The Magicians

by J. B. Priestley

  “Not staying, Chummie,” he told Karney, with a wide wet smile under his curly moustache. “Just handin’ out today’s tip—straight from the jockey’s cousin. Saw His Nibs this morning, as per usual, and His Nibs is fussing—yes, almost creating, His Nibs is. Not so much as most blokes would notice, but of course I read the signs—bit of smoke comin’ out of the ears an’ all that. Thought I’d give you the tip. We all like to be put in the picture, I always say. Cheery-pip!” But he gave Ravenstreet a sharp look. “Nice to have met you, sir.” And he ambled away, waving a hand to various acquaintances who looked up and smiled.

  “Pippy Prisk,” Karney murmured, as they watched him go. “What do you make of him now? I’d be interested to know, Ravenstreet.”

  “A clever devil pretending to be a silly-ass char­acter.”

  “Right! You’re no fool.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Ravenstreet, “I’m beginning to think I am. But who is he?”

  “He’s Mervil’s confidential man. Sort of A.D.C. You don’t know Mervil, do you? I think he said you hadn’t met.”

  Ravenstreet admitted that although he had heard and read a great deal about Lord Mervil, he hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting him.

  “We’re in one or two things together,” said Karney, with a touch of complacency. “And now there’s something new on. That’s what Prisk meant when he said Mervil was fussing. Of course he doesn’t fuss, but Prisk was giving me a hint. That’s his style. Now there might be something for you in this thing, if you’re interested. No, I’m not at liberty to explain. Mervil will want to do that. But what I’m wondering is whether you’d like to get together with me and Mervil one night soon, just to talk it over. You’re more or less at a loose end, aren’t you? Mervil’s always heavily booked up, but I imagine we might be able to make it dinner toward the end of next week or the beginning of the week after. All right to you?”

  Ravenstreet said it was. “Unless,” he added, “you’re thinking of entering the field against New Central——”

  “No, no, something quite different. Not connected with the electrical industry at all. You might say, and probably will,” Karney went on, “that it isn’t your kind of thing at all. It’s as far away as that.”

  “Then it’s probably too far, and I’m not your man.”

  Karney moved his long chin from side to side, which was apparently as near as he could get to shaking that fixed head of his. “Mervil takes the view, and I agree with him, that although a man may have specialised, if he’s big enough he belongs by right to the élite. He’s very different from the smaller type of specialist, who can’t really give orders but only take ’em, like a technician or a clerk. Mervil’s hot on this distinction. But then he very much believes in a compact élite, working together behind the scenes, so to speak——”

  “What scenes?” demanded Ravenstreet bluntly. He was rather suspicious of this kind of talk.

  Karney waved a hand. “A few people put on the show—and the rest lap it up. Either you’re out in front, having it done for you, or you’re at the back, knowing how it’s done. That’s all very much down Mervil’s street, of course. He says there’ll be more and more of it, that the gap’ll soon be wider and wider.” He gave his chin an up-and-down movement now. “Better cross that gap while the going’s good, Ravenstreet.”

  “This all sounds a bit fancy to me, Karney,” said Ravenstreet rather stiffly. “But of course I’ll be glad to meet Lord Mervil and hear what he has to say. It’s a business proposition, I take it—and not politics—or a new religion?”

  “Oh—very much a business proposition,” Karney replied; and then added: “Among other things. Well, one of Mervil’s people will be letting you know when and where we dine. Probably Major Prisk, if he’s still in town.”

  Actually it was Prisk who rang him up, in a ‘jolly-good-egg’ style, two days later, inviting him to dine at Lord Mervil’s house on Friday week, which would be the night after his evening at the theatre with Mavis. Well, there was a page of his book nicely filled, with what seemed adequate arrangements for delaying the darkness.

  Mavis and he did not agree about the play they saw; their respective attitudes toward the Theatre were quite different. Ravenstreet disliked going to West End playhouses; their hours were wrong; they were mostly uncomfortable; they seemed to have too many half-witted patrons; and nine out of ten of the plays they offered didn’t seem worth the time, trouble, money, spent on them, so many trashy novelettes printed on hand-made paper and bound in calf-skin. The truth was that Ravenstreet, who had done much playgoing on his travels abroad and had some ap­preciation of dramatic art, was almost always angry with these London theatres because they disappointed him, not giving him the magical experience he hoped for, needed. Their failure was one small part of life’s swindle; just as a man expected a love he never found, friends he never made, trust and honour and glory that only arrived in shopworn substitutes, so he expected a theatre that was not to be found in or near Shaftesbury Avenue. He soon discovered that Mavis’s view was not like this at all. She expected nothing of any im­portance, probably not seeing any possibility of magical experience in the playhouse; and so she enjoyed everything, the whole silly business, arriving and finding the seats and looking at the programme and looking at the audience and looking at the lights going down and the lights going up, and the curtain rising, and seeing the set and the actors and the actresses and noticing what they wore and whether they were looking older or younger and remembering tasty bits of their private lives that could be discussed over drinks in the interval. To her the play was some fascinating types doing charades. So this play they saw, which to Ravenstreet was idiotic, was to her as good as any other; she chattered about it happily at supper, in a restaurant filled with fascinating types who had been doing charades and behaved as if taking supper were part of a charade too.

  They ate well and drank a good deal. Mavis was excited by the noise and luxury and late-night bon­homie, and by the presence of the stage and screen stars, the famous faces that smiled through the smoke. This female excitement was infectious; Ravenstreet also began to yield to the richly sexual atmosphere of the place and the hour. So when Mavis, beaming with gratitude, asked him in for a drink, he followed her into the small flat, which seemed to him charming and rather pathetic, all deliciously feminine. He was not drunk; he spoke sensibly and moved steadily; but his in­hibitions had been dissolved away, his eye was flattered by all it saw, possibilities existed that were not visible to his sober mind, and the sharp edge of things was smoothed out into a dreamy highway. A self that usually lurked in the background, making suggestions that other and more widely experienced selves rejected with contempt, now took charge of him, and of Mavis too, for this was a fellow who understood her perfectly, it seemed. He took possession of her magnificent body like an Oriental conqueror; she was a peach warm from a south wall; the writhing sweet mouth, the long golden legs, the breasts that were like faintly phosphorescent globes in the light filtering through the scarf over the bedside lamp, were his to command; and among the scented pillows he heard, this fellow who knew all along what he wanted and where it was to be found, her moans of gratified desire. But there was a cold man there too, a melancholy man, standing aloof from the archaic yet ever brand-new witcheries of time; and this man, much closer to the essential Charles Ravenstreet than the other fellow, refused to feel anything but a cool wonder, a faint disgust. It was he who, when they returned to the sitting-room for a final drink and a cigarette, pointed out that sex without love must be either mindless and brutal or, as this was now, fatuous. Here was the hour of tenderness; and there could be none between them, without the most shocking pretence.

  At first she regarded him, as if through some diminishing glass, with that ironical appraisement which comes naturally to a woman who has been taken without love, possessed outside any sustaining relation­ship and therefore, in her opinion, not possessed at all. If he thought he had achieved something,
her look announced, then he was wrong: he had merely wasted energy on her body, had won a shadow fight.

  When he was about to break the heavy sticky silence between them, she stopped him. “Don’t say it.”

  “You don’t know what I was going to say.” He sounded, he thought, as big an ass as he felt.

  “Perhaps not,” she said wearily. “But you looked as if you were about to come all moral and fatherly, and tell me I’m much too nice a girl to do this sort of thing. And if so, for God’s sake—don’t say it.”

  “All right, I won’t.” He finished his drink. Then, not looking at her but staring at the smoke that curled from his cigarette: “As a matter of fact, I was about to be rather pompous, but in a different way. What I was going to say was that where we make the mistake—men, not women, and all kinds of men from indignant moralists to the worst womanisers—is in thinking that making love is a physical act, whereas it’s a psychological one, two personalities at play, not just two bodies. We’re encouraged in this mistake,” he continued slowly, more for his own benefit than for hers, “by the idea, which we start with quite early, that women are like something to eat—‘a dish’ as some Americans say. I think women themselves are partly re­sponsible now, though they don’t really believe it, but feel it might be a useful short cut to what they’re really after—a real relationship. They——”

  He broke off because he saw that she was crying. He half rose. “My dear girl!” he began, in dismay. But she waved him down again, and then flung herself in front of him, leaning against his knees and so keeping her head turned away from him. After some hesitation and a little sympathetic prompting, it all came out, drawn out of her by the ghost of that tenderness which should have been there between them at that hour, revealing the love they had only mimicked and mocked. She had never loved her husband, who had gone, perhaps almost by appointment, to his death knowing half her secret. What he didn’t know was that the other man she loved then, still loved, would always love, was one of his Service superiors, older and heavily married and committed, a man now in a distant command who was busy forgetting she existed. “The Magic Man,” she said mournfully. “Girls like me, jolly good sorts who tart around when we’re not washing our stockings and wondering about the rent, nearly always get tangled early with one of these fatal devils—magic men—damn their eyes! Two nice dull men have wanted to marry me, in a nice dull way, and I’ve just been decent enough to tell them it wouldn’t work. By the time I’ve come round to thinking it would, the offers won’t be there. God knows what I’ll grab hold of and make do with before I’ve finished. Of course if I was a clever cool girl like Anne, it would be very different. But I’m not. As you observe. Believe it or not, I’ve often thought of suicide. No, don’t start telling me I’m a fool—I know I am up to a point. But it’s all such a hellish waste, that’s what I can’t bear. Everything’s slipping away, running out on one, going down the sink like dirty water. Ten years ago there was a whole wide world in front of me. Now it’s been cut down to getting by in Knightsbridge. In another ten I’ll be wondering how to make my face look like one. And in another ten, if I live that long, I’ll be wondering if I can raise two cooked meals a day. What’s it all for? Why don’t they tell us the truth while we’re young and able to stand it? Why aren’t we brought up to be tough as hell? What’s the use of all our fancy feelings if we’re all just hurrying to the undertaker? This love business we get tangled in—what’s the point of it, why do we bother with it? Comfort me, for God’s sake! I did my best for you—though I know it didn’t mean anything—no, shut up, don’t let’s pretend. If it had meant anything, I wouldn’t be talking like this now—no fear! I’d have been staring at you with big eyes, making you feel that this had all been something special to me too, a grand passion, working hard to become your mistress with a hope of jockeying you somehow into marriage.” She turned sharply to look up into his face, grinning derisively. “I know I look like hell, and you see I’m not bothering. No tactics. No tact. Somebody like Anne would have a fit. I know men aren’t supposed to talk—though that’s all my eye—but don’t tell Philip about this so that he’ll tell her, because I’ll have to admit I’ve deliberately thrown another chance away. I’ll be your mistress if you want me to, though you’re too intelligent to think it would work, I suppose. Am I a complete fool? Am I a coward? What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with nearly everybody? Tell me something to comfort me. Blast—I’m crying again. It’s this dam’ making love that isn’t making love that does it—I start remembering. Go on, go on, just talk—don’t leave me yet—I can’t bear it.”

  So he talked, a weary man at the end of a long empty day, and he was sensible and kind and quite futile. There was nothing she wanted to hear that he could tell her. He was merely further along the same road, where it was narrower still, indeed a mere edge with three-dimensional technicolour scenes of a man’s life on one side, and the darkness into which the track would finally curve on the other side. As he forced himself to offer her meaningless consolation and good advice that was not worth the stale air that carried it to her ear, he found himself at the end of this rollicking evening, with everything in it, bedworthy luscious blonde and all, still crawling on the edge of things. Nor did he deceive her.

  “That’ll do.” She jumped to her feet. “Have another drink? No? You want to go, don’t you? All right. But I’ll tell you something. You may have plenty of money and be a great man among these electrical engineering boys. But, apart from that, you haven’t a clue, have you? And if you ask me, you’re about where I am—in a different, dry, man’s way—aren’t you?”

  “To be honest—yes,” he admitted, preparing to go. “In fact, it’s probably worse for me—inside. I’ve arrived after a long journey—and there isn’t anything. As you say, not a clue. Of course it may be temporary—a busy man who’s beginning to stop being busy—but I doubt it. Lots of people die long before they’re buried. Perhaps I’m one of them.”

  “You can’t be,” she retorted, with an unexpected touch of shrewdness. “If you were, you wouldn’t know it. I meet plenty of them. You’re not one. Perhaps you’ll get religion or something. Let me know if you do—I’ll try it.”

  He shook his head smilingly. “But there’s something else. You might want a bit of help, somebody to stake you in a small way—to start some modest enterprise, to go somewhere to make a start. If there’s nobody else you can ask, then ask me. Promise? Good!” She looked tearful again as she nodded agreement. After she had given him a kiss that had more salt in it than sex, she stood for a moment or two in the doorway of her flat. The top light of the corridor, almost as searching and harsh as a prison searchlight, instantly banished all her gold and rose-pink and carmine, put out her eyes and set black sockets in her skull, and made her farewell smile a twisting of dark lines on a grey mask. So much for nights out with gorgeous gay blondes who make a man forget how time is draining him away!

  Next night he dined with Lord Mervil. Karney was there, the deformed lieutenant of this captain of finance; and so was Major Prisk, mixing drinks, waiting for orders, doing his silly-ass act. All on a top floor in Park Lane, where a very large sitting-room and a small dining-room, both with plate-glass windows, over­looked the park, and most of the fittings and decorations appeared to be made of stainless steel, and there were all the indirect lighting tricks and functional hocus-pocus. At a first glance, set against such massive oddities as Karney and Prisk, Lord Mervil seemed small and ordinary, almost colourless: a man in his sixties, grey and trim, with something of the manner and voice, clipped and high-pitched, of the routine British general. Ravenstreet was surprised; he had expected somebody more impressive; after all, Mervil, whether a public benefactor or a public nuisance, was supposed to be a tremendous fellow. But these first impressions soon had to be revised. Mervil had something that reduced Karney to an eccentric-­looking subordinate and Prisk to a servile clown. It was not mere self-­confidence, the result of years of success
and power; it was a quality of will residing in that compact figure, that neat grey head, behind those Arctic eyes. It could be discovered in the questions he shot at Ravenstreet. After the first quarter of an hour, Ravenstreet felt that Mervil knew every­thing about him that Mervil thought worth knowing; and he guessed that both Karney and Prisk had already reported on him but that Mervil had decided to ask his own questions before taking him into his confidence. It was brilliantly and ruthlessly done, like an examination by the super-head of a World State’s secret police. Ravenstreet was not usually fanciful along these lines, especially when a man was about to put a business proposition before him; but Mervil created an atmo­sphere in which it was easy to feel that the future had already arrived. Perhaps to him it had, and that was the secret of his success and power, based on his knowledge of what people would soon be wanting and how public events would shape themselves.

  The food and the wines were excellent, but Mervil himself ate little and appeared to be drinking barley water. No servants waited on them. The dishes arrived in a service lift, and Prisk, who was sur­prisingly quick and deft for a man of his bulk, carried them to the table and opened and poured out the wine.

  “It’s the only way,” Mervil explained, “if you really want to talk privately. People will imagine that servants and waiters haven’t ears, even people who ought to know better. The leakage everywhere is shocking. It’s bad in this country, and in America it’s worse. All this Confidential and Top Secret nonsense! Here I really take pains, Ravenstreet. So Major Prisk does his best for us. Down below I’ve a dining-room where I can put a man behind every two chairs. Hope to see you there. But you won’t hear anything you can turn to any account. Up here you might.”