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By Root 23734 0

have heard some disagreeable things about me?" "I only know one story about you and that seems very much to your credit." "The execution?" "I told you last week." "I have a feeling that you have heard something else. From Captain Mitford?" "Absolutely nothing. I assure you." He was standing in the doorway, giving me his intensest look. He seemed to gather strength; to decide that the mystery must be cleared up; then spoke. "I am psychic." The house seemed full of silence; and suddenly everything that had happened earlier led to this. "I'm afraid I'm not psychic. At all." We seemed drowned in dusk; two men staring at each other. I could hear a clock ticking in his room. "That is unimportant." He moved away. "In half an hour?" "Of course. But why did you tell me that?" He turned to a small table by the door, and struck a match to light the oil lamp, and then carefully adjusted it. In the doorway he stopped a moment. "In half an hour?" he said again. Then he went down the passage and across the landing into his room. I heard his door shut. The house was very still. I had a sensation that I couldn't define; except that it was new.

16

The bed was a cheap iron one. Besides a second table, a carpet, and an armchair, there was only an old, locked _cassone_, of a kind to be found in every cottage on the island. It was the least likely millionaire's spare room imaginable. The walls were bare except for a photograph of a number of village men standing in front of a house--the house. I could make out a younger Conchis in the centre, wearing a straw hat and shorts, and there was one woman, a peasant woman, though not Maria, because she was Maria's age in the photo and it was plainly twenty or thirty years old. I held up the lamp and turned the picture round to see if there was anything written on the back. But the only thing there was a fragile gecko, which clung splayfooted to the wall and watched me with cloudy eyes. Geckos like seldom-used rooms. On the table by the head of the bed there was a flat shell to serve as an ashtray, and three books; a collection of ghost stories, an old Bible and a large thin volume entitled _The Beauties of Nature_. The ghost stories purported to be true, "authenticated by at least two reliable witnesses." The list of contents--_Borley Rectory_, _The Isle of Man Polecat_, _No. 18 Dennington Road_, _The Man with the Limp_--reminded me of being ill at boarding school. I opened _The Beauties of Nature_. The nature was all female, and the beauty all pectoral. There were long shots of breasts, shots of breasts of every material from every angle, and against all sorts of background, closer and closer, until the final picture was of nothing but breast, with one dark and much larger than natural nipple staring from the centre of the glossy page. It was much too obsessive to be erotic. I picked up the lamp and went into the bathroom. It was well fitted out, with a formidable medicine chest. I looked for some sign of a woman's occupation, and found none. There was running water, but it was cold and salt; for men only. I went back to my room and lay on the bed. The sky in the open window was a pale night blue and one or two first faint northerly stars blinked over the trees. Outside, the crickets chirped monotonously, with a Webern-like inconsistency yet precision of rhythm. I heard small noises from the cottage below my window, and I could smell cooking. In the house was a great stillness. I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so Germanically dogmatic that I wanted to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me, and not only as a rich man with some enviable works of art in his house. And now he quite definitely frightened me. It was the kind of illogical fear of the supernatural that in others made me sneer; but all along I had felt that I was invited not out of hospitality, but for some other reason. He wanted to use me in some way. I now discounted homosexuality; he had had his chances and ignored