The Magus - John Fowles [130]
speaking.' Then she leant forward and picked up a box of matches I had left on the table. She took out a dozen matchsticks and began to build a house. "Perhaps you are afraid to think about God." "One can't _think_ about what cannot be known." "You never _think_ about what is not certain? About tomorrow? About next year?" "Of course. I can make reasonable prophecies about them." She played with the matches, pushing them idly into patterns with her long fingers. I watched her beautiful mouth; wished I could end the cold dialogue. "I can make reasonable prophecies about God." "Such as?" "He is very intelligent." "How do you know that?" "Because I do not understand him. Why he is, who he is, or how he is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives." She stared up at me from her matches; her eyes had a kind of bright intensity that I recognised from Conchis. Things were not fortuitous; her entry was timed, the subject ensured, and now the double message. "Very intelligent--or very unkind?" I looked at Conchis with a small smile, but she answered. "Very wise. Do you know, Mr. Urfe, that I pray?" "What for?" "I ask God never to reveal himself to me. Because if he did I should know that he was not God. But a liar." Now she looked at Conchis, who was facing expressionlessly out to sea; waiting for her, I thought, to finish her part of the act. Suddenly I saw Lily's forefinger silently tap the table twice. Her eyes flicked sideways at Conchis and then back to me, and she gave the tiniest, least perceptible of nods. I looked down. She had laid two matches diagonally across each other and two others beside them: XII. She avoided my suddenly comprehending eyes; and then, pushing the matchsticks into a little heap, she leant back out of the pool of light from the lamp and turned to Conchis. "But Mr. Urfe wishes to listen to you." "I sympathise with you, Nicholas." He smiled at me. "I felt very much as you do when I was older and more experienced than you are. Neither of us has the intuitive humanity of womankind, so we are not to blame." He said it quite without gallantry, as a simple statement. Lily would not meet my eyes. Her face was in shadow. She wore no jewellery, no ornament; simply the white dress, like a figure in a tableau symbolising Purity. "But then I had an experience that led me to understand what Lily was just said to you. Just then she paid us the compliment of making God male. But I think she knows, as all intelligent women do, that all profound definitions of God are essentially definitions of the mother. Of giving things. Sometimes the strangest gifts. Because the religious instinct is really the instinct to define whatever gives each situation." He settled back in his chair. "I think I told you that when modern history--because that chauffeur stood for democracy, equality, progress--struck de Deukans down in 1922 I was abroad. I was in fact in the remote north of Norway, in pursuit of birds--or to be more exact, bird sounds. You know that countless rare birds breed up there on the Arctic tundra. I am lucky. I have perfect pitch. I had by that time published one or two papers on the problems of accurately notating bird's cries and songs. I had even begun a small scientific correspondence with men like Dr. Van Oort of Leiden, the American A. A. Saunders. The Alexanders in England. So in the summer of 1922 I left Paris for three months in the Arctic. "On my way north a professor at Oslo University told me of an educated farmer who lived in the heart of the vast fir forests that run from Norway and Finland into Russia. It seemed this man had some knowledge of birds. He sent migration records, things like that, to my professor, who had never actually met him. The fir forest had several rare species I wanted to hear, so I decided to visit this farmer. As soon as I had ornithologically exhausted the tundra of the extreme north I crossed the Varanger Fjord and went to the