The Magus - John Fowles [132]
peace. Sounds like the splash of a duck landing on the water, the scream of an osprey, came across miles with a clarity that was first incredible--and then mysterious because, like a cry in an empty house, it seemed to make the silence, the peace, more intense. Almost as if sounds were there to distinguish the silence, and not the reverse. "I think it was on the third day that I discovered their secret. The very first morning Nygaard had pointed out a long tree-covered spit of land that ran into the river some half a mile south of the farm, and asked me not to go on it. He said he had hung many nesting boxes there and started a thriving colony of smew and goldeneye, and he did not want them disturbed. Of course I agreed, though it seemed late, even at that latitude, for duck to be sitting their eggs. "I then noticed that when we had our evening meal, we were never all present. On the first evening, the girl was away. On the second the boy appeared only when we had finished--even though I had seen him sitting gloomily by the shore only a few minutes before Nygaard came and called me to eat. The third day it so happened that I came back late myself to the farm. As I was walking back through the firs some way inland I stopped to watch a bird. I did not mean to hide, but I was hidden." Conchis paused, and I remembered how he had been standing the week before, when I left Lily; like a pre-echo of this. "Suddenly about two hundred yards away I saw the girl going through the trees by the shore. In one hand she held a pail covered with a cloth, in the other a milk can. I remained behind a tree and watched her walk on. To my surprise she followed the shore and went on to the forbidden promontory. I watched her through glasses until I saw her disappear. "Nygaard disliked having to sit in the same room with both his relations and myself. Their disapproving silence irked him. So he took to coming with me when I went to my 'bedroom' in the barn, to smoke a pipe and talk. That evening I told him I had seen his niece carrying what must have been food and drink onto the point. I asked him who was living there. He made no effort to hide the truth. The fact was this. His brother was living there. And he was insane." I glanced from Conchis to Lily and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present. "I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said, I think we are all insane here. He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my campbed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant 'hill of the holy stone,' the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures. "Originally the farm had been no more than a summer _dacha_, a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father--an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of the traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing--of returning to the wild. Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side. Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship's engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the church. While staying with Gustav, who had by then begun to practice