The Goat-Foot God

by Dion Fortune

  Miss Wilton had hardly got out of the door when in came Hugh Paston.

  ‘Well, T.J.,’ he said, ‘I’ve done my duty by my family. I’ve lunched with my mother. Poor old mater. She’s terribly fed up about this business. She can’t exactly blame me, and yet she’s furious with me. She said I ought to have looked after Frida better.’

  The old bookseller grunted his disapproval. ‘I’ve seen that artist I told you of.’ He handed Hugh Mona’s professional card.

  ‘Oh, a woman?’ said Paston.

  ‘Yes. Plain, Thirtyish. Competent. You’ll find her all right. She knows her job. She’s coming in this evening to supper.’

  Jelkes was busy dishing up the ready-made beefsteak pudding, which was half in and half out of its basin when there came a sound of knocking on the half-glass door of the shop.

  ‘Go to the door, will you, Hugh?’ he called from the kitchen. He heard footsteps crossing the oilcloth floor of the shop, the clang of the bell as the door opened, and voices — the man’s pleasantly cordial, the woman’s impersonal and business-like.

  Mona Wilton, coming in hatless through the door of the shop, was surprised to find herself confronted by a stranger. She saw before her a loosely-built man whose well-cut suit did what it could towards disguising his stooping shoulders. His sharp-featured face looked haggard, and his black tie reminded her why. Except for his good clothes he was a nondescript individual, she thought, lacking personality. She was not surprised that this man’s wife had been unfaithful to him. What was there in him to hold a woman faithful?

  He, on his side, saw a youngish woman, tired-looking, with a sallow complexion and rather unkempt dark hair. She had a square face, with a strong jaw and wide mouth, innocent of lipstick. The only thing that struck him about her was the strong, muscular neck, the muscles showing moulded like a man’s under the olive skin. She had hazel eyes, set wide apart under heavy black brows that almost met over the bridge of the short, straight nose. Her brows were much blacker than her hair, which was a rusty brown, like the coat of an ill-kept cat. She wore it coupé en page, with a straight-cut fringe in front, and a straight-cut bob behind.

  She went through into the room behind the shop, and as he lingered behind to secure the door, he heard her being grunted at by the bookseller. He was not particularly struck with Jelkes’s choice. In fact, to be candid, he was disappointed. He had hoped for something much more exotic than this. She looked competent, however; and there would obviously be no nonsense about her.

  He joined the party in the room behind the shop. Jelkes wasted no time in introductions. He took it for granted they had become acquainted. They drew their chairs up to the table, and he ceremoniously laid before them an old willowpattern dish, burnt almost black in the oven, instead of serving the food out of the usual frying-pan.

  Conversation was stilted. Old Jelkes did not bother with it, but shovelled down his food in silence, as was his usual custom. Hugh Paston tried to get the girl to talk about her work, and this she did impersonally and without enthusiasm, telling him what her qualifications were, and what experience she had had. He saw that she was not prepared to make friends, but was keeping him on a purely business footing.

  The meal was dispatched expeditiously under such circumstances. Jelkes moved them over to the fire to drink their tea, and with an airy wave of his hand, said: ‘Now, you two, get on with your business while I clear away,’ and disappeared into the kitchen and left them to it.

  Hugh, taking his cue from the girl’s attitude, came straight to business. ‘Has Jelkes told you anything about what I want doing?’ he inquired.

  ‘A little,’ said the girl. And then suddenly the wide colourless lips broadened into a smile, ‘I heard you have been reading A Rebours.’

  The sudden humanizing of the girl startled Hugh Paston, she changed so completely. But before he had time to respond, her face settled back again into its impassivity.

  ‘I suppose Jelkes had told you I’m half mad?’ he said.

  The smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. ‘No, he didn’t exactly say that,’ she said.

  ‘Well, take it from me, I am. At any rate, I’m very eccentric.’

  The smile hovered again for a moment, and then suddenly the whole face changed and softened and became almost beautiful, and Hugh Paston knew that the story of his tragedy had been told to this woman. A wave of uncontrollable emotion surged up in him; his mouth quivered and his eyes stared into space, seeing his mutilated dead. It was a moment or two before he could recover control, but when he did, and met the woman’s eyes again, he knew that the barriers were down between them.

  He moved uneasily in his seat, seeking desperately for some remark that would serve to break the silence and bring the atmosphere back to normal.

  It was the woman, however, who picked the situation out of the fire. ‘I gather that the first thing to do is to set to work and find a house?’ she said. ‘What sort of a house do you want, and where?’

  ‘Do you know, I haven’t the remotest idea,’ said Hugh, and the girl burst out laughing. The intolerable tension was relieved, and Hugh leant back in his corner of the sofa and laughed too.

  Mona Wilton leant forward, resting her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand, and considered him.

  ‘It is to be a mixture of Là-Bas and A Rebours, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly it,’ replied Hugh eagerly.

  ‘Does access to town, or anything like that matter?’

  ‘Not in the slightest.’

  ‘Very well, then, the best thing we can do is to get out a map and pick a district that will give the right conditions. Uncle Jelkes!’ she called, and the old bookseller popped his head out of the kitchen. ‘Have you got a big atlas? One that has a geological map in it?’ Jelkes ambled over to the far corner of the room, pushed some books aside with his foot, and extracted an enormous and very dilapidated tome. ‘And I want a pencil and ruler, please,’

  ‘Huh,’ said the bookseller. ‘So you’re at that game, are you?’

  ‘Now look,’ said Mona, opening the atlas at the map of England. ‘There are certain places that are more suitable than others for what you want to do, just as there are some places where you can grow rhododendrons, and some where you can grow roses. Now look at this map. You see Avebury?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was the centre of the old sun-worship. Now draw a line from Avebury to any other place where there are the remains of ancient worship, and anywhere along that line will be good for what you want. If you want to wake the Old Gods, then you have to go where the Old Gods are accustomed to be worshipped.’

  ‘But then surely one would go to Avebury itself or Stonehenge?’

  ‘Too much of a tourist show. You would get no seclusion. No, the lines of force between the power centres are much better for your purpose.’

  ‘Okay. I’ve got my finger on Avebury, what next?’

  ‘Bring the ruler on to Tintagel. That’s the western power-centre. Now draw a line right across the map to Avebury and project your line to St Albans. Is that straight?’

  ‘Dead straight. It’s one line.’

  ‘St Albans is the eastern power-centre Now take St Albans Head in Dorset, and lay your ruler from there to Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast. Does that pass through Avebury?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lindisfarne is the northern power-centre. So you see, if you take a line through Avebury from either Lindisfarne or Tintagel, you end up with a St Albans. Odd isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s odd. But I don’t quite see why it’s odd.’

  ‘St Alban was the first British saint.’

  ‘Look here, we don’t want any saints in this business.’

  ‘Don’t you realize that these prehistoric saints are really the Old Gods with a coat of whitewash? Do you know that somewhere in the neighbourhood — sometimes actually in the crypts of the oldest cathedrals — the ones with some Saxon work in them, you invaria
bly find traces of the old sun-worship. The old pagan Britons were in the habit of having fairs when they assembled at their holy centres for the big sun festivals. The fairs went on just the same, whether they were pagan or Christian, and the missionary centres grew up where the crowds came together. When the king was converted, they just changed the Sun for the Son. The common people never knew the difference. They went for the fun of the fair and took part in the ceremonies to bring good luck and make the fields fertile. How were they to know the difference between Good Friday and the spring ploughing festival? There was a human sacrifice on both occasions.’

  ‘“Plus ca change, plus c’est la mime chose”,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Precisely. You see, where people have been in the habit of reaching out towards the Unseen, they wear a kind of track, and it’s much easier to go out that way.’

  ‘Are the Old Gods synonymous with the Devil?’

  ‘Christians think they are, but I think they’re the same thing as the Freudian subconscious.’

  ‘Oh, you do, do you? Now I wonder what you mean by that?’

  ‘Shall we get on with our house-hunting? Now the best place to get the kind of experiences you want is on the chalk. If you think of it, you know, all the earliest civilization in these islands was on the chalk. Avebury’s on the chalk; and St Albans is on the chalk. Anywhere on that line, where it runs through the chalk will serve your purpose.’

  ‘That’s narrowed the field of search down very satisfactorily. Now what’s the next move?’

  ‘Get a large-scale ordnance map and look for standing-stones and hammer-pools. Standing-stones are the sighting-marks on these lines of force between the power-centres. The stones on the high places, and the hammer-pools in the bottoms. Water shows up in a valley bottom among trees, where stones wouldn’t. You sight from one to another, and get a dead straight line across country. You know the Long Man, cut out of the turf on the chalk downs? You remember he has a staff in each hand? Well, those are the pair of sighting-staffs that are used for marking out these lines. These lines criss-cross all over England just like a crystalline structure. You can work them out on any large-scale ordnance map by means of the place-names and standing-stones and earthworks.’

  ‘But look here, my idea is to do an invocation of Pan. What has all this got to do with Pan?’

  ‘Well, what is Pan? You don’t suppose he’s half a goat, any more than Jehovah is an old man with a gold crown and a long white beard, who made man out of mud, do you?’

  ‘To tell you the honest truth, I’ve never thought about it. The one’s just as much a name to me as the other. But never mind the metaphysics. Let’s get on with the house.’

  ‘But it’s applied metaphysics you’re aiming at.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that either. I’m afraid it’s beyond me. Now look here, what’s the next item on the programme? Go house-hunting along this line of villages on the chalk? Who’s going to do it?’

  ‘I will, if you wish.’

  ‘How will you manage about transport? Supposing I run you round in my car, and then we can look at them together?’

  ‘That is very kind of you.’

  The following day, at ten o’clock precisely, Mona Wilton presented herself at the second-hand bookshop, clad in her brown tweed coat with the coney collar and her little knitted cap. Outside the door stood an open two-seater. It had the minutest windscreen and no hood. Mona gazed at it apprehensively; her tweed coat was of the cheapest, with little warmth in it, and the day was bleak.

  She entered the shop and found Hugh and the old bookseller still at their breakfast. She was offered a cup of tea, and accepted it. Hugh rose from the table and girded himself into a heavy leather motoring coat and pulled a big pair of wool-lined gauntlets on to his hands. ‘Now we’re ready,’ he said. ‘I must apologize for the car. I had forgotten I’d only got this one when I offered you transport.’

  Mona remembered what had happened to the other car, and she guessed from his face that he was thinking of the same thing.

  They entered the two-seater. She had a beautiful llama-wool rug round her knees, but the cold wind cut like a knife through the upper half of her as the car whipped into the main road. To her surprise, they turned east instead of west. The car twisted through the traffic like a hound, and then came to an abrupt standstill outside the magnificent premises of a firm of motor accessory dealers. Hugh Paston got out. Mona, supposing he was going to get something for the car, stopped where she was.

  ‘Come along,’ said Hugh, opening the low door for her. She got out meekly and followed him. One does not argue with clients.

  He led the way through the region of lamps and horns and came out where rows of leather coats hung on stands.

  ‘I want a coat for this lady,’ he said to the shopwalker.

  Mona gasped. Opened her mouth to slay him. Shut it again in bewilderment and stared at him in speechless protest. He turned to her with a melancholy smile on his face.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘This means nothing to me. I’ve got a lot more than I know what to do with. You can leave the coat in the car if you don’t want to take it, but I can’t stand watching you shiver.’

  Mona could not find a word to reply. Every instinct of the independent professional woman was against accepting the gift, and yet she was profoundly touched by the way it was done. The man’s manner conveyed the impression that he had not the slightest expectation of being liked for himself; that he had not the slightest expectation of receiving any gratitude for anything he might do. Before she could find her tongue, the assistant returned.

  It was a very different matter, driving in the camel-lined leather coat to what it was driving in her thin little worn-out wrap. The car, roaring in second, whipped in and out of the traffic. Mona was interested in watching how Hugh Paston handled it. One can learn a great deal about a man by watching the way he handles a car. She saw that he knew exactly what he was about with a car, what he could do with it, and what he could ask of it.

  She realized very clearly that the man beside her was by no means in a normal state at the moment, and wondered what he might be like when he was himself. Between his sudden flare-ups of animation he was curiously negative. She got the impression that this negativeness was his habitual attitude; and yet it did not seem to her that it could be considered normal. He gave her the impression of a man who had given life up as a bad job; and yet in his position he had only to formulate a wish in order to gratify it. Now she had been on the point of giving life up as a bad job because the struggle to keep her head above water was too severe. If she had had this man’s resources, she thought, she would have lived with a most amazing fullness of life.

  With a car like Hugh Paston’s, and handled in the way he handled it, they were not long before they got clear of the London streets into an arterial road. Hugh changed into top gear, the car settled down to a steady snore, and conversation became possible.

  ‘How far out shall we run before we start house-hunting?’ said the man to his companion as the scanty weekday traffic thinned out behind them.

  ‘We must run clear of London’s aura,’ came the answer in an unexpectedly rich speaking-voice that rang above the rush of the wind and the roar of the car without effort. ‘Look, turn down one of these lanes. We’ll soon get away from it now if we leave the main road.’

  Hugh swung the car into a narrow by-lane that dipped to the valley bottom where a marshy stream ran amid osiers, crossed a hump-backed bridge, and began to climb steeply up the far flank of the valley. Presently they found themselves coming out on to a wide common. Everything was brown and sear up here, though first green had been showing in the hedges of the main road. The sparse growth of Scotch firs broke the sky-line; a scanty sprinkling of birches marked the wide expanse here and there, and the blackened stems of a burnt-out patch of gorse writhed as if in perpetual agony, the tins and bottles of many picnics revealed among them. It was not a prepossessing spot.

 
; ‘We are still too near the main-road,’ said Mona. ‘This is where London slops over on a Sunday.’

  They left the common behind them and dipped into another but shallower valley, little more than a depression between two ridges, and found themselves suddenly in rural England. The average picnicking motorist had gone no further than the first bit of open ground. Here was unspoiled country. They followed a winding lane between high hedges that opened every now and then to give a glimpse of plough-land. Then the ground rose again, and plough gave place to pasture. The gradient grew steeper, and pasture gave place to open common with a few geese walking about. A hamlet strung out along one side of the common, and they drew up opposite the inevitable tiny general store. Mona marched in, and was greeted by an elderly gentleman who ledged his corporation on the counter and his backside on the shelves that held his stock. His ruddy countenance was smoothly shaven. Chilly as the day was, he wore no coat. The sleeves of a spotless pale pink shirt were carefully folded above his elbows. A grey waistcoat encircled his enormous front, and round his middle was a white fringed towel such as grocers affect. Hen-food, veterinary medicines, hardware, haberdashery, stationery, tinned goods, braces, overalls, children’s pinafores, a large cheese in cut, a side of bacon ditto, a canary in a cage and a cat with family occupied the shop. He seemed pleased to see them, and a smile of immense geniality creased his vast pink countenance with its perfect schoolgirl complexion. ‘And what can I do for you, sir? — madam?’

  ‘There is not much you can do for us at the moment,’ said Hugh, ‘except for some milk chocolate; but we are looking for a house, and were wondering if you could put us on the track of one.’

  ‘A ‘ouse, now, a ‘ouse? Now what sort of a ‘ouse?’

  At this very reasonable question Hugh turned and looked helplessly at Mona.

  ‘An old house, roomy, that can be modernized and adapted.’

  The old man shook his head sadly. ‘We only ‘ad two big ‘ouses about ‘ere,’ he said, ‘and they’re both schools now. But I’ll tell you where you’ll find a farm that’s empty. Monks Farm. It belongs to old Miss Pumfrey. That’s ‘er ‘ouse you see through the trees. She wouldn’t do no repairs to it, and I reckon she’d be glad to sell it, sir.’