Goat Foot God

by Dion Fortune

  He could imagine the amazement of the monks when first this spectral visitant greeted them through the narrow aperture; then their terror when they realised that their prior was indeed dead and that this was his ghost that had come to them. Then their gradual reassurement as they realised that the spirit was kindly—that death had in no way changed the man they had trusted. And finally, the establishment of regular communications between death-in-life and life-in-death so that the spirits of the imprisoned men rose out of the narrow confines of their cells and breathed a wider air, even such air as Hugh himself had breathed in the sunshine of the Greek hillside.

  Suddenly Hugh roused from his reveries to find the old bookseller standing over him, looking at him reproachfully and saying:

  “Laddie, you'll set the house on fire if you go on like this.”

  “By Jove, T. J., do you know, I was actually at that priory, walking up and down the passage with Ambrosius and talking to the monks? I say, do you realise that the fellow came back from the dead every night and had a chat with them? And do you know what has just occurred to me? That if he could come back to them, would it be possible to persuade him to come back for me? You know, I've been at seances when something came back which I would swear was not the medium's subconscious. You can't prove it, of course, but all the same, you know it. Now if I got hold of a good medium, do you think I could get in touch with Ambrosius?”

  The old man stood looking down at him with a very queer expression on his face.

  “I should leave mediums alone, if I were you, Hugh. You'll get no good from them.”

  “T. J., do you know, I believe for two two's Ambrosius would come back to me, I feel so much in sympathy with him. His history is so much like mine. Doing your best to carryon on wrong lines till you feel you will burst, and then suddenly getting the clue that opens everything out to you. Now he was shut in. He didn't get through with it. Circumstances were too much for him. But the world has moved on since then. Now I believe I could get through with it. I could do what he failed to do—”

  A curious change came over the figure lying propped on its elbow in the bed. The rather boyish, eager, hesitating manner of a man uncertain of himself, who had never found himself, gave place to something entirely different. The air was that of a man accustomed to be obeyed. A man aloof, purposeful, resolute. The keen eyes gazed at Jelkes, but without any look of recognition in them.

  “Pax vobiscum,” said Jelkes.

  “Et tibi, pax,” said the man on the bed.

  He looked into Jelkes' eyes for a minute, then a shudder passed through him. He blinked dazedly at the lighted candle in the old man's hand.

  “Hullo?” he said vaguely. “What's up ?”

  “What do you imagine is up, my son?” said Jelkes.

  “I've no idea, but I'm in a muck-sweat. Chuck us a towel, there's a good chap.”

  Jelkes did as requested, and sat down on the foot of the bed while Hugh swabbed his dripping chest. He wondered how much Hugh remembered of what had happened; how far the two modes of consciousness had made any sort of contact with each other. But there was no glimmering of awareness in Hugh's rather nondescript grey-green eyes, so he waited till the towel was cast aside, a sodden rag, and then extinguished the candle and bid his guest good-night.

  The next morning found Hugh perfectly normal, with no recollection whatever of the incidents of the previous night. He was all agog, however, to go down to the museum again and arrange to have the picture of Ambrosius in the illuminated psalter photographed.

  “There ought to be a photographer capable of the job in a town that size,” said he. “If you could get hold of Miss Wilton for me, we'll run down and tackle it.”

  Jelkes looked at him. Why was Miss Wilton wanted for the job? Why couldn't he go down himself?

  “Is she on the telephone?”

  “Yes, I think she is, unless it's been cut off.”

  “Why should it have been cut off?”

  “Well, she's been rather hard up lately, so she may have had to dispense with it.”

  “I say, do you think she'd let me stick it in again for her? It would be a great convenience to have it. And I say, Jelkes, will you let me put one in here, too?”

  “Good Lord, you'll be through with the job long before you get the telephone in. Remember you're dealing with a government department.”

  “That's all right, I can ginger them up. I've got friends in high places.”

  Jelkes went round to fetch Mona while Hugh went to fetch the car. Arrived at her house, he stepped inside the front door when she opened it to him, and drew it shut behind him.

  “My dear,” he said, “we're in for the devil of a time. Ambrosius turned up last night in person.”

  “What do you mean?” said Mona, startled, as much by his manner as his words.

  “I guessed that Hugh had gone to sleep with his light still on, and I went in to him. And he woke up and began talking about Ambrosius—I think he had been dreaming of him—and for about five seconds Hugh became Ambrosius, and, my God, he startled me! He didn't know me from Adam. and he looked as fierce as a hawk. I addressed him in clerical Latin. and he answered me. And then he swung back to Hugh again, and, thank God, he doesn't remember a thing about it this morning.”

  “If he has done it once. he will do it again, Uncle jelkes, especially when he gets to the farm. and what will happen then?”

  “The Lord only knows. I don't. We shall have to hang onto his coat-tails and do the best we can. If he looks at you like he looked at me. you'll run a mile. He must have been a terror of a prior.”

  Mona went up and got her leather coat and hood. and they walked round to the shop together, where they found Hugh outside on the pavement. tinkering at the car. He straightened up at their approach, and greeted them with his usual diffident air, like a school-boy greeting his family in public—much more pleased to see them than he dared to admit. It was an odd scene. There was old Jelkes in his ancient ulster, his tumbledown, paintless shop-front as a background, both he and the shop looking so much the same colour that from a little distance he appeared to melt into it and disappear under the protective coat of London grime that covered them both. Then there was Mona Wilton, the handsome vivid leather coat enveloping her from chin to ankle and revealing only the ancient pair ofbrown brogues on her feet, mercifully concealing the shabby, dingy jumper and skirt. Finally there was Hugh Paston and his car. Hugh in a chrome leather racing coat; the car a vivid but battered blue, still bearing the great black numerals that had distinguished it in a famous race. The dingy street and the dingier bookseller all faded into a neutral drab, but Hugh and Mona and the car stood out like the brightly coloured vignettes in the illuminated manuscripts of the ancient monks. To the old bookseller, standing back and looking at them, it seemed that everything Hugh Paston touched at the present moment turned bright-coloured. His own life; Mona's life; the grey farm on the bare hill—everything suddenly became vivid, exciting, perilous. It was the touch of Pan all right, thought the old man with a sigh, and where the devil was it going to end? Hugh had about as much control over it as he had over a sunset. Pan had taken charge.

  Hugh and Mona drove off in the car, the powerful engine making a fearful shindy in the narrow street. Jelkes watched them go. What was going to be the end of that also? Hugh Paston was a wealthy and wellconnected man, still young, and, at the moment, very unbalanced. Mona, the daughter of a Nonconformist minister in a small manufacturing town in the Midlands, was a young woman with a stormy emotional past behind her. She had lived as girl artists breaking out from such homes into England's Bohemia are apt to live—going from one extreme to the other. It was his hand that had steadied and saved her when the inevitable reaction had set in, and he had hoped that she had settled down. Left to her own devices, he thought that she had; but was she going to be left to her own devices? Jelkes did not at all like the way Hugh was looking at her. After all, she was a young woman of an entirely different class who was in
his employment, and he had no business to be looking at her like that. Hugh had been educated at Harrow and Balliol, Mona at the local high-school and one of the private ateliers in which London's Bohemia abounds—the prestige and security of the Slade were beyond her reach. Hugh was accustomed to a very sophisticated type of feminity; if Mona managed to be clean and tidy, that was about as high as she aspired, her early upbringing effectually preventing her from adventuring into the slipshod garishness that girl artists often affect, and which is not without its effectiveness. Jelkes judged that Hugh's present mood was a reaction to the shock and disillusionment he had been through, and that when it wore off he would revert to normal and return to his own kind. He would no longer be willing to put up with the discomforts of the bookshop or the limitations of Mona's society.

  At the moment Mona appeared to be taking things impassively and impersonally. She had had experience of men of Hugh's type before when she had been doing designs for the interior decorations of Mayfair, and had a pretty good idea what their attentions were worth. Her attitude was that of a woman humouring her employer, falling in with his mood, and at the same time keeping him at arm's length. Jelkes entirely approved. But he knew from experience that underneath her impassive exterior, Mona Wilton was a young woman of stormy emotions, and apt to get the bit between her teeth in pursuit of them. He could not imagine her falling for Hugh, however; Hugh seemed to him an exceedingly unlikely person for any woman to fall for, with his diffident bearing and general unsureness of himself and lack of personality. All the same, he did not like the way that Hugh kept Mona continually at his heels, taking advantage of the position of employer and employee. Mona, it is true, stalked after him impassively enough in her heavy brogues, her downright manners giving no encouragement to romance. Jelkes could not quite see how romance was going to come into it, in view of all the circumstances, but all the same, he wished Hugh would give Mona a list of what he wanted and send her out to attend to it, instead of running round with her like this.

  In the meantime Hugh was putting the car along in the way to which it was accustomed, and they were not long before they arrived in the little town and had sought out the inevitable photographer whose fate it was to perpetuate features much better forgotten. They took the scrubby, disillusioned little man and his gear into the car. He had to have the seat as he was elderly, so Mona in her vivid green perched on the tapering back, holding on by Hugh's collar while he took the car carefully round the bends of the narrow, winding, medieval streets so as not to shoot her off.

  Arrived at the museum, the photographer did his job and departed; but Hugh, as Mona expected, remained bent over the illuminated pages of the ancient book. She watched his face as he studied them, and it seemed to her that his features changed as she watched him, taking on the same air of a watching hawk that was worn by the sharp features of the tonsured head rising from the black folds of its thrown-back cowl in the fourhundred year old picture. The two men were certainly extraordinarily alike, and as the living man stared at the dead one, he grew more and more like him.

  It seemed to Mona as ifher employer were hypnotising himself with the picture of the dead monk, and she felt that she had better break the spell before it took altogether too much hold on him.

  She leant forward, intending to touch him on the sleeve, but the leg of her chair slipped on the uneven floor, and instead she touched him on the bare skin of his wrist. He looked up suddenly, and met her eyes, and the man who looked up was not Hugh, but Ambrosius, and he had reacted to her touch as a cloistered monk might be expected to react. Mona found herself looking into the eyes of a bird of prey.

  She knew well enough that she had Ambrosius and not Hugh Paston to deal with, but she had no means of knowing whether the monkish celibate was infuriated by her touch, or stirred out of all reason by it. She was alone with him in a large empty upper room of the medieval house that served the town as a museum. From the ordinary point of view she was dealing with a madman—a man who imagined himself to be a dead and gone monk of sinister history. She was not even sure if a man of his epoch would understand modern English if she spoke to him—he must be a coeval of Chaucer. Not knowing what to do, she very wisely did nothing. The eminent churchman, whether real or imaginary, was unlikely to resort to any sudden violence or unseemliness.

  Fra Ambrosius—it was impossible to think of him as Mr Paston—stared at her with the fixity of a snake at a bird. It was probable that he was just as much surprised as she was by the encounter. The room would appear familiar enough to him—it was a room of his own period, carefully preserved and restored; the book under his hand was one of his own books. The table on which it rested was a refectory table out of the monastery itself. The only thing, beside Mona herself, that was out of the picture was a notice on the wall requesting people not to smoke—a request which could have conveyed nothing to him even if he were able to decipher the modern script.

  But he was not paying any attention to notices. He was entirely occupied in attending to what was before him. Mona in the vivid green of the dyed leather was sufficiently incongruous to eyes accustomed to the crude dyes of the Middle Ages. She had an elfin face at the best of times, and in her quaint green hood she looked even to modern eyes, accustomed to freakish fashions, like something strayed from the greenwood—how must she have appeared to the cloistered eyes of the ecclesiastic, accustomed to the soberly coifed heads of the medieval women, and only to those at a distance?

  As she watched him, Mona saw the expression of stupefaction with which he had first greeted her gradually give place to a look of exaltation, as if he had been vouchsafed some miraculous, other-world vision. Mona wondered whether he was under the impression that he was having a vision of a saint. But the expression in his eyes disillusioned her. Ambrosius was under no delusion that he was seeing a saint. She thought of the Temptation of St Anthony, and wondered how Ambrosius was in the habit of dealing with devils. Was she going to be exorcised or strangled? Was Ambrosius going to do his duty as a monk and say: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan ?' or was he not?

  She felt, from the amazed, exalted expression with which he was regarding her, that he did not believe her to be of any earthly nature, and had jumped to the conclusion that she was something come to him from another world in answer to his ungodly experiments with the Greek manuscripts. To say that Ambrosius was agitated would have been but half the truth. The medieval mind of the man returned from the dead knew no half-lights or compromise in the doctrines of sin and hell. According to all the standards of his world, he had sold his soul to the Devil and an eternity of hell-fire awaited him. However much one may think for oneself, the standards of one's world are not easily thrown aside, and they are apt to come back whenever one is taken by surprise.

  The minutes went by, and neither of them moved. Mona, watching the expressions following each other on the face of the man bending towards her—the face of a stranger though the features were familiar—had a profound realisation of the tragedy of the cloister for those who have no vocation for it. The tragedy of Abelard and Eloise. Was this an English Abelard who was bending down to look into her face across the narrow table?

  She gazed back at him. The minutes were slipping away one after the other. A town clock chimed the hour. How much longer were they going to stay like this? She dared not move lest God knew what should be let loose upon her. She could conceive of Hugh Paston falling dead if the occupant of his body withdrew suddenly. Come what might, the first move must not come from her.

  Then the man, without taking his eyes off hers, slowly stretched his hand and touched the back of hers with the tips of his fingers, as if feeling her pulse. The finger-tips were icy cold. It was indeed like the touch of the hand of the dead. Mona did not stir, but continued to hold his eyes with hers. He was evidently trying to ascertain whether she was flesh and blood or phantasy. He had probably known many such phantasies.

  Then the other hand began to move and came towards her. Mona could see
it coming, though she never took her eyes from those that gazed into hers unwavering with their bird of prey regard. What was that hand going to do? Was it coming for her throat? But no, it came to rest on her shoulder. Then the finger-tips that had rested so lightly on the back of her hand closed round her wrist. Mona could not move now if she wanted to.

  So firmly had the phantasy of Ambrosius taken hold on her imagination that the modern dress disappeared from her view, and this man bending over her actually was to her the renegade Churchman, desperately risking hell-fire. To a Catholic the situation would have appeared one of horrible blasphemy and indecency, but Mona's nonconformist upbringing gave her no sympathy with, or understanding of, the Catholic point of view, and all she saw was the natural man hideously cut off from natural things. She knew life as it was lived in Bohemian circles, and she understood male human nature, and she was sorry for that man. Instinctively, unthinkingly, her free hand went out and rested on his arm in a touch of sympathy. She watched the eyes of the renegade, imaginary monk slowly fill with tears. It made no difference whether the man before her were a dead man come back from the past, or whether it was a madman phantasying the tragic history, the results were the same, and sprang from the same roots in frustrated human needs. Whether it were Ambrosius vowed to the celibacy of the cloister, or Hugh Paston wasting his manhood in a loveless marriage—the same causes were producing the same effects. There are loveless marriages sometimes when the nun weds the Church, and not every monk is able to get an effectual transference onto the Virgin Mary. The literature of mysticism leaves us in no doubt whatever as to the nature of that transference.