The Seed of Evil

“You can meet me here tomorrow,” Wizard Wazo replied shortly. Angrily, as Madders walked away, he signalled the waitress and ordered a cup of tea.

When, in the early afternoon of the following day, Arnold Madders next entered the coffee house, he found Wizard Wazo sitting at the same table as if he had not moved since Madders had left him. In front of him stood a cup of Turkish coffee, which he picked up and sipped at from time to time. He glanced up, stroking his mustachios with a forefinger, as the Earthman approached.

Madders sank into the chair opposite and bowed his head. “Relieve me of this,” he mumbled. “I cannot bear it.”

“At once, when you discharge your obligation to me.”

Madders kept his eyes downcast and was studiously avoiding looking at anyone in the restaurant. Not until that morning, when he had left his cramped flat to buy groceries, had he learned what had been done to him.

Now he knew that up until the present he had been blind, seeing nothing and no one, living an existence made up of himself only. Others had existed, but only as projections of his own needs, shadowy objects on the surface of his consciousness.

And why was he blind? Because he had not loved!

No one had, except in flashes that afterwards tormented the heart. And indeed it was needful that they should not. There was nothing worse than to love!

On coming down from his third-floor flat to the street, a plastic shopping-bag tucked under his arm, he had chanced to spy a young boy, perhaps ten years of age. A sharp-nosed, pinch-faced boy in shabby grey clothes, with narrow eyes and a mean, stupid look, a boy who (Madders had studied physiognomy) was destined for many misdeeds and much unhappiness. An unlikely object to win Madders’s love!

And yet there it was. Madders loved that boy. Love had been born in him, at first glance, like the striking of a match, bringing searing insights, a burning perception of a unique, if flawed, human being. He had stopped in his tracks, momentarily paralysed. He had thought to go after the boy, to get to know him somehow, to try to help him steer through the tragedies of life that, all too clearly, awaited him.

But the boy had turned a corner, and before Madders could act a new surprise was upon him.

How happy mankind was to be bereft of love! For was not love the most powerful of human emotions, and therefore the most destructive? Was it not an agony to be consumed with love, to ache and grieve for another person, to feel, as though they were one’s own, his sufferings, his disappointments, to become aware of the helplessness that secretly surrounds each human life?

Madders’s punishment now was to love everyone he met or saw, to love unrestrainedly and unreservedly. Seconds after seeing the boy, love had flared in him again, this time for a girl, not very attractive, in an ill-fitting skirt. Then for a hag, stooped and withered, lost in dreams as she carried home scant provisions in a tattered cloth shopping-bag. Next he saw a young man in baggy trousers, vague of manner, who stumbled as he mounted the kerb.

Madders loved them all, and he could not stop loving them even now! To love one person could be burden enough. But to feel the same intensity for every single person one encountered! For the heartbreak to be continuous, to flame anew a hundred times a day, anew and anew and anew, for love to pile on love!

No! The human frame could not endure it!

Within an hour Madders was devastated, and was conscious that before the day was out he would feel obliged to destroy himself. For this was nothing like the generalised love for all mankind he had once believed in, had even imagined he possessed. Now he knew that emotion for the sentimental and self-congratulating lie that it was. No, there was nothing generalised about this. Love could not count past the number one, and was never abstract. It was intimate, a gaze that rested only on living individuals, it was specific to the individual, it was never the same twice, and it blotted out the lover by forcing him never to forget that another was more precious to him than he himself was.

“Who are you?” Madders demanded in a low, unsteady voice. “Who taught you to do this?”

“I was trained by the Galactic Observance,” replied Wizard Wazo, as though repeating a self-evident fact. “And I it was who trained the Order of the Secret Star.”

“Tell me what you want of me.”

“My words of power. That is all.”

Madders shook his head. “I have no words of power, as you call them. I didn’t even know there were such things.”

Wizard Wazo bridled. “I am speaking to the Master of the Order of the Secret Star, am I not?”

“Yes … I mean, no. I took the name of the order, and some of the ceremonies, that’s all … as much as I could find. It was in a manuscript in the British Museum.” Madders groaned. “You’ve made a mistake, don’t you see?”