by Dion Fortune
“I suppose that explains it, though I'm not sure that I'm any the wiser. I suppose we've caught time bending, same as Einstein caught light. Well I don't pretend to understand either time or space apart from clocks and tape-measures. It's all so much talk to me, but I'll take your word for it, T. J. I suppose for all practical purposes Ambrosius is the foundation on which I am built. He's my subconscious, or part of it, anyway, and when anything happens to bring my subconscious to the surface, Ambrosius comes up with it and takes charge.”
“That's about it, laddie.”
“Well, what's to do about it? I don't know that I'm any better off now that I've been labelled. That is the grouse I've always had against psycho-analysis. But I'll tell you one thing, T. J., it's my solemn conviction that Ambrosius is normal, and it is Hugh Paston who is the pathology.”
“Hugh, you've spoken the sober truth, and if psychoanalysts went to work on that assumption, they'd get some cures, which is more than they do now. Ambrosius is the real you, and he was made what he is by experiences in a past life.”
“But hang it all, T. J., we can't let Ambrosius loose on polite society. I know Ambrosius if you don't.”
“Aye, that's the difficulty.”
“I can cope with Ambrosius,” came Mona's voice from the shadows.
“No, you can't,” said both men, hastily and simultaneously.
“Yes, I can,” said Mona. “I'm not afraid of Pan if you are.”
“I'd never dream of letting you try to cope with Ambrosius, Mona,” said Hugh. “He's not a man, he's a fiend.”
“'Starving men are dangerous men',” said Mona.
“And liable to turn cannibal,” added Jelkes. “Tell me, Hugh,” he continued hastily, hoping to change the subject, “what are the things that bring Ambrosius up with you?”
“Danger, anger, and Mona,” said Hugh curtly.
Before poor Jelkes could make another cast, Mona spoke again.
“It is my turn to be psycho-analysed now,” she said. “And I'm going to psycho-analyse my day-dreams. They are just as useful as night-dreams if you know how to take them. When I was little I used to imagine myself racing over hills with a boy who was my brother. As we lived in the very centre of an industrial town in the Black Country and I was an only child, it isn't difficult to trace the root of that dream. When I got older and went to school I was tremendously fascinated by the Greek myths and legends. Fairy tales did not amuse me in the least; neither did stories from English history; but the Greek myths fascinated me, and I fitted my day-dream into them. Instead of running over the hills hand in hand with a brother, I was a Bacchante going out to look for Dionysos and the boy playmate was a Greek athlete who followed me because he admired me. I wore nothing but the fawn-skin because I loved to feel the sun and air.”
“What do you trace that to?” said Jelkes.
“Mother making me wear wool next the skin,” said Mona tartly.
“That day-dream lasted a long time,” she went on. “I put myself to sleep with it every night for years. Then, when I learnt of the Mysteries from you, I became a priestess, a pythoness, and the Greek athlete became the high priest who used me as a pythoness. That is all I remember. I have got no medieval memories, but Hugh has. Now Hugh, you take up the tale. What were your day-dreams?”
“Good Lord, I never had any. I haven't got an imagination like yours.”
“Treat Ambrosius as a day-dream, and tell us about him.”
“Yes, I might do that. That's a bright idea. When I think of Ambrosius as real, he scares me; and when I think of him as imagination, I feel foolish, but I can treat him as a day-dream all right. Well, I think Ambrosius was a solitary, supercilious sort of blighter when he was a lad. Kept himself to himself and felt superior, in spite of being looked down upon locally because he was a flight of fancy. I think that wherever he was, he felt he didn't belong. Then they wanted to shove him in the Church, and that suited him well enough because he had got nothing to hold him outside it. Then, I think, as he got older he got it in the neck over women. Not because the old Abbot didn't ride him on a loose rein, but because he couldn't find a woman to suit him. He used to have a nightmare of a particular type of woman, and he couldn't find her in the flesh, and no one else was any use to him. It's a funny thing, but if you don't get just the right type of woman, rows of others are no use to you. I know, because I've tried. Pm not such a fool as to believe in one life one love sort of thing, but there's one type—or at any rate there's one particular factor you look for without quite knowing what it is. You don't know what you do want, but you do know what you don't want. Sorry, Mona, to be spilling my innermost Gubbins in front of you like this, but if Uncle J. will stir up my subconscious with a pole, what do you expect?”
“Have you got anything about Greece?” said Mona abruptly.
“Well now, I'll tell you, but you're getting onto ticklish ground again. What with a few ideas I'd picked up from you and Uncle jelkes, and the remains of what was called by courtesy my education, I had as a matter of fact been constructing a Greek fantasy. I was thinking how awfully interesting it would be to try you out as a pythoness, or priestess, or whatever it is. I could see you walking in a procession, looking as if you came off a Greek vase, and carrying whatever it was that the priestesses carried in the processions. And I could see you and me up at an altar, doing a ceremony together and bringing Pan through into manifestation. Getting a descent of power, don't you know, like the tongues of flame at Pentecost.”
Jelkes thanked his stars that even in the classics a public school education has its limits. He hastily cast about in his mind for some siding into which he could shunt Hugh out of harm's way, but before he found it Mona spoke again.
“So your day-dreams and mine have met, Hugh?”
“Yes,” came in a low voice from under the cowl.
“Then let's go through with it. If you will come outside, I will dance the Moon-dance for you on the grass in the moonlight.”
“I'd sooner not, if you don't mind,” said Hugh in a low voice.
“Come,” said Mona, and dropping her heavy dark wrap, she went walking down the aisle, her thin soft draperies fluttering and her golden sandals gleaming under the hem. Hugh came.
Je1kes hastily extinguished the candles lest there should be a fire, and hurried after them.
CHAPTER XXVII
MONA stood erect in the moonlight on the short grass of the barren pasture; the pallid light taking all colour from grass and gown and face so that she looked like a wraith. Hugh, tall and gaunt in his black cowled robe, stood a dozen yards away from her on the edge of the shadow thrown by the chapel, and even in the darkness the knuckles showed white on his clenched hands.
Then Mona began her dance. It was not so much a dance as a series of mime-gestures, for she never moved more than a few steps forward or back. A low, rhythmical humming that hardly seemed to come from human lips at all was her accompaniment, and to its rise and fall she swayed and gestured. Jelkes, knowing the symbollanguage of the ancient faiths, was able to read her meaning, and with his heart sinking within him, wondered how much of it Hugh was picking up subconsciously. The shades of the seminary had not altogether lifted from Jelkes' soul, and to him there was something rather startling in seeing the man in the garb of the Church watching the oldest dance in the world being danced for him. He had wanted Mona to come to an understanding with Hugh, but he had not bargained for anything quite so primitive.
He knew perfectly well that Hugh was not a priest; had taken no vows; that the black cowled gown was only a symbolic representation of his inhibitions; he knew that Mona's dance was perfectly decorous and unexceptionable; and yet he knew that she was deliberately drawing magnetism out of the man with her weaving hands. It was all make-believe, he told himself over and over again. Mona and Hugh were simply play acting, and knew it. There was no more in it than if they had taken part in amateur theatricals together. It was perfectly decorous, and he was there to play propriety—
and yet there was a vivid kind of reality about it. He could tell by Hugh's clenched, white-knuckled hands that it was real to him. Mona was playing with fire, and it was a diabolical th ing to do, especially with a man in Hugh's unbalanced state. Mona was a syren, drawing his very soul out of him. Hugh would never look at any other woman after this. What was Mona playing at? She had frankly declared she wanted none of Hugh, but she would never rid herself of him now without smashing the fellow.
But gradually, as-the dance went on, the sense of reality grew upon Jelkes. The dance was mime and make believe, yes, admitted. But it corresponded to certain other kinds of realities as the movements of the hands of a clock correspond to the passage of time. And Jelkes began to recognise that reality and admit its validity. The wild upheave in him died down. He was too old for this game. Emotions were short-lived at his time of life. His head cleared, and he stood watching the other two—the green, swaying, moving creature of life and dream, and the gaunt, black-cowled, solitary figure, set apart in the shadow of the chapel. There was always about Hugh Paston a peculiar solitariness. As he had said of Ambrosius, he never seemed to belong anywhere, but always to be an alien and an exile. And now, standing in the shadows in his cowled black robe, that lonely apartness was intensified to the nth degree.
Was it in Hugh's power to come out of the shadow of the chapel into the moonlight? Jelkes felt that Mona was trying to lure him. Why did he not respond if she wanted him to? It was only make-believe. It wouldn't hurt anybody. But Jelkes knew in his heart, and felt that Hugh knew also, that what was going on was very far from make-believe. Jelkes was not psychic; he had never seen anything in his life; but he could picture Mona's etheric hands going out and touching Hugh and drawing him to her, for he knew that that was what she was doing in her imagination.
He pictured to himself the weaving hands drawing lines of light upon the air, and then reaching right out, like tenuous silvery tentacles, and stroking Hugh. He could see Mona's hands on Hugh's shoulders, although she was a dozen yards away. And then he saw what he had never expected to see—he saw a grey, shadowy replica of Hugh standing a yard or so in front of himself, so that there were two Hughs, one black and one silvery grey. Jelkes gasped, feeling as if the universe were turning round on him. He had only been picturing in his imagination what he knew Mona was picturing, being familiar with the technique of that operation; he had never visualised Hugh moving out of his physical body—then why had he seen it? True, he had only seen it in his mind's eye, but nevertheless, he had seen it, and he certainly had not formulated it. The picture had risen spontaneously without any volition on his part, and it set Jelkes thinking.
The momentary distraction had caused him to lose sight of the two he was watching, and when he looked at them again he found that Mona had ceased her dance and was walking towards them with her normal step, no longer the curious processional pacing with which she had passed down the length of the chapel.
Jelkes knew at once that Mona had done as much as she meant to do for the moment, and was now pulling Hugh back to normal. But Hugh did not respond. He stood silently, looking down from his ungainly height upon Mona's face, upturned in the moonlight, his own completely hidden in the shadow of his cowl. Jelkes held his breath, wondering what was going to happen next; knowing that Mona had unleashed -the wind and must now be prepared to ride the whirlwind.
Suddenly Hugh seized her by the shoulders, left bare by the loose drapery of her sleeves. Then rigid once more, he stared down at her, the expression of his own face invisible inside the cowl. Jelkes was thankful that Mona was spared the sight of that face; he thought it would be a thing to haunt one's dreams. Mona stood quite still, looking back at Hugh, her features clear in the bright moonlight shining over his shoulder. Her eyes were calm and steadfast, but her mouth was twitching slightly. It is a terrible thing deliberately to raise such a conflagration in a man when no answering spark responds in oneself.
Hugh was speaking rapidly in a low vice. “Why are you doing this, Mona? What are you driving at with me? You know you don't want me. I had been hoping against hope, but I'm not such a fool that I can't see when I'm not really wanted. You are going to have trouble on your hands if you go on like this. It is a bit too much of a good thing.”
Hugh's grip was tightening painfully on her arms. She had a feeling that if she did not speak, did not command the situation, those hands would shift to her throat.
“If I knew what I was driving at,” she said in a level voice, “I would tell you, but I am feeling my way, and you must be content to feel your way with me. But I do not think I am taking you up a blind alley, Hugh.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Back to the beginning of things, I think. Back to elemental nature.”
“And when we get there, Mona?”
“That I don't know; but Nature is natural, we have got to trust her. I think we will distentangle all light when we get down to bed-rock. We have got to take a chance on it anyway.”
“I'll take a chance on it all right. As many as you like. But what about you? I suppose you are doing this with your eyes open?”
“Yes, I know what I am about.”
“Well, I hope you do. There is going to be the hell of a crash if you don't.”
As he spoke, Mona felt the curious cold thrill of fear in the solar plexus that heralds the coming of the god. She caught hold of Hugh's wrists as he held her, and they stood waiting and listening. The wind was rising and rustling the thicket of overgrown laurels that flanked the chapel, and the moon, sinking to her setting, was just tipping the high gable. The weather-worn remains of the cross that had lost its arms cut the bright disk and threw its pagan shadow across them. They waited; the wind freshened; the moon slowly passed behind the gable and sank from sight.
Jelkes heard Hugh say in a low voice, “Where is all this going to end, Mona?”
And Mona answered, “I don't know. We have just got to trust and follow on.”
“All right. Lead on. I'll follow. I'll follow you anywhere, Mona, you know that. All I hope is that at the end it won't be absolutely good-bye.”
Jelkes could see they had forgotten they had an audience. He wished he could see Hugh's face, but it was deep in his cowl and the light was behind him.
It grew darker as the moon sank behind the trees and the shadows deepened.
Jelkes could hardly see the two in the shadows now. Mona's drapery, grey and wraith-like, shone faintly in the dim, diffused light of the setting moon. Hugh in his black gown was invisible save for the pale blur of his face in the folds of the cowl. His two hands on Mona's shoulders alone showed up white and distinct. Je1kes expected every second to see the tense immobility of the two shadowy figures change into a desperate struggle as the forces evoked from the depths of the man's nature broke loose and took charge, and doubted whether his own strength would be sufficient to protect Mona. Had he not better interfere before the storm broke? He opened his lips, but no words came. He tried to take a step forward, but found himself unable to move. The whole scene had changed into nightmare. Mona and Hugh were real enough; but that which lay around them was not real; another dimension had opened.
It seemed to Jelkes as if the shadows all around him were alive with forms that Hugh and Mona between them, playing with strange forces, had called to life. It was like a cinema without a screen, with all the films moving in and out of each other. Was it possible that they had re-awakened the magic done by Ambrosius? Up here, at the chapel, he must have performed his rites, and things that are made with ritual live on in the memory of Nature.
This was the old magic all right, thought jelkes, fascinated and horrified; this was what Ambrosius had been up to! That was not Hugh at all, that was Ambrosius, and he had got his hands on Mona. But what was Mona? Jelkes did not know, for that was not Mona either. It was something that was not human, something disembodied that Ambrosius had created with his magic.
All around them, and passing overhead, was the conco
urse of the elemental forces; powers of the air and spirits of elemental fire; souls of the waters, guardians of the treasures hidden in the veins of the earth, and all the strange familiars that served the medieval magicians. In the middle of it all stood Ambrosius with the thing he had created in his hands—the woman-form built up by his own desires; and around him were the forms of his familiars, keeping the circle secure from intrusion.
Jelkes felt the hair on his neck rising like a dog's. He strove desperately to make the Sign of the Cross and banish it all, but he was bound in the circle ofthat sorcery and could move neither hand nor foot, but only watch with horrified eyes what was going on before him—a renegade monk caressing the woman-form he had made by forbidden arts.
Then slowly the sight faded; the buildings and the starlight re-appeared. Hugh stepped back from Mona. No one spoke. Hugh looked half-stunned. Mona seemed paralysed. Jelkes felt as ifhe were coming round from an anesthetic. He had a suspicion that Mona had actually been in Hugh's arms.
Hugh raised his hands uncertainly and pushed back his cowl; Mona drew a deep gasping breath and the rigidity of her attitude relaxed. Jelkes called up all his willpower and broke through the spell. He walked up to them, put a hand on the shoulder of each and turned them about.
“Come along,” he said. “We're going in. We've had enough of this.”
They walked beside him without word spoken; his hands on their shoulders guiding them as if they were sleep-walkers.
Back in the stuffy warmth of the living-room, Jelkes turned up the lamp as high as it would go and threw an armful of kindling on the fire. Hugh stared dazedly at the flame of the lamp and rubbed his eyes; then he dived in among the folds of his draperies and got a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his face, which was dripping with sweat as if he had dipped it in a basin of water. He looked round at Mona, who looked back at him with non-committal eyes. She had better control of herself than either of the two men, and was like the core of calm at the heart of a cyclone.