The Magus - John Fowles [72]
to be, M�. The bloody grave." I went to the village several times that week, to see if there were any strange faces about. There was no sign of the three people I was looking for, although there were a few strange faces: three or four wives with young children sent out to grass from Athens, and one or two old couples, dehydrated _rentiers_, who doddered in and out of the mournful lounges of the Hotel Philadelphia. One evening I felt restless and walked down to the harbour. It was about eleven at night and the place, with its catalpas and its old black cannons of i8zi, was almost deserted. After a Turkish coffee and a nip of brandy in a _kapheneion_ I started to walk back. Some way past the hotel, still on the few hundred yards of concrete "promenade," I saw a very tall elderly man standing and bending in the middle of the road, apparently looking for something. He looked up as I approached--he was really remarkably tall and strikingly well dressed for Phraxos; evidently one of the summer visitors. He wore a pale fawn suit, a white gardenia in his buttonhole, an oldfashioned white Panama hat with a black band, and he had a small goatee beard. He was holding by its middle a cane with a meerschaum handle, and he looked gravely distressed, as well as naturally grave. I asked in Greek if he had lost anything. "_Ah pardon... est-ce que vous parlez francais, monsieur?_" I said, yes, I spoke some French. It seemed he had just lost the ferrule of his stick. He had heard it drop off and roll away. I struck a few matches and searched round, and after a little while found the small brass end. "_Ah, tr�bien. Mille mercis, monsieur_." He produced a pocketbook and I thought for a moment he was going to tip me. His face was as gloomy as an El Greco; insufferably bored, decades of boredom, and probably, I decided, insufferably boring. He didn't tip me, but placed the ferrule carefully inside the wallet, and then politely asked me who I was, and, fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn't French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos _pittoresque, mais mains belle que D�s_. After a few moments more of this platitudinous chat we bowed and went our ways. He expressed a hope that we might meet again during the remaining two days of his stay and have a longer conversation. But I took very good care that we didn't. At last Saturday came. I had done the two extra duties during the week to clear my Sunday, and was thoroughly exhausted with the school. As soon as the morning lessons were over and I had snatched a quick lunch I headed towards the village with my bag. Yes I told the old man at the gate--a sure method of propagating the lie--I was off to Hydra for the weekend. As soon as I was out of sight of the school I cut up through the cottages and round the back of the school onto the path to Bourani. But I didn't go straight there. I had speculated endlessly during the week about Conchs, and as futilely as endlessly. I thought I could discern two elements in his "game"--one didactic, the other aesthetic. But whether his cunningly mounted fantasies hid ultimately a wisdom or a lunacy I could not decide. On the whole I suspected the latter. Mania made more sense than reason. I had wondered more and more during the week about the little group of cottages at Agia Varvara, the bay east of Bourani. It was a wide sweep of shingle with a huge row of _athanatos_, or agaves, whose bizarre twelve-foot candelabra of flowers stood facing the sea. I lay on a thyme-covered slope above the bay, having come quietly through the trees, and watched the cottages below for any sign of unusual life. But a woman in black was the only person I saw. Now I examined it, it seemed an unlikely place for Conchis's "assistants" to live. It was so open, so easy to watch. After a while I wound my way down to the cottages. A child in a doorway saw me coming through the olives and called, and then the entire populalion of the tiny hamlet appeared--four women and half a dozen children,