The Goat-Foot God

by Dion Fortune

  Supposing, thought Hugh, absorbed and completely oblivious of his surroundings — supposing he were to phantasy the part of the Greek high-priest of Mona’s day-dream until it became alive in him even as Ambrosius had done, might not Mona answer to it? Hugh remembered Mona’s words in the chapel concerning the Greek athlete of her phantasy who had followed her because he admired her. That, of course, was his own dream precisely. He remembered the tense look on Mona’s face when he had casually told that dream as they were looking at the dusty old books in the museum. She had recognized it all right, and for some reason best known to herself had made open confession when they were psychoanalysing themselves in the chapel. Was there something in Mona that was saying, ‘Yes, I will worship Pan with you provided you are of the true faith’?

  It seemed to him that if he could pull this thing off with Mona something would be brought through into the group-mind of the race and added to the racial heritage — that, at any rate, was the way Jelkes said the adepts worked.

  There came to him, as he stared at the marvel of the night-sky, a realization that he was part of a larger whole and that a vast life found expression through him, and that in his fulfilment it would find a measure of its fulfilment, and in his frustration it was frustrated. It was not a question of Hugh Paston being in love with a woman who did not respond to him, it was a question of unbalanced force in the universe, and he knew that the whole universe was striving to adjust that unbalance, and that if he would but lean back and let himself be borne by the cosmic tides, they would bring him to the place where he would be.

  He felt that he had stumbled on a very important key when he had realized that the way of approach to the dynamic reality lay by the path of phantasy, the most dynamic of all auto-suggestions. It might be pure imagination, but nevertheless it was the way to set the invisible causes in motion, provided it lay along the line of their course.

  This was indeed a discovery worth making. He had only to become the priest and he could command his priestess.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The sun rose next day through the morning mists with a promise of heat, one of those brief miniature heatwaves that sometimes come in the days between spring and summer, and Hugh, feeling the breathing warmth coming in at his open window as he dressed, felt a strong disinclination for heavy stuffs and stiff collars, and clad himself in an old pair of khaki shorts left over from his African expedition, a short-sleeved khaki mesh shirt minus most of its buttons, and Ambrosius’ sandals. In this disreputable kit he descended to breakfast.

  He moved silently in the heelless sandals, and came into the living-room without Mona being aware of his presence. As upon the day of their first morning meal at the farm, the door leading out to the garden was wide open to admit the morning sun and the table stood before it, a small oak gate-legged table covered with a gaily-coloured, coarse-textured, hand-woven cloth on which stood the hand-thrown earthenware breakfast set, all yellow and orange on the greyish-buff ground of the natural clay. As before, the brown velvety faces of polyanthuses rose from their little honey-pot, but whereas on that day they had been the first bold venturers from under a sunny wall, these were the last lingering laggards from a shady corner. Mona, singing softly to herself, was rearranging the haphazard efforts of Silly Lizzie in the way of table decoration, and the song she sang was a curious one.

  ‘Bowl of oak and earthen jar,

  Honey of the honey-bee;

  Milk of kine and Grecian wine,

  Golden corn from neighbouring lea —

  These our offerings, Pan, to thee,

  Goat-foot god of Arcady.

  ‘Horned head and cloven hoof —

  Fawns who seek and nymphs that flee —

  Piping clear that draweth near

  Through the vales of Arcady —

  These the gifts we have of thee,

  God of joyous ecstasy.

  ‘Come, great Pan, and bless us all:

  Bless the corn and honey-bee.

  Bless the kine and bless the vine,

  Bless the vales of Arcady.

  Bless the nymphs that laugh and flee,

  God of all fertility.’

  It was oddly appropriate to the simple breakfast-table set there in the sun, from which only the Grecian wine was lacking, and Mona, who, like Hugh, had felt the early heat and put on her thin green frock, was the appropriate priestess. She had her old brown sandals on her stockingless feet, and there was no fillet on her hair, but save for that, she was exactly as she had been the previous evening when she had danced the moon-dance for the drawing-out of Hugh’s soul.

  She looked up and saw him there and stood clutching the little bowl of flowers in her hands helplessly. Sleep and the sunshine had enabled her to put her problems behind her for the moment and escape into the vales of Arcady. She had not expected Hugh to be down just yet, and, taken by surprise, could find no word to say save: ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Mona,’ he replied.

  She tried desperately to discern from his bearing what his interpretation might be of the previous evening’s happenings. But there were times when Hugh was as impassive as an effigy on a tomb.

  ‘Isn’t it a lovely morning?’ she said nervously.

  ‘Very lovely. I think’ — a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth — ‘that Pan must be pleased with us.’

  Then, to Mona’s intense relief, Jelkes joined them clad in the everlasting Inverness, despite the warmth, and they sat down to the milk and the honey and the porridge and the new-laid eggs and whole-meal bread in the sunshine — a truly Arcadian meal.

  Mona departed to the back premises to start Silly Lizzie off with a push; Jelkes sat himself down in the sun with a sensational Sunday paper and proceeded to soak his soul in scandal, and Hugh wandered off across the pasture smoking his after-breakfast cigarette.

  He had an instinctive feeling that the chapel was not a suitable place for the invocation of Pan — he doubted if any roofed place ever could be. The great archangels in the buttress bays were the austere regents of the elemental forces and the mystical Tree in the east had meanings to meditate upon for a lifetime, but Pan was another matter. It was in Hugh’s mind that a coffer, up-ended, would serve as a cubical altar, and it was in his mind to shift it out into the pine-wood if he could find a place unobserved from both the house and the road.

  He strolled slowly down the broad grassy way between Mona’s newly-planted herb-beds, plucking here and there grey aromatic leaves, crushing them in his hands, and inhaling their clean, sharp odour from between his cupped palms.

  They had never explored the wood very thoroughly because it was beset with brambles, but Hugh, taking giant’s strides, lifted his long bare legs over these and reached its shade, hoping to find some sort of cover among the undergrowth.

  He pushed on, finding it easier going now that the shade made all growth scanty and saw ahead of him a dense mass of dark foliage among red-brown trunks. He headed towards it, to find a close-set belt of yews blocking his path. The yew is a long-lived, slow-growing tree, and from the girth of these he judged they must be pretty ancient, and with a sudden quickening of heart-beat, wondered whether they dated from Ambrosius’ day, and if so, why they had been planted?

  He ducked under the low-hanging outer branches, and with some difficulty forced his way through, to come out into a little open glade entirely surrounded by yews. Here was the very privacy he desired!

  All round him the green-black branches of the yews swept the very ground in a long narrow oval. The glade was the exact shape of the space made by two intersecting circles, and had evidently been laid out with mathematical precision. In the exact centre of the rabbit-nibbled turf an oblong boulder reclined upon its side. Hugh examined it. It was difficult to tell, so weather-worn it was, whether it was a natural outcrop or a tooled stone. The chalk, however, does not produce such stones as this, and Hugh, looking at the long narrow rock at his feet, guessed that it was one of those standing-stones of which Mon
a had spoken — a sighting-stone along a line of power. Ambrosius had chosen his site well. Around the ancient standing-stone he had planted his grove of yew, thus ensuring it being right in the track of one of the lines of force of the ancient worship.

  Hugh considered the great stone as it lay humbled in the dust. It would not take a great deal of work to set it up again. He thought he could do it single-handed, with luck. Pushing his way through the yews, he set off at a dog-trot for the house, skirted round to the potting-shed unobserved, and returned with pick and spade. The loose sandy soil worked easily, but up-ending the great stone was another matter, and sorely against his will, Hugh had to go and fetch Bill.

  Amiable as the bob-tailed sheep-dog he so closely resembled in everything save intelligence, Bill shoved through the bushes in his Sunday best in the wake of his employer. When he saw the stone, however, he pushed his peaked cap on to the back of his head and scratched it.

  ‘Oy,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the Devil’s skittles.’

  ‘Maybe, but we’re going to up-end his stone and put it tidy for him.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Bill, gave the stone a mighty heave, and set it upright in the hole that Hugh had dug under its base. Together they filled in the loose earth and trod it firm.

  Bill shouldered the pick and spade and ambled off, leaving Hugh to consider the next move. Having a standing-stone in the centre of the glade, he needed no other altar. He examined it closely, and decided that it was certainly a worked stone — a short, blunt pillar with a rounded top, it was too symmetrical to be anything else.

  In response to his message sent by Bill, lunch was in the open. Mona served them — it was no use getting Silly Lizzie to wait at table if you did not like your food down your neck — and they settled down to their meal. Suddenly old Jelkes looked up, and breaking his usual rule of silence while feeding said:

  ‘I reckon you are right to go through with this thing, Hugh, and I’ll do anything I can to help you, even if I do get knotted up in my own complexes sometimes. It’s that monk’s cowl that does for me. After all, I was very nearly one myself!’

  ‘Hugh said a true thing once,’ said Mona. ‘Or maybe it wasn’t Hugh but Ambrosius. I can’t tell them apart these days. He said that the Church was made for man, not man for the Church.’

  ‘I reckon that’s about it,’ said Jelkes. ‘After all religion is simply our speculation about what lies below the horizon of life. The only way you can judge a theology, so far as I can see, is by its effect on character. You can see its effect on human life. I look at their adherents — the general run of them — not the saints — not the black sheep, but the bulk. Christianity produces too many fiends and tolerates too many fools. It’s the worst persecutor of the whole bunch. Islam goes in for jehads and massacres, but there’s no petty spite about it. I reckon that group-souls get neuroses, same as individuals, and that Christianity is suffering from old-maid’s insanity from too much repression; that’s what makes it so damned unchristian.’

  ‘You are blaspheming abominably, Uncle,’ said Mona. ‘If I said the half of this, you’d screw my neck.’

  ‘It isn’t as bad as it sounds, my dear,’ said Jelkes. ‘It is the Church I’m slanging, not the Christ. It is function, not charter, that confers rights in religion. I defer to the man with genuine spiritual power, and I don’t care a hoot in hell whether he has been ordained or not.’

  Sitting on the low, broad bench, with the man and the girl on either side of him, Jelkes stared out towards the sun that hung golden over the pine-wood.

  ‘What is going to be the next move in the game?’ he said at length.

  ‘The next move,’ said Hugh, ‘is to return to our original plan, and invoke Pan by a blend of Ignatius and Huysmans. It is in my mind that we’ve travelled a good long way already; perhaps further than any of us realize.’

  Jelkes cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘What makes you think that?’ he said.

  Hugh pushed back his seat and rested his sinewy elbows on his great gaunt knees — he looked much bigger and more formidable thus sketchily clad than in his ordinary clothes.

  ‘Difficult to say,’ he said at length. ‘One expects psychic phenomena to be reasonably tangible and to have something of the miraculous about them. We’ve had nothing of that. But all the same we’ve had — or at any rate, I’ve had, some pretty drastic experiences. I couldn’t prove them to anybody else, but I’m quite satisfied about them in my own mind. Anyway, whatever they are, subconscious, super-conscious, hallucinations, telepathy, suggestion, auto-suggestion, I feel as if I had been born again, born into a wider life and a bigger personality.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t all your imagination, Hugh?’ asked Jelkes, watching him.

  ‘I don’t know and don’t care. It probably is, for I’ve used my imagination diligently enough over the job. But via the imagination I’ve got extended consciousness, which I probably wouldn’t have got if I’d stuck to hard facts and rejected everything I couldn’t prove. It’s no use doing that. You’ve got to take the Unseen as a working hypothesis, and then things you can’t prove at the first go-off prove themselves later. By going ahead “as if”, I’ve got in touch with another kind of reality and in that kind of reality I can pull the strings that make things happen — and damn it all, Jelkes, I’m going to!’

  ‘It appears to me,’ said Jelkes, ‘that if Mona is to remain here alone with you, she would be well advised to lock her door.’

  ‘That’s what I told her,’ said Hugh. ‘But she doesn’t do

  ‘How do you know I don’t?’ cried Mona indignantly.

  ‘Because I took the key away some time ago, and you’ve never missed it.’

  Mona sprang to her feet with the heavy earthenware pitcher in her hand.

  ‘If you throw that water over me, you’ll get what’s coming to you,’ said Hugh.

  Jelkes got on to his feet and pounded the table like a chairman at a disorderly meeting. ‘You’d better marry him, Mona, and be done with it. It will save us all a lot of trouble.’

  Mona, speechless with rage, poised the heavy pitcher in her hand as if about to heave it at them both simultaneously.

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ said Hugh airily. ‘The ceremony is not of overwhelming importance in the circles in which I move.’

  ‘Nor in the circles in which I move,’ said Mona. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to be bounced in this manner.’

  ‘Well, will you marry me or not?’

  ‘No, blast you, I won’t!’

  ‘Oh, my Gawd!’ said Jelkes, dropping down on the bench and resting his head on his hands.

  Hugh patted him on the back. ‘Cheer up, Uncle; we’re enjoying it, even if you aren’t. This is love among the moderns. Look at Mona, she’s thriving on it — Hi, you little devil!’ He fielded the pitcher neatly, but the water went all over Jelkes, who rose and shook himself like a wet cat, looking most indignant.

  ‘If this is love among the moderns, give me hate,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how you tell ‘em apart,’ and stalked off into the house, slamming the door behind him.

  Hugh set down the pitcher out of Mona’s reach.

  ‘Well, what about it? Will you marry me?’

  ‘NO ! ! ! !’

  ‘Splendid, I’ll see about the licence.’

  ‘It will be wasted.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter if it is. If you throw that dinner-plate, I’ll spank you with it.’

  Mona sank down on the bench as Jelkes had done, and clutched her head.

  ‘Oh, my God! I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Hugh. I suppose I may as well. I’ll get no peace till I do. But it was taking that key away that annoyed me.’

  ‘But I didn’t do it. I only said I’d done it.’

  ‘Then you’re a damned liar! Whatever possessed you to say that?’

  ‘I wanted to see if you really had locked your door after I warned you. Because if you hadn’t, it was safe to bully you into a wedding, for your su
bconscious had spoken for you,’ and he bent down and kissed her.

  Pending the three intervening weeks, while the vicar would be announcing the banns of employers and employees, Hugh bid Mona collect a suitable trousseau in which, he said, green should predominate as she was being dedicated to Pan.

  Mona agreed, while doing hasty mental arithmetic, too proud to ask for a halfpenny. But when the post came in, she waved before him a printed form in speechless indignation: a considerable sum of money had been placed to her credit at her bank.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ she demanded, as if direly insulted.

  ‘Well, I didn’t want you to take my instructions too literally and turn out in a fig-leaf, not in this uncertain weather, anyway. I want you to do the thing properly, a la Huysmans.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Mona, ‘and what would you consider to be garments appropriate to Pan?’

  ‘Well, strictly speaking, none at all, but as it’s an English spring—.’

  ‘I wish Uncle were here to tell you what he thought of you.’

  ‘Can’t you design something for yourself, same as you did for the house? I want you to feel unrepressed.’

  ‘I am unrepressed!’ snarled Mona, furious at this aspersion on her modernity.

  ‘No, you aren’t or you wouldn’t snarl. Unrepressed people have sweet tempers, for they are absolutely spontaneous and free from conflict.’

  ‘If I were absolutely spontaneous and free from conflict, you’d be lying dead at the moment.’

  ‘It is a curious thing,’ said Hugh, ‘that in the days when I was a decent citizen, you posed as a cat on the tiles, and now that I’ve taken you at your word and joined you on the tiles, you bolt for the hearth-rug.’

  ‘All right. Anything for a quiet life. I’ll do what you want, but I hate you giving me money.’

  What she proposed to do he neither knew nor inquired; but he returned one afternoon from a session with Mr Watney to find the farmhouse standing empty, and felt a sudden chill feeling of hurt, for it was the first time he had ever returned to the farm and Mona had not been there to welcome him. Then a sound in the old part of the building caught his ear, and he went quickly towards it. At the foot of the beautiful spiral stair stood a woman of the Renaissance.