The Goat-Foot God Read online

  ‘A beast of a night,’ he said, dropping the curtain back into place and returning to the fire.

  Hugh Paston roused himself wearily. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Getting on for late. Have you far to go?’

  Hugh named a hotel he knew.

  ‘Good Lord, what are you doing there?’

  ‘God only knows. I couldn’t stand the house so I cleared out.’ It never occurred to him that he had told the bookseller neither his name nor history, yet he took it for granted that the old man knew all about him, as in fact he did.

  The bookseller looked at him thoughtfully.

  ‘You can’t go back there. Look here, can I offer you a bed for the night? You’re very welcome.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. Yes, I’d be glad to accept.’

  The old man took the lamp in his hand and led the way into the shop. In one corner was a narrow wooden stair. They mounted two dusty flights of rickety stairs and his host opened a door next to the bath-room. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘No bugs. I guarantee that. That’s all I can guarantee, though.’

  Left alone, Hugh Paston took stock of his quarters. The bed was not exactly a four-poster, but had two high poles behind, from which a canopy stuck out. Curtains of faded red damask hung from it after the unhygienic fashion of an earlier age. Hugh got out of his clothes and slid into the bed, which consisted of a huge, fat old feather mattress, half a dozen washed-out blankets, and a faded patchwork quilt.

  When he awoke it was broad daylight, and his host, still in the same old dressing-gown, but with pyjamas under it, stood looking down at him with an immense mug in his hand.

  ‘Here’s some tea for you. Get up when you feel like it. There’s no hurry.’ He waved his hand and departed.

  Breakfast was one of the most agreeable meals, thought Hugh, that he had ever eaten. The tea-pot stood on the hob and kept really hot, and they made toast on their forks in front of the glowing coals. It only needed a dressing-gown like the old bookseller’s, and a pair of carpet-slippers, to be perfection.

  ‘Why are you doing all this for me?’

  The old man wagged his tufted brows at him. ‘God only knows!’ he said.

  Paston laughed. ‘You’ve heard my story, I take it?’

  ‘I know what’s in the papers, and guess the rest.’

  ‘There’s no rest. The papers got the lot.’

  The old man did not answer.

  ‘Well, I’m damned grateful to you, anyway. God knows what I’d have done to myself if I’d had to spend the night alone in that hotel.’

  The bookseller rose. ‘I’ve got work to do,’ he said. ‘Make yourself at home. There’s plenty to read. Don’t let the fire out.’ He disappeared through the curtain into the shop.

  Left to his own devices, Hugh Paston put his feet up on the sofa and settled down to his cigarette. Among the grubby cushions lay the book that he had bought the previous evening. He fished it out and commenced to flick over its pages.

  Presently the old bookseller finished his chores and returned to the room behind the shop. Once the mail orders had been dealt with, there was apparently nothing to do for the rest of the day but sit around and wait for casual customers to drop in, and as the weather was worse than bad, it was improbable that they would.

  At about lunchtime there came a great pounding at the door.

  ‘That’s Mrs Hull,’ said the bookseller, and went to admit the char, who came barging in like a ship in full sail, hung about with purchases, mostly wrapped in newspaper. The old bookseller gave her some loose silver from his trouser pocket, without troubling to count it, and she barged out again.

  He flung the now bulging black oilcloth bag on the table, where it disgorged everything imaginable.

  ‘Absolutely trustworthy,’ he said, ‘and a great comfort to me. That’s the right sort of woman to have about the place. Gets on with her job and clears off when finished.’

  The bookseller began to get on with the preparations for a meal. There was a pound of pale pink pork sausages, showing through their damp bit of greaseproof paper, and a large dollop of mashed potatoes in a basin, evidently fetched from the neighbouring eating-house and only needing warming. Hugh Paston leant against the jamb of the door leading to the kitchenette and watched the old boy at his cooking. The frying-pan presented quite an attractive sight as the pale pink sausages gradually browned.

  The old bookseller turned them out of the frying-pan, and picking up the white china basin containing the mashed potato, held it out at arm’s length and smacked its bottom, dodging skilfully back as the hot fat splashed out of the pan as the potatoes sploshed into it. Hugh Paston, cigarette between his teeth, was shaken with internal mirth. He thought of his butler. He thought of his chef. He thought of the head-waiters of fashionable restaurants. He wondered what his friends would make of him.

  He suddenly realized that he was more intimate with the old bookseller than he had ever been with anybody in his life. He had a feeling that the light-blue eyes under their thatch of whiskers saw far more deeply into his soul than he was capable of doing himself.

  His meditations were interrupted by having the large black tin tea-tray thrust into his hands. The old man loaded the dinner on to it, and Hugh Paston lugged the heavy load into the living-room. Without waiting to be told, he filled up the big black kettle and set it on the hob, ready for the everlasting tea. He reckoned that the old bookseller, with his tea-pot and his frying-pan, his broken-springed sofa and his cock-eyed feather-bed, had saved his mental balance and seen him safely through his time of crisis. How it had been done he had no means of knowing.

  The old bookseller ate fast and the meal concluded with a slab of moist sultana cake and tea. Paston was hoping to get down to a good chin-wag, when the old bookseller suddenly put two grubby books into his hands and said:

  ‘Amuse yourself with these. I always have a snooze now,’ and suiting the action to the words, he settled himself back in his chair, opened his mouth, and went to sleep forthwith.

  Hugh Paston, who could not drop off to sleep like that, settled down to look at the books that had been given him.

  They were the ones that the bookseller had previously recommended: The Devil’s Mistress, by Brodie Innes, who was a ‘writer to the Signet’, whatever that might be, and The Corn King and the Spring Queen, by Naomi Mitchison, a tale of ancient Sparta.

  He dipped into her first, and read the opening chapter upon the magic of the Scythian witch. He had learnt something of native magic during his safari expeditions, and knew the tremendous power of auto-suggestion upon the primitive mind. It was odd, very odd, to find the same kind of witchcraft in modern Africa and ancient Scythia. He settled down to read steadily the account of the rites of the spring ploughing. The dingy, cosy room disappeared from before his eyes as he saw in his imagination the woman lying nude in the centre of the great field, gazing up at the little white clouds of spring in the sky above her, and feeling the cold wind and the spring sun on her bare skin while the slow-moving, snow-white oxen dragged the primitive plough nearer and nearer as they circled the field.

  He read on; but the fate of the royal house of Sparta interested him less, and he put the book down and took up the other.

  Here was a tale of an entirely different calibre, based on the account of the witch-burnings in the state papers of Scotland. The old spell: ‘Horse, hattock, to horse and away!’ delighted him. It had the authentic ring. He chuckled at the picture of the handsome, vigorous Isabel Goudie putting the broomstick to bed with her stupid and boring husband and slipping off to the witch-coven in the old churchyard to enjoy herself with the Devil. He wondered what it was that made decent, sober Scottish matrons and maids kick up their heels and get their legs over the traces like this. He could understand their resorting to the rural Scottish equivalent of a night on the tiles, but why this adoration of the Devil? Why the religious element in it all?

  He chuckled to himself at the idea of some respectable burg
her playing the part of the Devil, complete with cow’s horns, two on his head and one in his hand. He chuckled so loudly that he woke the old bookseller. ‘Humph,,’ said Jelkes, ‘You stick to sausages.’

  But while nominally snoozing, the old man had been doing a lot of thinking. He had brought Hugh Paston to shore in the thick of the storm, it was not in him to stand idly by and watch him slip back into deep water again. Yet what could he do with the fellow? To invite him to prolong his visit, would, he felt, be an error of tactics. Paston belonged to a different world. He might be well enough content to picnic for a night or two on an old feather-bed but he would not care to keep it up for long. No, Hugh Paston must be returned whence he came on Monday.

  But what would happen to him then? There was something fundamentally wrong with the fellow. It was much more, and it dated back far earlier, than the wife’s defection. He wondered what inner emotional history lay behind Hugh Paston. There were powerful undercurrents that were making the surface so choppy, and their owner was the last man to know what they were.

  They made tea. Hugh Paston tried to count up the number of cups they had already drunk between them that day, but failed hopelessly. The storm had returned and was sheeting down the window, which was tight shut against it; and his cigarettes and Jelkes’ pipe and the blazing fire all united to produce a most comfortable frowst in which the soul was set free to range the heights of fancy while the body sprawled, too enervated for movement.

  ‘Well?’ said the old bookseller. ‘So you’ve read the books, have you? And what do you make of them?’

  ‘Don’t tell me that they worked the Black Mass in Calvinistic Scotland. They wouldn’t know how.’

  ‘No, precisely. Huysmans brings that out clearly. You have to have a pucka priest for the job.’

  ‘But you can get the book of the words anywhere. It’s all in the prayer-book.’

  ‘There’s a lot more in. it than the words. Do you know that it takes a priest a year after he’s ordained to learn to say Mass? I know what I’m talking about. I nearly became a priest after being educated by the Jesuits.’

  ‘What did you boggle at? Couldn’t you manage the faith?’

  ‘I could manage the faith all right. What I couldn’t manage was the humility.’

  Paston looked at the craggy old vulture, and believed him. ‘Could you work the Black Mass if you wanted to?’

  ‘If I wanted to, yes, I know enough for that. But I don’t want to.’

  ‘Then you have been actually ordained?’

  ‘No, I never got as far as that. But one couldn’t be on the inside of things, as I was in the seminary, without picking up a good deal if you had your eyes open. I saw a lot then which I learned to understand later.’

  ‘What do you think of the Jesuits, if it isn’t a tactless question?’

  ‘I think they are the most marvellously trained body of men in the world — and the most dangerous if you get on the wrong side of them. I think they make certain fundamental mistakes, but I admire them. They taught me a lot about the power of the trained mind.’

  ‘Is that what makes the difference when a priest says Mass?’

  ‘Yes, that, and the tremendous momentum of the Church itself backing him up. That is why the Roman Catholic Mass has a kick in it that the Anglo-Catholic hasn’t. The C. of E. doesn’t know how to train her men.’

  ‘Then it isn’t just a matter of theology?’

  ‘No, it’s a matter of psychology — in my opinion, at any rate, though that’s rank heresy, according to all the authorities.’

  ‘Look here, Jelkes, will you work the Black Mass for me, for a lark?’

  ‘No, you bloody fool, I won’t, it’s much too dangerous.’

  ‘But you’ve just said it’s only psychology.’

  ‘Maybe, but have you thought what you’d stir up in yourself?’

  ‘There’s nothing I know of that I hold sacred. Huysmans’ kind of Black Mass wouldn’t have any kick in it for me. But look here, Jelkes, you come clean. You keep on dangling the carrot in front of the donkey’s nose, and I keep on heehawing at it, but as fast as I try to close with it, you move it away.’

  ‘Well, what is it you want?’

  ‘Oh, damn it all, I don’t know! But I want something, that’s quite certain.’

  ‘Do you “yearn beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down”?’

  ‘No,’ said Paston, suddenly thoughtful, ‘and that’s my trouble, I believe. There aren’t any roads in my life, not even strange ones. It would be better for me to have devil-worship than nothing.

  Jelkes grinned his camel-grin. ‘We maybe able to manage something a bit better for you than devil-worship,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s we?’ asked Paston quickly.

  The bookseller brushed him aside with a wave of his hand. ‘You still haven’t told me what it is about these books that attracts you.’

  ‘The smell of sulphur, I think, if you want the sober truth.’

  ‘Well, there are times when civilized men — and women too, for that matter, need sulphur, just the same as horses need salt. It is that need that sent the Bacchantes out to dance with Dionysus on the mountains and tear fawns to bits.’

  ‘Ever read The Bacchae, T.J.?’

  ‘Yes. Euripides knew that man cannot live by bread alone. He wants a pinch of sulphur occasionally.’

  ‘It might have been all right for the Greeks, but if I go up to happy Hampstead, and take off my togs and tear a leg of mutton to bits, there’ll be trouble with the police.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the old bookseller sadly, staring thoughtfully into the fire, ‘I’m afraid there will. The Black Mass is a sort of break-away from convention. It is a reaction, my son, a reaction to an overdose of the true Mass.’

  ‘Can one have an overdose of that?’

  ‘One can have an overdose of anything that is strong enough to be medicinal. You take too much health salts and see how you feel.’

  ‘T. J., you’re an awful old pagan.’

  ‘I’m a comfortable old pagan, my lad, and I thank God for it.’

  ‘Well, I’m a pagan, T. J., but I’m not comfortable.’

  ‘When were you happy last, Hugh?’

  ‘It’s odd you should ask me that question, because it’s one I’ve been asking myself. Do you know, I can hardly remember. I’ve had precious little happiness in my life, and yet I suppose I’ve had everything a fellow could want. I’ve always seemed to be sort of making the best of things and enduring them as philosophically as I could.’

  ‘Was your marriage happy till it cracked up?’

  ‘Yes, it was. Frida was the perfect wife. I had no fault to find with her until the inquest.’

  ‘And yet you don’t impress me as having been particularly fond of her.’

  ‘Well, I was and I wasn’t. I was loyal to her, and we got on all right. We never had a wrong word. She’d always seemed perfectly contented. And yet the marriage could not have satisfied her or she wouldn’t have stepped outside, would she?’

  ‘Was she forced into the marriage against her inclinations, or did you get her on the rebound from someone else?’

  Hugh Paston sat staring into the fire, his cigarette extinct between his lips. At last he removed it and said: ‘Do you know who it was introduced me to Frida, and practically made the marriage — it was her cousin Trevor Wilmott, the fellow she subsequently carried on with.’

  Jelkes raised his massive eyebrows.

  ‘Was it now? So that was the game!’

  ‘I don’t know. It never struck me there was a game. Trevor was my great pal at college, and when we came down, we were both rather at a loose end; he couldn’t get a job, and I had nothing to do but chew a silver spoon.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘You think I was married for my money, then.’

  ‘Looks like it to me.’

  Silence fell in the dingy room, darkening to twilight. The fire was low, but the old bookseller did not sti
r to put coal on.

  Finally Paston broke the silence. ‘But why did Trevor go out of his way to make that marriage?’

  ‘Did you ever read a book by Henry James called The Wings of a Dove?’

  ‘No, what’s it about?’

  ‘A man and a woman love each other, but they can’t afford to marry. They arrange between them that the man shall marry a rich woman who’s dying of consumption.’

  Hugh Paston sat silent for a while. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it,’ he said at length. ‘I suppose I was the milch-cow that financed the liaison. God, what a world! I think I’ll go out for a walk.’

  ‘It’s raining cats and dogs.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I want some air.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  At first Hugh Paston walked aimlessly about the dark streets, thankful for the cool, damp, rain-washed air after the stuffy heat of the room behind the shop. The revelation to which the old bookseller had led him had certainly been a tremendous shock. He knew that the old man had effectually lanced the abscess on his soul and it now ought to have a chance to heal. All the same, he harboured no delusion that he was out of the wood. He did not like the feel of himself. He still felt unnatural. He wondered whether the old bookseller had come on the scene too late to give him any real help. If he had known it, the old man whom he had left in the stuffy room behind the shop was wondering exactly the same thing, and was more than a little worried at the result of his playing with souls. It is one thing to have grasped the theory of psychoanalysis, but quite another to apply it in practice.

  In a little while Hugh Paston ceased his aimless wandering and set out resolutely towards his house. It was no great distance, and his long legs carried him over the ground rapidly in the empty streets.