The Magus - John Fowles [138]
45
Lily glanced at him, then at me, as if it was for me to say something. 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 realise 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 forever 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." "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 no longer took any 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. Henrik is dead, Ragnar is dead. _Multa docet fames_." It was Lily who translated. "Hunger teaches many things." "Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities." "What happened to you when you got back to France?" "Something you will not believe. I saw Henrik meet his pillar of fire at about midnight on August 17, 1922. The fire at Givray-le-Duc began at the same hour of the same night." "Heavens!" "Good Lord." Lily and I spoke together, though her voice sounded far more convincingly amazed than mine. I said, "You're not suggesting..." "I am suggesting nothing. There was no connection between the events. No connection is possible. Or rather, I am the connection, I am whatever meaning the coincidence has." There was an unusual shade of vanity in his voice, as if in fact he believed he had in some way precipitated both events and their common timing. I sensed that the coincidence was not literally true, but something he had invented, which held another, metaphorical, meaning: that the two episodes were linked in significance, that I was to use both to interpret him. Just as the story of de Deukans had thrown light on Conchis himself, this threw light on the hypnosis--that image he had used, "reality breaking through the thin net of science"... I had myself recalled something too similar from the hypnosis for it to be coincidence. Everywhere in the masque, these interrelationships, threads between circumstance. He turned parentally to Lily. "My dear, I think it is your bedtime." I looked at my watch. It was eleven twenty-five. Lily gave a little shrug, as if the matter of bedtime was unimportant. She said, "Do you feel possessed by them? I know I feel some people possess me." She looked to me for confirmation, though the question was to Conchis; and the question seemed, oddly, to come