Goat Foot God

by Dion Fortune

  She was not troubled about the outcome of the affair for herself; she had little or nothing to lose; it was Hugh she feared for. Would he stand the strain of what they were doing to him, or were they pushing him over the border-line into a breakdown? And were they, after all, upon the right track? The occult philosophy is a very tenuous thing, and there is not much to lay hold of when it comes to putting it into practice. Was it, after all, just intellectual chess, with no relation whatsoever to life, like the speculations of the schoolmen, who debated how many angels could stand on the point of a needle?

  So far as she could see, Pan, if stirred up sufficiently, would come into action. Hugh's real nature would break through to the surface, never to be repressed again. But several problems presented themselves. Would the Pan in Hugh be strong enough to break through his inhibitions? And if it did, would Hugh's nature stand the strain, or would it split? And supposing the two sides of Hugh's nature became merged into harmony, and normality were restored, what would the resulting man have to say to her? Would he, being made normal, return whence he came to the life that was habitual to him, as Jelkes had always declared? After all, this life at the farm with her was an absurd one for Hugh, with his position and resources. She was no mate for him if he were normal. It was this realisation that made her reluctant to yield to his advances. Hugh, normal, might, and probably would, be a very different person to the Hugh Paston she had learnt to know and like. Mona feared and distrusted Mayfair, having seen a good deal of its ways and works from the point of view of the under-dog. Old school ties stank to heaven in her nostrils after several unfortunate experiences. Mona's distrust was deep-rooted. From her point of view she could not see what there was to do with Mayfair, except exploit it and avoid its claws.

  She sat on in the sun, smoking her cigarette down to the bitter end and burning her lips before she threw it away. She was a courageous creature, and could have steered steadily through the breakers ahead had she had any sort of a chart or compasses. It was the absence of any sea-mark by which she could lay her course that gave her anxiety. She knew the general direction, but she did not know where the water might be expected to shoal and the channel would have to be kept accurately.

  But there are many worse sea-marks than a star. She found herself picturing the sea of her metaphor, indigo in the darkness, flecked here and there with foam where it broke on the unseen rocks. Above her head was the night sky and the stars. The sunlight faded out, and Mona was alone with her vision. She could feel the boat of the soul that carried herself and another reaching steadily on its tack; then she put it about, and it paid off on the next long slant of the wind. The night was closing in, the wind freshening, and she thought of the Master Who had walked the waves in the storm. His comforting touch was not for her if she were following after the Wild Goat of the mountains. And then there came to her the vision of Pan with his crook, Pan as the Shepherd; Pan with his pipes—the Nether Apollo—the harmoniser. She saw him, shaggy and wild and kind, leading the creatures of the flock of Ishmael down to the grey and barren shore that lay ahead. And he held out his crook towards her over the dark waters, and she laid the course that would bring her to him where he waited, the creatures of the flock of Ishmael about his feet—creatures for whom there was no place in the world of towns and men. Somehow she knew that steering by that uplifted crook, she would come steadily through the churning white water that marked the unseen rocks.

  She held on her course fearlessly, even though she could hear the breakers closing in all round her. Then it seemed to her that the Shepherd of Goats rose up gigantic in the darkness, towering above her small boat, his slanting agate eyes gleaming and kindly. He was the keeper of all wild and hunted souls for which no place could be found in a man-made world, and she and Hugh were running in under the shadow of his crook. They were coming down onto the fundamental realities of life which cannot be shaken, to which all things must come in the end. She began to feel safe and secure. Keeping her eyes fixed on the fundamental reality, let it be what it might, she felt certain that she would steer the right course. This was the real invocation of Pan—the surrender to bed-rock natural fact, the return to Nature, the sinking back into the cosmic life after all the struggle to rise above it into an unnatural humanity. Animal is our beginning, and animal our end, and all our sophistications are carried on the back of the beast and we do ill to forget our humble brother. Uncared-for, collar-galled and filthy, he takes his revenge in the spread of disease. St Francis spoke contemptuously of Brother Ass, but man is a centaur who is related to Pegasus on one side of the family. The wise Cheiron who taught LEsculapius healing was carried swiftly on his four strong hooves. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for us.

  Mona awoke from her dream of goats and centaurs and breaking seas to find that the sun had gone in and the wind of spring was cold. All the same, she knew that she had received the Blessing of Pan on her enterprise because she had given her undeviating loyalty to things natural—because she had said: ‘What is truth?' and set to work to pursue it.

  The gong summoned her to lunch, but Hugh did not appear. She sent Silly Lizzie, now radiant—so radiant that Mona could only conclude that she had sinned again—up to his bedroom to see if he were there, but drew blank.' Alarmed, which was hardly reasonable, for to be late for lunch does not necessarily argue tragedy, Mona ran across to the chapel, and drew blank once more. Hurrying back through the cloisters, she noticed that the door into the main building stood ajar with the huge key in the lock. Work on the main building had come to a standstill since Mr Pinker had finished his share of it and departed, and they had not yet begun on the furnishing. Decorating there was none, for all was stone.

  The big stove in the cellar had done its work, and the place struck warm as she entered, for stone, once warmed up, holds the heat well. She ran from the one big room to the other, but they were empty; peered into the cellar, but that was empty too, so far as she could see; then upstairs, and along the long line of cells—all empty; up again, to the chapel in the gable—empty also. Mona, now thoroughly scared, for there was a sense of impending evil about the place, ran down the worn twisting steps of the stairs again, and down into the cellar, the only place she had not searched thoroughly. One of the cells, that had probably been used as a coal-bunker by the last tenants, had a door to it, and the door was closed; Mona pushed it open and looked in.

  A single point of dim blue flame flickered in the darkness, giving practically no illumination; but by the light coming down the stairway behind her she saw that Hugh, clad in his monk's robe, lay on a roughly-made bench, his cowl drawn over his face. The dim blue flamecame from his cigarette-lighter, which he had stood burning in a niche high up in the wall. He did not stir at the sound of the opening door.

  Anything might have happened in that airless cellar with the closed stove burning anthracite. Mona, terrified, pushed back the cowl from his face, and his eyes opened and looked up at her.

  “This was how it should have been,” he said, without moving.

  Then Mona knew that he had been deliberately living over again his life and death as Ambrosius in the hope of picking up the lost threads of memory. The atmosphere of doom was all about him, and it was this that she had felt as impending evil and danger. Powerfully and definitely, as only a trained mind could do it, he had created that atmosphere by his picturing, and she, being sensitive, had felt it.

  ‘This was how it should have been.' he had said. This was how the monk Ambrosius. meeting death in his sins, had pictured it. The succuba of his dreams. the woman he had never seen in real life. had come to open the prison doors, and he would be free on the hillside of Greece where the Shepherd of Goats awaited him.

  Mona took upon herself the personality of the dreamwoman, the succuba, the visitant from the wide free world of the Unseen. She put out her hand and took his, knowing by the heat of his hand in hers how cold hers must feel to him.

  “Come.” she said, and he rose.

  He f
ollowed her up the cellar steps. cowl over face, hands in sleeves. but at the top he turned aside from the door.

  “I must call them also.” he said, and went on up the winding stairs. She followed him. standing with her head just above the topmost step to watch what would happen.

  He passed down the long line of the empty cells, some doorless, some with rotting modern doors hanging on broken hinges, for Mr Pinker had been refused permission to work here. and Mona now saw why. Door by door, Hugh paused and called a name. Benedick. Johannes, Gyles—one by one he called the roster of the condemned monks, long since mouldered to dust. Mona wondered what spirits reborn felt a sudden stir of memory within them, a nostalgia for the Unseen.

  At the end of the passage Hugh turned, and came back towards her again where she stood on the topmost step of the steep and winding stairs. He walked slowly, as befitted a Churchman, the slow swing of the skirted gown keeping time to his stride; his hands, thrust into the wide sleeves, rested folded on the knot of his girdle; his cowl was pulled forward over his face as monks use when meditating. He came and stood before her, and looking up from below, she saw his face clearly for the first time. In the shadows of the hood it looked dark and saturnine, indefinably different from Hugh Paston, and yet not Ambrosius.

  “I am not the same man you have known, Mona, I am something quite different.”

  “So I see,” said Mona in a low voice.

  He did not ask her if she minded, as Hugh would have done. He left her to take it or leave it, and in so doing, accomplished his ascendency over her.

  “Do you realise what I am?” he said. “I am a Churchman who has mastered the Church. The Church was made for man, not man for the Church, Mona.”

  She noticed that he did not say: ‘Who has renounced the Church,' nor yet: ‘Who has been cast out of the Church,' but: ‘Who has mastered the Church'.

  He came closer to her.

  “I shall never wear this gown again,” he said. “But there is one thing I mean to do before I put it off.”

  He took Mona by the shoulders and held her at arm's length, staring down into her face, his own shadowed in the cowl.

  He began to speak in a low voice, as if communing with himself, heedless of his listener.

  “I have seen you many times, near, very near, but never quite—.” He paused. “This is what I have always wanted to do—” and he folded her in his arms. She stood for a while leaning against him, her face buried in the loose harsh folds of the monk's robe, stifled by them, but not caring to move.

  “Look up,” he said at length, and she raised her head.

  The dark hawk's face of Ambrosius, deep in its cowl, hung over hers.

  “This is what is forbidden me,” he said, “and that is why I am doing it,” and he kissed her on the forehead. Then his hands dropped to his sides, and he stood back and looked at her, not as if to see how she had taken it, but as if he had done all he meant to do and had finished. He was perfectly calm, but there was a kind of still intensity about him like the hush before a thunderstorm. Mona felt herself trembling.

  They stood face to face, neither moving, and she, looking up at the harsh-featured face in the shadow of the cowl, had a sudden feeling that the fantasy was real, and that they were back in the days of Ambrosius, risking all for love under the shadow of the terrible hand of ecclesiastical power.

  The man before her was a prince of the Church, powerful, ambitious; he was risking everything that made life living—more, he was risking life itself, to talk to her thus, for a few stolen moments.

  And she, what was she risking? In the days of Ambrosius she would have been burnt at the stake; in the days of the present, she was risking a very nasty, possibly a pretty dangerous, experience, at the hands of an unbalanced man whom she was deliberately inciting. She might even be risking life itself, there in the empty building; many murders have been done by men in the state Hugh Paston was in. Pan in his most goatlike aspect might appear, and if thwarted, might strangle her.

  Mona tried to keep a level head as she gazed back into Hugh's grey-green eyes that regarded her with a fixed, unwavering stare. But under the influence of those fanatical eyes she felt herself unconsciously slipping back into Ambrosius's century, and finding in the renegade monk confronting her a man more magnetic and fascinating than any she had ever known.

  With an effort she dragged consciousness back to the present, but the renegade monk came with it, and Mona found herself wanting to rouse the Ambrosius aspect of Hugh and find with him tremendous experiences of the emotions. That aspect of her which she had thought dead began to wake again.

  It must have shown in her eyes, for a strange look came into Hugh's for a moment. Then he too dragged himself back to the present. He gave a short laugh, thrust his hands into his wide sleeves after the manner of monks, and stepped back and away from her.

  “This, won't do, Mona,” he said. “You go on back to the house and wait for me there.”

  “Aren't you coming?” she asked, startled, fear rising in her at the thought of what might be afoot in the empty building with Hugh prowling like a ghost.

  He shook his head. “No, I am in the full tide of a catharsis, if you know what that is. You've read psycho-analysis, haven't you, Mona? Well, I am abreacting my complexes. Leave me alone. I'll be all right. Don't worry. There's nothing to worry about.”

  Mona turned away and he shut the door. She knew she must leave him alone. There was nothing else to be done—but to obey his instruction and not to worry was beyond her power. Neither did she believe that there was nothing to worry about. What Hugh was going through might be truly cathartic—a purge of the soul; but it put a severe strain on the integrity of the personality and she knew from Jelkes of things that happen in psycho-analyses that never get into the text-books. Personalities sometimes come to pieces at such times, and the results have to be certified.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  HUGH climbed up the worn and winding stone stairs till he came to the chapel in the gable. It had been scantily furnished with a Glastonbury chair, a press and a coffer. It was just such an equipment as Ambrosius might have had in his study, save that there was a rush mat to keep the feet from the cold of the stone—a luxury he was unlikely to have enjoyed. Hugh dropped into the Glastonbury chair, resting his elbows in the crutches of its arms, drew his cowl yet closer over his head, and settled down to think.

  It had never been his custom to do much thinking, it is a lost art in the modern West, but he had picked up from Jelkes one or two of the tricks of the trade, and as the subject on which he proposed to think was an absorbing one, he had no difficulty in fixing his mind on it, a capacity that in the ordinary way has to be slowly and laboriously acquired.

  He wanted to understand; beyond everything else he felt that this was his need. Disjointed scraps of realisation had been coming to him in the weeks that had passed since his wife's death, and he was trying to piece them together. Only so could he reconstruct his house of life upon its faulty foundations. He had learnt from Jelkes the trick of thinking backwards—of tracing a thing to its source, step by step, instead of starting at the imagined cause and trying to see how the effects came about. As he had tracked back through his own life he had been struck again and again by the curious recurrence of the same factors in different forms. His grandfather and Jelkcs were of a type; his mother and his wife; his old Scotch nurse and Mrs Macintosh—Mona alone in his experience was unique, he had never met anything like her—and then he remembered his flash of recollection as Ambrosius, who had been haunted by a succuba in her likeness.

  He shuddered involuntarily when his thoughts turned to the life of Ambrosius, and his mind shied away like a frightened horse. He had spent two hours in the dark cellar thinking of Ambrosius, thinking of him with an intensity that had reconstructed the whole medieval scene till he was living in it, and not only experiencing its emotions but feeling its sensations; and now it seemed to him as if Ambrosius' experiences had been his own experiences
, many years ago, which though healed, could still pain in the old scar.

  He was startled to find how real the thing had become to him.!t seemed as if there were not two lives. but two epochs ofone life, and that the earlier years of Hugh Paston bore the marks of the experiences that had left Ambrosius shattered. He could imagine that had Ambrosius escaped with his life, a broken man, he would have been in the same nerveless condition that Hugh found himself in. Hugh knew from his reading that there is all the difference in the world between the man whose nerve has been shattered by a devastating experience and the congenital neurotic; that the crisis of the former will pass, but that the latter condition is chronic. Every doctor who had ever seen him had declared Hugh to be neurotic; but if his condition were due to the experiences that had broken him when he was Ambrosius, might not the condition pass as it passes in the normal man who breaks down from overstrain? Once the conditions that produced the breakdown had passed away and the body has rested, the normal man becomes normal again as soon as he can pick up his old interests. In this deeper shattering, that had passed beyond the personality into the immortal soul, might it not be possible that he would once more recover his spiritual strength ifhe could touch the springs of life that had motived Ambrosius?

  He knew what these were. Ambrosius, a misfit in the cloister, pagan at heart for all his priesthood, had seen God made manifest in Nature and rejected the ascetic doctrine which cries ‘Unclean, unclean' to natural things. Ambrosius was no malignant devotee of a destructive Satan, after the manner of the old witchcults; he sought life for deadness and light for the medieval gloom and narrowness of the cloister. Ambrosius had been broken because he had been born out of due season; he had been blackened and cut off as surely as fruit-blossom flowering too early. But the times had advanced now, and the whole age was reaching out in the same direction as Ambrosius, its way cleared by Freud and the psychologists; supposing he could do as Ambrosius had done, and go back to the prime source of his inspiration, back beyond that disastrous medieval tragedy, might he not also contact the springs of life and live anew? It was no good stopping at Ambrosius; that would be fatal, he would only reconstruct the tragedy; but to evade and avoid Ambrosius would have been like leaving an unconquered fortress in his rear; this he had known when he had passed that grim hour of hard thinking in the darkness of the cellar, facing all the things he feared.