The Magus - John Fowles [133]
in Tronctheim, Henrik met Ragnar, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre. "All went well for a year or two, hut then his behaviour 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 realised 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 neighbours within twenty miles. No village within fifty. I realised 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 recognised 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 behaviour 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 realised 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 clangour 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