The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  ‘I then noticed that when we had our evening meal, we were never all present. On the first evening, the girl was away. On the second the boy appeared only when we had finished – even though I had seen him sitting gloomily by the shore only a few minutes before Nygaard came and called me to eat. The third day it so happened that I came back late myself to the farm. As I was walking back through the firs some way inland I stopped to watch a bird. I did not mean to hide, but I was hidden.’

  Conchis paused, and I remembered how he had been standing two weeks before, when I left Julie; like a pre-echo of this.

  ‘Suddenly about two hundred yards away I saw the girl going through the trees by the shore. In one hand she held a pail covered with a cloth, in the other a milk-can. I remained behind a tree and watched her walk on. To my surprise she followed the shore and went on to the forbidden promontory. I watched her through glasses until I saw her disappear.

  ‘Nygaard disliked having to sit in the same room with both his relations and myself. Their disapproving silence irked him. So he took to coming with me when I went to my “bedroom” in the barn, to smoke a pipe and talk. That evening I told him I had seen his niece carrying what must have been food and drink on to the point. I asked him who was living there. He made no effort to hide the truth. The fact was this. His brother was living there. And he was insane.’

  I glanced from Conchis to Julie and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present. I pressed against her foot. She returned the touch, but then moved her foot away. The story caught her, she was not to be distracted.

  ‘I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said, “I think we are all insane here.” He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my camp-bed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant “hill of the holy stone”, the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures.

  ‘Originally the farm had been no more than a summer dacha, a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father – an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of the traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing – of returning to the wild. Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side. Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship’s engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the Church. While staying with Gustav, who had by then begun to practise in Trondheim, Henrik met Ragna, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre.

  ‘All went well for a year or two, but then his behaviour grew stranger and stranger. Finally Ragna wrote Gustav a letter. What it said made him catch the next boat north. He found that for nearly nine months she had managed the farm single-handed – what is more, with two babies to look after. He returned briefly to Trondheim to clear up his affairs, and from then on assumed the responsibility of the farm and his brother’s family.

  ‘He said, “I had no choice.” I had already suspected it in the strain between them. He was, or had been, in love with Ragna. Now they were locked together more tightly than love can ever lock – in a state of total unrequitedness on his side and one of total fidelity on hers.

  ‘I wanted to know what form the brother’s madness had taken. And then, nodding at the stones, Gustav went back to Seidevarre. To begin with, his brother had taken to going there for short periods to “meditate”. Then he had become convinced that one day he – or at any rate the place – was to be visited by God. For twelve years he had lived as a hermit, waiting for this visit.

  ‘He never returned to the farm. Barely a hundred words had passed between the brothers those last two years. Ragna never went near him. He was of course dependent for all his needs on them. Especially since, by a surcroît de malheur, he was almost blind. Gustav believed that he no longer fully realized what they did for him. He took it as manna fallen from heaven, without question or human gratitude. I asked Gustav when he had last spoken to his brother -remember we were then at the beginning of August. And he said shamefacedly but with a hopeless shrug, “In May.”

  ‘I now found myself more interested in the four people at the farm than in my birds. I looked at Ragna again, and thought I saw in her a tragic dimension. She had fine eyes. Euripidean eyes, as hard and dark as obsidian. I felt sorry for the children too. Brought up, like bacilli in a test-tube, on a culture of such pure Strindbergian melancholia. Never to be able to escape the situation. To have no neighbours within twenty miles. No village within fifty. I realized why Gustav had welcomed my arrival. In a way he had kept his sanity, his sense of perspective. His insanity, of course, lay in his doomed love for his sister-in-law.

  ‘Like all young men I saw myself as a catalyst, as a solver of situations. And I had my medical training, my knowledge of the still then not ubiquitously familiar gentleman from Vienna. I recognized Henrik’s syndrome at once – it was a textbook example of anal overtraining. With an obsessive father identification. The whole exacerbated by the solitude in which they lived. It seemed as clear to me as the behaviour of the birds I watched each day. Now that the secret was revealed, Gustav was not unreluctant to talk. And the next evening he told me more, which confirmed my diagnosis.

  ‘It seemed Henrik had always loved the sea. This was why he had studied engineering. But gradually he realized that he did not like machinery, and he did not like other men. It began with miso-mechanism. The misanthropism took longer to develop, and his marriage was probably at least partly an attempt to prevent its development. He had always loved space, solitude. That is why he loved the sea, and no doubt why he came to hate being cramped aboard a ship, in the grease and clangour of an engine-room. If he could have sailed round the world alone … But instead he came to live at Seidevarre where the land was like the sea. His children were born. And then his eyesight began to fail. He knocked glasses over at table, stumbled over roots in the forest. His mania began.

  ‘Henrik was a Jansenist, he believed in a divine cruelty. In his system, he was elect, especially chosen to be punished and tormented. To sweat out his youth in bad ships in filthy climates so that his reward, his paradise should be snatched out of his hands when he came to enjoy it. He could not see the objective truth, that destiny is hazard: nothing is unjust to all, though many things may be unjust to each. This sense of God’s injustice smouldered in him. He refused to go to hospital to have his eyes looked at. He became red-hot for lack of the oil of objectivity, and so his soul both burnt in him and burnt him. He did not go to Seidevarre to meditate. But to hate.

  ‘Needless to say, I was eager to have a look at this religious maniac. And not altogether out of medical curiosity, because I had grown to like Gustav very much. I even tried to explain to him what psychiatry was, but he seemed uninterested. It is best left alone, was all he said.

  I promised him still to avoid the promontory. And there the matter was left.

  ‘One windy day soon after, I had gone three or four miles south along the river when I heard someone calling my name. It was Gustav in his boat. I stood out from the trees and he rowed towards me. I thought he had been netting gra
yling, but he had come to find me. He wanted me after all to look at his brother. We were to remain hidden, to stalk and watch Henrik like a bird. Gustav explained that it was the right day. Like many afflicted with near-blindness, his brother had developed very sharp hearing and so the wind was in our favour.

  ‘I got into the boat and we rowed to a little beach near the end of the point. Gustav disappeared and then came back. He said Henrik was waiting near the seide, the Lapp dolmen. It was safe for us to visit his hut. We made our way through the trees up a small slope, passed over to the southern side, and there, where the trees were thickest, in a depression, was a curious cabin. It had been sunk into the ground, so that only the turf roof showed on three sides. On the fourth, where the ground fell away, there was a door and a small window. A stack of wood lay beside the house. But no other sign of any employment.

  ‘Gustav made me go in while he stayed on watch outside. It was very dark. As bare as a monastic cell. A truckle bed. A rough table. A tin with a bundle of candles. The only concession to comfort, an old stove. There was no carpet, no curtain. The lived-in parts of the room were fairly clean. But the corners were full of refuse. Old leaves, dirt, spiders’ webs. An odour of unwashed clothes. There was one book, on the table by the one small window. A huge black Bible, with enormous print. Beside it, a magnifying glass. Pools of candle-wax.

  ‘I lit one of the candles to look at the ceiling. Five or six beams that supported the roof had been scraped pale and along them had been carved two long brown-lettered texts from the Bible. They were in Norwegian, of course, but I noted down the references. And on a cross-beam facing the door there was another sentence in Norwegian.

  ‘When I came out into the sunlight again I asked Gustav what the Norwegian sentence meant. He said “Henrik Nygaard, cursed by God, wrote us in his own blood in the year 1912.” That was ten years before. Now I will read you the other two texts he had cut and then stained in with blood.’

  Conchis opened the book beside him.

  ‘One was from Exodus: They encamped in the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar off re. The other was an echo of the same text in the Apocrypha. Here. From Esdras: I gave you light in a pillar of fire, yet have you forgotten me, saith the Lord.

  ‘These texts reminded me of Montaigne. You know he had forty-two proverbs and quotations painted across the beams of his study roof. But there was none of the sanity of Montaigne in Henrik. More the intensity of Pascal’s famous Mémorial – those two crucial hours in his life that he could afterwards describe only by one word: feu. Sometimes rooms seem to imbibe the spirit of the people who have lived in them – think of Savonarola’s cell in Florence. And this was such a place. One did not have to know the occupant’s past. The suffering, the agony, the mental sickness were as palpable as tumours.

  ‘I left the cabin and we went cautiously towards the setde. It came in sight through the trees. It was not a true dolmen, but simply a tall boulder that wind and frost had weathered into a picturesque shape. Gustav pointed. Some fifty yards away, on the far side of a clump of birches, hidden from the seide, stood a man. I focused my glasses on him. He was taller than Gustav, a thin man with rough-cut dark-grey hair and beard and an aquiline nose. He turned by chance and faced us and I had a full view of his gaunt face. What surprised me was its fierceness. A severity that was almost savagery. I bad never seen a face that expressed such violent determination never to compromise, never to deviate. Never to smile. And what eyes! They were slightly exophthalmic, of the most startling cold blue. Beyond any doubt, insane eyes. Even at fifty yards I could see that. He wore an old indigo Lapp smock with faded red braid round its edges. Dark trousers and heavy snout-ended Lapp boots. And in his hand he held a staff.

  ‘I watched this rare specimen of humanity for some time. I had expected to see some furtive creature, someone who mumbled to himself as he crept through the trees. Not this fierce blinded hawk of a man. Gustav nudged my arm again. The nephew appeared by the seide with a bucket and the milk-can. He put them down, picked up another empty bucket that must have been set there by Henrik, looked round, and then cried something in Norwegian. Not very loud. He evidently knew where his father was, for he faced the clump of birches. Then he disappeared back through the trees. After five minutes Henrik began to walk up towards the seide. Quite confidently, but feeling his way with the end of the staff. He picked up the bucket and can, placing the staff under his arm, and then started back along the familiar path to his cabin. The path brought him within twenty yards of the birch-scrub behind which we were standing. Just as he passed us I heard high overhead one of the frequent sounds of the river, a very beautiful one, like the calling of Tutankhamen’s trumpets. The flight cry of a black-throated diver. Henrik stopped, although the sound must have been as banal to him as the wind in the trees. He stood there, his face turned up towards the sky. Without emotion, without despair. But listening, waiting, as if it might be the first notes of the herald angels telling him the great visit was near.

  ‘He went on out of sight and I returned to the farmstead with Gustav. I did not know what to say. I did not like to disappoint him, to admit defeat. I had my own foolish pride. After all, I was a founder-member of the Society of Reason. In the end I concocted a plan. I would visit Henrik alone. I would tell him I was a doctor and that I would like to look at his eyes. And while I looked at his eyes, I would try to look at his mind.

  ‘I arrived outside Henrik’s hut at midday the next morning. It was raining slightly. A grey day. I knocked on the cabin door and stood back a few steps. There was a long pause. Then he appeared, dressed exactly as he had been the evening before. Face to face and close to him I was struck more than ever by his fierceness. It was very difficult to believe that he was nearly blind, because his eyes had such a pale, staring blueness. But now I was close to him I could see that it was a poorly focused stare; and I could also see the characteristic opacity of cataract in both eyes. He must have been very shocked, but he gave no sign of it. I asked him if he understood English – I knew from Gustav that he in fact did, but I wanted him to answer. All he did was to raise his staff, as if to keep me at bay. It was a warning rather than a threatening gesture. So I took it to mean that I could go on provided that I kept my distance.

  ‘I explained that I was a doctor, that I was interested in birds, I had come to Seidevarre to study them – and so on. I spoke very slowly, remembering that he could not have heard the language for fifteen years or more. He listened to me without expression. I began to talk about modern methods of treatment for cataract. I was sure that a hospital could do something for him. All the time, not a single word. At last I fell silent.

  ‘He turned and went back into the hut. He left the door open, so I waited. Suddenly he appeared again. In his hand he held what I held, Nicholas, when I came on you this afternoon. A long axe. But I knew at once that he was no more thinking of chopping wood than a berserk about to enter battle. He hesitated a moment, then rushed at me, swinging the axe up as he ran. If he had not been nearly blind he would beyond any doubt have killed me. As it was I sprang back only just in time. The axe head went deep into the soil. The two moments he took to jerk it free gave me the time to run.

  ‘He came stumbling after me across the little clearing in front of the hut. I ran some thirty yards into the trees, but he stopped by the first one. At twenty feet he probably could not have told me from a tree-trunk. He stood with the axe poised in his hands, listening, straining his eyes. He must have known I was watching him, for without warning he turned and swung the axe with all his strength into a silver birch just in front of him. It was a fair-sized tree. But it shook from top to bottom with the blow. And that was his answer. I was too frightened by the violence of the man to move. He stared a moment into the trees where I stood and then turned and walked into the hut, leaving the axe where it had struck.

  ‘I went back to the farmstead a wiser young man. It seemed incr
edible to me that a man should reject medicine, reason, science so violently. But I felt that this man would have rejected everything else about me as well if he had known it – the pursuit of pleasure, of music, of reason, of medicine. That axe would have driven right through the skull of all our pleasure-orientated civilization. Our science, our psycho-analysis. To him all that was not the great meeting was what the Buddhists call lilas – the futile pursuit of triviality. And of course to have been concerned about his blindness would have been for him more futility. He wanted to be blind. It made it more likely that one day he would see.

  ‘Some days afterwards I was due to leave. On my last evening Gustav kept me talking very late. I had said nothing to him of my visit. It was a windless night, but in August up there it begins to get cold. I went out of the barn to urinate when Gustav left. There was a brilliant moon, but in one of those late summer skies of the extreme north, when day lingers even in the darkness and the sky has strange depths. Nights when new worlds seem always about to begin. I heard from across the water, from Seidevarre, a cry. For a moment I thought it must be some bird, but then I knew it could only be Henrik. I looked towards the farmstead. I could see Gustav had stopped, was standing outside, listening. Another cry came. It was dragged out, the cry of someone who is calling a great distance. I walked across the grass to Gustav. “Is he in trouble?” I asked. He shook his head, and remained staring out at the dark shadow of Seidevarre across the moon-grey water. What was he calling? Gustav said, “Do you hear me? I am here.” And then the two cries, with an interval between, came again and I could make out the Norwegian words. “Hører du mig? Jeg er her.” Henrik was calling to God.