The Winged Bull

by Dion Fortune

  ‘You have a little self-contained flat up here,’ she said, smiling; and, looking round, he saw that open doors led into two small rooms, bedroom and sitting-room, and a third door, which was probably a bathroom.

  ‘I hope you have got everything you want,’ said Miss Brangwyn, ‘if not, you must ask.’

  Murchison mumbled an acquiescence, which he strove in vain to make sound decently civil, but his wits had forsaken him. All he could think of was the bull of Babylon and a girl’s head no bigger than an orange that floated in the air at the foot of his bed.

  Miss Brangwyn led the way out of the little sitting-room and paused on the landing.

  ‘This is the roof-garden,’ she said, opening the glass door, and he followed her out into the open air. They found themselves in an open court of some dimensions. Leafless creepers upon the walls and leafless shrubs in tubs promised greenery in the summer, and a seat in an angle of the wall received the winter sun.

  Ursula Brangwyn led the way to an embrasure in the wall and mounted a step.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing, and Murchison looked.

  He saw, apparently quite near, the dome of St Paul’s, and in the foreground a huddle of roofs looking like the mountains of the moon. Human beings he could not see, for the near streets were too narrow. They too might have been alone in a dead world.

  ‘The only way out here is through your flat, I am sorry to say,’ said Miss Brangwyn, desperately making conversation. ‘So we shall have to trespass, I am afraid.’

  ‘Oh — er — yes,’ said Murchison.

  Ursula looked at him, and saw that his shyness was of such a painful intensity that she felt sorry for him, though oafishness was not usually a passport to her esteem.

  ‘I am afraid I shall be the principal trespasser,’ she said, smiling. ‘I have to come out here to practise my dancing.’

  ‘Er — yes,’ said Murchison, thinking that if she wanted him for a partner he would fling himself from the parapet. She seemed to guess this, for her smile broadened, and she said:

  ‘It is Greek dancing that I do.’

  ‘Oh — er — do you?’ said Murchison. ‘That — er — must be very interesting.’

  And then, mercifully, a deep-toned gong sounded in the depths below them, and she led the way down to lunch, Murchison feeling as if he could kick himself, for though he was not blessed with facile manners with women, he had never in his born days behaved like this before. He prayed that his employer would preside at the lunch table, but his prayer was not answered, and he and Miss Brangwyn settled down to a tête a tête. Miss Brangwyn heaved a slight sigh, and set herself to entertain him kindly and patiently. Murchison realized quite clearly what was her attitude towards him, and it did not improve his state of mind. She had evidently decided that he was of weak mentality, but otherwise harmless.

  Silence fell between them after Luigi had served the coffee and disappeared; a silence which neither made any attempt to break, each having given the other up as a bad job; when a sudden exclamation from Murchison made the girl look up, startled, to find that he was staring fixedly at her breast.

  ‘What is it? What is the matter?’ she exclaimed involuntarily.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Murchison. ‘It was a mistake.’ He fixed his eyes on his plate. She raised her hand nervously to her breast. Was it possible that her clothes had fallen off her back? She could think of nothing else to account for his startled expression. Her garments proved to be intact; but as she fingered them she felt under her hand a small carved plaque of dark green jade that hung from a thin gold chain round her neck; a plaque carved in bas-relief a winged bull of Babylon. Her fingers closed upon it convulsively.

  ‘What do you know about my bull?’ she demanded; and now there was nothing to choose between them in bewilderment and mental confusion.

  ‘God only knows,’ said Murchison. ‘I don’t know anything about it. I saw one like it at the British Museum yesterday. That is all!’

  ‘That isn’t all,’ said Ursula Brangwyn in a low voice. ‘You know more about it than that. I wish you would be frank with me. I don’t know where I am, or what is expected of me. My brother simply sent for me. He gave no explanation. He simply said he wanted me to see that the spare rooms were got ready for a Mr Murchison, who was stopping with him, and to look after him till he got back in the afternoon. And as soon as I saw you, I saw you knew me, and were surprised to see me here; and now I see you know my bull. I do not understand. I — I wish you would be frank with me,’ she ended lamely.

  Murchison saw that she was really startled and distressed, and her confusion restored his self-possession for the first time since he had set eyes on her.

  ‘I don’t understand things either,’ he said slowly, squashing his cigarette-end in the saucer of his coffee cup. ‘I’ll tell you frankly all there is to tell, if it is any help to you. Yesterday I was at the end of my tether. Out of a job, and down on my luck, and all the rest of it. I turned into the British Museum to kill an hour or two. And I suppose I was pretty wrought up, what with one thing and another. I came face to face with one of those winged bulls that stand near the entrance to the Egyptian Gallery, and in the half-light — you remember how foggy it was yesterday — I thought the blessed thing was alive for a moment, and it gave me a turn. I got into a queer mood, I don’t know why, and I sort of rose up and cursed. Your brother heard me, and spoke to me. I was wandering about in the fog in the yard outside the Museum. We found we knew each other. I had been under him during the War, and he offered me a job. That’s all there is to it. I don’t understand it. It upheaved me beyond all reason. I am not usually the sort of idiot I am to-day.’

  ‘I begin to understand a little,’ said the girl, leaning her chin on her hand and staring at him thoughtfully. ‘But you say you had never seen the bull before?’

  ‘Never,’ said Murchison.

  Ursula Brangwyn continued to stare, but made no comment. Finally she said, ‘But you still haven’t told me where it was you saw me before.’

  ‘Your brother put me to sleep in your room last night because the spare room wasn’t ready; and I dreamt that a woman’s head, no bigger than an orange, hung in the air at the foot of the bed. Of course, when I woke up there was nothing there. When I saw you I was struck by the likeness, that was all.’

  Ursula Brangwyn continued to stare at him fixedly without speaking. Then, to his surprise, she shut her eyes for a long moment, and then opened them and blinked like one awakening from sleep.

  ‘Now I think I know why I have been sent for,’ she said. She stirred the dregs of her coffee thoughtfully. ‘You say you have never seen the bull before?’

  ‘Never,’ said Murchison.

  ‘Well, it is connected with an experiment my brother is doing, and that I am helping him with. An experiment in psychology. My brother thinks that there was a great deal more in the old pagan faiths than is generally realized, and he is investigating them from the psychological point of view. I have undertaken to help him’ — her eyes avoided his, and a wave of colour flooded her face. ‘He thinks you would be able to help him. And I think he sent for me so that I could see whether I would be able to work with you.’

  The girl lifted her head and looked at him with a curious, almost frightened expression on her face.

  ‘I had better warn you,’ she said, ‘that the experiment has already been tried once and — and it went wrong. And I got rather a bad shock that upset me a good deal at the time, though I think I am over it now, but it may have left me a little jumpy.’

  ‘Of course, I don’t know what my position in the matter is until I have had a talk with your brother,’ said Murchison, ‘but you can rely on me to do everything I can to fit in with you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ursula Brangwyn, and rose from the table. Murchison retired upstairs to his own quarters and began to sort his meagre belongings, realizing as he did so that two-thirds of them had not been worth the trouble of transport. The task did not take l
ong, for he was not a fastidious person, and contented himself with separating his boots from his collars and his shaving-tackle from his writing materials. This job finished, he went into his sitting-room and lit the gas fire. The fireplace was flanked on either side by narrow bookcases, no wider than a step-ladder. They contained an odd assortment of books. Psychology predominated, but there was a representative collection of ancient fables retold in popular style. He selected one and began to turn over the pages, seeing Pan and the nymphs in Arcadia; Apollo driving the chariot of the sun; Aphrodite born of the sea-foam; and Dionysus with his Maenads racing over the mountains.

  He turned another page, and found himself face to face yet again with the winged bull. He stared at the beast. ‘What in God’s name are you up to?’ he admonished it. ‘Why do you keep on bobbing up?’

  The beast had a man’s head, an animal’s body and eagle’s wings. It must have meant something to the man who made it. Curious how these symbols of forgotten faiths appealed to him while the symbols of his own faith irritated him.

  The sudden ringing of a telephone bell startled him, for he had not noticed a phone in the room, and it was a moment or two before he could locate it. When he did so, he heard Brangwyn’s voice at the other end: ‘Will you come down to tea, Murchison?’

  The moment Murchison entered the lounge he knew that he had been under discussion. There was a sudden cutting-off of the conversation, a sudden seeking for superficial topics. Ursula Brangwyn was making the tea with an electric kettle on a low tabouret beside her chair.

  The girl looked up as he entered and their eyes met, and there was something in her expression that seemed to him to imply an understanding between them. Murchison became very much the employee and only spoke when spoken to. Brangwyn himself made conversation gamely. He talked of the political situation; he talked of mutual reminiscences of the War; finally he was reduced to talking of the weather.

  The moment that tea was over Miss Brangwyn disappeared up the corkscrew stairs without apology, and the tension in the atmosphere appreciably relaxed. Murchison heaved a sigh of relief.

  They sat smoking in silence; but the silence was not uncomfortable. Brangwyn stared into the fire, and Murchison watched Brangwyn, wondering what was passing in his mind.

  Finally Brangwyn said:

  ‘Let’s put the cards on the table, shall we, Murchison? You have been talking to my sister, I gather. How much did she tell you of my affairs?’

  ‘She said you were interested in psychology and extinct religions.’

  ‘Extinct religions? Mmmm,’ said Brangwyn. ‘That’s exactly what I’m not interested in. I’m interested in some very much alive religions. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder what such a symbol as the winged bull meant to the men who made it?’

  Murchison hesitated for a long moment. ‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘That was just exactly what I was wondering upstairs while I was looking at the books in my quarters.’

  ‘Did you notice the nature of the books?’

  ‘A mixture of ancient religions and modern psychology.’

  ‘Precisely. And those represent my interests, as Ursula told you. And those books were put there that you might have a look at them.’

  This was heavy going, thought Brangwyn, but he persevered. Murchison’s outcry of ‘Io Pan’ in the forecourt of the British Museum; his psychism, which had enabled him to see the face of Ursula Brangwyn in his dream; and his emotion at the sight of the jade pendant all told him that his new secretary was by no means as stolid as he looked, and that his stolidity was probably his front line of defence against a world that wipes its boots on sensitiveness, wherever found. It was not an easy thing to find sensitiveness combined with a burly virility, as was the case in the somewhat rough-looking customer seated opposite to him. Brangwyn had in his mind another man, who had possessed many qualities that Murchison did not, but who had lacked the necessary alloy of honest earth. The over-tempered steel had snapped and splintered, and some of the splinters had gone into Ursula Brangwyn’s heart. There had been wounds all round, and Brangwyn had not yet got the taste out of his mouth of the interview in which he had had to put hard facts in front of his sister and make her face them. Not that she had burked at facing them. She was a thoroughbred. But her face as she did it — that was what he could not forget. And he had a shrewd suspicion that although the wound had healed on the surface, there were some splinters still lingering inside it, and it had not healed underneath. There was sepsis somewhere in Ursula Brangwyn’s soul, and that sepsis had got to be got out, even if he operated on her without an anaesthetic.

  He thought of the man who had caused all the trouble. He had been a remarkable personality, both physically and mentally; resembling some such swift creature as a stag, or a racehorse, or a greyhound. And his mind bad had the same swift litheness. And then Brangwyn caught himself up suddenly. Why was he thinking of the fellow in the past tense as if he were dead? Of course, he wasn’t dead; be was alive, God help him. It would have been a great deal better for him if be had been dead.

  Brangwyn looked at the man on the other side of the fireplace. He had slipped down on the cushions in the deep chair till be was practically sitting on his shoulderblades. His clumsily shod feet were gracelessly asprawl on the hearthrug, and his expression was sullen as he stared into the fire and gnawed the knuckles of his big, freckled hands. His rough, thick, fair hair stood up like the crest of a fretful cockatoo. His profile, seen against the dark background of the panelling, revealed a short, blunt nose, high cheekbones and a heavy jaw. A bulldog type, thought Brangwyn thicknecked, heavy-Shouldered, lumbering; but very staunch and enduring. This was a man who would never let you down. Once he got his teeth into a thing, he would hang on.

  The bull of Babylon, and all it meant — thought Brangwyn. The other fellow had been a stag. He had not fitted in with the bull symbolism. But this chap was an altogether different proposition. A creature of earth, but with volcanic fire inside him. That was how he summed him up; and that would suit his purpose very well indeed. Now, if he could only handle Murchison in just the right way, and get him where be wanted him, everything would be all right, even if he did not look a very promising specimen at the moment.

  ‘What do you suppose it means,’ he said, ‘that the bull of Babylon has a man’s head, a beast’s body and bird’s wings?’

  ‘Haven’t we all got beast’s bodies?’ said Murchison without looking up.

  ‘What about the eagle’s wings attached to the bull’s body?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But I do,’ said Brangwyn.

  Murchison looked up at him under heavy, sandy brows, but did not speak.

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Brangwyn, ‘that there might be a technique in these things? A lost and forgotten art? Were you under a strong emotion when you were invoking Pan in the fog?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Resentment, I think. Resentment at life in general and God in particular. I was ripe for anything when you came along. I was just about ready for crime.’

  ‘Had you said to evil, Be thou my good?’

  ‘No, not that. I wasn’t out for evil. At least not what I consider to be evil. I don’t deny God, but I thought I’d like a change of gods. It may sound a queer thing to say, but I reckon there are more gods than one.’

  ‘I think so, too,’ said Brangwyn. ‘The precession of the equinoxes brings a new sign of the Zodiac into function every two thousand years, and we’re about due for a change.’

  Brangwyn had begun to realize that there was a caution and reserve, even a surly suspiciousness about Murchison which argued a life lived in an unsympathetic atmosphere.

  ‘Murchison,’ he said quietly, ‘do you know why it was I offered you this job?’

  ‘No,’ said Murchison.

  ‘As I was coming out from the British Museum reading-room yesterday I heard someone calling upon Pan as if they meant it. That i
s a subject which happens to be my special line of interest, and I went to the trouble to grope about in the fog until I found the person who was making the noise. When I found that he was a man I knew I thought I might be able to ask him to join me in experimentation. How does the idea appeal to you?’

  Murchison played his usual trick of a long silence before reply. Finally he said: ‘Naturally I’d like the job, but it’s not in my power to guarantee to deliver the kind of goods you’re asking for.’

  ‘I am not asking you to guarantee anything. All I ask you to do is to carry out certain processes in a particular way and to put your heart into the job. I’ll take all responsibility for the outcome.’

  ‘All right,’ said Murchison. ‘Subject to a week’s notice on either side, I’m your man.’

  ‘I dare say you’ve gathered that the secretarial duties are pretty negligible,’ said Brangwyn. ‘But what I want you to do is to familiarize yourself with the literature of the subject as a start. When you have got the general lie of the land in your head, we can proceed to details. I also want you to keep a record of your dreams and let me do a bit of analysis on them. As long as you are undertaking this job, I want you to be absolutely frank with me in the matter of your dreams and what comes out of them. That is the chief thing I ask of you. If you mislead me in even the smallest details in that matter, you will vitiate the result of the whole experiment. Are you prepared for that?’

  ‘I am if you are,’ said Murchison.

  ‘That,’ said Brangwyn, ‘is all I require. The rest is up to me.’

  He rose from his chair and went over to the cupboard, from which on the previous evening he had taken out the peacock and crimson robes, opened it, and extracted a flowing garment of dark green silk, the colour of leaves in summer.

  ‘Will you wear this, this evening?’ be said. ‘The robes are part of the experiment. Tell me, when you wore the blue robe last night, did you feel anything?’