He rose promptly when I came out onto the patio; he shook my hand vigorously but briefly and sat down again, indicating that I sit next to him while Iris went for tea. He was smaller and more compact than I’d thought measuring him against myself as one does, unconsciously, with an interesting stranger. He wore a plain brown suit and a white shirt open at the collar, a modified Lord Byron collar which became him. The eyes, which at first I did not dare look at, were, I soon noticed, sheathed ... an odd word which was always to occur to me when I saw him at his ease, his eyes half-shut, ordinary, not in the least unusual. Except for a restless folding and unfolding of his hands (suggesting a recently reformed cigarette smoker) he was without physical idiosyncrasy. “It’s a pleasure to meet you” were the first words, I fear, John Cave ever spoke to me; so unlike the dialogue on the spirit which I later composed to celebrate this initial encounter between master and disciple-to-be. “Iris has told me a lot about you.” His voice was light, without resonance now. He sat far back in his deck chair. Inside the house I could hear Iris moving plates. The late afternoon sun had just that moment gone behind trees and the remaining light was warmly gold. “And I have followed your ... career with interest too,” I said, knowing that “career” was precisely the word he would not care to hear used but, at that moment, neither of us had got the range of the other. We fired at random. “Iris told me you write history.” I shook my head. “No, I only read it. I think it’s all been written anyway.” I was allowed to develop this novel conceit for some moments, attended by a respectful silence from my companion who finally dispatched my faintly hysterical proposition with a vague “Maybe so”; and then we got to him. “I haven’t been East you know,” he frowned at the palm trees. “I was born up in Washington state and I’ve spent all my life in the Northwest, until last year.” He paused as though he expected me to ask him about _that_ year. I did not. I waited for him to do it in his own way. He suddenly turned about in his chair and faced me; those disconcerting eyes suddenly trained upon my own. “You were there the other night, weren’t you?” “Why, yes.” “Did you feel it too? Am I right?” The quick passion with which he said this, exploding all at once the afternoon’s serenity, took me off guard. I stammered, “I don’t think I know what you mean. I ...” “You know exactly what I mean, what I meant.” He leaned closer to me and I wondered insanely if his deck chair might not collapse under him. It teetered dangerously. My mind went blank, absorbed by the image of deck chair and prophet together collapsing at my feet. Then, as suddenly, satisfied perhaps with my confusion, he settled back, resumed his earlier ease, exactly as if I had answered him, as though we had come to a crisis and together fashioned an agreement: it was most alarming.