The Blessing of Pan Read online

  She looked up at him coming in so late.

  “They have all gone over the hill with Tommy Duffin,” he said.

  “Have they?” she said quickly.

  “Yes. It is very foolish of them,” he said.

  But she did not answer at once. “Yes. Yes, of course,” she said then, looking straight in front of her.

  And he knew it was no use saying to her things that he did not feel.

  She too must have heard that music, but she did not speak of it.

  Then he broke the silence by asking about their maid. “Is Marion here?” he said.

  “No,” she replied.

  And he knew that Marion had gone away after the others.

  Whether or not Mrs. Tweedy were gone he did not ask. They had cold supper in any case, so she might be still in the kitchen.

  And the meal passed almost in silence. Augusta could not make light of it all now, as he had so much hoped she would; for he felt the need of being woken out of a dream that was too dark and much too long. But she could not do that after what she had heard; for the music had beaten across the valley, each note with a terrible clearness, and as full of a meaning, almost, as there is in words.

  So Anwrel went to his study and lit his pipe, and sat there smoking late, and thought far back into time till he came to the slopes of Arcadia, and tried to link old fables up with the things that were all about him, and saw thousands of pictures made by meditation amongst the smoke of his pipe, and yet saw no way out.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE TOMB OF ST. ETHELBRUDA

  A PATCH of moonlight shining bright on the wall awoke the vicar from dreams that were troubled by the sound of the pipes of reed. He listened then but heard no more of that music, and could not be sure if it came from the pipes or dreams. After that he slept no more, and soon dawn came. He dressed quietly then and stole away from the house, as though he fled from the thoughts that were troubling him; and climbed the hill and went through the still wood, and came out to the clear quiet light of the early morning. And certainly there far up on the airy hill, in that light and that freshness, thoughts that had loomed so large in the little room seemed smaller and weaker. And soon he was striding away with no moody step, over dewy grass and more cobwebs than one could credit, if one did not know the dawn. No reasoned plan directed his walk: first of all he felt he must leave a sleepless bed and walk in the still morning to think clearly, then the mood that brought him there directed his steps, and so he was going to the worn white stones said to be marble, that tradition named the tomb of St. Ethelbruda. Shaped like the sarcophagus of some crusader it stood right out in a field, with nothing to protect it from cattle but a few briars; and, as all Wolding believed, it cured warts.

  When the vicar arrived at the worn white stones he stood a long while there. And soon he found he could reflect more calmly for being further from Wolding, for having come as it were from the enemy’s lines to a friendly influence that was as a fortress against paganism. At any rate the sight of St. Ethelbruda’s traditional resting place cheered him, and he at once thought more hopefully. First then he must have a long talk with Mrs. Tichener; he had been too downcast for that when he met her coming from Drover’s: he must talk with her quietly about this thing that had come from the past; and when he had got to the bottom of that they would be able to find a remedy: with her help he could do wonders. And with the brightening of his mood the very morning brightened; which is not to be wondered at as the sun was climbing all the time; but Ethelbruda got some credit for it that we need not grudge to her.

  Amongst seedlings of birches on slopes too steep to plough four different kinds of orchid were blooming where the vicar walked homeward through the splendid morning. When he returned his wife was down and breakfast was ready, which seemed very natural to him; but it was far too early for breakfast. Augusta seeing him gone had guessed a lonely walk, and certainly a hungry appetite; so everything was ready nearly an hour before its usual time. Hungry though he was he hurried, and soon he was off to the village to find Mrs. Tichener. He found her at breakfast.

  “Mrs. Tichener,” he said as he came in, “I want to have a long talk with you about Tommy Duffin and all this trouble he’s making.”

  The cheerfulness died out of the end of his sentence as he saw the old woman’s expression. For a sly look came over the face of Mrs. Tichener.

  “Don’t know very much about him, I’m afraid, sir,” she said. —

  “No. But you had a theory about him,” he said.

  “Had I sir?” she replied.

  “About it all coming out of the past you know.”

  “Ah, but I know so little about the past,” she said.

  “It’s not knowledge, exactly, that I want,” he said. “It’s more...”

  But she interrupted him. “Won’t you take a chair, sir?” she asked.

  “Thank you. Another time. I must be going now,” he said. “We’ll have a talk some other day.”

  For he saw now it was hopeless. And he saw too that the music that had entered his dreams had been real music, though he always marvelled how a melody so fantastic could have any place in reality; for Mrs. Tichener had changed overnight, and must have followed the pipes to the old grey stones; and he was alone now in the village, the only enemy of that victorious music.

  He walked home mournfully, thinking of his loneliness. Tomorrow would be Sunday; and he must prepare some sort of sermon with his distracted thoughts. He came back to the vicarage with no trace of the brightness he had got from the hills in the morning.

  “Mrs. Tichener, too,” was all he said to his wife. And she merely nodded with a little sigh. One has not need of many words in times of great disasters. He brooded some, while in silence; then raised his head as a brooding broke into words: “If only we weren’t alone against it,” he said.

  “But you are not alone,” she said.

  “There’s no one knows of it but us, that has not gone over to it,” he answered.

  “There’s the man that took the service for you,” she said, “when we were at Brighton.”

  He almost gasped; so greatly loom little things when they bear on a big trouble. He had forgotten him. He had forgotten all about him. The man had stayed three days at the vicarage and must have heard the music.

  “Why, of course!” he exclaimed.

  “His name was Hetley,” she said.

  “What? The Hetley?” asked Anwrel.

  “I don’t know anything else about him,” she said, “but I know he was called Hetley.”

  “Did he come from near Snichester?” he asked.

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “But it’s certainly the Hetley,” he said. “Why. Fancy the Bishop sending him. It was really very good of him. The Bishop is going to help us after all!”

  “Do you think so?” she said.

  “Yes,” said the vicar, “if he sends us a man like Hetley.”

  “What does he do?” she asked.

  “Do,” he replied. “Why, Hetley was one of the finest scholars at Gabriel’s. A Greek scholar, you know. A first-rate man. It was extremely kind of the Bishop.”

  “Do you know him?” she asked.

  “Know him,” he said. “No. I’ve seen him. I used to see him at Cambridge. But of course I don’t know him.”

  It was unlike her to ask such a question: she should have understood that one didn’t know men like Hetley. But she was urging her husband to go and see him. And when she suggested it, he said, “Why, yes, I must.”

  They knew where he lived, at Rolton; so near to Snichester that the cathedral bells could be heard all over his parish.

  And so they decided that he should go on Monday to meet this new ally. And the hope that he got from this sufficiently raised his spirits to face the weary task of preparing a sermon from which his thoughts were far distant. But as he sat in his study with his red ink and his black ink, and his sheet of foolscap before him, the old blue palæolith that used to be but
an ornament, seemed almost to leer at him with its wrinkles and hollows, as though the primitive were coming nearer and this old stone claimed some sort of equality with him now, to which it had never dared to presume before.

  CHAPTER XX

  WHAT HETLEY HEARD

  IT was a bright Sunday morning, and the Anwrels went down to the church for the morning service. To the few that they met on the way Anwrel said nothing. He saw a few entering the church, and one of the fears that had troubled him flew away. When the vicar came out of the vestry he saw that the church was nearly as full as ever; and at that his hope increased, for he felt, whatever might come of it, that while the habit of coming to church was not overthrown his parish was invaded but not yet conquered. This feeling strengthened the high hopes he had from the conference he was to have with Hetley on Monday.

  He preached to them much as he had ever preached, only without those little rises above his own level, that came every now and then, and that always surprised himself whenever they came. He made ample notes but did not write out his sermon, so that at any moment, he never knew when, there might come that ring in his voice, and some finer thought soaring up, above the rest of his theme. But none of these brief exaltations came today, for they come of an inner energy, and that had been all expended on thought and anxiety. He did not preach on the thing against which his heart and mind were struggling: he had thought of it overnight; and had got as far as looking up a text from where the children of Israel had worshipped the golden calf, and, neater still, where all but three bowed down at the sound of the sackbut, psaltery and all manner of instruments. But in the end, still tired by the shock and anxiety, he did not feel he had strength enough to make this open attack on that goat-shaped enemy that was becoming more real to him than the personal Satan to the Salvation Army. So he preached a sermon good and useful enough for any little parish, but drably contrasted with the strange event that had been stirring Wolding. And as he preached he noticed for the first time, although too slight to be sure about, a certain untidiness in his congregation.

  When the service was over the vicar met his wife, as he always did, outside the vestry door; and, as always happened, he just fell in with the tail of his departing parishioners. This time it was Mr and Mrs. Duffin. The vicar avoided their eyes and the Duffins avoided his, so that it might have seemed easy for them to go their separate ways. But the vicar felt that this avoidance was wrong, a sin of omission in a vicar, and called up a remark for Duffin, and a remark that, of all the remarks one might make, would be nearest to Duffin’s heart.

  “When are you going to cut your hay?” he said.

  But Duffin brought back his thoughts as though from a distance.

  “Oh, one of these days, sir,” he said.

  And it should have been the next day, for the hay was all ready to cut.

  “I am sure it will all come right,” he said to Augusta on the way home, fortified by the fair attendance that there had been.

  “Yes,” she said. Yet something in her voice as she said the single syllable, or something in her eyes, seemed aware of a danger too great to be safely turned away from his thoughts for the sake of his peace of mind, as with a word or so she had often turned many anxieties.

  “I will have a long talk about it with Mr. Hetley,” he said. And he spoke as though talking to Hetley, let alone being answered by him, would solve great difficulties.

  She was as anxious that he should see Hetley as combatant nations, in battle for their existence, are anxious for a new ally. Yet even there she could not or would not comfort him in such a way as to minimise the danger against which he was striving.

  Somehow he knew that she felt more deeply than he; and, in spite of his more accurate information and greater knowledge, he continually looked to her opinion, as though any change in the situation would always be found there. And often during that day he asked her leading questions, all framed in the hope that her answer would brush the danger aside, so that his tired nerves could rest. And all the day, though she said little, it seemed as if, had she spoken, she would have uttered an icier fear of the end of it all, than he whose anxieties were so outspoken.

  So that day passed with its shadows of dark forebodings; and Monday came that was to bring Anwrel a new ally, equipped with information from his actual visit to Wolding, and able to deal, if reputation goes for anything, with any human problem. Things all looked brighter that morning; and one small shadow was drifting from Anwrel’s spirit, the shade of a trouble too little to bring a gloom, yet certainly casting a shadow, the refusal of help by the Bishop. That was what it had seemed to him, and thus it had been felt by his spirit, breeding an inner melancholy more deeply seated than will. And all the while the Bishop had sent Hetley, the ripest scholar of his year. He felt more grateful to the Bishop now than he would have if he had never suspected him of deserting him in his need. In the bright June morning, with an inner feeling that was brightening once again, he drove with Spelkins once more to Seldham station and took the train to Snichester.

  There he arrived, and knowing the direction in which Rolton lay, walked straight over the fields to it.

  Very soon he saw the trees rising over the hedges, both of which encircled the rectory and church of Rolton. Great fields lay round it, stretching far away, and the trees seemed guarding that part of the parish from the level waste of the eternal fields. A few farmhouses straggled away behind.

  He passed through the rampart of trees by a wicket-gate in a hedge, and walked up a path to the rectory; and here he was calling on Hetley at the wrong time, and at the wrong door, for he had come to the door leading out to the lawns and the garden, and he could not find a bell. Hetley, however, who was writing downstairs in a room looking over the lawn, saw him at once and ran round to open the door.

  Flustered apologies came from Anwrel first, at which Hetley smiled in a most friendly way, but said nothing. When they had come in and turned at once to their right they were in the room in which Hetley had been writing. The very appearance of Hetley encouraged him, scholarly but alert, a little grey; and a fine face still, if slightly weakened by time. Whatever was heard by this man would be somehow the more earthly for that; and Anwrel felt that his fears were to be called back at last from the infinite vast of phantasy to the surer ground of the scholarly. What then had Hetley heard in his few days at Wolding? What had he made of it? These thoughts flashed past in a moment.

  “My name is Anwrel,” he said.

  “Annel?” said Hetley.

  “No, Anwrel.”

  “Oh, yes. I took the service for you at Wolding.”

  “It was most kind of you.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I said it was most kind of you.”

  “Oh, don’t mention it.”

  “I wanted to ask you,” said Anwrel, “about what you heard when you were there. It’s almost every evening. It’s faint of course, yet every note of it marvellously clear. A music clear but not loud. You must have heard it.”

  “No,” said the Rector. “I heard nothing.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE WISDOM OF HETLEY

  THE quiet remark that closed my last chapter brought an episode to an end like a cataclysm. We live more in hope than we think. And Anwrel had built so much on his hope of help from the Rector of Rolton that when that hope came to an end it was to him as tragic a loss as those greater mishaps that claim the attention of history.

  And there was the Rector smiling at him across his table, near which Anwrel was seated in an armchair. He could not go immediately; and then came the thought to him that all was not yet lost, and that, though Hetley had no information with which to guide him, some help might be had from his learning. So he rallied all the forces of his mind, to save something from the forlorn situation, and speaking a little louder than he had spoken hitherto, began to question the Rector.

  “I can remember you at Cambridge,” he said.

  “I remember seeing you at Gabriel
’s; though of course you wouldn’t remember me.”

  “Yes, I think I do, I think I do,” said Hetley. “You’ve changed a bit of course, but I think I remember your face. You were at...”

  “At All Angels,” said Anwrel.

  “Yes, of course,” said Hetley. “Yes, I remember you now. A long time ago. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Anwrel, “yes. I remember, of course we all remember, what a great Greek scholar you were.”

  “Oh, I was interested in it you know,” said Hetley, “that was all.”

  “Ah,” said Anwrel, “I have been interested, but without your knowledge that doesn’t go for much. I have been particularly interested in one thing. You might perhaps care to tell me a little about it, only that it would be so unwarrantably taking up your time.”

  “Not in the very least,” replied Hetley.

  “I’m afraid I disturbed you when I broke in,” said Anwrel with a look straight at the foolscap and ink-pot that were before Hetley.

  “Not a bit,” said Hetley, “I find relaxation as necessary for writing as ink. If you had not come in for a talk I should have gone out in another five minutes to dig up plantains. Believe me: — I prefer a talk.”

  “It’s awfully kind of you,” said Anwrel. “Well, what I was interested in was how much their belief in Pan affected the lives of the Greeks. What rites they practised. What appearance they allege of Pan amongst them. Of course we all know the time he appeared to Phidippides. But on what other occasions he came. And, and all that.”