Magic Seeds

by V. S. Naipaul

  After some time he went to the bathroom. It had been constructed within the older room and the partitions were thin. The wallpaper was of a bold design, widely spaced green vines suggesting a great openness. But on one wall there was no wallpaper, no feeling of openness, only pages from an old illustrated magazine called The Graphic, closely printed grey columns in the Victorian way, broken up by line drawings of events and places all over the world. The pages were from the 1860s and 1870s. The artist or reporter (possibly one and the same person) would have sent his copy or sketches by ship; in the office of the magazine a professional artist would have straightened out the drawings, probably adding things according to his fancy; and week by week these drawings, the products of advanced journalistic enterprise, illustrating events in the empire and elsewhere for an interested public, were reproduced according to the best methods of the day.

  For Willie it was a revelation. The past in these pasted pages seemed to be just there, something he could reach out and touch. He read about India after the Mutiny, about the opening up of Africa, about warlord China, about the United States after the civil war, about the troubles of Jamaica and Ireland; he read about the discovery of the source of the Nile; he read about Queen Victoria as though she were still alive. He read until the light faded. It was hard to read the small print by dull electric light.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Roger. He had been discussing business with the banker and he looked drawn.

  He saw the book on the dressing table and said, “What book do you have?” He took it up and said, “It’s a first edition, you know. He likes leaving them about casually for his guests. They are gathered up very carefully afterwards. This time I have a Jane Austen.”

  Willie said, “I’ve been reading The Graphic. It’s in the bathroom.”

  Roger said, “It’s in my bathroom, too. I will tell you about that. I have an interest, as they say. There was a time when I used to go to the Charing Cross Road to look at the bookshops. It’s not something you can do today, not in the same way. One day I saw a set of The Graphic on the pavement outside one of the shops. They were quite cheap, a couple of pounds a volume. I couldn’t believe my luck. The Graphic was a famous thing, one of the precursors of the Illustrated London News. They were in beautifully bound volumes. It was the way things were done at that time. I don’t know whether the magazine did the binding, or the libraries, or the people who subscribed. I could only take home two of the Graphic volumes, and I had to take a taxi. They were very bulky things, as I told you, and very heavy. It was about this time that I was getting involved with our banker. I was beginning to understand the immense power of the true egomaniac on people around him. In fact, I was yielding to that power without knowing it. To the intelligent person, like myself, the egomaniac is in some ways pathetic, a man who doesn’t see like the rest of us that the paths of glory lead but to the grave. And that is how the intelligent man is caught. He begins by patronising and ends by being a minion. Anyway. Just after I had seen the Graphic set I came here. The great man was still courting me, and in fact I had already been caught. I’m not punning. He showed me some of his pictures. He told me how he had picked them up. And, not to be outdone, I told him how I had recently picked up the two bound volumes of The Graphic. I was boasting. He of course didn’t know about The Graphic, and I was telling him how much I knew. Having boasted to him about The Graphic, I thought, when I went back to London, that I should go and get a few more of the volumes. I found nothing. Our friend had sent his big car and carried away the lot. This was his wife’s idea, pasting the pages on the lavatories. When the place is done up again, or sold, and becomes a hotel or whatever, all those pages will go to the builder’s rubbish dump.”

  “You think it will become a hotel?”

  “Something like that. Ordinary people can’t live in places like this. You would need a lot of servants. These places were built in the days of many servants. Fifteen gardeners, umpteen chambermaids. Those people don’t exist nowadays. People in service, as they used to say. At one time they were a big part of the population.”

  Willie asked, “What happened to them?”

  “It’s a wonderful question. I suppose one answer would be that they died out. But that’s not the question you asked. I know what you are asking. If we asked it more often we might begin to understand the kind of country we’re living in. I realise now I haven’t heard anyone ask the question.”

  Willie said, “In many parts of India it’s the big issue nowadays. What they call the churning of the castes. I think it’s more important than the religious question. Certain middle groups rising, certain top groups being sucked under. The guerrilla war I went to fight in was a reflection of this movement. A reflection, no more. India will soon be presenting an untouchable face to the world. It won’t be nice. People won’t like it.”

  They went down later to drinks and dinner. It was not a formal affair. The banker’s wife was not there. The only other guest was a picture-gallery owner. The banker was a painter, in addition to everything else, and wished to have an exhibition in London. He had told Willie and Roger, when telling them about their fellow dinner guest, “Thought it would be better to ask him down to talk things over. These people like a little style.” Using that last sentence both to flatter Willie and Roger and to rope them into his conspiracy against the gallery man.

  He, the gallery man, was dressed as stiffly as Roger. He had big red hands, as though he had been carrying about big framed pictures in his gallery all day.

  Spotlights in the ceiling of the very big room played on three of the paintings the banker had done. Willie began to understand what Roger had said about the power of the true egomaniac. It was open to Willie and Roger and the gallery man to say that the paintings the banker had chosen to light up were second-rate work, Sunday painting, no more. It was open to them to be quite brutal. But the man had exposed himself in too innocent a way, and no one wished to wound him.

  The gallery owner was suffering. Whatever excitement he might have felt about being a guest in the grand house (and having his elegant clothes unpacked and noted) was going.

  The banker said, “Money is of no moment to me. You understand that. I am sure you do.”

  And the gallery owner struggled, and failed, to say that he was in the gallery business to make money and the last person he was interested in professionally was a painter who didn’t need money. He spoke two or three disconnected ideas and then gave up.

  The subject was then left alone. But enough ego and power had been displayed (the ceiling spotlights continuing to play on the banker’s paintings) for Willie to understand that, after the artistic grand charge, whatever arrangements were going to be made with the gallery man were going to be made privately, without witnesses.

  The banker said to Willie, “Do you know the maharaja of Makkhinagar?” He gave Willie no chance to reply. “He came to stay. It was just after Mrs. Gandhi had de-recognised the princes and abolished their privy purses. This would have been in 1971. He was very young, uncertain in London, very much pulled down by the loss of his privy purse. I thought I should do something for him. My father knew his grandfather. Naturally enough, with all the changes in India, the young man was very much standing on his dignity when he came here. No one minded that, but I don’t think he appreciated the people I had brought together for him. Many doors would have been open to him if he wanted, but he didn’t appear interested. They do that, and then they go away and talk about a lack of regard over here. In London I invited him to the Corner Club for lunch. Do you know the Corner? It’s smaller than the Turf Club, and even more exclusive, if such a thing can be imagined. The dining room is very small. The Corner isn’t called the Corner for nothing. Eyebrows were raised when they saw young Makkhinagar, I don’t mind telling you. But I never heard a word from him after that. About fifteen years later I went to Delhi. One of the many occasions when the rumour was that the economy was going to be liberalised. I looked up Makkhinaga
r in the telephone book. He was a member of the Indian upper house now, and he had a house in Delhi. He invited me over one evening. Such a panoply of security at the house, watchmen and soldiers and sandbags at the gate, and men with guns inside. Makkhinagar was much more relaxed, in spite of it all. He said, ‘Peter, that was an amusing little lunch place we went to the last time.’ That’s what I mean about the Indians. ‘Amusing little lunch place.’ The Corner! You put yourself out, and that’s what you get.”

  Willie said nothing. The gallery man gave a little laugh, already like a man pleased to be admitted to this kind of converse about the great; but Roger was silent and looked suffering.

  More people were going to come the next day. Willie wasn’t looking forward to it. He wondered why. He thought, “It’s vanity. I can only be easy with people who have some idea of what I am. Or probably it’s just the house. It makes too many demands on people. I am sure it alters them. It has certainly altered the banker. It altered me. It prevented me from seeing things clearly when I arrived.”

  In the morning after breakfast (which he went down for) he met the banker’s wife. She greeted him before he greeted her, striding towards him and stretching out her hand as if in the completest welcome, a still-young woman with long bouncing hair and a big bouncing bottom. She gave her name and said, in a fine tinkling voice, “I’m Peter’s wife.” She was narrow-shouldered, narrow-chested, attractive: a very physical person, Willie thought. Nothing about her afterwards was as fine as that first moment. She was only her smile and her voice.

  Willie thought, “I must work out why, like the maharaja in the Corner Club, I am not at ease with these people. The maharaja felt the lack of welcome and settled the score fifteen years later. I don’t feel like that. I don’t feel the lack of a welcome. On the contrary, I feel anyone who comes here would be more than ready to meet the banker’s guest. What I feel is that for me there is no point in going through with the occasion. I don’t wish to cultivate anybody or to be cultivated by them. It isn’t that I think they are materialist. No one in the world is more crudely materialist than the Indian well-to-do. But in the forest and in the jail I changed. You can’t go through that kind of life without changing. I have shed my materialist self. I had to, to survive. I feel that these people don’t know the other side of things.” The words came to him just like that. He thought, “The words would have meant something. I must work out what the words mean. The people here don’t understand nullity. The physical nullity of what I saw in the forest. The spiritual nullity that went with that, and was very much like what my poor father lived with all his life. I have felt this nullity in my bones and can go back to it at any time. Unless we understand people’s other side, Indian, Japanese, African, we cannot truly understand them.”

  The banker had been talking business with Roger, playing with his golf tee as with a rosary. When they came out from where they had been the banker took Roger and Willie and the gallery man and someone who had just arrived on a little tour of some of his things. He had come back from a world trip visiting business associates and (like a visiting head of state) getting presents from people. Some of these he now displayed. Many of them he mocked. He especially mocked a tall blue semi-transparent porcelain vase, crudely painted with local flowers. The banker said, “It was probably done by the local manager’s wife. Nothing to do in the long nights at those latitudes.” The vase was very narrow at the base, too wide at the top, unsteady, rocking at the touch of a finger. It had already taken a few tumbles and had a long diagonal crack; a piece of the porcelain had broken off.

  Roger, speaking with an unusual irritation, possibly as a result of something that had happened during his business conversation, said provocatively, “I think it’s rather nice.”

  The banker said, “It’s yours. I’ll give it to you.”

  Roger said, “It will be too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. I’ll get them to wrap it up and see it into the train with you. I am sure Perdita will find some use for it.”

  That was what happened the next afternoon. So the first-class tickets that Roger had bought at last had the witness for whom they had been intended, and Roger was spared the most horrible kind of shame. But again, at tipping time, he lost his nerve and tipped the servant ten pounds.

  He said to Willie, “All the way in the car I was trying to work out the tip. For everything extra connected with that odious vase. I settled on five pounds, but at the last minute I changed my mind. It’s all the effect of that man’s ego. I allow him to insult me, as he did with that cracked vase, and then I try to find excuses for him. I think, ‘He’s like a child. He doesn’t know about the real world.’ One day someone with nothing to lose will insult him in the profoundest way, and then the magic will be broken. But until then for people like me there’s an electric charge around the man.”

  Willie said, “Do you think you will be the one to insult him in that profound way when the moment comes?”

  “Not now. I have too much to lose. I am too dependent on him. But at the end, yes. When my father was dying in hospital his character completely changed. This very gentlemanly man began to insult everybody who came to see him. My mother, my brother. He insulted all his business associates. Really vile language. He said everything he thought about everybody. He kept nothing back. The nearness of death gave him that licence. I suppose you would say that for my father death was his truest and happiest moment. But I didn’t want to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh, according to what I’ve read. Peacefully smoking a pipe, reconciled to everybody and everything, hating no one. But Van Gogh could afford to be romantic. He had his art and vocation. My father didn’t, and I don’t, and very few of us have, and now that I am within sight of the end I find myself thinking that my father had something. It makes death something to look forward to.”

  When they got back to the house in St. John’s Wood Roger said to Perdita, “Peter has sent you a gift.”

  She was excited, and immediately began undoing the servant’s unskilled and perfunctory wrapping (a lot of sticky tape) of the awkwardly shaped, tall vase.

  She said, “It’s a lovely craft piece. I must write to Peter. I have a place for it. The crack needn’t show.”

  For a few days the vase was where she put it, but then it disappeared and wasn’t spoken of again.

  A WEEK OR so later Roger said to Willie, “You made a great hit with Peter. Did you know?”

  Willie said, “I wonder why. I hardly said anything to him. I just listened.”

  “That’s probably why. Peter has a story about Indira Gandhi. He never thought much of her. He didn’t think she was educated or knew much about people in the wider world. He thought she was a bluffer. In 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh business, he went to Delhi and tried to see her. He had some project on hand. She ignored him. He twiddled his thumbs in his hotel for a whole week. He was furious. At last he met someone from the inner Indira Gandhi circle. He asked this person, ‘How does the lady judge people?’ The person said, ‘Her method is simple. All the time she is waiting to see what her visitor wants.’ Peter no doubt took the tip. He was waiting all the time to find out what you wanted from him, and you said nothing.”

  Willie said, “I didn’t want anything from him.”

  “It brought out the best in him. He talked to me about you afterwards, and I told him some of your story. The result is he’s made you an offer. He’s involved with some big construction companies. They do a quality magazine about modern buildings. It’s high-class public relations. They don’t overtly sell any company or product. He thinks you might want to work for them. Part-time or full-time. It depends on you. The offer is perfectly genuine, I should tell you. It’s Peter at his best. He’s very proud of his magazine.”

  Willie said, “I know nothing about architecture.”

  And Roger knew that Willie was interested.

  He said, “They do courses for people like you. It’s like the courses
the auction houses do in art history.”

  SO WILLIE AT last found a job in London. Or found something to go to in the mornings. Or, to make it still smaller, something to leave the St. John’s Wood house for.

  The magazine’s offices were in a narrow, flat-fronted old building in Bloomsbury.

  Roger said, “It’s like something out of central casting.”

  Willie didn’t know the meaning of the words.

  Roger said, “In the old days in Hollywood the studios had departments that did exaggerated sets of foreign places. Exaggerated and full of cliché so that people would know where they were. If somebody—doing A Christmas Carol, say—had gone to them and asked for a Dickensian office in a Dickensian building they would have built something like your building and enveloped it in fog.”

  It was not far from the British Museum—pediment and columns, big front court and tall, pointed, black iron rails. And it wasn’t far from the Trades Union Congress building, tight against the street, modern, three or four storeys high, glass and concrete in rectangular segments, with a strange cantilevered flying figure in bronze above the entrance, representing labour threatening or labour triumphant, or perhaps only labour or the idea of work, or perhaps again representing mainly the sculptor’s struggle with his socialist subject.