John Fowles - The Magus

But I had had enough of the farce. I stood up. The headmaster spoke; a pursed mouth in a grave old face.

“The headmaster also says,” translated Androutsos, “that your insane assault on a colleague at breakfast this morning has done irreparable harm to the respect he has always entertained for the land of Byron and Shakespeare.”

“Jesus.” I laughed out loud, then I wagged my finger at Androutsos. The gym master got ready to spring at me. “Now listen. Tell him this. I am going to Athens. I am going to the British Embassy, I am going to the Ministry of Education, I am going to the newspapers, I am going to make such trouble that…”

I didn’t finish. I raked them with a broadside of contempt, and walked out.

I was not allowed to get very far with my packing, back in my room. Not five minutes afterwards there was a knock on the door. I smiled grimly, and opened it violently. But the member of the tribunal I had least expected was standing there: the deputy headmaster.

His name was Mavromichalis. He ran the school administratively, and was the disciplinary dean also; a kind of camp adjutant, a lean, tense, balding man in his late forties, withdrawn even with other Greeks. I had had very little to do with him. The senior teacher of demotic, he was, in the historical tradition of his kind, a fanatical lover of his own country. He had run a famous underground newssheet in Athens during the Occupation; and the classical pseudonym he had used then, o Bouplix , the oxgoad, had stuck. Though he always deferred to the headmaster in public, in many ways it was his spirit that most informed the school; he hated the Byzantine accidie that lingers in the Greek soul far more intensely than any foreigner could.

He stood there, closely watching me, and I stood in the door, surprised out of my anger by something in his eyes. He managed to suggest that if matters had allowed he might have been smiling. He spoke quietly.

“ Je veux vous parler, Monsieur Urfe .”

I had another surprise then, because he had never spoken to me before in anything but Greek; I had always assumed that he knew no other language. I let him come in. He glanced quickly at the suitcases open on my bed, then invited me to sit behind the desk. He took a seat himself by the window and folded his arms: shrewd, incisive eyes. He very deliberately let the silence speak for him. I knew then. For the headmaster, I was simply a bad teacher; for this man, something else besides.

I said coldly, “ Eh bien? ”

“I regret these circumstances.”

“You didn’t come here to tell me that.”

He stared at me. “Do you think our school is a good school?”

“My dear Mr. Mavromichalis, if you imagine—”

He raised his hands sharply but pacifyingly. “I am here simply as a colleague. My question is serious.”

His French was ponderous, rusty, but far from elementary.

“Colleague… or emissary?”

He lanced a look at me. The boys had a joke about him: how even the cicadas stopped talking when he passed.

“Please to answer my question. Is our school good?”

I shrugged impatiently. “Academically. Yes. Obviously.”

He watched me a moment more, then came to the point. “For our school’s sake, I do not want scandals.”

I noted the implication of that first person singular.

“You should have thought of that before.”

Another silence. He said, “We have in Greece an old folk song that says, He who steals for bread is innocent, He who steals for gold is guilty.” His eyes watched to see if I understood. “If you wish to resign… I can assure you that Monsieur le Directeur will accept. The other letter will be forgotten.”

“Which monsieur le directeur? ”

He smiled very faintly, but said nothing; and would, I knew, never say anything. I remembered those eyes that had watched me during the finale of the trial scene; eyes that took risks. In an odd way, perhaps because I was behind the desk, I felt like the tyrannical interrogator. He was the brave patriot. Finally, he looked out of the window and said, as if irrelevantly, “We have an excellent science laboratory.”

I knew that; I knew the equipment in it had been given by an anonymous donor when the school was reopened after the war and I knew the staifroom “legend” was that the money had been wrung out of some rich collaborationist.

I said, “I see.”

“I have come to invite you to resign.”

“As my predecessors did?”

He didn’t answer. I shook my head.

He tacked nearer the truth. “I do not know what has happened to you. I do not ask you to forgive that. I ask you to forgive this.” He gestured: the school.

“I hear you think I’m a bad teacher anyway.”

He said, “We will give you a good recommandation .”

“That’s not an answer.”

He shrugged. “If you insist…”

“Am I so bad that—”

He raised his head in curt negation, but said, almost fiercely. “We have no place here for any but the best.” Under his oxgoad eyes, I looked down. The suitcases waited on the bed. I wanted to get away, to Athens, anywhere, to nonidentity and noninvolvement. I knew I wasn’t a good teacher. But I was too flayed, too stripped elsewhere, to admit it.

“You’re asking too much.”

He shook his head. “You did not steal for bread.”

“I’ll keep quiet in Athens on one condition. That he meets me there.”

“ Pas possible .”

Silence. I wondered how his monomaniacal sense of duty towards the school lived with whatever allegiance he owed Conchis. A hornet hovered threateningly in the window, then caromed away; as my anger retreated before my desire to have it all over and done with.

I said, “Why you?”

He smiled then, a thin, small smile. “ Avant la guerre .”

I knew he had not been teaching at the school; it must have been at Bourani. I looked down at the desk. “I want to leave at once. Today.”

“That is understood. But no more scandals?” He meant, after that at breakfast.

“I’ll see. If…” I gestured in my turn. “Only because of this.”

“ Bien .” He said it almost warmly, and came round the desk to take my hand; and even shook my shoulder, as Conchis had sometimes done, as if to assure me that he took my word.

Then, briskly and sparsely, he went.

And so I was expelled. As soon as he had gone, I felt angry again, angry that once again I had not used the cat. I did not mind leaving the school; to have dragged through another year, pretending Bourani did not exist, brewing sourly in the past… it was unthinkable. But leaving the island, the light, the sea. I stared out over the olive groves. It was suddenly a loss like that of a limb. It was not the meanness of making a scandal, it was the futility. Whatever happened, I was banned from ever living again in Phraxos.

After a while I forced myself to go on packing. The bursar sent a clerk up with my pay check and the address of the travel agency I should go to in Athens about my journey home. By noon I was ready to leave. I deposited my bags with Barba Vassili and then, with a goodbye only to him, and no regrets at all, I walked out of the gate for the last time.

At the village I went first to Patarescu’s house. A peasant woman came to the door; the doctor had gone to Rhodes for a month. Then I went to the house on the hill. I knocked on the gate. Hermes came Out to open it.

No, the young lady had not been. He still had the suitcase. Did I want to look at it again?

I went back down through the village to the old harbor, to the taverna where I had met old Barba Dimitraki. Georgiou, as I hoped, knew of a room for me in a cottage nearby. I sent a boy back to the school with a fish trolley to get my bags; then ate some bread and olives.