by Beech, Mark
No one has yet discovered how the bottle of wine in that cave in Goskin Woods is so vigilantly replenished. Nor has it been discovered who neatly piles the stones, and offers fresh flower cuttings in the darkness, so many years after the unusual events described here are rumored to have taken place.
Pan’s Pipes
Robert Louis Stevenson
(1878)
The world in which we live has been variously said and sung by the most ingenious poets and philosophers: these reducing it to formulae and chemical ingredients, those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures for the handiwork of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and the choosing mind has much to reject before it can get together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroying Atilla and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order of contrasts which no repetition can assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish strain throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house of life. Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself awhile with heaven’s delicate distillations, decays again into indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar’s ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the most portentous nightmare of the universe—the great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell’s squibs, tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself is enough to disgust a human being of the scene which he inhabits; and you would not fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet it is by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the arbour door.
The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of human experience. To certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful and an angry look, the type of the shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his pipe.
For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds sing among the trees in pairing-time? What means the sound of the rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest? To what tune does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning, and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat? These are all airs upon Pan’s pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the exultation of his heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow with his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth of herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses, beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of hands; and the voice of things, and their significant look, and the renovating influence they breathe forth—these are his joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in choral harmony. To this music the young lambs bound as to a tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.
Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is changed; and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies, subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; in the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we recognise the ‘dread foundation’ of life and the anger in Pan’s heart. Earth wages open war against her children, and under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The cool waters invite us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns up in the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly, not in itself, but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in England the hurricane must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the paths of dalliance, confident of Nature’s sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from his ambuscade below the bed of marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother’s corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was the most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee life’s pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of Nature’s God! Shrilly sound Pan’s pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the bank parlour! For to distrust one’s impulses is to be recreant to Pan.
There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man’s experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
From London magazine. May 1878.
The House of Pan
John Gale
One:
The Oculus of Autumn
Sebastian Alvanley was approaching his sixty-seventh year when he came into a rather reluctant possession of his great uncle Fluin’s medieval hall; named the House of Pan, the hall was situated in a
remote corner of the Duchy of Greywall. Rich seams of silver were now beginning to run through the darkness of Sebastian’s locks and ever-deepening lines were cutting into the pale skin of his face from habitual frowning and the harsh and negative judgements he passed upon his fellow men and women.
His journey there, with his man servant Jonathan, was a lengthy one and consequently it was late into a golden afternoon when his carriage began the steady climb from the deep peridot illumination of wild beechen woods up onto the wind-haunted moors where the manse was built. The contrast of the wide green and grey moors, where skies of alabaster, flushed with a pale and delicate lapis lazuli, seemed within touching distance, was a stark one indeed to the gentle hills and the pleasant, sylvan lanes they had been passing through until then.
The hall was set on a rising of ground and the approach was masked by a malachite plethora of dark cypress and pines. The edifice, which had been mercilessly added too over the centuries—including the unfortunate monstrosity of a Gothic tower which had been attached to the western end of the house—had also in more recent years been lamentably neglected. It was now a place of sorrow, mourning the passing of its youth, its roof, mused Sebastian fancifully, swathed liberally with pallid ashes.
When the carriage had settled before the house, Sebastian sat within its sanctum whilst Jonathan and the coach driver unloaded the trunks from the roof and took the hand luggage from the interior. Sebastian stared unkindly at the dour frontage of the building before quietly sighing and opening with resolution the door of the vehicle and stepping down onto its drive of small white stones, where he stood stiffly attired in tight clothes of a funereal shade, apart from swan-white stock, looking the very picture of a severe parson.
Staring up at the stone height of the house his melancholy gaze eventually fell from the tower—its conical roof of copper a startling green of verdigris; the structure’s single window blinded by ivy—and settled upon the oculus of stained glass that pierced the wall above the heavy oak doors. Set in a cartouche carven with madly-twining vines that were burdened with grapes, the glass in the window depicted the Goat-Footed God standing within the glorious deep gold and burning jasper fume of an autumn woodland, flourishing a set of syrinx as pale as a new moon. Sebastian recalled the glass very well indeed from those far off days when he had stayed there as a child: the prancing image of the god, as indeed now, fascinated and horrified at the same time.
As he stared, enwrapped in the remembrance of that long gone and somewhat tarnished era, Sebastian became suddenly aware that one of the doors of blackened oak had yawned open and for a moment he had the curious fancy that the figure standing in the dark violet shadows of the threshold had a face like a thin and raddled moon and that through the wild and brindled hair rose two horns. The creature spoke and the vision dissipated as abruptly as it had materialised.
“Master Alvanley,” said the figure from the crushed blackberry shade, “welcome back to the House of Pan, sir.” Sebastian then recognised his great uncle’s old seneschal, Septimus Utterington, the tone of his voice the same gravelly timbre from long use of tobacco. “Come in, sir,” he continued, stepping back into the dimness of the hall and ushering him in.
Sebastian stepped forward into the dark panelled hall, the heavily-carved stairway leading to the upper floor before him. He immediately felt oppressed as he entered the house; it was as if he were suddenly enclosed in the dim gilt shadows of an impenetrable autumnal wood.
Utterington’s voice faded away, becoming the furtive rustling of unseen and unknowable creatures in thick undergrowth, and he could hear the mournful piping of birds in a misty aureate distance... Then the light became the stained glass rays of the summer sun filtering in through the oculus that depicted Pan. Utterington’s voice became cognizable to him again, suggesting the idea of a cold repast, and asking whether he could have the help of his man servant in its preparation.
“Yes,” he responded vaguely. “Jonathan, will you help Mr Utterington? I will amuse myself with getting reacquainted with this old place.” Though amuse may not be the correct word to utilise, thought Sebastian Alvanley to himself.
He was disturbed by the indistinct memories that the house evoked from his distant stays here as a child with his father, and by the peculiar illusions—visionary and auditory—that he had experienced in the very short time since arriving. The rooms seemed to be filled with shadows even though light and colour came in through the windows: the pale and fragile golden fire of the late afternoon moorland sun; the scarlet and chrysolite, the snow white and the dense pools of midnight azure created by the stained glass set into the top portions of all the ground floor windows. Yet even so, restless shades seemed to dwell in every corner, behind every chair, hid from the light under every piece of dark furniture; and as he strolled cautiously about the rooms he felt the sable shadows gathering behind him, seeping from their endusted hiding places, falling from the ceilings, massing and flickering, like the ancient revenants of moon-silhouetted leaves soundlessly stirring. But on turning, suddenly, there was nothing to behold but darkening aureate sunlight and, agitated by his passage, gyring motes of burning dusts executing a graceful saraband.
The shadow-fraught rooms that he wandered through were crowded with antiquities and curios, art that his great uncle had returned with from his Grand Tour taken when a young man; Sebastian recalled many of the objects from his childhood visits. However, there were many he did not remember. Had they been acquired during the fifty years or so since his last sojourn here or had they been hidden from his innocent sight because of their profane or obscene nature?
Amidst the dusty, but still glowing ceramics, porcelain, pottery and faience there were statues and figurines, in snow-white marble or dark bronze, of pagan deities: grape-bearing Dionysus, Artemis with a lunate crown of white crystal above her smooth brow and the grotesque hybrid of Aegipan, all undoubtedly exquisite in a strange manner; but then there were images that brought a crimson bloom to his pale features, many representing Pan, his bearded face transformed horribly as he engaged in lustful acts. It was as if his great uncle had transformed the entire house into a gentleman’s Cabinet of Curiosities. There were many other pieces, too, the moonstone horn of a unicorn displayed upon a wall next to a gleaming arthame, with a handle of orichalcum, beneath which a legend proclaimed it to have once belonged to a magus from fabled Vindru.
Sebastian Alvanley turned swiftly from the horror of a multibreasted Artemis of Ephesus and endeavoured to salve his eyes on the view through the window, where the sun was anointing the tips of the dark pines with a chrism of ancient gold.
It was whilst he was thus engaged that Jonathan and Mr Utterington returned from the realms of the kitchen laden with foods to help appease his hunger.
Whilst his great uncle’s aged seneschal began to busy himself lighting candles and lamps, Sebastian addressed him:
“Mr Utterington, some this artwork is rather distasteful and disturbing to me, I’ll have Jonathan remove them tomorrow.”
The aged man paused as he was lighting a candle of pale green wax, the white taper trembling in his hand, and the trembling not entirely due to the infirmities of age, thought Sebastian.
“Very well, Sir,” he eventually responded, “but I shall attend to the task myself if it must be done. I know the correct place to store them.”
Without turning to face Sebastian he abruptly walked from the room after blowing out the golden flame at the end of the taper, leaving a pearlescent trail of smoke to rise into the air from its glowing tip. How strange, thought Sebastian, not noticing the old seneschal’s insolence, for the smoke had seemed for the briefest of moments to sketch a face upon the air. But no, it had been his imagination only.
The repast that the two men had set upon the oaken table was a simple enough affair: cold meats, cheeses and a fruit pie; to drink there was a local wine made from the berries of the Rowan, sweet and syrupy, a veritable fire of cinnabar within the enclosure of the wine
glass.
Soon after completing his repast, Mr Utterington reappeared to show Sebastian up to his room which he had prepared earlier in the day. He took a dislike to the chamber almost as soon as he had set eyes upon it: heavily and darkly wainscoted with the walls above painted a shade of malachite so deep in hue as to be almost black, like the environs of a secret hollow within the pine and cypress wood at the front of the hall. The candles did little to alleviate the gloom: the shadows proliferated, capering in draughts, though the evening was still. The bed was an ancient, but solid construction with four curtained posts, the blankets and the ice-white linen almost hidden beneath thin counterpanes of Oriental silks: the uppermost was woven with golden desert scenes and long, begemmed caravans wending their way beneath the rays of silvern moons and fierce flower-like suns; and the other, he was surprised and disturbed to see, was a reproduction in silk of the scene from the autumn oculus, that of prancing Pan, the circular, woven image surrounded by a lustrous black, a planished ocean of onyx.
Well, thought Sebastian, that must go: I shall not be sleeping beneath that tonight. So, as soon as he was alone he carefully folded up the Pan counterpane, along with a couple of the blankets which he felt would not be needed for it seemed to him to be a sultry night, and deposited them in the darkness of the large wardrobe.
After washing and attiring himself in his night garments—for he had allowed Jonathan the evening off—he sat up in bed and prepared to read by the nervous flickering of the candle’s light. However, he found that he could not concentrate on the slim volume, a Faery Tale in verse, The Cap and the Bells by Grey-wall authoress Sarah Vaughn Lloyd, for the events of the day kept intruding and these in turn gave way to thoughts of what Sebastian knew of his great uncle, Fluin Alvanley.