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Finally, through a friend, he was hired as a Middle East correspondent for the Ullstein publications of Germany. Ullstein soon sent him to Paris, then yanked him back to Berlin to become, at 25, science editor of an Ullstein newspaper. By the next year, he was also doubling as foreign editor of another, the B.Z, am Mittag (circ. 190,000).
The Morning After. Thereupon, in December 1931, Arthur suffered another metaphysical revolution. He joined the Communist Party. He had, so he thought, good reason. The Nazis were coming to power in Germany, and to Koestler it seemed that only the Communists could hold out against them. More generally, the party offered him a release for his "state of Chronic Indignation" at "a polluted society." Even so, a run of irrelevant bad luck at that time had some other "field that awaits the plow of the Lord."
Around Irma and Sam—and an assortment of turn-of-the-century islanders—Novelist William March fashions a choice tropical romp in the serio-comic vein of Satirists Aubrey Menen and Edgar Mittel-holzer.
Piglets for Rahabaat. The natives have all the sins of the senses, but no sense of sm. They worship Rahabaat, a god who lives in the local volcano, with frank fertility rites. When Sam preaches his Vermont fundamentalism at the men, they giggle and slip away into the underbrush When Irma tries to clothe the women in sacklike dresses of her own design, they cut holes in the tops to bare their breasts.
After a brief vogue, even this ventilated version goes out of fashion. When the natives hear of Irma's virginity, they laughingly dub her "The One Too Slippery to Be Caught."
But Irma has been caught by the languid charm of October Island. While Sam files reports of "no progress" to his superiors, she scouts around the island and one day digs up an hermaphroditic sculpture. Shocked, she heaves it into the volcano. Her Christian mission, she decides is to destroy as many of these pagan relics as possible. The natives find her constant digging odd, but since she tosses everything into Rahabaat's volcano, they find her piety admirable. When, in a moment of hunger, she eats a portion of roast piglet left on the altar of Rahabaat and the god fails to strike her dead, the natives are sufficiently awed to make her the guest of honor at a fecundity festival. "You're a lost woman," comments Sam Barnfield sadly. "And you," she taunts, "are a dirty-minded old man."
Great Breast Mother. Irma's true hour
of glory comes as she is ladling condensed
milk to a sick native out of an old stone
cup she has dug up and failed to destroy.
I he native vaults out of bed shouting-She is here! The Great Breast Mother of
the World is here!" The cup, it seems, is
the one from which Rahabaat drank and
drew power; and Irma Barnfield fits the
legend of the virgin goddess whose coming
will insure October Island a millennium
of peace and plenty. In no time, a mass
conversion to Christianity takes place but
the natives insist on added sacraments
Irma must periodically spoon out milk
from the stone cup.