“You don’t understand. My whole training is to suspend belief, to examine, to experiment, to try things out, to test them.”
“So, just for an experiment, you want a curse on your enemy.”
“I never spoke of a curse.”
“Not in words. But to my old-style ears, that inform my old-style mind, you don’t have to use the old-style word. You can’t say it because you want to leave yourself a way out; if it works, so—and if it doesn’t work, it was all Gypsy bunk anyway, and the great professor, the modern-style man, is still on top. Look; you want this book. Well, get somebody to steal it. I can put you on to a good, clever thief.”
“Yes; I’ve thought of that. But—”
“Yes—but if you stole it and then wrote about it, your enemy would know you stole it. No?”
“That had occurred to me.”
“Ho! Occurred to you! So let’s face the facts as you have already faced them inside your heart, and as you won’t admit to me, or even admit straight out to yourself: if you are to have this book or whatever it is, and be safe to use it, the fellow who has it now must be dead. Are you prepared to wish somebody dead, professor?”
“Thousands of people wish somebody dead every day.”
“Yes, but do they really mean it? Would they do it if they could? So: why not get him murdered? I won’t find you a murderer, but Yerko might be able to tell you where to look.”
“Madame, I didn’t come here to hire thieves and murderers.”
“No, you are too clever; too modern. Suppose your murderer gets caught; they are often very clumsy, those fellows. He says, ‘The professor hired me;’ and you are in trouble. But if you are found out and say, ‘I hired an old Gypsy woman to curse him,’ the judge laughs and wags his finger at you for a big joker. You are a clever man, Hollier.”
“You are treating me like a fool.”
“Because I like you. You are too good a man to be acting like this. You’re lucky you have come to me. But why did you come?”
“At Christmas you read my fortune in the Tarot, and it has proved true. The obsession and the hatred of which you spoke have become terrible realities.”
“Making trouble for you and somebody near to you. Who is that?”
“I had forgotten that. I don’t know who it could be.”
“I do. My daughter Maria.”
“Oh yes; of course. Maria was to work with me on the manuscript, if I can get it.”
“That’s all about Maria?”
“Well, yes, it is. What else could there be?”
“God, Hollier, you are a fool. I remember your fortune well. Who is the Knave of Coins, the servant with a letter?”
“I don’t know. He hasn’t appeared yet. But the figure in your prediction that has brought me back to you is the Moon, the changeable woman, who speaks of danger. Who can that be but yourself? So naturally I turn to you for advice.”
“Did you look good at that card? The Moon, high in the sky, and she is both the Old Woman, the full moon, and the Virgin, the crescent moon, and neither of them is paying any attention to the wolf and the dog who are down on the earth barking at the Moon: and at the bottom of the card, under the earth, do you remember, there is the Cancer, and that is the earth spirit that governs the dark side of all the Moon sees, and the Cancer is many bad things—revenge and hate and self-destruction. Because it devours, you see; that is why the devouring disease bears its name. When I see the Moon card coming up, I always know that something bad could happen because of revenge and devouring hate and that it could ruin the person I am talking to. Now listen to me, Hollier, because I am going to tell you some things you won’t like, but I hope I can help you by telling you the truth.
“You have been hinting for more than an hour that as an experiment—just as a joke, just to see what happens—I might try one of those old Gypsy spells on your enemy. What old Gypsy spells? Do you know of any? You talk as if you knew much more about Gypsies than I do. I only know maybe a hundred Gypsies, and most of them are dead—killed by people like you who must always be modern and right. All that spell business is just to concentrate feeling.
“But a curse? That needs the strongest feeling. Suppose I sell you a curse? I don’t hate your enemy; he is nothing to me. So to curse him I have to be very well in with—What?—if I am to escape without harm to myself. Because What? is very terrible. What? does not deal in the Sweet Justice of civilized man, but in Balance, which is not nearly so much concerned with man, and may seem terrible and evil to him. You understand me? When Balance decides the time has come to settle the scales awful things happen. Much of what we do not understand is Balance at work. We attract what we are, you know, Hollier; we always get the dog or the fiddle that is right for us, even though we may not like it, and if we are proud Balance may be rough in showing us how weak we are. And the Lord of Balance is What?, and if I call down a curse just for your benefit, believe me, Balance must be satisfied, or I shall be in deep trouble. I do not think I want to stretch my credit with What? to oblige you, Hollier. I do not want to call on What?, who lives down there in the darkness where Cancer dwells, and whose army is all the creatures of the dark, and the spirits of the suicides and all the terrible forces, to get an old book for you. And do you know what frightens me about this talk we are having? It is your frivolity in asking such a thing of me. You don’t know what you are doing. You have the shocking frivolity of the modern, educated mind.”
Hollier was not taking this well. As Mamusia talked his face grew darker and darker until it was the colour people mean when they say a face is black; it was bloody from within. Now he faced her, and all the reasonable, professorial manner with which he had been talking for the past hour was gone. He looked terrible as I had never seen him before, and his voice was choked with passion.
“I am not frivolous. You cannot understand what I am, because you cannot know anything of intellectual passion—”
“Pride, Hollier, give it its real name.”
“Be silent! You have said all you have to say, which is No. Very well then, say no more. You may have it your own way. When I came here I probably did hope that somehow you might consent to use your powers for my sake. I took you for a phuri dai and a friend. Now I know how far your friendship goes, and I have revised my ideas about the extent of your wisdom. I am no worse off then when I came. Good afternoon.”
“Wait, Hollier, wait! You do not understand what danger you are in! You have not understood what I have been saying! It is the feeling that is the power of the curse. If I say to What? ‘My friend here feels very deeply about so-and-so; what will you do for him?’ I am only your messenger. To be the messenger I must have belief. You don’t need me for a curse; you have already cursed your enemy in your heart, and you have reached What? without me. Man, I fear for you! I have seen terrible hate before, but never in a man so stupid about himself as you are.”
“Now you tell me I can do it without you?”
“Yes, because you have pushed me to it.”
“So, listen to me, Madame Laoutaro: you have done one great thing for me this afternoon. I know now that I have both feeling and belief! I believe! Yes—I believe!”
“Oh God, Hollier my friend, I am in great distress for you! Maria, drive the professor home—and be very careful how you drive!”
I did not speak a word as I drove Hollier back to the gate of Spook. I had not spoken a word during his angry hour with Mamusia, though I was terrified by the awful feeling that mounted in that room, like a poison. What was there for me to say? As he got out of my car he slammed the door so hard I feared it might fall off.
(2)
THE NEXT DAY Hollier seemed calm, and said nothing to me about his row with Mamusia. Indeed, to judge from appearances, it affected him much less than it did me. I was being forced to come to new terms with myself. I had struggled hard for freedom from my Mother’s world, which I saw as a world of superstition, but I was being forced to a recognition that it was out of my
power to be wholly free. Indeed, I was beginning to think more kindly about superstition than I had done since the time, when I was about twelve, when I first became aware of the ambiguous place it had in the world in which I lived.
Everybody I knew at school was terribly hard on superstition, but I had only to watch them to see that all of them had some irrational prejudice. And where was I to draw the line between the special veneration some of the nuns had for particular saints, and the tricks the girls played to find out if their boy-friends loved them? Why was it all right to bribe St. Anthony of Padua with a candle to find you the spectacles you had mislaid but not all right to bribe The Little Flower to keep Sister St. Dominic from finding out you hadn’t done your homework? I despised superstition as loudly as anyone, and practised it in private, as did all my friends. The mind of man is naturally religious, we were taught; it is also naturally superstitious, I discovered.
It was this duality of mind, I suppose, that drew me to Hollier’s work of uncovering evidence of past belief and submerged wisdom. Like so many students I was looking for something that gave substance to the life I already possessed, or which it would be more honest to say, possessed me; I was happy and honoured to be his apprentice in this learned grubbing in the middens of supposedly outworn faith. Especially happy because it was recognized by the university as a scientific approach to cultural history.
But what was going on around me was getting uncomfortably near the bone of real superstition, or recognition that what I thought of as superstition might truly have some foundation in the processes of life. Long before Hollier told me he wanted me to take him to Mamusia again, I knew that what she had seen in the Tarot was manifesting itself in his life—and because in his, in mine as well. Growing difficulties and dissatisfaction with the way his work was going; the troublemaker?—it was plain enough to me that Urquhart McVarish was the source of the disquiet and that Hollier’s response was hatred—real hatred and not just the antagonism that is common enough in academic life. In the old expression, he was Cain Raised to get his hands on the Gryphius portfolio; the fact that he knew very little about what was in the letters merely served to persuade him that they were of the uttermost importance. What new light he expected on Rabelais and Paracelsus I could not guess; he dropped hints about Gnosticism, or some sort of crypto-protestantism, or mystical alchemy, about herbal cures, or new insights into the link between soul and body that were counterparts of the knowledge Ozy Froats was so patiently seeking. It seemed that he expected anything and everything if he could only get his hands on the letters that were tucked into the back flap of that leather portfolio. McVarish was thwarting him, and Cain was raised.
This at least had nothing to do with imagination. Urky was behaving in an intentionally irritating way, and betrayed that he knew what was in Hollier’s mind. When they met, as they sometimes did at faculty meetings or more rarely on social occasions, he was likely to be affectionate, saying, ‘How’s the work going, Clem? Well, I hope? Run across anything in your special line lately? I suppose it’s impossible to put your hand on anything really new?’
It was the sort of talk which, when it was said with one of Urky’s teasing smiles, was enough to make Hollier uncivil, and afterward, when he was talking to me, furious and abusive.
He was angry because Darcourt would not accuse Urky to his face, and threaten to put the police on him, which I could see plainly was not something Darcourt could do on wobbly evidence. All Darcourt knew was that Urky seemed to have borrowed a manuscript from Cornish, which could not now be traced, and it takes more than that to spur one academic to set the cops on another. Hollier, by the time he demanded that I take him to Mamusia, had grown thinner and more saturnine; feeding on his obsession. Chawing his own maw, like that Dragon in the Faerie Queene.
When Hollier told Mamusia he did not recognize the Knave of Coins, the unjust servant, I could not believe my ears. Parlabane was worse than ever, and his demands for money, which had been occasional before Christmas, were now weekly and sometimes more than weekly. He said he needed money to pay for the typing of his novel, but I couldn’t believe it, for he would take anything from two dollars to fifty, and when he had sponged from Hollier he would come to me and demand further tribute.
When I say ‘demand’ I mean it, because he was not an ordinary borrower; his words were civil enough but behind them I felt a threat, though what the threat might be I never found out—took care not to find out. He begged me with intensity, a suggestion that to refuse him would provoke more than just abuse; he seemed not far from violence. Would he have struck me? Yes, I know he would, and it would have been a terrible blow, for he was a very strong little man, and very angry, and I feared the anger even more than the pain.
So I kept up a modern woman’s pretence that I was acting from my own choice, however unwillingly; but not far below that I was simply a woman frightened by masculine strength and ferocity. He bullied money out of me, and I never reached the point of anger where I would rather run the risk of a blow than submit to further bullying.
He didn’t bully Hollier. Nobody could have done that. Instead he worked on the loyalty men feel for old friends who are down on their luck, which I suppose has at least one of its roots in guilt. There but for the Grace of God…; that nonsense. He could whine ten dollars out of Hollier and within thirty seconds be in the outer room twisting another ten out of me. It was an astonishing performance.
His novel was to him what the Gryphius MSS were to Hollier. He lugged masses of typescript around in one of those strong plastic bags you get at supermarkets. There must have been at least a thousand pages of that typescript, for the bag was full even when Parlabane at last handed Hollier a wad which was, he said, almost a complete and perfect copy of the book. He hinted, but did not actually say, that a typist somewhere had the final version, and was making copies for publishers, and that what he still had in the bag was a collection of notes, drafts, and unsatisfactory passages.
Parlabane made rather a ceremony of handing over his typescript, but after he had gone, Hollier glanced at it, retreated in dismay, and asked me to read it for him and make a report, and perhaps to offer some criticism that he could pass on as his own. Whether Parlabane ever suspected this deceit I do not know, but I took care that he never found me grappling with his rat’s-nest of fiction.
Some typescripts are as hard to read as bad handwriting, and Parlabane’s was one of these. It was on that cheap yellow paper that does not stand up to correction in ink and pencil, to frequent crossings-out, and especially to that pawing a book undergoes when it is in the writing process. Parlabane’s novel, Be Not Another, was a limp, dog-eared mess, unpleasing to the touch, ringed by glasses and cups, and smelly from too much handling by a man whose whole way of life was smelly.
I read it, though I had to flog myself to the work. It was about a young man who was studying philosophy at a university that was obviously ours, in a college that was obviously Spook. His parents were duds, unfit to have such a son. He had long philosophical pow-wows with his professors and friends, and these gurgled with such words as ‘teleological’ and ‘epistemological’, and there was much extremely fine-honed stuff about scepticism and the whole of life being a can of worms. There was a best friend called Featherstone, who seemed to be Hollier; he was just bright enough to play straight man to the Hero, who of course was Parlabane himself. (He had no name and was referred to throughout as He and Him in italics.) There was a clown friend called Billy Duff, or Plum Duff, who never got any good lines; this was undoubtedly Darcourt. There were sexual scenes with girls who were too stupid to recognize what an intellectual bonanza He was, and they either refused to go to bed with Him, or did and failed to come up to expectation. Light dawned when He went to another university for advanced study and met a young man who was like a Greek God—no, he did not deny himself that cliché—and with the G.G. He was fulfilled spiritually and physically.
He denied himself nothing. Everybody wrangl
ed far too much and didn’t do nearly enough—even in the sexy parts. They weren’t much fun except with the G.G. and those encounters were described so rhapsodically that it was hard to figure out what was happening except in a general way, because they talked so learnedly about it.
I cannot pretend to be a critic of modern fiction; for the moment, Rabelais was in the front of my mind; but anyhow I question whether this thing of Parlabane’s was really a modern novel or perhaps a novel at all. It just seemed to be a discouragingly dull muddle, and so I told Hollier.
“It’s his life, though not nearly so interesting as what he told me in The Rude Plenty; everything is seen from the inside, so microscopically that there’s no sense of narrative; it just belly-flops along, like a beached whale.”
“Doesn’t it come to anything at all?”
“Oh yes; after much struggle He finds God, who is the sole reality, and instead of scorning the world He learns to pity it.”
“Very decent of him. Plenty of caricatures of his contemporaries, I suppose?”
“I wouldn’t recognize them.”
“Of course; before your time. But I dare say there are some recognizable people who wouldn’t be too happy to have their youthful exploits recalled.”
“There’s scandalous stuff, but it isn’t described with much selection or point.”
“I thought we would all be in it; he made enemies easily.”
“You don’t come off too badly, but he’s rather hard on Professor Darcourt; he’s the butt, who thinks he has found God, but of course it isn’t the real eighteen-karat philosopher’s God that He finds after his spiritual pilgrimage. Just a peanut God for tiny minds. But the queerest thing is that he hasn’t a scrap of humour in it. Parlabane’s a lively talker, but he seems to have no comic perception of himself.”
“Would you expect it? You, a scholar of Rabelais? What he has is wit, not humour, and wit alone never turns inward. Wit is something you possess, but humour is something that possesses you. I’m not surprised that Darcourt and I appear in a poorish light. No such bitter judge of old friends as a brilliant failure.”