The next morning it did not rain, though dark clouds covered the sky. Her Ladyship arrived on time, looking very tired, as if she had not slept the night. As soon as she saw me, she would know if I had any news concerning her stolen cheques. I admitted I had not yet. She became greyer, ready to go right then to the bank to report the loss. I swore to her this would be futile. So then she would at nine o'clock go to the American Embassy. I told her that without money she would be deported home on the first plane; the socialist government might be hoping to make a poor example of an American capitalist trading on the black market. Better to take more time, I told her, not rush anything. I should have more news in a few days. And now a train was arriving, so we took up our bags, ready to run for seats, only it was not the correct one.

Our train was twenty minutes late. Deborah, though used to traveling in India, had seldom ridden trains, then always airconditioned compartments. I had often done so, even third class as necessary. Now she was disheartened to see a child urinating on the platform, the mother not even moving her feet as the filthy water ran under her shoes.

More and more people filled the platform, all seeming to Deborah very experienced at taking trains. They would have all the window seats, she was sure. Perhaps we should instead have gone by bus. I assured her that the bus was even worse, but this she could not believe. Four hours on this train would be her death.

And then, to my utter horror, I saw arriving three Englishmen dressed in colourful clothes and jewelry, each with a traveling bag. They saw us. One pointed. Then Deborah saw them and for the first time that morning laughed. She could not know what a threat they were to our plans, did not notice how pale her friend Conningsfield had suddenly become.

Finally the train arrived. Our porters reappeared and jumped aboard one coach with our bags. We followed. They hammered the bags onto a rack with their fists and took their tip.

Our compartment had already most places occupied, only two remaining, far from the steamy window. We sat down, thigh to thigh with the white-clothed Sinhalese men seated on the wooden benches. Already we were eight or ten, quite enough in a train compartment. Only now more arrived and found room. Then some more. So many narrow-hipped, skinny men, so foul-smelling. More came in; now perhaps fifteen or eighteen sat where in Europe only eight could have fit. A row of skinny legs pushed against Deborah,, making room for more.

She jumped to her feet. "Let's take the bus."

A half minute later we were again on the platform with our bags. The train was leaving. Through one window I saw a flash of red and gold, a moustache, an amazed expression. Then it was gone. I had to laugh. So ironic. Our porters reappeared and with no word, only grieved faces, rushed our bags back across the walkover and to the taxis.

The taxi driver did not speak English, could not understand where we wanted to go. He stopped some people crossing the street and they were able to translate. You understand, the citizens of this country are not themselves villains, but polite and friendly persons, victims of the bad ones, even as Deborah and I.

Now the driver would not take us to the bus station, wanting instead to take us south in his taxi. Sixty rupees only. Deborah looked at me pleadingly. "On buses there might be thieves."

I was feeling rich and the fare was not so high. The hotel taxi, Deborah told me, had proposed 120 rupees for the same ride. Now that we were inside with all our bags, and knowing Her Ladyship would not endure three to four hours on a public transport bus, I agreed. Thus a few hours later we drove up to the Coral Reef Hotel. A light rain was falling. The room would not be ready until four o'clock.

"Let's have breakfast," said Deborah.

Let's. The first breakfast of our new life together. Conningsfield was wishing only that he and Her Ladyship, like the other tourists, had already left their bags inside their room, had been able to dress in beach clothes after passing an agreeable soirée and night. Compared to our hero and his American friend, the others sitting before the glass windows overlooking that idyllic seashore appeared so intime, so en famille, not just casual acquaintances. But then they were looking a little dull also, so Conningsfield was not moved to envy.

We were served then the worst breakfast of our lives. The eggs had been designed after a junkyard, grey, irregular, smelling of brass. The toast was no better and the coffee unspeakable, so we ordered tea. The view across the lawn toward the sea was spoiled by rain. Americans at the next table were keeping back their children, who begged to go swimming, but later allowed it.

Deborah now seemed almost at the bottom of her morale, wanting to know why she had ever come to Ceylon at all, why to India, why had she ever left home, etc.

"Perhaps you should have remained in Villefranche."

She looked out the window rather long, then sighed. She told me that she still didn't understand why the Mother had so affected her, so that she was often remembering and weeping. She refused absolutely to admit the old woman has any spiritual or super-human powers. Not since that day in Trichy had we discussed what happened between Deborah and the Mother of Villefranche. I felt that, to help her understand, I would have to know more. I asked her if she thought the Mother might have hypnotized her.

"The thought crossed my mind at the time, only I'm sure it wasn’t that." Instead, she told me, she had felt a struggle between the Mother and herself, as if the woman had tried to get some sort of power over her, but not a mechanical, hypnotic power.

"Did you resist?"

"Yes, but...." She paused to watch the American children go clattering out into the rain. Then she told me that although she had resisted, she had not wanted to resist, that this was the strangest part. She had wanted the Mother to win, to dominate her. All this had happened in the very few seconds that the Mother looked at her. Now she spoke of the woman’s long, very clear, grey eyes.

"Like yours," I said, for Deborah too has grey eyes, and very beautiful ones.

She told me then that she has eyes like her own mother, that the one thing her mother had ever given her graciously was her eye genes. Then again she was remembering her visit with the Mother of the Ashram. "She kept looking into my eyes. I didn't know what to do. Then I asked myself what did I want to do?"

She stopped speaking. I could see she was very moved, very close again to tears. "And what was that?" I asked softly.

"I wanted to hold her hands."

Quickly Deborah reached into her bag for her dark spectacles, but the tears were already falling onto her cheeks. I was afraid that once again she would stop talking, but she seemed determined to continue. She told me she had reached out and taken the old, smooth, but surprisingly strong hands of the Mother, who grasped hers, still looking deep into her eyes. And then finally the Mother gave a little chuckle, closed her eyes briefly as if in signal, and their hands gently released.

"And then she turned like a searchlight away from my face and shone full on Thérèse, who fell to her knees weeping."

Deborah wiped under her spectacles with a piece of tissue. I have never felt so tender toward a human creature before, except possibly toward Erde when she would come for her weekly consultations to tell of her unhappy marriage to the car salesman, then take off blouse and brassiere. Now I reminded Deborah that I have had some years of psychological experience and that perhaps if she would tell me something of her past I would be able to help her understand the Mother's influence upon her.

Her Ladyship agreed that this was an excellent idea, only not with our bags sitting out in the lobby (as if our bags had something to do with the condition of her soul!). Why, she must absolutely know, would the room not be ready before four o'clock? This was very unusual. Now she saw that the rain had stopped. It would be possible to walk along the beach and look for another hotel that would be less expensive and less crowded. Then she jumped up from the table and announced that that was what we were going to do, if I cared to accompany her.

This beach is truly idyllic. Few coastlines have ever so impressed me; the coconut orchards come almost to the water's edge. Off the shore lies the famous coral reef with its tropical fishes. Bending to remove my shoes and socks, for the sand was wet with rain, I could wish my ankles and feet were less white, not sticking out of the rolled up trousers like two skeleton bones. Deborah was wearing her rubber sandals and now walked cautiously on the sharp, underwater rocks, slippery with seaweed.

Almost immediately we attracted one of the local beach boys, the sort that in Greece had caused such disaster between myself and Erde. Naturally I was quite cold to him and tried to drive him off, but Deborah scolded me; she would learn a few things from him. Did he know of a second hotel on the beach?

"Yes, farther down." He is a handsome boy, strong, but has lost most of his front teeth against the rocks. He told us that many times he has broken his bones in the sea.

We three proceeded slowly, he on the sharp rocks with his bare feet, which were black and hard as leather. Now and then Deborah would lose a sandal, would hold onto his wrist while she fished for it in the water. How strange that women know instinctively how to take for granted the full possibilities of the male.

So another came to walk near her, a very small fellow. I imagined him fourteen years old, but he is eighteen and very smart, speaking German as well as some English. His elder brother has gone to Germany to work as gem cutter. A year from now this boy will also go.

Deborah advised him to stay in Ceylon. She was thinking of the cold German winters (and summers) and the dark colour of his skin, so un-Teutonic. But he was eager to be there. He would marry a German girl; he would live where there were actions. Thus he reminded me of a certain Conningsfield; he too would not spend his whole life on a beach.

The hotel to which they brought us was a very simple place with a straw roof, bare rooms filled with beds, all with lumpy mattresses, no sheets or bedcovers, no bathrooms. Each room had so many beds there was no room to walk between them. The rates were rather high.

But Deborah looked doubtful. She did not like the number of beds, also not the expensive rates. And why were no guests staying there? Then they unlocked another door and let us see inside. Only five beds, traveling bags in a corner. Hanging from the hooks on one wall were many bright-coloured shirts, beads, straw hats. In one corner a gold-tipped cane.

"Not woman clothes," laughed the proprietor. "Men."

"Englishmen," I nodded.

"You know these people?"

"Very bad men," I told him. "Dirty criminals."

He shook his head sadly, locking the door with a sigh.

Since seeing that room, there was no possibility in my mind that we would stay at this hotel. Out of the question. Then Deborah noticed on the ground under the outside water tap six pairs of bright yellow chicken feet.

"Well," she said, "we'll let you know."

As we walked back along the beach the sun came out and shone very hot. Deborah would go immediately into the water with her black friend as guide. Her clothes she would change in the public dressing room under the hotel. Then she would rent a snorkel and rubber fins.

The smaller of our escorts now bid us farewell. His pale-skinned lady was waiting impatiently on the lawn. "My fiancée," he said with a grimace, nodding toward a fat lady with so ugly red goose-flesh on her arms and thighs. I think he was being sarcastic. He was only interested in a big tip. Then he went to her and began ordering her about, she hastening to please this rascal.

Deborah appeared in her bathing costume, a bikini that she had brought from France. Everyone turned to look. The packaged tourists all had large bathing costumes covering belly and breasts. Deborah was nearly naked, but fortunately her figure was perfect as few are.

She told me she would return in an hour or so. I watched as she walked a little shyly with everyone turning to stare, keeping her towel modestly around her shoulders as she jumped into a native boat and started out toward the reef.

I went to take a chaise longue, found there were only six available and they were already rented. That is the problem with these underdeveloped socialist lands. Everything is planned for the lowest possible need. When the demand is approaching even normal, then nothing is to be had.

Taking off my tie I opened the collar of my shirt and sat down under a kind of giant Pilz (mushroom? fungus? I must ask Deborah) used here for shade on the lawn. Soon came other pairs of feet outside my circle of shade, the toes pointing toward me. I began to reach for my umbrella, then remembered I had left it in the lobby with the luggage, a most dangerous error.

I looked up. Instead of three there were now four, one a pretty, stupid-looking English girl with very long hair and almost no dress, so small it was. When she turned I could see the two round knobs of her posterior. How could such a young, innocent girl go together with these criminals? Had my umbrella been to hand I would have given her a good thrashing on her bottom until she begged for mercy.

Now they accused me angrily of breaking my promise not to leave Colombo without paying them the money. I replied indignantly that I had promised not to leave by train, plane or boat, had said nothing about taxis. And anyway, they had given me seventy-two hours to find the money. I still had until the evening.

So they would return that evening. I told them it was no use doing so, as I could not give them money. The sarees, I told them, had been stolen in Colombo, I had them no longer, and if I was able to come to this hotel it was only because my American companion was paying my room. (How easily I was able to lie, but it is the only way to deal with such riff-raff .)

They left and sat down in the sun a short distance away to discuss what to do, ten minutes later returning with a plan. I was to steal the money from my American friend and give it to them. If I did not do this she was going to suffer an accident while swimming. She would lose her teeth or nose upon the reef, or perhaps even drown. They would give me forty-eight hours to get the money, and there was no way for us to flee.

Afterwards, Deborah returned greatly thrilled and excited from her swim, not noticing how pale in the face her friend Flaminio had become. They had seen many fish and corals, had brought back from the deep a baby tortoise which the tourists on the beach had all photographed. Deborah herself had put the animal back into the water. She had felt it break free from her hands and had watched it through her mask disappear rapidly off into the sea.

She showed me her knee which had scraped against the coral and bled. Her black friend had rubbed a dangerous, slimy coral substance off of the wound, but still one could see ugly red welts arising on the flesh. Would she be scarred for life, she wondered? How strange, she mused, to bring back such a souvenir from the other world under the water.

She laid her hand carelessly on my arm. "You must come tomorrow and see for yourself. It's so easy. You just float on the surface and look through the mask."

"I think it can be very dangerous near those rocks," I told her sternly. "You could be badly hurt." Of course I was thinking more of my English "colleagues" than of the dangers of the sport.

"Nonsense."

Now, as a surprise, our room was suddenly announced ready. Our luggage was carried after us down a long, exterior corridor which opened on a courtyard of tropical plants. The room surpassed expectations — a wall of glass (not too clean, but this partly because of the salt air) opening onto a large private terrace only a few feet from the water. Air circulated by means of perpetually open windows high up on the walls. A good idea in such a hot climate, but an invitation to thieves. The bedroom furniture was attractive; two rather simple beds, the cotton bedspreads gay but badly stained. I did not mind. It was already a miracle that in a moment or two we would be alone together for the first time in our room. But Deborah ordered the spreads changed immediately, then went to the bathroom to shower for lunch.

Only then, hélas, there was no hot water. This was no accident; there were only cold-water taps. Such a thing I have seen only in the poorest hotels. Outside rain again had started to fall and the sky was black. There was a cry from the bathroom. Taking off her bathing costume, Deborah discovered that she had been badly burned in the sun. She stuck her head out of the bathroom. Would I ask the room servant for some warm bath water? She would take the teeth washing glass and dip it out of the bucket with that.

After half an hour a tiny kettle of boiling water arrived, as if for tea! Deborah, who had dressed in a robe to wait for her bath, was furious at the error, berating the servant. When he was gone she was very sorry, didn't know what was wrong with herself, had never before spoken to a servant in that manner.

I told her it was the only way to talk to these stupid people, but she had succeeded once again in depressing her spirits, now saying she was no better than Fatty. I do not know how she managed to bathe from that tiny vessel of boiling water, for she closed the bathroom door. I then went downstairs to give her more privacy.

We ate lunch together, watching the storm cross the sky toward the horizon. Deborah tasted the soup and said that thereafter she would touch no soup in that place, that it had been prepared with bad water. I looked around. Others were tasting the soup and adding much salt and pepper.

"Salt and pepper aren't what's wrong with it," she said.

The rest of the lunch was no better. In fact it was inedible unless one was fainting for nourishment. Then she would order an omelette, not the fixed menu. That could not be so bad. The waiter told her there was an hour wait for à la carte dishes, even omelettes, so she did not make a special order.

After eating we had no reason to return outside. Feeling sleepy, I decided to take a siesta in our room. I remembered the after-lunch siestas with Erde in Greece. How beautiful they were. But now Her Ladyship's burnt skin, was beginning to pain her, so she covered herself with oil until she was shiny as well as red. Not so appetizing, it must be admitted. I decided instead to read.

So now Deborah would sit on our private terrace and write her article on the Mother of Villefranche. Flaminio, meanwhile, could read anywhere but on the terrace. Or he could read on the terrace and she would work in the room. And so a silent hour passed, I reading, sometimes lifting my head to look out through the glass wall. Deborah, after ten minutes, had abandoned her notebook and was sitting on the terrace wall, thoughtfully watching the rain.

Finally she came in and sat on her bed, saying nothing. I asked her whether she had finished her article and she admitted that she did not yet understand what had happened between herself and the Mother and until she did could not continue writing it. I told her she was perhaps seeking her own dead and departed mother, but at this she shook her head.

"How did your mother die?" I asked.

"Cancer."

She would not talk about it, was more worried about the lost cheques, wondering if she should immediately return to Colombo and see the American Embassy or wire to her father to cable some money. She looked very doubtful when I told her of my thousands of rupees, but I could not take them out of their secret hiding place to show her. She told me the first thing she wanted to do was repay me.

I told her she did not ever have to repay me, that it was an honour for me just to be with her like this. Would she care to have me read to her? She agreed and lay back carefully (because of the sunburn) on the bed. Would she prefer something from history, philosophy, the languages? She didn't care; I could choose, and she would tell me if she liked it. (This procedural simplicity is the American genius!)

I had bought in New Delhi a book on Napoleon written by a British historian, but had not yet read it and was distrustful — one should perhaps not take too seriously Anglo-Saxon versions of that French emperor. The chapter titles I now saw, while glancing through, indicated that much had been made of the defeats in battle, with little mention of the positive good. I asked Deborah what she already knew of Napoleon from her school studies. She replied that she had never studied French history!

"You know nothing of Napoleon?"

"Only that every psychopath thinks he's him." She was gazing at the ceiling, then slipped her hand into her shirt in the familiar pose. "Three cornered hat, and all that."

I had to laugh, hiding my smile behind the book. "Would you like me to read to you of Napoleon?"

"I'd consider it a very unusual experience." She glanced at me ironically. I wanted to rush over and embrace her. How good we could joke about things so close to the soul.

I put down the Napoleon book, feeling so warm inside. Could I possibly be in love with this young woman?. Concerning my "anti-Semitism," I wonder if it had really been so deep after all, it seems to me now so distant and remote. Deborah, who has seen past my opaque spectacles, knows that behind my stern, military appearance there is a soul and a man perhaps too soft and mild with a rather large desire for giving tenderness (and also receiving it), a man too easily feeling compassion.

So the military madness is perhaps keeping this in a wonderful balance. "Believe me," I told her, "I am very far from being a schizophrenic, but am many persons. In contrast to the schizophrenic, in which they have melted together, I am a rather congruent whole."

Then Deborah would know about my childhood. Beyond the glass wall the rain was falling gently, the dark clouds covering the sky off to the western horizon, the colours of the day muted. I would have liked the servant to bring tea, but the telephone in the room did not work and I did not like now to leave and go down the hall to find him and thus break the mood fallen so suddenly upon us.