by John Fowles
‘I’d enjoy it all more if I knew what it meant.’
That pleased him. He sat back and smiled.
‘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 the gods he has said it to is that not one of them has ever returned an answer.’
‘Gods don’t exist to answer. You do.’
‘I am not going to venture where even the gods are powerless. You must not think I know every answer. I do not.’
I stared at the now bland mask of his face, then said quietly, ‘Why me?’
‘Why anyone? Why anything?’
I pointed to the east, behind him. ‘All that -just to give me a lesson in theology?’
He pointed up to the sky. ‘I think we would both agree that any god who created all that just to give us a lesson in theology was gravely lacking in both humour and imagination.’ He left a pause. ‘You are perfectly free to return to your school if you wish. Perhaps it would be wiser.’
I smiled and shook my head. ‘This time I take the tooth.’
‘This time it may be real.’
‘At least I’m beginning to realize that all your dice are loaded.’
‘Then you cannot possibly win.’ But he went on quickly, as if he had taken a step too far. ‘I will tell you one thing. There is only one answer to your question, both in general terms and in those of your presence here. I gave it to you on your first visit. Why everything is, including you, including me, and all the gods, is a matter of hazard. Nothing else. Pure hazard.’
I searched his eyes and at last found something in them that I could believe; and grasped dimly, somewhere, that my ignorance, my nature, my vices and virtues were somehow necessary in his masque. He stood and fetched the brandy bottle from beside the lamp on the other table. He poured me a glass, then a little in his own, and still standing, raised it to me.
‘Let us both drink to knowing each other better, Nicholas.’
‘I’ll second that.’ I drank, then gave him a cautious smile. ‘You didn’t finish your story.’ Strangely, that seemed to set him back, as if he had forgotten – or presumed I would have no further interest in it. He hesitated, then he sat again.
‘Very well. I was going … but no matter now.’ He paused. ‘Let us jump to the climax. To the moment when these gods that neither of us believes in lost patience with such hubris.’
He leant back, once more turned a little to the sea.
‘Whenever I see a photograph of a teeming horde of Chinese peasants, or of some military procession, whenever I see a cheap newspaper crammed with advertisements for mass-produced rubbish. Or the rubbish itself that large stores sell. Whenever I see the horrors of the pax Americana, of civilizations condemned to century after century of mediocrity because of over-population and under-education, I see also de Deukans. Whenever I see lack of space and lack of grace, I think of him. One day, many millennia from now, there will perhaps be a world in which there are only such chateaux, or their equivalents, and such men and women. And instead of their having to grow, like mushrooms, from a putrescent compost of inequality and exploitation, they will come from an evolution as controlled and ordered as de Deukans’s tiny world at Givray-le-Duc. Apollo will reign again. And Dionysus will return to the shadows from which he came.’
Was that it? I saw the Apollo scene in a different light. Conchis was evidently like certain modern poets: he tried to kill ten meanings with one symbol.
‘One day one of his servants introduced a girl into the château. De Deukans heard a woman laughing, I do not know how … perhaps an open window, perhaps she was a little drunk. He sent to find out who had dared to bring a real mistress into his world. It was one of the chauffeurs. A man of the machine age. He was dismissed. Soon afterwards de Deukans went to Italy on a visit.
‘One night at Givray-le-Duc the major-domo smelt smoke. He went to look. The whole of one wing and the centre portion of the chateau were on fire. In their master’s absence most of the servants were away at their homes in the neighbouring villages. The few who were sleeping at the chateau started to carry buckets of water to the mass of flames. An attempt was made to telephone for the pompiers, but the line had been cut. When they finally arrived, it was too late. Every painting was shrivelled, every book ashes, every piece of porcelain twisted and smashed, every coin melted, every exquisite instrument, every piece of furniture, each automaton, even Mirabelle, charred to nothingness. All that was left were parts of the walls and the eternally irreparable.
‘I was also abroad at the time. De Deukans was woken somewhere near dawn in his hotel in Florence and told. He went home at once. But they say he turned back before he got to the still smouldering remains. As soon as he was near enough to realize what the fire had done. Two days later he was found dead in his bedroom in Paris. He had taken an enormous quantity of drugs. His valet told me that he was found with a kind of sneer on his face. It had shocked the man.
‘I returned to France a month after his funeral. My mother was in South America and I did not hear what had happened till my return. One day I was asked to go and see his lawyers. I thought he might have left me a harpsichord. So he had. Indeed, all his surviving harpsichords. And also … but perhaps you have guessed.’
He paused, as if to let me guess, but I said nothing.
‘By no means all his fortune, but what was, in those days, to a young man still dependent on his mother, a fortune. At first I could not believe it. I knew that he liked me, that he had come perhaps to look on me rather as an uncle, a nephew. But so much money. And so much hazard. Because I played one day with opened windows. Because a peasant-girl laughed too loud … ‘ Conchis sat in silence for a moment or two.
‘But I promised to tell you the words de Deukans also left me, with his money and his memory. No message. But one fragment of Latin. I have never been able to trace its source. It sounds Greek. Ionian or Alexandrian. It was this. “Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?” Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?’
‘He drank the wave?’
‘We all drink both. But he meant the question should always be asked. It is not a precept. But a mirror.’
I thought; could not decide which I was drinking.
‘What happened to the man who set fire to the house?’
‘The law had its revenge.’
‘And you went on living in Paris?’
‘I still have his apartment. And the instruments he kept there are now in my own chateau in the Auvergne.’
‘Did you discover where his money came from?’
‘He had large estates in Belgium. Investments in France and Germany. But the great bulk of his money was in various enterprises in the Congo. Givray-le-Duc, like the Parthenon, was built on a heart of darkness.’
‘Is Bourani built on it?’
‘Would you leave at once if I said it was?’
‘No.’
‘Then you have no right to ask.’
He smiled: I was not to take him too seriously; and stood up, as if to kill any further argument. ‘Take your envelope.’
He led the way through to my room, and lit my lamp, and wished me good night. But in his own door he turned and looked back towards me. For once his face showed a moment’s doubt, a glimpse of a lasting uncertainty.
‘The water or the wave?’
Then he went.
30
I waited. I went to the window. I sat on the bed. I lay on the bed. I went to the window again. In the end I began to read the two pamphlets. Both were in French, and the first had evidently once been pinned up; there were holes and rustmarks.
THE SOCIETY FOR REASON
We, doctors and students of the faculties of medicine of the universities of France, declare that we believe:
Man can progress only by using his reason.
The first duty of science is to eradicate unreason, in whatever form, from public and international affairs.
Adherence to reason is
more important than adherence to any other ethos whatever, whether it be of family, caste, country, race, or religion.
The only frontier of reason is the human frontier; all other frontiers are signs of unreason.
The world can never be better than the countries that constitute it, and the countries can never be better than the individuals that constitute them.
It is the duty of all who agree with these statements to join the Society for Reason.
Membership of the Society is obtained by signing the formula below.
I promise to give one-tenth of my annual income to the Society of Reason for the furtherance of its aims.
I promise to introduce reason at all times and places into my own life.
I shall never obey unreason, whatever the consequences; I shall never remain silent or inactive in front of it.
I recognize that the doctor is the spearhead of humanity. I shall do my utmost to understand my own physiology and psychology, and to control my life rationally according to those knowledges.
I solemnly acknowledge that my first duty is always to reason.
Brother and sister human beings, we appeal to you to join in the struggle against the forces of unreason that caused the blood-dementia of the last decade. Help to make our society powerful in the world against the conspiracies of the priests and the politicians. Our society will one day be the greatest in the history of the human race. Join it now. Be among the first who saw, who joined, who stood!
Across the last paragraph someone a long time before had scrawled the word Merde.
Both text arid comment, in view of what had happened since 1920, seemed to me pathetic; like two little boys caught fighting at the time of an atomic explosion. We were equally tired, in mid-century, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.
I listened to the house and the night outside. Silence; and turned to the other, bound, pamphlet. Once again, the browning paper and the old-fashioned type showed it to be unmistakably a genuine pre-war relic.
ON COMMUNICATION WITH OTHER WORLDS
To arrive at even the nearest stars man would have to travel for millions of years at the speed of light. Even if we had the means to travel at the speed of light we could not go to, and return from, any other inhabited area of the universe in any one lifetime; nor can we communicate by other scientific means, such as some gigantic heliograph or by radio waves. We are for ever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time.
How futile all our excitement over aeroplanes! How stupid this fictional literature by writers like Verne and Wells about the peculiar beings that inhabit other planets!
But it is without doubt that there are other planets round other stars, that life obeys universal norms, and that in the cosmos there are beings who have evolved in the same way and with the same aspirations as ourselves. Are we then condemned never to communicate with them?
Only one method of communication is not dependent on time. Some deny that it exists. But there are many cases, reliably guaranteed by reputable and scientific witnesses, of thoughts being communicated at precisely the moment they were conceived. Among certain primitive cultures, such as the Lapp, this phenomenon is so frequent, so accepted, that it is used as a matter of everyday convenience, as we in France use the telegraph or telephone.
Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained.
This is the only means we shall ever have of communicating with mankind in other worlds. Sic itur ad astra.
This potential simultaneity of awareness in conscious beings operates as the pantograph does. As the hand draws, the copy is made.
The writer of this pamphlet is not a spiritualist and is not interested in spiritualism. He has for some years been investigating telepathic and other phenomena on the fringe of normal medical science. His interests are purely scientific. He repeats that he does not believe in the ‘supernatural’; in rosicrucianism, hermetism, or other such aberrations.
He maintains that already more advanced worlds than our own are trying to communicate with us; and that a whole category of noble and beneficial mental behaviour, which appears in our societies as good conscience, humane deeds, artistic inspiration, scientific genius, is really dictated by half-understood telepathic messages from other worlds. He believes that the Muses are not a poetic fiction; but a classical insight into scientific reality we moderns should do well to investigate.
He pleads for more public money and co-operation in research into telepathy and allied phenomena; above all he pleads for more scientists in this field.
Shortly he will publish direct proof of the feasibility of intercommunication between worlds. Watch the Parisian press for an announcement.
I had never had a telepathic experience in my life, and I thought it unlikely I should start with Conchis; and if benevolent gentlemen from other worlds were feeding good deeds and artistic genius into me, they had done it singularly badly – and not only for me, for most of the age I was born into. On the other hand, I began to understand why Conchis had told mc I was psychic. It was a sort of softening-up process, in preparation for the no doubt even stranger scene that would take place in the masque that next night… the ‘experiment’.
The masque, the masque: it fascinated and irritated me, like an obscure poem – more than that, for it was not only obscure in itself, but doubly obscure in why it had even been written. During the evening a new theory had occurred to me: that Conchis was trying to recreate some lost world of his own and for some reason I was cast as the jeune premier in it, his younger self. I was intensely aware that our relationship, or my position, had changed again; as I had been shifted from guest to pupil, now I uneasily felt myself being manoeuvred into a butt. He clearly meant me not to be able to relate the conflicting sides of his personality. Things like the humanity in his playing of Bach, in certain aspects, however embroidered, of his autobiography, were undermined, nullified by his perversity and malice elsewhere. He must know it, therefore must want me to flounder; flounder indeed, since the ‘curious’ books and objects he put in my way, Lily herself, and now the myth-figures in the night with all their abnormal undertones had to be seen as a hook, and I couldn’t pretend that it had not sunk home. But the more I thought about it, the more I suspected the authenticity of that Belgian count … or at any rate, of Conchis’s account of him. He was no more than a stalking-horse for Conchis himself. De Deukans had some sort of truth by analogy, perhaps; but far less than a literal one.
Meanwhile, the masque was letting me down. Silence still reigned. I looked at my watch. Nearly half an hour had passed. I could not sleep. After some hesitation, I crept downstairs and out through the music-room under the colonnade. I walked a little way into the trees in the direction the ‘god’ and ‘goddess’ had disappeared; then turned back and went down to the beach. The sea lapped slowly, dragging down a few small pebbles now and again, making them rattle drily, though there was no wind, no air. The cliffs and trees and the little boat lay drenched in starlight, in a million indecipherable thoughts from other worlds. The mysterious southern sea, luminous, waited; alive yet empty. I smoked a cigarette, and then climbed back to the fraught house and my bedroom.
31
I had my breakfast alone again. It was a day of wind, the sky as blue as ever, but the breeze tore boisterously off the sea, typhooning the fronds of the two palms that stood like sentinels in front of the house. Farther south, off Cape Matapan, the meltemi, the tough summer gale from the Ionian islands, was blowing.
I went down to the beach. The boat was not there. It confirmed my half-formed theory about the ‘visitors’ – that they were on a yacht in one of the many deserted coves round the west and south sides of the island, or anchored
among the group of deserted islets some five miles to the east. I swam out of the cove to see if Conchis was visible on the terrace. But it was empty. I lay on my back and floated for a while, feeling the cool slop of the waves over my sun-warmed face, thinking of Lily.
Then I looked towards the beach.
She was standing on it, a brilliant figure on the salt-grey shingle, with the ochre of the cliff and the green plants behind her. I began to swim towards the shore, as fast as I could. She moved a few steps along the stones and then stopped and watched me. At last I stood up, dripping, panting, and looked at her. She was about ten yards away, in an exquisitely pretty First World War summer dress. It was striped mussel-blue, white and pink, and she carried a fringed sunshade of the same cloth. She wore the sea-wind like a jewel. It caught her dress, moulded it against her body. Every so often she had a little struggle with the sunshade. And all the time fingers of wind teased and skeined her long, silky-blonde hair around her neck or across her mouth.
She showed a little moue, half mocking herself, half mocking me as I stood knee-deep in the water. I don’t know why silence descended on us, why we were locked for a strange few moments in a more serious look. It must have been transparently excited on my side. She looked so young, so timidly naughty. She gave an embarrassed yet mischievous smile, as if she should not have been there, had risked impropriety.
‘Has Neptune cut your tongue off?’
‘You look so ravishing. Like a Renoir.’