Not, however, when I wanted to think about the Devil. It was too romantic, too Germanic altogether. As I lay in my big bed, looking out of the windows at the mountains on which moonlight was falling, what could be easier than to accept an operatic Devil, up to every sort of high-class deception, and always defeated at the end of the story by the power of sheer simple-minded goodness? All my life I have been a keen operagoer and playgoer, and in the theatre I am willing to accept the notion that although the Devil is a very clever fellow, he is no match for some ninny who is merely good. And what is this goodness? A squalid, know-nothing acceptance of things as they are, an operatic version of the dream which, in North America, means Mom and apple pie. My whole life had been a protest against this world, or the smudged, grey version of it into which I had been born in my rural Canada.
No, no; that Devil would never do. But what else is there? Theologians have not been so successful in their definitions of the Devil as they have been in their definitions of God. The words of the Westminster Confession, painstakingly learned by heart as a necessity of Presbyterian boyhood, still seemed, after many wanderings, to have the ring of indisputable authority. God was infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory. Excellent, even if one is somewhat seduced by the high quality of the prose of 1648. What else? Most loving, most gracious, merciful, longsuffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin: the rewarder of those that diligently seek him. Aha, but where does one seek God? In Deptford, where Eisengrim and I were born, and might still be living if, in my case, I had not gone off to the First World War, and in his case, if he had not been abducted by a mountebank in a travelling show? I had sought God in my lifelong, unlikely (for a Canadian schoolmaster) preoccupation with that fantastic collection of wise men, virtuous women, thinkers, doers, organizers, contemplatives, crack-brained simpletons, and mad mullahs that are called Saints. But all I had found in that lifelong study was a complexity that brought God no nearer. Had Eisengrim sought God at all? How could I know? How can anybody know what another man does in this most secret part of his life? What else had I been taught in that profound and knotty definition? That God was most just and terrible in his judgements, hating all sin, one who will by no means clear the guilty. Noble words, and (only slightly cloaked by their nobility) a terrifying concept. And why should it not be terrifying? A little terror, in my view is good for the soul, when it is terror in the face of a noble object.
The Devil, however, seems never to have been so splendidly mapped and defined. Nor can you spy him simply by turning a fine definition of God inside out; he is something decidedly more subtle than just God’s opposite.
Is the Devil, then, sin? No, though sin is very useful to him; anything we may reasonably call sin involves some personal choice. It is flattering to be asked to make important choices. The Devil loves the time of indecision.
What about evil, then? Is the Devil the origin and ruler of that great realm of manifestly dreadful and appalling things which are not, so far as we can determine, anybody’s fault or the consequences of any sin? Of the cancer wards, and the wards for children born misshapen and mindless? I have had reason to visit such places—asylums for the insane in particular—and I do not think I am fanciful or absurdly sensitive in saying that I have felt evil to be palpable there, in spite of whatever could be done to lessen it.
These are evil things within my knowledge: I am certain there are worse things I have never encountered. And how constant this evil is—Let mankind laboriously suppress leprosy, and tuberculosis rages: when tuberculosis is chained, cancer rushes to take its place. One might almost conclude that such evils were necessities of our collective life. If the Devil is the inspirer and ruler of evil, he is a serious adversary indeed, and I cannot understand why so many people become jokey and facetious at the mention of his name.
Where is the Devil? Was Eisengrim, whose intuitions and directness of observation in all things concerning himself I had come to respect, right in saying the Devil stood beside him when Willard the Wizard solicited him to an action which, under the circumstances, I should certainly have to call evil? Both God and the Devil wish to intervene in the world, and the Devil chooses his moments shrewdly.
What had Eisengrim told us? That on 30 August 1918, he had descended into hell, and did not rise again for seven years? Allowing for his wish to startle us, and his taste for what a severe critic might call flashy rhetoric, could what he said be discounted?
It was always a mistake, in my experience, to discount Magnus Eisengrim. The only thing to do was to wait for the remainder of his narrative, and hope that it would make it possible for me to reach a conclusion. And that would be my much-desired document.
6
I knew nothing about filming, but Land’s subordinates told me that his methods were not ordinary. He was extremely deliberate, and because he liked careful rehearsal and would not work at night he semed to take a lot of time. But as he wasted none of this time, his films were not as devastatingly expensive as impatient people feared they might be. He was a master of his craft. I did not presume to question him about it, but I sensed that he attached more importance to Eisengrim’s story than ordinary curiosity would explain, and that the dinners and discussions at Sorgenfrei fed the fire of his creation. Certainly he and Kinghovn and Ingestree were anxious for more as we settled down in the library on the third night. Liesl had seen to it that there was plenty of brandy, for although Eisengrim drank very little, and I was too keen on my document to drink much, Lind loved to tipple as he listened and had a real Scandinavian head; brandy never changed him in the least. Kinghovn was a heavy drinker, and Ingestree, a fatty, could not resist anything that could be put into his mouth, be it food, drink, or cigar.
Magnus knew they were waiting, and after he had toyed with them for a few minutes, and appeared to be leading them into general conversation, he yielded to Lind’s strong urging that he go on with his story or—as Ingestree now quite seriously called it—”the subtext”.
“I told you I was on a train, but didn’t know it. I think that is true, but I must have had some notion of what was happening to me, because I had heard the whistle, and felt the motion, and of course I had seen trains. But I was so wretched that I couldn’t reason, or be sure of anything, except that I was in close quarters in pitchy darkness. My mind was on a different unhappiness. I knew that when I was in trouble I should pray, and God would surely help me. But I couldn’t pray, for two reasons. First, I couldn’t kneel, and to me prayer without kneeling was unknown. Second, if I had been able to kneel I could not have dared to do it, because I was horribly aware that what Willard had done to me in that disgusting privy had been done while I was in a kneeling posture. I assure you, however strange it may seem, that I didn’t know what he had done, but I felt strongly that it was a blasphemy against kneeling, and if I knew nothing of sex I certainly knew a lot about blasphemy. I guessed I might be on a train, but I knew for a certainty that I had angered God. I had been involved in what was very likely the Sin against the Holy Ghost. Can you imagine what that meant to me? I had never known such desolation. I had wept in the privy and now I could weep no more. Weeping meant sound, and I had a confused idea that although God certainly knew about me, and undoubtedly had terrible plans for me, He might be waiting for me to betray myself by sound before He went to work on me. So I kept painfully still.