Goat Foot God

by Dion Fortune

  The old bookseller looked at him intently with his light, bright eyes under their sandy brows.

  “People don't die of psychological troubles,” he said.

  “Don't they, T. J.? Well I don't intend to live with them, I can tell you that.”

  CHAPTER VII

  HUGH PASTON, chased off to bed by the sleepy bookseller, found sleep far from him. His mind was roused to alertness by the talk of the evening in a way that it had never been roused before, and images chased each other through his brain. The house he proposed to buy and equip as a marvellous temple of the Old Gods-in fact more than a temple, a monastery, for there must be others who would delight to join him on his quest-took various forms in his imagination as the dark hours went slowly past. First it was to be of classical architecture, with a front entrance resembling the Parthenon, over the door of which Jelkes' artist friend should carve the motto: ‘Know thyself’. Entering, one should find oneself in a vast pillared hall to impress the imagination. Everything was to be of white marble. Then he discarded the marble as too like a bathroom, and the house took on a designedly commonplace exterior; but as soon as the front door opened, one found oneself in the mysterious gloom of an Egyptian temple, with vast shadowy images of the gods looming over one. He decided to take a leaf out of ‘A Rebours’ and have a coalblack negro to open the door. But then he decided that that would not work; the negro would bolt like a rabbit at the first sign of anything supernatural. Perhaps a Chinaman would be more suitable. But a Chinaman wouldn't go with the Egyptian temple. Hugh Paston gave it up. He must wait for Jelkes' artist.

  He lay on his back on the feather-bed and stared up at the shadowy outline of the cock-eyed canopy, dimly revealed by the faint light that always shines through a London window, and wondered where his quest would end, if there were any end to it. He had spoken with great assurance to old J elkes concerning his quest of Pan, but did he really believe in it himself? One thing, and one thing only he knew, he had a desperate need that was eating him up and destroying him, as if something were feeding on his tissues, and that something could only be appeased by the thing he chose to call Pan, whatever that might ultimately prove to be. It was the x in his calculation. He wasn't obliged to define it at the present moment. He could erect an altar to the Unknown God if he chose.

  The fancy temples passed from his thoughts and he lay along the soft hummocks of the feather-bed wondering exactly what was going to happen now that he had deliberately and with malice aforethought unleashed the Pan Within and sent it forth in search of the Cosmic Pan in the same way as Noah sent out the dove from the Ark. Surely it would return to him with at least an ivy-leaf in its beak? He wondered what manner of thing in reality sympathetic magic might be; as described by the anthropologists it was just plain idiocy; but he had a shrewd suspicion the anthropologists never really got at the heart of anything. In sympathetic magic one imitated a thing and so got into touch with it. How superstitious, said the anthropologists. What childishness the mind of primitive man is capable of I But Ignatius Loyola said: Put yourself in the posture of prayer, and you will soon feel like praying; and the founder of the Jesuits was reckoned a very profound psychologist. If some of the methods taught in his ‘Exercises’ were not sympathetic magic, well, Hugh Paston would like to know what was! And if sympathetic magic was the basis of the Jesuits' training, perhaps there might be something to be said for the viewpoint of the ancients, who at least knew enough to build the pyramids.

  Hugh Paston had browsed to some purpose on the tangled shelves of the dusty library. All the books that Jelkes most highly esteemed, his private library, one might say, were in the inner room, safe from sacrilegious hands, and in these Hugh had dipped and skipped extensively. It was not in his nature to work systematically; studying, annotating, collating, experimenting, as the old bookseller had done; but he was an expert at picking up the drift of a book with the minimum of reading, which is the only way to keep up to date in Mayfair. One thing, and not much else, he had picked out from four tattered, dog-eared, paper-backed volumes on magic spelt with a K— the magician surrounds himself with the symbols of a particular potency when he performs a magical operation in order to help himself to concentrate. That was a useful practical point, thought Hugh Paston; it bore out his theory that the. sympathetic magic of Loyola's ‘Exercises’ could be usefully reinforced by all the deckings of a temple. And if, in addition to the decked-out temple, one lived the life—one had every object within one's sight, every garment one wore, every word one spoke, or that was spoken to one, tuned to the same key over a period of time—surely the effect would be reinforced a hundredfold? Was not that the idea underlying the retreats that High Church people disappear into round about Easter time?

  He was determined to seek Pan by the same methods that other people use to seek Christ. Was it a horrible blasphemy? That would certainly be the opinion of most people, but he didn't mind that. Was it the Black Mass? In a way he supposed it was, and yet it did not seem to him black. He certainly had no intention of desecrating anything that anybody held sacred. It would not give him the slightest kick to throw the sacred Wafer on the ground and jump on it, as ‘le formidable chanoine’ appeared to amuse himself by doing. He might try working his Mass on the tummy of an undraped lady, provided he would find one that wasn't ticklish, but he doubted if this would amuse him after the novelty had worn off. There was not much kick left in that for anyone who was used to cabaret. No, he thought all that sort of thing was only one remove from writing dirt on walls. Those who were given that way might abreact their complexes by so doing, but it didn't appeal to him because his complexes did not lie along those lines. He felt that the Black Mass, whether of Huysmans' or of A. E. W. Mason's variety, was a destructive and negative thing, not a constructive one; it was a symbolic freeing of oneself from one's inhibitions; it called through no power. Maybe Isabel Goudie managed something a little more constructive when she went out to dance with the Devil in churchyards, but there was a big measure of abreaction there also. He could picture the medieval women, repressed by religion and custom, stealing out of the narrow streets of the walled towns by twos and threes at the dark of the moon to go to the terrible Sabbat and taste of its dear-bought freedom, so often paid for with the faggot and rack. He also thought of the hint picked up from another book, how the witches that could not attend the Sabbat rubbed themselves with the drugged, aphrodisiac ointment, lay down and concentrated on what was going on out on the moor or in the forest, and presently found themselves there in dream or vision. This again was Ignatius done backwards. The more he thought of it, the more he saw that all the methods were really one and the same method. The broom-stick flying of the medieval witches was first cousin to the temple sleep, or incubation, of the Greeks, in which the worshipper, sleeping in the temple, was blessed with a vision of the god. Was it along this track that he would find Pan?

  He composed himself for sleep on his back, for he had always understood that this position induced dreams, and sent his mind ranging out over the vales of Arcady in search of Pan. In his imagination he performed the ‘composition of place’ reconstructing the scene from what he could remember of the classics, so laboriously and unprofitably rammed into his head at Harrow. The sparse woods of oak and fir; the wine-dark sea beneath; the sound of the bees in the cistuses, the basking lizards, and above all, the flocks of leaping goats springing from rock to rock. He imagined the thin fluting pipe of the goatherd that at any moment might change to the pipes of Pan; he smelt the smell of the pines in the rare dry air; he felt the sun warm upon his skin; he heard the surf of the loud-sounding sea on the rocks far beneath. He heard the crying of gulls. Were there gulls in the isles of Greece? He did not know, he only knew he heard them; they had come of their own accord.

  But the act of attention and question had broken the magic, he was back in bed again, with Greece far away, as if seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass. All the same he had seen enough to satisfy him. Those gulls
had been extraordinarily real, and he hadn't phantasied them as he had the goats, he had actually heard them.

  He turned over and lay passively waiting for sleep, his mind drifting idly over what he had just experienced; over his talks with old Jelkes in the dusty brown bookshop; he remembered a particular race he had run in at school, when he had been in particularly good condition; the sun had been warm on his back through the thin running singlet as he had crouched waiting for the start, just like the sun in ancient Greece. His wife's face came to him, as she sat before her mirror, making-up; her frock off, her backless scanties revealing the satiny skin with its softly-moulded muscles, so different to a man's. She turned her head to speak to him, and he suddenly realised with a start that it was not his wife, but a stranger. But in that brief glimpse he could discern no more than a flash of eyes, nose and mouth. He could not identify the face, save that it was not his wife's.

  Then he found himself out on the hillside among the thin woods of oak and fir, and ahead of him moved through the light shadow the satiny back. He followed it, springing after it; it kept ahead. He quickened his pace; he was sure that when it came out into the sunshine, as come it must in those sparse woods, he would see the face; but it did not come, and he lost sight of it, and found himself in deeper woods, a dense growth, dark with laurels. And through that darkness there came a curious cold exhilarating fear, a touch of panic.

  He found himself sitting up in bed, tense and startled. Something must have wakened him suddenly. What was it? He listened, eyes staring into the darkness. His ears took in nothing, but his nose did. There was a distinct smell of burning.

  He leapt out of bed, flung open his door, went out onto the landing and shouted for Jelkes. The old house would burn like tinder if it once got a start. A bump upstairs told him that the old man had roused, and the light of a candle over the banisters immediately followed.

  “I say, Jelkes?” he called out. “I woke up smelling smoke. I think we'd better have a look round your establishment.”

  Jelkes joined him, and they stood on the stairs sniffing, trying to see whether the smoke came up from below. But it didn't. They went into Paston's room, and there they met it, faint blue wreaths of it, and a very distinct smell. The old man stood still and stared at those blue wreaths revealed by the candle-light, making no attempt to do anything about it. Hugh was round the room like a questing hound; head under the bed, head in the fireplace, flinging up the window to see whether the smoke had come in from outside. But he found nothing. Still old Jelkes did not move.

  “There's smoke all right,” said Hugh, shutting the window. “But I can't trace where it's coming from.”

  “No,” said Jelkes, “and you won't either, because it isn't here.”

  “Where is it then? In the next house?”

  The old man shook his head. “No, it isn't on this plane at all. Do you notice that it is the smell of smouldering cedar-wood?”

  He suddenly found himself seized by the shoulders and swung around his dusty landing in a wild dance. Hugh Paston, regardless of the seatless state of his pyjamas, was performing a saraband.

  “T. J.,” he cried. “Do you realise we've made a start? We've really made a start!”

  “Damn!” said T. Jelkes, as the candle fell over and spilled hot wax on his thumb.

  CHAPTER VIII

  UPON the two men in the old bookshop the cold light of morning had its usual sobering effect. Hugh Paston wondered how much of last night's experience was pure imagination, and T. ]elkes wondered how in the world he was going to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis that confronted him. Every dictum of common sense told him to leave well alone; he would embroil himself in a pretty kettle offish ifhe went any further. Occultism was all right between the covers of books, especially novels; but in real life, if it were not such stuff as dreams were made of, it would probably prove to be pretty explosive. He himself was by nature the dreamer, the contemplative; the mystical philosophy appealed to him for the understanding it gave, and as a way ofescape from the limitations of life as it is lived on a meagre income. But Hugh Paston was no mystic; whatever he learnt he would immediately put into practice. Old Jelkes saw himself being dragged in out of his depth when the duckling he had hatched took to the water, as it showed every sign of doing.

  He believed that the final cord had been cut when he made Hugh Paston face the fact that he had never been loved but had been tricked from the beginning, and in so doing had torn the last rag of self-respect from him. Such treatment was kill or cure. He had smashed the man down to his foundations. For all the brave face Hugh Paston might put on things, he was lying with his head in the dust. The old bookseller had dealt with him by the horneeopathic method of rubbing his nose in it in the hope of making him lift his head out of sheer resentment, if nothing else. If there were any capacity for reaction left in Hugh Paston, now was the time to apply stimulants, and they must be drastic stimulants. He daren't stop now or he would have a pretty bad wreck on his hands. The old bookseller sighed, and wished to God he had never started playing with souls.

  He looked at his vis á vis across the breakfast table, and saw that he was staring glumly into the fire. Serious conversation was impossible, for the char was still bumping about like a colossal bluebottle, and in any case it was inadvisable to go any further until he knew exactly what he could do. It would be fatal to raise hopes and then dash them. He determined that there should be no further conversation until he had everything ready for what must inevitably transpire.

  Hugh solved his problem for him by saying abruptly:

  “I shall have to tackle my mother today. Can't leave things hanging about any longer.”

  Jelkes nodded. “Back to lunch?” he enquired.

  “No, back to supper-if I may.”

  Having seen his guest safely off the premises, Jelkes discarded his dressing-gown for an ancient Inverness cape and sallied forth. He had not far to go. A couple of turns, and he was at his destination. He pressed one of a number of bells at the side of a shabby door under a pretentious portico. A visiting-card stuck up beside it with a drawing-pin announced that Miss Mona Wilton, Designer and Craft-worker, was the owner of the bell. Jelkes lodged his shoulders against the pilasters flanking the portico and set himself to wait, for he knew that even if Miss Mona Wilton were in, it would take her a little time to get from top to bottom of that tall narrow house to admit him. Presently his patience was rewarded; he heard a step on the bare tiles of the hall, the door opened, and a girl in a faded blue linen smock presented herself.

  He looked at her sharply, almost suspiciously, and saw what he expected to see—a pinched look about the nostrils, a hollowness about the eyes; early in the day as it was, the girl looked fine-drawn and exhausted, and there was about her a curious air of apprehension. It is the appearance that is produced by fasting. Jelkes blamed himself bitterly that he had not been round before to see what was happening.

  At the sight of the old bookseller the girl's eyes filled with tears and she was unable to speak.

  “Why didn't you come round and see me?” demanded Jelkes, glaring at her.

  “I'm all right,” the girl answered brokenly, ushering him into the dusty, empty hall, whose only furniture was a smelly pram.

  He followed her up the wide, uncarpeted stone staircase. Up and up they went; and presently the bare stone gave place to echoing wood and the stairs grew steeper. Each landing was decorated with milk bottles, full and empty; also ash-cans—full.

  Finally they came to the narrow winding stairs that led to the attics. At the top was a flimsy, glass-panelled partition. They passed through it, and the girl closed the door behind them.

  “Heavens, what a climb!” said the panting bookseller. “No wonder you keep your figure, my dear.”

  “It's worth it,” said the girl. “You see, I can shut my door behind me and have privacy up here, and no one else in the house can. Besides, there's the view and the sunsets.”

  Jelkes thought
to himself that the sunsets must be poor consolation for grilling under the tiles during a London summer.

  The girl led him into a little sitting-room lit by small dormer windows in the sloping walls, and placed him in the one arm-chair as the guest of honour. There was no fire in the grate, but an eiderdown that had slipped to the floor behind the chair showed how she had been keeping herself warm.

  Miss Wilton sat down on a small pouf, folded her arms round her knees—to keep herself from shivering, he suspected, and smiled up at him with a gallant attempt at cheerfulness.

  “What brings you here at this time of the morning?” she enquired.

  “A job of work,” said Jelkes.

  Her face brightened eagerly.

  “For me?”

  “Yes, if you'll take it on.”

  “What is it?”

  “It's a very odd job, but I think there's money in it.”

  “It will have to be very odd indeed if I don't take it on. My last paper has let me down.”

  “Why didn't you tell me?”

  “Oh, well, one can't tell that sort of thing, can one? You haven't got much more than I have, you know.”

  “I've got enough to give you a meal,” said Jelkes savagely.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I did look round last night, but you had got someone with you, so I did not come in.”

  Jelkes snorted, and rose to his feet resolutely.

  “You are coming round with me now to have a meal,” he said, “and you'll get no information till you do.”

  “Well, Uncle Jelkes, I won't say no. I've done about as much slimming as I care for.”