You can hypnotize yourself thinking inwardly this way, as well as by cutting with an oxy-acetylene torch. The old man had hobbled to within five feet of me, the chauffeur and a couple of the entourage trailing behind; he was looking down at me, and I didn’t even know he was there.
“You,” he said, and then I knew he was there. “Are you the one stopped that bargehand from breaking his neck?”
“Yes.”
“Oh?” said the old man. “Is that why you think you have the right to loaf on my time?”
I opened my mouth to answer that as it should be answered, after which, I figured, I’d let the union try to get me back my job, but the chauffeur, half-hidden behind the old man, frantically waved a hand at me. Don’t say it, the gesture warned. Don’t say it, or the old bastard will drop dead on the spot.
I looked with tranquillity on Jacob Voorhees. “No,” I answered sweetly.
“All right then,” he said. “Don’t sit there gawking at nothing. You’ve got a job to do. Go do it,” and he turned and went, hobbling one inch ahead of death but not afraid of it.
I watched him go.
Next hunting season, I thought, I would take Joe up to Maartenskill and return some of his past hospitality. He and Aldo would like each other on sight, and Shirley, who always hated being left behind that one week every year, could come with us and make a fuss over the latest crop of young Gennaros. She and the Gennaro women were as much sisters under the skin as Joe and Aldo were brothers; they knew that the world revolved around husbands, children, and kitchen stove, and that there was no pain that could not be eased a little by a bowl of hot soup. And I would fill myself with good food, and hunt, and join the family in anxiously listening to the daily farm reports on the radio, and show Joe the Hudson, which was my river in the way that the St. Lawrence was his. And one of those hazy, sunlit afternoons I would drive Mama Gennaro to the cemetery and visit Ben’s grave. She would like that both for Ben’s sake and for mine.
I thought that, and then I took the gauges off the tanks, stored them in the tool box there, and went my way to the Rio de Centrale to earn my day’s pay.
NINE
So it ended as it began, with a Messenger calling for me.
Not the proud public relations man of a proud university this time, calling me to my doom, but an old, old man, a dying old man who ran a dying old shipyard, calling me to my work. He made no allowances, Jacob Voorhees. You’ve got a job to do. Go do it. It was as simple as that.
And, of course, he was right, although I might have my own opinions on how you tell a man to go do it. Today is today. Today you can’t live on yesterday’s coin, can’t make love to yesterday’s women, can’t tremble before yesterday’s heroes. Part of you may want to do it, but that part is the Weltschmerz, the yearning over one’s own pathetic self, the pale thin Hamlet in black drawers instead of the real Hamlet, a burly Dane who did the best he could.
While I walked the crane tracks to the Centrale I tried to remember something that just eluded me. It had to do with Lyle McGhan, the Shakespearean authority at the University, who once said that he himself, a big, red-bearded tub of guts, bore more physical resemblance to Hamlet than anyone he had ever seen play the part. But he had also said something else that seemed important to me right now, and I stopped in meditation, trying to hook it out of the forgotten past into the light of day.
It had something to do with Greek mythology, yet not the familiar mythology. Something to do with the ancient god Pan, the fearmaker, the god whose job it was to breed terror in the dark, and from whose name came the word panic. He was a hard-working god and for good reason, because whenever a man alone with himself considered the limitless extent of his own shame and guilt and insufficiency, Pan had work to do.
And then I remembered.
The whole thing suddenly came out into the light of day, and when I looked at it I saw for the first time what McGhan had been trying to tell me. It was the meaning of the Aegean legend about the Crucifixion that he had mentioned to me the night I said good-bye to him before slipping away from the University. The legend that a friendly classics instructor at Temple had helped me look up one rainy afternoon in Philadelphia where I was hiding away from the world.
I had read it without comprehension then, because I was not ready to comprehend it. I had thought at the time that McGhan was being snide about Ben Gennaro, since McGhan could be as unabashedly snide about the dead as he was about the living. So it was my idea that he was identifying Ben as Pan and me as his devotee, which seemed an elaborate way of stating what he had already stated plainly many times before.
But that was not what he meant. Ben wasn’t Pan at all. Ben, at most, was a glittering opportunist, a lesser god. Pan himself was a great god. Terror was his tribute, he commanded the heart, and the head was powerless to defy him. In his day the world was a mysterious place, and men had no choice but to bow before the mystery and be afraid of it.
So the legend about him was born. It was the simple legend which told how, at the moment of the Crucifixion, a storm burst over the earth, and black clouds boiled in the sky, darkening it, and a great voice cried out words louder than the storm itself. And the men in their boats on the Aegean, fishermen and sailors, merchants and travelers, shrank back before the fury of the storm and turned their faces away from the words that thundered over them, not understanding them as I had not understood them until I came to this time and this place.
Only a few words, but they tell a man all he needs to know, so that he can live with himself in peace, and can eat and drink and rejoice in his labor unafraid.
HO MEGAS PAN TETHNEKAI
Almighty Pan is dead.
About the Author
Stanley Ellin (1916–1986) was an American mystery writer known primarily for his short stories. After working a series of odd jobs including dairy farmer, salesman, steel worker, and teacher, and serving in the US Army, Ellin began writing full time in 1946. Two years later, his story “The Specialty of the House” won the Ellery Queen Award for Best First Story. He went on to win three Edgar Awards—two for short stories and one for his novel The Eighth Circle. In 1981, Ellin was honored with the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. He died of a heart attack in Brooklyn in 1986.
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Copyright © 1960 by Stanley Ellin
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ISBN: 978-1-5040-4273-4
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The Winter After This Summer Page 46