A middle-aged woman with a beard spoke to the foreign lady, whose mouth couldn’t cope with the reply. Soon afterwards the procession wobbled on, with laughter and prayers.
‘What did she say?’
‘When we have come for such other reasons, she wanted me to kiss the corpse!’ Hero could have been spitting out the sensation.
They continued through the now empty streets, and came out at the foot of a mountain which she said they must climb. He recognized the blocks of marble melting as they ought in the direction of miracles and martyrdom. On the summit stood the great monastery, manned against assault. An old man came down from drinking on a terrace, and began pissing in the wrong quarter; the wind blew it back at him. Troglodytes, variously bearded, scampered out of their caves and off amongst the olives, scattering dung.
Hero chose a narrow track through caper vines and renegade artichokes. ‘This is a short way,’ she explained, her back rounding under the effort of the climb.
She couldn’t get there quickly enough, but as her memory had misled her, and the way turned out to be far from short, she was forced to rest from time to time. At such moments his spirit was free to roam the landscape which was becoming his. He made notes, mental ones: then, as he grew more at home in it, marks, and sometimes fairly elaborate drawings, on a pad he had been carrying in his pocket. Occasionally his directions were worded: ‘. . . here angels fold their wings—very wooden . . . goat-hermits (devils?) . . . tongues of fire announcing the miracle—or simply a progression of light . . .’
Once Hero inquired sulkily: ‘What are you doing, Hurtle?’
‘Putting down one or two things as a reminder.’
Fortunately she was too much occupied with her own thoughts to ask further questions; for in her present state she would not have tolerated varieties of exaltation. So they went their separate ways, whether straying to one side or other of the actual path, or each forging deeper into a private labyrinth.
Burnt by the sun, and glazed by their respective missions, they reached and crossed the ridge.
‘There!’ she breathed, pointing. ‘This is the Convent of the Assumption.’
The buildings, partly hidden by cypresses, olives, and the conventual wall, were of a pale earthen colour, and suggested human rather than ascetic pursuits. He was more impressed by the wandering coastline and beyond it the blaze of sea. On a peak—no, you couldn’t call it that, but the apex of the eastern slope of the island, stood a white chapel, thin as a needle.
‘There is the Church of St John—the house of Theodosios beside it. After the convent we shall visit them.’ She spoke sternly, as though daring him to object. ‘Down there,’ she nodded vaguely in the direction of a sandy inlet, ‘is where the saint landed. They say a spring gushed out, and is still running.’
‘Shan’t we go there as well—to find out whether it is?’
‘Why should we? We have more important things to do.’
He was reminded momentarily of a prim teacher determined to hang on to her half-sceptical beliefs.
While they were approaching the convent a couple of girls in grey frocks, or lay habits, ran out of the gate, and sprang sideways on noticing them.
‘They are some of the orphans these good nuns are taking care of.’ Hero spoke with a sentimental sententiousness; but to him the disappearing girls had the look of sturdy, hairy animals bounding amongst the rocks and thyme.
‘You will love the abbess: she is so sweet,’ Hero whispered à la Olivia Davenport as they stood at the studded gate the girls had slammed shut.
The bell tinkled away, then subsided as they listened to it.
‘Do I look a scarecrow?’ Hero whispered very loud, hoping for praise; her bare lips, revealing no more than the transparent tips of her teeth, were trembling.
He didn’t have to answer, because a small, spry, ageless nun dragged the gate open.
Hero began to speak to her in the tongue peculiar to Greeks and saints, which naturally he couldn’t understand. In the circumstances he was glad Hero was deaf to the language in which he communed with devils.
The small nun smiled, laughed, looking, not at the suppliant, but in complete innocence at the man. She led them along a path edged with round, whitewashed stones and equally rounded basils of a clamorous green. At one point he trod over the edge and the scent shot up and around.
Hero and the nun seemed to have a lot to tell each other.
‘What is she saying?’
‘Nothing. I am telling her that Greek light illuminates. I can breathe Greek air. I am renewed.’
They passed a dormitory where snivelling girls were lying on narrow beds.
Hero hurried him on. ‘She says the abbess has a cold but will be delighted to receive us. Everybody is with cold. There is an epidemic.’
They had been swept into a chaste slit of a room overlooking the luminous sea. There were several upright chairs, signed photographs of royalty and politicians in clothes of another age, three or four indifferent icons, and a day bed covered with an embroidered rug, or blanket. It could only have been the day bed which suggested the seraglio. He had to look out at the sea to remind himself they had been brought there by urgent matters of the spirit.
The abbess appeared with a suddenness and elasticity which made him wonder if she was wearing anything under her habit. She was of medium height, neither young nor old, neither plain nor pretty, but so agile, so supple. He saw her on the day bed rather than the upright chair she chose.
She was chatting away at what seemed a worldly, superficial level, which obviously irritated Hero as her veneer of sentimental piety wore thin. Hero wanted to get down to business with the abbess: to talk about herself, the richly putrid state of her soul, and how her conscience had made her reject her dear Lord and Husband.
Just when she had begun to get a word in, the little portress-nun returned carrying a tin tray with a bottle of ouzo and glasses on it. The nun was so jolly about it all, she mightn’t have known what the bottle contained. She poured out a couple of liberal tots.
Hero angrily refused hers, but the innocent nun appeared as unconscious of anger as she was of the danger in men. He thought he could detect a scent of the basil against which her skirt had brushed.
When the nun had retired, Hero aimed again at the abbess, who sat with her hands folded, her eyelids, lowered, smiling at something, probably not of a spiritual nature, but a concrete object in the world she had left. Hero’s explosive monologue must have been boring her: she looked so much the picture of a lady in a drawing-room; once or twice she seemed to remember her cold, and coughed genteelly behind her hand.
Without the ouzo, he, too might have been bored by the situation. He poured himself another in case the abbess forgot to suggest it: while becoming occupied with a series of slides, which his mind accepted, rejected, improved on, without yet finding the perfect slide, or fusion of near misses. Sometimes it was Hero on the day bed, sometimes the abbess; at times it was Hero in the abbess’s habit, at others the abbess exposing her supple odalisque contours. In each case, hands were plaited behind the head, elbows cocked at the viewer.
It was this which drove him to take out his fountain pen and make a little drawing on the palm of his hand. He was delighted with his discovery of flesh against the unevenly distempered tomato-coloured walls of the parlour, even more with the narrow windowful of luminous sea.
It was probably sight of the fountain pen which caused Hero’s ripened rage to burst. ‘She is impossible, this woman, this
abbess:
she is so stupid, and so vulgar! Somebody once told me she is the daughter of a Salonica baker. She looks like it, doesn’t she? She herself is made out of unrisen dough! It is from sitting here with the Turks just across the water which makes these women so oriental. I shall not be surprised if lovers come up from the village at night and the nuns are too passive to send them away.’ Her final conjecture made her part her lips in triumph.
He put away his pen. ‘Are you sure she can’t understand you?’
‘Not a word,’ Hero had decided. ‘She is too stupid.’
The abbess had been dreamily looking smiling at his hands during the conversation in which she couldn’t take part.
‘What has she done or said,’ he asked, ‘to annoy you so much?’
‘What? She asks why you have become so silent. When you are here before, you have talked with her. She thinks,’ Hero was becoming raucous, ‘you are my
husband.
’
‘But didn’t you tell her I’m your lover, and that you want your conscience tidied up?’
Hero ignored him.
He felt so lazy after the ouzo, and the abbess was smiling more than ever in her dumb language.
Fortunately the door opened and the jolly little portress reappeared dragging behind her two of the orphans. From the arms of the hulking girls dangled embroidered mats and runners and fringed book-marks.
The abbess smiled and murmured.
‘These are the girls’ works,’ Hero interpreted unwillingly, ‘which will help her maintain her orphanage.’
He chose several pieces of the embroidery, though it didn’t really interest him. On feeling in his pockets he found his wallet wasn’t there; he must have left it behind at the inn.
Hero paid, somewhat contemptuously: while the abbess extended her upper lip without having drunk any of the ouzo, still dreamily murmuring, staring at the full note-case.
Hero said: ‘All these girls are whores. They have all had bastards, or are in process of having them.’
The girls sniggered and blushed over what they couldn’t understand. Embroidered on their glowing skins, pimples shone with a virulence of chicken-pox.
It was time for the visitors to leave, whether their mission was completed or not. As they passed alongside the dormitory windows, the girls lay snivelling and sniggering on their beds, one of them too obviously hugging a bellyful of sin under her blanket.
The abbess turned to the sympathetic husband, and said in English of a kind: ‘Girls seeck, seeck.
Grippe.
’ She mimed it by clutching her small animated breasts.
‘You see? She understands.’
‘Hardly a word.’ Hero laughed; she had modified her opinion, though.
Strands of purple were by now visible in the sea or sky along the coast. A conventional piety had reappeared in Hero’s face: she was possibly hoping for a blessing on taking leave of the condemned abbess. He felt drunk and sick from the ouzo, but exalted by the light and colour of the sea-sky.
Soon after they had left the two nuns (perhaps there weren’t any more) and two attendant orphan-whores, at the convent gate, Hero turned on him as though he were to blame. ‘You see? Why did we expect more? Even Cosmas was sceptical of this woman.’
She walked down the track, her head grown disproportionate. A phalanx of goats, or orphans, dashed out and away from a tangle of evergreens.
‘It was I who was foolish enough to believe in the possibility of regeneration.’ Even so, it was her lover and her absent husband she accused.
‘Can God be sceptical of us?’ he suggested.
‘I am beginning to think so,’ She sighed at the purple evening. ‘But wait,’ she suddenly remembered and took heart, ‘wait till we talk with this hermit—Theodosios. This is a saint who will plead for us.’ In her conviction, and the blaze of hieratic gold, she turned her face towards him, her sins as good as forgiven.
His unregenerate soul could feel no more than sympathetic towards her state of mind, while worshipping the aesthetic variations of its incarnation. It was the same with the landscape. He was conscious of God as a formal necessity on which depended every figure in the afternoon’s iconography: goat-troglodytes; the old man pissing against the wind; orphan-whores; the procession of mourners; a martyred Hero. The ouzo in him, which should have helped dissolve, made him cling, on the contrary, to outward and visible signs. There were moments when his fingers were forced actually to cling: to jags of marble, or lichen-spotted olive branch, to steady himself on the ascent.
‘If we’re mad enough to climb up to this chapel,’ he reasoned aloud, ‘probably the most you can expect is half an hour’s rambling conversation with a crazy monk, and we’ll break our legs coming down in the dark. Who’ll carry us, I’d like to know?’
‘God will,’ she answered from ahead.
It didn’t sound incongruous in the world of light through which they were climbing.
Actually Hero was in pretty bad physical condition. As they mounted the last earthwork separating them from this soaring arrow of a white chapel, she was breathing like a broken-winded horse. The heel was coming off one of her shoes.
‘Even the clothes we wear are degenerate,’ she gasped and ranted. ‘If I had been truly sincere—single-minded—I would have walked here on my bare feet.’
For a moment he was afraid she might be preparing to throw away the offending shoes.
So he returned to the subject of her recent disgust. ‘Is the abbess in touch with Theodosios?’
‘This abbess! Why should such a holy man interrupt his spiritual life for the babble of a silly, worldly woman?’
‘In sickness, for instance: she could send him food and help. Didn’t you at least inquire after him?’
‘I will not be bullied, Hurtle—’ she stumbled—‘with what I have failed to do. In any case, how could I get a word in with this woman? She is all the time complaining about the price of oil—the tear and wear of girls’ drawers. She is hinting at me that I should maintain her convent. Like all greedy people, she thinks she is the only one who has a right to be the blood-sucker.’
At this point, if she had been wearing her fur coat, Hero would have settled deeper in it; but she wasn’t: and they had reached the narrow plateau in front of the chapel.
‘I myself no longer know which way to approach. I am afraid,’ she said, jittering after his hand.