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By Root 2175 0

if the molecules of his immediate sensory world were being . . . rearranged. This suspicion allows us to interpret the second occurrence of the main symptoms. Before the appearance of the Fitches’ adoptive son Titus, Charles experiences a similar cluster of symptoms as he looks through the binoculars at the sea, awaiting what he is convinced will be the reemergence of his sea monster. The disturbances of sound and visual distortion experienced by Charles are plausibly in the world and not inside him. The hyoshigi sound returns. Then he sees through his glass the foot of the young man who has been brought to the sea by James and who is to play such a sad role in the climax of the book. Again, a third time, the accelerating thumping of the hyoshigi precedes a phenomenon we can link to James, his reappearance at Shruff End toward the very end of the book to check up on and say farewell to the cousin it is clear he loves. Since Charles is so fond of noise (“Noise has always been my friend,” he brags when he confronts le mari Ben on the natural stone bridge over Minn’s cauldron, p. 286), it may be that James chose this avenue of preparation for the three experiences of fear and premonition. What is clear is that James is somehow behind as well as mingling in these conjurings of presence.

Of the many other respects in which James and Charles echo one another, the jumble of their living arrangements is not the least important. (The clicking bead curtain from Shruff End is echoed by the tinkling chimes in James’s place.) James, too, seems to have had trouble settling in. His flat, kept preternaturally dark, is filled with a forbidding and apparently nonsensical mix of fetishes and treasures. Charles says he finds this mess of feathers and sticks “childish” (another example of his failure to gauge the spiritual depth of his cousin). The apartment is quite dusty, perhaps unused, as if it were a place James has been trying to leave or has seldom lived in. The aura of departure surrounds him. Charles calls it a “dumping ground.”

There are also a number of very exquisite have-worthy jade animals which I used to feel tempted to pocket, and plates and bowls of that heavenly Chinese grey sea-green colour wherein, beneath the deep glaze, when you have mopped the dust off with your handkerchief, you can descry lurking lotuses and chrysanthemums. (p. 170)

Things of beauty are being sifted over with the inattentions of time as James has moved deeper into white magic, which he admits is also demonic: “White magic is black magic.” Because he summons Titus to the sea, Titus drowns. On the other hand, because James has magical skill, he might have saved Titus had he been able to “hold on.” But here the demons of Charles’s rotten past crowd in and darken the results of James’s well-meaning magic. As the causality of his sins dawns on him, Charles has to take responsibility for Titus’s death, too: Because he stole Rosina from Peregrine and because Peregrine pushed Charles into Minn’s cauldron and James could not resist expending superhuman effort to rescue him, then had to rest for days, he was unable to prevent Titus from drowning or to summon the strength to administer the kiss of life at the right moment when Titus is found. This failure is so bitter that James almost disappears from under Charles’s gaze; he paces about near the tower among the rocks as if measuring something out. This is part of James’s agon, to suffer to the dregs the resemblance between the loss of Titus and the loss of his Sherpa during a Himalayan blizzard. The ego of the adept also leads to sin.

There is a teaching in Buddhism that suggests a more than personal goal for the Bodhisattva, or Buddha-in-training. It is that by delaying his departure from life he may acquire merit and transfer it to another otherwise less worthy person. (The Teshoo Lama does this for Kim at the end of the Kipling novel.) James has unnaturally protracted his own limbo period out of love for Charles, who interprets James’s beliefs somewhat too narrowly but with chastened rue as his cousin