The Great God Pan
A >>
Arthur Machen >> The Great God Pan
This book prepared by:
Brandi Weed
brandi@primenet.com
THE GREAT GOD PAN
by
ARTHUR MACHEN
I
THE EXPERIMENT
"I am glad you came, Clarke; very glad indeed. I was
not sure you could spare the time."
"I was able to make arrangements for a few days; things
are not very lively just now. But have you no misgivings,
Raymond? Is it absolutely safe?"
The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of
Dr. Raymond's house. The sun still hung above the western
mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no
shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the
great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the
soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long
lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely
hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a
faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr.
Raymond turned sharply to his friend.
"Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a
perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it."
"And there is no danger at any other stage?"
"None; absolutely no physical danger whatsoever, I give
you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know
my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine
for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and
charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the
right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then
every day has been a preparation for what we shall do tonight."
"I should like to believe it is all true." Clarke knit
his brows, and looked doubtfully at Dr. Raymond. "Are you
perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is not a
phantasmagoria--a splendid vision, certainly, but a mere
vision after all?"
Dr. Raymond stopped in his walk and turned sharply.
He was a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow
complexion, but as he answered Clarke and faced him, there was a
flush on his cheek.
"Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and
hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods
and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching
to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside
you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things--
yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the
solid ground beneath our feet--I say that all these are but
dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from
our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour
and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a
career,' beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether
any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know,
Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from
before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense;
it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what
lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan."
Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the
river was chilly.
"It is wonderful indeed," he said. "We are standing on
the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say
is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?"
"Yes; a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all;
a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical
alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain
specialists out of a hundred. I don't want to bother you with
'shop,' Clarke; I might give you a mass of technical detail which
would sound very imposing, and would leave you as enlightened as
you are now. But I suppose you have read, casually, in
out-of-the-way corners of your paper, that immense strides have
been made recently in the physiology of the brain. I saw a
paragraph the other day about Digby's theory, and Browne Faber's
discoveries. Theories and discoveries! Where they are standing
now, I stood fifteen years ago, and I need not tell you that I
have not been standing still for the last fifteen years. It
will be enough if I say that five years ago I made the discovery
that I alluded to when I said that ten years ago I reached the
goal. After years of labour, after years of toiling and groping
in the dark, after days and nights of disappointments and
sometimes of despair, in which I used now and then to tremble
and grow cold with the thought that perhaps there were others
seeking for what I sought, at last, after so long, a pang of
sudden joy thrilled my soul, and I knew the long journey was at
an end. By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the
suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar
lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the
great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of
sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands,
and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief)
since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the
stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think
this all high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be
literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at
cannot be set forth in plain and lonely terms. For instance,
this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph
wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed
of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south,
across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an
electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his
friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them
for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw
uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men
flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems
beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the
waste void that bounds our thought. As analogies go, that is a
pretty good analogy of what I have done; you can understand now
a little of what I felt as I stood here one evening; it was a
summer evening, and the valley looked much as it does now; I
stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable
gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter
and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim
before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the
earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned. You may
look in Browne Faber's book, if you like, and you will find
that to the present day men of science are unable to account for
the presence, or to specify the functions of a certain group of
nerve-cells in the brain. That group is, as it were, land to
let, a mere waste place for fanciful theories. I am not in the
position of Browne Faber and the specialists, I am perfectly
instructed as to the possible functions of those nerve-centers
in the scheme of things. With a touch I can bring them into
play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current, with a
touch I can complete the communication between this world of
sense and--we shall be able to finish the sentence later on.
Yes, the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will
effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and
probably, for the first time since man was made, a spirit will
gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!"
"But you remember what you wrote to me? I thought it
would be requisite that she--"
He whispered the rest into the doctor's ear.
"Not at all, not at all. That is nonsense. I assure
you. Indeed, it is better as it is; I am quite certain of
that."
"Consider the matter well, Raymond. It's a great
responsibility. Something might go wrong; you would be a
miserable man for the rest of your days."
"No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you
know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain
starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to
use as I see fit. Come, it's getting late; we had better go
in."
Dr. Raymond led the way into the house, through the
hall, and down a long dark passage. He took a key from his
pocket and opened a heavy door, and motioned Clarke into his
laboratory. It had once been a billiard-room, and was lighted
by a glass dome in the centre of the ceiling, whence there still
shone a sad grey light on the figure of the doctor as he lit a
lamp with a heavy shade and placed it on a table in the middle
of the room.
Clarke looked about him. Scarcely a foot of wall
remained bare; there were shelves all around laden with bottles
and phials of all shapes and colours, and at one end stood a
little Chippendale book-case. Raymond pointed to this.
"You see that parchment Oswald Crollius? He was one of
the first to show me the way, though I don't think he ever found
it himself. That is a strange saying of his: 'In every grain of
wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.'"
There was not much furniture in the laboratory. The
table in the centre, a stone slab with a drain in one corner,
the two armchairs on which Raymond and Clarke were sitting; that
was all, except an odd-looking chair at the furthest end of the
room. Clarke looked at it, and raised his eyebrows.
"Yes, that is the chair," said Raymond. "We may as
well place it in position." He got up and wheeled the chair to
the light, and began raising and lowering it, letting down the
seat, setting the back at various angles, and adjusting the
foot-rest. It looked comfortable enough, and Clarke passed his
hand over the soft green velvet, as the doctor manipulated the
levers.
"Now, Clarke, make yourself quite comfortable. I have
a couple hours' work before me; I was obliged to leave certain
matters to the last."
Raymond went to the stone slab, and Clarke watched him
drearily as he bent over a row of phials and lit the flame under
the crucible. The doctor had a small hand-lamp, shaded as the
larger one, on a ledge above his apparatus, and Clarke, who sat
in the shadows, looked down at the great shadowy room, wondering
at the bizarre effects of brilliant light and undefined darkness
contrasting with one another. Soon he became conscious of an
odd odour, at first the merest suggestion of odour, in the room,
and as it grew more decided he felt surprised that he was not
reminded of the chemist's shop or the surgery. Clarke found
himself idly endeavouring to analyse the sensation, and half
conscious, he began to think of a day, fifteen years ago, that
he had spent roaming through the woods and meadows near his own
home. It was a burning day at the beginning of August, the heat
had dimmed the outlines of all things and all distances with a
faint mist, and people who observed the thermometer spoke of an
abnormal register, of a temperature that was almost tropical.
Strangely that wonderful hot day of the fifties rose up again in
Clarke's imagination; the sense of dazzling all-pervading
sunlight seemed to blot out the shadows and the lights of the
laboratory, and he felt again the heated air beating in gusts
about his face, saw the shimmer rising from the turf, and heard
the myriad murmur of the summer.
"I hope the smell doesn't annoy you, Clarke; there's
nothing unwholesome about it. It may make you a bit sleepy,
that's all."
Clarke heard the words quite distinctly, and knew that
Raymond was speaking to him, but for the life of him he could
not rouse himself from his lethargy. He could only think of the
lonely walk he had taken fifteen years ago; it was his last look
at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child, and
now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before
him. Above all there came to his nostrils the scent of summer,
the smell of flowers mingled, and the odour of the woods, of
cool shaded places, deep in the green depths, drawn forth by the
sun's heat; and the scent of the good earth, lying as it were
with arms stretched forth, and smiling lips, overpowered all.
His fancies made him wander, as he had wandered long ago, from
the fields into the wood, tracking a little path between the
shining undergrowth of beech-trees; and the trickle of water
dropping from the limestone rock sounded as a clear melody in
the dream. Thoughts began to go astray and to mingle with other
thoughts; the beech alley was transformed to a path between
ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bough to
bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple
grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree
stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the
deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his
father's house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he
was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in
place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an infinite silence
seemed to fall on all things, and the wood was hushed, and for a
moment in time he stood face to face there with a presence, that
was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but
all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all
form. And in that moment, the sacrament of body and soul was
dissolved, and a voice seemed to cry "Let us go hence," and
then the darkness of darkness beyond the stars, the darkness of
everlasting.
When Clarke woke up with a start he saw Raymond pouring
a few drops of some oily fluid into a green phial, which he
stoppered tightly.
"You have been dozing," he said; "the journey must have
tired you out. It is done now. I am going to fetch Mary; I
shall be back in ten minutes."
Clarke lay back in his chair and wondered. It seemed
as if he had but passed from one dream into another. He half
expected to see the walls of the laboratory melt and disappear,
and to awake in London, shuddering at his own sleeping fancies.
But at last the door opened, and the doctor returned, and behind
him came a girl of about seventeen, dressed all in white. She
was so beautiful that Clarke did not wonder at what the doctor
had written to him. She was blushing now over face and neck and
arms, but Raymond seemed unmoved.
"Mary," he said, "the time has come. You are quite
free. Are you willing to trust yourself to me entirely?"
"Yes, dear."
"Do you hear that, Clarke? You are my witness. Here
is the chair, Mary. It is quite easy. Just sit in it and lean
back. Are you ready?"
"Yes, dear, quite ready. Give me a kiss before you
begin."
The doctor stooped and kissed her mouth, kindly enough.
"Now shut your eyes," he said. The girl closed her eyelids, as
if she were tired, and longed for sleep, and Raymond placed the
green phial to her nostrils. Her face grew white, whiter than
her dress; she struggled faintly, and then with the feeling of
submission strong within her, crossed her arms upon her breast
as a little child about to say her prayers. The bright light
of the lamp fell full upon her, and Clarke watched changes
fleeting over her face as the changes of the hills when the
summer clouds float across the sun. And then she lay all white
and still, and the doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was
quite unconscious. Raymond pressed hard on one of the levers
and the chair instantly sank back. Clarke saw him cutting away
a circle, like a tonsure, from her hair, and the lamp was moved
nearer. Raymond took a small glittering instrument from a
little case, and Clarke turned away shudderingly. When he
looked again the doctor was binding up the wound he had made.
"She will awake in five minutes." Raymond was still
perfectly cool. "There is nothing more to be done; we can only
wait."
The minutes passed slowly; they could hear a slow,
heavy, ticking. There was an old clock in the passage. Clarke
felt sick and faint; his knees shook beneath him, he could
hardly stand.
Suddenly, as they watched, they heard a long-drawn
sigh, and suddenly did the colour that had vanished return to
the girl's cheeks, and suddenly her eyes opened. Clarke quailed
before them. They shone with an awful light, looking far away,
and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched
out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the
wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The
muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from
head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within
the house of flesh. It was a horrible sight, and Clarke rushed
forward, as she fell shrieking to the floor.
Three days later Raymond took Clarke to Mary's bedside.
She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side,
and grinning vacantly.
"Yes," said the doctor, still quite cool, "it is a
great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be
helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan."
II
MR. CLARKE'S MEMOIRS
Mr. Clarke, the gentleman chosen by Dr. Raymond to
witness the strange experiment of the god Pan, was a person in
whose character caution and curiosity were oddly mingled; in his
sober moments he thought of the unusual and eccentric with
undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his heart, there was a
wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the more recondite
and esoteric elements in the nature of men. The latter tendency had
prevailed when he accepted Raymond's invitation, for though his
considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor's theories
as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged a belief in
fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed.
The horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a
certain extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in
an affair not altogether reputable, and for many years
afterwards he clung bravely to the commonplace, and rejected all
occasions of occult investigation. Indeed, on some homeopathic
principle, he for some time attended the seances of
distinguished mediums, hoping that the clumsy tricks of these
gentlemen would make him altogether disgusted with mysticism of
every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not efficacious.
Clarke knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by
little, the old passion began to reassert itself, as the face of
Mary, shuddering and convulsed with an unknown terror, faded
slowly from his memory. Occupied all day in pursuits both
serious and lucrative, the temptation to relax in the evening
was too great, especially in the winter months, when the fire
cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor apartment, and a bottle
of some choice claret stood ready by his elbow. His dinner
digested, he would make a brief pretence of reading the evening
paper, but the mere catalogue of news soon palled upon him, and
Clarke would find himself casting glances of warm desire in the
direction of an old Japanese bureau, which stood at a pleasant
distance from the hearth. Like a boy before a jam-closet, for
a few minutes he would hover indecisive, but lust always
prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up his chair, lighting a
candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its pigeon-holes
and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid subjects,
and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which he
had painfully entered he gems of his collection. Clarke had a
fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story
ceased to interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole
pleasure was in the reading, compiling, and rearranging what he
called his "Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil," and
engaged in this pursuit the evening seemed to fly and the night
appeared too short.
On one particular evening, an ugly December night,
black with fog, and raw with frost, Clarke hurried over his
dinner, and scarcely deigned to observe his customary ritual of
taking up the paper and laying it down again. He paced two or
three times up and down the room, and opened the bureau, stood
still a moment, and sat down. He leant back, absorbed in one
of those dreams to which he was subject, and at length drew out
his book, and opened it at the last entry. There were three or
four pages densely covered with Clarke's round, set penmanship,
and at the beginning he had written in a somewhat larger hand:
Singular Narrative told me by my Friend, Dr. Phillips.
He assures me that all the facts related
therein are strictly and wholly True, but
refuses to give either the Surnames of the
Persons Concerned, or the Place where these
Extraordinary Events occurred.
Mr. Clarke began to read over the account for the
tenth time, glancing now and then at the pencil notes he had
made when it was told him by his friend. It was one of his
humours to pride himself on a certain literary ability; he
thought well of his style, and took pains in arranging the
circumstances in dramatic order. He read the following story:--
The persons concerned in this statement are Helen V.,
who, if she is still alive, must now be a woman of
twenty-three, Rachel M., since deceased, who was a year younger
than the above, and Trevor W., an imbecile, aged eighteen.
These persons were at the period of the story inhabitants of a
village on the borders of Wales, a place of some importance in
the time of the Roman occupation, but now a scattered hamlet,
of not more than five hundred souls. It is situated on rising
ground, about six miles from the sea, and is sheltered by a
large and picturesque forest.
Some eleven years ago, Helen V. came to the village under
rather peculiar circumstances. It is understood that she, being
an orphan, was adopted in her infancy by a distant relative, who
brought her up in his own house until she was twelve years old.
Thinking, however, that it would be better for the child to have
playmates of her own age, he advertised in several local papers
for a good home in a comfortable farmhouse for a girl of twelve,
and this advertisement was answered by Mr. R., a well-to-do
farmer in the above-mentioned village. His references proving
satisfactory, the gentleman sent his adopted daughter to Mr.
R., with a letter, in which he stipulated that the girl should
have a room to herself, and stated that her guardians need be
at no trouble in the matter of education, as she was already
sufficiently educated for the position in life which she would
occupy. In fact, Mr. R. was given to understand that the girl
be allowed to find her own occupations and to spend her time
almost as she liked. Mr. R. duly met her at the nearest
station, a town seven miles away from his house, and seems to
have remarked nothing extraordinary about the child except that
she was reticent as to her former life and her adopted father.
She was, however, of a very different type from the inhabitants
of the village; her skin was a pale, clear olive, and her
features were strongly marked, and of a somewhat foreign
character. She appears to have settled down easily enough into
farmhouse life, and became a favourite with the children, who
sometimes went with her on her rambles in the forest, for this
was her amusement. Mr. R. states that he has known her to go
out by herself directly after their early breakfast, and not
return till after dusk, and that, feeling uneasy at a young
girl being out alone for so many hours, he communicated with
her adopted father, who replied in a brief note that Helen must
do as she chose. In the winter, when the forest paths are
impassable, she spent most of her time in her bedroom, where
she slept alone, according to the instructions of her relative.
It was on one of these expeditions to the forest that the first
of the singular incidents with which this girl is connected
occurred, the date being about a year after her arrival at the
village. The preceding winter had been remarkably severe, the
snow drifting to a great depth, and the frost continuing for an
unexampled period, and the summer following was as noteworthy
for its extreme heat. On one of the very hottest days in this
summer, Helen V. left the farmhouse for one of her long rambles
in the forest, taking with her, as usual, some bread and meat
for lunch. She was seen by some men in the fields making for
the old Roman Road, a green causeway which traverses the
highest part of the wood, and they were astonished to observe
that the girl had taken off her hat, though the heat of the sun
was already tropical. As it happened, a labourer, Joseph W. by
name, was working in the forest near the Roman Road, and at
twelve o'clock his little son, Trevor, brought the man his
dinner of bread and cheese. After the meal, the boy, who was
about seven years old at the time, left his father at work,
and, as he said, went to look for flowers in the wood, and the
man, who could hear him shouting with delight at his
discoveries, felt no uneasiness. Suddenly, however, he was
horrified at hearing the most dreadful screams, evidently the
result of great terror, proceeding from the direction in which
his son had gone, and he hastily threw down his tools and ran
to see what had happened. Tracing his path by the sound, he
met the little boy, who was running headlong, and was evidently
terribly frightened, and on questioning him the man elicited
that after picking a posy of flowers he felt tired, and lay
down on the grass and fell asleep. He was suddenly awakened,
as he stated, by a peculiar noise, a sort of singing he called
it, and on peeping through the branches he saw Helen V. playing
on the grass with a "strange naked man," who he seemed unable
to describe more fully. He said he felt dreadfully frightened
and ran away crying for his father. Joseph W. proceeded in the
direction indicated by his son, and found Helen V. sitting on
the grass in the middle of a glade or open space left by
charcoal burners. He angrily charged her with frightening his
little boy, but she entirely denied the accusation and laughed
at the child's story of a "strange man," to which he himself
did not attach much credence. Joseph W. came to the
conclusion that the boy had woke up with a sudden fright, as
children sometimes do, but Trevor persisted in his story, and
continued in such evident distress that at last his father took
him home, hoping that his mother would be able to soothe him.
For many weeks, however, the boy gave his parents much anxiety;
he became nervous and strange in his manner, refusing to leave
the cottage by himself, and constantly alarming the household
by waking in the night with cries of "The man in the wood!
father! father!"