As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  Dear Sir Alec,

  I have now completed, as you will see from the attached report, a survey of all the rice stations which it was agreed that I should visit. My inspection of those in the United States, the Philippines, Japan and North Australia enlightened me greatly. Appendixes A to C concern information about techniques in my own field, and, with the hope that they may be useful to my colleagues, reports from experts in allied fields, also suggestions for equipment which I think we could profitably acquire.

  Inevitably my most intense study has been reserved for the many laboratories in the countries of South-East Asia and of the Indian peninsula where the hybrid rice Magic, for the discovery of which our Institute was responsible, now forms the staple of rice agriculture. On the whole, I must state that the assiduity and intelligence with which our findings have been applied have led to results which can only be called revolutionary and with which the Rapson Trust has every reason to be greatly satisfied. There have been misunderstandings, there are special local problems, there are special financial needs, outstanding individual workers could profit by a year or so at the Institute, certain laboratories lack expensive equipment and, more importantly, have staff qualified to use it if they were provided with it. All these I have listed in Appendices D to H.

  It would appear then that the first, retrospective phase of my work is over, and that I should now proceed to Pakistan and the African countries where I can assess the problems outstanding in the various improvements of sorghum culture which we have agreed up to now should be the next major research project of the Bureau in its programme of assistance to what my experience has now told me are rightly called “under-developed countries”.

  Please note that I write “up to now”, for I wish to make an earnest and serious plea for a change of programme. You told me, with your greater experience of the world, that I should soon find myself involved in the political aspects of the work we carry out. I should like to amend what you said to “human aspects”. I have rigidly eschewed political involvement. For this reason I have accepted on trust the statement of the authorities that the large growth in yield, the greater nutritive value, the increased annual spread of rice crops brought about by the cultivation of Magic has produced a marked diminution in that urban under-nourishment which is the major problem of most of these countries, notably, of course, India (into Burma, as you forecast with your political knowledge, I was unable to obtain entry). I have neither the time nor the competence to check this happy conclusion, therefore I have accepted it. But the process is clearly a slow one. And, whatever may be called its political aspect, one is constantly reminded here that it is a pressing human one.

  Meanwhile the success of Magic has brought in its train a number of rural difficulties, most of them inherent in the social, political or economic structures of the countries concerned. I refer to matters of land tenure, provision of capital, co-operative systems of storage and maintenance of agricultural machinery, distribution of fertilizers, irrigation and innumerable other allied problems. About these I am incompetent to speak and it would be impertinent of me to do so. Different states have different approaches. I am no politician or social dogmatist to judge them. We can, we may think, do little to help here; and where help is impossible, moral exhortation is rightly resented as impertinence.

  There is, however, one aspect of this question where, I believe, we can and should act decisively. I refer to what are often spoken of in these countries as “hopeless lands” which have been farmed for many decades with very small yields owing to the inherent poverties of the soils. The position of the small-scale cultivators of these soils was always poor; with the advent of the rich yields of Magic to which their soils are unresponsive, it has become indeed “hopeless”. It is my clear belief that if, over a period of three or four years, we were to concentrate our energies on the production of hybrids particularly fitted for these various soils—stony, marshy, and so on—we could solve their problems. They are, of course, a very small minority in these over-populated lands. Their problems will in the long run be solved by population control or emigration to cities where in time industrialization and the fruits of Magic will have abolished starvation and poverty. But I fear it will be over a very very long time. Meanwhile, by acting thus “irrationally”, we should be emphasizing by practice our belief in the supremacy of the human aspect of our work. Such action would avoid, on the one hand, impertinent moral exhortation or, worse, interference in the administration, and on the other, the unchecked supply of finance to governments of dubious efficiency. It would also, however quixotic, be practicable. I remember my great-uncle, Sir James Langmuir, telling me that politics is the art of the practicable. I hope that when my accompanying report reaches him, as no doubt either in its full form or in a digest it will, in his capacity as Chairman of the Rapson Trust, that you and any other colleagues concerned will stress this very practical aspect of it.

  It is, indeed, a case of first things first, for our work on Magic, revolutionary though it has been, will never be complete until the human, or to use a necessary word, the moral concerns involved are made clear to the beneficiaries; above all, until that acceptance of “hopelessness” so endemic in these parts has been clearly and manifestly rejected.

  It is hard, indeed, to postpone the sorghum research, but surely we must attempt to complete one task before taking on another.

  I do not see who can lose by this change of priorities, unless it be those European and American firms dealing in what I have learned to call by the ugly name “agribusiness”. Increase in export markets our work, it is true, would not assist. But far more important, as I am sure my colleagues will agree, the work will be of great intrinsic scientific interest; and, of course, as with all research, the further experiments to which it may lead are incalculable.

  I have suggested in the first place research by six teams consisting of a plant geneticist, a plant physiologist and a biochemist, backed in each team by a full complement of laboratory technicians. It may be that the leaders of two teams should be plant geneticists (I hope that I may qualify for one such position), of two others, plant physiologists (I should strongly suggest Hart for one of these), and for two teams, biochemists (do you think we should be lucky enough to interest Miss Kinlake?). For the whole project I think we should need the attachment of a tropical botanist and a tropical entomologist. A preliminary necessity would be an intensive and extensive soil survey of various so-called “poverty” areas of South-East Asia, India and Ceylon. I also urge in my report the association with our teams of various promising young scientists in these countries. The detailed analyses of these various aspects of the report which I trust will be of service to you and my colleagues are contained in Appendixes I to M.

  It is my intention now to proceed to New Delhi, there to think over various aspects of the work that will be entailed, until such time as I hear, as I very earnestly hope I shall, that the Rapson Trust accepts my report. I shall then fly home at once to consult with you and my colleagues.

  I trust that Lady Jardine is in good health and I hope that you had your usual “lucky” weather for your family summer holiday on Mull . . .

  Hamo placed this report and letter in an envelope addressed to Sir Alec and gave it to the reception clerk for immediate posting to England, and at the same time he handed in an exact copy addressed to himself at his flat in London.

  *

  The weather in Goa during December is usually most pleasantly cool. But this year on December 3rd, the anniversary of the death of Saint Francis Xavier, Patron Saint of All Missions, the temperature was excessively—unaccountably—high, the humidity almost unbearable. In old Goa, where a thousand or two of pilgrims had assembled, sleeping in tents or directly in the open air, where the image-mongers, lemonade-sellers and popcorn-vendors were already gathering, though furtively, for the restoration of Jesuit control in the last decades had chastised them severely even from the fore-courts of the churches, the mercury top
ped 28 degrees centigrade; only the nuns walking the cloisters of Saint Monica and the priests officiating in the vast baroque Cathedral were safe from the sun’s fury. In the Bom Jesus itself, after the visitor had passed through the West Door in the fine Renaissance facade, the great flaming sun of the baroque altar broke the cool darkness, yet the tomb of the Saint himself, in jasper and chalcedony with its coloured-marble scenes of the Saint’s earthly progress and the glistering, yet more glacial wrought silver of the sanctified coffin offered some proper repose to the eye. Outside, where stood the ruins of the Inquisitorial Palace, the heat brought to life again the many autos-da-fé that the square had once known, so that a fanciful ear might have found in every sound of the waking crowd a horrid crackle or an agonizing scream, an over-wrought eye might have made of the sun’s rays flashing against the parked pilgrim motor-coaches the fierce flames that consumed a thousand or more pagans and heretics. Even the statue of Camoens suggested alarm today rather than delight at his beloved illustrissima ilha.

  In Panaji by the banks of the Mandovi the temperature was perhaps a degree less, but the humidity, with the ocean so near, was even greater. Scrawny Thelma was stripped down to the old-fashioned bra and panties she still wore. Elinor lay ghostlike on the bed in another tulle gown, this time of pale malmaison pink that suggested Bernhardt in the Dame aux camélias rather than Bernhardt in Salomé. She had said nothing for the last three days, but she had dutifully taken the cold soups, the crèmes caramels, and the sweet champagne which Thelma had wheedled and bullied out of the hotel staff. Alexandra, in the next room, to which she had come, despite her longing to be one with the sand and the sea, so that she might consult a doctor for Oliver whose diarrhœa had proved persistent, was hardly aware of the heat in her anxious concern to be exact in the programme of administering the medicines and starch foods which had been prescribed for her baby. There was no communication between the two rooms. It would be difficult to say whether Elinor or Oliver felt more deprived by Ned’s continuous absence, or Alexandra or Thelma more aggrieved at that deprivation.

  Suddenly Elinor hoisted herself up on her bed and looked at her mother with such a mixture of earnestness and impatience that Thelma, recalling some of the Victorian stories forced upon her in her childhood by a pious grandmother, started with terror for a moment at the awful possibility that here was a death-bed. But Elinor only said: “I want to see Alexandra, Mother, immediately, and alone.”

  To Alexandra, summoned and persuaded only with great difficulty to leave Oliver to Thelma’s care, Elinor said: “You know that Mother and I are leaving tomorrow. It’s mostly gone wrong for me, you’ll be glad to know.”

  Alexandra said, “Oh dear! You do dramatize.”

  “Yes,” Elinor admitted. “That’s true. It’s partly why it’s all gone wrong. That and my hubris, my pride. But it doesn’t matter. Teaching school will lower that soon enough. And then I shall start all over again. But through exercise and meditation only. There mustn’t be any of this magic. I thought it didn’t matter because either it was accidental, a power that just came with non-involvement, or else it was just charlatanism. Either way it couldn’t affect the eventual dissolution of the self. And if it did do some harm it was only in the so-called real world, to people and things that are passing shadowy beings anyway. But I was wrong, Alexandra.”

  Something of Alexandra’s impatience with all this talk, her wish to return to Oliver, must have communicated itself to Elinor, for she said:

  “Oh, not that I’d want the sort of false calm you’ve found, that kind of animal peace, the detachment of the cow concentrating on its udder. But mine wasn’t detachment either. I see that now. It couldn’t be, while I was getting my disciplines from a corrupt source. Not that I want to blow up the Swami into a devil-figure or something. Part of him’s a man who really has acquired some strange detachment. But he’s let the powers, the incidental powers it’s brought with it, go to his head. And part of him’s a frightened, shrivelled common fake—like any phoney card trickster at a fair—who’s scared out of his wits at what he’s got into. But that doesn’t matter either. It’s only that there are just two kinds of people drawn to magic, and, once the proper discipline gets involved with it, it gets involved with those sorts of people. You know what kind they are?”

  Alexandra felt as she had at the Swami’s audience, that she was being involved in something threatening. She sought evasion by appearing not to have heard the question.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you are a cow. You can smell nothing except the cud you chew and that baby’s messes. Well, understand this, Alexandra Grant,” and the sharp tone of her voice, the pinched lines round her mouth gave Alexandra a sudden vision of the American school-marm that Elinor would become in ten years’ time, “being a vegetable isn’t the true peace. Get with child a mandrake root. Perhaps even you will shriek if I tear your roots out of the warm earth of Oliver’s potties and nappies. Tell me where all past years are and who cleft the devil’s foot? Have a look at his feet. Do that, Alexandra. Have a look at that Swami’s feet. Or rub him with garlic in front of a mirror, or whatever. Some involvement with magic, even childish magic, might save you from bovine inanition. But he won’t vanish, that’s the trouble. He’s no devil, alas. He’s just a huge mass of flesh with a little tiny, screwy, crooked mind that’s tried to be more. Poor bastard.”

  She stared suddenly with such contempt that Alexandra found it hard not to smack her face.

  “I don’t believe you’ve the guts. Or the intelligence to do it,” Elinor said.

  She tried to raise herself from the bed, but she was already panting and sweating with the effort of talking for so long, and now she fell back with a thud against the bed-post that stunned her for a moment. She began to cry.

  “Well, God, I can’t make any move. You can see that. I’m to be a stretcher case even for the aeroplane. What was I saying? Yeah. It’s all ballsed up when magic comes into it because it draws two kinds of people. Just my dear daddy the Senator and my dear momma the lush. That’s who. The power-hungry and the neurotic. There isn’t a person in that crowd around the Swami that doesn’t fit into one or other of those categories. Except maybe for Ned. Look! It’s for Ned you’ve got to act. For Ned and a lot of innocent people like that dead boy that are going to get hurt, by chance, when the Swami gets his growing band of loving disciples and screwy Shivites and Saktras, Ned the new recruit along with them, to burst through that procession and expose the body of Francis Xavier, when he calls upon those Lemurian powers of his to break the bondage of the Himalayan siddhas, when he shows himself to the crowd as the avatar of Vishnu. He’s going to have a hell of a lot of madmen yelling for him, and a hell of a crowd of angry Catholics, and Hindus and Moslems too, I guess, right on his tracks. In fact all hell is going to break loose right there at old Goa around noon today when the procession starts out from the Bom Jesus to the Cathedral. And if you don’t stop it, the authorities can’t. And even if you can’t stop it, you can get Ned away. Well, for God’s sake, didn’t you know all this? You and your baby and its squits! God save us from letting ordinary people have the running of this world or any other.”

  Elinor sounded to Alexandra more and more like Thelma, so that she at once felt more at ease with her and also less respectful. She said:

  “I think I understand more than you suppose. I think I’ve sensed more of this than I’ve allowed myself to know. It just seemed either so silly or so frightening that I thought of other things. But surely, with the insistence of the Church authorities, the police will be there in full force, enough to control it?”

  “Hooray for the fuzz!” Elinor laughed maliciously, and in an imitation Oxford accent, she said, “I do think the Goan police are so splendid. Look, they’re going to have a hell of a lot on their hands. The Swami’s a poor half-magician but he’s a very shrewd organizer of mischief. Most of this I know under oath so if the bed goes up in flames with me in it, you’ll know. But I don’t think their magic
is very strong. Sheep rot is about the limit of their powers, I think, and I had that as a kid.”

  Alexandra was surprised that Elinor was really enjoying this unusual indulgence in humour. If I ever had lots of money, Alexandra thought, I’d give her a theatre. She’d be a nice kind of person if she was an actress.

  “Well, here goes of what I shouldn’t tell. When Ned last spoke of it, the Swami was relying on some other troubles—some agricultural riots or something—to draw off most of the police. And then he’s sure that there’ll be Moslem—Hindu troubles with the end of Ramadan. And he’s arranged a little side-show with the Shaktras he’s brought up from Bengal to cause trouble with the Vishnuvites at that great Hindu temple Shri Mangesh. No, there’ll be plenty enough action. Oh, for pity’s sake, it all seemed unimportant to me before that boy’s death and before what happened that night, and since then I’ve been trying to forget it. Hoping I suppose that I could still get back my detachment. But I can’t. I don’t think my psyche could stand much more guilt, especially if anything should happen to Ned.”

  Alexandra felt so disgusted at such egotism that she turned away, then she said crossly to conceal her distaste, “Well, what do you suppose I can do?”

  “You can go to where the Swami is. I can tell you where. They’re in two detachments on the swamp scrub on each side of old Goa. They’re to converge. The Swami’s on the river side, where it turns before it reaches old Goa. My guess is that the Swami’s dead scared that at the crisis he won’t hear these Lemurian voices of his. He’s frightened that the moment of truth is near for him, that after this he’ll have to live with the knowledge that he’s a charlatan, instead of the half-doubt. That would be far worse for him than what the world thinks. He’d take any chance to get out of it. But his followers believe in him too much. You’ll have to help him to get away before they realize and shame him into going on with it. And if he’s too afraid of them you must use that Sir James. He’s relying on that old boy’s millions for his old age.”