The Magicians

by J. B. Priestley

  “Are you catching the five-thirty-five? You’ll have to hurry, won’t you? I won’t come to the station. You didn’t expect me to, did you?” Questions asked in another cottage, in another world, where surrender and passion and tenderness had never been heard of, a cool and dignified world, empty as hell. That was where she might have to live now, banished by some treachery she would never understand.

  This again was when all might be changed, by a look, a word. But the young man was in control of the situation, not the other who could do nothing but feel his helplessness and share something of the girl’s frozen anguish. There were more words exchanged but they had no real meaning. Time, which seemed to have no even pace here but moved with the heart, hurried to gabble them.

  He was outside, dazzled by the sun and the flashing mirror of the sea, carrying a raincoat and his bag. He turned, before climbing the steps to the road, and saw her standing at the door watching him, a forlorn little figure yet huge in its reproach. And now it appeared that memory or anything resembling it turned to wild dreaming, for he no longer saw through the eyes of his younger self, about to climb the steps, but seemed to move closer to the girl standing at the door, whose misery and despair rose like a dark tide to drown him. What was that something still hidden from him, the fact, the fear, the key that was lost? He had it—yes, he had it—no, he had nothing. . . .

  He stared at the chair facing his in the little study; and was much relieved to find that Marot had gone. But then it was late, close on midnight. He must have been asleep for a couple of hours. What had Marot said—that he would show him time alive, the life as it is? As he crept upstairs, almost morbidly anxious to reach his room without meeting anybody, Ravenstreet began asking himself what in fact he had experienced during those two hours, whether he had remembered or dreamt, or dreamt and remembered together, or if, as he suspected Marot meant to suggest, he had more or less re-entered a past that was in some inexplicable fashion still going on, presumably in ‘time alive’ or ‘the life as it is’. He had come across vague references to theories that played about with time and unknown dimensions in this fashion, and so far as he could under­stand such theories he found them irrational and repellent, belonging to some tormented Eastern notions of existence. By the time he reached his room, his mind still working coldly, he had come to the con­clusion that what he had experienced was a mixture of memories, released in a flood by some hypnotic trick of Marot’s, and some dream elements, stimulated no doubt by his talk with the Magicians. So there it was.

  The rain had stopped; the night was clear and fresh; he stayed by the open window, breathing deeply. And it was then, just when he thought he had the whole business nicely and coolly settled, that he felt such emotion as he hadn’t known for years and years, as if a giant hand were shaking him. It was almost every kind of feeling at once: bitterness and horror and pain were there, reaching out to him from Pelrock Bay and 1926, but so were wonder and a strange hopefulness, even a sort of confused joy, coming from a sense of indefinable possibilities, perhaps time alive, perhaps life as it is.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wise Men in a Garden

  It was a smoking hot morning; the tall flowers in the borders blazed; distance was lost in the heat haze; the air was unmoving, heavy; the whole garden might have been inside a greenhouse. Ravenstreet had breakfasted lightly in his bedroom, had seen the Wiversons, telephoned the works, written a few letters, and was now ready if necessary to spend the rest of the morning with the Magicians. Bury had put out some deck-chairs for them near the summer-house, and there he found them, their wise old heads wreathed in smoke. It seemed wrong to ask such characters how they had slept, so he merely gave them a Good-morning, dropped into the fourth chair, and waited for their questions.

  “I thought it better,” said Marot, an old grey eagle in this morning light, “to leave you last night. These experiences—they are often very disturbing, exhausting—much emotion. One is better alone perhaps.”

  “That was tactful of you,” said Ravenstreet. “It was, as you say, a disturbing, exhausting experience. I still don’t understand it, don’t know where I am. Somehow you made me re-live a day I’d almost forgotten; perhaps because I’d wanted to forget it, as the psychologists tell us——”

  “Psychologists!” cried Perperek, his yellow moon of a face creased with contempt. “Is no use talking of psychologists. Tick-tock—tick-tock!” He removed some shreds of tobacco from his underlip, as if a Freudian or two might be hiding there.

  Ravenstreet looked at Marot. “You said you wished to show me some part of my life as it is. Those were your very words, I remember. The time alive. Well, I suppose that’s what happened. It’s hard to explain. I was there, twenty-seven years ago, doing and saying the same things, not able to stop myself though I tried hard enough sometimes. But of course I wasn’t exactly the same. Here it gets very confusing. I was conscious of my own consciousness as it was then. I was back there and yet was different—I’m afraid I’ll never make you understand.” He looked round at them innocently.

  Perperek roared with laughter, swallowed some smoke, coughed, wheezed, spluttered, thumped his fat little thighs. Wayland was smiling broadly. Only Marot still looked grave. “You forget, my friend,” he said reproachfully. “You have not to make us under­stand. We were trying to make you understand.”

  “It was a sort of test, you remember,” said Wayland, still smiling. “We asked for your help. We had to prove we were worthy of it.”

  “Did I not say,” said Marot carefully, “I must persuade you by an example that your view of life is wrong and ours is right? You agree? Then that was the example.”

  “Tick-tock gone.” Perperek grinned. “Where is tick-tock now? I tell you other thing, Rav-en-street. You change a little already. You notice? Is true. More open, more life. Is more garden for you today than yesterday. You notice?”

  “I hadn’t, but now I come to think of it, you’re probably right.” Ravenstreet hesitated. “When I—remembered that day, went back to it—I felt at once how much richer and warmer my sensations were—I was a lot younger then of course. But—now you mention it—there has been a sort of hangover since I—I returned. I’m noticing more. Curious!” He looked almost angrily at the grinning Perperek. “How the devil do you know these things?”

  Perperek roared with laughter again. “The devil—yes. I am fat little devil. Is new kind—not so good to look at—would not please ladies so much—but still very clever—read important English industry man like little book for childrens——”

  “Now, Perperek,” said Wayland, “we must get on with this.” He looked at Ravenstreet. “What you experienced last night isn’t any concern of ours. It’s your affair, your life. I must warn you, though, that it wasn’t memory, simply traces in the brain of what is over and done with. It hadn’t that quality, had it?”

  “No, it hadn’t,” Ravenstreet admitted. “The whole feeling of it was different. It was solidly and intensely there. Was I hypnotised into believing that—what shall I say?—that a released flood of memories was something really happening again?” He glanced at Marot, who after all had been responsible for this queer business.

  The gaunt old Frenchman shook his head. “No, you have it the wrong way round. You were—what is it?—de-hypnotised. When you speak of floods of memories, you speak out of hypnotic trance.”

  “Trance of tick-tock,” cried Perperek. “A day is here, is gone. A minute is here, is gone. A second is here, is gone. Past is nothing. Future is nothing. All is thin slice—a tick, a tock—between nothings. You hyp­notise yourself believe these things—all follows very, very bad. A life for sheeps. Marot, I think we walk an’ talk a little—eh?”

  The other man obediently rose, nodding to Wayland, as if telling him to carry on with Ravenstreet’s in­struction. The tottering giant and the fat waddling dwarf moved together across the lawn, a vaudeville act again. Ravenstreet wanted to laugh. Had he been in danger of losing his common sense and
humour? These fellows might have some odd gifts and tricks—all kinds of people had—and yet be childishly wrong about everything. Philippa’s cottage at Pelrock Bay, so far as he was concerned, was now as much part of the past, sunk into it, sealed by it, as the men building the Pyramids were, as dead and gone for ever as Julius Cæsar. What was real, to be taken into account, was the here and now—the bee-buzzing borders, the grass warm in the sun, the July blue, the two quaint receding figures, the flushed brick of the house front, Bury and Wiverson gossiping at the entrance to the vege­table garden, Wayland and himself about to talk. He must stop this Magicians’ nonsense getting hold of him.

  “What about common sense?” he suddenly demanded of the waiting Wayland. “Despise it?”

  “Not at all in its place.” Wayland glanced in the direction his friends had gone. “Those two have probably more common sense than anybody in this country.”

  “Hard to prove.”

  “Of course. But both of them have lived exactly as they’ve wanted to live, and have spent at least fifty years raising their level of being and acquiring real knowledge, wisdom. They know far more than I do. I was once their pupil, their disciple, but now they pretend I’m their colleague. Both of them use common sense where it’s needed, in common affairs. But I think you meant something else, Ravenstreet. You were in fact retreating, busy wondering if you weren’t in danger of allowing us to make a fool of you.”

  “This thought-reading act you fellows do makes any discussion with you difficult and embarrassing.” Raven­street was rather impatient. “But, if you don’t mind my saying so, you might have a good mind-reading act and yet be wrong about most things.”

  Wayland smiled broadly, his dark parchment face lighting up. Whatever else he might be, he was certainly a most even-tempered old fellow, rather more so, it seemed to Ravenstreet, than his two senior necromancers. “We have no acts, only a certain amount of knowledge, rare now. And I will say again what I told you last night. We have no wish to convert you to our way of thinking, Ravenstreet. It would take too long and there is much to do.”

  “Much of what to do?”

  “Our object in meeting like this is to share any discoveries we may have made, to pool our knowledge, and to discuss what may be done by ourselves and others——”

  “Yes, yes,” cried Ravenstreet impatiently. “The usual objects of a conference, however small. But to what purpose? Or haven’t you one?”

  “Our purpose—and of course we aren’t alone here—need not be despised even by the busiest man,” replied Wayland with a smooth irony that was not unpleasant. “It is to save Man—not all men but some—essential Man, if you like.”

  “From what?” His tone was sceptical.

  “From being bound, without hope of release, into the mere organic life of this planet, without any further chance of possible development as a fully conscious spiritual being, capable of being himself, of making free choices. We don’t want mankind to go the way the social insects went.”

  “Good God! Of course not.” Ravenstreet stared at him, incredulous. “Neither does anybody else. Any­how, it’s absurd, I’m sorry—but—really——”

  Wayland was no longer smiling now, but, to Raven­street’s relief, he showed no sign of losing his temper. His self-control was exceptional. “Very well, it’s absurd. But you must allow us our absurdity —that is, if you are ready to dismiss in a second what we’ve been thinking about for thirty years——”

  “I know, I know,” cried Ravenstreet. “But this idea of men turning into insects——”

  The other checked him. “I never said anything about men turning into insects. That is absurd. I said we didn’t want mankind to go the way the social insects apparently went, away from all developments, into unchanging automatism. We believe it’s in danger of happening. We believe that the life of contemporary man is now a battleground, where intelligences and forces, on a higher level of being than Man, are contending.”

  “I find that most unlikely,” said Ravenstreet mildly. “You mean God and the Devil—good and evil—that sort of thing?”

  “It isn’t so simple. We live in a universe much more complicated than that, Ravenstreet. But even the simplest explanation would take too long.”

  “And I might find it very hard to swallow.”

  Wayland leant forward, his hands on his knees, and looked searchingly at Ravenstreet. “I will tell you what you are doing. You are busy re-hypnotising yourself, pushing yourself back into a trance——”

  “Tick-tock?” He was derisive.

  Wayland did not smile. “Yes, tick-tock. At heart nothing matters because our lives are being shovelled away. This is living two dimensions short. It is like the hen that cannot move away from the straight line. Now this won’t do from you, Raven­street.”

  “Have you some reason for saying that? I’m not arguing, I’m curious. Were you making a point then—or just talking?”

  “I was making a point.” Wayland did not relax. “All three of us have agreed now that our encounter with you was not mere accident. In spite of what you say, there’s something in you open to certain in­fluences. That’s why you asked us here. Last night, as Marot said, we were trying to make you understand. I don’t know what happened to you, don’t want to know—it’s your life—you.”

  “It was me.”

  “No, it is you. You are your life. And nothing has gone, nothing has stopped. Your time is your life. You can change it but you can’t get out of it. And I’m certain that you knew this last night.”

  “I felt something vaguely like it,” Ravenstreet admitted cautiously. “Very disturbing.”

  “No doubt,” said Wayland dryly. “But is what you have now so precious that it mustn’t be disturbed? What had you when we met yesterday afternoon? What is your life as you see it? I don’t know what you experienced last night under Marot’s influence—if you did what we suggested beforehand you should have returned to an important moment of decision, one of those we may have to change——”

  “Change?” Ravenstreet was startled. “How can it be changed? It’s happened.”

  “It’s happening and it can be changed, with the right effort. But that’s not what I’m discussing now. I say that even during and after this merest glimpse of wakefulness and time alive, you began to feel differently, no longer in a world closing in like a prison that is harsher and harsher in its treatment—first, some work outside, then only exercise in the yard, then no yard and no sight of the sky, then solitary confinement, then the condemned cell——”

  “My God, Wayland!” cried Ravenstreet, his defences falling. “It’s not too far-fetched a comparison either.”

  “No longer such a world,” the other continued, ignoring this outburst. “One that might be too strange, confusing, frightening, but immensely rich with possibilities, opening out instead of closing in. I dare to say that’s what you found, and that now you’re pretending not to have found it. Common sense and humour have returned, with the bright morning and the familiar situation. You are cheating us, my friend. You are also cheating yourself, for what were common sense and humour doing for you last week, and, if we took ourselves off today, what would they be doing for you tonight? Do you know what Perperek said to Marot and me yesterday about you? He told us that obviously you were not altogether closed in, not almost an automaton like so many, but that the one spark left only showed you your despair——”

  “And so what?” cried Ravenstreet harshly.

  “It’s a type—we have a special name for it—that is often bent on self-destruction. Which is useless. The revolver you take to blow you out of your life blows you back into it, weighted with mysterious guilt——”

  “All right, Wayland.” Ravenstreet got out of his deck-chair. “Let’s take a turn or two round the garden, if you don’t mind.” As they moved off, he went on: “I don’t think I’m the suicidal type. You’re wrong there. And this blowing-out-of-life-back-into-it business is too complicated for me. B
ut you came near enough to make me feel uncomfortable, and perhaps, after last night, I wasn’t being strictly honest with you. I tried thinking about this time thing, because I can see that what Perperek calls tick-tock does get us down, takes something out of us that ought to be there, but it’s altogether too dam’ complicated for me. Though I might try again, if you give me a hint or two.”

  “Every age probably has its own riddle of the Sphinx that it must solve,” said Wayland. “Marot and Perperek have always said that our riddle is the riddle of Time. Our secret despair, hurrying us into deeper slavery, may come from our inability to solve this riddle. But now you will help us?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can. Though I must point out, before I start, that I wouldn’t be important in this affair, that it doesn’t depend on me at all.”

  “But we may be able to reach it through you. You understood this yesterday evening, you remember, though of course you said we were probably deceiving ourselves. Now we have an idea of this man you met, who wishes you to work with him. We know, because you told us, that it’s an enterprise that could affect the lives of millions. It is, then, some new form of drugging.”

  Ravenstreet stood still, to stare at him in astonish­ment. “How did you guess? More magic?”

  “No, no.” He laughed. “What else could it be, offered by such a type to millions and millions, but some new form of drugging? What else do millions want?”

  “Oh—come! Labour-saving gadgets, for instance.”

  “Possibly. But they couldn’t be offered so quickly on such a scale. It had to be some form of drugging. What is it?”

  “That’s where you surprised me. You meant drugging in a general sense, but this literally is a new drug.” And he explained about Sepman’s discovery, the claims that had been made for it, his own trial of it. “To some extent I was under the influence of the stuff when I agreed to go in with them. I’ve had some reservations since, but haven’t said anything.”