The Magus, A Revised Version (27 page)

‘
I am not going to venture where even the gods are powerless. You must not think I know every answer. I do not.
’

I stared at the now bland mask of his face, then said quietly,
‘
Why me?
’

‘
Why anyone? Why anything?
’

I pointed to the east, behind him.
‘
All that -just to give me a lesson in theology?
’

He pointed up to the sky.
‘
I think we would both agree that any god who created all that just to give us a lesson in theology was gravely lacking in both humour and imagination.
’
He left a pause.
‘
You are perfectly free to return to your school if you wish. Perhaps it would be wiser.
’

I smiled and shook my head.
‘
This time I take the tooth.
’

‘
This time it may be real.
’

‘
At least I
’
m
beginning
to realize that all your dice are loaded.
’

‘
Then you cannot possibly win.
’
But he went on quickly, as if he had taken a step too far.
‘
I will tell you one thing. There is only one answer to your question, both in general terms and in those of your presence here. I gave it to you on your
first visit. Why everything is,
including you, including me, and all the gods, is a matter of hazard. Nothing else. Pure hazard.
’

I searched his eyes and at last found something in them that I could believe; and grasped dimly, somewhere, that my ignorance, my nature, my vices and virtues were somehow necessary in his masque. He stood and fetched the brandy bottle from beside the lamp on the other table. He poured me a glass, then a little in his own, and still standing, raised it to me.

‘
Let us both drink to knowing each other better, Nicholas.
’

‘
I
’
ll second that.
’
I drank, then gave him a cautious smile.
‘
You didn
’
t finish your story.
’
Strangely, that seemed to set him back, as if he had forgotten
–
or presumed I would have no further interest in it. He hesitated, then he sat again.

‘
Very well. I was going … but no matter now.
’
He paused.
‘
Let us jump to the climax. To the moment when these gods that neither of us believes in lost patience with such hubris.
’

He leant back, once more turned a little to the sea.

‘
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 over-population and under-education, 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 chateaux, 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 c
hâ
teau. 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 major-domo smelt smoke. He went to look. The whole of one wing and the centre portion of the chateau were on fire. In their master
’
s absence most of the servants were away at their homes in the neighbouring villages. The few who were sleeping at the chateau 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 shrivelled, 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 smouldering remains. As soon as he was near enough to realize what the fire had done. Two days 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 kind of sneer on his face. It had shocked the man.

‘
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 liked me, that he had come perhaps to look on me rather as an uncle, 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 …
‘
Conchis sat in silence for a moment or two.

‘
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 chateau 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: I was not to take him too seriously; and stood up, as if to kill any further argument.
‘
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.

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 Fran
ce, declare that we believe:

Membership of the Society is obtained by signing the formula below.

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 arid 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 over-cerebral and of the over-faecal; 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 browning paper and the old-fashioned type showed it to be unmistakably a genuine pre
-
war 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 for ever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time.

How futile all our excitement over aeroplanes! 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 in
terested 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, her
metism, or 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 behaviour, 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 co-operation 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.