The Magus - John Fowles [81]
her hands. "He kept Madame Mirabelle behind locked doors. But in his private chapel he kept an even more--to my mind--obscene object. It was encased in a magnificent early mediaeval reliquary. It looked much like a withered, dusty sea cucumber. De Deukans called it, without any wish to be humorous, the Holy Member. He knew, of course, that a merely cartilaginous object could not possibly survive so long. There are at least sixteen other Holy Members in Europe. Mostly from mummies, and all equally discredited. But for de Deukans it was simply a collectable, and the religious or indeed human blasphemy it represented had no significance for him. This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor. "We never discussed religion or politics. He went to mass. But only, I think, because the observance of ritual is a form of the cultivation of beauty. In some ways, perhaps because of the wealth that had always surrounded him, he was an extremely innocent man. Self-denial was incomprehensible to him, unless it formed part of some aesthetic regimen. I stood with him once and watched a line of peasants labouring a turnip field. A Millet brought to life. And his only remark was: _It is beautiful that they are they and that we are we_. For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have stabbed the conscience of even the vulgarest _nouveau riche_, were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence. "Altruistic behaviour--what he termed _le diable en puritain_--upset him deeply. For instance, since the age of eighteen I have refused to eat wild birds in any form at table. I would as soon eat human flesh as I would an ortolan, or a wild duck. This to de Deukans was distressing, like a false note in a music manuscript. He could not believe things had been written thus. And yet there I was, in black and white, refusing his _p� d'alouettes_ and his truffled woodcock. "But not all his life was to do with the dead. He had an observatory on the roof of his _ch�au_, and a well-equipped biological laboratory. He never walked out in the park without carrying a small �i of test tubes. To catch spiders. I had known him over a year before I discovered that this was more than another eccentricity. That he was in fact one of the most learned arachnologists of his day. There is even a species named after him: _Theridion deukansii_. He was delighted that I also knew something of ornithology. And he encouraged me to specialise in what he jokingly called ornithosemantics--the meaning of birdsound. "He was the most abnormal man I had ever met. And the politest. And the most distant. And certainly the most socially irresponsible. I was twenty-five--your age, Nicholas, which will perhaps tell you more than anything I can say how unable I was to judge him. It is, I think, the most difficult and irritating age of all. Both to be and to behold. One has the intelligence, one is in all ways treated as a grown man. But certain persons reduce one to adolescence, because only experience can understand and assimilate them. In fact de Deukans, by being as he was--certainly not by arguing--raised profound doubts in my philosophy. Doubts he was later to crystallise for me, as I will tell you, in five simple words. "I saw the faults in his way of life and at the same time found myself enchanted. That is, unable to act rationally. I have forgotten to tell you that he had manuscript after manuscript of unpublished music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A paradise. To sit at one of the magnificent old harpsichords in his musicarium--a long rococo gallery in faded gold and pomona green, always in sunlight, as tranquil as an orchard... such experiences, such happiness, always gives rise to the same problem: of the nature of evil. Why should such complete pleasure be evil? Why did I believe that de Deukans was evil? You will say, Because children were starving while you