CHAPTER XXIV
WOODFELL'S RECORD
THE next morning we were married. Marks came with us to the registrar's office, lunched with us at the Savoy, and accompanied us to the station. We reached Woodfell House at five o'clock, and entered our paradise. During the next week we lived in an intoxication, an ecstasy; we came as near supreme happiness as human beings can; and we had earned it by the tension and the terror we had endured. We were in a natural, delightful reaction from them, together, alone, and in the country.
At the end of the week we would not return to the Walden Road. A bicycle carried me to the station early enough to get to the office in good time for a day's work. Mrs. Ringrose had moved into No. 19 and was looking after Woodfell in a quite satisfactory fashion; he needed so little care. There was no change in him; it was indeed early to look for it. One afternoon I brought an alienist of the first rank to see him.
As always when I came to see him; he said at the sight of us, in the thick slurring voice, laughing the vacant laugh, "Pan is not dead."
The alienist spent nearly an hour with him, watching him, studying him, trying to get him to speak. He only said, twice, "Pan is not dead."
Then we went into the study. The alienist looked at the statue of Pan which still lay along the floor; for it would have needed four or five men to set it up; and I had been too busy to see to it. He asked if he might see its face. I uncovered it; and when he had come to the end of expressing his admiration of it, he talked to me about Woodfell. He told me that I must entertain no hope whatever of his recovery; that it was only possible that his mind would return just before he died; that it was improbable that he would live very long.
At the end he was silent for a minute or two; then he said, "It's curious that his only words are, 'Pan is not dead;' for there is a peasant in the Naples asylum who says those very words. He was brought in from the hills, where he had been wandering about for eighteen months; and the authorities have never been able to find out to what village he be longs, or what shock wrecked his mind. He's far less worn out than Mr. Woodfell and will live longer. I've seen him." He paused, thoughtful again; then he added looking at me with keen, searching eyes, "You think that the sight of the statue falling on that unfortunate girl was the shock which robbed him of his reason."
"What else should it have been?" I said. "But now I come to think of it—it never occurred to me before—I heard him, when he opened his door to let Miss Ranger in, say 'Pan is not dead,' in the same tone and with the same laugh, two hours at least before I heard the fall of the statue."
"The devil you did?" he said sharply. "It's odd—very odd. It's perfectly devilish—the face of that statue."
And when he went away, his brow was still knitted in a frowning thoughtfulness. That night I told Pamela of the alienist's judgment; and we decided to try the effect of the country on her uncle. I hired a motor car; and Hind and I brought him down to Woodfell House. We had great difficulty in inducing him to leave No. 19, and when he reached Woodfell house, he was very restless. We thought that he might presently settle down; but he did not. He remained restless; he could not sleep; he would not eat. At the end of forty-eight hours we took him back to No. 19. At once he grew peaceful; he slept at night; and his appetite returned. He seemed linked to the scene of his researches by some subtile, inexplicable bond.
At the beginning of September the rest of my holiday began; and the fancy took me to bring down with me the four volumes in which Woodfell has recorded his quest of the ultimate revelation. In the happy peace of the country our fear of the Abyss had died; and we had grown curious to read it.
We read it in the evenings, together, in a big easy chair. Pamela sat on my knee with an arm round my neck. I held the book; and she turned the pages.
The record began:—
"I left my regiment, the Xth Lancers, on June 1st, 1878."
He plainly left the army in order to devote himself to his quest; for the beginning of the first volume tells of his dealings with mediums, clairvoyants, and astrologers in the European capitals. Most of them had proved charlatans; and sooner or later he had discovered their trickery. There is a succinct entry, "Fined 40/- and costs for caning Cantor." Cantor seems to have been a Parisian medium who for a while enjoyed considerable fame in spiritist circles in London. But among many charlatans he found three or four persons of indisputable sincerity and integrity; and he left this line of research with a very strong conviction that after making all possible allowances for conscious and unconscious fraud, there was a residuum of most important truth.
Then he came to the conclusion that the truth was most likely to be found in the wilder parts of the world among men unsophisticated; with minds unspoiled by civilization, in closer touch with the very heart of Nature. Half the first volume, all the second, and half the third record his wanderings at the ends of the world, seeking the key to the mystery in the primitive rites, the primitive magics, and the primitive minds of the wild peoples.
They are fascinating, thrilling reading, full of amazing adventures, dreadful privations endured, and dreadful perils encountered. I reckon that, on different journeys, Woodfell cannot have himself killed less than thirty men. They are full too of facts to gladden the heart of the ethnologist and student of folk lore. Now and again, too, he saw wonderful, inexplicable happenings.
An accident set him on the final lines of his quest. In 1900 he was at Dresden, resting after a journey through New Borneo before setting out to search among the tribes at the sources of the Amazon. He was in correspondence with many students of the occult in different parts of Europe; and from one of them he learned that a German gentleman, excavating, at his private cost, a Roman station on his estate on the "Western bank of the Elbe, had found a MS. of the rite of Mithras. Woodfell bought the MS. much against its owner's will—it was the Latin MS. labelled No. 1 in the safe—and with the aid of one of the Professors of the Weimar university, had set about studying it. It had turned his attention to the powers of the Abyss and the ceremonial magic of the true mysteries.
Then he set about hunting for more MSS. of rites; and two inquirers into the occult set him hunting. in Thibet. In 1902, in a Thibetan monastery, he found, along with some MSS. treating of sorcery, a MS. of the rite of Adonis.
These two rites were the beginning of his ritual of the Abyss. Celebrating them, he had found the path, or at any rate he believed him self to have found the path, to a realm of wonder; and the idea had come to him that the way to attain his goal was to elaborate and as it were intensify the ritual. He set about forming other rites of other gods of the Abyss on the model of the two he had found.
He formed the opinion that it is necessary to adjure the powers of the Abyss in the very tongues in which they were adjured ages ago. At the end of the third volume he gives his reasons at length for this belief. He was not sure indeed that there was more than one god of the Abyss, known to the nations and worshiped by them under many names; but none the less he believed in the efficacy of approaching that power or powers, by the different old paths.
With his amazing pertinacity he had set about learning the very tongues, or the prob able tongues, in which they had been worshiped, using all the resources of modern scholarship to help him, and paying handsomely the great experts in these obscure tongues for their aid. It had meant years of work; but he had found himself justified of his beliefs; for with the accession of each fresh rite, he found the bars of the Abyss loosening, as the wonders, or the illusions, grew.
The fourth volume is filled with the rites, in the actual tongues used; then the words of each prayer, or adjuration, or response are written in English letters, with an English translation beneath this, to aid the celebrants to learn them. There are also records of celebrations and of the growth of Woodfell's power over the lower creatures of the Abyss. The first celebration of all the seven rites was on the night of the full moon of July, 1906. The book ends with the rite of Ashtaroth. There is no record of what happened at the celebration when the celebrants fled.
But before the rite of Ashtaroth there is a second rite of Moloch, not the rite they actually used, which is fourth in the book. In this later one human sacrifice is to be substituted for the sacrifice of the lamb. From his recorded com plaint, immediately before it, that the seven rites had only released the lower and less powerful creatures of the Abyss—he declares that this was no illusion, and that Marks alone was doubtful—and from his complaint that there were no signs that they were advancing any further, I believe that he would have celebrated this other rite of Moloch, had he not turned aside to try the effect of the introduction of the feminine element. I think that he had had in mind for some years the substitution of human sacrifice for the sacrifice of the lamb, and that he had the £10,000 and the coupon-bearing securities under his hand in case discovery should compel him to try to save himself by flight.
Pamela and I read and re-read this record, and we have discussed it many times. In the end we have made up our minds that some day I shall write out of the earlier volumes, the story of Woodfell's wanderings and discoveries—at any rate in ethnology, folk-lore, and comparative religion. But about the fourth volume we differ. We are agreed, indeed, that it would be wrong that such an admirable monument of human endeavor should be wasted; we are agreed that nothing will ever induce us to essay the forbidden things our selves; and we think it not unlikely that a band of men, working with a single-hearted purpose to learn the truth, might unbar again the gates of the Abyss without any great danger to themselves. Some of Woodfell's associates were manifestly not such men. But if we are approached by students of the occult—and we shall be, since Woodfell's work must be known to many of them—Pamela wishes to give them the ritual of the Abyss; but I think it would be better to sell it to them at a good price, to insure that it does not fall into the hands of trifling dilettanti but into the hands of serious workers, who will really take up Woodfell's work in earnest. We shall assuredly make the stipulation that we are informed of the result of their efforts. They may finally settle the question for us—a question on which we are in disagreement—whether it was not all the illusion of strained nerves, or illusion thrown upon all our minds from the powerful mind of Woodfell.
When the autumn came we returned to the Walden Road, to No. 20. Pamela urged me to give up the law and devote myself to writing so that we might live at Sarratt. But I would not; I had no desire to live on her money. We content ourselves with spending the weekends at Woodfell house. On our return to the Walden Road Pamela, who had not seen her uncle since our wedding-day, declared that he had grown very much feebler. I, seeing him as I did at least once every week, had not observed the change.
There was one thing that weighed on my mind somewhat, the statue of Pan. I had a feeling that it was a center of malefic influences. I had no doubt that it had been; and I could not rid my mind of the fancy that it was still. Sometimes its malefic face came into my dreams.
I told Pamela of this fancy; and she said, "Oh, yes. Do let's get rid of it. I always feel that it's there—close to me."
Marks also said that it would be well to be rid of it; and I lost no time inviting a well-known art-critic to see it. After he had admired it, he suggested that since the British Museum was poor, I had better offer it to the Berlin Museum. I took his advice, and sent a photograph and description of the statue to the chief curator at Berlin. Three days later he arrived at the Walden Road himself. He saw the statue, and offered me £5,000 for it. A week later I sold it to him for £6,500. During one of our discussions on the subject of the price be should pay for the statue, I showed him the MSS. in the safe. He showed himself interested in them; and a fortnight after I had dispatched the statue to Berlin came a letter offering me £3,000 for the MSS. Pamela was all for selling them; and since Woodfell had as it were drained them dry and transferred their substance to his ritual of the Abyss, we let them go—for £4,200! It is probable that the officials of the Berlin Museum ascribe my bargaining powers to greed; I ascribe them to patriotism.
Sometimes it distressed us that we could do so little for Woodfell. We could only see to it that he had all comforts and luxuries—had his mind returned, he would not have recognized No. 19—but we were doubtful that he was even alive to the difference between delicacies and the plainest fare. Now and again we tried to rekindle a spark of mind in him, but in vain. Slowly he grew frailer and frailer; and in the middle of December he could no longer rise from his bed. The doctors could do nothing.
On the first Wednesday in January his nurse told me that she did not think that he would last through the night; and when the doctor came he said that that was his opinion. I did not tell Pamela; I would not have her distressed. But when she had gone to bed, I came into No. 19, and took up my watch. The long hours of the night passed very slowly; I tried to read, but could find no book on which I could keep my mind.
It was morning when the nurse called me, and said, "There is a change—and—and some thing is happening."
Her voice was uneasy.
I went up quickly to his bedroom. As I came into it I was aware of a dimness; the flames of the big fire were dull; and the electric lights seemed to be shining through dirty globes. The shadows were coming back.
With a little shiver I turned to the bed. Woodfell lay with closed eyes; and his faint breathing hardly raised his chest.
I laid my hand on his, and stood waiting. The dimness deepened; the nurse slipped out of the room and I heard her rustling down the stairs. I could hardly see Woodfell's face. Oddly enough, I felt none of the old fear, not even when the room became one dim mass of moving, shapeless shadows.
On a sudden, out of the dimness, came Woodfell's voice—his old, hoarse, strong voice:—
"Who—what is that in the house?" he said sharply.
There was a pause; then he cried in tones in which triumph blended strangely with fear, "Pan is not dead!"
He quivered, gasped, and the room went swiftly bright. His dead face was illumined by a triumphant exaltation.
THE END