Read A Maggot - John Fowles for Free Online Page A

moments she closes
her eyes, without altering the upward angle of her face.
    Another might have assumed it was an invitation to
kiss, but this man's only reaction is to move the candle a little
closer; to one side, to the other. He seems to search every inch of
that faintly waxlike facial skin, every curve, every feature, as if
somewhere among them lies a minute lost object, a hidden symptom, an
answer; and his face grows mysterious in its intensity of
concentration, its absence of emotion. The impression is of a
profound innonence, such as congenital idiots sometimes display; of
in some way seeing her more sustainedly, more wholly than normal
intelligence could. Yet there is nothing of the idiot about his own
face. Beneath its regularity, even handsomeness - the mouth is
    particularly strong and well shaped - there lurks a
kind of imperturbable gravity, an otherness.
    She bears this silent scrutiny for nearly a minute.
His free hand rises, hesitates, gently touches her right temple. He
traces the line of her face, down her cheek to the jawbone and chin,
as if she is indeed not flesh, but wax, painted marble, a death-mask.
The tracing continues, and she closes her eyes again: the forehead,
the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nose, the mouth itself. Her lips do
not move against the fingers that brush across them.
    Suddenly the man falls to his knees, putting the
candle upon the floor at her feet; and sinks his face into her lap,
almost as if he cannot stand further sight of what he has caressed,
and yet is at its mercy. She does not flinch or seem surprised at
this; but stares down for a long moment at the back of the head
buried against her; then reaches her left hand and strokes the bound
hair. She whispers, so softly it seems to be to herself, not to him.
    'Oh my poor Dick. Poor Dick.'
    He does not answer, seems once again frozen. She
continues slowly to stroke his hair and pat it for a minute or more,
in the silence. At last she gently pushes him away, and stands,
though only to turn to her opened bundle and from it to unroll an
oyster-pink gown and petticoat, which she smoothes out flat, as if
preparing to put them on. Still he kneels, with his head bowed, it
might seem in some kind of submission or supplication. The candle on
the floor lights something that suggests neither, and at which he
stares down, as hypnotized by it as he has been by her face; and that
both his hands clutch, as a drowning man a branch, though they do not
move. The top of his breeches have been torn aside, and what he
clutches is no branch, but a large, naked and erect penis. The young
woman shows no shock or outrage when she realizes this obscenity,
though her hands are arrested in their smoothing. She goes quietly to
the top of her truckle-bed, where the violets still lie strewn on the
rough pillow; gathers them up, and returns to where he kneels, to
toss them, it seems casually, almost mockingly under the down-turned
face and across the hands and the monstrous blood-filled glans.
    His face jerks up as in an
agony at the painted one above, and they stare for a moment into each
other's eyes. She steps round him and unlatches the door and stands
holding it open, for poor Dick to leave; at which, clutching his
opened breeches, he struggles clumsily to his feet and without
looking at her, and still in obscene disarray, lurches through the
open door. She steps into the doorway, it seems to give him light
down the dark stairway to the landing below. Some draught threatens
to extinguish the candle, and she draws back, shielding the guttering
flame, like a figure from a Chardin painting, and closes the door
with her back. She leans against it, and stares down at the pink
brocaded clothes on the truckle-bed. There is no one to see she has
tears in her eyes, besides the belladonna.
    * * *
    Dick had been, during his absence upstairs, briefly a
subject of conversation at the long table in the inn kitchen. Such
kitchens were once semi-public and as much the centre