Goat Foot God

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by Dion Fortune


  But he knew perfectly well, and so did she. It was the hawk face in the black cowl she dreaded to see.

  “This is rather awkward,” said Hugh, dropping into his accustomed chair, which engulfed him completely so that he sat on his shoulder-blades. “Sit down, Mona, we've got to face up to this, otherwise we shall never be able to exist together in the same house. You're not scared of me, are you? No one on God's earth could be scared of me. Is it Ambrosius you're scared of?”

  “Yes—and no,” said Mona. “I give reflex jumps at the sight of Ambrosius, but I'm not really scared of him.”

  “I should have said you were badly scared of him, Mona.”

  “Yes, perhaps I am; but all the same, I'm not going to chase Ambrosius off. He has got to come through, you know, Hugh. That is what I have been facing up to while you have been away. He has got to come through.”

  Hugh was so delighted at her use of his Christian name instead of the formal ‘Mr Paston’ which was her usual custom, that he very nearly forgot about Ambrosius forthwith, for it did not matter whether he came or not. It was Mona who recalled him.

  “We have got to face up to Ambrosius, Hugh, both of us,”

  “Well,” said Hugh, “what about him?”

  Mona sat silent for quite a while, staring at the fire, and Hugh sat watching her. He could imagine Ambrosius watching like that, from the window in the Abbey gate-house that overlooked the market-place—watching the women that were forbidden to him as a Churchman, himself unobserved.

  Mona seemed to have forgotten Hugh's presence, and he sat watching her in the dying firelight, wondering whether he dared think of Ambrosius, or whether, if he did, he would wreck the whole show. For a moment it seemed to him that he could almost see with his physical eyes the arched stone mullions of the gate-house window through which he looked.

  At length she spoke once more.

  “Hugh, has it ever occurred to you to wonder exactly what Ambrosius is?”

  “Well, I took it for granted he was a dead and gone monk, the poor chap they did to death belowstairs across the way. And that I'm more or less mediumistic, without ever having realised it, and that he'd speak through me, given half a chance.”

  “That's one possibility,” said Mona.

  “Is there any other? Beyond my being just plain loopy?”

  “Yes, there is another. Ever heard of reincarnation, Hugh?”

  “Yes, I've heard something. It means we've lived before, doesn't it? Do you think I knew Ambrosius in a past life?”

  “Might have,” said Mona noncommittally, wondering how much she dared say without bringing about a general gaol-delivery of the subconscious contents. Silence fell between them again.

  Then suddenly Hugh burst out: “Mona, I wish to God you'd tell me what you really think. I don't know where I am, and I'll go crazy in good earnest if I don't find out soon.”

  “All right,” said Mona in a low voice, “I'll tell you. Of course I may be wrong, but personally I think you actually are Ambrosius.”

  “What do you mean? You mean I've just imagined him?”

  “No, I mean you've been him. The soul that is now you was once Ambrosius, and before that—some one else again.”

  “Mona, I don't understand. What do you mean?”

  She could tell by his voice that Hugh was very agitated, and hoped to heaven that she had not said too much. But there was no backing out now.

  “You've heard Uncle Jelkes talk of reincarnation?” she said quietly, trying to pull him together by her own quietness.

  “Yes, I've heard him talk, but I'm not sure I took in very much of it. He's too metaphysical for me. You mean that Ambrosius is part of myself? A kind of split personality?”

  “No, not that either. That implies a pathology—something gone wrong. Ambrosius isn't that. At least, he needn't be, if we handle him the right way. He's part of you, Hugh, part of your subconscious that's coming up, not something outside you.”

  “I wish to God he were, Mona. It seems to me that Ambrosius is everything I ought to be but aren't.”

  “Yes, he probably is. There's a whole lot of you that has slipped into Ambrosius and got lost. If we get him back, you'll recover it.”

  “This is the most sensible thing I've heard yet. Everyone else stampedes at the mention of Ambrosius. It's only you who've got the pluck to stand up to him. I'm dashed grateful to you, Mona.”

  She did not answer, but sat staring into the fire, and he sat watching her, the conviction strengthening all the time that the way to Mona lay through Ambrosius' hood, though how, or why, he could not say.

  He broke the silence, which threatened to become permanent, so far away did Mona seem.

  “Well now, what about it? Supposing I was Ambrosius in a past life, what do I do about it in this one?”

  Mona roused herself.

  “That was just what I was puzzling over,” she said. “So far as I can see, the only thing for you to do is to face up to Ambrosius, and then absorb him. Only I don't quite know how it is to be done.”

  “I do, though,” said Hugh. “I have only got to think of myself as him, and feel him strongly, and I am him. I've done it several times for brief moments, and I haven't measured my length, either, on the last two or three occasions.”

  “If you do that,” said Mona, “Ambrosius will absorb you instead of your absorbing him.”

  “I shouldn't object to that,” said Hugh, “he's a dashed sight better specimen than I am. Would you object, Mona, if that happened? If Ambrosius absorbed me, would it be the end of our friendship?”

  “Goodness only knows,” said Mona. “I've no idea. You'll have to chance it.”

  Hugh sat in silence for a time. At length he spoke:

  “I believe you'd like Ambrosius a lot better than you like me, Mona. Oddly enough, you know, it's through you I always get into touch with Ambrosius. He missed a lot in life, and so have I; and it's when I get comparing what I have missed with what Ambrosius missed that I gct in touch with him.”

  Mona did not offer any comment.

  Hugh spoke again:

  “If you're game for the experiment, I am. If you and Uncle Jelkes between you will tackle Ambrosius when he comes along, I'll go and fctch him.”

  “Uncle Jelkes can't do much in this business,” said Mona in a low voice. “It is I who have got to tackle Ambrosius, Hugh. I'm the only person who can do anything with him.”

  Hugh looked at her without speaking.

  “Yes, you're right,” he said at length. “That is, if it isn't too much to ask of you.”

  Silence fell between them again. After a long pause, while the fire settled upon its ashes and the room got dark, Hugh spoke.

  “Do you know what I shall do, Mona, if things turn out all right, and I'm no longer only half there, like I am now, nor clean bug-house, like Ambrosius?”

  “No?”

  “I shall ask you if you'll marry me. Now don't you start getting worried. There's no need for you to go to the trouble of refusing me, for I'm not asking you now. But if things straighten out for me, I shall come and ask you.”

  “Rats,” said Mona. “If things straighten out for you, you won't want to marry me.”

  “Well, we'll see about that when the time comes. Anyway, you can count on a square deal, whatever it may be.”

  They both did more thinking than sleeping that night. Mona had said a great deal more than she had meant to, and was very worried in consequence. She had merely been debating possibilities when Hugh had come in, and taken by surprise and shaken offher poise, had blurted out what was in her mind. She could not understand herself; at the best of times she was a silent, reserved person, and on this occasion, when she was decidedly uneasy and had by no means arrived at any conclusion or decision, she could not understand why she had committed herself so rashly. And she had said so much that it was impossible to back out. Hugh had been started off on a line of ideas that would bear fruit in the near future, if she were not very much mista
ken; any wavering or uncertainty in handling him, and there would be a crash as surely as if he were a high-powered car driven at speed. Only absolute steadiness and an iron nerve could take Hugh round his corners.

  Hugh's suggestion of marriage she did not take seriously. She was not in the least attracted by him, though she liked him and was exceedingly sorry for him; but as she had said to Jelkes, a woman of her type does not make a marriage on such a basis as that. Mona had known real, heart-searing passion, and would never mistake mere emotional twitchings for the great love.

  She was old enough, and disillusioned enough, to consider the possibility of marrying for the sake of a home, but she felt perfectly certain that Hugh, once restored to normal, would return to the fleshpots of Egypt as Jelkes had repeatedly declared. They came from such totally different worlds, did she and Hugh, that he might as well have married a Martian or a Hottentot for all he would have in common with her. None of his friends would accept her, and she would loathe his way of life, to judge, at least, from what she had heard of it from Mrs Macintosh. She could not play bridge: she had not a notion how to give a dinner-party, or even how to attend one; and as for a week-end at a country house, it would be the death of her. She could neither dress nor walk nor talk as did the women of his world, and her dignity was a thing that Mona valued highly; she would not willingly expose herself to the criticisms of butlers and lady's maids and all the folk who know a great deal more about the gentry than the gentry know about themselves.

  She had seen enough of the world to know that a man of Hugh's watery, impressionable, over-sensitive type will cling to any hand held out to him when in trouble, but once the trouble is over, will shake that hand very warmly in thanks and then let go of it.

  Mona asked herself how it had come about that she, who considered herself the least impressionable of women, and who from bitter past experience dreaded emotional entanglements as a burnt child dreads fire, should have let herself in for this schemozzle with Hugh? She cast her mind back to the scene as she had sat in the gathering dusk over the fire, and remembered that she had not been thinking of Ambrosius at all at the moment, nor even of Hugh directly, but of the dream of Greece about which Hugh had told her, and of the sun-drenched hill-side above the sea where he had followed a woman clad in a fawn-skin who had had her carriage and walk. Mona, who was well read in modern psychology, knew at once what Hugh's subconscious had up and said in that dream. But she also knew that such a scene as this had been a favourite phantasy of hers all through her childhood and girlhood. As a child she had daydreamed of racing over sun-warmed rocks beside a boycomrade, clad in the short Spartan tunic she had seen in her book of Greek legends. As she grew older, the phantasy had grown more romantic, and it was the pursuit of the lover, not the hand in hand running of comrades that she phantasied. Later, when Jelkes introduced her to the knowledge of the ancient Mysteries and what was taught at Eleusis, the phantasy took on yet another content, and she visualised herself as the msenad adoring Dionysos, giver ofecstasy, and following the beautiful god over the mountains in the frenzied running dance. There were times when Mona had taken offher shoes and stockings and danced on the dew-soaked turf. She, who could not dance the modern niggerinspired ball-room dances, had a rhythmic movement of her own and an inner singing to accompany it, and sometimes, when she was certain ofsolitude she had given way to it. No one had ever seen her, not even jelkes, and she would have flown like a mznad at anyone who spied upon her. There was another dance she knew, the dance of the priestesses of the sea-goddess whereby the moon is invoked, but she had never dared to try that.

  It was odd that Hugh should have had the same phantasy in his dream. And yet not inexplicable. There was no need to look for an esoteric explanation. Hugh had had the usual public school smattering of the classics, and images of ancient Greece and Rome would be lying latent in his mind. No, she must not take the shared phantasy as indicative of twin soulery or any such tosh. That was merely asking for trouble. It was quite a tricky enough business even when handled impersonally, and utterly impossible if she let her feelings in any way become involved.

  Remembering Hugh's reactions in his dream, and the face of Ambrosius when he appeared in the upper room of the museum, Mona considered the possibility of some fairly drastic experiences before they had got Hugh safely onto his feet and returned him whence he came. Remembering Freud's dictum that cure proceeds via transference, she faced the possibility of having to become Hugh's mistress for a time, and being a modern maiden, concluded that it wouldn't kill her if she had to. Thanks to the ministrations of Malthus, unpleasant consequences were highly improbable, and Mona cared nothing for conventions and had her own ideas on the subject of morals. She was not a sensual woman, and no passing attraction had any power to stir her senses to flash-point; she would sooner put her last shilling in the gas and her head in the gas-oven than sell herself for money, however great her need; but she would give herself for love freely, and under whatever conditions she saw fit; and oddly enough, she would also give herself out of pity if the need were great enough; and though she would have agreed, and in fact asserted, that she was unconventional, she would not have admitted that she was immoral. She would have considered that term much more applicable to the woman who claims all the assets of marriage and doesn't give value for moneys

  Such being Mona's amoral attitude, she contemplated the handling of Hugh in a purely clinical spirit.

  Hugh, for his part, stood in front of his low-pitched window with his hands in his pockets staring out into the moonlight hour after hour, totally unconscious of the lapse of time. At first his head was in such a whirl that he could only see pictures and could not think at all. He saw the Greek hill-side and knew that the woman he had been pursuing was beyond all question Mona, and wondered whether in a still earlier incarnation he had enacted just such a scene. He saw Ambrosius walking around the priory as it was a-building, just as he himself had walked around it while it was being restored. He thought of the discovery he had made in the chapel of the trick of looking out of Ambrosius' hood in order to become Ambrosius.

  This checked the flight of his imagination and gave him a cold feeling all down his spine. Dared he do that trick? And if it came off, what the devil would happen? He did not care two pence about what happened to himself. The thing that worried him was what he might do to Mona Wilton—scare her into the middle of next week and offend her beyond repair? He had no confidence in Ambrosius' morals. He judged that that repressed celibate would break out pretty badly once he started, and whether he were the result of Greek magic in the past or a marriage gone wrong in the present, the consequences would be the same. Hugh funked the responsibility of evoking Ambrosius.

  Finally he went to bed, very bothered and depleted and fed-up, and dreamt unhappy dreams about his mother and the person he now thought of as his first wife.

  In the morning Mona met a dispirited Hugh at breakfast, and could have shaken him for the way in which his moods veered with the wind. So far as could be judged from his demeanour, yesterday's conversation might never have taken place. After breakfast he disappeared and she saw him no more.

  Her household duties concluded, she took a note-book and measuring-rod and set out to plan the garden she intended to make inside the courtyard of the old farmhouse. There should also, she thought. be a wide double herbaceous border leading from the west door out across the pasture to the fir-wood, bordering the faint track that led thither and that was a favourite sunset stroll. There could be no question of stately hollyhocks and regal delphiniums in the shallow, stony soil upon the chalk, but grey, aromatic things such as sea-lavender and old man's beard; goat's rue and thrift; flowering sage, scarlet and blue, and southernwood and rosemary. It was hot in the bright spring sunshine, and Mona wished she had departed from her usual custom and put on a hat.

  Fearing a headache if she persevered, she went just inside the door of the chapel to make her notes and calculate her measurements. She was busily e
ngaged in adding and subtracting, and dividing yards into feet, when there stole over her a feeling that she was not alone. She glanced uneasily over her shoulder. cross with herself for being so nervous, and saw Hugh standing bolt upright and motionless in the centre of the crude Zodiac on the tessellated pavement of the sanctuary. She had not noticed him when she came in because her eyes had been too dazzled by the outside glare to see anything in the semi-darkness of the chapel. She wondered how long he had stood like this, and whether he had been there ever since breakfast, for he was so rigid and immobile that it looked as ifhe would stand for ever.

  She half turned on the stone ledge on which she was seated and gave herself over to watching him. That motionless, absorbed figure produced a very queer feeling as one watched it. She wondered whether it were Ambrosius or Hugh, or a blend of the two, and for some reason she could not define, inclined to the latter idea.

  He stood in the centre of the circle of the Zodiac, his feet in a smaller circle which contained the signs of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. In the compartments formed by the radii of the signs were small holes into which Mona knew the signs representing the seven planets could be fitted according to the manner in which they stood in their heavenly houses as the wheel of the skies revolved. Hugh was standing in the exact centre of the symbolic representation of the universe, and Mona thought that she had never believed it possible that any living being could be so absolutely alone.

  All her irritation with Hugh vanished. He was the watery type, under the presidency of the Moon and Aquarius; it was his nature to be attentive to the wavering images reflected by moonlight on water. She herself was of the earth, being a Virgo, and Virgo, by the way, is not Ever-virgin, but also Many-breasted.

  She felt a profound pity for that lonely soul up there in the shadows of the east, unlighted by any window in the sanctuary, for Ambrosius, for some reason best known to himself, had left the eastern end of his church in darkness. She sat waiting, watching, and wondering. It seemed as if Hugh would stand there indefinitely. Finally she could bear the tension no longer, and moving silently on her jute-soled shoes, she passed up the aisle and took her stand behind and a little to one side of him.

 

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