The Magus - John Fowles [84]
in hand, Apollo and his sister, Artemis-Diana. The beam went out. I saw them retreat into the dark penumbra of the trees. Silence. Night. As if nothing had happened. I looked back at Conchis. He had not moved. I tried to understand. I tried to think what connection there was between the elderly man on the road by the hotel, the "pre-haunting," and this scene. During the telling I thought I had grasped the point of the _caract�_ of de Deukans; Conchis had been talking of himself and me; the parallels were too close for it to be anything else. _And discouraged every kind of question_... _how unable I was to judge him_... _very few friends and no relations_... but what had that to do with what had just happened? Plainly it was meant to be mythical, but it had awakened in me vague memories of Oscar Wilde--the Wilde of _Salom�-and of Maeterlinck; something Germanic, _fin de si�e_, had floated over it all. It was also an attempt at the sort of scandalous evocation mentioned in _Le Masque Francais_. There was some very nasty, some very perverse, drift in Conchis's _divertimenti_. The naked man. What were they doing now, inside those trees? Because the girl acted one thing for an hour, there was no reason why she shouldn't act something else, anything else, the next. I remembered wryly that she had said "I am called." I had given it a spiritualistic significance; but it had a normal other meaning--for actresses. I felt, irrationally, betrayed; and envious and jealous of those other mysterious young men who had appeared from nowhere to poach in "my" territory; and walked off with the prize. I tried to be objective, content to be a spectator, to let these weird incidents flow past me as one sits in a cinema and lets the film flow past. But even as I thought that, I knew it to be a bad analogy. I went and stood behind her empty chair. "Very strange." Conchis didn't answer. I moved round the table, to where I could see his face. His eyes were open, but his stare to the south was fixed, and for a moment I was frightened. I said urgently, "Mr. Conchis?" and touched his shoulder. He looked up then, for all the world like a man coming out of a trance. "Are you all right?" "I fell asleep. I apologise." He shook his head as if to wake himself up. "But your eyes were open." "A kind of sleep." He smiled at me, one of his smiles that was intended, flagrantly, to make me wonder what he really meant. I smiled warily back. "Or a kind of mystification?" He stood up and took my arm, then walked me silently to the western end of the terrace--probably, I guessed, to give the man with the arrow in his heart time to decamp. He breathed deeply for a moment, facing the distant mountains, his hand on my elbow. Then he said, "I am rich in many things, Nicholas. Richer even in some than I am in money." "I realise that." "Richer in forgotten powers. In strange desires." He pressed my elbow lightly, then let go of it. His face was inscrutable, but his tone aroused old suspicions in me. Young men, young women. Perhaps I should soon find myself asked to take part in some kind of orgy, some sexual fantasy; and I knew that if I was faced with it, joining in or not, I might not know what to do--sexually or morally. A double lack of _savoir vivre_. I was out of my depth; I had a quick self-protective need to be debunking, English. I lit a cigarette; put on a smile and a light voice. "I saw your 'visitor' meet her boyfriend over there." There was a long pause; in the shadow his eyes were like black phosphorus. "An uncensored rendezvous with Apollo." Still he forced me to go on. "I have no program, Mr. Conchis. I don't know." More silence. I said rather desperately, "I just feel I'd enjoy it more if I knew what it all meant." Then it was as if I had said something that really pleased him. He turned and gave me a smile, took my arm again. We strolled back to the table. "My dear Nicholas, man has been saying what you have just said for the last ten thousand years. And the one common feature of all those gods he has said it to is that not one of them has ever returned