Short Story: The Moon-Slave

The Princess Viola had, even in her childhood, an inevitable submission to the dance; a rhythmical madness in her blood answered hotly to the dance music, swaying her, as the wind sways trees, to movements of perfect sympathy and grace.

For the rest, she had her beauty and her long hair, that reached to her knees, and was thought lovable; but she was never very fervent and vivid unless she was dancing; at other times there almost seemed to be a touch of lethargy upon her. Now, when she was sixteen years old, she was betrothed to the Prince Hugo. With others the betrothal was merely a question of state. With her it was merely a question of obedience to the wishes of authority; it had been arranged; ​Hugo was comme ci, comme ça—no god in her eyes; it did not matter. But with Hugo it was quite different—he loved her.

The betrothal was celebrated by a banquet, and afterwards by a dance in the great hall of the palace. From this dance the Princess soon made her escape, quite discontented, and went to the furthest part of the palace gardens, where she could no longer hear the music calling her.

'They are all right,' she said to herself as she thought of the men she had left, 'but they cannot dance. Mechanically they are all right; they have learned it and don't make childish mistakes; but they are only one-two-three machines. They haven't the inspiration of dancing. It is so different when I dance alone.'

She wandered on until she reached an old forsaken maze. It had been planned by a former king. All round it was a high crumbling wall ​with foxgloves growing on it. The maze itself had all its paths bordered with high opaque hedges; in the very centre was a circular open space with tall pine-trees growing round it. Many years ago the clue to the maze had been lost; it was but rarely now that anyone entered it. Its gravel paths were green with weeds, and in some places the hedges, spreading beyond their borders, had made the way almost impassable.

For a moment or two Viola stood peering in at the gate—a narrow gate with curiously twisted bars of wrought iron surmounted by a heraldic device. Then the whim seized her to enter the maze and try to find the space in the centre. She opened the gate and went in.

Outside everything was uncannily visible in the light of the full moon, but here in the dark shaded alleys the night was conscious of itself. She soon forgot her purpose, and wandered about quite aimlessly, ​sometimes forcing her way where the brambles had flung a laced barrier across her path, and a dragging mass of convolvulus struck wet and cool upon her cheek. As chance would have it she suddenly found herself standing under the tall pines, and looking at the open space that formed the goal of the maze. She was pleased that she had got there. Here the ground was carpeted with sand, fine and, as it seemed, beaten hard. From the summer night sky immediately above, the moonlight, unobstructed here, streamed straight down upon the scene.

Viola began to think about dancing. Over the dry, smooth sand her little satin shoes moved easily, stepping and gliding, circling and stepping, as she hummed the tune to which they moved. In the centre of the space she paused, looked at the wall of dark trees all round, at the shining stretches of silvery sand and at the moon above.

​'My beautiful, moonlit, lonely, old dancing-room, why did I never find you before?' she cried; 'but,' she added, 'you need music—there must be music here.'

In her fantastic mood she stretched her soft, clasped hands upwards towards the moon.

'Sweet moon,' she said in a kind of mock prayer, 'make your white light come down in music into my dancing-room here, and I will dance most deliciously for you to see.' She flung her head backward and let her hands fall; her eyes were half closed, and her mouth was a kissing mouth. 'Ah! sweet moon,' she whispered, 'do this for me, and I will be your slave; I will be what you will.'

Quite suddenly the air was filled with the sound of a grand invisible orchestra. Viola did not stop to wonder. To the music of a slow saraband she swayed and postured. In the music there was the regular beat of small drums and a perpetual ​drone. The air seemed to be filled with the perfume of some bitter spice. Viola could fancy almost that she saw a smouldering camp-fire and heard far off the roar of some desolate wild beast. She let her long hair fall, raising the heavy strands of it in either hand as she moved slowly to the laden music. Slowly her body swayed with drowsy grace, slowly her satin shoes slid over the silver sand.

The music ceased with a clash of cymbals. Viola rubbed her eyes. She fastened her hair up carefully again. Suddenly she looked up, almost imperiously.

'Music! more music!' she cried.

Once more the music came. This time it was a dance of caprice, pelting along over the violin-strings, leaping, laughing, wanton. Again an illusion seemed to cross her eyes. An old king was watching her, a king with the sordid history of the exhaustion of pleasure written on his flaccid face. A hook-nosed ​courtier by his side settled the ruffles at his wrists and mumbled, 'Ravissant! Quel malheur que la vieillesse!' It was a strange illusion. Faster and faster she sped to the music, stepping, spinning, pirouetting; the dance was light as thistle-down, fierce as fire, smooth as a rapid stream.

The moment that the music ceased Viola became horribly afraid. She turned and fled away from the moonlit space, through the trees, down the dark alleys of the maze, not heeding in the least which turn she took, and yet she found herself soon at the outside iron gate. From thence she ran through the palace garden, hardly ever pausing to take breath, until she reached the palace itself. In the eastern sky the first signs of dawn were showing; in the palace the festivities were drawing to an end. As she stood alone in the outer hall Prince Hugo came towards her.

'Where have you been, Viola?' ​he said sternly. 'What have you been doing?'

She stamped her little foot.

'I will not be questioned,' she replied angrily.

'I have some right to question,' he said.

She laughed a little.

'For the first time in my life,' she said, 'I have been dancing.'

He turned away in hopeless silence.

*****

The months passed away. Slowly a great fear came over Viola, a fear that would hardly ever leave her. For every month at the full moon, whether she would or no, she found herself driven to the maze, through its mysterious walks into that strange dancing-room. And when she was there the music began once more, and once more she danced most deliciously for the moon to see. The second time that this happened she had merely thought that it was a recurrence of ​her own whim, and that the music was but a trick that the imagination had chosen to repeat. The third time frightened her, and she knew that the force that sways the tides had strange power over her. The fear grew as the year fell, for each month the music went on for a longer time—each month some of the pleasure had gone from the dance. On bitter nights in winter the moon called her and she came, when the breath was vapour, and the trees that circled her dancing-room were black bare skeletons, and the frost was cruel. She dared not tell anyone, and yet it was with difficulty that she kept her secret. Somehow chance seemed to favour her, and she always found a way to return from her midnight dance to her own room without being observed. Each month the summons seemed to be more imperious and urgent. Once when she was alone on her knees before the lighted altar in the private chapel of the ​palace she suddenly felt that the words of the familiar Latin prayer had gone from her memory. She rose to her feet, she sobbed bitterly, but the call had come and she could not resist it. She passed out of the chapel and down the palace-gardens. How madly she danced that night!

She was to be married in the spring. She began to be more gentle with Hugo now. She had a blind hope that when they were married she might be able to tell him about it, and he might be able to protect her, for she had always known him to be fearless. She could not love him, but she tried to be good to him. One day he mentioned to her that he had tried to find his way to the centre of the maze, and had failed. She smiled faintly. If only she could fail! But she never did.

On the night before the wedding, day she had gone to bed and slept peacefully, thinking with her last ​waking moments of Hugo. Overhead the full moon came up the sky. Quite suddenly Viola was wakened with the impulse to fly to the dancing-room. It seemed to bid her hasten with breathless speed. She flung a cloak around her, slipped her naked feet into her dancing-shoes, and hurried forth. No one saw her or heard her—on the marble staircase of the palace, on down the terraces of the garden, she ran as fast as she could. A thorn-plant caught in her cloak, but she sped on, tearing it free; a sharp stone cut through the satin of one shoe, and her foot was wounded and bleeding, but she sped on. As the pebble that is flung from the cliff must fall until it reaches the sea, as the white ghost-moth must come in from cool hedges and scented darkness to a burning death in the lamp by which you sit so late—so Viola had no choice. The moon called her. The moon drew her to that circle of ​hard, bright sand and the pitiless music.

It was brilliant, rapid music to-night. Viola threw off her cloak and danced. As she did so, she saw that a shadow lay over a fragment of the moon's edge. It was the night of a total eclipse. She heeded it not. The intoxication of the dance was on her. She was all in white; even her face was pale in the moonlight. Every movement was full of poetry and grace.

The music would not stop. She had grown deathly weary. It seemed to her that she had been dancing for hours, and the shadow had nearly covered the moon's face, so that it was almost dark. She could hardly see the trees around her. She went on dancing, stepping, spinning, pirouetting, held by the merciless music.

It stopped at last, just when the shadow had quite covered the moon's face, and all was dark. But it stopped only for a moment, and ​then began again. This time it was a slow, passionate waltz. It was useless to resist; she began to dance once more. As she did so she uttered a sudden shrill scream of horror, for in the dead darkness a hot hand had caught her own and whirled her round, and she was no longer dancing alone.

*****

The search for the missing Princess lasted during the whole of the following day. In the evening Prince Hugo, his face anxious and firmly set, passed in his search the iron gate of the maze, and noticed on the stones beside it the stain of a drop of blood. Within the gate was another stain. He followed this clue, which had been left by Viola's wounded foot, until he reached that open space in the centre that had served Viola for her dancing-room. It was quite empty. He noticed that the sand round the edges was all worn down, as though someone had danced there, round and round, ​for a long time. But no separate footprint was distinguishable there. Just outside this track, however, he saw two footprints clearly defined close together: one was the print of a tiny satin shoe; the other was the print of a large naked foot—a cloven foot.

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Barry Pain (1864 - 1928) was an English author most noted in his time for his humorous tales, most notably 'The Eliza Stories', but who also turned his hand to the supernatural in books such as his 1901 collection 'Stories in the Dark' from which this story is taken.

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The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan

Michael Wheatley (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

Many writers in the early twentieth century particularly were fascinated by Pan as a figure of unbridled vivacity and pagan ecstasy, but also associated the god and folk hero with a sense of danger and even horror.
Selecting an eclectic cross-section of tales and short poems from this boom of Pan-centric literature, many first published in the influential Weird Tales magazine, this new collection examines the roots of a cultural phenomenon and showcases Pan’s potential to introduce themes of queer awakening and celebrations of the transgressive into the thrillingly weird stories in which he was invoked.

I wonder if there's a deity more suited to these times than Pan; a god continually remoulded through his renaissance over the centuries to reflect our changing attitudes towards the untamed and the natural, a god cut adrift from his roots in Greek antiquity and now free to roam across our wildest imaginings.

Opening this fascinating collection of prose and poetry is the poem 'Pan A Double Villanelle' by the arch-decadent Oscar Wilde, a lament for the absence of the wild, the free, the colourful and imaginative in the grey lifelessness of England at that time.  

Following it we have the story that gives this collection its subtitle, Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan' which despite being amongst the most famous stories revolving around the goat footed god it should be noted that Pan is entirely absent from the story. In the tale a young woman is operated on and "a slight lesion in the grey matter" is made to allow her "to see the god Pan".  Whether or not this is what happens to poor Mary we never know but after waking from the operation she experiences a moment of wonder followed by utter insanity at which point she exits the story to be eventually replaced by another.  I remain unconvinced that in his use of the name Pan that Machen is actually invoking the god but is instead using the name as a metaphor for life beyond the confines of civilisation and conventional morality.  In the aftermath of the operation Mary sees the wildness within and becomes absent of morality and sanity, a condition passed on to her daughter who lives her life in a state of wildness, in the amorality of nature, until it's pointed out to her and she crumbles away, an example of the flimsiness of a life lived without the moral restraints that modern civilisation brings.

George Egerton's 'Pan' takes a different track to its predecessor, a feature common to the rest of this very well curated anthology, where it's the music of Pan that awakens a longing in a young woman that is misunderstood until it's too late.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'A Musical Instrument' tells of the God's chase of Syrinx and the creation of his characteristic pipes before Barry Pain allows the God to catch a different quarry in his tale of irresistible compulsion, 'The Moon-Slave'.

One of the unexpected delights of the book was the chapter from Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in the Willows' which I've never read or even remotely wanted to due to an aversion to anthropomorphised animals but 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' which tells of Rat and Mole's encounter with Pan proved to be a complete delight.

The brilliant Edwardian satirist Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) is represented by 'The Music on the Hill', the first of a run of stories here that I'd read before in other collections, but very happily it makes for an enjoyable re-read as a town bred socialite falls foul of Pan's more vindictive side after she spurns his existence.  Edith Hurley on the other hand is rueful for his absence in the modern world but is open to hints of his presence in her poem 'The Haunted Forest'.  

E.M. Forster's 'The Story of a Panic' positions  Pan as a liberator of the spirit, one who frees those who need it from the straightjacket of 'normal' society, in this case with a thinly veiled story of a young man's realisation of his own sexuality.

Shining above many of the others, even in a collection as good as this, is Algernon Blackwood whose 'The Touch of Pan' with its characteristic rejection of industrial society and it's submergence in the rural and the wild tells a tale of erotic freedom and purity of desire whereas A. Lloyd Bayne's poem 'Moors of Wran' tells of the more destructive aspect of the God..

Until I read it here I was convinced I'd already read Margery Lawrence's 'How Pan Came to Little Ingleton' but I'm not so sure now and very glad to now have done so as it proved to be an amusing tale of Pan's more bucolic and pastoral nature as he guides a belligerent priest to a more caring and accepting place that provided a gently wonderful and witty highlight.

In 'The Devil's Martyr' Signe Toksvig (great aunt of broadcaster Sandi) brings the gothic in the form of avaricious flagellating monks and an escape within the groves of Pan which are lamented in Willard N. Marsh's poem 'Bewitched' and which call to the newly wed Constance in David Keller's 'The Golden Bough'.

The excellent collection ends with a poem and a story by Dorothy Quick, the former an ode to the ecstatic nature of an encounter with the god whereas the latter - actually the older of the two- digs deeper into that idea and the toll it takes as a bride hankers for wildness in a time of domesticity.

At the end when we close the book we are holding a fantastic collection, possibly the best in the series, that encompasses many of the ways which authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed and explored and utilised Pan to express notions of freedom, of beauty and of self-determination often placing him in the face of an increasingly homogenised modern, industrial age and one is left wondering how Pan could be once again recalled in our own time of imminent ecological collapse as an avatar for a new green awareness.

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The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

Robert Aickman (ed)
Fontana Books

After finally getting to read some stories by Aickman, who over the last year had climbed to the top of my list of authors I wanted to track down, I noticed on my shelf this anthology of stories chosen by him.  It's the only one of the Fontana series I've managed to track down so far and it's a real delight.

For Aickman 'The essential quality of the ghost story is that it gives form to the unanswerable' and that key aspect of the unknown and mysterious is what guides the choice of stories.  There are few answers here and resolutions are often ephemeral.

Opening the book is 'The Accident' by Ann Bridge.  The pseudonymous Bridge was an avid mountain climber and her story reflects this as a psychiatrist attempts to help a young brother and sister menaced by sinister letters and footprints in the snow.  It's an attractive premise but one which is hampered by Bridge's
love of climbing and so much of the suspense becomes lost in the descriptions of the activity.

Barry Pain's 'Not On The Passenger List' is one in a long line of ocean traversing ghost stories. Here a widow on her way to England is haunted by a ghost that, unusually, is also seen by other passengers.  the story is told by another traveller and whilst not played for laughs has a lightness to it that indicates, to me at least, an author more at home with a more frivolous story style.

Oscar Wilde

The great Oscar Wilde is represented by a story called 'The Sphinx Without a Secret' wherein two men discuss a recent doomed romance and the enigmatic lady at the centre of it.  It is the most sparse of tales with the entire story revolving around the ladies behaviour and the endless connotations implied by the ambiguity of the ending.

The American writer (and friend of Wilde) Vincent O'Sullivan offers a fairly inconsequential but amusingly macabre little story of a belligerent ghost in denial of his own death in 'When I Was Dead' before we are provided with a translation of Alexander Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades' that reveals itself at the last to be an amusing tale of spectral revenge rather than a fairly typical tale of avaricious behaviour within the Russian nobility.

Whilst more renowned as a critic Desmond MacCarthy's 'Pargiton and Harby' shows him to have had a keen predilection for the weird as his tale of a man haunted by an event in his past reveals itself to be far more interesting than it's premise.

Hugh Walpole

Whilst we're on the subject of the weird Hugh Walpole's 'The Snow' is a brief, fiery examination of a marriage in tumultuous decline as the husband's placidity and the young wife's irascibility clash irrevocably in the shadow of his dead wife's memory.

I can find very little information regarding the author of the next story, Eric Ambrose, other than that he was English and his from and to dates.  His story, 'Carlton's Father', written in 1936 is a fabulous piece of proto-steampunk that any attempt to explain would spoil so onto the next which is by the peerless M.R. James.

'A School Story' is one of the fastest moving of James' tales with a rapidity of telling that takes it's tempo from the narrators bewildered retelling of the events surrounding the disappearance of a teacher.  It isn't one of James' most involved tales and the ending goes a bit too far but it's always fun to dip into any of James' works.

I've read a few of Saki's stories over the last couple of years and they're usually enjoyable but they've never grabbed me as much as some of his contemporaries.  His story here, 'The Wolves of Cernogratz'  is a rather gentle and poignant tale of the return to the ancestral home by the last of the von Cernogratz family.

Wilkie Collins

The book ends with the William Wilkie Collins novella, 'Mad Monkton'.  This wonderful tale by friend and contemporary of Charles Dickens tells of one man's attempt to avoid both the family curse and the family prophecy as he searches for the body of his dead uncle.  I've read a couple of Collins' stories before this and have been hugely impressed each time and this was the best of them all.  I find his way with words to be eminently readable and his imagination beguiling.

I picked up this book expecting to be entertained for a weekend and instead was treated to a number of old favourites alongside a number of intriguing authors whose work I was unaware of and who were of such a level of obscurity that it would have been no effort for me to have remained ignorant of them.

An excellent and extraordinary collection that explores the fantastical and the macabre in the most imaginative and enjoyable way.