The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  ‘I told you how sounds carried at Seidevarre. Each time he called the cry seemed to stretch out infinitely, through the forest, over the water, into the stars. Then there were receding echoes. One or two shrill cries from distant disturbed birds. There was a noise from the farmstead behind us. I looked up, and saw a white figure at one of the upper windows – whether Ragna or her daughter, I could not see. It was as if we were all under a spell.

  ‘To break it, I began to question Gustav. Did he often call like this? He said, not often – three or four times a year, when there was no wind and a full moon. Did he ever cry other phrases? Gustav thought back. Yes – “I am waiting” was one. “I am purified”, another. “I am prepared”, another. But the two phrases we had heard were the ones he used most.

  ‘I turned to Gustav and asked him if we could go again and see what Henrik was doing. Without answering, he nodded, and we set off. It took us some ten or fifteen minutes to get to the base of the point. Every so often we heard the cries. We came to the seide, but the cries were still some way off. Gustav said, “He is at the end.” We passed the cabin, and walking as quietly as we could, made our way to the end of the point. At last we came through the trees.

  ‘Beyond them there ran out a beach. Some thirty or forty yards of shingle. The river narrowed a little and the point took the force of what current there was. Even on a night as calm as that there was a murmur over the shallow stones. Henrik was standing at the very tip of the shingle spit, in about a foot of water. He was facing out to the northeast, to where the river widened. The moonlight covered it in a grey satin sheen. Out in midstream there were long low banks of mist. As we watched, he called. “Hører du mig?” With great force. As if to someone several miles away, on the invisible far bank. A long pause. Then, “Jeg er her.” I trained my glasses on him. He was standing legs astride, his staff in his hand, biblically. There was silence. A black silhouette in the glittering current.

  ‘Then we heard Henrik say one word. Much more quietly. It was “Takk.” The Norwegian for “thanks”. I watched him. He stepped back a pace or two out of the water, and knelt on the shingle. We heard the sound of the stones as he moved. He still faced the same way. His hands by his side. It was not an attitude of prayer, but a watching on his knees. Something was very close to him, as visible to him as Gustav’s dark head, the trees, the moonlight on the leaves around us, was to me. I would have given ten years of my life to have been able to look out there to the north, from inside his mind. I did not know what he was seeing, but I knew it was something of such power, such mystery, that it explained all. And of course Henrik’s secret dawned on me, almost like some reflection of the illumination that shone over him. He was not waiting to meet God. He was meeting God; and had been meeting him probably for many years. He was not waiting for some certainty. He lived in it.

  ‘Up to this point in my life you will have realized that my whole approach was scientific, medical, classifying. I was conditioned by a kind of ornithological approach to man. I thought in terms of species, behaviours, observations. Here for the first time in my life I was unsure of my standards, my beliefs, my prejudices. I knew the man out there on the point was having an experience beyond the scope of all my science and all my reason, and I knew that my science and reason would always be defective until they could comprehend what was happening in Henrik’s mind. I knew that Henrik was seeing a pillar of fire out there over the water, I knew that there was no pillar of fire there, that it could be demonstrated that the only pillar of fire was in Henrik’s mind.

  ‘But in a flash, as of lightning, all our explanations, all our classifications and derivations, our aetiologies, suddenly appeared to me like a thin net. That great passive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of a mysterious vigour, new forms, new possibilities. The net was nothing, reality burst through it. Perhaps something telepathic passed between Henrik and myself. I do not know.

  ‘That simple phrase, I do not know, was my own pillar of fire. For me, too, it revealed a world beyond that in which I lived. For me, too, it brought a new humility akin to fierceness. For me too a profound mystery. For me too a sense of the vanity of so many things our age considers important. I do not say I should not have arrived at such an insight one day. But in that night I bridged a dozen years. Whatever else, I know that.

  ‘In a short time we saw Henrik walk back into the trees. I could not see his face. But I think the fierceness it wore in daylight was the fierceness that came from his contact with the pillar of fire. Perhaps for him the pillar of fire was no longer enough, and in that sense he was still waiting to meet God. Living is an eternal wanting more, in the coarsest grocer and in the sublimest mystic. But of one thing I am certain. If he still lacked God, he had the Holy Spirit.

  ‘The next day I left. I said goodbye to Ragna. There was no lessening of her hostility. I think that unlike Gustav she had divined her husband’s secret, that any attempt to cure him would kill him. Gustav and his nephew rowed me the twenty miles north to the next farm. We shook hands, we promised to write. I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted. And so I returned to France.’

  45

  Julie glanced at me, as if asking tacitly whether this didn’t prove that we must ultimately be in safe hands. I didn’t dispute it, and not only because I could see she didn’t want me to. I half expected to hear a voice calling in Norwegian from Moutsa, or to see some brilliantly contrived pillar of fire rise out of the trees. But there was a long silence; only the crickets cheeping. ‘You never went back there?’ ‘Sometimes to return is a vulgarity.’

  ‘But you must have been curious to know how it all ended?’ ‘Not at all. Perhaps one day, Nicholas, you will have an experience that means a great deal to you.’ I could hear no irony in his voice, but it was implicit. ‘You will then realize what I mean when I say that some experiences so possess you that the one thing you cannot tolerate is the thought of their not being in some way for ever present. Seidevarre is a place I do not want time to touch. So I am not interested in what it is now. Or what they are now. If they still are.’

  Julie spoke. ‘But you said you would write to Gustav?’ ‘So I did. He wrote to me. He wrote for two years with regularity, at least once a season. But he never referred to what interests you -except to say that the situation was unchanged. His letters were full of ornithological notes. They became very dull reading, because I had lost most of my interest in the classifying aspects of natural history. Our letters became very infrequent. I think I had a Christmas card from him in 1926 or 1927. Since then, no sound. He is dead now. Henrik is dead, Ragna is dead.’

  ‘What happened to you when you got back to France?’ ‘I saw Henrik meet his pillar of fire at about midnight on August 17th, 1922. The fire at Givray-le-Duc began at the same hour of the same night.’

  Julie was more nakedly incredulous than I was. He sat turned away, and our eyes met. She lowered hers with a little grimace, like someone disappointed.

  I said, ‘You’re not suggesting …’

  ‘I am suggesting nothing. There was no connection between the events. No connection is possible. Or rather, I am the connection, I am whatever meaning the coincidence has.’

  There was an unusual shade of vanity in his voice, as if in fact he believed he had in some way precipitated both events and their common timing. I sensed that the coincidence was not literally true, but something he had invented, which held another, metaphorical, meaning ; that the two episodes were linked in significance, that we were to use both to interpret him. Just as the story of de Deukans had thrown light on Conchis himself, this threw light on the hypnosis – that image he had used, ‘reality breaking through the thin net of science ‘ … I had myself recalled something too similar from the hypnosis for it to be coincidence. Everywhere in the masque, these inter-relationships, threads between circumstance.

 
He turned parentally to Julie. ‘My dear, I think it is your bedtime.’ I glanced at my watch. It was just after eleven. Julie gave a little shrug, as if the question of bedtime was unimportant.

  She said, ‘Why have you told us this, Maurice?’

  ‘All that is past possesses our present. Seidevarre possesses Bourani. Whatever happens here now, whatever governs what happens, is partly, no, is essentially what happened thirty years ago in that Norwegian forest.’

  He spoke to her then as he often spoke to me. The pretence that Julie was basically any different, any more understanding of what was going on, was wearing very thin. I knew he was initiating another shift in our relationships, or the conventions that ruled them. In some way we were both cast now as his students, his disciples. I remembered that favourite Victorian picture of the bearded Elizabethan seaman pointing to sea and telling a story to two goggle-eyed little boys. Another surreptitious look passed between Julie and myself. It was clear to both of us that we were moving into new territory. Then I felt her foot: a fleeting touch like a snatched kiss.

  ‘Well. I suppose I must go.’ The mask of formality was reassumed. We all stood. ‘Maurice, that was so remarkable and interesting.’

  She moved and kissed him briefly on the cheek. Then she offered me her hand. One shadow of conspiracy in her eyes, one minute extra pressure of her fingers. She turned to go; stopped.

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot to replace your matches.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Conchis and I sat again, in silence. A few moments later I heard light footsteps going across the gravel towards the sea. I smiled across the table at his unrevealing face. The pupils of his eyes seemed black in their clear whites – a mask that watched me, watched me.

  ‘No illustrations in the text tonight?’

  ‘Does it need them?’

  ‘No. You told it… very well.’

  He shrugged dismissively, then waved his arm briefly round: at house, at trees, at sea.

  ‘This is the illustration. Things as they are. In my small domaine.’

  At any point before that day I should have argued with him. His not so small domaine held a lot more mystification than mysticism; and the one sure feature of ‘things’ there was that they were not what they seemed. He might have his profound side, but another was that of a cunning old charlatan.

  I said lightly, ‘Your patient seemed much more normal this evening.’

  ‘She may appear more normal tomorrow. You must not let that deceive you.’

  ‘There’s no chance of that.’

  ‘As I told you, I shall keep myself out of sight tomorrow. But if we do not see each other again … I shall see you next weekend?’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  ‘Good. Well … ‘He stood up, as if he had really only been waiting for a certain time, I presumed the time for Julie to ‘disappear’, to pass.

  As I stood as well I said, ‘Thank you. Once again. For possessing me.’

  He inclined his head, like some seasoned impresario too accustomed to first-night compliments to take them very seriously. We walked indoors. The two Bonnards glowed gently from the inner wall of his bedroom. On the landing outside I came to a decision.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a stroll, Mr Conchis. I don’t feel very sleepy. Just down to Moutsa.’

  I knew he might say he would come with me and so make it impossible to be at the statue at midnight; but it was a counter-trap for him, an insurance for me. If we were caught, I could claim the assignation was an accident. At least I hadn’t concealed that I was going out.

  ‘As you wish.’

  He put out his hand and clasped mine, then watched me for a moment as I went downstairs. But before I reached the bottom I heard his door close. He might have been out on the terrace listening, so I crunched noisily on the gravel as I walked north towards the track out of Bourani. But at the gate, instead of turning down to Moutsa, I went on up the hill for fifty yards or so and sat down against a tree-trunk, from where I could watch the entrance and the track. It was a dark night, no moon, but the stars diffused a very faint luminescence over everything, a light like the softest sound, touch of fur on ebony.

  My heart was beating faster than it should. It was partly at the thought of meeting Julie, partly at something far more mysterious, the sense that I was now deep in the strangest maze in Europe. Now I really was Theseus; somewhere in the darkness Ariadne waited; and perhaps the Minotaur.

  I sat there for a quarter of an hour, smoking but shielding the red tip from view, ears alert and eyes alert. Nobody came; and nobody went.

  At five to twelve I slipped back through the gate and struck off eastwards through the trees to the gulley. I moved slowly, stopping frequently. I reached the gulley, waited, then crossed it and walked as silently as I could up the path to the clearing with the statue. It came, majestic shadow, into sight. The seat under the almond tree was deserted. I stood in the starlight at the edge of the clearing, very tense, certain that something was about to happen, straining to see if there was anyone in the dense black background. I had an idea it might be a man with blue eyes and an axe.

  There was a loud ching. Someone had thrown a stone and hit the statue. I stepped into the darkness of the pine trees beside me. Then I saw a movement, and an instant later another stone, a pebble, rolled across the ground in front of me. The movement showed a gleam of white, and it came from behind a tree on my side of the clearing, higher up. I knew it was Julie.

  I ran up the steep slope, stumbled once, then stood. She was standing beside the tree, in the thickest shadow. I could see her white shirt and trousers, her blonde hair, and she reached forward with both hands. In four long strides I got to her and her arms went round me, and we were kissing, one long wild kiss that lasted, with one or two gulps for air, for a fevered readjustment of the embrace, and lasted … in that time I thought I finally knew her. She had abandoned all pretence, she was passionate, almost hungry. She let me crush her body; met mine. I murmured one or two torn endearments, but she stopped my mouth. I turned to kiss her hand; caught it; and brushed my lips down its side and round the wrist to the scar on the back.

  A second later I had let go of her and was reaching in my pocket for the matches. I struck one and lifted her left hand. It was scarless. I raised the match. The eyes, the mouth, the shape of the chin, everything about her was like Julie. But she was not Julie. There were little puckers at the corner of her mouth, a slight over-alertness in the look, a sort of calculated impudence; above all, there was a deep sun-tan. She sustained my stare, then looked down, then up again under her eyelashes.

  ‘Damn.’ I nicked the match away, and struck another. She promptly blew it out.

  ‘Nicholas.’ A low, reproachful – and strange – voice.

  ‘There must be some mistake. Nicholas is my twin brother.’

  ‘I thought midnight would never come.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  I spoke angrily, and I was angry, but not quite as much as I sounded. It was so neat a modulation into the world of Beaumarchais, of Restoration comedy; and I knew the height the dupe has fallen is measured by his anger.

  ‘She?’

  ‘You forgot your scar.’

  ‘How clever of you to see it was make-up before.’

  ‘And your voice.’

  ‘It’s the night air.’ She coughed.

  I caught hold of her hand and pulled her over to the seat under the almond tree.

  ‘Now. Where is she?’

  ‘She couldn’t come. And don’t be so rough.’

  ‘Well, where is she?’ The girl was silent. I said, ‘That wasn’t funny.’

  ‘I thought it was rather exciting.’ She sat, then glanced up at me. ‘And so did you.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake I thought you … ‘ but I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. ‘You’re June?’

  ‘Yes. If you’re Nicholas.’

  I sat down beside her and fished out a packet of Papastratos.
She took one, and I gave her a good long look in the matchflare. In return she examined me, with eyes markedly less frivolous than her voice till then.

  The striking facial similarity with her sister upset me in some unexpected way. It seemed a hitherto unrealized aspect of Julie that I could do without, an unnecessary complication. Perhaps it was the tan on this other girl’s skin, a general air of living a more outdoor, physical life, of being healthier, a fraction more rounded in the cheeks … indeed of being what Julie herself must look like in normal circumstances. I leant forward, elbows on knees.

  ‘Why didn’t she come herself?’

  ‘I thought Maurice had told you why.’

  I didn’t show it, but I felt like an over-confident chess-player who suddenly sees that his supposedly impregnable queen is only one move from extinction. Once again I thought frantically back – perhaps the old man had been right about the high intelligence of some schizophrenics. The tea-throwing scene had seemed too far out of character if she was cunning-mad; but cunning-madder still might have precipitated it just to plant the wink at the end; then those collusive bare feet under the table, the message with the matches … perhaps he had been less oblivious than he had seemed.

  ‘We don’t blame you. Julie’s misled far greater experts than you.’

  ‘Why are you so sure I’m misled?’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t have kissed someone you really thought was mentally unbalanced like that.’ She added, ‘At least I hope you wouldn’t.’ I said nothing. ‘Honestly, we’re not blaming you. I know how clever she is at suggesting that the madness is in everyone around her. The damsel-in-distress line.’

  But there was something faintly interrogative behind her tone of voice in that last little phrase, as if she wasn’t quite certain how I would react – how far I could be pushed.

  ‘She’s certainly cleverer at that than the line you’re taking.’

  She was silent a long moment. ‘You don’t believe me?’