The Magus - John Fowles [240]
understand your remark." "No?" I grimaced menacingly at the old man, but I was already more than half persuaded that his incomprehension was genuine. At a sign from the vicemaster Androutsos raised a sheet of paper and read from it. "The following complaints were made against you. One: you have failed to enter the life of the school, absenting yourself almost every weekend during this last term." I began to grin. "Two: you have twice bribed prefects to take your supervision periods." This was true, though the bribery had been no worse than a letting them off compositions they owed me. Demetriades had suggested it; and only he could have reported it. "Three: you failed to mark your examination papers, a most serious scholastic duty. Four: you --" 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and was the disciplinary dean also; a kind of camp adjutant, a lean, tense, balding man in his late forties, withdrawn even with other Greeks.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