which went by the name

of a studio. All visitors were taken to see this atelier. It was

smothered in dust and cobwebs. Clearly, as the Count himself would

explain with a honeyed smile, it had not been in use for twenty years

or more.

Mr. van Koppen knew all this.

He knew about that strip of land which the old man had reserved for

himself at the sale of his ancestral domain. It lay among the hills,

some twenty or thirty miles above the classic site of Locri. On this

spot, people were given to understand, fragments of old marbles and

vases had been picked up by the peasantry within the last years. Things

of small worth--pottery mostly; they lay about Count Caloveglia's

Nepenthe courtyard and were given by him, as keepsakes, to any visitor

who showed an interest in them. He attached no value to these trifles.

"From my little place on the hills," he would say. "Pray take it as a

memento of the pleasure which your visit has given me! Oh, it is quite

a small property, you know; just a few acres, with a meager soil; in

good years it produces a little oil and a barrel or two of wine. And

that is all. I only kept back this morsel from the general ruin of my

property--well, for sentimental reasons. One likes to feel that one is

still tied--by a slender thread, it is true--to the land of one's

ancestors. There is certainly no wealth to be obtained above ground.

But it is quite possible that something might emerge from below, given

the energy and the means to make systematic excavations. The whole

country is so rich in remains of Hellenic life! The countrymen,

ploughing my few fields, often stumble upon some odd trifle of this

kind. There was that Demeter you may have heard about; sadly mutilated,

alas!"

Before the discovery of the Locri Faun on this site the only find of

any value had been a battered head--a Demeter, presumably. It was sold

to a Paris collection for a few thousand francs, and had thereafter

attracted no further attention. It was not worth talking about.

Now, when this dazzling Faun came to light and Mr. van Koppen announced

his intention of purchasing the masterpiece for his collection, his

art-expert, Sir Herbert Street--the eminent connoisseur whom he had

filched form the South Kensington Museum with the bribe of a Cabinet

Minister's salary--thought it his duty to compare the disfigured Demeter

with this new and marvelous thing. Sir Herbert Street was an

inordinately vain man, but conscientious at the same time and, in

matters of art-criticism, sufficiently reliable. Not every art-expert

would have done what he did. In the interests of his employer he took

the trouble of journeying to Paris and carefully examining the poor

Demeter fragment. Then, viewing the Locri Faun at Nepenthe in the

presence of Count Caloveglia, he made rather a subtle remark.

"Does it not strike you, Count, that there is a curious, an evasive

kind of resemblance between this Faun and the Demeter?"

The old man beamed with joy at these words.

"My dear Sir Herbert, allow me to congratulate you on your keen

artistic perception! I believe you are the only person, besides myself,

who has hitherto been struck by those definite but undefinable traits

of similarity. Mr. van Koppen may well be proud of your penetration--"

"Thank you," said the other, immensely flattered. "That is what I am

paid for, you know. But now, how do you account for the likeness?"

"I will tell you my own hypothesis. I hold, to be brief, that they both

came from the same workshop."

"The same workshop! You amaze me."

"Yes, or at all events from the same school of craftsmen, or some

common fountain of inspiration. We know lamentably little of the art

history of even a great center like Locri, but, judging by the hints of

Pindar and Demosthenes, I think there may well have been--there must

have been--consummate local masters, now forgotten, who propagated

certain methods of work, certain fashions in form and feeling and

treatment which ended, naturally enough, in a kind of fixed tradition.

This would suffice to explain the resemblance which your sagacity has

enabled you to detect between these two pieces. That is what I mean by

saying that they came from the same workshop. What do you think of my

theory?"

"I think it accounts for the fact in a most satisfactory manner," the

expert had replied, thoroughly convinced.

Mr. van Koppen knew all this.

But he only believed half of it....

"You were saying, Count?"

The Italian shifted his glance from the dainty outlines of the Locri

Faun and smiled upon his interlocutor and then upon Mr. Heard, who had

at last taken a seat, after walking approvingly round and round the

statuette.

"I was going to tell you of another point which occurred later on to

Sir Herbert; a man, by the way, of unusual acumen. We agreed that Locri

was the indubitable place of origin both of the Demeter and of the

Faun. 'Well,' said he, 'granting this--how came they to be unearthed up

in the hills, on your property, twenty-five miles away?' I confess I

was at first nonplussed by this question. For, to the best of my

knowledge, there are no indications of any large Hellenic settlement up

there. But it struck me that there may well have been a villa or

two--indeed, there must have been, to judge by the miscellaneous ancient

material found on my little place. This is what makes me think that

these two relics were deliberately carried there."

"Carried?"

"Carried. For although the summer season at Locri was undoubtedly more

endurable then than it now is, yet the town must have been sufficiently

hot in the dog-days; whereas my vineyard is situated among the cool

uplands--"

"A kind of climatic station, you mean?"

"Precisely. Don't you think that richer people had domiciles in both

places? The ancients, you know, were so sensitive in the matter of

temperatures that in summer time they traveled only by night and some

of their toughest generals had underground chambers built for them

during their campaigns. I can imagine, for instance, some young and

ardent lover of art, in the days when Pythagoras taught under those

glittering colonnades of Croton, when the fleets of Metapontum swept

the blue Ionian and Sybaris taught the world how to live a life of

ease--I can almost see this youth," he pursued enthusiastically,

"flitting from a hot palace on the plain towards those breezy heights

and, inflamed with an all-absorbing passion for the beautiful, carrying

up with him one or two, just one or two, of those beloved bronzes from

which he could not, and would not, be parted--no, not even for a short

summer month--to be a joy to his eyes and an inspiration to h is soul

among the mountain solitudes. These men, I take it, had a sense in

which we their descendants are wholly deficient--the sense of the

solace, of the pleasurable companionship, to be derived from works of

art. That sense has been destroyed. The Japanese alone, of all moderns,

still foster an ingenuous affection which prompts them to cling closely

to these things of beauty, to press them to their hearts as loving

friends; the rest of us, surrounded by a world of sordid ugliness, have

become positively afraid of their fair but reproachful shapes. Ah, Mr.

van Koppen, that was the age of true refinement, the age of gold!

Nowadays--nowadays we only carry our troubles about with us."

The bishop was touched by these moving words.

Mr. van Koppen, wearing a benevolent twinkle in his eye, said to

himself:

"What a lordly liar! Almost as good as myself."

Luncheon was announced.

CHAPTER XXX

"You are quite right," the Count was saying to Mr. Heard. "The ideal

cuisine should display an individual character; it should offer a menu

judiciously chosen from the kitchen-workshops of the most diverse lands

and peoples-a menu reflecting the master's alert and fastidious taste.

Is there anything better, for instance, than a genuine Turkish pilaf?

The Poles and Spaniards, too, have some notable culinary creations. And

if I were able to carry out my ideas on this point I would certainly

add to my list of dishes a few of those strange Oriental confections

which Mr. Keith has successfully taught his Italian chef. There is

suggestion about them; they conjure up visions of that rich and glowing

East which I would give many years of my remaining life to see."

"Then why not do what I have proposed several times already?" queried

the millionaire. "I am in the East every winter; we reckon this year to

reach Bangkok the first fortnight in November. We can find room for you

on board. We'll make room! Your company would give me more pleasure

than I can say."

Count Caloveglia was probably the only male person on earth to whom the

owner of the FLUTTERBY would have extended such an invitation.

"My dear friend!" replied the other. "I shall never be able to repay

your kindness, as it is. Alas, it cannot be done, not now. And don't

you think," he went on, reverting to his theme, "that we might revive a

few of those forgotten recipes of the past? Not their over-spiced

entremets, I mean--their gross joints and pasties, their swans and

peacocks--but those which deal, for example, with the preparation of

fresh-water fishes? A pike, to my way of thinking, is a coarse,

mud-born creature. But if you will take the trouble, as I once did, to

dress a pike according to the complicated instructions of some obsolete

cookery-book, you will find him sufficiently palatable, by way of a

change."

"You would make an excellent chef!"

"It is plain," added Mr. Heard, "that the Count does not disdain to

practise his skill upon the most ancient and honourable of domestic

arts."

"Indeed I don't. I would cook CON AMORE if I had leisure and materials.

All culinary tasks should be performed with reverential love, don't you

think so? To say that a cook must possess the requisite outfit of

culinary skill and temperament--that is hardly more than saying that a

soldier must appear in uniform. You can have a bad soldier in uniform.

The true cook must have not only those externals, but a large dose of

general worldly experience. He is the perfect blend, the only perfect

blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his

palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.

That is why you will never obtain adequate human nourishment from a

young girl or boy. Such persons may do for housework, but not in the

kitchen. Never in the kitchen! No one can aspire to be a philosopher

who is in an incomplete state of physical development. The true cook

must be mature; she must know the world form her social point of view,

however humble it be; she must have pondered concerning good and evil,

in however lowly and incongruous a fashion; she must have passed

through the crucible of sin and suffering or, at the very least--it is

often the same thing--of married life. Best of all, she should have a

lover, a fierce and brutal lover who beats and caresses her in turns;

for every woman worthy of the name is subject and entitled to

fluctuating psychic needs--needs which must be satisfied to the very

core, if the master is to enjoy sound, healthy fare."

"We don't always allow them to fulfil that last condition," observed

Mr. Heard.

"I know we don't. That is precisely why we are so often poisoned or

starved, instead of being cheered with wholesome food."

"You were speaking of woman-cooks?" asked van Koppen.

"I was. But it stands to reason that no woman can be trusted with so

responsible a task--so sacred a mission, I ought to call it--in regions

south of Bordeaux or east of Vienna. Among many other reasons the whole

sex is too drowsy, outside that radius. And if she drinks a little--"

"Drinks a little?"

"If she drinks a little, why it is all to the good. It shows that she

is fully equipped on the other side of her dual nature. It proves that

she possesses the prime requisite of the artist; sensitiveness and a

capacity for enthusiasm. Indeed, I often doubt whether you will ever

derive well-flavoured victuals from the atelier of an individual who

honestly despises or fears--it is the same thing--the choicest gift of

God. Andrea, my man here, is abstemious to the last degree; not, I am

glad to say, from conviction or ill-health--it is the same thing--but

because he is incurably desirous of saving my money. What is the

consequence? You can taste his self-imposed asceticism in the very

ZABBAGLIONE, for which I must really apologize! It speaks to the eye,

but not to the heart. Let us hope the coffee will be more harmonious."

"Would you not include some of our American dishes in your bill of

fare?"

"To be sure I would; a fine selection. I have most pleasant

recollections of the cuisine of Baltimore."

"You can get all those things in New York."

"No doubt; no doubt. But one thing invariably distresses me in

transatlantic dinners: the unseemly haste in rising. One might really

think the company were ashamed of so natural and jovial a function as

that to which a dining-room is consecrated. And then, have you not

noticed that, sitting at table, a certain intellectual tone, an

atmosphere of a definite kind, is insensibly generated among the

guests, whatever the subject of conversation may be? They are often

quite unaware of its existence, but it hangs none the less about the

room and binds the inmates together for the time being. Suddenly we are

bidden to rise and betake ourselves elsewhere; to sit on other chairs

in a different temperature among different surroundings. It is a

wrench. That peculiar atmosphere is dissipated; the genius of the

earlier moment driven out beyond recapture; we must adapt ourselves to

other conditions and begin anew, often with a good deal of

trouble--often, how often, against our inclination! I call that a

perverse custom. Every state of the mind, whether we are in society or

alone, should be pressed to the last drop, irrespective of whether we

happen to have swallowed a final mouthful of food or not. When the

conversation has died, as everything must die, from sheer inability to

draw further breaths of life, then is the time to break up that old

encircling dome of thought; to construct a fresh one, if need be, in a

fresh environment."

"I confess," said the American, "it has always struck me as rather

barbarous--this running away. I like to linger. But the ladies don't.

They know that their dresses show off better in a parlour than under a

boards of a mahogany table; perhaps their conversation, too, sounds

better among arm-chairs and rugs. So we run after then, as we generally

do; instead of making them run after us" ("as I do," he added to

himself). "But, Count! If you like our American dishes, why not get

this man of yours to learn a few from the Duchess? I know she would

gladly teach him; she is not jealous of her knowledge like a

professional chef."

"I would have asked her that favour long ago, if Andrea had been a born

cook, like Keith's men. Unfortunately he is quite different. The

philosopher is represented in his nature, but not the artist. He is

only a devoted Arcadian, overflowing with good intentions."

"And are they of no avail?" queried the bishop.

"I have been told that, in art and literature, they will atone for

deficiency of natural talent. It may be so; some persons, at least,

have been able to cajole their brains into believing this. However that

may be, I do not think the rule can be extended into the domain of

cookery. Good intentions--no. Nobody need attempt such an imposture on

his stomach, an upright and uncompromising organ, which refuses to

listen to nonsense. Or let them try the experiment. Gastritis will be

the result of good intentions...."

Mr. Heard stretched out his legs. He was beginning to feel at ease. He

like this comely old man; he detected an abiding quality in his outlook

and person. And he felt at home in these surroundings. There was an air

of simplicity and refinement in that calm ground-floor chamber, with

its subdued light filtering through windows that opened upon the

courtyard, groined vaulting of noble proportions, stucco frieze stained

with age to an ivory hue, and those other decorations which the Count,

loyal to the traditions of old-world peasant architecture, had piously

left unaltered--or, it may be, adapted to modern needs by touches so

deft as not to reveal his own consummate artistry. Through the open

door by which they had entered came breathings of warm wind laden with

the suave odour of a tuft of Madonna lilies that grew, half neglected,

in a shady corner. He had noticed them on his entry--how they stood in

proud clusters, bending forward with mighty effort to reach the light.

His eye strayed into the courtyard and moved about the green penumbra

created by the fig tree's massy foliage; it glanced over fragments of

statuary half buried under a riot of leaves and nodding flowers, and

rested with complaisance upon the brickwork flooring of herring-bone

pattern, coloured in a warm, velvety Indian-red. It was worn down here

and there by tread of feet, and pleasantly marked with patches of

emerald-green moss and amber-tinted streaks of light that played about

its surface wherever the sunbeams could pierce the dense leafage

overhead.

From where he sat he could see the Locri Faun on its pedestal. The

figure was drowned in twilight. It seemed to slumber.

Meanwhile Andrea, looking uncommonly ceremonious in white tie and white

cotton globes, was handing round the coffee. It was pronounced an

unqualified success. "Absolutely harmonious," declared the bishop, who

had no hesitation, after a critical sip or two, in extending his

approval to a curiously flavoured liqueur of unknown ingredients.

"From my little property on the mainland," the Count explained. "If it

were a clear day I would take you up to my roof and show you the very

site, although it is leagues and leagues away. But the south wind

always casts a haze over the mainland at this time of day--a kind of

veil."

Mr. van Koppen, connoisseur of cigars, opened his capacious case and

offered its contents, without disclosing the fact that they were

specially manufactured for him at a fabulous price.

"You will find them smokable, I hope. As a matter of fact it's no use

trying to keep a cigar in good condition on the yacht. And it must be

the same on an island like this. So far as tobacco is concerned,

Nepenthe can be nothing but a ship at anchor."

"True," said the Count. "The moist sirocco is injurious to the finer

growths."

"This south wind!" exclaimed Mr. Heard. "This African pest! Is there no

other wind hereabouts? Tell me, Count, does the sirocco always blow?"

"So far as I have observed it blows constantly during the spring and

summer. Hardly less constantly in autumn," he added. "And in winter,

often for weeks on end."

"Sounds promising," observed the bishop. "And has it no influence on

the character?"

"The native is accustomed, or resigned. Foreigners, sometimes, are

tempted to strange actions under its influence."

The American said:

"You spoke of amalgamating our cuisine with yours, or vice versa. It

can doubtless be done, to the profit of both parties. Why not go a step

further? Why not amalgamate our respective civilizations?"

"A pleasant dream, my friend, with which I have occasionally beguiled

myself! Our contribution to human happiness, and that of America--are

they not irreconcilable? What is yours? Comfort, time and labour saving

contrivances; abundance; in a word, all that is summed up under the

denomination of utility. Ours, let us say, is beauty. No doubt we could

saturate ourselves with each other's ideals, to our mutual advantage.

But it would never be an amalgam; the joints would show. It would be a

successful graft, rather than a fusion of elements. No; I do not see

how beauty and utility are ever to be syncretized into a homogeneous

conception. They are too antagonistic to coalesce."

"But there is abundant beauty and grandeur in modern American life,"

said the millionaire, "quite apart, I mean, from that of the natural

scenery. A fine steam-engine, for instance--I call that a beautiful

thing, perfectly adapted to its end. Is its beauty really so

antagonistic to that of your civilization?"

"I know that some excellent persons have been writing lately about the

beauty of a swift-gliding motor-car and things of that kind. They are

right, in one sense of the word. For there is a beauty to mechanical

fitness which no art can enhance. But it is not the beauty of which I

spoke."

"And therefore," observed the bishop, "we ought to have another word

for it."

"Precisely, my dear sir! We ought to have another word. All values are

continually being revised, and tested anew. Are they not? We have been

restating moral values within the last half-century; it is the same

with artistic ones. New canons of taste, new standards, are continually

being evolved; there is a general widening and multiplying of notions.

This, I think, ought to make us careful as to the words we employ, and

ready to coin new ones whenever a new idea is to be expressed. If we

enlarge our concepts, we should likewise enlarge our vocabulary. When I

spoke of beauty, I used the word in its narrow classical meaning, a

meaning which may be out of fashion, but which has the great advantage

that it happens to be irrevocably fixed and defined for us by what the

ancients themselves have handed down in the way of art and criticism.

This particular beauty, I say, is irreconcilable with that other beauty

of which you spoke."

"How so?" asked the millionaire.

"There resides, for example, in Hellenic sculpture a certain

ingredient--what shall we call it? Let us call it the factor of

strangeness, of mystery! It is a vague emanation which radiates from

such works of art, and gives us a sense of their universal

applicability to all our changing moods and passions. That, I suppose,

is why we call them ever young. They beckon to all of us familiarly and

yet, as it were, from an unexplored world. They speak to us at all

seasons in some loving and yet enigmatical language, such language as

we may read, at times, in the eyes of a child that wakes from sleep.

Now the swiftest and fairest steam-engine in the world is not for ever

young; it grows obsolete and ends, after a short life, on the

scrap-heap. That is to say, where usefulness enters, this spirit of

mystery, of eternal youth, is put to flight. And there is yet another

element of classical beauty which is equally at variance with your

modern conception of it: the element of authority. Beholding the

Praxitelean Eros, the veriest ruffian feels compelled to reverence the

creator and his work. 'Who was the man?' he asks; for he acknowledges

that such things impose themselves upon his untutored mind. Now a

certain Monsieur Cadillac builds the most beautiful motor-cars. Who is

this man? We do not care a fig about him. He is probably a Jewish

syndicate. Such being the case, I cannot bring myself to reverence

Monsieur Cadillac and his cars. They are comfortable, but that factor

of authority, which compels our homage to the Eros, is wholly lacking.

Yet both things are called beautiful. That we should apply the same

word to products so different, so hopelessly conflicting, as those of

Praxiteles and Monsieur Cadillac--what does it prove? It proves our

poverty of invention. And what does it explain? It explains our

confusion of thought."

The millionaire remarked:

"I suppose the human outlook has shifted with the years. Democracy hyas

changed your old point of view."

"Assuredly. No American, no modern of any race, I fancy, can divest

himself of the notion that one man is as good as another; in the eyes

of God, they add--meaning in their own eyes. No Greek, no ancient of any

race, I fancy, could have burdened himself with so preposterous a

delusion. Democracy has killed my point of view. It has substituted

progress for civilization. To appreciate things of beauty, as do the

Americans, a man requires intelligence. Intelligence is compatible with

progress. To create them, as did the Greeks, he requires intelligence

and something else as well: time. Democracy, in abolishing slavery, has

eliminated that element of time--an element which is indispensable to

civilization."

"We have some fine slavery in America at this moment."

"I am using the word in the antique sense. Your modern slavery is of

another kind. It has all the drawbacks and few of the advantages of the

classic variety. It gives leisure to the wrong people--to those who

praise the dignity of labour. Men who talk about the Dignity of Labour

had better say as little as possible about civilization, for fear of

confusing it with the North Pole."

The American laughed.

"That's one for me!" he remarked.

"On the contrary! You are an admirable example of that happy graft

which we mentioned just now."

"Progress and civilization!" exclaimed Mr. Heard. "One uses those words

so much in my walk of life that, thinking it over, I begin to wonder

whether they mean more than this: that there are perpetual

readjustments going on. They are supposed to indicate an upward

movement, some vague step in the direction of betterment which,

frankly, I confess myself unable to perceive. What is the use of

civilization if it makes a man unhappy and unhealthy? The uncivilized

African native is happy and healthy. The poor creatures among whom I

worked, in the slums of London, are neither the one nor the other; they

are civilized. I glance down the ages, and see nothing but--change! And

perhaps not even change. Mere differences of opinion as to the value of

this or that in different times and places."

"Pardon me! I was using the words in a specific sense. What I mean by

progress is the welding together of society for whatever ends. Progress

is a centripetal movement, obliterating man in the mass. Civilization

is centrifugal; it permits, it postulates, the assertion of

personality. The terms are, therefore, not synonymous. They stand for

hostile and divergent movements. Progress subordinates. Civilization

co-ordinates. The individual emerges in civilization. He is submerged

in progress."

"You might call civilization a placid lake," said the American, "and

the other a river or torrent."

"Exactly!" remarked Mr. Heard. "The one is static, the other dynamic.

And which of the two, Count, would you say was the more beneficial to

humanity?"

"Ah! For my part I would not bring such consideration to bear on the

point. We may deduce, from the evolution of society, that progress is

the newer movement, since the State, which welds together, is of more

recent growth than the individualistic family or clan. This is as far

as I care to go. To debate whether one be better for mankind than the

other betrays what I call an anthropomorphic turn of mind; it is

therefore a problem which, so far as I am concerned, does not exist. I

content myself with establishing the fact that progress and

civilization are incompatible, mutually exclusive."

"Do you mean to say," asked the millionaire, "that it is impossible to

be progressive and civilized at the same time?"

"That is what I mean to say. Now if America stands for progress, this

old world may be permitted--with a reasonable dose of that flattery

which we accord to the dead--to represent civilization. Tell me, Mr. van

Koppen, how do you propose to amalgamate or reconcile such ferociously

antagonistic strivings? I fear we will have to wait for the

millennium."

"The millennium!" echoed Mr. Heard. "That is another of those unhappy

words which are always cropping up in my department."

"Why unhappy?" asked Mr. van Koppen.

"Because they mean nothing. The millennium will never come."

"Why not?"

"Because nobody wants it to come. They want tangible things. Nobody

wants a millennium."

"Which is very fortunate," observed the Count. "For if they did, the

Creator would be considerably embarrassed how to arrange matters,

seeing that every man's millennium differs from that of his neighbour.

Mine is not the same as yours. Now I wonder, Mr. van Koppen--I wonder

what your millennium would be like?"

"I wonder! I believe I never gave it a thought. I have had other things

to puzzle out."

And the millionaire straightway proceeded to think, in his usual

clear-cut fashion. "Something with girls in it," he soon concluded,

inwardly. Then aloud:

"I guess my millennium would be rather a contradictory sort of

business. I should require tobacco, to begin with. And the affair would

certainly not be complete, Count, without a great deal of your company.

The millennium of other people may be more simple. That of the Duchess,

for example, is at hand. She is about to join the Roman Catholic

Church."

"That reminds me," said Mr. Heard. "She gave me some remarkable

tea-cakes not long ago. Delicious. She said they were your specialty."

"You have found them out, have you?" laughed the American. "I always

tell her that once a man begins on those tea-cakes there is no reason

on earth, that I can think of, why he should ever stop again. All the

same, I nearly overate myself the other day. That was because we had a

late luncheon on board. It shall never occur again--the late luncheon, I

mean. Have you discovered, by the way, whether the business of Miss

Wilberforce has been settled?"

Mr. Heard shook his head.

"Is that the person," enquired the Count, "who is reported to drink to

excess? I have never spoken to her. She belongs presumably to the lower

classes--to those who extract from alcohol the pleasurable emotions

which we derive from a good play, or music, or a picture gallery."

"She is a lady."

"Indeed? Then she has relapsed into the intemperance of her inferiors.

That is not pretty."

"Temperance!" said the bishop. "Another of those words which I am

always being obliged to use. Pray tell me, Count, what you mean by

temperance."

"I should call it the exercise of our faculties and organs in such a

manner as to combine the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of pain."

"And who is the judge of what constitutes the dividing line between use

and abuse?"

"We cannot do better, I imagine, than go to our own bodies for an

answer to that question. They will tell us exactly how far we may

proceed with impunity."

"In that case," said the millionaire, "if you drink a little too much

occasionally--only occasionally, I mean!--you would not call that

intemperance?"

"Certainly not. We are not Puritans here. We do not give wrong names to

things. What you suggest would be by the way of a change, I

presume--like the eating of a pike: something we do not indulge in every

day. If I were to come home a little joyful now and then, do you know

what these people would say? They would say: 'The old gentleman is

pleased to be merry to-night. Bless his heart! May the wind do him

good.' But if I behaved as Miss Wilberforce is reported to do, they

would say: 'That old man is losing self-control. He is growing

intemperate. Every evening! It is not a pretty sight.' They never call

it wrong. Their mode of condemnation is to say that it is not pretty.

The ethical moment, you observe, is replaced by an aesthetic one. That

is the Mediterranean note. It is the merit of the Roman Church that she

left us some grains of common sense in regard to minor morals."

The bishop remarked:

"What I have seen of the local Catholicism strikes me as a kind of

pantomime. That is the fault of my upbringing, no doubt."

"Oh, I am not referring to externals! Externally, of course, our Church

is the purest rococo--"

Mr. Heard was expanding in this congenial atmosphere; he felt himself

in touch with permanent things. He glanced at the speaker. How charming

he looked, this silvery-haired old aristocrat! His ample and gracious

personality, his leisurely discourse--how well they accorded with the

environment! He suggested, in manner, the secret of youth and all that

is glad, unclouded, eternal; he was a reflection, a belated flower, of

the classic splendour which lay in ruins about him. Such a man, he

thought, deserves to be happy and successful. What joy it must have

been to a person of his temperament--the chance discovery of the Locri

Faun!

A great stillness brooded upon the enclosure beyond. The shadows had

shifted. Sunny patches lay, distributed in fresh patterns, upon the old

brickwork flooring. An oval shaft of light, glinting through the

foliage, had struck the pedestal of the Faun and was stealthily

crawling up its polished surface. He looked at the statue. It was still

slumbering in the shade. But a subtle change had spread over the

figure, or was it, he wondered, merely a change in the state of his own

mind, due to what the Count had said? There was energy, now, in those

tense muscles. The slightest touch, he felt, would unseal the

enchantment and cause life to flow through the dull metal.

Mr. van Koppen was slightly ruffled.

"Are you not a little hard on the Puritans?" he asked. "Where would we

have been without them in America?"

"And after all," added the bishop, "they cleared up an infinity of

abuses. They were temperate, at all events! Too temperate in some

matters, I am inclined to think; they did not always allow for human

weakness. They went straight back to the Bible."

The Count shook his head slowly.

"The Bible," he said, "is the most intemperate book I have ever read."

"Dear me!"

Mr. van Koppen, a tactful person, scented danger ahead. He remarked:

"I did not know Italians read the Bible. Where did you become

acquainted with it?"

"In New York. I often amused myself strolling about the Jewish quarter

there and studying the inhabitants. Wonderful types, wonderful poses!

But hard to decipher, for a person of my race. One day I said to

myself: I will read their literature; it may be of assistance. I went

through the Talmud and the Bible. They helped me to understand those

people and their point of view."

"What is their point of view?"

"That God is an overseer. This, I think, is the keynote of the Bible.

And it explains why the Bible has always been regarded as an exotic

among Greco-Latin races, who are all pagans at heart. Our God is not an

overseer; he is a partaker. For the rest, we find the whole trend of

the Bible, its doctrinal tone, antagonistic to those ideals of

equanimity and moderation which, however disregarded in practice, have

always been held up hereabouts as theoretically desirable. In short, we

Southerners lack what you possess: an elective affinity with that book.

One may wonder how the morality of those tawny Semites was enabled to

graft itself upon your alien white-skinned race with such tenacity as

to influence your whole national development. Well, I think I have at

last puzzled it out," he added, "to my own satisfaction at least."

The bishop interposed with a laugh:

"I may tell you, Count, that I am not in the Episcopal mood to-day. Not

at all. Never felt less Episcopal in my life. For that matter, it is

our English ecclesiastics who have dealt some of the most serious blows

at Biblical authority of late, with their modern exegesis. Pray go on!"

"I imagine it is nothing but a matter of racial temperament."

"Goth and Latin?"

"One does not always like to employ such terms; they are so apt to

cover deficiency of ideas, or to obscure the issue. But certainly the

sun which colours our complexion and orders our daily habits,

influences at the same time our character and outlook. The almost

hysterical changes of light and darkness, summer and winter, which have

impressed themselves on the literature of the North, are unknown here.

Northern people, whether from climatic or other causes, are prone to

extremes, like their own myths and sagas. The Bible is essentially a

book of extremes. It is a violent document. The Goth or Anglo-Saxon has

taken kindly to this book because it has always suited his purposes. It

has suited his purposes because, according to his abruptly varying

moods, he has never been at a loss to discover therein exactly what he

wanted--authority for every grade of emotional conduct, from savage

vindictiveness to the most abject self-abasement. One thing he would

never have found, had he cared to look for it--an incitement to live the

life of reason, to strive after intellectual honesty and self-respect,

and to keep his mind open to the logic of his five senses. That is why,

during the troubled Middle Ages when the oscillations of national and

individual life were yet abrupter--when, therefore, that classical

quality of temperance was more than ever at a discount--the Bible took

so firm a hold upon you. Its unquiet teachings responded to the unquiet

yearnings of men. Your conservatism, your reverence for established

institutions, has done the rest. No! I do not call to mind any passages

in the Bible commending the temperate philosophic life; though it would

be strange if so large a miscellany did not contain a few sound

reflections. Temperance," he concluded, as though speaking to

himself--"temperance! All the rest is embroidery."

Mr. Heard was thoughtful. The American observed:

"That side of the case never struck me before. How about Solomon's

proverbs?"

"Maxims of exhaustion, my dear friend. It is easy to preach to me. I am

an old man. I can read Solomon with a certain patience. We want

something for our children--something which does not blight or deny, but

vivifies and guides aright; something which makes them hold up their

heads. A friend, an older brother; not a pedagogue. I would never

recommend a boy to study these writings. They would lower his spirits

and his self-respect. Solomon, like all reformed debauchees, has a

depressing influence on the young."

"Do you know England well?" asked Mr. Heard.

"Very little. I have spent a few days in Liverpool and London, here and

there, on my periodical journeyings to the States. Kind friends supply

me with English books and papers; the excellent Sir Herbert Street

sends me more than I can possibly digest! I confess that much of what I

read was an enigma to me till I had studied the Bible. Its teachings

seem to have filtered, warm and fluid, through the veins of your

national and private life. Then, slowly, they froze hard, congealing

the whole body into a kind of crystal. Your ethics are stereotyped in

black-letter characters. A gargoyle morality."

"It is certainly difficult," said Mr. van Koppen, "for an Anglo-Saxon

to appraise this book objectively. His mind has been saturated with it

in childhood to such an extent as to take on a definite bias."

"Like the ancients with their ILIAD. Where is a truer poet than Homer?

Yet the worship of him became a positive bane to independent creative

thought. What good things could be written about the withering

influence of Homer upon the intellectual life of Rome!"

The bishop asked:

"You think the Bible has done the same for us?"

"I think it accounts for some Byzantine traits in your national

character and for the formlessness and hesitancy which I, at least,

seem to detect in the demeanour of many individual Anglo-Saxons. They

realize that their traditional upbringing is opposed to truth. It gives

them a sense of insecurity. It makes them shy and awkward. Poise! That

is what they need, and what this unbalanced Eastern stuff will never

give them."

"The withering influences of Homer: surely that is a bad sign?" asked

the American.

"And that of the Bible?" added Mr. Heard.

"How shall a plant survive, save by withering now and then? If the

ancients had not exhausted themselves with Homer, the soil might not

have been ready for our Renaissance. A bad sign? Who can tell! Good and

bad--I question whether these are respectable words to use."

"You are content, as you observed before, to establish a fact?"

"Amply content. I leave the rest to the academicians. And the only fact

we seem to have established is that your notions of morality resemble

my notions of beauty in this one point: neither of them are up to date.

You will have be admire a steam-engine. Why? Because of its delicately

adjusted mechanism, its perfect adaptation to modern needs. So be it. I

will modify my conception of what is fair in appearance. I will admire

your steam-engine, and thereby bring my ideals of beauty up to date.

Will you modify your conception of what is fair in conduct? Will you

admire something more adapted to modern needs than those intemperate

Hebrew doctrines; something with more delicately adjusted mechanism?

The mendicant friar, that flower of Oriental ethics--he is not up to

date. He resembles all Semites. He lacks self-respect. He apologizes

for being alive. It is not pretty--to apologize for being alive!"

The American observed:

"I should say that even our greatest bigots, nowadays, don't take those

old doctrines as seriously as you seem to think."

"I daresay they don't. But they profess to reproach themselves for not

doing so. And this is more contemptible. It adds insincerity to

imbecility."

A sunny smile played about his face as he spoke these words. It was

evident that his thoughts were already far away. The bishop, following

the direction of his glance, saw that it rested upon the statuette of

the Faun whose head and shoulders were now enveloped in a warm beam of

light. Under that genial touch the old relic seemed to have woke up

from its slumber. Blood was throbbing in its veins. It was inn

movement; it dominated the scene in its emphatic affirmation of joy.

Mr. Heard, his eyes fixed upon the statuette, now realized the

significance of what had been said. He began to see more clearly. Soon

it dawned upon him that not joy alone was expressed by the figure.

Another quality, more evasive yet more compelling, resided in its

subtle grace: the element of mystery. There, emprisoned in the bronze,

dwelt some benignant oracle.

Puzzle as he would, that oracle refused to clothe itself in words.

What could it be?

A message of universal application, "loving and enigmatical," as the

old man had called it. True! It was a greeting from an unknown friend

in an unknown land; something familiar from the dim past or distant

future; something that spoke of well-being--plain to behold, hard to

expound, like the dawning smile of childhood.

CHAPTER XXXI

Towards evening, Mr. van Koppen drove the bishop down in the carriage

which he usually hired for the whole of his stay on Nepenthe. They said

little, having talked themselves out with the Count. The American

seemed to be thinking about something. Mr. Heard's eye roamed over the

landscape, rather anxiously.

"I don't like that new cloud above the volcano," he observed.

"Looks like ashes. Looks as if it might drift in our direction, doesn't

it, if the wind were strong enough to move it? Do you see much of the

Count?" he enquired.

"Not as much as I should like. What excellent veal cutlets those were!

So white and tender. Quite different from the veal we get in England.

And that aromatic wine went uncommonly well with them. It was his own

growth, I suppose."

"Very likely. From that little vineyard which produces so many good

things." He chuckled softly. "As to English veal--I never yet tasted any

worth eating. If you don't slaughter a calf till it's grown into a

cow--why, you're not likely to get anything but beef."

"They say the English cannot cook, in spite of the excellence of their

prime materials."

"I think the prime materials are at fault. They sacrifice everything to

size. It's barbaric. Those greasy Southdown sheep! It's the same with

their fowls; they're large, but insipid--very different from the little

things you get down here. Now a goose is capital fodder. But if you

grow him only for his weight, you destroy his quality and flavour; you

get a lump of blubber instead of a bird."

"Apple sauce?"

"I don't like apples in any shape. A sour kind of potato, I call them.

They eat an awful lot of apples in our country. That is what makes so

many of our women as flat as boards, in front and behind--especially in

the Eastern States. It's apple-eating. Apples ought to be taxed. They

ruin the female figure. I'm not sure that they don't sour the character

as well."

"Don't you care about our English vegetables?"

"Can't say I'm much in love with them, Mr. Heard. Brussels sprouts, for

instance--I'm very partial to Brussels sprouts. But the things they give

you over there are the size of a bath sponge, and much the same taste,

I reckon. And the carrots! A carrot ought to be small and round and

yellow, it ought to melt in the mouth like a plum. Those carrots aren't

carrots at all. They're walking sticks. And the peas! No, I don't care

about English peas. Too large and too lively for me."

"Lively?"

"That's it. Lively. I shall never forget my first experience of them,"

he went on, laughing. "There were two or three in the dish; just two or

three; filled it up nicely. Looked like cannon-balls. What do they

expect me to do with these things? I wondered. I didn't like to ask the

waiter. One doesn't care to be taken for an ignorant stranger. Well, I

landed one on my plate and began carving at it, to see if there was

anything eatable inside the shell, when the durned thing slipped away

from my knife and crashed on to the floor. Bounced up like a marble. I

called for a nutcracker--'I shall want the largest you've got,' I said.

They couldn't find one. Now I'm not the sort of man, Mr. Heard, to be

beaten by a vegetable, if it really was a vegetable. Because, you see,

it behaved more like a blamed mineral. I sent for the head waiter, and

took him into my confidence. I tried to talk English, like I'm talking

to you. 'What d'ye call these things?' I asked. 'Marrowfats, Sir.' 'Ah,

I thought they weren't peas. You've got PETITS POIS down on the bill of

fare. Better get that put right. And now, how d'ye eat them?' 'You bite

them!' That's what he said. 'You bite them.' Of course I didn't believe

him. I thought it was just a bit of English humour, especially as the

other waiter was looking the opposite way all the time. Well, like a

fool, I said to myself: 'No harm in trying!' I've got pretty sharp

teeth, you know, for a boy of my age. That's how I managed to do what a

lot of you younger fellows couldn't have done. I got them fixed into

the softest of that bunch of marrowfats. But as to pulling them out

again! The head waiter, you bet, had disappeared. And the other fellow

was standing at the window with his back to me. Looking up the street,

I should say, to see if it was going to rain."

After this little outburst, the millionaire seemed to have nothing more

to say.

He was thinking....

Cornelius van Koppen loved a good liar. He knew something about the

gentle art. It was an art, he used to say, which no fool should be

allowed to cultivate. There were too many amateurs knocking about.

These bunglers spoiled the trade. Without doing any good to themselves,

they roused distrust; they rubbed the fine bloom off human credulity.

His puritan conscience was enraged at petty thefts, petty forgeries,

petty larcenies. That was why he despised that otherwise excellent

person, the Financial Commissioner for Nicaragua, whose wildest flights

of embezzlement never exceeded a few hundred dollars. He respected a

man who, like himself, could work in the grand style. To play upon the

credulity of a continent--it was Napoleonic, it was like stealing a

kingdom; it was not stealing at all. This, he shrewdly suspected, was

what his good friend the Count was engaged upon. That delightful old

man was working in the grand style.

Bronzes, ancient or modern, were Greek to Mr. van Koppen. He could not

tell the difference between the art of Clodion and of Myron--had, in

fact, never heard the names of these good people and did not

particularly care to hear them; he paid Sir Herbert Street for that

part of the business. But he had picked up, in the course of his long

humanitarian career, a good deal of general knowledge. Old Koppen was

no fool. He was intelligent; intelligence, as the Count had said, being

perfectly compatible with progress. The millionaire could put two and

two together as fast as most men; he was celebrated, even among his

quick-witted compatriots, for an uncanny faculty of walking round

people without getting off his chair. Common sense, he called it.

Many a time he had listened to Count Caloveglia's rounded periods anent

the Locri Faun. Taking his own personal experience as a guide, he had

come to the conclusion that a man does not explain things quite so

satisfactorily, unless he has some business in hand. Everything fitted

into a hypothesis which had been slowly maturing in his mind, namely,

that he was confronted by a fraud, a really noble fraud, a fraud after

his own heart, a fraud deserving the fullest support of every sensible

man and woman.

That vineyard, for instance, with those antiquities. A good many

friends of his in the States had made their pile out of salted gold

mines. Why not salt a vineyard? Oh yes; everything fitted in

beautifully. The remoteness of that vineyard ... a town like Locri

was obviously unsafe, too public a place for such important

discoveries. The conscientious Sir Herbert would certainly want to make

enquiries on the spot--enquiries which would prove that no Faun had ever

been found there. And that would ruin everything. Therefore the statue

had been "carried" to the vineyard in ancient times by "some young and

ardent lover of art." Carried, ha, ha! His knowledge of human nature

made him doubt whether the Locri Faun had ever in its life made a

further journey than to Caloveglia's shady courtyard from that

mysterious, dusty shed at the back of his house. Or the Demeter either.

That "sadly mutilated head" was a feeler--a rehearsal. They both came

"from the same workshop." Excellent! That shed was the workshop--the

birthplace of these two antiques; the Count himself their old Hellenic

creator.

Andrea, no doubt, was the secret.

These art experts! Here was Street, one of the best of them, a man of

celebrity in his department, solemnly pronouncing for the authenticity

of the fake--in the full and innocent conviction that it was really

authentic. A sucking babe. This man, he could see by his simple society

face, had not even made an arrangement with the Count as to a

commission for himself in the event of a purchase being concluded. He

was satisfied with his salary. These experts--what a crowd of fools they

were! Especially the honest ones.

None the less, he was delighted with Sir Herbert's opinion. It was

exactly what he wanted. For he meant to help the County who, he was

sure, would never accept a cent from him save under a pretext like that

of the sale of the Faun. He loved old Caloveglia. There was something

clean and purposeful about him. His friendship with such a man filled

up what he knew to be a void in his own equipment as citizen of the

world. And the count was working--was lying--for a worthy purpose: a

daughter's dowry. For that reason alone he was deserving of assistance.

Mr. van Koppen was unmarried. Knowing life as he did, from its more

seamy or mercenary side, he had never brought himself to accept a

single one of several hundred offers of marriage which had been more or

less overtly made to him--to his millions. He loved the sex, as a whole;

but distrusted them individually. He thought he knew exactly what they

were after. Pearl necklaces and things. He was a good American; fond of

bestowing pearl necklaces. But he liked to give them when, and to whom,

he fancied; he meant to be his own master and to keep his painfully

gotten millions under his own control. All of which, far from

extinguishing, actually fostered that queer bachelor's feeling of

reverential awe for the married state and its results. Every form of

courage and success appealed to van Koppen--none more than the reckless

impetuosity of a man who speculates in such a delirious lottery and

sometimes actually draws a prize. Such had been Count Caloveglia's

portion. His marriage had plainly been a love-match; a success; its

result, this offspring--a daughter of whom any father might be proud.

Mr. van Koppen thoroughly understood the Count's position. These

Italians need dowries for their girls. Well, he should have one! What

did it signify? One pearl necklace the less, for some operatic charmer.

Not worth talking about. Among all h is various benefactions, none was

ever projected with a lighter heart, with more sincere pleasure. It

made him glad to be a millionaire.

All the details had been settled. The FLUTTERBY was sailing in a day or

two. The relic would be brought on board, at dead of night, by the

faithful Andrea, who would return to the Count with a cheque in his

pocket. It was a considerable sum; so considerable that Caloveglia had

displayed great hesitation in accepting it. But the millionaire pointed

out that the parties must be guided by Sir Herbert's opinion. What was

the good, he asked, of employing a specialist? Sir Herbert Street had

declared the bronze to be priceless, unique. His employer, therefore,

insisted on paying what the other had called "an adequate amount, if

the value of such a work of art can be expressed in monetary figures at

all." There was nothing more to be said. The Count gave way, with

graceful reluctance. A sham ancestry having been manufactured for the

masterpiece (it was proved to come from Asia Minor) in order to elude

the vigilance of the Italian Government, the Locri Faun could

thereafter be freely displayed to the American public, and Sir Herbert

Street was probably right in foretelling that it would be the show

piece of the millionaire's museum-artists and antiquarians flocking to

see it from every part of the world.

And Mr. van Koppen, as he drove along, was thinking of that cheque; he

was converting the dollars into francs. They made rather an awkward

sum. He decided to round it off, if only for the sake of appearances; a

further reason for not sending the cheque till the last moment,

together with a carefully worded letter to allay the Count's scruples.

The old fellow might otherwise return the balance, in a fit of

conscientiousness. Like himself, Count Caloveglia was infernally, and

very properly, punctilious--in small matters.

Yes, there was some fun, at times, in being a millionaire. Or a

sculptor either, for that matter! For it evidently took some doing--a

little thing like that Locri Faun. It took some doing. And it was worth

doing: that was the main point. A man who could bamboozle Sir Herbert

Street--such a man deserved to be supported. And what if the truth

ultimately leaked out? Had he not acted with the best intentions, under

the written advice of an expert? Far from feeling uneasy, Mr. van

Koppen smiled at the thought of how his millions, backed by the opinion

of a connoisseur of international reputation, had enabled him to play

yet one more trick upon that great Republic whose fathomless

gullibility no one had ever exploited to a better purpose than

himself....

Mr. Eames was waiting for the bishop, according to appointment.

"How about Mrs. Meadows?" he at once began.

"She was out, invisible. I waited nearly two hours and then lunched

with Count Caloveglia. By the way, have you seen anything of Denis

lately?"

"No. Why?"

"The old man seemed to be concerned about him. He asked me to make

enquiries. Van Koppen thought that he might have got into trouble with

some girl. But that strikes me as very unlikely. He may be a little

homesick and lonely, so far from his mother."

The bibliographer said:

"I understand Mr. van Koppen is quite an authority on girls. As to

Denis, I saw him last--when was it? Oh, not so very long ago. The day

all those funny things happened; those portents. We walked up and down

together on this very terrace. Perhaps he has left the island, like

that wretched mineralogist who promised me--never mind! He seemed all

right then. A little depressed, perhaps. Yes; a little depressed, no I

come to think of it. But the Count need not be anxious. This island is

a great place for scares and rumours."

Mr. Heard was not satisfied.

"Do you believe the influence of Nepenthe can make Northern people

irresponsible for their actions? Keith does. Or how about the sirocco?

Can it upset their nerves to such an extent?"

"Not my nerves. I have heard of people making fools of themselves and

then blaming the Creator. Often! And of course, if one begins to brood

over accidentals like the weather, one is sure to become a lunatic

sooner or later. Weather was not made for that purpose. If you come to

think of it, how few days there are when a man can honestly say that

the weather is quite to his liking! It is nearly always too hot or too

cold or too wet or too dry or too windy. I don't trouble myself about

sirocco. Why should Denis? He is not nearly as much of a fool as many

people look. And I would not listen to Keith. He moves among

hyperbolas."

Mr. Heard felt slightly relieved. What a sensible fellow this was; so

matter-of-fact and sure of his ground. The ideal scholar. Sirocco did

not exist for him. He stood aloof from human passions and infirmities.

It was plain that the bishop had never heard that story about the

BALLON CAPTIF.

"For my part," he said, "I am beginning to object to this south wind. I

never felt it worse than to-day. Phew! Stifling! One can hardly

breathe. My shirt is sticking to my back. Suppose we sit down

somewhere?"

They found a bench, in view of the sea and the volcano. The population

moved sedately up and down before their eyes.

"Is it always like this?" enquired Mr. Heard.

"Spring is a little warmer than usual. Or perhaps one should say that

summer has begun earlier. The sirocco is the same, year after year,

although there is a kind of conspiracy among the foreign residents to

say that it happens to be worse than usual that particular season. It

never varies."

"What does your Perrelli say on the subject?"

Mr. Eames glanced at him distrustfully.

"You are trying to chaff me," he said. "Serves me right for talking so

much this morning. I am afraid I bored you dreadfully."

The bishop wanted to know.

"Then I may tell you that Monsignor Perrelli does not so much as

mention the South wind. He names all the others and has come capital

observations on the anchorages of the island as adapted to different

winds and seasons. He has also extracted from old chronicles the

records of the great storms of 1136, 1342, 1373, 1460, and so on; but

never discloses the fact that they all blew from the south. He says the

air is pleasant, tempered by gentle breezes from the sea. The word

sirocco does not occur in his pages save once, when he laments its

prevalence on the mainland."

"The old humbug!"

A little shiver ran through Mr. Eames. Then he observed, in a suave

tone of voice:

"He was an historian of the period, an agreeable gentleman telling

others of his kind what he knows will be of interest to them. That is

what makes his work attractive to me: the personality of the writer.

The facts that he records, taken in conjunction with those he slurs

over or omits--they give one such an insight into changing human nature!

You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what

he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do."

"Modern historians are not like that," said Mr. Heard. "They give you

the truth to the best of their ability. It is rather dry reading

sometimes. I would like to borrow your Perrelli for a day or two, if

you don't mind."

"I'll send it round, together with some old prints of this island and

modern photographs. You will then see what I mean. The prints are not

exactly true to nature; these people did not want to be true to nature.

And yet they convey a better impression of the place than the modern

pictures. Perhaps there are two truths: the truth of fact and that of

suggestion. Perrelli is very suggestive; romance grafted upon

erudition, and blossoming out of it! So imaginative! He has a

dissertation on the fishes of Nepenthe--it reads like a poem and is yet

full of practical gastronomic hints. Can you picture Virgil

collaborating with Apicius?"

The bishop said:

"Horace might have got on better with that old BON-VIVANT."

"Horace could never have had a hand in this chapter. He lacks the

idealistic tinge. He could never have written about red mullets as

Perrelli writes when he compares their skin to the fiery waves of

Phelgethon, to the mantle of rosy-fingered dawn, to the blush of a

maiden surprised in her bath, and then goes on to tell you how to cook

the b east in thirty different ways and how to spit out the bones in

the most noiseless, genteel fashion. That is Perrelli--so original, so

leisurely. Always himself! He smiled as he wrote; there is not a shadow

of doubt about it. In another section, on the fountains of the island,

he deliberately indulges in the humour of some old mediaeval schoolman.

Then there is a chapter on the ecclesiastical conditions of the place

under Florizel the Fat--it is full of veiled attacks on the religious

orders of his own day; I suspect it got him into trouble, that chapter.

I am sorry to say there is a good deal of loose talk scattered about

his pages. I fear he was not altogether a pure-minded man. But I cannot

bring myself to despise him. What do you think? Certain problems are

always cropping up, aren't they?"

Mr. Eames suddenly looked quite troubled.

"They are," replied the bishop, who was not in a mood to discuss ethics

just then. "What are you going to do about it?" he added.

"About what?"

"This poetic omission on the part of Perrelli to mention the sirocco?"

"It has given me a deal of extra work, I can assure you. I have had to

go into the whole question. I have tabulated no less than fifty-seven

varieties of sirocco. Sailors' words, most of them; together with a

handful of antiquated terms. Fifty-seven varieties. Twenty-three

thousand words, up to the present, dealing the with south wind."

"That is a fair-sized foot-note," laughed the bishop. "A good slice of

a book, I should call it."

"My foot-notes are to be printed in small type. In fact, I am thinking

of casting the whole of this sirocco--material into an appendix. Too

much, you think? Surely the number of words is not disproportionate to

the subject? The south wind is a good slice of Nepenthe, is it not?...

Look! That cloud has made up its mind to come our way after all.

There will be another shower of ashes. Sirocco, you observe...."

The terrace, meanwhile, had become crowded. Already the evening sun was

slightly obscured behind a brown haze. Ashes were traveling fast. They

began to fall, softly.

What was to be done? Everybody, mindful of the previous experience, was

in favour of a second procession to take place immediately. The PARROCO

held the same opinion. For form's sake, however, he dispatched a

confidential messenger to learn the views of Mr. Parker, who was

sitting dejectedly in his study with the incomplete Financial Report

still staring him in the face. The Commissioner pulled himself together

with praiseworthy alacrity and gave his whole mind to the question.

No. On due consideration, he was opposed to the idea of a procession.

Having enjoyed, in various continents and various capacities, some

experience of backing the same horse twice over, Mr. Parker was not in

favour of demanding a second largesse from the Saint. It might spoil

everything, he said. Let them wait till next morning. If there was a

deep fall like last time, the experiment might be worth trying. But not

just yet! While admitting that something ought to be done, it struck

him as a hazardous proceeding to play fast and loose, in this fashion,

with the reputation of a Saint.

His Reverence, duly impressed, waited for half an hour. It was then

seen that the Nicaraguan Representative had once more given the

soundest of advice. The downpour of ashes ceased abruptly, at the

moment when the sun sank into the sea. No mischief was done.

Late at night another phenomenon became visible. The volcano was

observed to be in violent eruption. It blazed forth like a gigantic

torch held into the heavens. Streams of lava poured down the mountain

flanks, reddening sky and sea.

Nepenthe was consoled by the spectacle. The demon had at last found an

outlet--a method of relief. There would be no more showers of ashes. The

fact that villages were being overwhelmed under a deluge of flame,

vineyards scorched and hundreds of innocent folks, their retreat cut

off by fiery torrents, were even then being roasted to death, was no

concern to the islanders. It only proved what every one knew: that the

jurisdiction of their Patron Saint did not extend to the mainland.

Each of those villages had its own Saint, whose business it was to

forestall accidents of this kind. If they failed in their duty through

incapacity or mulishness, nothing was easier than to get rid of them;

there were others to choose from--dozens of others, waiting for the job!

Thinking thus, the islanders gave vent to an immense sigh if relief.

They wished long life to their Patron Saint, with whose services they

had reason to be satisfied. Their own crops and lives were safe from

harm, thanks to the martyr Dodekanus. He loved his people, and they

loved him. He was a protector worthy of the name--not like those

low-bred bastards across the water.

CHAPTER XXXII

Mr. Heard had just finished his early Italian luncheon. Sitting at his

coffee and smoking a cigarette, in a mood of considerable contentment,

he gazed over the mirror-like surface of the sea towards the volcano,

whose pyrotechnical display on the previous evening had kept him awake

to a late hour. Yet another glistering day! Each one warmer than the

last, and never a change in the wind! Presently he would retire for an

hour or two into his cool and darkened bed-room.

One little thing troubled his mind. There had been no reply to the

note--a kind of note of enquiry--which he had left at the villa Mon Repos

on the preceding day. Though he knew little of his cousin, he could not

help feeling anxious. She was all by herself in that lonely little

place, suffering--perhaps, and too proud or too shy to complain. Mr.

Eames' description of her had made him uneasy. Why should she look as

if she had seen a ghost? What could that signify? The bibliographer was

a level-headed person, by no means given to flights of imagination.

Imperceptibly, he felt, there had been established an under-current of

sympathy between himself and this solitary woman, whom everybody seemed

to like. She was different from the ordinary type; the kind of woman

whom a man could not help respecting. She contrasted favourably with

some of his recent female acquaintances who, however charming or witty,

dissatisfied him in this or that particular. His cousin's devotion to

child and husband appealed to his heart. She seemed to be perfect of

her kind.

Africa had boiled most of the starch out of Mr. Heard. But his

acquaintance with some of the saddest and wildest aspects of womanhood

only deepened his conviction of the sanctity of the sex. Some called

him old-fashioned or quixotic, because he was not altogether in

sympathy with modern feministic movements; they called him an idealist,

because he had preserved his belief in the sacred mission of women upon

earth--his childlike faith in the purity of their souls. They were a

humanizing influence, the guardian angels of mankind, the inspirers,

the mothers, the protectors of innocence. It pleased him to think that

woman had softened harsh dealings between man and man; that every

mitigation of savagery, every incitement to worthy or heroic actions,

was due to her gentle words, her encouraging example. From the very

dawn of history woman had opposed herself to deeds of violence. What

was it Count Caloveglia had said? "Temperance. All the rest is

embroidery." How well the old man could put things! Temperance....

His cousin, from what he could guess of her character, agreed with that

description. Mr. Heard would have maintained against the whole world

that a woman, a true woman like this, could do no wrong.

And now he gathered that she was in trouble of some kind. Then why not

allow him to help? He had asked for an early reply to his note. Well,

perhaps it would arrive by the evening post.

Slightly vexed none the less, he laid down the stump of his cigarette,

preparatory to retiring for the hot hours of the day. One owes

something to oneself, N'EST-CE PAS? At that moment there was a knock at

his door.

Denis entered. His face, shaded under a broad-brimmed hat, was ruddy

with the heat. He wore light flannels, and was carrying his jacket on

his arm. There was a large parcel in his hand. He looked the picture of

health.

Mr. Heard, on rising, gave him a critical glance. He remembered his

trip in the boat, and the suicide's rock--that black, ominous cliff; he

remembered the thoughts which had passed through his mind at the time.

Was this the kind of boy to kill himself? Surely not. Keith must have

been mistaken. And Count Caloveglia--was he mistaken too? Evidently.

There was nothing tragic about Denis. He was brimming over with life.

His troubles, whatever they were, must have been forgotten.

"I've been lunching with Keith," he began. "He made me tell him a

fairy-tale."

"Sit down and have some coffee! You came away very early."

"He told me he wanted to go to sleep after luncheon. And one or two

other nice things."

Ah, thought Mr. Heard, Keith was acting up to what he had said in the

boat; he was being good to the boy; that was right of him.

"I'm sure," he said, "that Keith has been speaking kindly to you."

"Kindly? It's like talking to an earthquake. He told me to dominate my

reflexes. He called me a perambulating echo. He said I was a human

amoeba--"

"Amoeba. What's that?"

"A sort of animal that floats about trying to attach itself to

something which it can't find."

"I think I see what he means. Anything else?"

"He said I was a chameleon."

"A chameleon!"

"A chameleon that needed the influence of a good woman. Then he gave me

this box of Cuban chocolates, to keep me from crying, I suppose. Have

one! They're not nearly as nasty as they look."

"Thanks. A chameleon. That is really interesting, as Keith would say. I

have seen thousands of them. Outlandish beasts, that anchor themselves

by their tails and squint horribly. Let's have a look at you, Denis.

No, I fail to detect any striking resemblance."

"I believe he meant that I take on the colour of other people and have

none of my own. Then he told me to go and murder somebody."

"I wouldn't do that, Denis," laughed the bishop. "Murders are so

dreadfully vulgar."

"He said it might make a man of me. He forgets that I'm not quite his

age."

"You had better not tell him that! Any other advice?"

"Nothing new. He said I made a mistake in paying attention to what

human beings said and did, and that I ought to forsake mankind for a

while, and art and books and so on. You know the way he talks! He said

it would give me a stronger individuality if I came into contact with

nature and thought things out for myself instead of listening to other

people. He advised me to sit among the rocks at midnight and in the hot

afternoons, conversing with the genii of earth and air. It would

correct my worldly perspective. I think he may be right, in a way.

There is something in it. So I asked him to climb into the hills with

me, then and there, in order to get into touch with elemental Powers.

He said he thought highly of my character, but as to climbing about in

this heat--he said he'd be damned if he would. Those were his very

words. He wanted to sleep. He was too old for that sort of thing."

"Very sensible, I'm sure."

"You think so? Because then--then he told me that you were the proper

person for an expedition of that kind. He suggested I should come and

see you about it at once--it would allow him time to get his usual

afternoon nap. That is why I'm here. So do! It isn't so very hot, once

you get used to it. We are sure to see something funny."

"Oh!"

This, thought the bishop, was a pretty example of that doctrine of

benevolent egotism which Keith had expounded to him once or twice. A

very pretty example!

"He said that?"

Denis nodded.

The notion was distasteful to Mr. Heard. To go out into this torrid

sunshine.... He, too, was not exactly young; moreover, he was still

rather delicate--he needed all the rest he could get. He was looking

forward with positive delight to the coming hours in his cool bedroom.

"You really want me to climb to the top of a mountain at this hour of

the day and sit there in the heat, waiting for some wretched demon to

reveal himself? Aren't you a little too old for that sort of thing?

Come now! Does it strike you as a reasonable proposition? With the

thermometer at seventy-eight in this room?"

"Keith said you liked nothing better. He said you might take offence if

I didn't ask you to come."

He seemed to be disappointed.

There were not many people for whom Mr. Heard would have put himself

out just then in that particular way; and Denis, up to a few days ago,

was certainly not one of them. The bishop had never been drawn towards

this rather precious youth. He was not Mr. Heard's type of boy. There

was a lack of grit and stamina about him--something soft, both in manner

and appearance; something dreamy, ambiguous, almost epicene. Mr. Heard

had not quite lost his old British instinct as to the fundamental

uselessness of all art. A young fellow who, instead of taking up some

rational profession, talked about Cimabue and Jacopo Bellini ...

there was something not quite right with him. Jacopo Bellini! But even

while thinking what to reply, he was conscious of having undergone a

slight change of feeling lately. He was growing more tolerant and

benign, even in trifles like this. Jacopo Bellini: why not? Meanwhile,

he bethought himself of a way of escape.

"Suppose you go alone? Or why not try the midnight expedition first? I

might manage midnight."

"I've tried it."

"Alone?" he laughed. "No success?"

"None whatever," said Denis. And it seemed as if a shadow flitted

across his face at these words.

That cloud, that change of tone--what did they portend? Something might

be wrong, then, after all. Perhaps Keith had been correct in his

diagnosis when he observed that a susceptible mind like this could be

shaken out of its equilibrium by the influence of Nepenthe--"capable of

anything in this clear pagan light." It was not Mr. Heard's habit to

probe into the feelings of others--as to those of a person like Denis he

did not pretend to understand them. Artistic people! Incalculable!

Inconsequential! Irresponsible! Quite another point of view! Yet he

could not help thinking of that doleful black rock, with the

turquoise-tinted water at its foot. Remembering these things he felt a

sudden access of sympathy towards this lonesome fellow-creature.

Instead of pursuing the subject of the expedition he asked, quite

abruptly:

"Tell me, Denis, are you happy here?"

"How odd that you should come with that question! I had a letter from

my mother this morning. She wants to know the same thing. And hanged if

I know what to say."

Mr. Heard made up his mind.

"Hanged if you know? Then I'll tell you. Write to say that you have met

the Bishop of Bampopo, who seems a perfectly respectable old fellow.

Uncommonly respectable! Tell her you rather like him. Tell her she can

find out all about him in Crockford or the Red Book. Tell her that he

will be happy to correspond with her, if she will allow it. Tell her

you feel sure he will look after you these last few days, before we all

go away. Tell her--oh, everything nice you can think of. You'll do that,

won't you? And now I will climb any mountain you like. Where are we

going?"

"I have thought of a good place. Rather high up, but well worth it. I

feel sure something funny is going to happen to-day. Don't you notice a

kind of demonic influence in the air?"

"I notice a kind of infernal heat, if that is the same thing.

Seventy-eight in this room! You will have to walk slowly. I am not in

good condition just yet. Wait a moment. I must take my field-glasses. I

never go without them."

Mr. Heard, resigned to his fate, was filled at the same time with

anxiety. He could not drive Keith's words out of his head. Perhaps

Denis was really up to some mischief. Who could tell? His eagerness--his

curious language! That note of exaltation in his voice.... And what

did he mean by saying that something funny would happen? Was he

contemplating--? Above all, his dread of being unaccompanied! Mr. Heard

was aware that persons of unbalanced mind are apt to experience before

some critical outbreak a pathetic horror of solitude, as though, dimly

conscious of what was about to happen, they feared to trust themselves

alone.

He meant to keep a sharp eye on Denis.

Often, in later times, he recalled that trivial conversation. Every

word of it was graven on his memory. How more than strange that Denis

should have dragged him away that afternoon, to that particular spot,

at that very hour! By what a string of accidents had everything

happened....

CHAPTER XXXIII

It was nearly two o'clock. To step out of doors was like passing into a

furnace. Streets were deserted. The houses showed glaring white against

the cobalt of the firmament; their inhabitants lay asleep within,

behind closed shutters. Heat and silence brooded over the land.

Climbing slowly aloft by a lava-paved lane they reached the

bibliographer's residence and paused awhile near its entrance. Mr.

Heard tried to picture the scholar's life in this two-roomed cottage;

he regretted having had no chance of visiting that amiable person in

his own abode. (Mr. Eames was chary of issuing invitations.) A life of

monastic severity. There was a small outhouse attached to one side of

the wall; it was the kitchen, Denis explained; Eames' only servant

being a boy whom he borrowed for an occasional morning's work from a

neighbouring farm which supplied him with dairy produce.

"It isn't often used, that kitchen," said Denis. "He lives mostly on

bread and milk. Does his own marketing in the early hours. I met him

one day before breakfast, walking with a large brown basket on his arm.

Said he was buying anchovies. There was a big haul of them overnight.

He had heard about it. A penny a pound, he said. I noticed some lettuce

as well. A couple of oranges. Fine chap! He knows what he wants."

The bishop looked over the gate. An air of friendly seclusion reigned

in this place. There was no pretence at a garden--not so much as a rose

tree or a snapdragon; the vines, of daintiest green but sternly

utilitarian, clambered up to the door-lintel, invading the very roof.

He pictured to himself the interior. Bare walls and floorings, a print

or two, a few trunks and packing cases utilized as seats, a bookshelf,

a plain table littered with manuscripts; somewhere, in that further

room, a camp bedstead whereon this man of single aim and purpose, this

monk of literature, was even then at rest like all sensible folks, and

dreaming--dreaming, presumably, of foot-notes. Happy mortal! Free from

all superfluities and encumbrances of the flesh! Enviable mortal! He

reduced earthly existence to its simplest and most effective terms; he

owed no man anything; he kept alive, on a miserable income, the sacred

flame of enthusiasm. To aspire, that was the secret of life. Thinking

thus, Mr. Heard began to understand the bibliographer's feeling for

Mrs. Meadows. She lived for her child--he for his work. They were alike;

calm and self-contained, both of them; incapable of illusions, of

excesses in thought or conduct.

Without the doorway, in a small triangle of shade, sat is fox-terrier,

alert, head poised on one side in knowing fashion, ready to bark if the

visitors only touched the handle of the gate. Denis remarked:

"He told me that dog was sick the other morning, just like Keith."

"It had probably been eating something. I suppose they couldn't be

unwell, could they? What a heat, Denis! It's addling my old brains.

More slowly, please."

An hour went by. Fatigue was beginning to tell upon Mr. Heard. They had

left he cultivated ground behind and were now ascending, by a cindery

track of pumice-stone, among grotesque blocks of lava and scoriae that

glowed like molten metal. Tufts of flowery broom scented the air. The

soil, so recently drenched by the miraculous shower of rain, was once

more dry and dusty; its fragile flowers wilted in the sirocco. And

still the young man marched ahead. Always upwards! The landscape grew

more savage. They bent round a corner and gound themselves skirting a

precipice. The bishop glanced down in trepidation. There lay the sea,

with not a boat in sight. As he continued to look the horizon

oscillated; the ground sank under his feet and blue waters seemed to

heave and rise up towards him. He shut his eyes in a fit of dizziness

and grasped a rock. Its burning touch revived him.

Then on again. Always upwards.

"Do walk a little more slowly," said the bishop, puffing and wiping his

face. "We must be well above the level of the Old Town by this time. A

wild scramble. How much higher are we going?"

"Here we are. This is the place I meant."

"Charming, I must say! But aren't we a little too near the edge of the

cliff? It makes me feel funny, as if I were in a balloon."

"Oh, we'll get used to it. Let's sit down, Mr. Heard."

Still distrustful of his companion, the bishop made himself comfortable

and glanced around. They were high up; the view embraced half the

island. The distant volcano confronting him was wreathed in sullen grey

smoke that rose up from its lava torrent, and crowned with a menacing

vapour-plume. Then an immensity of sea. At his feet, separated from

where he sat by wide stony tracts tremulous with heat, lay the Old

Town, its houses nestling in a bower of orchards and vineyards. It

looked like a shred of rose-tinted lace thrown upon he landscape. He

unraveled those now familiar thoroughfares and traced out, as a map,

the more prominent buildings--the Church, the Municipality, the old

Benedictine Monastery where Duke Alfred, they say, condescendingly

invited himself to dine with the monks every second month in such state

and splendour that, the rich convent revenues being exhausted, His

Highness was pleased to transfer his favours to the neighboring

Carthusians who went bankrupt in their turn; he recognized Count

Caloveglia's place and, at the furthest outskirts, the little villa Mon

Repos.

Where was she now, his cousin?

Reposing, no doubt, like all sensible folks.

And his eye wandered to the narrow pathway along the precipice where he

had walked with her in the evening light--that pathway which he had

suggested railing in, by reason of its dangers. A section of the

horrible face of the cliff was exposed, showing that ominous

coloration, as though splotched with blood, which he had noticed from

the boat. The devil's rock! An appropriate name. "Where the young

English lord jump over...."

It was the stillest hour of the day. Not a soul in sight. Not a

particle of shade. Not a breath of air. A cloudless sky of inky

blueness.

To Mr. Heard's intense relief Denis had settled down, apparently for

ever. He lay on his stomach like a lizard, immovable. His head,

sheltered by a big hat, rested upon his jacket which he had rolled up

into a sort of cushion; one bare sunburnt arm was stretched to its full

length on the seared ground. What a child he was, to drag one up to a

place like this in the expectation of seeing something unearthly! Mr.

Heard was not quite satisfied about him. Perhaps he was only feigning.

Time passed. Do what he would to keep awake, the bishop felt his

eyelids drooping--closing under the deluge of light. Once more there

approached him that spirit of malevolence brooding in the tense sunny

calm, that baleful emanation which seemed to drain away his powers of

will. It laid a weight upon him. He felt into an unquiet slumber.

Presently he woke up and turned sharply to look at his companion. Denis

had not stirred an inch from his voluptuous pose. A queer boy. Was he

up to some mystification?

The landscape all around was scarred and deserted. How silent a place

can be, he thought. An unhealthy hush. And what a heat! The lava

blocks--they seemed to smoulder and reel in the fiery glare. It was a

deathly world. It reminded him of those illustrations to Dante's

INFERNO. He thought to see the figures of the damned writhing amid

tongues of flame.

His glance fell once more upon the villa of his cousin. Strange! There

were two persons, now, walking along the edge of the cliff. Mere

specks.... He took up his glasses. The specks resolved themselves

into the figures of Mrs. Meadows and Mr. Muhlen.

The devil! he thought. What's the meaning of this?

They were moving up and down, at the same spot where he had moved up

and down with her. They seemed to be on friendly terms with one

another. Excellent terms. It looked as if they were laughing now and

then, and stopping occasionally to glance at something, some book or

other object, which the lady carried in her hand. The devil! At times

his cousin seemed to be dangerously near the edge--he caught his breath,

remembering that sensation of giddiness, of gulping terror, with which

he had watched the falcon swaying crazily over the abyss. She was

enjoying it, to all appearances. Then, as they retraced their steps, it

was the man's turn to take the outside of the path. He suffered as

little as she did, evidently, from vertigo. Laughing, and

gesticulating. The devil! What were they talking about? What were they

doing there, at this impossible hour of the day? Five or six times they

went to and fro; and then, suddenly, something happened before Mr.

Heard's eyes--something unbelievable.

He dropped his glasses, but quickly raised them again. There was no

doubt about it. Muhlen was no longer there. He had disappeared. Mrs.

Meadows was walking down towards her villa, in sprightly fashion,

alone.

Mr. Heard felt sick. Not knowing exactly what he was about, he began to

shake Denis with needless violence. The young man turned round lazily,

flushed in the face.

"Where--what--" he began. "Rather funny! You saw it too? Oh, Lord!

You've woke me up. What a bother.... Why, Mr. Heard, what's the

matter with you? Aren't you feeling well?"

The bishop pulled himself together, savagely.