The Magus, A Revised Version (19 page)

‘
Russian roulette.
’

‘
Less fallible. These pills work within a few seconds.
’

‘
I don
’
t want to play.
’

‘
Then you are a coward, my friend.
’
He leant back and watched me.

‘
I thought you believed brave men were fools.
’

‘
Because they persist in rolling the dice again and again. But a young man who will not risk his life even once is both a fool and a coward.
’

‘
Did you try this on my predecessors?
’

‘
John Leverrier was neither a fool nor a coward. Even Mitford was not the second.
’

And he had me. It was absurd, but I would not let my bluff be called. I reached for the shaker.

‘
Wait.
’
He leant forward, and put his hand on my wrist; then placed a tooth by my side.
‘
I am not playing at make-believe. You must swear to me that if the number is six you will take the pill.
’
His face was totally serious. I felt myself wanting to swallow.

‘
I swear.
’

‘
By all that is most sacred to you.
’

I hesitated, shrugged, then said,
‘
By all that is most sacred to me.
’

He held out the dice and I put it in the shaker. I shook it loosely and quickly and threw the dice. It ran over the cloth, hit the brass base of the lamp, rebounded, wavered, fell.

It was a six.

Conchis was absolutely motionless, watching me. I knew at once that I was never, never going to pick up the pill. I could not look at
him. Perhaps fifteen seconds passed. Then I smiled, looked at him and
shook my head.

He reached out again, his eyes still on me, took the tooth beside me, put it in his mouth and bit it and swallowed the liquid. I went red. Still watching me, he reached out and put the dice in the shaker, and threw it. It was a six. Then again. And again it was a six. He spat out the empty shell of the tooth.

‘
What you have just decided is precisely what I decided that morning forty years ago at Neuve Chapelle. You have behaved exactly as any intelligent human being should behave. I congratulate you.
’

‘
But what you said? The perfect republic?
’

‘
All perfect republics are perfect nonsense. The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
’

‘
But the dice was loaded.
’

‘
Patriotism, propaganda, professional honour,
esprit de corps
–
what are all those things? Cogged dice. There is just one small difference, Nicholas. On the other table these are real.
’
He put the remaining teeth back in the box.
‘
Not just ratafia in coloured plastic
’

‘
And the other two
–
how did they react?
’

He smiled.
‘
Another means society employs to control hazard -to prevent a freedom of choice in its slaves
–
is to tell them that the past was nobler than the present. John Leverrier was a Catholic. And wiser than you. He refused even to be tempted.
’

‘
And
Mitford?
’

‘
I do not waste time teaching the blind.
’

His eyes lingered a dry moment on mine, as if to make sure I took the implicit compliment; and then, as if to limit it, he turned out the lamp. I was left in more than the literal darkness. What last thin pretence had remained that I was merely a guest lay discarded. He had evidently been through all this before. The horrors of Neuve Chapelle had been convincing enough as he described them, yet they turned artificial with this knowledge of repetition. Their living reality became a matter of technique, of realism gained through rehearsal. It was like being earnestly persuaded an object was new by a seller who simultaneously and deliberately revealed it must be second-hand: an affront to all probability. I was not to believe in appearances… but why, why, why?

Meanwhile he had started weaving his web again; and once more
I
flew to meet it.

‘
The middle six hours of that day we passed in waiting. The Germans hardly shelled us at all. They had been bombarded to their knees. The obvious thing would have been to attack at once. But it takes a very brilliant general, a Napoleon, to see the obvious.

‘
About three o
’
clock the Gurkhas came alongside us and we were told an attack on the Aubers Ridge was to be launched. We were to be the first line. Just before half past three we fixed bayonets. I was beside Captain Montague, as usual. I think he knew only one thing about himself. That he was fearless, and ready to swallow the acid. He kept looking along the lines of men beside him. He scorned the use of a periscope, and stood and poked his head over the parapet. The Germans still seemed stunned.

‘
We began to walk forward.
Montague and the sergeant-major
called incessantly, keeping us in line. We had to cross a cratered ploughed field to a hedge of poplars, and then across another small field lay our objective, a bridge. I suppose we had gone about half the distance we had to cover, and then we broke into a trot and some of the men began to shout. The Germans seemed to stop firing altogether. Montague called triumphantly.
“
On, lads! Victo
ree
!
”

‘
They were the last words he ever spoke. It was a trap. Five or six machine guns scythed us like grass. Montague spun round and fell at my feet. He lay on his back, staring up at me, one eye gone. I collapsed beside him. The air was nothing but bullets. I pressed my face right into the mud, I was urinating, certain that at any moment I should be killed. Someone came beside me. It was the sergeant-major. Some of the men were firing back, but blindly. In despair. The sergeant-major, I do not know why, began dragging Montague
’
s corpse backwards. Feebly, I tried to help. We slipped down into a small crater. The back of Montague
’
s head had been blown away, but his face still wore an idiot
’
s grin, as if he were laughing in his sleep, mouth wide open. A face I have never forgotten. The last smile of a stage of evolution.

‘
The firing stopped. Then, like a flock of frightened sheep, every
one who survived began to run back towards the village. I as well. I had
lost even the will to be a coward. Many were shot in the back as they ran, and I was one of the few who reached the trench we had started from unhurt
–
alive, even. We were no sooner there than the shelling began. Our own shells. Owing to the bad weather conditions, the artillery were shooting blind. Or perhaps still according to some plan established days before. Such irony is not a by-product of war. But typical of it.

‘
A wounded lieutenant was now in command. He crouched beside me, with a great gash across his cheek. His eyes burned dully. He was no longer a nice upright young Englishman, but a neolithic beast. Cornered, uncomprehending, in a sullen rage. Perhaps we all looked like that. The longer one survived the more unreal it was.

‘
More troops came up with us, and a colonel appeared. Aubers Ridge must be captured. We had to have the bridge by nightfall. But I had meanwhile had time to think.

‘
I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible hum
an lie. What the lie was, I had
too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan
–
that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.
’

He was silent; I could just make out his face, his staring to sea, as if
Neuve Chapelle was out there, grey mud and hell, visible.

‘
We attacked again. I should have liked simply to disobey orders
and stay in the trench. But of course cowards were treated as deserters,
and shot. So I clambered up with the rest when the order came. A sergeant shouted at us to run. Exactly the same thing happened as earlier that afternoon. There was a little firing from the Germans, just enough to bait the trap. But I knew that there were half a dozen eyes watching down their machine-guns. My one hope was that they would be truly German. That is, methodical, and not open fire until the same point as before.

‘
We came to within fifty yards of that point. Two or three bullets ricocheted close by. I clasped my heart, dropped my rifle, staggered. Just in front of me I had seen a large shell-crater, an old one. I stumbled, fell and rolled over the edge of it. I heard the cry
“
Keep on!
”
I lay with my feet in a pool of water, and waited. A few
seconds later there was the violent unleashing of death I had expected.
Someone leapt in the other side of the shell-hole. He must have been a Catholic, because he was gabbling Ave
’
s. Then there was another scuffle and I heard him go in a falling of bits of mud. I drew my feet out of the water. But I did not open my eyes until the firing had stopped.

‘
I was not alone in that shell-hole. Half in, half out of the water opposite me was a greyish mass. A German corpse, long dead, half eaten by rats. Its stomach gaped, and it lay like a woman with a stillborn child beside it. And it smelt… it smelt as you can imagine.

‘
I stayed in that crater all night. I accustomed myself to the mephitic stench. It grew cold, and I thought I had a fever. But I made up my mind not to move until the battle was over. I was without shame. I even hoped the Germans would overrun our positions and so allow me to give myself up as a prisoner.

‘
Fever. But what I thought was fever was the fire of existence, the passion to exist. I know that now. A
delirium vivens.
I do not mean to
defend myself. All deliria are more or less anti-social, and I speak clinically, not philosophically. But I possessed that night an almost total recall of physical sensations. And these recalls, of even the simplest and least sublime things, a glass of water, the smell of frying bacon, seemed to mc to surpass or at least equal the memories of the greatest art, the noblest music, even my tenderest moments with Lily. I experienced the very opposite of what the German and French metaphysicians of our century have assured us is the truth: that all that is other is hostile to the individual. To me all that is other seemed exquisite. Even that corpse, even the squealing rats. To be able to experience, never mind that it was cold and hunger and nausea, was a miracle. Try to imagine that one day you discover you have a sixth, a till then unimagined new sense
–
something not comprehended in feeling, seeing, the conventional five. But a far profounder sense, the source from which all others spring. The word
“
being
”
no longer passive and descriptive, but active … almost imperative.

‘
Before the night was ended I knew that I had had what religious people would call a conversion. A light in heaven indeed shone on me, for there were constant starshells. But I had no sense of God. Only of having leapt a lifetime in one night.
’

He was silent for a moment. I wished there was someone beside me, an Alison, some friend, who could savour and share the living darkness, the stars, the terrace, the voice. But they would have had to pass through all those last months with me. The passion to exist: I forgave myself my failure to die.

‘
I am trying to describe to you what happened to me, what I was. Not what I should have been. Not the rights and wrongs of conscientious objection. I beg you to remember that.

‘
Before dawn there was another German bombardment. They attacked at first light, their generals having made exactly the same mistake as ours the day before. They suffered even heavier casualties. They got past my crater and to the trenches we had attacked from, but they were driven back again almost at once. All I knew of this was the noise. And the foot of a German soldier. He used my shoulder for a support while he was firing.

‘
Night fell again. There was war to the south, but our sector was quiet. The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirtee
n thou
sand killed. Thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes
–
because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself-and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

‘
At midnight I crawled back to the village on my stomach. I was afraid I might be shot by a startled sentry. But the place was manned by corpses, and I was in the middle of a desert of the dead. I found my way down a communication trench. There, too, only silence and corpses. Then a little further on I heard English voices ahead, and called out. It was a party of stretcher-bearers, passing round for a final ascertaining that only the dead remained. I said I had been knocked out by a shell-blast.

‘
They did not doubt my story. Stranger things had happened. From them I learnt where what was left of my battalion were. I had no plan, nothing but the instinct of a child to return to its home. But as the Spanish say, a drowning man soon learns to swim. I knew I must be
off
icially dead. That if I ran away, at least no one would be running after me. By dawn I was ten miles behind the lines. I had a little money and French had always been the lingua franca of my home. I found peasants who sheltered and fed me that next day. The next night I marched again, over the fields, always westwards, across the Artois towards Boulogne.

‘
A week later, travelling always like this, like the
émigrés
in the 1790s, I arrived there. It was full of soldiers and of military police, and I was near despair. Of course it was impossible to board a returning troopship without papers. I thought of presenting myself at the docks and saying that my pocket had been picked … but I lacked the impudence to carry it
off
. Then one day fate was kind to me. She gave me an opportunity to pick pockets myself. I met a soldier from the Rifle Brigade who was very drunk, and I made him drunker. I caught the leave ship while he, poor man, was still snoring in a room above an
estaminet
near the station.

‘
And then my real troubles began. But I have talked enough.
’