The Magus

by John Robert Fowles

  She had changed into a long saffron chiton. It had a thin blood-red hem where it ended at the knees. On her feet were black buskins with silver greaves, which gave her a grim gladiatorial look, in strange contrast to her bare shoulders and arms. The skin was unnaturally white, the eyes elongated by black makeup, and her hair was also elongated backwards in a way that was classical yet sinister. Over her shoulders she had a quiver. In her left hand she held a long silver-painted bow. Something in her stance, as well as her distorting makeup, was genuinely frightening.

  She stood, cold and outraged and ominous for a long second, and then she reached back with her free hand and with a venomous quickness pulled an arrow out of the quiver. But just as she began to fit it to the bow string, the beam tracked like lightning back to the arrested man. He was standing, darker-skinned, in a black chiton, spectacularly terrified, his arms flung back, and his head averted. It was a pose without realism, yet effectively theatrical. The beam swept back to the goddess. She had the bow at full stretch, the horn blew again, the arrow went. I saw it fly, but lost its flight in the abrupt darkness as the torch flicked off again. A moment later it shone on the man. He was clutching the arrow—or an arrow—in his heart. He fell slowly to his knees, swayed a second, then slumped sideways among the stones and thyme. The torch lingered a moment on him, then went out. Apollo stood impassively, surveying, a pale marmoreal shadow, like some divine umpire, president of the arena. The goddess began to walk, a striding huntress walk, towards him, her silver bow slung like a rifle over one shoulder. As she came near, into the diffuse beam of weak light, he held out his hand. They stood like that, facing me, hand in hand, Apollo and his sister, Artemis-Diana. The beam went out. I saw them retreat into the dark penumbra of the trees. Silence. Night. As if nothing had happened.

  I looked back at Conchis. He had not moved. I tried to understand. I tried to think what connection there was between the elderly man on the road by the hotel, the “pre-haunting,” and this scene. During the telling I thought I had grasped the point of the caractêre of de Deukans; Conchis had been talking of himself and me; the parallels were too close for it to be anything else. And discouraged every kind of question… how unable I was to judge him… very few friends and no relations… but what had that to do with what had just happened?

  Plainly it was meant to be mythical, but it had awakened in me vague memories of Oscar Wilde—the Wilde of Salomé—and of Maeterlinck; something Germanic, fin de siècle, had floated over it all. It was also an attempt at the sort of scandalous evocation mentioned in Le Masque Français.

  There was some very nasty, some very perverse, drift in Conchis’s divertimenti. The naked man. What were they doing now, inside those trees? Because the girl acted one thing for an hour, there was no reason why she shouldn’t act something else, anything else, the next. I remembered wryly that she had said “I am called.” I had given it a spiritualistic significance; but it had a normal other meaning—for actresses.

  I felt, irrationally, betrayed; and envious and jealous of those other mysterious young men who had appeared from nowhere to poach in “my” territory; and walked off with the prize. I tried to be objective, content to be a spectator, to let these weird incidents flow past me as one sits in a cinema and lets the film flow past. But even as I thought that, I knew it to be a bad analogy.

  I went and stood behind her empty chair.

  “Very strange.”

  Conchis didn’t answer. I moved round the table, to where I could see his face. His eyes were open, but his stare to the south was fixed, and for a moment I was frightened. I said urgently, “Mr. Conchis?” and touched his shoulder. He looked up then, for all the world like a man coming out of a trance.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I fell asleep. I apologize.” He shook his head as if to wake himself up.

  “But your eyes were open.”

  “A kind of sleep.” He smiled at me, one of his smiles that was intended, flagrantly, to make me wonder what he really meant.

  I smiled warily back. “Or a kind of mystification?”

  He stood up and took my arm, then walked me silently to the western end of the terrace—probably, I guessed, to give the man with the arrow in his heart time to decamp. He breathed deeply for a moment, facing the distant mountains, his hand on my elbow. Then he said, “I am rich in many things, Nicholas. Richer even in some than I am in money.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Richer in forgotten powers. In strange desires.” He pressed my elbow lightly, then let go of it. His face was inscrutable, but his tone aroused old suspicions in me. Young men, young women. Perhaps I should soon find myself asked to take part in some kind of orgy, some sexual fantasy; and I knew that if I was faced with it, joining in or not, I might not know what to do—sexually or morally. A double lack of savoir vivre. I was out of my depth; I had a quick self-protective need to be debunking, English. I lit a cigarette; put on a smile and a light voice.

  “I saw your ‘visitor’ meet her boyfriend over there.” There was a long pause; in the shadow his eyes were like black phosphorus. “An uncensored rendezvous with Apollo.” Still he forced me to go on. “I have no program, Mr. Conchis. I don’t know.” More silence. I said rather desperately, “I just feel I’d enjoy it more if I knew what it all meant.”

  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 win
dow, 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 Pappous 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 rust-marks.

  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.

  4. 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.

  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 mid-century, 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.

  * * *