John Fowles - The Magus

“All went well for a year or two, hut then his behavior grew stranger and stranger. Finally Ragnar 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 singlehanded—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 Ragnar. 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 that last two years. Ragnar never went near him. He was of course dependent for all his needs on them. Especially since, by a surcroit 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 Ragnar 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 neighbors 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 gentlemen from Vienna. I recognized Henrik’s syndrome at once—it was a textbook example of anal over- training. With an obsessive father identification. The whole exacerbated by the solitude in which they lived. It seemed as clear to me as the behavior 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 misomechanism. 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 clangor 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 sik, but he had come to find me. He wanted me 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. His brother had very sharp hearing and so the wind was in our favor.

“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 northern 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 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 odor 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 candlewax.

“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, Henrick 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 of fire.' 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 tumors.