The Magus - John Fowles [241]
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 harbour, 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