“I suppose it’s part of that human condition silly-clever people are always grizzling about,” said Liesl. “If you want truth, I suppose you must shoot the film from God’s point of view and with God’s point of focus, whatever it may be. And I’ll bet the result won’t look much like cinéma vérité. But I don’t think either you or Jurgen are up to that job, Harry.”
“There is no God,” said Kinghovn; “and I’ve never felt the least necessity to invent one.”
“Probably that is why you have spent your life as a technician; a very fine one, but a technician,” said Lind. “It’s only by inventing a few gods that we get that uneasy sense that something is laughing at us which is one of the paths to faith.”
“Eisengrim talks a lot about God,” said Ingestree, “and God seems still to be a tremendous reality to him. But there’s no question of God laughing. The bottle in the smoke—that’s what he was. I really must read the Bible some time; there are such marvellous goodies in it, just waiting to be picked up. But even these Bibles Designed to be Read as Literature are so bloody thick! I suppose one could browse, but when I browse I never seem to find anything except tiresome stud-book stuff about Aminadab begetting Jonadab and that kind of thing.”
“We’ve only had part of the story,” I said. “Magnus has carefully pointed out to us that he is looking backward on his early life as a man who has changed decisively in the last forty years. What’s his point of focus?”
“Nobody changes so decisively that they lose all sense of the reality of their youth,” Lind said. “The days of childhood are always the most vivid. He has let us think that his childhood made him a villain. So I think we must assume that he is a villain now. A quiescent villain, but not an extinct one.”
“I think that’s a lot of romantic crap,” said Kinghovn. “I’m sick of all the twaddle about childhood. You should have seen me as a child; a flaxen-haired little darling playing in my mother’s garden in Aalborg. Where is he now? Here I sit, a very well-smoked bottle like our friend who has gone to bed. If I met that flaxen-haired child now I would probably give him a good clout over the ear. I’ve never much liked kids. Which was the greater use in the world? That child, so sweet and pure, or me, as I am now, not sweet and damned well not pure?”
“That’s a dangerous question for a man who doesn’t believe in God,” I said, “because there is no answer to it without God. I could answer it for you, if I thought you were open to anything but drink and photography, Harry, but I’m not going to waste precious argument. What I want is to defend Eisengrim against the charge of being a villain, now or at any other time. You must look at his history in the light of myth—”
“Aha, I thought we should get to myth in time,” said Liesl.
“Well, myth explains much that is otherwise inexplicable, just because myth is a boiling down of universal experience. Eisengrim’s story of his childhood and youth is as new to me as it is to you, although I knew him when he was very young—”
“Yes, and you were an influence in making him what he is,” said Liesl.
“Because you taught him conjuring?” said Lind.
“No, no; Ramsay was personally responsible for the premature birth of little Paul Dempster, and responsible also for Paul’s mother’s madness, which marked him so terribly,” said Liesl.
I gaped at her in astonishment. “This is what comes of confiding in women! Not only can they not keep a secret; they re-tell it in an utterly false way! I must put this matter right. It is true that Paul Dempster was born prematurely because his mother was hit on the head by a snowball. It is true that the snowball was meant to hit me, and it hit her instead because I dodged it. It is true that the blow on the head and the birth of the child seemed to precipitate an instability that sometimes amounted to madness. And it is true that I felt some responsibility in the matter. But that was long ago and far away, in a country which you would scarcely recognize as modern Canada. Liesl, I blush for you!”
“What a lovely old-fashioned thing to say, dear Ramsay. Thank you very much for blushing for me, because I long ago lost the trick of blushing for myself. But I didn’t spill the beans about you just to make you jump. I wanted to make the point that you are a figure in this story, too. A very strange figure, just as odd as any in your legends. You precipitated, by a single action—and who could think you guilty just because you jumped out of the way of a snowball (who, that is, but a grim Calvinist like yourself, Ramsay)—everything that we have been hearing from Magnus during these nights past. Are you a precipitating figure in Magnus’s story, or he in yours? Who could comb it all out? But get on with your myth, dear man. I want to hear what lovely twist you will give to what Magnus has told us.”
“It is not a twist, but an explication. Magnus has made it amply clear that he was brought up in a strict, unrelenting form of puritanism. In consequence he still blames himself whenever he can, and because he knows the dramatic quality of the role, he likes to play the villain. But as for his keeping Willard as a sort of hateful pet, in order to jeer at him, I simply don’t believe it was like that at all. What is the mythical element in his story? Simply the very old tale of the man who is in search of his soul, and who must struggle with a monster to secure it. All myth and Christianity—which has never been able to avoid the mythical pull of human experience—are full of similar instances, and people all around us are living out this basic human pattern every day. In the study of hagiography—”
“I knew you’d get to saints before long,” said Liesl.
“In the study of hagiography we have legends and all those splendid pictures of saints who killed dragons, and it doesn’t take much penetration to know that the dragons represent not simply evil in the world but their personal evil, as well. Of course, being saints, they are said to have killed their dragons, but we know that dragons are not killed; at best they are tamed, and kept on the chain. In the pictures we see St George, and my special favourite, St Catherine, triumphing over the horrid beast, who lies with his tongue out, looking as if he thoroughly regretted his mistaken course in life. But I am strongly of the opinion that St George and St Catherine did not kill those dragons, for then they would have been wholly good, and inhuman, and useless and probably great sources of mischief, as one-sided people always are. No, they kept the dragons as pets. Because they were Christians, and because Christianity enjoins us to seek only the good and to have nothing whatever to do with evil, they doubtless rubbed it into the dragons that it was uncommonly broadminded and decent of them to let the dragons live at all. They may even have given the dragon occasional treats: you may breathe a little fire, they might say, or you may leer desirously at that virgin yonder, but if you make one false move you’ll wish you hadn’t. You must be a thoroughly submissive dragon, and remember who’s boss. That’s the Christian way of doing things, and that’s what Magnus did with Willard. He didn’t kill Willard. The essence of Willard lives with him today. But he got the better of Willard. Didn’t you notice how he was laughing as he said good-night?”