by John Fowles
Then it was as if I had said something that really pleased him. He turned and gave me a smile, took my arm again. We strolled back to the table.
"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 those 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."
"In this respect treat me as if I did not exist."
I sneaked a look at his bald, saturnine profile.
I said quietly, "Why me?"
He stopped us. "Why anyone? Why anything?"
I gestured to the east. "All this . . . just to give me a lesson in theology?"
He was pointing to the sky. "I think we would both agree that any god who created all this just to give us a lesson in theology was gravely lacking in both humor and imagination." We came to the table and sat down. He left a long pause. "You are perfectly free to return to your school if you wish. Perhaps it would be wiser."
"And weaker." I smiled at him. "Your rules." He eyed me, as if he was half inclined to send me away. I reminded him that he had never finished his story.
"Very well. Let us have a little more brandy first." I got up and fetched the bottle from beside the lamp and poured some. He sipped it, and then, after a gathering pause, went on. "I was going to tell you more of him. But no matter now. Let us jump to the climax, To the moment when the gods lost patience with his hubris.
"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 overpopulation and undereducation, 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 châteaux, 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 majordomo smelt smoke. He went to look. The whole of one wing and the center portion of the château was on fire. Most of the servants were away at their homes in the neighboring villages. The few who were sleeping at the château 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 shriveled, 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 smoldering remains. As soon as he was near enough to realize what the fire had done. A fortnight 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 smile on his face.
"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 had liked me, that he had come perhaps to look on me rather as an uncle on 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 . . . all hazard. The world began in hazard. And will end in it. Though I should in any case have been rich. My father was hardly poor. When o Pap pous died in 1924 he also left everything to my mother. And he was very far from poor.
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 château 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, as if to tell me not to take him too seriously, and stood up, as if to nip any further argument in the bud. "To bed now. 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:
1. Mankind can progress only by using his reason.
2. The first duty of science is to eradicate unreason, in whatever form, from public and international affairs.
3. Adherence to reason is more important than adherence to any other ethos whatever, whether it be of family, caste, country, race or religion.
4. The only frontier of reason is the human frontier; all other frontiers are signs of unreason.
5. 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.
6. 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.
1. I promise to give one-tenth of my annual income to the Society for Reason for the furtherance of its aims.
2. I promise to introduce reason at all times and places into my own life.
3. I shall never obey unreason, whatever the consequences; I shall never remain silent or inactive in front of it.
5. 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 and 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 midcentury, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the overcerebral and of the overfecal; 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 cheap browning paper and the old-fashioned type showed it to be
unmistakably a genuine prewar 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 forever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time.
How futile all our excitement over airplanes! 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, and 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 behavior, 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 cooperation 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 me 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 well aware that during that day our relationship had changed. I was less a guest; and he was far less a host. A different kind of tension had arisen, mainly because there were things in him that I could not relate (and which he knew and intended I could not); things like the humanity in his playing of Bach, in certain elements in his autobiography, which were spoilt, undermined, by his perversity and malice elsewhere; his aggressive defense of his wealth, the "curious" books and objects that he put in my way — another parallel with de Deukans — and now the myth figures in the night, with all their abnormal undertones.
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 a symbolic truth, 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. There I made my way round the gravel along the route that Lily must have taken. I walked a little way into the trees in the direction the two 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. Further 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 some way 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 chop of the waves over my sunwarmed face, thinking of Lily.
Then I looked toward the beach.
She was standing on it, a brilliant figure on the salt-gray 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. A
nd all the time fingers of wind teased and skeined her long, silky-blond 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."
She moved a little further away, and twirled her ombrelle. I slipped into my beachshoes and, toweling my back, caught her up.
"I prefer you without the silver bow."
She raised a finger to her lips, banning the subject, then smiled with a sort of innocent sideways slyness; she had a remarkable gift for creating and diminishing distance by an intonation, a look. She sat down on a low projecting piece of rock that was overshaded by a pine tree, where the precipitous gulley ran down to the shingle; then closed her sunshade and pointed with it to a stone beside her, a little away from her, in the sun, where I was to sit. But I spread my towel on the rock and sat beside her in the shade. I thought how ridiculous it really was to pretend that she was in some way "psychic"; the moist mouth, the down on her bare forearms, a scar above her left wrist, her slim neck, her loose hair, an animated glance she turned to give me.
"You're the most deliciously pretty girl I've ever seen."
"Am I?"
I had meant it; and I had also meant to embarrass her, But she simply widened her smile and stared back at me, and I was the one who eventually looked down.
"Do we still have to . . . keep to the rules?"
"If you want me to sit with you."
"Who's the other girl?"
"What other girl?"
