The Magus - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  * * *

  There was a strange moment of hiatus; of a new madness.

  "Have you had your tea?"

  "Yes."

  He lowered the axe.

  "I have found a dead pine. Will you help me cut it down?"

  "Of course."

  "It will make good firewood."

  The dialogue bore no relation to what either of us was thinking or wanted to say. His first appearance had been another coup de théatre, intentionally ominous, as if he was going to run at us with the axe raised and split our heads open; and he still stared at me as if something about Lily's quick exit had made him newly suspicious.

  "Come."

  He silently offered me the axe to carry. We set off towards the gate. He walked fast, with a grim, purposeful expression. At last I made an effort and asked him where he had learnt to hypnotize. He dismissed it — "a very simple discipline"; there was nothing mysterious or magical about it, it was a matter of training and experience.

  "Have you ever failed?"

  "Of course. Any hypnotist who maintains the contrary is a charlatan." Something had annoyed him, though it was apparently not myself.

  I hefted the axe to the other shoulder.

  "Did you ask me any questions?"

  He looked quite shocked. "I am a doctor, therefore under the Hippocratic oath. If ever I wished to ask you questions under hypnosis, I should certainly ask your permission first." We walked twenty paces before he went on. "It is a very unsatisfactory method. It has been demonstrated again and again that patients are quite capable of lying under hypnosis."

  "All those stories about sinister hypnotists forcing — ?"

  "A hypnotist can make you do foolish and incongruous things. But he is powerless against the superego."

  We went through the gate. I let a few moments pass.

  "You hypnotize Lily?"

  "From time to time. For therapeutic reasons."

  He indicated the line we should take through the trees.

  "It reduces her schizophrenia?"

  "Precisely. It reduces her schizophrenia." Again we walked some way before he spoke again; but this time it was with less asperity, as if the leaving Bourani had allowed him to recover his equanimity. "How did you find her just now?"

  "Enigmatic."

  "Not to me." He gave me a quick, burning look. "She is assuming her persecution role. I saw that at once."

  I grinned; he studiously avoided looking at me.

  "I didn't notice it."

  "She is deceitful." Then he said, as if it followed, "She has spoken of you a great deal in our absence."

  "May I ask where you were?"

  "We were in Beirut, Nicholas. And she talked about you in terms that suggested the possibility of a certain physical attraction. I say this merely to warn you. You must resist all her advances in that line. This will be difficult for you. She is a pretty girl. And very clever at getting what she wants."

  "I'll do my best."

  I smiled at him again, to insure myself against seeming his fool. But once more he had neatly slashed off the cautious belief I was beginning to grow in Lily as a totally independent person, with independent motives. It was as if he could never let me rest too long on the pleasant side of the masque; always the black side had to be evoked. Always he had to suggest that Lily was simply the personification of his irony, his partner in making all declarations ambivalent. Every truth at Bourani was a sort of lie; and every lie there, a sort of truth.

  I asked him what they had been doing in Beirut, and as we went down through the trees, he talked about the Lebanon, which had not been the subject of my question, but which I guessed was all the answer I should get to it. Later, when he pressed me to tell him about Alison, I paid him back in his own coin.

  44

  She came with her lovely swaling walk towards the lamplight, towards the table, in the corner of the terrace, in a white dress under a black evening cloak. It looked more an Empire than a First World War dress, but I assumed that it was in period. Conchis and I stood for her. She allowed him to take off her cloak, then bowed imperceptibly to me. We sat, Conchis poured her a cup of coffee.

  "Nicholas and I have been discussing religion."

  It was true. He had brought a Bible to table, with two reference slips in it; and we had got on to God and no-God.

  "Indeed." She looked at me; almost with hostility, so formally, in role.

  "Nicholas calls himself an agnostic. But then he went on to say that he did not care."

  She switched her eyes back to me.

  "Why do you not care?"

  We had returned to uncontracted forms.

  "More important things."

  "Is anything more important?"

  "Practically everything, I should have thought."

  She pressed her lips together, and stared down at the tablecloth without speaking.' Then she leant forward and picked up a box of matches I had left on the table. She took out a dozen matchsticks and began to build a house.

  "Perhaps you are afraid to think about God."

  "One can't think about what cannot be known."

  "You never think about what is not certain? About tomorrow? About next year?"

  "Of course. I can make reasonable prophecies about them."

  She played with the matches, pushing them idly into patterns with her long fingers. I watched her beautiful mouth; wished I could end the cold dialogue.

  "I can make reasonable prophecies about God."

  "Such as?"

  "He is very intelligent."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Because I do not understand him. Why he is, who he is, or how he is. And Maurice tells me I am quite intelligent. I think God must be very intelligent to be so much more intelligent than I am. To give me no clues. No certainties. No sights. No reasons. No motives." She stared up at me from her matches; her eyes had a kind of bright intensity that I recognized from Conchis. Things were not fortuitous; her entry was timed, the subject ensured, and now the double message.

  "Very intelligent — or very unkind?" I looked at Conchis with a small smile, but she answered.

  "Very wise. Do you know, Mr. Urfe, that I pray?"

  "What for?"

  "I ask God never to reveal himself to me. Because if he did I should know that he was not God. But a liar." Now she looked at Conchis, who was facing expressionlessly out to sea; waiting for her, I thought, to finish her part of the act. Suddenly I saw Lily's forefinger silently tap the table twice. Her eyes flicked sideways at Conchis and then back to me, and she gave the tiniest, least perceptible of nods. I looked down. She had laid two matches diagonally across each other and two others beside them: XII. She avoided my suddenly comprehending eyes; and then, pushing the matchsticks into a little heap, she leant back out of the pool of light from the lamp and turned to Conchis. "But Mr. Urfe wishes to listen to you."

  "I sympathize with you, Nicholas." He smiled at me. "I felt very much as you do when I was older and more experienced than you are. Neither of us has the intuitive humanity of womankind, so we are not to blame." He said it quite without gallantry, as a simple statement. Lily would not meet my eyes. Her face was in shadow. She wore no jewelry, no ornament; simply the white dress, like a figure in a tableau symbolizing Purity. "But then I had an experience that led me to understand what Lily was just said to you. Just then she paid us the compliment of making God male. But I think she knows, as all intelligent women do, that all profound definitions of God are essentially definitions of the mother. Of giving things. Sometimes the strangest gifts. Because the religious instinct is really the instinct to define whatever gives each situation."

  He settled back in his chair.

  * * *

  "I think I told you that when modern history — because that chauffeur stood for democracy, equality, progress — struck de Deukans down in 1922 I was abroad. I was in fact in the remote north of Norway, in pursuit of birds — or to be more exact, bird sounds. You know that countless
rare birds breed up there on the Arctic tundra. I am lucky. I have perfect pitch. I had by that time published one or two papers on the problems of accurately notating bird's cries and songs. I had even begun a small scientific correspondence with men like Dr. Van Oort of Leiden, the American A. A. Saunders. The Alexanders in England. So in the summer of 1922 I left Paris for three months in the Arctic.

  "On my way north a professor at Oslo University told me of an educated farmer who lived in the heart of the vast fir forests that run from Norway and Finland into Russia. It seemed this man had some knowledge of birds. He sent migration records, things like that, to my professor, who had never actually met him. The fir forest had several rare species I wanted to hear, so I decided to visit this farmer. As soon as I had ornithologically exhausted the tundra of the extreme north I crossed the Varanger Fjord and went to the little town of Kirkenes. From there, armed with my letter of introduction, I set out for Seidevarre.

  "It took me four days to cover ninety miles. There was a road through the forest for the first twenty, but after that I had to travel by rowing boat from isolated farm to farm along the river Pasvik. Endless forest. Huge, dark firs for mile after mile after mile. The river as broad and silent as a lake in a fairy tale. Like a mirror unlooked-in since time began.

  "On the fourth day two men rowed me all day, and we did not pass a single farm or see a single sign of man. Only the silver-blue sheen of the endless river, the endless trees. Towards evening we came in sight of a house and a clearing. Two small meadows carpeted with buttercups, like slabs of gold in the somber forest. We had arrived at Seidevarre.

  "Three buildings stood facing each other. There was a small wooden farmhouse by the water's edge, half hidden among a grove of silver birches. Then a long turf-roofed barn. And a storehouse built on stilts to keep the rats out. A boat lay moored to a post by the house, and there were fishing nets hung out to dry.

  "The farmer was a smallish man with quick brown eyes — about fifty years old, I suppose. I jumped ashore and he read my letter. A woman some five years younger appeared and stood behind him. She had a severe but striking face, and though I could not understand what she and the farmer were saying I knew she did not want me to stay there. I noticed she ignored the two boatmen. And they in their turn gave her curious looks, as if she was as much a stranger to them as myself. Very soon she went back indoors.

  "However, the farmer bade me welcome. As I had been told, he spoke halting, but quite good, English. I asked him where he had learnt it. And he said that as a young man he had trained as a veterinary surgeon — and had studied for a year in London. This made me look at him again. I could not imagine how he had ended up in that remotest corner of Europe.

  "The woman was not, as I expected, his wife, but his sister-in-law. She had two children, both in their late adolescence. Neither the children nor their mother spoke any English, and without being rude, she made it silently clear to me that I was there against her choice. But Gustav Nygaard and I took to each other on sight. He showed me his books on birds, his notebooks. He was an enthusiast. I was an enthusiast.

  "Of course one of the early questions I asked concerned his brother. Nygaard seemed embarrassed. He said he had gone away. Then as if to explain and to stop any further questions, he said, 'Many years ago.'

  "The farmhouse was very small and a space was cleared in the hayloft above the barn for my campbed. I took my meals with the family. Nygaard talked only with me. His sister-in-law remained silent. Her chlorotic daughter the same. I think the inhibited boy would have liked to join in, but his uncle could rarely be bothered to translate what we said. Those first days none of this little Norwegian domestic situation seemed important to me, because the beauty of the place and the extraordinary richness of its bird life overwhelmed me. I spent each day looking and listening to the rare duck and geese, the divers, the wild swans, that abounded in all the inlets and lagoons along the shore. It was a place where nature was triumphant over man. Not savagely triumphant, as one may feel in the tropics. But calmly, nobly triumphant. It is sentimental to talk of a landscape having a soul, but that one possessed a stronger character than any other I have seen, before or since. It ignored man. Man was nothing in it. It was not so bleak that he could not survive in it — the river was full of salmon and other fish and the summer was long and warm enough to grow potatoes and a crop of hay — but so vast that he could not equal or tame it. I make it sound forbidding, perhaps. However, from being rather frightened by the solitude when I first arrived at the farm, I realized in two or three days that I had fallen in love with it. Above all, with its silences. The evenings. Such peace. Sounds like the splash of a duck landing on the water, the scream of an osprey, came across miles with a clarity that was first incredible — and then mysterious because, like a cry in an empty house, it seemed to make the silence, the peace, more

  intense. Almost as if sounds were there to distinguish the silence, and not the reverse.

  "I think it was on the third day that I discovered their secret. The very first morning Nygaard had pointed out a long tree-covered spit of land that ran into the river some half a mile south of the farm, and asked me not to go on it. He said he had hung many nesting boxes there and started a thriving colony of smew and goldeneye, and he did not want them disturbed. Of course I agreed, though it seemed late, even at that latitude, for duck to be sitting their eggs. "I then noticed that when we had our evening meal, we were never all present. On the first evening, the girl was away. On the second the boy appeared only when we had finished — even though I had seen him sitting gloomily by the shore only a few minutes before Nygaard came and called me to eat. The third day it so happened that I came back late myself to the farm. As I was walking back through the firs some way inland I stopped to watch a bird. I did not mean to hide, but I was hidden."

  Conchis paused, and I remembered how he had been standing the week before, when I left Lily; like a pre-echo of this.

  "Suddenly about two hundred yards away I saw the girl going through the trees by the shore. In one hand she held a pail covered with a cloth, in the other a milk can. I remained behind a tree and watched her walk on. To my surprise she followed the shore and went on to the forbidden promontory. I watched her through glasses until I saw her disappear.

  "Nygaard disliked having to sit in the same room with both his relations and myself. Their disapproving silence irked him. So he took to coming with me when I went to my 'bedroom' in the barn, to smoke a pipe and talk. That evening I told him I had seen his niece carrying what must have been food and drink onto the point. I asked him who was living there. He made no effort to hide the truth. The fact was this. His brother was living there. And he was insane."

  I glanced from Conchis to Lily and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present.

  "I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said, I think we are all insane here. He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my campbed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant 'hill of the holy stone,' the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures.

  "Originally the farm had been no more than a summer dacha, a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father — an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of t
he traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing — of returning to the wild. Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side. Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship's engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the church. While staying with Gustav, who had by then begun to practice in Tronctheim, Henrik met Ragnar, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre.

  "All went well for a year or two, hut then his behavior grew stranger and stranger. Finally Ragnar wrote Gustav a letter. What it said made him catch the next boat north. He found that for nearly nine months she had managed the farm singlehanded — what is more, with two babies to look after. He returned briefly to Trondheim to clear up his affairs, and from then on assumed the responsibility of the farm and his brother's family.

  "He said, 'I had no choice.' I had already suspected it in the strain between them. He was, or had been, in love with Ragnar. Now they were locked together more tightly than love can ever lock — in a state of total unrequitedness on his side and one of total fidelity on hers.

  "I wanted to know what form the brother's madness had taken. And then, nodding at the stones, Gustav went back to Seidevarre. To begin with, his brother had taken to going there for short periods to 'meditate.' Then he had become convinced that one day he — or at any rate the place — was to be visited by God. For twelve years he had lived as a hermit, waiting for this visit.

  "He never returned to the farm. Barely a hundred words had passed between the brothers that last two years. Ragnar never went near him. He was of course dependent for all his needs on them. Especially since, by a surcroit de malheur, he was almost blind. Gustav believed that he no longer fully realized what they did for him. He took it as manna fallen from heaven, without question or human gratitude. I asked Gustav when he had last spoken to his brother — remember we were then at the beginning of August. And he said, shamefacedly but with a hopeless shrug,