by Dion Fortune
Ursula felt deadly cold with the after-effect of the shock she had received, and she drew a three-legged stool close up to the bonfire Mrs Davies had set going, and stared with unseeing eyes at the flames climbing from log to log.
It had never occurred to Ursula that anything more than her dignity had been in danger from Fouldes’ violence. The thing she most dreaded was his sinister influence over her. To call it hypnotic merely classified, but did not explain it. It was the enemy within the gates that she dreaded, the unregenerate side to her own nature, that Fouldes had learnt to play upon so cleverly, her developed mediumship making her highly suggestable. And, although she knew all this; and knew exactly how she was being worked upon, it did not make her any the less susceptible. No one could appreciate better than she could how cleverly Fouldes had found the weak spots in her armour in appealing to her fastidiousness and snobbery by emphasizing the uncouthness and shabbiness of poor Murchison.
That afternoon’s experience had given her a warning that her security was very precarious, and that Astley’s grip would close on her if she were not very careful. If she yielded to the attraction that Frank Fouldes still had for the baser side of her nature, she knew only too clearly that she would be following a dangerous witch-light, and that in a few steps she would feel the suck of the slough about her feet, and she would be drawn down and down, and sucked in, till she came within reach of Astley and the slime of ancient and forgotten abominations closed over her head. And yet Fouldes had a fascination for her. It was as if there were two sides to her — the extreme fastidiousness that gave her her appreciation of the fine nuances of sophisticated culture, and another side that made her kin to the Maenads that followed Dionysus and tore fawns to pieces in their mystical frenzy; and, even baser, the women who crept out of the mediaeval walled towns by night to go to the witches’ sabbath and ‘kiss the buttocks of the goat’.
This side of her horrified her; and yet, denied it, life seemed savourless. Love and marriage, if it meant no more than housekeeping and child-bearing, had no attraction for her after she bad realized the possibilities revealed to her by Fouldes. She was pulled in every direction as if caught in a cyclone. Fouldes was her true mate, and yet she knew that mating with him meant unspeakable degradation and an early death. Murchison, pressed on her by her brother as her only hope of salvation, was distasteful to her by his roughness. But behind Fouldes loomed Astley, slug-like in his foulness; and to go to Frank meant to come into the hands of this high-priest of evil.
But, although she realized all this, the moment she looked into his face after she had been away from him for a little while she thought only of his fascination. There were times when she thought that to burn with fullness of life in a fierce flame was a greater good than long life and peace; when she was sorely tempted to throw off all restraints and give herself to Fouldes utterly. But then the shapeless, vulture-shadow of Astley would loom over him, and she would remember that there were horrors not to be faced.
Murchison was not like Fouldes; there was no ease of relationship with him. To contact him was like walking into a cliff in the dark. Frank had been possessed of a rare gift of imagination, and had excelled in those finer arts of life that make the companionships of a cultured man so agreeable to an intellectual woman.
But that afternoon had been a shock to her. She had realized with horror how strong was the baser side of her nature; how eagerly she desired to steal forth to the witches’ coven and embrace the goat-god. But she had also realized as never before the extent of the demoralization that had taken place in Fouldes. There was a blanched pallor about him which she suspected to be due to drugs, and a curious, goat-like, inhuman expression in his eyes; and when Gwenny attacked him he had been like a wild animal.
She made up her mind that at the next opportunity she would go into matters fully with Murchison. She ought to take what he was willing to give in the spirit in which it was offered, and be grateful to him for his kindness.
There are only three gates to Wales: Gloucester, Chester and Shrewsbury, and it was at Shrewsbury that the two men crossed the Severn on their hasty journey north, and entered a new spiritual atmosphere. From time to time they passed the ruined walls of castles designed to keep the Kelt to his mountains, and presently the road began to wind up the narrow, wooded valleys that lead into the heart of the Snowdon range.
Twilight fell swiftly among the woods, and Murchison switched on the powerful headlights. There was a sense of primitive wildness in the air, and he had a curious feeling that they had left civilization behind.
They were following the windings of a river mile after mile, and presently the trees gave out, and heathery hillsides lay dappled in the light of the newly risen moon. On and on they went, and the wind grew very cold. Then the valley narrowed and granite walls closed in on them, with snow lying in the gullies.
‘Steady on the bend,’ said Brangwyn, ‘we turn off just here.’
‘Right or left?’ said Murchison.
‘Left, man, left. Good God, don’t turn right! It’s a hundred-foot drop!’
The headlights revealed a gap in the dry stone walling that flanked the road, and Murchison swung the car into it.
They were bumping over a rough cart-track that wound up a narrow gulch into the very heart of the range. The rock walls closed in behind them, and they might have been among the mountains of the moon. The headlights made the road as bright as day in that confined space, and some very worried mountain sheep ran panic-stricken ahead of them. A sheepdog came cantering out of the shadows and turned his charges neatly on to the grass at the roadside. Another sheepdog answered him from near at hand, and then they heard the cry of new-born lambs and smelt the acrid odour of penned sheep. Then lights appeared round a corner of rock and the wavering light of a lantern came bobbing towards them.
‘Why, surely it is Mr Brangwyn!’ exclaimed a high-pitched, staccato voice.
‘Good evening, Mrs Davies, and who did you think it was? Good Lord, woman, what are you doing with that gun?’
Murchison saw a tall, gaunt woman step into the glare of the headlights, with an old-fashioned, single-barrelled shotgun in the crook of her arm.
‘Well, now, I did not know who it was. Mr Davies has gone to send you a telegraph. We have had trouble here.’
Murchison felt a horrible coldness close about his heart. ‘What’s the matter, Mrs Davies?’ he heard Brangwyn say in a very quiet voice.
‘Oh, it is not too bad, Mr Brangwyn. Miss Ursula, she has been frightened, but she is not hurt. Gwenny took care of her. She was fetching the sheep from the high hill, and she saw Miss Ursula was being frightened, and she came down, and she tore the trousers off him.’
Murchison looked round to see who the termagant was who had performed this feat, and a little black collie with a pretty white waistcoat ran up and stood with her tongue out, looking self-conscious.
‘I am very grateful to Gwenny,’ said Brangwyn.
‘Ah, Mr Brangwyn, she does not speak English.’ Some rapid gutturals translated the compliment into Welsh, and Gwenny acknowledged it with a wave of her tail and disappeared into the darkness.
‘Is my sister up at the cottage, Mrs Davies?’
‘Yes. She would not come down to the farm, and I could not make her. I will go up and tell her you are here. She may think it is that man come back if you drive up in the dark.’
Mrs Davies disappeared into the darkness, followed by the dogs. A shrill cry and waving of the lantern called them on, and Murchison drove the car across the little Alpine meadow in which the farmhouse stood, rounded a projecting rocky corner, and saw a low, whitewashed cottage with a grey slate roof in front of them. Flickering firelight shone from its windows, and the tall form of Mrs Davies stood in the open doorway, but there was no sign of Ursula Brangwyn.
They went up a narrow flagged pathway across the small forecourt surrounded by low whitewashed stone walls. The open door led straight into the single room that occupied the
whole of the ground floor, save for a little lean-to at the back. The air struck warm and sweet as they entered, for a large fire of pine-wood burnt in the primitive grate at one end. A magnificent Welsh dresser, jet-black with generations of elbow-grease, occupied the best part of one wall, but its shelves held books instead of crockery. A couple of highbacked settles made an ingle-nook of the fireplace, and on them were piled bright-coloured cushions to relieve their hardness. Rugs covered the uneven flags of the floor.
The lamp was unlit, and it took a moment or two for Murchison’s eyes to become accustomed to the flickering light. Then he saw that Ursula Brangwyn was sitting on a three-legged stool in front of the fire with her back to the room. She was dressed as for walking, save that her hat had been flung aside and her dark hair was dishevelled. There was mud on her shoes, and she looked as if she had returned to the house after her adventure, sat down by the fire, and had not moved since.
‘Hello, Ursula?’ said her brother.
‘Hello, Alick?’ said the girl, without turning her head. Brangwyn crossed the room and sat down on the settle and studied her face. Murchison, embarrassed, hung back in the shadows by the door. No one spoke.
At length the girl broke the silence. ‘Did Mrs Davies tell you what happened?’
‘Yes,’ said Brangwyn.
There was silence again for a while. Then the girl spoke once more.
‘Alick,’ she said, ‘I’d have gone with him if the dog hadn’t driven him off.’
‘I told you you would,’ said Brangwyn.
Once again silence fell, and there was no sound in the room save the hissing of the sap in the pine-logs and the slow tick-tock of an old clock.
Again the girl broke the silence.
‘I’ll have to take Murchison, Alick, he’s my only chance. What shall we do about it?’
‘Murchison is here, Ursula,’ said Brangwyn.
‘Oh!’ cried Ursula, and turned round so suddenly that she nearly over-balanced her three-legged stool.
Murchison came forward out of the shadows.
‘Good evening, Miss Brangwyn,’ he said.
He took off his old trench-coat and sat down on the settle beside Brangwyn, and stared into the fire. These few revealing words of Ursula Brangwyn’s had caught him like a blow in the face.
Brangwyn rose from the settle. ‘I’ll go and put the car away,’ he said.
‘Let me do it,’ cried Murchison, leaping to his feet, only too thankful for an excuse to make his escape.
‘No, my lad, sit down. You don’t know where it goes. Besides, I want to have a word with old Davies; he ought to be back by now.’ He wished to leave the two together to come to an understanding as best they might. He could not conceive of any other way in which Ursula could pick up the brick she had dropped. He went out; and Murchison had perforce to re-seat himself beside the silent girl, who stared at the fire without speaking.
Murchison could not make out how far Ursula Brangwyn was lost in her own thoughts, and how far she chose to ignore his presence. He slid himself into the corner of the settle that Brangwyn had vacated, so as to get some rest for his back, weary from the long drive, and before he knew where he was he had dropped off to sleep.
But Ursula Brangwyn was quite alive to his presence. Her silence and averted face were due to sheer embarrassment. If one did not mind a certain ruggedness of feature, he might be considered a fine-looking man. Why, oh why, had she not been able to see beneath the rough exterior as her brother had done? She remembered Murchison’s kindness, almost tenderness, when she had had her upheavals at the flat, and the infinite comfort of it. If only he would be like that again she would open her heart to him and tell him of the horrible panic-fear and helplessness that descended on her, and of her desperate need to hold on to him lest she be swept away and lost for ever.
If she told him all this, surely he would understand that her unlucky remark was not quite as bad as it sounded?
She would tell him that they should become one on the plane of earth, as they already were in the invisible kingdoms by virtue of what had been done in the rite of the earth in spring. This rite, she knew, had really been a marriage rite — a marriage that depended entirely upon function for its validity. If no magnetic circuit sprang up between them when the power was invoked, no marriage took place; if magnetism began to flow from the one to the other, the marriage had actually come into being, and only needed to be ratified on the physical plane.
She raised her eyes from the fire and turned towards the silent man to speak to him, and discovered that he was sound asleep. A sudden wave of anger shot over her. So this was all the regard he had for her? So little real concern for her that he had not even been able to keep awake!
CHAPTER NINE
Murchison could not imagine where he was when he was aroused by Mrs Davies’ entry with a broom next morning.
‘Mr Murchison!’ she exclaimed. ‘I would have given you a bed at the farm if I had known! Have you been there all night?’
‘I think I must have been, Mrs Davies. I’ve no recollection of going to sleep. I must have just dropped off, and they left me here.’
‘Dear to goodness now, you could not have been very comfortable.’
‘I slept too soundly to know whether I was comfortable or not. All I want is a jug of hot water and somewhere to have a wash and a shave.’
Mrs Davies led him into the lean-to, which was fitted up as a little kitchen, boiled him some water on an oil-stove and left him to get on with his ablutions at the sink.
‘I say, Mrs Davies?’ he said, coming out with a shining morning face. ‘Do you think you could give me something to eat? I am ravenous, and I don’t suppose the Brangwyns will be down yet awhile. I missed my supper last night, you know.’
‘Yes, indeed!’ exclaimed the hospitable Mrs Davies, bustling about with a frying-pan.
He disposed of three eggs, half a dozen rashers of bacon, the best part of a home-baked loaf, and a large pot of black tea in a manner that completely won Mrs Davies’ heart. Then he went out into the spring sunshine to escape from her broomings and brushings, and there Brangwyn presently joined him, and they strolled together up the steep couloir, in the mouth of which the cottage stood.
It had evidently been the bed of an ancient glacier, for the marks of the grinding ice could be clearly seen on the cliffs that bounded it. A breadth of turf, smooth as a lawn, and dotted here and there with boulders left behind by the ice, clothed what had once been the bed of a prehistoric river. The high rock walls sheltered them from the wind, the sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, and the mountain air was magnificent.
‘Tradition has it,’ said Brangwyn, ‘that it was up here that Keridwen minded her cauldron.’
‘Who might Keridwen be?’ inquired Murchison.
‘She is the Keltic Ceres, and her cauldon is the prototype of the Graal. Ursula, in her better moments, likes to identify herself with Keridwen; but I tell her she is not an Earth-mother.’
‘No, more like a moon-goddess,’ said Murchison, forgetting his resentment against her for the moment. ‘I didn’t think the part of the earth in spring quite suited her.’
Brangwyn glanced at him covertly, and wondered how much he had guessed of the significance of that rite. They walked on up the path in silence for a time until it came out on to the steep slope of the mountain-side.
‘It is curious that you should have likened Ursula to a moon-goddess,’ said Brangwyn conversationally. ‘For that is the symbolism we have been working with in the winged bull formula.’
‘You told me she was,’ said Murchison irritably, still staring out at the horizon. ‘You said she was Isis, and Isis is the same as Luna, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ said Brangwyn. ‘And that’s curious, for Luna is also the same as Diana, and you remember how the dogs made it hot for Acteon when he annoyed Diana? These symbolisms work out in a very odd way, though nobody has ever been able to explain how it comes about. You meditate on the s
et of symbols which make up a formula and soon they begin to express themselves in your life. I have seen it happen over and over again. Have you ever noticed how meditation on the black Calvary cross of sacrifice always brings suffering and renunciation?’
‘Can’t say I have. Never having done any,’ said Murchison, with his back still to his companion. Brangwyn stared at that broad back, wondering what on earth had upset Murchison, for upset he obviously was.
Suddenly he turned round with a short laugh, and the expression of his face was not pleasant.
‘If I remember aright, from the scanty remains of my classical education, Diana was given to blood sacrifices.’
‘So she was,’ said Brangwyn, wondering what all this was leading up to. ‘But we are not in Aulis these days. Diana, I trust, is a reformed character.’
‘The symbols never change, Brangwyn. If you start on them at all you have got to see them through.’
Brangwyn looked at him, wondering where this knowledge came from.
Murchison laughed again his harsh, barking laugh, that Brangwyn had never heard before, and that he did not particularly care about.
‘Is it part of my job to murder my predecessor?’ he asked.
‘What in the world do you mean?’
‘Well, you remember the priest of Diana in the Arician Grove? He always held his job by virtue of having murdered his predecessor, didn’t he? And that was the only qualification required of him.’
‘It will not be necessary for you to murder Fouldes,’ said Brangwyn quietly. ‘It will be quite enough if you put his nose out of joint. Shall we go back to breakfast?’
‘I believe the priest of Diana in the Arician Grove was always a runaway slave, or some other scallywag,’ said Murchison pleasantly. ‘So the symbolism fits me just nicely.’