by Beech, Mark
There was in particular one spot through which I had often passed when first I had come to that part of the country; it led to one of the rare open spaces in the countryside rising above the tree-tops, and from there it had been my custom of an evening to watch the sunset and the dark formation of the clouds. And to reach that high heathery place I had passed at first by a path, which leading through the trees dipped suddenly into a dry dingle where heather and bracken were crowded together, and old tree-stumps sawn smooth and lichen-covered stood upon the ground. It was upon the opposite side of this dingle, where it sloped up to meet the wood again, that among the ferns I saw one day a face. I say I saw a face, although at that time and on that night, when I debated with myself concerning this affair, my words were not so definite. I could not even then say of what colour was the face, or of what texture was the hair, or of what shade were the eyes (nor whether there were horns there). For I have always been absent-minded and unobservant of physical things, not being able to tell the colour of the eyes even of persons I know well and am frequently with; nor the clothes they wear upon occasions, nor the shape of their ears. On that evening when I had returned home (for I turned back quickly from the dingle, foregoing the summit), it was not my recollection that told me the shape and significance of what I had seen, but the memories of half-mortal things, which, as I said, I had read of in stories or heard in tales at the dinner table or by the fireside (although of the lore of such things I was ignorant), and also, as I now suppose, all those little moments of fear in my life, unexplained before, gathered now in my brain as evidence for the reality, and the tangibility and fleshly presence of that face and head I had seen (and of that tangibility and fleshly presence I had no doubt then; for the former little fears had no tangible visible origin, and therefore gave no rise to a feeling of brutality or revenge (which is the chief consequence of fear). Yet they had stayed unexplained because I had scarcely thought analytically about them, but only as vague unjoined memories reaching up from my childhood to the present day. Now, however, for the first time I found myself probing into the cause of them, and trying to draw conclusions from their presence and effect.
One thing I understood very clearly straight away: that this thing—I call it Pan now, though I did not then so pin it down to a particular name—but Pan in its meaning of Panic’ produced by Nature, gives my meaning shortly, and to the many modern readers of the weird, comprehensively, did not necessarily mean evil to me. And there again I have written so as not to give my meaning clearly. For at that time I was convinced—nay, I understood as though none could doubt that the Pan was quite unconscious of me as a man, and therefore could not mean me evil as one man to another, it was only vaguely conscious of any emanation of personality that my being gave out, and so if those two forces, my personality and the Pan, were antipathetic, I, as the weaker, should suffer. I understood, too, that it was a force I might meet and be sensitive to, and that if I could conquer my fears and accept it—as it were, if I could flow with the tide—not only would it fail to harm me, but I should discover in it a great and pleasurable excitement; it would be uncivilised, for I should renounce what centuries of evolution had attempted rightly or wrongly to do for me; I should deny my manhood and my consequent supposed capability of mastering nature, and would slip back into unconscious happiness like a dope-fiend to his dope. But I realised very clearly that if I could not conquer my fears, I should then be compelled by my fears to strive and fight against it, and should thereby be broken that k, all my being, my soul, would be broken against a force that the whole of mankind working together for millions of years has not quite succeeded in conquering. And as I thought of this I knew deep down in my heart that I could not conquer my fears. I was too much of a man; the animal in me was dead and only its ghost survived, by whose dim radiance I faintly knew that to yield was to discover a wonderful happiness which is the beast’s. It may perhaps seem odd to the reader that I had no thought of escaping from the doom that threatened me. I could sell my house and take my work elsewhere—into some more open country, or into some place where man’s hand was more evident in the control of nature. But at this time escape did not occur to me; and in my house my fears were in abeyance, the only difference being that I no longer after my evening meal sat working, with my windows open and my curtains undrawn, but closed and locked the hasps of the window and drew the blinds and curtains close in order that no eye might peer in upon me. And there you can see the inconsequence of my actions. My mortality, my being of mankind, translated this Pan into a possible peering thing, so that I was in comfort with the blinds drawn, although if the force was there blinds could make but little difference. But even now, I do not think these precautions—absurd though they sound—were mistaken. It was a muddling of values, a wrong perspective to take—that is, from the point of view of man. But we do not understand the workings or the limitations of things outside ourselves; and it is possible, twisted though the action seems to be, and quite like the action of an unsound mind, that what I did had after all some power in it to defeat and turn away anything that might come up to the walls of my house out of the wood; that it did in fact screen me then from any influence of which I might be afraid, out there in the dark.
There is one thing more to say about the face I saw out there in the darkness before I go on with my account. I do not believe the face was there objectively. Though I have alluded to its tangibility and visibility, I do not believe, had any one been with me, that he would also have seen it. I alone saw it because I alone was aware of its presence—the presence of Pan as a force. And this force, by its past contact with my personality and its present extraordinary strong contact, produced to my vision the illusion of a figure. It so worked upon me that I may say I materialised that face... and a face or something very like a face it had to be, for the human mind cannot imagine, and therefore cannot materialise, conceptions outside its imagination, outside its limit of thought. It can, no doubt, in visions go among them, but it cannot make them flesh; and that face was flesh and blood, and if I had dared (which, as the reader will now understand, was impossible on my part) to go up to it, I should have found a body couched there in the bracken with live darting eyes (and no doubt a pungent smell); but no one with me could have seen it or felt it. Of all this I was aware, and as I sat thinking upon that night of my experience in the closeness of my room I decided what I should do.
The next day I sent for a dog, because I perceived that I could not continue to walk in the woods without a companion of some sort; and of man and beast I preferred the beast. The dog very soon arrived—a large brute, high-spirited and companionable—and we soon became fast friends. He of course gave no sign of the Pan-force about us, nor indeed did I expect that he would, but he served his purpose, and my walks continued, though I did not care to go through that particular dingle where I had seen the face of Pan, but made a path round about to reach the open piece of ground, where I sat and watched the coming of the night. And the only other thing I noticed at this time—a time of comparative peace—was that my work progressed at a great rate. But whereas in the former days I should have been content at this, now the very fact of its speed disturbed my mind. Surely, I thought to myself, it is as though I were working against time: this must be done quickly if it be done at all. I can imagine a man in a consumption working in such a way, so that his work might be finished before he was. How strange! and yet I am in health and nothing harms me. And I wondered the more, not being able to explain the real reason.
And now I come to the second part of my story: and it is here that the reader will think I began to be insane and although at the time I knew my arguments to be false, yet could I not relinquish them, knowing always that what I experienced was outside the boundaries of man’s thought, and therefore not to be judged by man’s logic.
Well, soon after I had bought the dog, to whom I had in the meantime become much attached, I was unexpectedly called away to the city, and there had to remain for
some little time upon certain affairs I was not able to leave in the hands of a deputy. It was in the city, being away from the influence of the Pan, that I began now to consider what I should do to rid myself of the evil—how I might conquer it. And this I did, not as communicating with myself when alone (for the whole time I was occupied with business or being entertained by my friends), but rather it was my inner brain that communed with itself as I sat in the dimness of the theatres or among the noisy company at dinners, or walking in the streets with my friends. I began then to ponder how I might revenge myself upon, and cripple, and drive away the Pan from my country; how, where I could not conquer my fears, I might with the sudden courage and audacity they gave to my heart, break the force that threatened to crush and annihilate my personality. And wondering thus during the busy days I passed in the city, the thought suddenly came to me that it was the trees... that in the trees lay the thing that troubled me. Where I live, I said to myself, it is in the trees the Pan lies, for in the open country I am not afraid: the force is inoperative there; but in the woods it is strong, and it is in the trees therefore lies the Pan. Yet, even as I thought thus, I knew that to an open and an obvious mind this reasoning would sound fanciful. An untortuous mind would certainly have said to me—as though to a child who asked some curious question—that the Pan is between the trees as much as in them; and can you attack the space between the trunks? It is only because the trees are visible to you that therefore you think they are the culprits; the air is invisible, and so you cannot see the force there. In fact, this man would continue; you would try to destroy a conscious immaterial force of nature by destroying a material unconscious thing. And although this answer would sound reasonable—or, at the least, more reasonable than my theory—yet I should be impelled to think that such arguments were only half true; and that by attacking the trees (of whose unconsciousness we cannot be certain) I should, as it were, be drawing off blood from the Pan, and so be weakening it, as a strong man may be bled to inactivity and helplessness; that where I could not attack the Pan contained in the atmosphere, yet since it was in the trees as well as in the atmosphere—within a certain radius of the country, in fact, omnipresent—by destroying the trees I should be destroying a moiety of its strength. The reader must not think I was so foolish as to imagine that by making the trees die—by the fact of their death—I was killing their force; the force I knew was, as far as man is concerned, immortal; but I realised quite clearly that it must have something through which to flow, and that about my house, where it was for some unusual reason concentrated very close, it used the trees for that purpose. It became to me evident and offensive through the trees. Therefore if the trees were destroyed, it would either pass elsewhere or become attenuated and so lose its strength. The force was as blood, which is useless unless it flow through a living organism; or as water, which has no strength when spread in shallow pools, but when concentrated can shatter steel.
But of these things I spoke to my friends not at all, nor did they see in me any sign of anxiety: so that in the press and hurry of business these inner thoughts appeared to me like some still-sailing ship upon the waters in the bay of a hidden and hitherto undiscovered island; concealed, unknown, and to the busy world unthought of. But after my business was finished and my friends had gone, I went secretly to a cutler and there purchased some woodman’s axes, and took them the next day to the country, and hung them upon a rack; and so my mind was easier as having discovered the cause of my trouble and at the same time the cure.
And the next day, after I had finished my work in the morning, I whistled to my dog and went to the woods. Now on that day I did not take an axe, because I was, as it were, reconnoitring to discover the place and disposition of the enemy. And as I went along I touched the trees and handled them; I was, in fact, extraordinarily happy then, and even dared laugh loudly in the wood. I shouted to my dog, and together we ran about the wood in any direction like people who have been suddenly rescued from death, and whose motions know not how to express the ecstasies of their minds. So I hurried about, waving my arms and calling to the trees:
“Oh ! you trees; oh! you trees!”
But after I had gone on like this for a little time, and had begun, I suppose, to be exhausted, some of the old fear took hold of me and made me think that I had been guilty perhaps of folly and even of bravado. And so we went home quickly again, and when the darkness fell I shut the windows and pulled the blinds as of old; and on that evening I did no work, but sat and considered how I had discovered the secret of the trees amid the noise and bustle of the city. And as I mused thus I watched my dog, who lay at my feet beside the fire, fatigued by his exercise; and I decided then that I no longer had any need of him; so I settled that I would send him away on the morrow. And when I had made up my mind to do that, I knelt down on the floor beside him and fondled him; and he lifted his head from the rug upon which he lay and licked my hand, and looked at me with great affection, till the tears rose to my eyes at the thought of his departure; for he might not find again so pleasant a home as mine.
And that night, because it was his last, he slept with me upon the bed (a thing that hitherto had been forbidden), and the next morning I sent him to my friends in the city, asking that he might be found a home in the country, “because he had done his job with me.”
Then in the afternoon of that day I took an axe and went into the wood and began to cut down the trees. Any one seeing me then would have thought me a lunatic. For I cut them down as though they were my enemies, and as though they of themselves had done me harm, and I were fighting them for my life; whereas they were but the means through which I reached the Pan; so that I said to myself as I damaged them: “Poor things! they suffer not because of themselves, but of the force that is in them; therefore they suffer.” For I cut them down because I was man, and of mankind, which had risen above the Pan; and because the fear in me made me fight the thing which threatened to destroy me. So I attacked the base of the trees furiously, and shouted as the trees fell; yet I went quickly from the wood when the sun began to set with an uneasy feeling, which made me say to myself, “Tomorrow I must cut more and yet greater trees.”
And I determined to come out into the wood in the morning, and for the present to desert my work that all my strength might be given to my salvation.
So the next morning I went out early and laboured all the day; and so I did day by day until this day.
Nor do I know whether I am the more distracted now or the more at peace for what I have done up to this time, nor how the end will be. But as I write this account I find myself at peace, and maybe it will prove to be my last will and testament. I shall perhaps slip back, for all my fighting, into the force of the Pan, and again with a new world spend millions of years fighting out the queer destiny of mankind... to escape from all that is natural and wild and go to some unforeseen, unhappy end. Is it that we have been fighting God?...
DEAR ______,
I told you I’d write some time a story of a man frightened of the trees. Today a wet afternoon and a sudden thirst for words sat me down. I have just finished it; 3500 words in three hours is not bad. It is, of course, disjointed and much should yet be done to it—and, if I know myself, it will be left in that state for ever and a day. But even unpolished, rough-hewn, I think it is good. The man himself writes it the night before the trees get him. Mr. Moxon, a neighbour, saw his death, and describes it and publishes it. Mr. Moxon calls it a puzzling affair as it was.
Yrs.,
I. C.
Ivar Campbell was born in 1890 and was killed fighting in Mesopotamia in 1916. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and dreamed, prior to the war, of opening a bookshop in Chelsea. In the words of E.B. Osborn in The New Elizabethans (1919): “There under the peaceful name of John Cowslip he proposed to sell books and drawings by modern artists and also holly walking-sticks polished like ivory, to be cut by his familiar friend in certain woodlands they had discovered in their wanderings.”
The modest extent of his literary works were collected posthumously and privately printed by his friends and family. This unfinished piece was published in The Prose Writings of Ivar Campbell in 1918, along with the unsent letter above. It is his last known work of prose.
—Mark Beech
South-West 13
Nina Antonia
The reedy notes danced on the air, poignant and lilting, provoking a longing for the fragrant breath of summer and autumn’s russet glory. It was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard but with an undertone of melancholy. Though the refrain could be described as musical, it came from no instrument I’d previously encountered and despite its intangible beauty had a vaguely unnerving quality. In common with the lonesome cry of fox cubs that verge on the human yet remain feral, it had a chimerical affect. My cat, Arthur, was the only other witness to the strange lilt. Lime green eyes wide as the fullest moon, he would always run to the window overlooking the woods, moments before the notes caught the breeze. Normally placid, a giddy delirium would seize him as if he could no longer be contained in the small flat. Clawing at the walls, he chattered animatedly to the shadows for several hours afterwards. I started to make a note in my diary to see if there was a pattern to these otherworldly recitals but none existed and save for Arthur and I, no one else could hear it. But then, I have always known there was music in the rain and the sighing of souls in the trees. That’s why I’d moved to the edge of a nature reserve.