The Winged Bull

by Dion Fortune

  ‘Well, there you are!’ said Brangwyn, plunging his hands into his trouser pockets, and taking a turn or two up and down the room. ‘I don’t know how to put it to you. One would have to explain so much before it became comprehensible. And a half-explanation would be worse than none at all.’

  ‘I am perfectly willing to take risks,’ said Murchison, ‘provided I know what they are. What I don’t fancy is barging along in the dark.’

  ‘Very well, then I will do my best to explain. Ursula has been worked upon by means of the rare knowledge of which I have told you. It is impossible for me to get her right simply by cutting her off from Fouldes. There is a curious, subtle link between them. Ursula and Fouldes have been made to form a kind of circuit which carries these forces. If I break that circuit I destroy Ursula. All I can do is to replace Fouldes with someone else, someone clean and straight, who won’t do Ursula any harm and who will treat her decently.’

  ‘How?’ said Murchison.

  ‘I want to get these natural forces, psychic forces, to flow in circuit through you and Ursula. If that comes off, Fouldes is automatically shunted and we shall have no more trouble with him. It will be done by means of ritual. A very small ritual, I promise you, just enough to see whether the power will flow between you and Ursula or not.’

  ‘I know nothing about these things, but if I am any judge, it won’t flow. She has no use for me, and I have no use for her, save as part of my job.’

  ‘I admit it is not flowing at the present moment, because Ursula is panicking and you are hanging back. But you can’t deny that there have been moments when it has flowed, when you have been in sympathy with each other. It is on this that I am banking. On this, and my knowledge of your respective characters.’

  ‘But, look here, Brangwyn, this is out of the question. I never set eyes on the girl till a couple of days ago, and she has made it very plain that she doesn’t fancy me.’

  ‘Do you fancy her?’

  ‘To tell you the honest truth, I don’t.’

  This was a facer for Brangwyn, who, watching closely, had come to the conclusion that his secretary was highly susceptible in that quarter. ‘Anyone else you fancy?’

  ‘No, nobody.’

  ‘I had an idea,’ said Brangwyn quietly, ‘that you were — er — susceptible to my sister.’

  ‘Damn it all I’m susceptible to any woman who isn’t an absolute char! I’m like that bull of Babylon your sister uses as a book-plate. I’ve got an animal body, I admit it; but because I’ve got impulses it doesn’t follow that I give way to them.’

  Brangwyn looked at him steadily, a slight smile on his lips. ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the bull has wings?’

  Murchison passed his hand wearily across his eyes. ‘Yes, I know it has, but I could never make anything of that.’

  ‘It is the winged side of the bull that I want to develop between you and Ursula. I have knowledge of these matters, Murchison, and I want to pass on my knowledge. I had hoped to pass it on to Ursula, if she had married the right sort of man. I wouldn’t pass it on to Fouldes, and that was what all the trouble was about. He tried to get it from Astley, for Astley also has knowledge; but he has got hold of it by the wrong end. The result we know. Ursula knows that if she wants that knowledge she has got to be prepared to work with and marry the right kind of man.’

  Murchison suddenly found himself as dead tired as he had been earlier in the day. ‘I’ll work with her, if that’s what you both want,’ he said wearily. ‘But I won’t marry her, and that’s final. To be perfectly candid with you, I don’t particularly like her, though I’m very sorry for her. There’s something about her that rubs me up the wrong way and makes me feel on the defensive. An inferiority complex, I suppose. She’s smart, and I’m uncouth. She’s conscious of it, too; my uncouthness, I mean; she wouldn’t care to have me as an escort if she were going anywhere, and I don’t blame her. She’s no use for me, and I’ve no use for her.’

  Brangwyn studied him closely, and wondered how much of this was pride and how much was genuine. Murchison was exceptionally sensitive. He had followed every move in Ursula’s mind with perfect accuracy. Ursula was reluctant, and for the exact reasons that he had divined.

  ‘Look here, Murchison, I have studied these things pretty deeply. Believe me, if this experiment succeeds, things will come all right between you and Ursula. It is the circuiting of certain forces between two people which makes them get fond of each other. The current keeps on jumping between you and Ursula spontaneously, and therefore I reckon that you will not only be able to form a circuit, but will carry a very high voltage when you get going. That is what I want to test tonight.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? I haven’t a notion about these things.’

  ‘I simply want you to carry out the instructions I shall give. This is a spontaneous ritual. I shall have the general plan in my head, and shall direct you. But you yourself will have to do spontaneously whatever occurs to you under the circumstances in which I shall place you. It is a kind of acted psycho-analysis. It enables your subconscious mind to come up to the surface.’

  Murchison rubbed his nose. ‘If I follow my spontaneous inclinations, I may end up by kissing your sister.’

  ‘Splendid!’ said Brangwyn. ‘There’s nothing I should like better.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Murchison was not a person who did things by halves. He made up his mind that he would take Ursula Brangwyn on and flirt with her outrageously. He had never thought of himself as a gigolo; and, however low he had fallen, had always held that gigolos were one degree lower. But once her infatuation for Fouldes was broken up she would have a chance. At present she had none.

  When he arrived down in the firelit lounge from his afternoon nap he found Ursula Brangwyn alone, lying back languidly in one of the big armchairs. He took a firm grip on himself and sat down on the edge of the wide brick hearth at her feet, folding his arms round his knees. He was a Yorkshireman, and there is no finesse in the Yorkshire heritage. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.

  Ursula Brangwyn gazed at him without speaking.

  ‘Your brother has put the cards on the table at last. I didn’t know what he was driving at before. I’d like you to think of me as if I were the doctor and you the patient. But I swear to you that when the job’s done I’ll clear out and not bother you any more. You thought I might have to be built permanently into the structure, but I pointed out to your brother that that wasn’t possible.’

  ‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I am just trusting my brother. I feel as if my mind had gone completely into abeyance, and I simply can’t think or plan, or anything. I know it’s just as bad for you as it is for me.’

  Brangwyn came into the room and summoned them to dinner. Luigi was in great form, having discovered a new way of cooking veal; and Murchison realized that there were times when it was a great advantage to have the loquacious Italian to turn on and off like a tap.

  Brangwyn left them alone again after the meal, alleging he had some telephoning to do. Murchison took his seat on the edge of the hearth and watched her make the coffee.

  ‘Ursula,’ he said abruptly, ‘my misguided parents called me Edward when I was christened, but no one has ever called me that since. I have always been Ted to my friends.’ He paused, but there was no reply from the girl. He laid his hand over hers and to his amazement he saw her eyes fill with tears. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, his hand tightening on hers involuntarily.

  ‘You’re so sweet to me, and I’m such a pig,’ she answered in a broken voice.

  ‘That’s all right. Don’t you worry about that.’ He patted her hand gently, and they sat together silently in the firelight, the girl’s slender hand in his, the coffee forgotten as they stared into the fire.

  Murchison was amazed to find himself filled with the profoundest peace as he sat with the girl’s hand in his, and through the peace
there flowed a sense of the most intense compassion. He had gone into the thing entirely selflessly, hoping to do the girl a good turn; expecting to get nothing out of it for himself save a lot of worry and nervous wear and tear. Instead of the strain he had anticipated, there was this great peace. He remembered having read of the Witches’ Sabbath, and how the postulants for that dark initiation were led up to the altar to kiss the latter end of the Goat of Mendes, and, when they got there, it was the beautiful calm face of the priestess of Isis that their lips touched.

  When Brangwyn came into the room he heaved a sigh of relief as he sensed the change in the atmosphere. ‘If you are ready,’ he said, ‘we will go downstairs.’

  They followed him through a door in the panelling that Murchison had not realized existed, and found themselves on a continuation of the spiral staircase that led downwards to the basement.

  They found themselves in a room of modest dimensions entirely surrounded by cupboards, the whole place warm almost to suffocation with central heating. Brangwyn opened one of the cupboards and took out a diaphanous robe of palest green. It was exceedingly thin, but exceedingly voluminous; dozens of yards of material must have gone to the making of it. He handed this to his sister.

  ‘Go and get dressed,’ he said, and she vanished through a door in the corner, which evidently led to a dressing-room, for Murchison got a glimpse of a mirror.

  ‘Don’t come back till we send for you,’ Brangwyn called after her.

  He opened another cupboard and took out a straight-hanging, sleeveless garment of heavy gold tissue. ‘This is for you,’ he said, handing it to Murchison.

  Following Brangwyn’s instructions Murchison stripped and pulled on the robe, letting Brangwyn lace golden sandals on to his bare feet and bind a golden fillet about his shaggy fair hair, which stuck out in a veritable sun-god’s halo all round it. A broad band round the hips, like the sash on the cassock of a priest, completed the outfit.

  Murchison surveyed himself in a long mirror, and perceived a startling figure. He saw at once that his kit was cut on the lines of the tunic of an Egyptian priest, save that it was all gold from head to heel instead of bleached linen. It was absolutely plain save for the rayed golden sun-disk embroidered on the breast. With the shedding of his everyday garments he had also shed his everyday personality. The man that looked back at him from the mirror was not himself; it was someone from the Oldest Land that had risen to the surface from the depths of his unconscious mind. Someone that he himself might have been in a previous incarnation. He remembered what Brangwyn had said about the Lost Continent and its forgotten wisdom, and wondered whether the form of the garment he wore was older than Egypt. Was he clad as were the priests of lost Atlantis? With the pagan robe he had put on the pagan outlook — free, self-assertive, near to Nature. He felt Brangwyn watching him, and knew that his employer had observed the change in him and was well pleased.

  Brangwyn rapped on the door of the dressing-room. ‘Are you ready, Ursula?’ he called. The door opened, and Ursula Brangwyn came out.

  She was clad in a filmy, flowing green robe that billowed around her in a cloud. It hung from a narrow band of gold about the breast, but no girdle confined it at the waist, and it flowed as she moved like wind-blown smoke. A gold fillet bound the dark hair that had been released from its plaits, and gold sandals similar to his own were upon her bare feet.

  She, too, was not Ursula Brangwyn, but someone else, someone who also came from the Oldest Land.

  ‘Now listen, you two,’ said Brangwyn, still clad in a lounge suit. ‘Go in and sit down while I robe. I shall come in presently and do my part, during which you remain seated. I shall chant, and invoke, and when the spirit moves you, you start to perform your parts. You take the initiative, Murchison, at least, I expect you will. Now bear this in mind, and picture it in your imagination — Ursula represents the earth in spring. You are the sun-god gradually gathering strength as the days lengthen. My chanting, if I do my part properly, ought to cause images to rise in your imagination. Accept those images as if they were real, and live in your imagination while the rite goes on. When you get really into it, and feel as if it were real, act out the play as you feel it.’

  Murchison followed Ursula through a felt-covered door and found himself in a spacious, candle-lit apartment. There were only half a dozen candles in high ecclesiastic candle-sticks ranged in a circle round the room, but walls, ceiling, floor and every article of furniture was painted a shining golden hue, and the light of the candles reflected back again and again till the very air of the room seemed to glow with golden light.

  Ursula made her way across the golden floor with soundless steps. She took her seat on a throne-like chair of carved and gilded wood at one side of the room, and, without speaking, motioned Murchison to take his seat on a similar chair placed opposite, the breadth of the room away. Towards the far end of the room, an equal distance from both their seats, and forming an equilateral triangle with them, was a small, square altar, also of bright gold, and on it was, somewhat incongruously, a rough pitcher of unglazed earthenware with a shaggy mass of pine-boughs in it, their resinous needles smelling aromatically in the warmth of the room. Surrounding the rude pitcher were ranged a cup of curious shape, three-parts full of a very dark wine; a platter of broken bread, and a small dish of coarse salt. The shape of the cup put Murchison in mind of the famous cup of the ancient king that had been moulded from the breast of Helen of Troy.

  At the end of the room at which they had entered was a raised, curtained platform, reached by three steps, which acted as an effectual screen to the door and enabled anyone to enter and reach the dais unobserved by those already within the room.

  Ursula Brangwyn had assumed the posture of the ancient Egyptian gods; sitting bolt upright, knees and feet together, hands along thighs. Murchison imitated her, taking the opportunity to have a good look at her, as her eyes were fast shut.

  He had never considered her in detail before. His rather shy and shamefaced glances had only conveyed to him a general impression.

  He saw that she was tall and long-limbed, and that slender, olive-skinned hands lay along her thighs. She was thin almost to emaciation but she was very beautiful in a strange and unusual way. He could imagine that everyone would admire her, but not everyone would like her. Her head was rather small, and the hair seemed heavy on it. Aloof fastidiousness was written in every line of her body, from the thrown-back poise of her head, with its close-held mouth, to the way she placed her narrow feet side by side on the golden floor. Murchison felt sorry for the man who should marry her, and suddenly found himself disliking her. Something primitively male in him resented the aloof Untouchability of her.

  ‘All right, you bitch,’ he found himself saying under his breath. ‘I’ll rub your nose in it for you.’ Ursula Brangwyn, knocked off her pedestal by a hearty hand and well and soundly rolled in mother earth, might wake up a much saner and more normal creature than she was at present.

  He heard a slight rustling on the dais, and reckoned his employer was arriving. He glanced at his opposite number, and thought that she looked tense and apprehensive, and suddenly felt sorry for her again. He felt an inner excitement of curiosity rise within him, and gave himself up to the glamour of the adventure.

  A single clear bell-note rang out from the curtained dais, and the amazingly resonant voice of Brangwyn filled the room.

  ‘Hekas, Hekas, este bibeloi!’

  Because of his classical education Murchison recognized the warning cry of the Dionysiac Mysteries which bid the profane to flee from the path of the divinely inebriated revellers lest they be torn to pieces by the frenzied worshippers.

  It startled him; and the faint thrill of fear went through him which is the surest presage of a successful psychic experiment. Ursula Brangwyn’s eyes remained fast shut, but his were open, darting here and there about the golden room as if expecting to see the gods appear at any moment. He was rapt away out of himself, his imagination en
thralled.

  Then the music came, presumably from Brangwyn’s record player, and Murchison gave himself up to it. At first it rippled and ran like purling water, or the wind in spring woods that are in bare leaf, and he thought of Ursula Brangwyn’s diaphanous green robe. Then it deepened and strengthened, and he thought of the summer woods in deep leaf and full of bird-song; and then began a rushing, circling fire-music that made him think of the sun’s corona of towering flame, each licking tongue thousands of miles in height. The golden room seemed to turn to red-gold flame, and he could feel the heat and excitement of it upon his face.

  The music ceased, and with a faint rattle of rings on rods the curtains parted, and a strange and startling figure appeared on the topmost of the three steps of the dais. It was Brangwyn, clad in a great golden cope shot with salmon-pink. On his head, and adding a foot and a half to his already considerable height, was the headdress of united Egypt with the Uraeus-serpent reared before it.

  Brangwyn stretched out his hands, and without word spoken, called the two of them to their feet as a conductor gathers up his orchestra. Murchison wondered how the girl, with her tightly closed eyes, caught this soundless cue. Then he saw that she was in a sleep-walking, hypnoidal state, and wondered what Svengali act was about to be performed.

  Brangwyn caught his eye and held it, and, holding up his hand for attention, began to intone in his sonorous voice, to the intense surprise of his hearer, the words of a modern poet.

  ‘Years have risen and fallen in darkness or in twilight,

  Ages waxed and waned that knew not thee or thine,

  While the world sought light by night and sought not

  thy light,

  Since the last sad pilgrim left thy dark mid-shrine.

  Dark the shrine and dumb the fount of song thence

  welling,

  Save for words more sad than tears of blood, that said;