CHAPTER VI
THE RITE IN THE GARDEN
WE talked no more of the Mysteries, but of literature, the arts and public affairs till past midnight.
When Marks bade me good night I said: "Please don't tell Woodfell that I'm interested in his niece. She has a very poor time of it, and I'm trying to brighten it. He does not know."
"I shall say nothing to him about you," said Marks.
I had learned from him that night, but I had learned nothing reassuring, nothing to lessen my uneasiness about Pamela. My suspicion that Woodfell practiced strange arts was become a certainty, and my anxiety was deepened by what Marks had let slip about the danger of his letting loose these powers of the dark ness with which he trafficked, and then finding himself grown too feeble to control them. I could not but think that the sudden appearance of the beast in the garden of No. 19 was a sign of such a loosened control. My fears for her kept Pamela more in my mind than ever—if that were possible.
On another night she and I wandered again through Richmond Park; and I found that my sense of the mystery of woods had deepened. But I was no longer, as on the first evening with her in the park, fearful in its thickets; I felt an odd expectation, now and again, of some thing wonderful about to happen. Often in a wood I feel it still. But Pamela had lost none of her fearfulness; in the dusk of the trees she kept very close to me; and when presently I slipped her arm into mine she held it tight. But in spite of her fearfulness, they drew her into them with a fascination; she must go into them.
Once she said: "It must be the summer that makes them like this."
On another night I took her to the Hungarian Exhibition at Earl's Court. She enjoyed the water-chute with a whole-hearted delight; and we went down it seven times. But when we had done with it, and were wandering on through the crowd, she asked me to take her away.
"It's very silly of me," she said. "But it makes me very uncomfortable to be among all these people."
"It's not at all silly," I said. "It's how a hamadryad should feel. Come along."
When we came out of the gates of the Exhibition, I heard her breathe a little sigh of relief; then she said, "Why shouldn't we walk home—by some quiet way?"
I do not know the Kensingtons well; but I made in the direction of Hertford Park, keep ing along quiet streets and through quiet squares. It was a long and devious walk, but we were hardly aware of its length.
The weather was fine again; and my tennis and my talks with Pamela in the garden prevented me from keeping my watch in my study, so that I saw little of Woodfell's visitors. Once I saw the noxious rich man come to No. 19; and on another evening there came a shambling, red-haired man, with lack-lustre eyes of a pale green. No women came—at least I saw none.
The night of the new moon passed without event; and I had watched its waxing with a growing expectation. On the evening of the full moon I was expectant indeed. At nine o'clock I was in my garden talking to Pamela over the hedge to the accompaniment of her sewing-machine.
Of a sudden she said, "Hush! There's uncle!"
I was silent, and heard him open the door of his dining-room.
"It's time you were in bed, Pamela. I'm expecting some people, and I want you out of the way," he said in his hoarse voice.
I waited till she had gone into the house and the door was shut; then I went quietly to my study. I did not switch on the electric light; I sat down before the open window, back in the shadow, where no one in the road could see me, and began my watch.
I waited patiently for nearly two hours; then at a few minutes past eleven came the rich man, and the door of No. 19 opened at once to his knock. Marks came next. Then came the two dilettanti, not together; first came the man with the pointed beard and mincing gait, then the battered Apollo. They came some two minutes after one another; they might very well have come by the same train and separated at Hertford Park station. This secrecy of movement disquieted me.
For perhaps a quarter of an hour the brooding hush which lay on Walden road was unbroken. Then came the shambling, red-headed man, and two minutes later a thick-set man with a white beard, wearing spectacles and a black soft hat. He was panting and brought home to me the fact that every one of them, even the shambling, red-headed man, had come walking quickly as if eager to reach the meeting-place.
I waited another twenty minutes, but no more came. It was full time that I looked to the back of the house. I went quickly up to the top room at the back and, keeping in the shadow, looked down on the garden of No. 19. The moonlight fell brightly on the white cupola but the sycamores and the tall shrubs kept the garden dark. I could hear no sound of voice or movement in it. Woodfell and his friends had not yet come into it. I feared that they might not come at all, and I should learn nothing.
I went down to my bedroom and brought up a chair; then I sat waiting patiently, in a silence only broken by the steady, monotonous snore of Mrs. Ringrose in her bedroom on the other side of the landing, till the moon was nearly at the top of the sky, and the little square of turf in the middle of the garden was clear in its light.
Then the door into the garden opened, and there was a mutter of voices. A man came out; and the fluttering roar of the hull-roarer broke on the air. It startled and even daunted me a little; it indeed sounded a warning to pryers into the Mysteries to begone. Six figures followed the whirler of the bull-roarer down the garden path to the lawn in the middle, two of them swinging censers of incense; and when they came into the moonlight, I saw that they were wearing robes and curious caps, or rather curious head-dresses, for they were larger than caps. It seemed to me that they were fitted with horns.
They halted at the end of the lawn before the cupola, and ranged themselves in a half-circle facing it, with their backs to me. For a while the bull-roarer roared on; then it ceased suddenly, and I heard the crackling of sticks. They had kindled a fire; and its smoke rose straight in the still air, before the cupola.
Then Woodfell's voice rose in a hoarse chanting, uttering an invocation or a prayer in a strange tongue. It was a while before I discovered that it was a barbarous Latin jargon. I caught Latin words and uncouth words I did not know mingled with them. I caught no whole sentence only a word now and again. Twice I caught the word Abyssi; and it seemed to me likely that he was making his prayer to the powers of the Abyss. Now and again the voices of the others rose as a chorus.
It was a long ritual and I could not follow it. Woodfell was not the chief celebrant of the rite all the while. The others seemed to take his place in turn. Sometimes the celebrant was out of my sight close to the cupola; and the smoke from the fire would thicken and another smell would mingle with the fragrance of the incense. But it was not till a smell of burnt toast reached my nostrils that I understood that they were making burnt offerings; meal had been thrown on the fire. Several times the flame of the fire shot up high and clear as if oil had been poured on it. All of them except Marks had bad voices and I caught but a few words of their prayers; when his deep, sonorous tones rose to me, I thought that now I should hear clearly; but he was using a tongue quite strange to me. All I understood of his prayers was the name Adon, uttered many times.
All through the rites one or other of the celebrants would quit the group, come to the left-hand corner of the lawn, and presently go back again. For a long while I could not see what they did there. Then, with the moving moon, the shadow of a Wellingtonia moved along the lawn, and I saw that there was a great bowl in that corner; and they came to it and dipped a shining cup in it and drank. The bowl looked to me as big as a bushel measure; but in that still air the smoke of the incense and the fire gathered and hung about the lawn till they were all in a magnifying mist and sometimes as big as giants.
For a long while the ritual was formal and mechanical; and I watched it, as you might watch a curious and rather pointless mummery, with an attention that sometimes flagged, for the prayers and the responses were expressionless. But after a long while, when the shadows thrown by the declining moon were falling across half the lawn, I became aware of a sudden that a new note had crept into their voices, a note of eagerness and expectancy. The prayers grew quicker, and louder, and more insistent; the responses were deeper. When one of the celebrants came to the bowl, he made haste to drink and get back to his place. My eyes grew more intent on them; and I found myself quivering once or twice, as if their eagerness was infecting me.
Woodfell was again the chief celebrant, and his muttering had risen to a hoarse chanting. It sounded like a series of adjurations. It was then I caught the names. Adon I caught, and Pan, and Moloch, and Mithras; and there was a name Nodens. I was sure it was a name, though I did not know it. They came again and again louder and louder. A fierceness, a savagery had come into their tones; and it affected me oddly. I was quivering and tingling in an intense expectancy.
Of a sudden the fluttering roar of the bull-roarer broke on the air. It struck on my ear as a warning and a threat; and on the impulse of some other, under-self, I found myself on my feet in act to fly. I gripped the back of the chair and stood swaying, dazed.
There fell a sudden dead silence; and it was broken by the sharp bleat of a lamb. On the instant Babel broke loose. All the celebrants were shouting together, each of them was shouting a different name, and adjuring the bearer of the name in a different tongue, and leaping and waving his arms, as he shouted. A thick cloud of smoke rolled over the lawn, as if handfuls of incense had been thrown on the fire, veiling them from my eyes. Then came a triumphant outcry and a victorious shouting and then the patter of dancing feet.
And as they cried out as they danced I could have sworn that their voices were changed. Or did other voices rise up to me from the veiled lawn? A puff of wind set the incense veil stirring for a moment; and my strained eyes seemed to see the lawn full of figures dancing, many more than seven. Once above the confused outcries, a woman's laugh came clearly, joyous and wanton: I could swear it. Yet it was not quite a woman's laugh, a human woman's laugh.
Suddenly, as I listened and stared down with straining eyes, there smote on my nostrils, stronger than the strong fragrance of the incense, the acrid odor of the goat.
On the instant, inexplicably, I filled with a panic terror. This trivial thing seemed to let loose that under-self which I had held down so long, and deliver me to it helpless. I dashed out of the room, rushed stumbling, staggering, striking against the banisters and the walls, down the stairs, out of the house, and up the Walden Road.