John Fowles - The Magus

“I must go. And you have a long walk.”

We set off back up the cliff hill. Halfway up, where the steep path broadened, there was a small cast-iron seat. Conchis, who had set a quickish pace, sat down gratefully on it. He was breathing hard; so was I. He patted his heart. I put on a look of concern, but he shrugged.

“When you grow old. The annunciation in reverse.” He grimaced. “Not to be.”

We sat in silence and got our breaths back. I watched the yellowing sky through the delicate fenestrations in the pines. The sky in the west was hazy. A few evening wisps of cloud were curled high, tranced over the stillness of the world.

Then out of the blue he said quietly, “Are you elect?”

“Elect?”

“Do you feel chosen by anything?”

“Chosen?”

“John Leverrier felt chosen by God.”

“I don’t believe in God. And I certainly don’t feel chosen.”

“I think you may be.”

I smiled dubiously. “Thank you.”

“It is not meant as a compliment. Hazard makes you elect. You cannot elect yourself.”

“I’m afraid you have me out of my depth.”

He put his hand momentarily on my shoulder, as if to reassure me; to say it did not matter. Then he stood and climbed the rest of the hill. At last we were on the gravel by the side colonnade. He stopped.

“So.”

“Thank you very much indeed.” I tried to get him to return my smile, to confess that he had been pulling my leg; but his masklike face was drained of humor.

“I make two requests of you. One is that you tell no one over there that you have met me. This is because of certain events that happened during the war.”

“I’ve heard about that.”

“What have you heard?”

“The story.”

“There are many versions of the story. But never mind now. For them I am a recluse. No one ever sees me. You understand?”

“Of course. I shan’t tell anyone.”

I knew what the next request would be: not to visit him again.

“My second request is that you come here next weekend. And stay Saturday and Sunday nights. That is, if you do not mind the walking back early on Monday morning.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much. I’d love to.”

“I think we have many things to discover.”

“'We shall not cease from exploration'?”

“You read that in the book on the beach?”

“Didn’t you leave it for me to read?”

He looked down. “Well. Yes. It was left. And you read it.”

“I had a feeling someone was watching me. It was you?”

His dark brown eyes burnt up into mine; he took a long moment to reply. The faintest ghost of a smile.

“Do you feel that you are being watched now?”

And once again his eyes flicked past my shoulders, as if he could see something some way inside the trees. I looked round. The pines were empty. I looked back at him; a joke? He was still smiling, a small dry smile.

“Am I?”

“I merely wondered, Mr. Urfe.” He held out his hand. “If for some reason you cannot come, leave a message at Sarantopoulos’s for Hermes. It will get here the next day.”

“I’ve enjoyed meeting you very much.”

“Good. I am delighted. Till Saturday.”

After fifty yards I turned and looked back. He was still standing there, master of his domaine. I waved and he raised both his arms in an outlandish hieratic gesture, one foot slightly advanced, as if in some kind of primitive blessing. When I looked back again, just before the trees hid the house, he had disappeared.

Whatever else he was he was not like anyone else I had ever met. Something more than mere loneliness, mere senile fantasies and quirks, burnt in his striking eyes, in that abrupt, probing then dropping conversation, in those sudden oblique looks at nothing. But I certainly didn’t think, as I went into the trees, that I should have the apparent answer within another hundred yards.

Long before I came up to the gate out of Bourani, I saw something whitish lying in the gap. At first I thought it was a handkerchief, but when I stooped to pick it up I saw it was a cream-colored glove; and of all gloves, an elbow-length woman’s glove. Inside the wrist was a yellowish label, with the words Mireille, gantiêre embroidered on it in blue silk. The label, like the glove, seemed unreasonably old, something from the bottom of a long-stored trunk. I smelt it, and there it was, that same scent as on the towel the week before—musky, old-fashioned like sandalwood. When Conchis had said that he’d been down on Moutsa the week before, it had been this one fact, the sweet womanish perfume, that had puzzled me.

Now I began to understand why he might not want unexpected visits, or gossip. Why he should want to risk his secret with me, perhaps, next week, let me know it, I couldn’t imagine; what the lady was doing out in Ascot gloves, I couldn’t imagine; and who she was, I couldn’t imagine. She might be a mistress, but she might equally well be a daughter, a wife, a sister—perhaps someone weakminded, perhaps someone elderly. It flashed through my mind that it was someone who was allowed out in the grounds of Bourani and down at Moutsa only on pain of keeping herself concealed. She would have seen me the week before; and this time, have heard my arrival and tried to catch a glimpse of me—that explained the old man’s quick looks past me, and perhaps some of his nervous strangeness. He knew she was “out"; it explained the second place at the tea table, and the mysterious bell.

I turned around, half expecting to hear a giggle, a rather inane giggle; and then as I looked at the thick shadowy scrub near the gate, and remembered the grim reference to Prospero, a more sinister explanation came to me. Not weakmindedness, but some terrible disfigurement. Not all young and beautiful, Mr. Urfe . I felt, for the first time on the island, a small cold shiver of solitary-place fear.

The sun was getting low and night comes with near tropical speed in Greece. I didn’t want to have to negotiate the steep northside paths in darkness. So I hung the glove neatly over the center of the top bar of the gate and went on quickly. Half an hour later the charming hypothesis occurred to me that Conchis was a transvestite. After a while I began, for the first time in months, to sing.

I told no one, not even Méli, about my visit to Conchis, but I spent many hours conjecturing about the mysterious third person in the house. I decided that a weakminded wife was the most likely answer; it would explain the seclusion, the taciturn servants.

I tried to make up my mind about Conchis too. I was far from sure that he was not just a homosexual; that would explain Mitford’s inadequate warning, though not very flatteringly to me. The old man’s nervous intensity, that jerking from one place to another, one subject to another, his jaunty walk, the gnomic answers and mystifications, the weird ffinging-up of his arms when I left—all his mannerisms suggested, were calculated to suggest, that he wanted to seem younger and more vital than he was.

There remained the peculiar business of the poetry book, which he must have had ready to puzzle me. I had been swimming a long time that first Sunday, far out in the bay, and he could easily have slipped the things onto the Bourani end of the beach while I was in the water. But it seemed an oddly devious means of introduction. Then what did my “being elect” mean—our “having much to discover"? In itself it could mean nothing; in regard to him it could mean only that he was mad. And Some would say I lived alone : I remembered the scarcely concealed contempt with which he had said that.

I found a large-scale map of the island in the school library. The boundaries of the Bourani estate were marked. I saw it was bigger, especially to the east, than I had realized: six or seven hectares, some fifteen acres. Again and again I thought of it, perched on its lonely promontory, during the weary hours of plodding through Eckersley’s purgatorial English Course. I enjoyed conversation classes, I enjoyed doing more advanced work with what was known as the Philologic Sixth, a small group of eighteen-year-old duds who were doing languages only because they were hopeless at science, but the endless business of “drilling” the beginners bored me into stone. What am I doing? I am raising my arm. What is he doing? He is raising his arm. What are they doing? They are raising their arms. Have they raised their arms? They have raised their arms.