As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  If the secretary’s shocked repetition of her words, or was it surprised repetition? was a foreshadowing of Sir James’s annoyance, then she had given him a scratch that would make him think twice about snubbing her again. He must be made to know that he had someone resolute to deal with.

  Roddy rang later that evening. “Oh, dear,” he said, “I tried and tried to let you know about the meeting. In the end I had to leave a message with Lady Needham. She seemed so sure of giving it to you.”

  Alexandra thought, damn the very old. She said, “Well never mind all that. What has Sir James decided?”

  “Ally, dear, do be reasonable. First he couldn’t decide just like that. No doubt he’ll influence the other members of the Rapson as he wants. But he’ll have to consult them. And they’re very important figures in finance and industry themselves.”

  “You mean they’ll be concerned about whether they’ll be backing something that won’t give them large-scale customers in Asia. Like Hamo said.”

  “I don’t know what he said. We haven’t all read this famous report, you know. But I can promise you that Sir James and probably the others will see things on a larger scale than immediate commercial interests.”

  “Oh. Well, what did you think at the meeting?”

  “Ally, I’m a social secretary. I don’t go to meetings like that. I know he was furious with that Sir Alec. He called him a second-rate bureaucrat. He’d be most influenced by what the scientists said. If it looked like a scheme of real formal meaning to them . . . He’s much more an æsthete than you’d think. Dandies are.”

  “But surely he said something about the social importance of what Hamo was trying to do. His concern with the hopeless.”

  “I don’t know about the hopeless. It isn’t a word to use here. But, after all, it was Sir James who was one of the chief City figures behind all this revival of Young England Toryism—you know, making England richer and redressing the social balance by helping the hard cases. Disraeli dandyism. Although, of course, he’s strictly non-political. So what you told me of Hamo’s scheme made me immediately sure that he’d be favourable to it. I put it in that light to him and he rang Sir Alec at once and blew him up. One thing he can’t stand is people who don’t come into the open.”

  “Oh, good,” Alexandra said; for the first time she felt a little cheered, though it worried her that Rodrigo talked in such a stupid way now he worked for this Sir James. “Then he’ll be pleased that I left that message for him.”

  “What message?”

  “He wanted to know about the Austrian Swami. He seems to believe he’s some sort of genius. But I told him that he’s mostly a charlatan.”

  “Oh!”

  “Well, you said he liked people to give their real opinions.” “Yes, I’m sure it’ll be all right. It’s only that all this psychic business . . .”

  “And you say he’s this brilliant man. Look, this scheme of Hamo’s is something that’s real and important . . .”

  “Oh, I know, Ally. And I feel sure that he’ll come out for it. He came back from the meeting in a very good mood. Full of putting bureaucrats in their place. I’m certain it’s going to be all right. Only it’s a bit disconcerting when anyone starts to talk of his psychic interests. To begin with I just don’t understand a word of them, and then, they do matter immensely to him. It’s some sort of compensation, I think. But it’ll be all right. Ally, when can we meet, please?”

  At first she was going to say, I can’t be fussing with that until we know about Hamo’s report. But then she suddenly felt turned off with all this being anxious and this obsessiveness. Impossible though living at Number 8 was, Oliver had a new grandmother, a new great-grandmother, and a new great-great-grandmother, all of whom he seemed to adore as much as they loved him. She was free to leave him for whole days or even nights. She had money. She loved watching Roddy enjoy himself as he did in grand surroundings. She said: “I want to take you out to dinner. But you choose where. I thought perhaps that place where they gave you those pancakes with caviar and whipped cream.”

  She could almost see his tongue flicking out like a cat’s to lick the cream from his lips as he purred his pleased acceptance back at her over the telephone. She thought, I must find a real way of enjoying life as well as taking it seriously. Meanwhile she would have to acrobat her path along the two wires of fun and of duty.

  *

  Church was a new experience to Alexandra. Not that this church seemed very like religion. It was so extremely smart and decorative, almost like a drawing-room of Zoe’s, although the blue-painted vault with gold stars was more theatrical and new than would do in the home. But the furnishing, the pews and the carving, especially the pulpit, were “in the best of taste”. And, truth to tell, with her new cultivation of the eye, they did give her pleasure. All the lines of the vaulted ceiling and the pillars and columns, and half-pillars on the walls, seemed to work together with the furnishing. Probably what Zoe called “pulling everything together”. And the tablets with their plump cherub faces blowing little puffs of air, and a recumbent figure of a man in a big wig, some armour and a bare stomach made super ornaments. She wondered if getting money would inevitably force her into “taste” like Zoe. All the same it didn’t look like religion, less in a funny way than the Swami’s ghastly villa, but God, if he existed, would prefer these surroundings, she supposed.

  The offering to Him was perfunctory but it made speedy way for the handsome Sir James to go up into the handsome pulpit. She hoped it was all what Hamo would have wanted. But she felt he would have wanted something more conventional, more churchy. On the other hand, he had so admired this great-uncle . . .

  Which was more than she did. She felt a real worry about this old actorish sort of creature—his wavy grey hair, his red flushed face, his popping blue eyes, and what a cruel mouth! But the voice was nice, so easy, smooth and flowing, and, if a little drawling, that seemed only to be poking a little fun at himself . . . and at the occasion! Damn him! The whole act was a great deal too charming and condescending—this recital of Hamo’s scientific achievements—Glorious Wheat and Magic Rice and the modification of the Mendel-Osborne method. People shouldn’t talk about what they don’t understand. “And a brilliant future before him. That sorghum crop upon which Africa depended as much as Asia upon rice.” It took her a few moments to absorb this. Then she had to force herself not to rise and shout, like those Victorian banns scenes, like Mrs. Yeobright. She said aloud, “Damn him, damn him, damn him,” so that Zoe, who knew she was in a state but couldn’t understand why, took her hand and held it.

  Now she forced herself to listen to him.

  “Hamo Langmuir’s death at the hands of a mob is for all of us here today who knew him a personal and a scientific tragedy. But it is also something else. It is a manifest representation of the instinctive hatred of the stupid, the unteachable and the weak, for the clever, the educated and the strong. In little—and I make no belittlement of Hamo as a man and as a scientist in using that expression—it represents the danger which civilization faces today.

  “Hamo Langmuir was one of the strong of this world. His life was given to discoveries which would increase the number of those who are strong, by increasing the total amount of wealth at the disposal of society, by adding to the number of well-fed whose lot would naturally be cast on the side of a sane, organized, disciplined society. Science is knowledge and knowledge is order. But there are elements within society whom no amount of increased nutrition, no amount of increased social well-being, no amount of increased education can make strong, ordered, controlled and disciplined. These are the naturally unteachable, the naturally hopeless. Years of misguided sentimentalism, of capitulation to these elements, of paying of blackmail to the weak by the strong have brought us to a point where society is deeply threatened, where knowledge and science—the things for which Hamo Langmuir lived—are in real peril. The senseless death of this brilliant scientist should serve as a warning to us all, t
hat we can take no risks, no easy sentimental indulgence in making sure that the unstable, the weak and the diseased strains in the human race as in the rest of the natural world should be eliminated.

  “This was the work to which Hamo Langmuir was dedicated in agriculture. It is our job—the job of the administrators and the authorities—to apply the same dogged weeding-out of the weak strains in human society.

  “For myself I believe that all our science, our organization, our wise accretion of material wealth, in short what we call civilization or culture, will not suffice to restrain the disruptive forces which misguided and often purely self-flattering sentimentalism has so nearly unleashed. To all of you met here today to remember a brave and brilliant young man—fellow-scientists of Hamo Langmuir’s whose work in the future will continue to add to the forces of reason and order and strength; administrators who will channel this work wisely; and the makers of wealth who will give it force and practical expression—I shall say something with which none of you will have much sympathy—but I have never, as those of you who know me will attest, judged values by committee consensus. It is my certain belief that this saving of our civilization from the weak, the exploited and the diseased cannot be accomplished by natural science alone. There is a whole further realm of spiritual science, hidden from us for centuries through our own wilful blindness, an occult science, which, harnessed and leashed as it will be, I believe, in the next decade, in the service of civilized order, will allow the great discoveries of natural science, the work of men like Hamo Langmuir, to forge ahead without any threat of such wasteful muddle as his tragic and meaningless death. Weakness means muddle. We simply cannot afford the indulgence of the hopeless in a world on the edge of discoveries both natural and psychic that will eliminate disorder.”

  Later he stood at the porch so bland and charming and perfunctory. His handshake with each departing friend and acquaintance was so firm and so very short-lasting.

  She was determined not to let herself make a foolish scene. She would ask his intentions; if they were hostile, she would rally all her weapons for war, but with a proper campaign in full self-control.

  Rodrigo gave her name to Sir James with a look that she knew tried to cover alarm. Sir James said: “How good of you. When you’re so busy with house-hunting.” His smile hovered between charm and a sneer.

  She said, “Does this mean that you’ve decided to reject Hamo’s whole plan for work on rice in the so-called hopeless areas?”

  He turned his smile wholly to sneer. “Oh, yes. I think it was a momentary aberration on his part. The sentimentalism of an overworked man. Quite right of you, though, to bring it to our attention.”

  “But Hamo died because he cared about these people.”

  “I very much trust not. In any case, the entire planning of the World Food Programme can hardly be overturned for the sudden brain-wave of one man, however brilliant.”

  “But all his colleagues support him.”

  “They’re naturally attracted by theoretical considerations of so-called pure science which can only be secondary in such affairs, I’m afraid.”

  “So you support this Sir Alec in all his timid, cringing bungling . . .”

  “Oh, come, Sir Alec acted improperly, and, thanks to you, we know it. But this doesn’t invalidate a programme organized over a decade.”

  She restrained herself from hitting him by kicking her own ankle. She said, “So all this order,” and she waved her arm at Wren’s elegant form, “comes down to brutal bullying of the weak, does it? Well, I can promise you you’ll have your fill of the neurotic and the weak and the hopeless with your famous Swami.”

  She was conscious of Zoe’s protesting whisper, of Rodrigo’s misery, even of someone attempting physically to edge her out of the scene. She turned to the distinguished people behind, who were forming up to shake Sir James’s hand.

  “All right,” she said, “I’m not going to make a scene.”

  “Now, that is wise,” Sir James said, “But do let me beg you, my dear young lady, not to let yourself get obsessed with all this. Obsession is the greatest waste of intelligence and energy. As well as of youth and beauty. And just one word of warning: you seem intent on a planned scheme of slander against Swami Sant Sarada. As a holy man, of course, he is quite outside the range of any such malice. But for myself, as his admirer, and, I hope, his disciple, I should feel forced to take legal proceedings if you continued such a very wrong course of action.”

  He looked at her still without any real anger or hatred, only a smile of patronage. In the taxi going home with Zoe, her controlled rage gave way to tears.

  *

  Driving rain had kept down the number of purely curious spectators that the considerable newspaper publicity given to the opening of Sir James Langmuir’s College of Occult Science at Avebury might otherwise have drawn to that strange massive circle of earthworks and those mysterious concentric circles of stones. Not that the college itself was to be built within that area of strong psychic waves. The Swami had wisely forbidden this—wisely, perhaps, because the Ministry of Works and the National Trust had alike declared their total opposition to such building, even backed by all the influence and money of Sir James.

  No, the College was to cover the land at present occupied by the Museum, the rectory, the manor-house, and the parish church of St. Mary. All these had been built in later centuries, by Christian secular and ecclesiastical persons instinctively and positively avoiding the powerful etheric waves concentrated within the holy places. That the Atlantean adepts had, in fact, exerted strong psychic pressures to prevent any outsider building there, the Swami made clear to Sir James. Indeed the crushed skeleton of a fourteenth-century barber-surgeon showed what happened to Christian profaners of the sacred circles, until in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Atlantean cosmic forces had temporarily weakened. The Swami was deeply drawn to Avebury, however, because the forces were now in the process of ritual renewal.

  The truth of this assertion he made evident by the self-mockery with which he admitted that these same etheric forces had directed their current against himself, when for a short while he had played with the idea of setting up the College within the boundaries of the ceremonial sanctuary itself. If more proof were needed of the occult powers at work, the unexpected sudden collapse of the opposition of the Church Commissioners to Sir James’s acquirement of St. Mary’s church for the purpose of demolition seemed to crown it. The negotiations had proved hardly more difficult than the purchase of the many small properties which Langmuir House now so powerfully replaced.

  But, driving rain or no, the small village, set improbably and inconveniently by a main road in a right- and left-angle bend, was packed with camera-men, newspaper reporters, spectators apparently idle, motorists immensely frustrated, and police of all kinds. The heights of the earthworks were lined with members of various occult groups, in particular the Southampton Transcendental Meditators and the Ashford Atlanteans. Some few were exerting adverse waves of consciousness against a scheme which they suspected of calling forth malign powers; but most were setting their vibrations in harmony with what would be the start of a new order in which the occult Atlantean sciences would control the more haphazard and generally neophytic natural sciences, that had proved so dangerously inadequate after decades of foolish autarchy. Some groups, who had assembled within the two holy rings, were fighting the Lemurian forces, which it was now feared might seek to put pressure on the Swami in his new adherence to Atlantean wisdom. This, of course, was without the knowledge of the Swami himself, who would have been quick to point out that the older Lemurian wisdoms were inevitably superior within Lemurian realms, but since Lemurian adepts had shown themselves to have passed beyond concern even for those their proper regions, they were hardly likely to bother with the parvenu world of Atlantis.

  There were also a number of mathematicians, astronomers, professors of engineering, retired colonels and majors of the Sappers, and astr
ologers who, while not necessarily accepting the spiritual claims of the Swami or even the value of the proposed new college, were interested in any research into Atlantean science, colonial and decadent though the offshoots of Avebury no doubt must prove to be.

  To the motorist sight-seers, lured by the highly coloured forecasts of the journalists to brave the stinging rain that swept across the open earthworks and down into the village streets before a strong south-west gale, and, indeed, to the journalists themselves, the occult groups in their mackintoshes and plastic pixie hats, in their Wellingtons and their tweed capes, were something of a disappointment. They looked like the spectators at a point-to-point, only there were a great many more of them than was usual at the average meeting.

  What, in default of occult interest, and while the arrival of the Swami and Sir James was impatiently awaited, did draw attention were the isolated individuals, a motley collection, who walked among the crowd handing out leaflets, and crying feebly “What Sir James won’t tell you. Read all about it. What Sir James won’t tell you.”

  They were suitably attired to meet the driving rain: Alexandra in a long fur coat and top-boots, Lady Needham in a thick mustard-coloured tweed twin-suit, the Little Mam with a silk scarf over her head, a short fur coat and navy-blue trousers, Zoe in a camel-hair coat and a petunia head-square, Nelson Hart in a sports coat, innumerable scarves and top-boots over grey flannels, Erroll in a short coat with a black fur collar and a small black fur hat, Ned in a complete daffodil yellow old-fashioned cyclists’ outfit borrowed from his dad, and Rodrigo in a long, high-collared, large-lapelled white patent-leather overcoat.

  Each was noble to be there; Lady Needham, because of her age, but she considered that an eye must be kept on Alexandra otherwise Oliver would suffer from a cranky and disordered mother; the Little Mam, because of her sciatica, but she dreaded Alexandra getting cut off from the normal world and the possible results of that for Oliver; Zoe, because she was tortured with the thought of Oliver left with a “nanny” that Alexandra had hired at great expense, but she felt that she must sacrifice Oliver for Alexandra wherever necessary, otherwise she would be punished for her failure as a mother by some misfortune happening to her grandson. In any case, all three ladies were attached to the cause of the neglected, the forgotten and the downtrodden. Nelson Hart was ashamed to be in such a cranky public display, but he felt angry at the disregard of his scientific judgement and guilty because his work at the Institute would be easier without Hamo. Erroll was worried at being away from Kit’s movie-making at what might be a critical juncture, but he hoped that he might finally expiate his guilt over leaving Hamo in Goa; Ned truly believed that the Occult College was of far greater importance to the “hopeless” than any scheme of rice improvement, but he could not bear to hurt Alexandra. Rodrigo bravely told himself, with little credence, that Sir James would respect him more for taking such a stand, but he hoped that this bravery might finally win Ally over.