The Blessing of Pan

by Lord Dunsany

  “Dumpling the son of suet,” said the vicar to himself, whose mind now and then was astonished by the unclerical thoughts that at moments would pass across it. But Tommy’s cheeks looked so red, and his face so fat and vacant, and his hair so brilliantly greasy, that the thought came all by itself.

  “I came about some more of your excellent eggs,” said the vicar after they had shaken hands.

  “Glad, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Duffin.

  “I’m afraid I interfered with your morning’s work,” he said.

  “Not at all,” she answered. It was before the days of “quite all right.”

  “I was just taking them back with me,” he said.

  But that could not be yet. For Mrs. Duffin enquired after Mrs. Anwrel, and this was followed by small talk, kindly but tiny, wearing the morning away; and all the while Tommy sat in his tidy clothes, looking perfectly vacant.

  “I christened him, you know,” said the vicar.

  “Oh yes,” replied Mrs. Duffin. “And we was married the year before you came. Less than a year, really.” And there followed more reminiscences. And at last the vicar was able to say his farewells, and just as he picked up the basket he remembered that it had to be returned, and made a plan all of a sudden. How if he brought it back himself one day a little before sunset, and stayed a bit while Mrs. Duffin talked, and watched the, boy as the light was fading away?

  CHAPTER III

  A SIGHT OF THE PIPES

  “I’VE just been talking to the Duffins,” said the vicar to Mrs. Anwrel. “Young Tommy, doesn’t seem to be the boy to be doing that sort of thing.”

  “It never is the likely ones,” she answered “that do those unlikely things.”

  “That’s so,” said the vicar, thinking of things that had happened one time and another in the parish.

  And that day passed over the vicarage, and over the sunny valley. But, for all the quiet of the little house and its lawns, thoughts were racing through Anwrel’s mind in the unprofitable pursuit of the course that the Bishop would take, and how he would deal with this thing that was perturbing the parish of Wolding, even how he would word his letter.

  That day he did not return to Duffin’s house with the basket, feeling it to be barely a sufficient excuse for two visits on the same day. Instead he sat in a chair outside his house towards evening and watched Wold Hill with a look of strained anxiety. And amongst all the sounds that welled up through the dim gold air beneath the enchantment of evening, nothing reached Anwrel’s ears that was not assuredly earthly; sounds only of human cries came up from the valley, faint murmurs of human speech, far ripples of human laughter; and such sounds as the barking of dogs, sheep bleating, a rooster crowing, which are a sort of palisade that man has set up between his homes and the silences of the stars. It was not every evening that the tune called from the hill, and Anwrel felt certain that for this silence it was all the more sure to be heard on the following evening.

  Next day he was anxious and silent all the morning. He was not by profession a fighting man, yet he was going nearer, and of his own free will, to a power he felt to be awful; and even if it were not Tommy Duffin that played the tune that so haunted the evening, yet he knew that by going down to the farm in the valley he would be far nearer to Wold Hill, and at the hour he dreaded.

  “I am going down to Duffin’s this evening to take the basket back,” he said to his wife.

  “I can take it,” she said, “I’m going to Skegland’s.”

  “No,” he said, “I should like the walk.”

  She said no more, having only spoken to assure herself of his purpose. She was glad he was going; for, little though she had said of it, and though even in her own mind the thought lacked definite words, she knew that about that time that she heard on Wold Hill at sunset was something utterly wrong.

  Rather than postpone what he feared the vicar started sooner than necessary, and came to the farm while the sun was still some way from Wold Hill. And there, when Duffin showed him into the parlour, was Mrs. Duffin all ready to receive him, and she had brought in Tommy. They must have seen him coming while some way off.

  “I just brought back your basket,” said the vicar. He made no effort to stay. He knew that all that could be left to Mrs. Duffin. And sure enough, she asked after the eggs. “They were excellent,” he said, without waiting to reflect whether he had eaten all six, or any. And from that she went to the hens, and from that she went to her work looking after them, and from that to life in general; while Duffin stood and smiled, and Tommy looked mutinous because of his stiff white collar and because he was sitting indoors. And the vicar sat and listened, sometimes adding a brief remark to the conversation, as a traveller skilful with fires puts a piece of fuel exactly where it is needed. And so the talk went on and the sun neared Wold Hill.

  And Tommy began to shuffle and grow impatient. After a while the vicar, watching Mrs. Duffin, saw her notice the shufflings. At that moment he rose to go. Mrs. Duffin, who valued gossip with the vicar even a little more than gossip for its own sake, would have tried to delay him in any case, and she did so now if only to reprove Tommy. Thus pressed with a double eagerness the vicar stayed on; and the sun went lower and lower.

  The talk was now of onions; how to grow them, how to cook them, and whether they might be eaten raw. For some while Tommy’s shufflings had ceased; his expression was changing. A drawn look made his face thinner, his cheeks were paler; but in his eyes, when the vicar looked, was the real change: such a glare of yearning was in them, that the antimacassar behind the boy’s head and the black sofa on which it rested seemed suddenly absurd to the vicar. “Yes,” thought the vicar, “that boy could do it.” For he seemed all changed.

  “I think the healthful properties of spring onions,” he said, “should outweigh the censure of our neighbours.”

  “I do so agree with you, sir,” said Mrs. Duffin, “but I’ve always been a little afraid, people being what they are.”

  “Too censorious, of course,” said the vicar quite absently. And there was Tommy Duffin with that look on his face and the sun touching Wold Hill, and shadows huge and long stalking into the valley, and Tommy’s left hand moving again and again towards his jacket pocket and drawing back furtively.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Duffin was saying, “I think the Cochin Chinas are the best, considering the work they do.”

  “Yes,” said the vicar. And then, feeling sure that the boy would soon be gone and that there would be no overtaking him, he shot out a question that might hit or miss, but was better than doing nothing. “What kind of flute is that,” he said, “that you have in your pocket?”

  The boy went white.

  “I’ve no flute,” he said.

  “Come, Tommy,” said Mrs. Duffin, “show Mr. Anwrel, whatever it is.”

  There was a silence, and a stillness came over Tommy. He wore a menacing look, and Anwrel thought he would defend his pocket to the last. Then all in the silence, the light now a little dim, Tommy Duffin, menacing still, drew something out of his pocket.

  “What have you got, dear,” said his mother, the dark oak of the room making things darker there than they should be just after sundown.

  “Why, it’s one of those things,” said Duffin, “that the Punch and Judy men play. Did you get it...”

  But the look on the face of Anwrel checked him. For a wild fancy unbidden was crossing the vicar’s mind, saying against all reason, “The very pipes of Pan.”

  CHAPTER IV

  THE AIR OF BRIGHTON

  TOMMY DUFFIN had slipped away from the horsehair sofa and parlour, and the vicar had made his farewells, and here he was in the gloaming hurrying home. He had seen at a glance that the pipes young Duffin had shewn him had been probably made by the lad himself, as his wife had actually said, from reeds that he could have got in the small stream running through Wolding. The vicar had no crazy or pagan thoughts concerning them. And yet that one wild fancy that had gone as a flash through his mind, to be
instantly banished, by reason, had left like a kind of track a boding faint but oppressive that pervaded all his moods and lay deep under every thought; so that he hurried uphill, struggling to be home and amongst familiar things before the tune he dreaded should haunt all the air of the valley. And this he barely did, and was in his study reading a monograph upon eoliths, the worked flints of the brown clay, the crudest tools or weapons of the very earliest men, which he himself sometimes found in his walks over upland fields, and brought home and kept in a drawer; when there went through the evening that call, a little softened by the walls of the house but multiplied by his ready apprehensions, which drove his thoughts surging far from science and theory, to drift them mazed upon bewildering shores, where nothing in his calling or education could be any guide at all.

  In a while the tune died away. How long it lasted the vicar could not guess amongst those tempestuous fancies. But after some seconds or minutes the music died away, and the vicar’s thoughts came back guided slowly home by voices from distant gardens, and the chirrup of birds that he knew, and such murmurs as had gone up about that village not only for all the years that he had known it, but for more centuries than one could say. They guided home his thoughts from immense remotenesses as old lights bring shipping home from distant dangerous shores. He wondered how the tune affected others; whether the strangeness that seemed to have come over the parish before he came there absorbed it and made it seem natural; whether minds a little coarser than his were less easily swept afar by it, or whether the plainer minds being closer to natural, even to pagan, things responded to the marvel of that enchantment with an abandonment unknown even to him. He remembered those village maidens gazing at evening towards it.

  But his speculations led him nowhere.

  It was all silent now on Wold Hill, and gradually Anwrel returned to his only source of comfort, to the thought that all this matter was now in the hands of the Bishop, that a shrewder mind, a far better educated mind, one experienced in the affairs of a hundred parishes, knowing London and (oddly enough so ran the perplexed thoughts) the Athenaeum Club, would see with a wider view this thing that was troubling the parish, and would be able to deal with it wisely. With reiterated hopes that the letter would come tomorrow, Anwrel went to his supper, and soon after that to bed.

  And sure enough in the bright morning the letter came. It lay there beside his plate where Marion had put it, an envelope with the Bishop’s handwriting. His wife glanced towards him. “Yes,” he said, “it has come.”

  “I’m so glad,” she said.

  She, also, felt that potent help was at hand.

  Then Anwrel read in silence.

  And this was the Bishop’s letter.

  THE PALACE, SNICHESTER,

  June 12th.

  MY DEAR MR. ANWREL, You were right to write to me, as at all times, I trust, any clergyman in my diocese will do — and fully — whenever in doubt or difficulty. I can understand your feelings and amply sympathise with them. That your parish is sometimes a little difficult and responds, at times, slowly to the touch on the rein, I knew well; and your letter only confirms the opinion I held, even if your actual statement goes somewhat beyond it. I have, indeed, long been conscious that nearly all the clergy in my diocese are much overworked. Not, indeed, in any one week, not perhaps in a whole year, which makes it so hard to complain; but in a long period of time, year after year with very rarely a holiday, harder worked than the members perhaps of any other profession, and in this diocese especially. And many of my clergy have easier parishes than yours, though some, of course, harder.

  Taking into consideration the difficulties of Wolding, and the long time that you have worked there without a holiday, I am especially anxious that you should take a holiday (so long delayed) of at least a full week. I am told by one who is especially qualified to judge, that the air of Brighton is particularly invigorating, and he warmly recommends it for the very purpose of rapidly removing all traces of overwork. I will myself see that every arrangement is made for both services in Wolding for at least one Sunday, and I urge you not to return before you feel yourself amply able to cope with all the exigencies of this parish. If I may advise it I would suggest that you should go on your little holiday (of course with Mrs. Anwrel) without any thought for the care that will be taken of Wolding during your absence, for that will be in my hands. My Chaplain will write to you about lodgings he knows of near Brighton, that he believes will be exactly suited to the holiday that we contemplate.

  Yours sincerely,

  A. M. WEALDENSTONE.

  When Anwrel had read the letter he read it again. Only after that he looked up from it.

  “What does he say, dear?” said Mrs. Anwrel.

  “He says...,” but a weakness came into the vicar’s voice, and without saying any more he sat looking foolishly at the letter, and Mrs. Anwrel came round to him and read it. And not a scrap of her disappointment showed in her voice or face as she exclaimed, “Why! He is offering us a holiday.”

  The tone in which she said it astonished the vicar; for it showed that it was possible for someone to look at this matter as not only not being hopeless, but even as being pleasant; and the possibility cheered him.

  “Yes, a week’s holiday,” he said.

  “And this,” she said, picking up a letter that had lain under the Bishop’s, for Marion’s eye had swiftly recognised the importance of that one, “this must be the chaplain’s.”

  And so it was.

  The chaplain wrote:

  DEAR MR. ANWREL,

  The Bishop has told me of the holiday that you contemplate taking at Brighton. As I know some rather jolly little lodgings at Hove he thought you would like to hear of them. Hove as you know adjoins Brighton, the esplanade is continuous. The lodgings are kept by a Mrs. Smerdon and she only charges 7s. 6d a day for a double-bedded room and board and lodging for two. She has undertaken to do this for any friends of mine, though of course when the ordinary holiday-season is on it brings its temptations for her. I have, however, sent her a note to tell her she must not think of that now, and to make you and Mrs. Anwrel as comfortable as possible. I enclose a list of the trains with their rather tiresome changes, which are, of course, the essence of crosscountry journeys. The 3.2 looks the best, does it not? The Bishop tells me that he will be most interested to hear from you as soon as you have completed your holiday. So I assume that you will be writing to him in about a fortnight.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. W. PORTON.

  Standing beside him she had read the letter partly, over his shoulder, till they arrived at the bottom of the page at different moments and he had read the rest aloud to her.

  “Seven-and-six?” she said. “Seven-and-six for everything?” Then suddenly she stopped and said no more about that.

  “Yes. It seems very little,” he said.

  “Yes, it does rather,” she answered.

  He might have had many holidays. But he did not look on the work that he did amongst those hills as thousands must look on theirs; selling something perhaps that they know to be bad, amongst surroundings against which all the emotions they have are constantly in rebellion; a thing to be fled from as Lot fled from Gomorrah, when rare opportunity offers; alas, to return again. More and more every year the outlines of those hills rounded off for him the view, dreams, outlook and philosophy that a man calls his world, and so gently rounded it that there could have been nothing in all their slopes to jar on a simple mind.

  And more and more every year it grew distasteful to him even to contemplate the fuss and the petty difficulties of leaving that wide circle of hills, wherein everyone knew everyone, for the hurried ways of people who not only would not know him but who with hasty ignorance would assign to him some personality ludicrously unlike his own, and would quietly ridicule or suspect him for every departure they were capable of observing from this absurd personality. And the less he travelled the less did nature equip him with a cynicism that would have been
an armour against all this.

  His daily, week-day work may be said to have been concerned with all the times of intensity that his neighbours knew; not only when they mourned or when they wed, but when the cricket-team won a notable local match or when they were badly beaten. After such occasions there would often be a smoking-concert, and the vicar would be there. On some such evening of victory none spoke like the vicar. To begin with he would mention every member of the team and something heroic they had done, or some resolution they had shown in the face of impossible odds, a perfectly new ball for instance from the hand of “their” best bowler, with such work on it as could only be got when the seam was fresh and rough, in fact the first ball of the match; on these lines he brought comfort when there was not material for praise. And praise he handled until each man glowed. It was far better than beer. And from the praise of individuals he came to the occasion itself. And this he spoke of, if there had been a victory, without actual exaggerations, far less with misstatements, and yet in such a way that those who heard him felt that there had been achieved in that valley at last an event that the years had had in gradual preparation, and there grew in the mind’s eye of all a glory about Wolding. And if there had been a defeat, then he fixed those mental eyes on some future day, towards which by arduous training and by keeping the eye on the ball that team would assuredly climb to merited victory; and the glory about Wolding would be as vivid as ever. And when you consider, though it is better not, but if you consider, how near the paths of life come at times to the edge of that desert that Solomon saw, where all is only vanity, then how wise seem the simple fancies of this man who so often built up for other simple men a triumphant purpose for Wolding. A holiday from all this at any time had a touch of exile about it, but now that this perplexity had arisen, a queerness stranger than any of those he had known in his time in Wolding, he was more loth than ever to turn his back upon it. Yet here was the letter from his Bishop, and one from the Bishop’s chaplain, telling him that he had already decided to go. He regretted part of the letter that he had written; he felt that he had exaggerated the difficulties of Wolding, all but this one great difficulty that he longed to stay and cope with. There may have been things now and then that were a little strange, but nothing he could not cope with without the help of the Bishop, until this thing came. And how was he to cope with this by going away from it?