by Dion Fortune
‘Well there’s one there now.’
‘That explains a good many things that have puzzled me,’ said Brangwyn thoughtfully. ‘But I should have thought that Monks, of all men, had reason to be loyal. He is under a very great obligation to me.’
‘Then that’s probably the cause of the trouble,’ said Murchison. ‘Gratitude disagrees very actively with some people. That little cock-sparrow, as sharp as a needle and as common as mud, is sure to have an inferiority complex.’
Brangwyn looked at the man standing over him in his filthy trench-coat. ‘What shall we do with Monks? My instinct Is to chuck him out.’
‘Don’t you do that. He may come in very handy.’
‘But I don’t like the feeling that I’m being spied on. How can we talk in comfort if we never know when he’s listening in? And, good God, how much does he know already?’
‘That’s what I’m wondering. Do you think he’s got a private entrance on to your corkscrew stair?’
‘Might have. It’s only matchboarding. Good God, what a fool I’ve been!’
‘Are those special papers you told me of all right. The ones you said Fouldes wanted to get hold of so badly?’
‘They’re in a safe. I’m not worried about them. The thing that’s worrying me is the amount of information they’ve got hold of about our doings with Ursula. If they know about last night, the fat’s in the fire properly.’
‘Well, if the fat’s in the fire, you’ll soon hear it sputtering. I suppose your sister is well looked after? She’s in safe hands, is she?’
‘She’s right up on the flank of Snowdon, in a shepherd’s cottage. No one knows she’s there.’
‘By herself?’
‘By herself in the cottage, but only a few hundred yards from the farm, and the only way to the cottage is through the farmyard, unless you’re a first-class rock climber.’
‘And the farm people?’
‘Good old God-fearing Welsh. Do anything for you if they like you, and anything to you if they don’t. Yes, I’d trust them, and I think you would, too.’
‘Well, I suppose you know your business best, but I shouldn’t have left her alone.’
‘She won’t have anyone with her.’
‘She can’t have everything she wants in this wicked world.’
Brangwyn smiled inwardly.
‘Do you know what I think?’ said Murchison. ‘I think that they’re planning to do something while I’m out. Planning to raid you, or something. Else why does Astley want to be told when I go out?’
‘But they can’t raid me in broad daylight, my dear fellow. Luigi’s got about fifteen nephews in the room underneath, and they’ve all got knives. They’d make mincemeat of anybody who raided me. Fouldes knows the ways of the house, and he’d never risk it.’
Murchison removed his trench-coat and hung it over the banister at the stair-foot, and perched his hat on the newel-post. Then he came and sat himself down in his usual chair. Brangwyn watched him closely. Hitherto his attitude had been that of a rather grudging deference, variegated by sudden flashes of alternating resentment and loyalty. But a curious change had taken place since the previous evening. There was still the deference of the younger man to the older man; but the leadership of the expedition had passed unobserved into Murchison’s hands. The practical man had taken the philosopher under his wing, and the philosopher was truly thankful to have it so.
There was no Ursula to brew coffee, so Brangwyn pulled up a tea-trolley and made tea with the ubiquitous electric kettle. ‘Now, Murchison,’ he said, ‘I want you to do some intensive study. You will need to have a working knowledge of mythology. You’ll see why later. You will find a pretty representative selection of books in your quarters. Browse among them, and tell me which appeals to you most. The next thing I want you to do is to practise meditation. Can you visualize clearly?’
‘Yes. Always could. When I was a kid I hardly knew fact from fancy.’
‘Thank goodness. That will cut out a lot of time in your training. You can go straight ahead with the composition of place. It is the way Ignatius Loyola trained his Jesuits. Only we apply it to other ends. The Jesuits visualize New Testament scenes, and work up an extraordinary religious pressure. We visualize the old myths, and work up pressures of quite a different kind.’
‘The feller I keep on meditating on without meaning to is my old bull,’ said Murchison.
‘What in the world’s that?’
‘When I was in the British Museum the day you found me, I had a most extraordinary experience with one of those winged bulls of Babylon near the entrance. It was very foggy, and the light was funny, and I thought the brute was alive. I saw his old face in the dusk, and thought he was human, and was just going to speak to him when I saw he was an exhibit. There was something there, and I can’t tell you what it was. But it was real, and I touched it.’
‘So that explains it. Good God! What an extraordinary story.’
‘Explains what?’
‘I’ve been working on the winged bull formula with Ursula all the time.’
‘I’m afraid I’m none the wiser.’
‘No, my dear boy, you can’t be expected to be. But let me put it as clearly as I can. All these animal gods are psychological formulae. In the old myths the bull is always a phallic symbol, meaning crude sexual force. The eagle’s wings are spiritual aspiration — the flight to the sun. The human head is human intelligence. Put the three together, and how does the formula read? The powerful bull-form of the natural instincts soaring on eagle’s wings of spiritual aspiration, with consciousness poised between them.’
‘Funny, isn’t it, that ever since I made his acquaintance he keeps on bobbing up?’ said Murchison.
‘How so?’
‘Well, as soon as I start to take a look around my quarters, I open a book, and there he is. And as soon as I sit down to a meal with your sister, he pops out of her frock.’
‘What’s all this? Ursula has never told me a word about it.’
‘There was nothing much to tell. She has him for a bookplate, too, hasn’t she, now I come to think of it?’
‘What did you say when you saw Ursula’s Gnostic gem?’
‘I didn’t say anything. I’ve got that much manners. But I’m afraid I stared at it rather hard, and she asked me what about it, so I told her what I’ve just told you, and she seemed rather interested, but I couldn’t get much out of her, and I didn’t like to pump her.’ Murchison paused, and then said: ‘But what does the cow symbolism mean?’
‘The cow-goddess is Hathor, the lower form of Isis, the moon-goddess. She is the Mighty Mother, the All-fertile.’
‘In other words, the earth in spring. And you want my bull for your cow?’
‘No. I want the winged bull of the sun for the moon-goddess Isis, in whom the cow-horns have become the lunar crescent on her brow. Do you understand the symbolism?’
‘Not altogether.’
‘You will!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Brangwyn and Murchison ate their breakfast next morning to a running accompaniment of loud grumblings at the cold, guaranteed to be clearly audible through whatever spy-hole the faithless Monks had established. When Murchison departed for his constitutional he left Brangwyn safely guarded by the presence of two active young Italians. Murchison felt eyes following him from behind the book-shop windows, and was pretty sure that the telephone was being dialled before he turned the corner.
He took a bus to Regent’s Park and started to circumambulate the Outer Circle at a good round pace. He had gone, perhaps, a quarter way round, when he heard himself accosted, and, turning sharply, found himself face to face with Astley, who was smiling affably and apparently bore no ill-will for his recent rough handling. So it was he himself who was the quarry, not Brangwyn in an empty flat?
‘I hope you will allow me to explain and apologize, Mr Murchison?’
‘I think the apologies are due from me,’ said Murchison. ‘I had my ins
tructions, however, and I had to abide by ‘em. And I think you’ll admit I gave you fair warning.’
‘Couldn’t have been fairer,’ said Astley. ‘Shall we have a drink on it and call it all square?’
‘If you like,’ said Murchison. ‘Where shall we go?’ He wondered whether he was being decoyed away somewhere as a preliminary to kidnapping.
‘There’s a little pub just outside the next gate. I dare say we might not appreciate its clientele when business is in full swing, but it will be quiet enough at this time of the morning.’
Murchison set a brisk pace, for he wanted to find out in what sort of physical condition his companion was, in case it came to a scrap, and had the satisfaction of hearing him begin to wheeze by the second lamp-post.
The pub was soon reached, and proved to be a humble little place. The upholstered divinity behind the beer-engines demanded their pleasure with a more than professional smile, for they were not her usual type of customer. Murchison chose a light lager, for he wished to have his wits about him, but Astley had a double whisky.
They took their drinks to a little marble-topped table set in the corner angle of a red plush settee that ran round two sides of the room, and settled down for what Astley evidently intended to be a careful bit of diplomacy. He opened the ball by comparing English pubs with Parisian cafés. Murchison grunted. He went on to compare them with Spanish ventas. Murchison grunted again. From Spain it was only a step to South America and voodoo, and from thence to Thibet and the Lamas.
‘Queer old bird, your reverend employer,’ said Astley reminiscently. ‘Did he ever tell you how he met me in the middle of a glacier on the road to Lhassa?’
Murchison’s grunt indicated a negative, and he lent a bored ear to a long account of the encounter. He was beginning to wonder whether he had been mistaken in thinking that he was the object of interest, and whether it might not be that he was merely being kept out of the way while something was being done at the flat, and was contemplating the advisability of bidding Astley good-bye and leaping into a taxi, when Astley suddenly came to business.
‘Are you at all interested in Brangwyn’s researches?’ he inquired with disarming casualness.
‘Don’t know anything about ‘em,’ said Murchison, burying his nose in the tankard of light lager, which had lasted out three double whiskies consumed by his companion.
‘Oh, don’t you?’ Astley was obviously surprised by this information. ‘We quite understood that you were there to help with his experiments.’
‘I’m there as chucker-out,’ said Murchison.
Astley chuckled. He evidently did not lack a sense of humour, even at his own expense. ‘So I gathered,’ he said. ‘How did you get to know Brangwyn?’
‘I was under him during the War, and ran into him again accidentally a few days ago, and he offered me a job.’
‘Permanently?’
‘No, only till he goes abroad, whenever that may be. He doesn’t know himself yet.’
‘And then you will be out of a job?’
‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’
‘Like a job with me?’
‘Doing what?’
Astley smiled unpleasantly. ‘Are you particular what you do?’
Murchison grunted. ‘You wouldn’t be particular if you’d been out of work as much as I have.’
Astley cast an appraising glance over his shabby outfit, and smiled again. ‘All right, you come to me when Brangwyn gives you notice, and I’ll find you something. And, meanwhile, would you like to make a bit for yourself?’
‘Shouldn’t mind, so long as it wasn’t too risky.’
‘Large profits and quick returns can’t be got without risks, my dear fellow. You know the safe in the corner of Brangwyn’s bedroom?’
‘No, can’t say I do. Never been in there.’
Astley looked rather taken aback. ‘Well, there is one, anyway, you can take my word for it. There are some papers in that safe that belong to me, and I can’t get them out of Brangwyn. I don’t want to have to take him to court; it would be too expensive. If you like to retrieve those papers for me, I’ll pay you handsomely.’
‘What do you call handsome?’
Astley named a sum that made Murchison’s eyes blink. ‘Okay, but I can’t guarantee anything.’
‘No results, no payment.’
‘All right. Cash on delivery. Where am I to find you?’
Astley handed him a very, superior card, but Murchison, who knew the street, noted that it did not bear a very superior address.
‘I had better be getting along,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be taking a constitutional in the park for the good of my health. One of my boss’s fads. He’s a bit of a freak, but harmless.’
‘He’s a freak, all right, but I’m not so sure that he’s harmless,’ said Astley, with more asperity than the occasion appeared to call for.
Murchison, a wide grin on his face, flung down the superior bit of pasteboard in front of his employer.
‘I done a deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve undertaken to steal the papers out of your safe,’ and he named the sum that Astley had agreed.
Brangwyn looked him all over as Astley had done, but in a different spirit. He said no word, but took fountain-pen and cheque-book from his pocket, wrote out a cheque for the sum in question, and handed it to Murchison. ‘I want you to accept this in the spirit in which it is given.’
Murchison twiddled the cheque helplessly between finger and thumb; then he stowed it away in an old pocket-book without a word; cast a worried look at his employer, and finally managed to blurt out, ‘Thanks very much I’m very much obliged to you.’
Day followed day uneventfully in the maisonette tucked away in the Bloomsbury slum. Murchison was sent out daily for the constitutional that health demanded, and always pursued the same route at the same time, so that Astley could find him readily if he wanted him; but nothing happened.
But if nothing were happening in the outer world, there was plenty going on in the subjective realm. Murchison read as bidden the tales of the childhood of man, and, as he read, he seemed to drift further and further away so that it was only by an effort he could recall his attention to mundane affairs. Brangwyn had bidden him spend half an hour twice a day in meditation, going over the myths in day-dream and imagining himself in the Egyptian temples or on the slopes of Mount Olympus. But Murchison soon found that the myths formed a continual running background to his daily life, as if he were all the time standing with his back to a cinema screen.
Brangwyn took a great interest in these day-dreams, and even more so in the stories that wove themselves into Murchison’s dreams at night; time and again he dreamt of the exploits of the heroes, himself sharing in their adventures. Brangwyn, patiently waiting for his pupil to begin to dream of the gods themselves, began to wonder if Murchison’s subconscious mind contained any ideas unconnected with war. He noticed a curious recurrent emotional tone that appeared in dream after dream in some form or other. Always Murchison seemed to consider himself invulnerable save to attack from the rear; and through all the dreams ran a curious undercurrent of disgruntlement and sulkiness. Brangwyn began to wonder whether there were a smouldering resentment directed against himself.
He pondered deeply upon the symbolism presented night after night by the dramatizing subconsciousness of his pseudo-secretary. What was this Achilles-heel that he feared? And with the question came the clue. Achilles had a vulnerable heel, and Achilles also suffered from the sulks. Deprived of his beloved Briseis, he sulked in his tent and refused to fight until the death of his friend called him to action and revenge, and his supreme heroism led to the restoration of his lost mistress.
Brangwyn looked across the table at the man opposite him, who, blissfully unconscious of what was passing in his employer’s mind, was engaged in consuming a large plate of porridge.
‘So you are sulking in your tent, are you?’ thought Brangwyn to himself, ‘and you will not fight until Briseis is res
tored to you? In other words, you will not magnetize Ursula because she does not respond to you; and she won’t respond to you because you do not magnetize her. How the devil is one to break the vicious circle?’
Murchison, having disposed of his usual ample breakfast, went out to walk it off. As he approached the gate that lay a third of the way round the circuit of the park, he saw a bulky figure hanging about, and guessed that Astley was getting tired of waiting, and had come to inquire about the fulfilment of his order.
The greeting was affable to brotherliness on both sides, and, without need for word spoken, they headed for the pub.
‘My turn this time,’ said Murchison. ‘Couple of double whiskies, please, miss.’
They repaired to their corner table with the drinks. ‘No luck with the safe?’ inquired Astley as soon as they were settled, downing the whisky in one gulp.
‘No luck at all. No flies on Brangwyn.’
‘What can one do with a fellow who neither drinks nor womanizes?’ grumbled Astley, who seemed to feel that Brangwyn was taking an unfair advantage in leading a godly, righteous and sober life.
‘What indeed?’ said Murchison, edging Astley’s empty glass away by inches and sliding his own forward with almost imperceptible movements. Astley absent-mindedly took up the full glass that stood so invitingly to his hand, and tossed down its contents. Murchison nodded to the barmaid, and the long tumblers were once more replenished.
‘What do you think of the girl?’ inquired Astley conversationally.
‘Not much,’ said Murchison. ‘Not my style.’
Astley chuckled. ‘Not my style, either. But there’s no accounting for tastes. Where’s she got to, by the way? When did she leave your place?’
‘She left about ten days ago. I’ve no idea where she is. I shoved her on the Irish boat-train at Euston the time I tried to see her off and she didn’t go.’
Astley winked. ‘She’s not in Ireland. Don’t you worry. The Irish boat-train stops at Llandudno Junction to pick up the mails from the north. Your little friend drops off there, and goes up to a shack Brangwyn has in the mountains.’