The Magus - John Fowles [57]
21
There was silence. The crickets chirped. Some night bird, high overhead, croaked primevally in the stars. "What happened when you got home?" "It is late." "But --" "Tomorrow." He lit the lamp. As he straightened up from adjusting the wick, he stared at me. "You are not ashamed to be the guest of a traitor to his country?" "I don't think you were a traitor to the human race." We moved towards his bedroom windows. "The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed." "I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self." He turned. "You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good." He led the way through to my room, and lit the lamp there for me. "Good night, Nicholas." "Good night. And..." But his hand was up, silencing me and what he must have guessed were to be my thanks. Then he was gone. When I came back from the bathroom, I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one. I undressed and turned out the lamp, then stood a moment by the open window. There was a vague smell of drains in the still air, of a cesspool somewhere. I got into bed, and lay thinking about Conchis. He seemed a more human person, a much more human person, than he had before; yet there was a kind of professionalism, an air of having rehearsed the narrative, or at any rate, of having told it before--to Leverrier and Mitford?--that took away a little from the frankness and impact of the confession. I knew that I must be getting close to his real purpose in inviting me. For some reason he wanted me to hear these things, to be impressed by them. They were not casual reminiscings. That was why the good night had followed so abruptly on the end of the story-telling; he had wanted to create a feeling of to-be-continued; to leave me in doubt about him, speculating. And then there were the footsteps, a whole tangle of unrelated ikons and incidents, the photo on the curiosa cabinet, oblique looks, Alison, the little girl called Lily with her head in sunlight I was about to go to sleep. At first hallucinatorily faint, impossible to pinpoint, it began. I thought it must be coming through the walls from a gramophone in Conchs's bedroom. I sat up, put my ear to the wall, listened. And then I leapt out of bed and went to the window. It was coming from outside, from somewhere far to the north, well up in the hills a mile or more away. There was no light, no sound except the crickets nearby. Only, beyond, this faintest sound of men, a lot of men, singing. I thought--fishermen. But why should they be in the hills? Then shepherds--but shepherds are solitaries. It grew imperceptibly clearer, as if on a gust of wind--but there was no wind--swelling, then fading away. I thought for an incredible moment that I caught something familiar in the sound--but it couldn't be. And it sank away, almost to complete silence. And then--unimaginable the strangeness of it, the shock of it--the sound swelled again and I knew beyond doubt what was being sung up there. It was "Tipperary." Whether it was the distance, whether the record, because it must