by Dion Fortune
‘We, T. Jelkes? Did I hear you say “we”? You impenitent old heathen, I believe you’re getting quite keen on the scheme.’
‘I’ll try anything once,’ said T. Jelkes grimly. ‘Now tell me straight, what are you trying to get at with your invocation of Pan and all the rest of it?’
‘Well, it seems to me, T.J., that if I get Pan, I’ll get all the rest of it. Now don’t think that I’m suffering from delusions. I know perfectly well that no cosmic billy-goat is going to materialize on your hearth-rug: but it’s my belief that if I can break out of the luminous opacity of the opal, something in me is going to touch something in the spiritual world that corresponds to it. I don’t want anything spiritual, it isn’t my line, I had an overdose of it at Oxford. What I want is that something vital which I feel to be somewhere in the universe, which I know I need, and which I can’t lay my hand on. Now I call that “something” the Great God Pan.’
Hugh Paston, chased off to bed by the sleepy bookseller, found sleep far from him. His mind was roused to alertness by the talk of the evening in a way that it had never been roused before, and images chased each other through his brain. The house he proposed to buy and equip as a marvellous temple of the Old Gods — in fact more than a temple, a monastery, for there must be others who would delight to join him on his quest — took various forms in his imagination as the dark hours went slowly past. First it was to be of classical architecture, with a front entrance resembling the Parthenon, over the door of which Jelkes’ artist friend should carve the motto: ‘Know thyself’. Entering, one should find oneself in a vast pillared hall to impress the imagination. Everything was to be of white marble. Then he discarded the marble as too like a bathroom, and the house took on a designedly commonplace exterior; but as soon as the front door opened, one found oneself in the mysterious gloom of an Egyptian temple, with vast shadowy images of the gods looming over one.
He lay on his back on the feather-bed and stared up at the shadowy outline of the cock-eyed canopy, dimly revealed by the faint light that always shines through a London window, and wondered where his quest would end, if there were any end to it. He had spoken with great assurance to old Jelkes concerning his quest of Pan, but did he really believe in it himself? One thing, and one thing only he knew, he had a desperate need that was eating him up and destroying him, as if something were feeding on his tissues, and that something could only be appeased by the thing he chose to call Pan, whatever that might ultimately prove to be. It was the x in his calculation. He wasn’t obliged to define it at the present moment. He could erect an altar to the Unknown God if he chose.
The fancy temples passed from his thoughts and he lay along the soft hummocks of the feather-bed wondering exactly what was going to happen now that he had deliberately and with malice aforethought unleashed the Pan Within and sent it forth in search of the Cosmic Pan. He wondered what manner of thing in reality sympathetic magic might be; as described by the anthropologists it was just plain idiocy; but he had a shrewd suspicion the anthropologists never really got at the heart of anything. In sympathetic magic one imitated a thing and so got into touch with it. How superstitious, said the anthropologists. What childishness the mind of primitive man is capable of! But Ignatius Loyola said: Put yourself in the posture of prayer, and you will soon feel like praying; and the founder of the Jesuits was reckoned a very profound psychologist.
Hugh Paston had browsed to some purposed on the tangled shelves of the dusty library. All the books that Jelkes most highly esteemed, his private library, one might say, were in the inner room, safe from sacrilegious hands, and in these Hugh had dipped and skipped extensively. It was not in his nature to work systematically; studying, annotating, collating, experimenting, as the old bookseller had done; but he was an expert at picking up the drift of a book with the minimum of reading. One thing, and not much else, he had picked out from four tattered, dog-eared, paper-backed volumes on magic spelt with a K— the magician surrounds himself with the symbols of a particular potency when he performs a magical operation in order to help himself to concentrate. That was a useful practical point, thought Hugh Paston; it bore out his theory that the sympathetic magic of Loyola’s ‘Exercises’ could be usefully reinforced by all the deckings of a temple. And if, in addition to the decked-out temple, one lived the life — one had every object within one’s sight, every garment one wore, every word one spoke, or that was spoken to one, tuned to the same key over a period of time — surely the effect would be reinforced a hundredfold?
He was determined to seek Pan by the same methods that other people use to seek Christ. Was it a horrible blasphemy? That would certainly be the opinion of most people, but he didn’t mind that. Was it the Black Mass? In a way he supposed it was, and yet it did not seem to him black. He certainly had no intention of desecrating anything that anybody held sacred.
He composed himself for sleep on his back, for he had always understood that this position induced dreams, and sent his mind ranging out over the vales of Arcady in search of Pan. In his imagination he performed the ‘composition of place’, reconstructing the scene from what he could remember of the classics, so laboriously and unprofitably rammed into his head at Harrow. The sparse woods of oak and fir; the wine-dark sea beneath; the sound of the bees in the cistuses, the basking lizards, and above all, the flocks of leaping goats springing from rock to rock. He imagined the thin fluting pipe of the goatherd that at any moment might change to the pipes of Pan; he smelt the smell of the pines in the rare dry air; he felt the sun warm upon his skin; he heard the surf of the loud-sounding sea on the rocks far beneath. He heard the crying of gulls. Were there gulls in the isles of Greece? He did not know, he only knew he heard them; they had come of their own accord.
But the act of attention and question had broken the magic, he was back in bed again, with Greece far away, as if seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass. All the same he had seen enough to satisfy him. Those gulls had been extraordinarily real, and he hadn’t phantasied them as he had the goats, he had actually heard them.
He turned over and lay passively waiting for sleep, his mind drifting idly over what he had just experienced; over his talks with old Jelkes in the dusty brown bookshop; he remembered a particular race he had run in at school, when he had been in particularly good condition; the sun had been warm on his back through the thin running singlet as he had crouched waiting for the start, just like the sun in ancient Greece. His wife’s face came to him, as she sat before her mirror, making-up; her frock off, her backless scanties revealing the satiny skin with its softly-moulded muscles, so different to a mans.’ She turned her head to speak to him, and he suddenly realized with a start that it was not his wife, but a stranger. But in that brief glimpse he could discern no more than a flash of eyes, nose and mouth. He could not identify the face, save that it was not his wife’s.
Then he found himself out on the hillside among the thin woods of oak and fir, and ahead of him moved through the light shadow the satiny back. He followed it, springing after it; it kept ahead. He quickened his pace; he was sure that when it came out into the sunshine, as come it must in those sparse woods, he would see the face; but it did not come, and he lost sight of it, and found himself in deeper woods, a dense growth, dark with laurels. And through that darkness there came a curious cold exhilarating fear, a touch of panic.
He found himself sitting up in bed, tense and startled. Something must have wakened him suddenly. What was it? He listened, eyes staring into the darkness. His ears took in nothing, but his nose did. There was a distinct smell of burning.
He leapt out of bed, flung open his door, went out on to the landing and shouted for Jelkes. The old house would burn like tinder if it once got a start. A bump upstairs told him that the old man had roused, and the light of a candle over the banisters immediately followed.
‘Jelkes?’ he called out. ‘I woke up smelling smoke. I think we’d better have a look round.’
Jelkes joined him, and
they stood on the stairs sniffing, trying to see whether the smoke came up from below. But it didn’t. They went into Paston’s room, and there they met it, faint blue wreaths of it, and a very distinct smell. The old man stood still and stared at those blue wreaths revealed by the candlelight, making no attempt to do anything about it. Hugh was round the room like a questing hound; head under the bed, head in the fireplace, flinging up the window to see whether the smoke had come in from outside. But he found nothing. Still old Jelkes did not move.
‘There’s smoke all right,’ said Hugh, shutting the window. ‘But I can’t trace where it’s coming from.’
‘No,’ said Jelkes, ‘and you won’t either, because it isn’t here.’
‘Where is it then? In the next house?’
The old man shook his head. ‘No, it isn’t on this plane at all. Do you notice that it is the smell of smouldering cedar-wood?’
He suddenly found himself seized by the shoulders and swung around his dusty landing in a wild dance. ‘T.J.,’ he cried. ‘Do you realize we’ve made a start? We’ve really made a start!’
‘Damn!’ said T. Jelkes, as the candle fell over and spilled hot wax on his thumb.
CHAPTER THREE
Upon the two men in the old bookshop the cold light of morning had its usual sobering effect. Hugh Paston wondered how much of last night’s experience was pure imagination, and T. Jelkes wondered how in the world he was going to steer between the Scylla and Charybdis that confronted him. Every dictum of common sense told him to leave well alone; he would embroil himself in a pretty kettle of fish if he went any further. Occultism was all right between the covers of books, especially novels; but in real life it would probably prove to be pretty explosive. He himself was by nature the dreamer, the contemplative; the mystical philosophy appealed to him for the understanding it gave, and as a way of escape from the limitations of life as it is lived on a meagre income. But Hugh Paston was no mystic; whatever he learnt he would immediately put into practice. Old Jelkes saw himself being dragged in out of his depth when the duckling he had hatched took to the water.
He looked at his vis-à-vis across the breakfast table, and saw that he was staring glumly into the fire. Hugh sighed and said: ‘I shall have to tackle my mother today. Can’t leave things hanging about any longer.’
Jelkes nodded. ‘Back to lunch?’ he inquired.
‘No, back to supper — if I may.’
Having seen his guest safely off the premises, Jelkes discarded his dressing-gown for an ancient Inverness cape and sallied forth. He had not far to go. A couple of turns, and he was at his destination. He pressed one of a number of bells at the side of a shabby door under a pretentious portico. A visiting-card stuck up beside it with a drawing-pin announced that Miss Mona Wilton, Designer and Craft-worker, was the owner of the bell. He heard a step on the bare tiles of the hall, the door opened, and a girl in a faded blue linen smock presented herself.
He looked at her sharply, almost suspiciously, and saw what he expected to see — a pinched look about the nostrils, a hollowness about the eyes; early in the day as it was, the girl looked fine-drawn and exhausted, and there was about her a curious air of apprehension. Jelkes blamed himself bitterly that he had not been round before to see what was happening.
At the sight of the old bookseller the girl’s eyes filled with tears and she was unable to speak.
‘Why didn’t you come round and see me?’ demanded Jelkes, glaring at her.
‘I’m all right,’ the girl answered, ushering him into the dusty, empty hall, whose only furniture was a smelly pram.
He followed her up the wide, uncarpeted stone staircase. Up and up they went; and presently the bare stone gave place to echoing wood and the stairs grew steeper. Each landing was decorated with milk bottles, full and empty; also ash-cans — full.
Finally they came to the narrow winding stairs that led to the attics. At the top was a flimsy, glass-panelled partition. They passed through it, and the girl closed the door behind them.
‘Heavens, what a climb!’ said the panting bookseller. ‘No wonder you keep your figure, my dear.’
‘It’s worth it,’ said the girl. ‘You see, I can shut my door behind me and have privacy up here, and no one else in the house can. Besides, there’s the view and the sunsets.’
Jelkes thought to himself that the sunsets must be poor consolation for grilling under the tiles during a London summer.
The girl led him into a little sitting-room lit by small dormer windows in the sloping walls, and placed him in the one arm-chair as the guest of honour. There was no fire in the grate, but an eiderdown that had slipped to the floor behind the chair showed how she had been keeping herself warm.
Miss Wilton sat down on a small pouf, folded her arms round her knees — to keep herself from shivering, he suspected, and smiled up at him with a gallant attempt at cheerfulness.
‘What brings you here at this time of the morning?’ she inquired.
‘A job of work,’ said Jelkes.
Her face brightened eagerly. ‘For me?’
‘Yes, if you’ll take it on. It’s a very odd job, but I think there’s money in it.’
‘It will have to be very odd indeed if I don’t take it on. My last paper has let me down.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Oh, well, one can’t tell that sort of thing, can one? You haven’t got much more than I have, you know.’
‘I’ve got enough to give you a meal,’ said Jelkes savagely.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I did look round last night, but you had got someone with you, so I did not come in.’
Jelkes snorted, and rose to his feet resolutely.
‘You are coming round with me now to have a meal,’ he said, ‘and you’ll get no information till you do.’
‘Well, Uncle Jelkes, I won’t say no. I’ve done about as much slimming as I care for.’
She hung the smock up on a peg behind the door, appearing in a shabby brown jumper and skirt that emphasized the sallowness of her skin and the dullness of her dark hair; put a little knitted cap on her head; pulled on a brown tweed coat with a worn coney collar, and slipped her latch-key into her pocket.
Jelkes, looking at her, felt relieved. It was improbable that Paston would get into mischief in that quarter.
They went round to the bookshop, and Jelkes warmed her by his fire, and filled her with sausages and tea, till the fine-drawn look gradually faded from her face and she settled down in the corner of the sofa that Hugh Paston had made his own, and helped herself to one of his cigarettes.
‘Well now, what about this job?’
‘Yes, what about it?’ said Jelkes, scratching what was left of his hair. ‘I hardly know where to begin. It’s a fellow that wants a house furnishing.’
‘You mean he wants me to design the decorations, and choose the furniture, and generally see the job through?’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said the bookseller hesitatingly.
‘And the rest?’ said Miss Wilton. ‘You’re looking very guilty, Uncle Jelkes. Isn’t this individual respectable?’
‘Yes, yes, he’s all right. At least I hope so. I suppose you can take care of yourself as well as any other girl of your age.’
‘If I couldn’t,’ said Mona, ‘I’d have become extinct long ago. I’ll keep my end up with this individual as long as he’s solvent. But I don’t want to let any firms in for bad debts, because that will queer my pitch for next time.’
‘He’s solvent right enough. He’s the grandson of the man that founded Paston’s, the big tea merchants. I suppose it practically belongs to him, and a lot more beside.’
‘Is he anything to do with that man whose wife was killed in a motor smash just recently when she was eloping?’
‘Yes, it’s the same man. But she wasn’t eloping. No such luck. She was keeping two homes going.’
‘I call that a dirty trick.’
‘An uncommonly dirty trick. And it’s made a
nasty mess of the man. I’m exceedingly sorry for him. He has now put his house and furniture in the auctioneer’s hands, lock, stock, and barrel.’
‘And he wants me to fit him up with a new one? That ought to be interesting.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Jelkes drily. ‘I only hope it won’t be too interesting by the time you’re through with it.’
‘What is all the mystery? Do come to the point, Uncle.’
‘Well now, I’ll tell you, Mona. He’s been dipping into Huysmans’ books, A Rebours and Là-Bas, and he wants to amuse himself by going and doing likewise.’
‘Does he want to work the Black Mass? How entertaining!’
‘Now, Mona, I won’t have you talking like that, even in fun. He certainly isn’t going to work the Black Mass or I wouldn’t have put you on to him. What he wants to do is to furnish a house on — er — esoteric lines.’
‘What exactly does he understand by that?’
‘Hanged if I know. And I don’t believe he does, either.’
‘Is he handsome?’
‘No. Plain as a pikestaff.’
‘Are you nervous for my morals, Uncle Jelkes?’
‘No more than usual, my dear. But you know what these society men are.’
‘Oh, well, I’ll soon disillusion him. By the way, where is his house?’
‘He hasn’t decided yet. I believe you will be wanted to help with the house-hunting.’
‘Uncle, this is going to he fun. I’ve never had a chance to choose the house before. I’ve always had to make the best of what someone else has chosen.’
‘It will be more than fun, Mona. It will be a really useful piece of work if you handle him the right way. The fellow wants taking out of himself or I really think he will go on the rocks.’
‘When am I to meet the poor young man? I take it he’s young, or you wouldn’t be so apprehensive about my morals.’
‘You come round this evening about seven and have a spot of supper with us. And put on that green frock of yours.’
