“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 gray satin sheen. Out in midstream there were long low banks of mist. As we watched, he called. 'Horer 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 standing legs astride, his staff in his hand, biblically. There was silence. A black silhouette in the glittering current. Whistles and the sough of wings as a flock of widgeon flew overhead.
“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 flashed in on me, almost like some reflection of the illumination that was flashing in on 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, behaviors, 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 of terrible light all our explanations, all our classifications and derivations, our etiologies, 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 vigor, 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. An ultimate, a metaphysical, I-do-not-know. For me, too, it revealed everything. 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 Ragnar. 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 offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any, for there are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted. And so I returned to France.”
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 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 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 out of her real self, reinforcing the impression I had had throughout: that the story of Seidevarre was as new to her as it was to me. It was as if she had become another guest, an older friend of the house than myself, but still a guest; and was trying, just as I was, to assess the meaning of the parable.