The Magus, A Revised Version (50 page)

‘
He went on out of sight and I returned to the farmstead with Gustav. I did not know what to say. I did not like to disappoint him, to admit defeat. I had my own foolish pride. After all, I was a founder-member of the Society of Reason. In the end I concocted a plan. I would visit Henrik alone. I would tell him I was a doctor and that I would like to look at his eyes. And while I looked at his eyes, I would try to look at his mind.

‘
I arrived outside Henrik
’
s hut at midday the next morning. It was raining slightly. A grey day. I knocked on the cabin door and stood back a few steps. There was a long pause. Then he appeared, dressed exactly as he had been the evening before. Face to face and close to him I was struck more than ever by his fierceness. It was very difficult to believe that he was nearly blind, because his eyes had such a pale, staring blueness. But now I was close to him I could see that it was a poorly focused stare; and I could also see the characteristic opacity of cataract in both eyes. He must have been very shocked, but he gave no sign of it. I asked him if he understood English
–
I knew from Gustav that he in fact did, but I wanted him to answer. All he did was to raise his staff, as if to keep me at bay. It was a warning rather than a threatening gesture. So I took it to mean that I could go on pr
ovided that I kept my distance.

‘
I explained that I was a doctor, that I was interested in birds, I had come to Seidevarre to study them
–
and so on. I spoke very slowly, remembering that he could not have heard the language for fifteen years or more. He listened to me without expression. I began to talk about modern methods of treatment for cataract. I was sure that a hospital could do something for him. All the time, not a single word. At last I fell silent.

‘
He turned and went back into the hut. He left the door open, so I waited. Suddenly he appeared again. In his hand he held what I held, Nicholas, when I came on you this afternoon. A long axe. But I knew at once that he was no more thinking of chopping wood than a berserk about to enter battle. He hesitated a moment, then rushed at me, swinging the axe up as he ran. If he had not been nearly blind he would beyond any doubt have killed me. As it was I sprang back only just in time. The axe head went deep into the soil. The two moments he took to jerk it free gave me the time to run.

‘
He came stumbling after me across the little clearing in front of the hut. I ran some thirty yards into the trees, but he stopped by the first one. At twenty feet he probably could not have told me from a tree-trunk. He stood with the axe poised in his hands, listening, straining his eyes. He must have known I was watching him, for without warning he turned and swung the axe with all his strength into a silver birch just in front of him. It was a fair-sized tree. But it shook from top to bottom with the blow. And that was his answer. I was too frightened by the violence of the man to move. He stared a moment into the trees where I stood and then turned and walked into the hut, leaving the axe where it had struck.

‘
I went back to the farmstead a wiser young man. It seemed incredible to me that a man should reject medicine, reason, science so violently. But I felt that this man would have rejected everything else about me as well if he had known it
–
the pursuit of pleasure, of music, of reason, of medicine. That axe would have driven right through the skull of all our pleasure-orientated civilization. Our science, our psycho-analysis. To him all that was not the great meeting was what the Buddhists call
lilas
–
the futile pursuit of triviality. And of course to have been concerned about his blindness would have been for him more futility. He wanted to be blind. It made it more li
kely that one day he would see.

‘
Some days afterwards I was due to leave. On my last evening Gustav kept me talking very late. I had said nothing to him of my visit. It was a windless night, but in August up there it begins to get cold. I went out of the barn to urinate when Gustav left. There was a brilliant moon, but in one of those late summer skies of the extreme north, when day lingers even in the darkness and the sky has strange depths. Nights when new worlds seem always about to begin. I heard from across the water, from Seidevarre, a cry. For a moment I thought it must be some bird, but then I knew it could only be Henrik. I looked towards the farmstead. I could see Gustav had stopped, was standing outside, listening. Another cry came. It was dragged out, the cry of someone who is calling a great distance. I walked across the grass to Gustav.
“
Is he in trouble?
”
I asked. He shook his head, and remained staring out at the dark shadow of Seidevarre across the moon-grey water. What was he calling? Gustav said,
“
Do you hear me? I am here.
”
And then the two cries, with an interval between, came again and I could make out the Norwegian words.
“
H
ø
rer du mig? Jeg er her.
”
Henrik was calling to God.

‘
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 a
s 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.
“
H
ø
rer 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 stand
ing 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 classifica
tions 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
off
er 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. H
e
nrik is dead, Ragna is dead.
’