by Dion Fortune
“Bowl of oak and earthen jar,
Honey of the honey-bee;
Milk of kine and Grecian wine,
Golden corn from neighbouring lea—
These our offerings, Pan, to thee,
Goat-foot god of Arcady.
“Horned head and cloven hoof—
Fawns who seek and nymphs that flee—
Piping clear that draweth near
Through the vales of Arcady—
These the gifts we have of thee,
God of joyous ecstasy.
“Come, great Pan, and bless us all:
Bless the corn and honey-bee.
Bless the kine and bless the vine,
Bless the vales of Arcady.
Bless the nymphs that laugh and flee,
God of all fertility.”
It was oddly appropriate to the simple breakfast-table set there in the sun, from which only the Grecian wine was lacking, and Mona, who, like Hugh, had felt the early heat and put on her thin green frock, was the appropriate priestess. She had her old brown sandals on her stockingless feet, and there was no fillet on her hair, but save for that, she was exactly as she had been the previous evening when she had danced the moon-dance for the drawing-out of Hugh's soul.
She looked up and saw him there and stood clutching the little bowl of flowers in her hands helplessly. Sleep and the sunshine had enabled her to put her problems behind her for the moment and escape into the vales of Arcady. She had not expected Hugh to be down just yet, and, taken by surprise, could find no word to say save: “Hello, Hugh?”
“Hello, Mona?” he replied.
She tried desperately to discern from his bearing what his interpretation might be of the previous evening's happenings. They meant much or little according to how one looked at them. But there were times when Hugh was as impassive as an effigy on a tomb, and the present was one of them. Mona thought that her best course was to make light of the previous evening's doings and trust to his following her lead.
“Isn't it a lovely morning?” she said nervously.
“Very lovely, very lovely indeed, Mona. I think”— a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth— “that Pan must be pleased with us.”
Then, to Mona's intense relief, Jelkes joined them, clad in the everlasting Inverness, despite the warmth, and they sat down to the milk and the honey and the porridge and the new-laid eggs and whole-meal bread in the sunshine—a truly Arcadian meal.
Mona departed to the back premises to start Silly Lizzie off with a push; Jelkes sat himself down in the sun with a sensational Sunday paper and proceeded to soak his soul in scandal, and Hugh wandered off across the pasture smoking his after-breakfast cigarette.
He had an instinctive feeling that the chapel was not a suitable place for the invocation of Pan—he doubted if any roofed place ever could be. The great archangels in the buttress bays were the austere regents of the elemental forces and the mystical Tree in the east had meanings to meditate upon for a lifetime, but Pan was another matter. It was in Hugh's mind that a coffer, up-ended, would serve as a cubical altar, and it was in his mind to shift it out into the pine-wood if he could find a place unobserved from both the house and the road.
He strolled slowly down the broad grassy way between Mona's newly-planted herb-beds, plucking here and there grey aromatic leaves, crushing them in his hands, and inhaling their clean, sharp odour from between his cupped palms. At the end of the walk, where the desert met the sown and there was no more any sustenance even for the grey herbs in the shallow black stony soil above the chalk, two round grey-green bushes stood sentinel. Hugh plucked a delicate maidenhair sprig from one of them. crushed it between his palms. and immediately the rank stench of the billy-goat assailed his nostrils. Hastily he rubbed his hands on the seat of his shorts. but this failed to improve matters, merely distributing the odour fore and aft. Frida had always insisted on his changing his shoes after he had visited the stables, and he wondered whether Mona would require him to get back into tweeds on this scorching day over which the heat-haze already hung luminous. He could apply Vim to his hands. but would it be a success applied to the seat of his pants? He doubted it, sat down for a few minutes in a patch of damp grass, and thought he would suggest having lunch out of doors.
Assured by the chill to his spine that the dew had done all that was to be expected of it. he rose from his uncomfortable seat, only to find, however, that the damp had made matters considerably worse. He gave it up as a bad job, muttered ‘damn,’ lit a cigarette, and strolled on down the path, a crying temptation to all the nannygoats in the neighbourhood.
The little wood was of Scotch firs; but as these go bare about the legs as they get on in years. and at this point the road, though at a little distance. ran along rising ground. whatever was done in the wood was clearly visible from the road, and the prospect of finding a secluded site for the altar of Pan was not very good. The bare ground out of sight of the road was overlooked by a scattered hamlet on the opposite side of the valley, so it must be here or nowhere. They had never explored the wood very thoroughly because it was beset with brambles. but Hugh. taking giant's strides, lifted his long bare legs over these and reached its shade, hoping to find some sort of cover among the undergrowth.
He pushed on. finding it easier going now that the shade made all growth scanty, and saw ahead of him a dense mass of dark foliage among red-brown trunks. This looked hopeful, and he headed towards it, to find a close-set belt of yews blocking his path. The yew is a long-lived, slow-growing tree, and from the girth of these he judged they must be pretty ancient, and with a sudden quickening of heart-beat, wondered whether they dated from Ambrosius' day, and if so, why they had been planted?
He ducked under the low-hanging outer branches, and with some difficulty forced his way through, to come out into a little open glade entirely surrounded by yews. Here was the very privacy he desired! He took stock of his surroundings while he picked the yew-needles out of his hair and shirt-collar.
All round him the green-black branches of the yews swept the very ground in a long narrow oval. The glade was the exact shape of the space made by two intersecting circles, and had evidently been laid out with mathematical precision. In the exact centre ofthe rabbitnibbled turf an oblong boulder reclined upon its side. Hugh examined it. It was difficult to tell, so weatherworn it was, whether it was a natural outcrop or a tooled stone brought thither by the hand of man. The chalk, however, does not produce such stones as this, and Hugh, looking at the long narrow rock at his feet, guessed that it was one of those standing-stones of which Mona had spoken—a sighting-stone along a line of power. The little stream in the valley was dammed, and on the dam grew ancient oaks. There was no point in such a dam. It watered no flocks. It turned no mill. But if a straight line were drawn between the dam in the valley and the old abbey, it would pass immediately over this stone. Scotch firs were new-comers in this part of the country. Before their day the barren hilltop stood bare, and a man standing beside the dam in one valley bottom could sight over here to the dam in the next valley, and so on to where the green roads of England converged on Avebury: Ambrosius had chosen his site well. Around the ancient standing-stone he had planted his grove of yew, thus ensuring it being right in the track of one of the lines of force of the ancient worship.
Hugh considered the great stone as it lay humbled in the dust. It would not take a great deal of work to set it up again. He thought he could do it single-handed, with luck. Pushing his way through the yews, he set off at a dog-trot for the house, skirted round to the potting-shed unobserved, and returned with pick and spade. The loose sandy soil worked easily, but up-ending the great stone was another matter, and sorely against his will, Hugh had to go and fetch Bill.
Amiable as the bob-tailed sheep-dog he so closely resembled in everything save intelligence, Bill shoved through the bushes in his Sunday best in the wake of his employer. When he saw the stone, however, he pushed his peaked cap onto the back of his head and
scratched it.
“Oy,” he said. “That's one of the Devil's skittles. ‘Adn't we better leave it alone, Mister?”
“Do you believe in the Devil?” said Hugh.
“Well, I dunno. ‘E's never done me no ‘arm, and 'e's bin arst to often enough. I've got nuthin' to complain of.”
“All right then. Up-end his stone and put it tidy for him, since he's always treated you decently.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Bill, gave the stone a mighty heave, and set it upright in the hole that Hugh had dug under its base. Together they filled in the loose earth and trod it firm. Then they straightened their backs and surveyed their handiwork, each wondering in his different way how the Devil would take it. Something attracted Bill's attention and he sniffed suspiciously.
“Gawd,' he said. “Someone's got a bleedin' billygoat!”
“Have they really?” said Hugh, edging to leeward.
Bill shouldered the pick and spade and ambled off, leaving Hugh to consider the next move. Having a standing-stone in the centre of the glade. he needed no other altar. He examined it closely. and decided that it was certainly a worked stone—a short. blunt pillar with a rounded top. it was too symmetrical to be anything else.
Well, he had got his temple. and now what about the rite? Was it done at high noon, or full moon, or the dark of the moon? He did not know. He would wait till the spirit moved him, and then bring Mona hereand Pan could speak for himself.
But supposing after all that Pan were the Devil. as Bill had opined? The Devil. taken so seriously by all good Christians. was certainly a very goat-like individual if the illustrations in the Sunday-school books were to be believed. And yet there was a geniality and kindliness about the celestial billy-goat that did not seem consonant with utter badness.
And after all. if God objected to the Devil, why did He tolerate him? And if God tolerated him. did He not connive thereby at his devilishness and share the responsibility therefor? It was beyond Hugh. His philosophy split on a rock that has sunk many stout theological ships. After all. why should Nature be at perpetual war with its Creator? It wasn't reasonable. unless. of course. the act of creation had been badly botched. Was it not more reasonable. as well as more reverent, to presume that God had made Nature as He meant it to be, and the saints, trying to improve upon God's handiwork. had made a mess of it? A distant gong called to lunch, and with a friendly nod to the standing-stone, Hugh pushed his way through the circling yews and departed.
In response to his message sent by Bill, lunch was in the open, but even so. Mona circled round Hugh, sniffing.
“Hugh,” she said, “have you been playing with my rues?”
“Hugh, trying to look innocent, demanded what rues might be.
“The two grey bushes at the end of the herb-walk—the goat-herbs.”
Hugh sheepishly explained his misadventure. The Vim had been efficacious enough applied to his hands. but neither dew nor Vim had had any effect on the seat of his pants.
Jelkes roared. “Well, I knew girls bathed their faces in dew for the sake of their complexions—” he said.
Mona cast a scathing glance at him.
“Better sit down. Hugh,” she said, “and then it won't be so noticeable.”
Mona served them—it was no use getting Silly Lizzie to wait at table if you did not like your food down your neck—and they settled down to their meal. Suddenly old Jelkes looked up, and breaking his usual rule of silence while feeding said:
“I reckon you are right to go through with this thing. Hugh, and I'll do anything I can to help you, even if I do get knotted up in my own complexes sometimes. It's that monk's cowl that does for me. Dash it all, I was very nearly one myself!”
“Hugh said a true thing once,” said Mona. “Or maybe it wasn't Hugh but Ambrosius. I can't tell them apart these days. He said that the Church was made for man, not man for the Church.”
“I reckon that's about it,” said Jelkes. “After all religion is simply our speculation about what lies below the horizon of life. We don't know. In the very nature of things. we can't know. The only way you can judge a theology, so far as I can see, is by its effect on character. You have no means of knowing how God views it save by what its opponents say He says about it; but you can see its effect on human life, and that is what I sum religions up by. I look at their adherents—the general run of them—not the saints—not the black sheep. but the bulk. Christianity produces too many fiends and tolerates too many fools. Now why does it do that, I ask myself? It's the worst persecutor of the whole bunch. Islam goes in for jehads and massacres, but there's no petty spite about it. I reckon that groupsouls get neuroses, same as individuals, and that Christianity is suffering from old-maid's insanity from too much repression; that's what makes it so damned unchristian.”
“You are blaspheming abominably, Uncle,” said Mona. “If I said the half of this, you'd screw my neck.”
“It isn't as bad as it sounds, my dear,” said Jelkes. “It is the Church I'm slanging, not the Christ.”
“When you have had a hearty sickener of the whole business it is very difficult to separate the Church from the Christ,” said Hugh. “For all practical purposes the Church exercises proprietary rights.”
“I don't admit those rights,” said Jelkes. “In the opinion of all impartial scholars, those deeds are forged. It is function, not charter, that confers rights in religion. I defer to the man with genuine spiritual power, and I don't care a hoot in hell whether he has been ordained or not.”
Sitting on the low, broad bench, with the man and the girl on either side of him, Jelkes stared out towards the sun that hung golden over the pine-wood.
“What is going to be the next move in the game?” he said at length.
“The next move,” said Hugh, “is to return to our original plan, and invoke Pan by a blend of Ignatius and Huysmans.”
“Have you ever departed from it?” said Jelkes.
“Well, we haven't been able to give it much attention while Mona had a cold on the chest, and I was getting the farm tidy, and Ambrosius was cutting his capers.”
“You have never departed from it, Hugh. The old buildings evoked Ambrosius and Ambrosius invoked Pan absolutely according to plan.”
“Good Lord!” said Hugh, and fell silent.
“Will living here make Hugh permanently Ambrosius?” asked Mona, a note of anxiety in her voice.
“It would if he had equipped the place on medieval lines. Put any medieval stuff you have got into the chapel. You can't live with it, any more than you could live with Ambrosius' drains or menus.”
“Then—ought Hugh to live here at all? But he's so awfully fond of the place. And it's such a fascinating place,” said Mona with a sigh, thinking of the happy beginnings of a garden in the cloister garth.
“A house is what you make it,” said Jelkes. “My predecessor ran the business as a cover for receiving stolen goods, but it doesn't follow that I have to receive stolen goods. One or two of his customers turned up at first, but when I said: ‘Nothing doing,’ they soon got out of the way of calling. After all, the person in possession has the last word on the subject of atmospheres unless he lets the place dominate his imagination. You get busy and dominate it; don't let it dominate you.”
“It is in my mind,” said Hugh, “that we've travelled a good long way already; perhaps further than any of us realise.”
Jelkes cocked an eyebrow at him. “What makes you think that?” he said.
Hugh pushed back his seat and rested his sinewy elbows on his great gaunt knees—he looked much bigger and more formidable thus sketchily clad than in his ordinary clothes.
“Difficult to say,” he said at length. “Very difficult to say. One expects psychic phenomena to be reasonably tangible and to have something of the miraculous about them. We've had nothing of that. Not even up to the standard ofan ordinary home circle with someone playing hymns on a harmonium. We've had nothing that you can't father onto the subconscious if you
have a mind to. Nothing you could call evidential if you'd got any notion of the nature of evidence. But all the same we've had—or at any rate, I've had, some pretty drastic experiences. I couldn't prove them to anybody else, and I'm not such a fool as to try to; but I'm quite satisfied about them in my own mind. Anyway, whatever they are, subconscious, super-conscious, hallucinations, telepathy, suggestion, auto-suggestion, cosmic experiences, bunk, spoof or hokum, I feel as if I had been born again. Not saved. Or ever likely to be. Or ever likely to want to be. But born into a wider life and a bigger personality. That's good enough for me, T. J., and I'll make anybody who wants it a present of the rest.”
“How do you know it isn't all your imagination, Hugh?” asked Jelkes, watching him.
“I don't know, T. J., and don't care. It probably is, for I've used my imagination diligently enough over the job. But via the imagination I've got extended consciousness, which I probably should never have been able to make a start on if I'd stuck to hard facts all along and rejected everything I couldn't prove at the first go-off. I t's no use doing that. You've got to take the Unseen as a working hypothesis, and then things you can't prove at the first go-off prove themselves later.
“It isn't real as tables and chairs arc real: that's to say, I wouldn't bark my shins if I fell over it in the dark; but no one but the very naive holds by that kind of reality nowadays. By going ahead ‘as if’, I've got in touch with another kind of reality to the popular one—and in that kind of reality I can pull the strings that make things happen—and damn it all, Jelkes, I'm going to!”