Goat Foot God

by Dion Fortune

  “May I examine you?” he said at length, hoping to warm up on the accustomed routine.

  “Certainly,” said Hugh. “Anything you like.”

  Dr Atkins got out his stethoscope.

  “Would you be good enough to undress?”

  “Undress?” exclaimed Hugh, suddenly waking up. “Good Lord, man, I'm all right from the neck downwards. This is where my trouble is,” and he tapped his head. “You don't want to stethoscope that, do you? Corne and sit down and have a cigarette.”

  “Thanks,” said Dr Atkins, feeling he was showing tact.

  “I don't know what we've got in the way of refreshments,” said Hugh, “I am afraid there's nothing but bottled beer,” and produced some forthwith from the sideboard. Dr Atkins, what with gratitude for the beer and relief at the turn the interview had taken, forgot to be professional and became the decent, inexperienced lad Nature meant him to be, and they settled down on either side of the hearth, he and his patient, with a glass of beer and a cigarette apiece, to the entirely unorthodox method of treating a mental case as if it were human.

  It was Hugh who took charge of the interview.

  “I suppose Mr Watney told you all there is to tell?” he said.

  “He told me all he knew,” said Dr Atkins, grinning. “But I dare say there's plenty more if you care to tell it.”

  This was not the way cases had been examined at the demonstrations at the asylum, but it was much more comfortable for both parties than the orthodox method—this and the beer.

  “I suppose Watney told you they want to certify me? I daresay they're right, but I don't want to be certified. I'd be glad if you could fix it so that I'm not. I'll do anything you want me to.”

  Dr Atkins, warmed by the beer, began to feel as if he were under Divine guidance, so successful did he appear to be in the management of mental cases.

  “Don't you worry about that,” he said. “I'll see you're not certified.”

  “Have some more beer?” said Hugh.

  “Thanks, I will,” said Dr Atkins.

  Hugh opened another bottle.

  “Had a bit of a shock?” said Dr Atkins.

  “Yes, the devil of a shock.”

  “Care to talk about it?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “It'll blow over, given time.”

  “Hope so. Have some more beer?”

  “I don't mind if I do.”

  Hugh opened another bottle. Dr Atkins contributed a packet of gaspers. They sat in a companionable silence. There are many worse ways than this of doing psychiatry. Hugh had seen some of them, and was duly grateful.

  “Know anything about psycho-analysis?” he asked his medical adviser as he filled his glass.

  “No, not much.”

  “Well, I do,” said Hugh. “And I'll wring your neck if you try it on me.”

  “Right-o,” said Dr Atkins.

  “Have some more beer?”

  “No, my Lord, no. I've got to drive home! There's a row of empties on the floor.”

  And so they parted. Hugh greatly relieved. He liked Dr Atkins personally, and had had his fears laid to rest. Dr Atkins, for his part, drove straight home and looked up the case in his books before he put the car away. He knew he had succeeded, but he did not know how, or why. He had sat like that once with a pal of his after the fellow had had a knock-out blow; but still, that wasn't psychiatry. He made a note of a prescription capable of calming lions and tigers, and hoped for the best. That was all he could do, poor lad. Medical science knows precious little about minds, diseased or healthy, and what it does know it has got hold of by the wrong end.

  Jelkes mounted guard over the household all the following day, and the next, but no sign came from the hostile camp. As Mr Watney had surmised, the Power of Attorney stimied them neatly, and they dropped the idea of certification, for the moment, at any rate, and unless Hugh did something really outrageous, he was safe enough.

  But even if that sword no longer hung over their heads, there was still a pretty serious problem on their hands, for it could not be denied that there was something very much wrong with Hugh. He had lasped into a peculiar, brooding, spiritless apathy, as if his mind were away in another world and that world not a pleasant one. jelkes, who had read widely in psychology and had seen a good many cracked-up minds among the Jesuits—a nervous breakdown, politely called surrender to God, being part of their curriculum—didn't like the look of Hugh at all. He had a shrewd suspicion, judging him on type, that he would swing between apathy and excitability. If something got through the skin of his apathy, he would be excitable; and when his excitement had exhausted him, he would lapse into apathy. After all, the human machine is an internal combustion engine running on spirit. Temperament activated by vitality. Jelkes judged Hugh to be suffering from air-lock, and liable to backfire as the air-lock blew clear. If one were turning the starting-handle when that happened, one could get a broken wrist as easy as kiss hands. Jelkes was deadly uneasy at the idea of leaving Mona alone with Hugh, but for the life of him did not see how he could let his business take care ofitselfany longer ifhe expected to have any business left to go back to. What was in Mona's mind he could not make out. Sometimes he thought she had no appreciation at all of the state of affairs, and sometimes he thought she knew a lot more than she had seen fit to tell him. Mona was blessed with a poker-face.

  CHAPTER XXI

  By the end of the week Hugh seemed considerably more normal; the telephone was in, so in case of emergency Mona could get either Mr Watney, the doctor, or the police according to which seemed to be indicated, and was no longer at the mercy of Hugh and his alter ego, Ambrosius, who between them might be capable of anything; Jelkes decided to risk itt and leave Monks Farm to its own devices for a few days and see what was happening to his means of livelihood.

  “I don't believe in selling one's soul for filthy lucre,” he said. “I think the Duke of Wellington had the right idea—put all your letters in a drawer, and they'll answer themselves, given time. But unfortunately you can't do too much of that sort of thing in business—folk don't like it. God knows why.”

  So Hugh ran him down into the valley in the car, and he caught the evening bus for London.

  Having pushed Jelkes into his bus, and his rush-basket after him, Hugh put the big car about and drove up into the hills. He dreaded the first meeting with Mona alone. There was a lot to be thought out. He needed to be clear on his own line of action, and very sure of his ability to carry it out. It was going to take a good deal of selfcontrol, he thought, to go just so far and no further, and not slip into anything that would earn him a snub from Mona, which might cause him, in his strung-up state, to lose his temper and have a row with her that would lead to permanent estrangement. Left to his own devices, Hugh would not have risked it, but he knew that Mona did not intend to leave him to his own devices, and he wondered how much she knew about life, and how much she knew about what she was doing, and whether she would be able to steer round the bends ahead.

  The thing he feared was the loss of his own selfcontrol. It was no longer his trouble that he could not grip life, but that he might accidentally strangle it. He knew that the stubbornness of the weak man, the courage of the coward, the binge of the saint are all notorious. He had always known that he had no stomach for a fight, that he was as weak as ditch-water in every relationship of life, and that he sincerely wished to do what was right and was always ready to sacrifice himself for others—and if that isn't the road to sainthood, what is? But now he found himself getting his head down and going at things like a bull at a gate; as for righteousness, he knew the thing his whole being ached for—life, more life, fullness of life—the blessing of Pan!

  Self-sacrifice? That was the last thread by which he hung. For Hugh was soft-hearted: keenly alive to the hurt of others. It was very difficult for him to sacrifice anybody, and impossible to sacrifice them to himself. But he knew that the gods are only to be invoked by sacrifice, and that in the
case of Pan, self-sacrifice would not serve.

  All around him, where he had pulled up his car on the high common, the gorse was in flower, and its sweet almondy odour filled the air. There was a mellowness as of summer in the slow-moving wind of the warm spring dusk. April was ending; May would soon be here; and with the last day of April came the Eve of Beltane.

  According to tradition, as Hugh had gathered from Jelkes's books, Beltane was the Night of the Witches, and if anything were going to happen, it might be expected to happen then. He wondered what form Pan would take if he appeared? Would he come crudely, as a materialising stench of goat? Or would he come more subtly in the soul? Hugh inclined to the latter view. He had always been interested in the uncanny, and had read all the occult thrillers as they appeared. He remembered that the great event was invariably one of two things—a materialisation that does not quite come off, or a dream from which everybody wakes up in the last chapter. He suspected that the writers of the thrillers had diligently taken in each other's washing—in fact one author went so far as definitely to disclaim all practical knowledge of the subject on which he wrote in great detail—and had not exactly gone to Nature. if such a term could be applied to so unnatural a matter, for their data.

  He, for his part, did not know quite what to expect, and so could not decide whether he should be disappointed that more that was spectacular had not happened, or satisfied that so much had already come about. Looking back over the weeks that had passed since he had started to break out of the luminous opacity that was his opal, he could not deny that things had happened —Ambrosius, for instance—, and Mona had come into his life, with results that looked as if they were going to prove harrowing.

  Was all this the fruit of his invocation of Pan? He began to suspect that it was. For after all, what was an invocation of Pan, in the first instance, save a resolution to break out of the opal? He had given permission to his own subconscious to come up to the light; then he had gone on to invoke the primordial forces of life to declare themselves; not only had he let loose the Pan within, but he had called upon the Great God Pan without. Plenty of people let loose the Pan within—the most appropriate rite for that was alcoholic—but the Great God Pan—that was another matter; he wasn't often called upon in these materialistic days when folk had given up believing in spiritual evil even more thoroughly than they had ceased to believe in spiritual good. But was the Great God evil? “No!” said Hugh aloud. “He isn't. I repudiate that.”

  And with that he started the engine, and put the car about once more, and returned to Monks Farm and Mona.

  He had a very queer feeling as he turned into the lane, now promoted by the liberal addition of gravel to be a carriage drive. Deep down in him there was a sudden thrill of eagerness, but all on the surface was dead numbness. During the days of brooding, that had passed with Jelkes for apathy, he had made up his mind that to try and make any further advance with Mona Wilton was to lose what he had already got. The side of him that had raised its seven crowned heads out of the kingdoms of unbalanced force, to quote Jelkes's favourite Qabalists, that old serpent Leviathan that is in each one of us, had been thrust back into the place of severest judgments again; what Hugh considered his better self was sitting on the lid, and all was quiet for the moment.

  As he came over a rise in the ground that hid the farm from the road and saw the firelight shining out of its uncurtained windows, he felt an exquisite pleasure, and at the same time a tantalised sense of frustration such as a starving man might feel when gazing at a realistic poster advertising plenty. The car slid down the gentle slope by its own weight, and he eased it through the wide doors of the barn without recourse to the engine. The thoroughbred car moved as silently as a ghost, not a spring squeaked, not a window rattled. The newlyrolled gravel hardly crunched, and Hugh returned to his home unobserved.

  He cut across the courtyard from the barn, intending to enter by the back door. As he passed the kitchen window he glanced in, and saw there Bill, very much taking his ease by the fire, with Silly Lizzie worshipping him as if he were the Vision Beautiful, which he decidedly was not, in this ungirt mood. Hugh hesitated. To break in on an idyll like that was like smashing a pane of glass. He turned away, re-crossing the courtyard, and entered the chapel.

  It was as black as pitch at first, but the lingering after-glow gleamed faintly through the west window, and his eyes gradually became accustomed to the dim light. The great angels in the buttressing bays were hidden in the gloom, but the dark mass of the Tree on the high wall at the eastern end showed up against its lighter background. Hugh stood staring at it, trying to picture it as he knew it to be, with its ten gaudy fruit arranged in their three symmetrical triangles with the odd one at the bottom. He had heard Jelkes discourse of the symbolism of that Tree, representing heaven and earth and the intermediate worlds between, according to the ancient rabbis. He moved slowly up the broad space of the nave, mounted the three shallow steps, and felt under his feet the smooth tessellated pavement of the sanctuary. Around him, though hidden by the darkness, was the rude circle of the Zodiac as designed by the primitive mosaic-workers of Ambrosius' day. His feet were treading the actual flooring that had been trodden by the sandalled feet of the dead monk. He wondered how often Ambrosius had come in thus, alone in the darkness, seeking guidance and strength as the net closed round him, and he thought how narrow his own escape had been from the spiritual equivalent of being walled up alive. He tried to reconstruct in his imagination the cubical altar of the Templars, which, according to their enemies, was the obscene throne of the goat-god, but according to themselves merely symbolised the universe. Of course, if one regarded the universe as the obscene throne of the goat-god, which is what the spiritually-minded seem to do, the Church was amply justified in its attitude towards Ambrosius. If, on the other hand, one regarded the universe as an altar, Ambrosius was right in his attitude towards the Church. It all depended on the viewpoint. If it is true that we are begotten in. sin and brought forth in iniquity, unquestionably the world is a good place to get away from; but if, on the other hand, this material universe is the luminous garment of the Eternal, as the Gnostics opined, it is a different story. He remembered a remark of Jelkes's: “I worship God made manifest in Nature, and to Hell with the saints!”

  Hugh wished to God he had the pluck to send the saints to hell and go his own way, as Ambrosius had done. He wondered what that ruthless rebel would have made of the present circumstances. Of one thing he was certain—he would not have been baulked of Mona Wilton by any such small circumstance as her disinclination. He could imagine Ambrosius by sheer will-power dominating anyone who came his way. And as he thought, imagining the mind of Ambrosius, it seemed to him as if something in his own mind opened like a door, and the two minds coincided, and once again he was Ambrosius. But this time he knew it. There was no closing-down of the one consciousness as the other opened, they were intercommunicating for a brief second.

  But the door closed again as swiftly as it had opened. Hugh breathless and sweating, staggered slightly as he recovered his balance. But now he understood a good many things he had not understood before. Rapidly his mind pieced together the various scraps of information that had come his way: the crash onto his back in the upper room at the museum, when he had lost his balance at the change-over from one mode of consciousness to another—Mrs Macintosh's remark: “Your face altered completely as you entered the door—.” He wondered whether, had there been a witness to note, his face would have been observed to change during these last few minutes, and felt pretty certain that it had.

  One thing in particular he had realised however, that he did not ‘get' Ambrosius by concentrating on a mental picture of him, as he had tried to do in the stuffy little parlour at the Green Man, but by meditating on what Ambrosius must have felt or thought or done.

  ‘He also looked forth for an hour

  On peopled plains and skies that lower,

  From those few windows in a tower />
  That is the head of a man.’

  The thing in Hugh that had stirred before under the surface apathy, turned over in its sleep and chuckled. A key had been found, if he had the nerve to use it. Ambrosius could be invoked at will by simply thinking ofhim in a particular way, which consisted in identifying oneself with him instead of looking at him.

  ‘But who shall look from Alfred's hood,

  Or breathe his breath alive?’

  Hugh had a pretty good notion that he was going to look from Ambrosius' hood. Exactly what the consequences would be, he did not know, but suspected that they might be drastic. He might even get himself certified in good earnest if he went on like this. But he did not care. He had an idea that the road to Mona Wilton might lie through Ambrosius' hood, and he didn't care a damn for the consequences. The renegade ecclesiastic had already begun to leave his mark behind him.

  Hugh turned and left the chapel and made his way round to the south front of the priory, passing silently over the dew-soaked grass. Glancing in at the window as he passed, he saw Mona sitting over the fire, an unlit lamp beside her, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, staring into the flames, deep in thought. And anxious thought, too, to judge by the set of her mouth and the lines on her forehead. The door stood open to the mild spring night and he entered unheard. It was not till he spoke to her that she realised his presence, and then she leapt to her feet so startled that she sent her chair over behind her and Hugh was only just in time to catch the lamp, thanking his stars that it was unlit.

  “I'm frightfully sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to scare you like that, but what was I to do as you hadn't heard me come?”

  “It's very stupid of me,” said Mona. “I don't know why I jumped like that. I can't imagine.”