by Dion Fortune
Slowly Hugh ungirt his robe, rolled it into a bundle, and threw it into a corner of the sofa. Then he mopped his neck.
“Gosh! “he said. “Is there anything in the cupboard?” and moved uncertainly towards the sideboard.
“No, there isn't anything in the cupboard,” said Jelkes firmly; “and if there was, I wouldn't let you have it. Mona will make us some tea.”
Mona, only too thankful to make her escape, disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Jelkes turned to Hugh.
“Well, what happened?” he demanded.
“God only knows, T. J. I don't. It was like a dream. I hope to goodness I haven't upset Mona.”
“She asked for it. She's got to put up with it.”
“She sure did, T. J. I never meant to let things go as far as this. This is what I have been scared of all along. This mustn't happen again, Jelkes, it isn't fair to anybody.”
Mona entered with a tray of crockery. She did not look at them, and they did not look at her.
“What are we going to do about it?” asked Hugh as she went out again.
“I'll speak to her,” said Jelkes.
“I wish you would,” said Hugh. “Somebody certainly ought to. I don't think she knows what she's about.”
Mona came in again, a big brown earthenware bowl between her two hand s. She paused in the doorway and stood looking at them. Still in her green dress and with the fillet about her hair, she looked, as Hugh had said, like something off a Greek vase. Jelkes looked at Hugh. He was staring at her fascinated, oblivious of all else. He looked at Mona. She stood looking down at Hugh as he half sat, half crouched in the deep chair. Her face was calm. Her eyes were steady, but the usual closeheld line of her mouth was relaxed, and her lips were full and very scarlet and in the hollow of her neck a pulse was beating visibly. Jelkes came to the conclusion that Mona knew exactly what she was doing, and that it was not the slightest use to speak to her.
The meal was eaten in silence, save for the necessities of the table. Jelkes and Mona drank the everlasting tea, and Hugh, though he forewent spirits out of deference to Je1kes, felt he owed himself something, and opened a bottle of beer. After all, the hop is the northern analogue of the vine, and Pan was due for a libation. Jelkes, observing his companions out of the corner of his eye, saw Mona look up, and finding Hugh Paston's eyes on her, look down again hastily, to look up no more for the rest of the meal.
The party broke up and went to their rooms as soon as the meal was over. Je1kes wondered whether it was his duty to patrol the passages, but concluded that it was better to leave things to nature and pulled the bedclothes over his head with a profound sigh. What would be, would be, Dei et Diaboli volunti.
CHAPTER XXVIII
MONA sat up in bed, her arms tight folded round her knees to prevent them from shaking, and asked herself what in the world had possessed her to act as she had. The reaction had set in and was proportionate to the previous exaltation. Not having the kind of conscience that prevaricates with herself, Mona did not deny that Ambrosius, the renegade monk, had a diabolical fascination for her; but to stir up the Ambrosius aspect of Hugh was to play with fire. In her reaction she swung over to the psychological explanation of the whole thing. Ambrosius was Hugh's repressed subconscious, built up into a secondary personality. He ought to go and be psycho-analysed and get it cleared up. If she played the fool with him any more, he might have a nasty breakdown, and even come within genuine reach of certification. She blamed herself bitterly. She had believed herself to be single-hearted in her desire to help Jelkes with his protégée, and then had fallen so low as to start messing about with him. Mona, whose standard of morality, though peculiar, was definite, was exceedingly angry with herself. Why had she let herself get carried away like this? She had thought she had learnt her lesson once and for all. She knew, too, that Jelkes was angry with her, and that vexed her still more, for she had a very great respect for him, and valued his good opinion highly. In the mood she was now in, she was disposed to be exceedingly angry with the unfortunate Hugh. and to find him not merely unattractive, but positively repulsive. Then, realising that tomorrow had got to be faced, and that it was steadily drawing nearer while she cogitated, she took two aspirins and set to work to try to go to sleep, but, as might have been expected, without much success. Finally she arrived at the state when all her life passed in review before her and she wept hopelessly into her pillow.
After that she thought she felt calmer, though exhausted, and another mood set in. After all Hugh was a dear, and life was very hard; she would certainly miss him if she broke with him, probably more than she realised. Why shouldn't she marry him? It would make him happy, and lift her from her the intolerable strain of the struggle for a livelihood.
Then back once more her mood reacted. After all, the post-War depression could not last for ever, and once she could earn a decent living again, there was nothing she would love better than her cat-en-the-tiles existence; nothing she would hate more than trying to be a good wife to Hugh. More tears began to flow, but tears of rage this time. Mona was furious with herself, with Hugh, but above all, with Jelkes, whom she recognised as acting as a kind of conscience to the pair of them. She felt certain that Jelkes hated Pan, if the truth were known, and was perpetually making the Sign of the Cross inside himself, thus preventing Pan from manifesting and so throwing everything into confusion, just as Mrs Macintosh's promise to pray for her had done. Mona flung angrily away from all restraints, and yet her self-respect prevented her from yielding to Pan in his satyric aspect. The tears of rage gave place to tears of self-pity, and then, beaten down to her foundations, to forlorn tears of humility before life and its problems. The world was too much for her, and she longed for the vales of Arcady.
Hugh, on his side, had not got any aspirins, and stood with his hands in his dressing-gown pockets staring out of the window at the starlight. He had had a pretty thorough shake-up, and sleep was far from him. He might be a fool in dealing with people because too easily swayed and influenced, but he was by no means a fool in summing them up, his plastic nature rendering him intuitive to a high degree. He knew with a sense of delighted triumph that Mona had let herself go far more than she had ever meant to; but he had also sensed the reaction that had been coming on steadily all through supper. He was quite alive to the fact that it was Mona's fixed intention not to involve herself with him, firstly, because she did not like him well enough, and secondly, because her pride stood like a lion in the way. He, for his part, felt that everything life held for him was bound up with Mona. His negative, hypersensitive nature clung to Mona's dynamism as the one thing that would enable it to go on living in a world that had been all darkness and coldness, but that under her touch became golden. He had come to the point when he was beginning to feel pretty desperate; if Mona wouldn't have him, he didn't know what he was going to do.
It did not seem to Hugh to be a subject which one could very well lay before a Heaven where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; there was more to be hoped of the infinite richness and everlasting fecundity of the earth. Surely out of all her richness and abundance the Great Mother of us all could meet his need? Why do we forget the Mother in the worship of the Father? What particular virtue is there in virgin begetting? Are the descending Paraclete and the uprising Pan two opposing forces locked in an everlasting struggle, or are they an alternating current playing between the two poles of spirit and matter?
Hugh did not know. Metaphysics had never been his strong point. He knew what his need was, and he considered it to be a legitimate need, and he did not see why he should be expected to deny it fulfilment as a matter of principle. He was going to fulfil it if he could, and that was that!
He began to consider how it could be fulfilled. What was the real thing in Mona's heart? Why had she never mated during her thirty-odd years? What was she asking of men that they did not give her? Wherein did the reality fail to match the ideal? Were there no priestinitiates now to work
with her the rites of Eleusis? Perhaps that was the trouble. And he debated whether it was feasible for him, Hugh Paston, to assume the part of the priest of the Mysteries as lamblichos said the priests assumed the part of the god? Could he, by imagining himself to be the Greek priest-initiate, identify himself with Pan? It was a bold concept, but after all, it was a traditional one, and no novelty.
But if he did this, what would be the repercussion? He and Mona were not boy and girl on the hills in the sun, but mature man and woman, who asked more of mating than would have satisfied the Greek athlete and his lass. They were priest and priestess. In Mona's phantasy the priest had been the initiator who had admitted her to the Mysteries. What was to be done about it? How was he to fill the bill? He could not very well enquire of the celibate monk in the bookshop; to ask Mona what secrets he ought to reveal to her was a contradiction in terms. Then came to him the remembrance of Ignatius' dictum—'Put yourself in the posture of prayer and you will soon feel prayerful'. If he played the part of the high-priest he would soon feel sacerdotal: especially if he could inveigle Mona into playing the part of the pythoness. It was the Froebel method, the action-song—‘This is the way we mow the wheat’—education by doing. That, according to Jelkes, was the way the ancients initiated.
Lost in his day-dream, Hugh stood on, oblivious of the passage of time. The bare grey stone of the English building gave place to the white marble of a Greek temple; the pale starlight of an English night to flickering Greek torches. He was the high-priest in the sanctuary awaiting the coming of the priestess. Beyond the curtains, Tyrian-dyed, he could hear the murmur of the crowded, excited temple. The curtains parted, and Mona stood before him in her robe as priestess of Ceres, the curtains falling again immediately behind her. The crowded temple hushed and held its breath. This was the sacrament, the bringing through of power. This was the sacerdotal office. Behind him was the All-Father, the First-Begotten Love, behind her was the Earth-Mother. As in the phantasy, he had become the priest, now the priest became the god—spontaneously, without any volition on his part. He felt power come upon him, he felt himself part of a larger whole, made one with the earth as she swung through the circling heavens. And then he checked and stayed. He could go no further. He lacked his priestess. The power that had sought expression through him could find no passage, for the circuit did not lead to earth but remained insulated in empty space. The reaction hit him hard. He knew that he had been within an ace of the thing he sought, and the missing of it gave him a sense of irritated frustration that promised badly for his nerves next day.
He tried to get hold of himself. After all, it was only phantasy he had been indulging in; there was no need to be so upheaved over a day-dream that had missed fire. He tried to concentrate his mind on the problem of his relationship with Mona. He suspected that the happenings of the last few hours had given him a distinct advantage, if he only knew how to use it. But he was so hopelessly inept with women, he was always either missing his chance or over-reaching himself. Hugh found himself slipping into his old condition of miserable selfhating. Desperately he struggled out of it. That way lay paralysis—he must not yield to it. He thought of Ambrosius. A little smile twiched the corner of his mouth. He suspected that Mona liked Ambrosius. Supposing he were deliberately to slip into his Ambrosius personality, as he could pretty nearly do at will now, would he be able to dominate Mona? It was a tempting proposition, but all the same, he had his doubts of it. Any relationship between Mona and Ambrosius implied frustration. The diabolical prior drew his dynamism from the very fact of his frustration.
Then there came to him an inexplicable but very definite feeling that he would never again turn into Ambrosius, for the good and excellent reason that Ambrosius had turned into him I As he had said to Mona, he was engaged in carrying out the last wishes of the renegade prior, and his unquiet ghost had no longer anything to walk for. Or in other words, he was engaged in fulfilling the thing for which Ambrosius stood in his soul. It is a curious fact that the inner self is satisfied if we ‘show willing “and it is not necessary actually to carry out its urges. It is the attitude that counts in the subjective kingdom, as the ancients knew when they made use of ritual.
The formidable prior could help him no longer. He had to stand on his own feet. It was no use dramatising a frustration.
There came to his mind the memory of that strange scene in the chapel when, goaded to despair by his sisters' innuendoes, he had phantasied the death of Ambrosius, and with it had come the strange certainty of a promise. What was it that had been promised to Ambrosius? What was it that he had sought? Was he, Hugh, entitled to claim the fulfilment of that promise?
His mind turned back to Arcady. There, and there alone, lay the fulfilment of both promise and dream. The Arcadian Pan with his shepherd's pipe was no diabolical deity, like the sinister Goat of Mendes of the inflamed medieval imagination. It was the thing behind Ambrosius he must go after—the Greek inspiration that had awakened Ambrosius to his manhood. It is a curious fact that when men began to re-assemble the fragments of Greek culture—the peerless statues of the gods and the ageless wisdom of the sages—a Renaissance came to the civilisation that had sat in intellectual darkness since the days when the gods had withdrawn before the assaults of the Galileans. What is going to happen in our own day, now that Freud has come along crying: “Great Pan is risen I”—? Hugh wondered whether his own problems were not part of a universal problem, and his own awakening part of a much wider awakening? He wondered how far the realisation of an idea by one man, even if he spoke no word, might not inject that idea into the group-mind of the race and set it working like a ferment?
Supposing, thought Hugh, absorbed and completely oblivious of his surroundings—supposing he were to phantasy the part of the Greek high-priest of Mona's day-dream until it became alive in him even as Ambrosius had done, might not Mona answer to it? A famous film-star, who is also a great artist, has said that something enters into him and takes possession of him when he plays a part, and he changes, and the character he represents becomes alive in him. Hugh remembered Mona's words in the chapel concerning the Greek athlete of her phantasy who had followed her because he admired her. That, of course, was his own dream precisely. He remembered the tense look on Mona's face when he had casually told that dream as they were looking at the dusty old books in the museum. She had recognised it all right, and for some reason best known to herself had made open confession when they were psycho-analysing themselves in the chapel. Now why had she done that? Was there something in Mona that was saying, ‘Yes, I will worship Pan with you provided you are of the true faith’?
It seemed to him that if he could pull this thing off with Mona-this curious experience of time as a mode of consciousness, and this even more curious experiment in the power of the day-dream—something would be brought through into the group-mind of the race and added to the racial heritage. He had no need to appeal to his fellow-men or seek their suffrage and support; he had only got to be something—do something, and the thing would start in the group-soul of the race and they would feel it subconsciously—that, at any rate, was the way Jelkes said the adepts worked.
There came to him, as he stared at the marvel of the night-sky, a realisation that he was part of a larger whole and that a vast life found expression through him, and that in his fulfilment it would find a measure of its fulfilment, and in his frustration it was frustrated. It was not a question of Hugh Paston being in love with a woman who did not respond to him, it was a question of unbalanced force in the universe, and he knew that the whole universe was striving to adjust that unbalance, and that if he would but lean back and let himself be borne by the cosmic tides, they would bring him to the place where he would be. But to achieve that, he must lean back, and let go, and allow the cosmic forces to adjust themselves in their own way. Not otherwise could he take advantage of them.
He felt that he had stumbled on a very important key when he had realised that the way of approach
to the dynamic reality lay by the path of phantasy, the most dynamic of all auto-suggestions. The orthodox psychologists had never spotted that. It might be pure imagination, but nevertheless it was the way to set the invisible causes in motion, provided it lay along the line of their course.
This was indeed a discovery worth making, thought Hugh, forgetting his frustration as he saw the way opening up in front ofhim once more. He had only to become the priest and he could command his priestess.
It was not a case of dominating Mona; it was a case of himself becoming the thing that would answer to the need in her. She knew too much to be contented with a commonplace mating; what she wanted was the priestinitiator. If he could make himself this, she would marry him all right, no need to worry about that. It was not Mona that was his problem, but he that was Mona's problem. But how was he to do this thing? How was he to ordain himself to the priesthood of a forgotten rite? How save by letting the power of which it was the expression rise up with its own peculiar magnetism, so that deep called unto deep? Mona had played a rite on him for reasons best known to herself and Jelkes; he would playa rite on Mona!
He thought he could see his way through, and determined that in the morning he would get on with it.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE sun rose next day through the morning mists with a promise of heat, one of those brief miniature heatwaves that sometimes come in the days between spring and summer, and Hugh, feeling the breathing warmth coming in at his open window as he dressed, felt a strong disinclination for heavy stuffs and stiff collars, and clad himself in an old pair of khaki shorts left over from his African expedition, a short-sleeved khaki mesh shirt minus most of its buttons, and Ambrosius, sandals. In this disreputable kit he descended to breakfast.
He moved silently in the heelless sandals, and came into the living-room without Mona being aware of his presence. As upon the day of their first morning meal at the farm, the door leading out to the garden was wide open to admit the morning sun and the table stood before it, a small oak gate-legged table covered with a gailycoloured, coarse-textured, hand-woven cloth on which stood the hand-thrown earthenware breakfast set, all yellow and orange on the greyish-buff ground of the natural clay. As before, the brown velvety faces of polyanthuses rose from their little honey-pot, but whereas on that day they had been the first bold venturers from under a sunny wall, these were the last lingering laggards from a shady corner. Mona, singing softly to herself, was re-arranging the haphazard efforts of Silly Lizzie in the way of table decoration, and the song she sang was a curious one.