Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In 1897, after spending five years at St Thomas’s Hospital I passed the
examinations which enabled me to practise medicine. While still a
medical student I had published a novel called _Liza of Lambeth_ which
caused a mild sensation, and on the strength of that I rashly decided
to abandon doctoring and earn my living as a writer; so, as soon as I
was “qualified”, I set out for Spain and spent the best part of a year
in Seville. I amused myself hugely and wrote a bad novel. Then I
returned to London and, with a friend of my own age, took and furnished
a small flat near Victoria Station. A maid of all work cooked for us
and kept the flat neat and tidy. My friend was at the Bar, and so I had
the day (and the flat) to myself and my work. During the next six years
I wrote several novels and a number of plays. Only one of these novels
had any success, but even that failed to make the stir that my first
one had made. I could get no manager to take my plays. At last, in
desperation, I sent one, which I called _A Man of Honour_, to the Stage
Society, which gave two performances, one on Sunday night, another on
Monday afternoon, of plays which, unsuitable for the commercial
theatre, were considered of sufficient merit to please an intellectual
audience. As every one knows, it was the Stage Society that produced
the early plays of Bernard Shaw. The committee accepted _A Man of
Honour_, and W.L. Courtney, who was a member of it, thought well enough
of my crude play to publish it in _The Fortnightly Review_, of which he
was then editor. It was a feather in my cap.
Though these efforts of mine brought me very little money, they
attracted not a little attention, and I made friends. I was looked upon
as a promising young writer and, I think I may say it without vanity,
was accepted as a member of the intelligentsia, an honourable condition
which, some years later, when I became a popular writer of light
comedies, I lost; and have never since regained. I was invited to
literary parties and to parties given by women of rank and fashion who
thought it behoved them to patronise the arts. An unattached and fairly
presentable young man is always in demand. I lunched out and dined out.
Since I could not afford to take cabs, when I dined out, in tails and a
white tie, as was then the custom, I went and came back by bus. I was
asked to spend week-ends in the country. They were something of a trial
on account of the tips you had to give to the butler and to the footman
who brought you your morning tea. He unpacked your gladstone bag, and
you were uneasily aware that your well-worn pyjamas and modest toilet
articles had made an unfavourable impression upon him. For all that, I
found life pleasant and I enjoyed myself. There seemed no reason why I
should not go on indefinitely in the same way, bringing out a novel
once a year (which seldom earned more than the small advance the
publisher had given me but which was on the whole respectably
reviewed), going to more and more parties, making more and more
friends. It was all very nice, but I couldn’t see that it was leading
me anywhere. I was thirty. I was in a rut. I felt I must get out of it.
It did not take me long to make up my mind. I told the friend with whom
I shared the flat that I wanted to be rid of it and go abroad. He could
not keep it by himself, but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman
who wished to install his mistress in it, and was prepared to take it
off our hands. We sold the furniture for what it could fetch, and
within a month I was on my way to Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel
on the Left Bank.
A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough to make friends
with a young painter who had a studio in the Rue Campagne Première. His
name was Gerald Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a painter,
for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge. He was highly talented,
abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first
made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently
been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could
not make head or tail of them. Without much searching, I found an
apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort. It
had two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven hundred francs a year,
which was then twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such
furniture and household utensils as were essential, and the _concierge_
told me of a woman who would come in for half a day and make my _café
au lait_ in the morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled down and set
to work on still another novel. Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly
took me to a restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d’Odessa, near
the Gare Montparnasse, where a number of artists were in the habit of
dining; and from then on I dined there every night. I have described
the place elsewhere, and in some detail in the novel to which these
pages are meant to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more
about it. As a rule, the same people came in every night, but now and
then others came, perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times. We
were apt to look upon them as interlopers, and I don’t think we made
them particularly welcome. It was thus that I first met Arnold Bennett
and Clive Bell. One of these casual visitors was Aleister Crowley. He
was spending the winter in Paris. I took an immediate dislike to him,
but he interested and amused me. He was a great talker and he talked
uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome,
but when I knew him he had put on weight, and his hair was thinning. He
had fine eyes and a way, whether natural or acquired I do not know, of
so focusing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind
you. He was a fake, but not entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won
his chess blue and was esteemed the best whist player of his time. He
was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had
actually done some of the things he boasted of. As a mountaineer, he
had made an ascent of K2 in the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain
in India, and he made it without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders
of oxygen and so forth, which render the endeavours of the mountaineers
of the present day more likely to succeed. He did not reach the top,
but got nearer to it than anyone had done before.
Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published
sumptuously at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his
verse is not entirely without merit. He had been greatly influenced by
Swinburne and Robert Browning. He was grossly, but not unintelligently,
imitative. As you flip through the pages you may well read a stanza
which, if you came across it in a volume of Swinburne’s, you would
accept without question as the work of the master. “_It’s rather hard,
isn’t it, Sir, to make sense of it?_” If you were shown this line and
asked what poet had written it, I think you would be inclined to say,
Robert Browning. You would be wrong. It was written by Aleister
Crowley.
At the time I knew him he was dabbling in Satanism, magic and the
occult. There was just then something of a vogue in Paris for that sort
of thing, occasioned, I surmise, by the interest that was still taken
in a book of Huysmans’s, _Là Bas_. Crowley told fantastic stories of
his experiences, but it was hard to say whether he was telling the
truth or merely pulling your leg. During that winter I saw him several
times, but never after I left Paris to return to London. Once, long
afterwards, I received a telegram from him which ran as follows:
“Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving.
Aleister Crowley.” I did not do so, and he lived on for many
disgraceful years.
I was glad to get back to London. My old friend had by then rooms in
Pall Mall, and I was able to take a bedroom in the same building and
use his sitting-room to work in. _The Magician_ was published in 1908,
so I suppose it was written during the first six months of 1907. I do
not remember how I came to think that Aleister Crowley might serve as
the model for the character whom I called Oliver Haddo; nor, indeed,
how I came to think of writing that particular novel at all. When, a
little while ago, my publisher expressed a wish to reissue it, I felt
that, before consenting to this, I really should read it again. Nearly
fifty years had passed since I had done so, and I had completely
forgotten it. Some authors enjoy reading their old works; some cannot
bear to. Of these I am. When I have corrected the proofs of a book, I
have finished with it for good and all. I am impatient when people
insist on talking to me about it; I am glad if they like it, but do not
much care if they don’t. I am no more interested in it than in a
worn-out suit of clothes that I have given away. It was thus with
disinclination that I began to read _The Magician_. It held my
interest, as two of my early novels, which for the same reason I have
been obliged to read, did not. One, indeed, I simply could not get
through. Another had to my mind some good dramatic scenes, but the
humour filled me with mortification, and I should have been ashamed to
see it republished. As I read _The Magician_, I wondered how on earth I
could have come by all the material concerning the black arts which I
wrote of. I must have spent days and days reading in the library of the
British Museum. The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort of
style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to the subject; and
there are a great many more adverbs and adjectives than I should use
today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the _écriture artiste_
which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned,
and unwisely sought to imitate them.
Though Aleister Crowley served, as I have said, as the model for Oliver
Haddo, it is by no means a portrait of him. I made my character more
striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley
ever was. I gave him magical powers that Crowley, though he claimed
them, certainly never possessed. Crowley, however, recognized himself
in the creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page
review of the novel in _Vanity Fair_, which he signed “Oliver Haddo”. I
did not read it, and wish now that I had. I daresay it was a pretty
piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably
verbose.
I do not remember what success, if any, my novel had when it was
published, and I did not bother about it much, for by then a great
change had come into my life. The manager of the Court Theatre, one
Otho Stuart, had brought out a play which failed to please, and he
could not immediately get the cast he wanted for the next play he had
in mind to produce. He had read one of mine, and formed a very poor
opinion of it; but he was in a quandary, and it occurred to him that it
might just serve to keep his theatre open for a few weeks, by the end
of which the actors he wanted for the play he had been obliged to
postpone would be at liberty. He put mine on. It was an immediate
success. The result of this was that in a very little while other
managers accepted the plays they had consistently refused, and I had
four running in London at the same time. I, who for ten years had
earned an average of one hundred pounds a year, found myself earning
several hundred pounds a week. I made up my mind to abandon the writing
of novels for the rest of my life. I did not know that this was
something out of my control and that when the urge to write a novel
seized me, I should be able to do nothing but submit. Five years later,
the urge came and, refusing to write any more plays for the time, I
started upon the longest of all my novels. I called it _Of Human
Bondage_.
The Magician
Chapter I
Arthur Burdon and Dr Porhoët walked in silence. They had lunched at a
restaurant in the Boulevard Saint Michel, and were sauntering now in
the gardens of the Luxembourg. Dr Porhoët walked with stooping
shoulders, his hands behind him. He beheld the scene with the eyes of
the many painters who have sought by means of the most charming garden
in Paris to express their sense of beauty. The grass was scattered with
the fallen leaves, but their wan decay little served to give a touch of
nature to the artifice of all besides. The trees were neatly surrounded
by bushes, and the bushes by trim beds of flowers. But the trees grew
without abandonment, as though conscious of the decorative scheme they
helped to form. It was autumn, and some were leafless already. Many of
the flowers were withered. The formal garden reminded one of a light
woman, no longer young, who sought, with faded finery, with powder and
paint, to make a brave show of despair. It had those false, difficult
smiles of uneasy gaiety, and the pitiful graces which attempt a
fascination that the hurrying years have rendered vain.
Dr Porhoët drew more closely round his fragile body the heavy cloak
which even in summer he could not persuade himself to discard. The best
part of his life had been spent in Egypt, in the practice of medicine,
and the frigid summers of Europe scarcely warmed his blood. His memory
flashed for an instant upon those multi-coloured streets of Alexandria;
and then, like a homing bird, it flew to the green woods and the
storm-beaten coasts of his native Brittany. His brown eyes were veiled
with sudden melancholy.
“Let us wait here for a moment,” he said.
They took two straw-bottomed chairs and sat near the octagonal water
which completes with its fountain of Cupids the enchanting
artificiality of the Luxembourg. The sun shone more kindly now, and the
trees which framed the scene were golden and lovely. A balustrade of
stone gracefully enclosed the space, and the flowers, freshly bedded,
were very gay. In one corner they could see the squat, quaint towers of
Saint Sulpice, and on the other side the uneven roofs of the Boulevard
Saint Michel.
The palace was grey and solid. Nurses, some in the white caps of their
native province, others with the satin streamers of the _nounou_,
marched sedately two by two, wheeling perambulators and talking.
Brightly dressed children trundled hoops or whipped a stubborn top. As
he watched them, Dr Porhoët’s lips broke into a smile, and it was so
tender that his thin face, sallow from long exposure to subtropical
suns, was transfigured. He no longer struck you merely as an
insignificant little man with hollow cheeks and a thin grey beard; for
the weariness of expression which was habitual to him vanished before
the charming sympathy of his smile. His sunken eyes glittered with a
kindly but ironic good-humour. Now passed a guard in the romantic cloak
of a brigand in comic opera and a peaked cap like that of an
_alguacil_. A group of telegraph boys in blue stood round a painter,
who was making a sketch—notwithstanding half-frozen fingers. Here and
there, in baggy corduroys, tight jackets, and wide-brimmed hats,
strolled students who might have stepped from the page of Murger’s
immortal romance. But the students now are uneasy with the fear of
ridicule, and more often they walk in bowler hats and the neat coats of
the _boulevardier_.
Dr Porhoët spoke English fluently, with scarcely a trace of foreign
accent, but with an elaboration which suggested that he had learned the
language as much from study of the English classics as from
conversation.
“And how is Miss Dauncey?” he asked, turning to his friend.
Arthur Burdon smiled.
“Oh, I expect she’s all right. I’ve not seen her today, but I’m going
to tea at the studio this afternoon, and we want you to dine with us at
the Chien Noir.”
“I shall be much pleased. But do you not wish to be by yourselves?”
“She met me at the station yesterday, and we dined together. We talked
steadily from half past six till midnight.”
“Or, rather, she talked and you listened with the delighted attention
of a happy lover.”
Arthur Burdon had just arrived in Paris. He was a surgeon on the staff
of St Luke’s, and had come ostensibly to study the methods of the
French operators; but his real object was certainly to see Margaret
Dauncey. He was furnished with introductions from London surgeons of
repute, and had already spent a morning at the Hôtel Dieu, where the
operator, warned that his visitor was a bold and skilful surgeon, whose
reputation in England was already considerable, had sought to dazzle
him by feats that savoured almost of legerdemain. Though the hint of
charlatanry in the Frenchman’s methods had not escaped Arthur Burdon’s
shrewd eyes, the audacious sureness of his hand had excited his
enthusiasm. During luncheon he talked of nothing else, and Dr Porhoët,
drawing upon his memory, recounted the more extraordinary operations
that he had witnessed in Egypt.
He had known Arthur Burdon ever since he was born, and indeed had
missed being present at his birth only because the Khedive Ismaïl had
summoned him unexpectedly to Cairo. But the Levantine merchant who was
Arthur’s father had been his most intimate friend, and it was with
singular pleasure that Dr Porhoët saw the young man, on his advice,
enter his own profession and achieve a distinction which himself had
never won.
Though too much interested in the characters of the persons whom chance
threw in his path to have much ambition on his own behalf, it pleased
him to see it in others. He observed with satisfaction the pride which
Arthur took in his calling and the determination, backed by his
confidence and talent, to become a master of his art. Dr Porhoët knew
that a diversity of interests, though it adds charm to a man’s
personality, tends to weaken him. To excel one’s fellows it is needful
to be circumscribed. He did not regret, therefore, that Arthur in many
ways was narrow. Letters and the arts meant little to him. Nor would he
trouble himself with the graceful trivialities which make a man a good
talker. In mixed company he was content to listen silently to others,
and only something very definite to say could tempt him to join in the
general conversation. He worked very hard, operating, dissecting, or
lecturing at his hospital, and took pains to read every word, not only
in English, but in French and German, which was published concerning
his profession. Whenever he could snatch a free day he spent it on the
golf-links of Sunningdale, for he was an eager and a fine player.
But at the operating-table Arthur was different. He was no longer the
awkward man of social intercourse, who was sufficiently conscious of
his limitations not to talk of what he did not understand, and sincere
enough not to express admiration for what he did not like. Then, on the
other hand, a singular exhilaration filled him; he was conscious of his
power, and he rejoiced in it. No unforeseen accident was able to
confuse him. He seemed to have a positive instinct for operating, and
his hand and his brain worked in a manner that appeared almost
automatic. He never hesitated, and he had no fear of failure. His
success had been no less than his courage, and it was plain that soon
his reputation with the public would equal that which he had already
won with the profession.
Dr Porhoët had been making listless patterns with his stick upon the
gravel, and now, with that charming smile of his, turned to Arthur.
“I never cease to be astonished at the unexpectedness of human nature,”
he remarked. “It is really very surprising that a man like you should
fall so deeply in love with a girl like Margaret Dauncey.”
Arthur made no reply, and Dr Porhoët, fearing that his words might
offend, hastened to explain.
“You know as well as I do that I think her a very charming young
person. She has beauty and grace and sympathy. But your characters are
more different than chalk and cheese. Notwithstanding your birth in the
East and your boyhood spent amid the very scenes of the Thousand and
One Nights, you are the most matter-of-fact creature I have ever come
across.”
“I see no harm in your saying insular,” smiled Arthur. “I confess that
I have no imagination and no sense of humour. I am a plain, practical
man, but I can see to the end of my nose with extreme clearness.
Fortunately it is rather a long one.”
“One of my cherished ideas is that it is impossible to love without
imagination.”
Again Arthur Burdon made no reply, but a curious look came into his
eyes as he gazed in front of him. It was the look which might fill the
passionate eyes of a mystic when he saw in ecstasy the Divine Lady of
his constant prayers.
“But Miss Dauncey has none of that narrowness of outlook which, if you
forgive my saying so, is perhaps the secret of your strength. She has a
delightful enthusiasm for every form of art. Beauty really means as
much to her as bread and butter to the more soberly-minded. And she
takes a passionate interest in the variety of life.”
“It is right that Margaret should care for beauty, since there is
beauty in every inch of her,” answered Arthur.
He was too reticent to proceed to any analysis of his feelings; but he
knew that he had cared for her first on account of the physical
perfection which contrasted so astonishingly with the countless
deformities in the study of which his life was spent. But one phrase
escaped him almost against his will.
“The first time I saw her I felt as though a new world had opened to my
ken.”
The divine music of Keats’s lines rang through Arthur’s remark, and to
the Frenchman’s mind gave his passion a romantic note that foreboded
future tragedy. He sought to dispel the cloud which his fancy had cast
upon the most satisfactory of love affairs.
“You are very lucky, my friend. Miss Margaret admires you as much as
you adore her. She is never tired of listening to my prosy stories of
your childhood in Alexandria, and I’m quite sure that she will make you
the most admirable of wives.”
“You can’t be more sure than I am,” laughed Arthur.
He looked upon himself as a happy man. He loved Margaret with all his
heart, and he was confident in her great affection for him. It was
impossible that anything should arise to disturb the pleasant life
which they had planned together. His love cast a glamour upon his work,
and his work, by contrast, made love the more entrancing.
“We’re going to fix the date of our marriage now,” he said. “I’m buying
furniture already.”
“I think only English people could have behaved so oddly as you, in
postponing your marriage without reason for two mortal years.”
“You see, Margaret was ten when I first saw her, and only seventeen
when I asked her to marry me. She thought she had reason to be grateful
to me and would have married me there and then. But I knew she hankered
after these two years in Paris, and I didn’t feel it was fair to bind
her to me till she had seen at least something of the world. And she
seemed hardly ready for marriage, she was growing still.”
“Did I not say that you were a matter-of-fact young man?” smiled Dr
Porhoët.
“And it’s not as if there had been any doubt about our knowing our
minds. We both cared, and we had a long time before us. We could afford
to wait.”
At that moment a man strolled past them, a big stout fellow, showily
dressed in a check suit; and he gravely took off his hat to Dr Porhoët.
The doctor smiled and returned the salute.
“Who is your fat friend?” asked Arthur.
“That is a compatriot of yours. His name is Oliver Haddo.”
“Art-student?” inquired Arthur, with the scornful tone he used when
referring to those whose walk in life was not so practical as his own.
“Not exactly. I met him a little while ago by chance. When I was
getting together the material for my little book on the old alchemists
I read a great deal at the library of the Arsenal, which, you may have
heard, is singularly rich in all works dealing with the occult
sciences.”
Burden’s face assumed an expression of amused disdain. He could not
understand why Dr Porhoët occupied his leisure with studies so
profitless. He had read his book, recently published, on the more
famous of the alchemists; and, though forced to admire the profound
knowledge upon which it was based, he could not forgive the waste of
time which his friend might have expended more usefully on topics of
pressing moment.
“Not many people study in that library,” pursued the doctor, “and I
soon knew by sight those who were frequently there. I saw this
gentleman every day. He was immersed in strange old books when I
arrived early in the morning, and he was reading them still when I
left, exhausted. Sometimes it happened that he had the volumes I asked
for, and I discovered that he was studying the same subjects as myself.
His appearance was extraordinary, but scarcely sympathetic; so, though
I fancied that he gave me opportunities to address him, I did not avail
myself of them. One day, however, curiously enough, I was looking up
some point upon which it seemed impossible to find authorities. The
librarian could not help me, and I had given up the search, when this
person brought me the very book I needed. I surmised that the librarian
had told him of my difficulty. I was very grateful to the stranger. We
left together that afternoon, and our kindred studies gave us a common
topic of conversation. I found that his reading was extraordinarily
wide, and he was able to give me information about works which I had
never even heard of. He had the advantage over me that he could
apparently read, Hebrew as well as Arabic, and he had studied the
Kabbalah in the original.”
“And much good it did him, I have no doubt,” said Arthur. “And what is
he by profession?”
Dr Porhoët gave a deprecating smile.
“My dear fellow, I hardly like to tell you. I tremble in every limb at
the thought of your unmitigated scorn.”
“Well?”
“You know, Paris is full of queer people. It is the chosen home of
every kind of eccentricity. It sounds incredible in this year of grace,
but my friend Oliver Haddo claims to be a magician. I think he is quite
serious.”
“Silly ass!” answered Arthur with emphasis.