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By Root 10706 0

unmistakably islanders. With the usual peasant hospitality they offered me a little saucer of quince jam and a thimbleful of _raki_ as well as the glass of cistern water I requested. Their men were all away far to the south, fishing. I said I was going to see _o kyrios_ Conchis, and their surprise seemed perfectly genuine. Did he ever visit them? Their heads all went back swiftly together, as if the idea was unheard of. I had to listen to the story of the execution again--at least the oldest woman launched out into a welter of words among which I heard "mayor" and "Germans"; and the children raised their arms like guns. Maria, then? They saw her, of course? But no, they never saw her. She is not a Phraxiot, one of them said. Then the music, the songs in the night? They looked at one another. What songs? I was not surprised, Veiy probably they went to bed and woke with the sun. "And you," asked the grandmother, "are you a relation of his?" They evidently thought of him as a foreigner. I said I was a friend. FIe has no friends here, said the old woman, and with a faint hostility in her voice she added, bad men bring bad luck. I said he had guests--a young girl with fair hair, a tall man, a younger girl so high. They had seen them? They had not. Only the grandmother had even been inside Bourani; and that was long before the war. Then they had their way and asked me the usual series of childish but charmingly eager questions about myself, about London, about England. I got free in the end, after being presented with a sprig of basil, and walked inland along the bluff until I could climb onto the ridge that led to Bourani. For some time three of the barefoot children accompanied me along the seldom-used path. We topped a rocky crest among the pines, and the distant flat roof of the house came into sight over the sea of trees ahead. The children stopped, as if the house was a sign that they should go no further. I turned after a while and they were still wistfully standing there. I waved, but they made no gesture in return.

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I went with him and sat in his music room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. All through tea I had waited for some indication on his part that he knew I had seen the girl--as he must have known, for it was obvious that the nocturnal concert had been given to announce her presence. But I intended to follow the same course of action as I had over the earlier incident: to say nothing until he gave me an opening. Not the slightest chink had appeared in our conversation. Conchis seemed to me, no expert, to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to "interpret," to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played--I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool, shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions. It was the first time I had heard him play great music, and I was moved as I had been by the Bonnards; moved in a different way, but still moved. The mystery of the old man dwindled, and his humanity rose uppermost. It came to me as I listened that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. Conchis had spoken of meeting his future, of feeling his life balanced on a fulcrum, when he first came to Bourani. I was experiencing what he meant; a new selfacceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. It was an awareness of a new kind of potentiality, one very different from my old sense of the word, which had been based on the illusions of ambition. The mess of my life, the seffishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things _could_ fall into place, they _could_ become a source