The MagicianMaugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset)
General
The Magician
Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset)
Magic -- Fiction; Paris (France) -- Fiction
He opened the door, and, without another word, she went. She walked
through the streets as if nothing at all had happened. She felt neither
remorse nor revulsion.
Then Margaret felt every day that uncontrollable desire to go to him;
and, though she tried to persuade herself not to yield, she knew that
her effort was only a pretence: she did not want anything to prevent
her. When it seemed that some accident would do so, she could scarcely
control her irritation. There was always that violent hunger of the
soul which called her to him, and the only happy hours she had were
those spent in his company. Day after day she felt that complete
ecstasy when he took her in his huge arms, and kissed her with his
heavy, sensual lips. But the ecstasy was extraordinarily mingled with
loathing, and her physical attraction was allied with physical
abhorrence.
Yet when he looked at her with those pale blue eyes, and threw into his
voice those troubling accents, she forgot everything. He spoke of
unhallowed things. Sometimes, as it were, he lifted a corner of the
veil, and she caught a glimpse of terrible secrets. She understood how
men had bartered their souls for infinite knowledge. She seemed to
stand upon a pinnacle of the temple, and spiritual kingdoms of
darkness, principalities of the unknown, were spread before her eyes to
lure her to destruction. But of Haddo himself she learned nothing. She
did not know if he loved her. She did not know if he had ever loved. He
appeared to stand apart from human kind. Margaret discovered by chance
that his mother lived, but he would not speak of her.
“Some day you shall see her,” he said.
“When?”
“Very soon.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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