Saturday 8 March 2014

The Great God Pan (Part 1) by Arthur Machen

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 comers 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 comer, 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."  


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