John Fowles - The Magus

“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 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?”