Chapter 2

MR. CLARKE’S MEMOIRS

Mr. Clarke, the gentleman chosen by Dr. Raymond to witness the strange
experiment of the god Pan, was a person in whose character caution and
curiosity were oddly mingled; in his sober moments he thought of the
unusual and eccentric with undisguised aversion, and yet, deep in his
heart, there was a wide-eyed inquisitiveness with respect to all the
more recondite and esoteric elements in the nature of men. The latter
tendency had prevailed when he accepted Raymond’s invitation, for
though his considered judgment had always repudiated the doctor’s
theories as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged a belief in
fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed. The
horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain
extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair not
altogether reputable, and for many years afterwards he clung bravely to
the commonplace, and rejected all occasions of occult investigation.
Indeed, on some homeopathic principle, he for some time attended the
seances of distinguished mediums, hoping that the clumsy tricks of
these gentlemen would make him altogether disgusted with mysticism of
every kind, but the remedy, though caustic, was not efficacious. Clarke
knew that he still pined for the unseen, and little by little, the old
passion began to reassert itself, as the face of Mary, shuddering and
convulsed with an unknown terror, faded slowly from his memory.
Occupied all day in pursuits both serious and lucrative, the temptation
to relax in the evening was too great, especially in the winter months,
when the fire cast a warm glow over his snug bachelor apartment, and a
bottle of some choice claret stood ready by his elbow. His dinner
digested, he would make a brief pretence of reading the evening paper,
but the mere catalogue of news soon palled upon him, and Clarke would
find himself casting glances of warm desire in the direction of an old
Japanese bureau, which stood at a pleasant distance from the hearth.
Like a boy before a jam-closet, for a few minutes he would hover
indecisive, but lust always prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up
his chair, lighting a candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its
pigeon-holes and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid
subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which
he had painfully entered the gems of his collection. Clarke had a fine
contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to
interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole pleasure was in the
reading, compiling, and rearranging what he called his “Memoirs to
prove the Existence of the Devil,” and engaged in this pursuit the
evening seemed to fly and the night appeared too short.

On one particular evening, an ugly December night, black with fog, and
raw with frost, Clarke hurried over his dinner, and scarcely deigned to
observe his customary ritual of taking up the paper and laying it down
again. He paced two or three times up and down the room, and opened the
bureau, stood still a moment, and sat down. He leant back, absorbed in
one of those dreams to which he was subject, and at length drew out his
book, and opened it at the last entry. There were three or four pages
densely covered with Clarke’s round, set penmanship, and at the
beginning he had written in a somewhat larger hand:

Singular Narrative told me by my Friend, Dr. Phillips. He assures me
that all the facts related therein are strictly and wholly True, but
refuses to give either the Surnames of the Persons Concerned, or the
Place where these Extraordinary Events occurred.

Mr. Clarke began to read over the account for the tenth time, glancing
now and then at the pencil notes he had made when it was told him by
his friend. It was one of his humours to pride himself on a certain
literary ability; he thought well of his style, and took pains in
arranging the circumstances in dramatic order. He read the following
story:—

The persons concerned in this statement are Helen V., who, if she is
still alive, must now be a woman of twenty-three, Rachel M., since
deceased, who was a year younger than the above, and Trevor W., an
imbecile, aged eighteen. These persons were at the period of the story
inhabitants of a village on the borders of Wales, a place of some
importance in the time of the Roman occupation, but now a scattered
hamlet, of not more than five hundred souls. It is situated on rising
ground, about six miles from the sea, and is sheltered by a large and
picturesque forest.

Some eleven years ago, Helen V. came to the village under rather
peculiar circumstances. It is understood that she, being an orphan, was
adopted in her infancy by a distant relative, who brought her up in his
own house until she was twelve years old. Thinking, however, that it
would be better for the child to have playmates of her own age, he
advertised in several local papers for a good home in a comfortable
farmhouse for a girl of twelve, and this advertisement was answered by
Mr. R., a well-to-do farmer in the above-mentioned village. His
references proving satisfactory, the gentleman sent his adopted
daughter to Mr. R., with a letter, in which he stipulated that the girl
should have a room to herself, and stated that her guardians need be at
no trouble in the matter of education, as she was already sufficiently
educated for the position in life which she would occupy. In fact, Mr.
R. was given to understand that the girl be allowed to find her own
occupations and to spend her time almost as she liked. Mr. R. duly met
her at the nearest station, a town seven miles away from his house, and
seems to have remarked nothing extraordinary about the child except
that she was reticent as to her former life and her adopted father. She
was, however, of a very different type from the inhabitants of the
village; her skin was a pale, clear olive, and her features were
strongly marked, and of a somewhat foreign character. She appears to
have settled down easily enough into farmhouse life, and became a
favourite with the children, who sometimes went with her on her rambles
in the forest, for this was her amusement. Mr. R. states that he has
known her to go out by herself directly after their early breakfast,
and not return till after dusk, and that, feeling uneasy at a young
girl being out alone for so many hours, he communicated with her
adopted father, who replied in a brief note that Helen must do as she
chose. In the winter, when the forest paths are impassable, she spent
most of her time in her bedroom, where she slept alone, according to
the instructions of her relative. It was on one of these expeditions to
the forest that the first of the singular incidents with which this
girl is connected occurred, the date being about a year after her
arrival at the village. The preceding winter had been remarkably
severe, the snow drifting to a great depth, and the frost continuing
for an unexampled period, and the summer following was as noteworthy
for its extreme heat. On one of the very hottest days in this summer,
Helen V. left the farmhouse for one of her long rambles in the forest,
taking with her, as usual, some bread and meat for lunch. She was seen
by some men in the fields making for the old Roman Road, a green
causeway which traverses the highest part of the wood, and they were
astonished to observe that the girl had taken off her hat, though the
heat of the sun was already tropical. As it happened, a labourer,
Joseph W. by name, was working in the forest near the Roman Road, and
at twelve o’clock his little son, Trevor, brought the man his dinner of
bread and cheese. After the meal, the boy, who was about seven years
old at the time, left his father at work, and, as he said, went to look
for flowers in the wood, and the man, who could hear him shouting with
delight at his discoveries, felt no uneasiness. Suddenly, however, he
was horrified at hearing the most dreadful screams, evidently the
result of great terror, proceeding from the direction in which his son
had gone, and he hastily threw down his tools and ran to see what had
happened. Tracing his path by the sound, he met the little boy, who was
running headlong, and was evidently terribly frightened, and on
questioning him the man elicited that after picking a posy of flowers
he felt tired, and lay down on the grass and fell asleep. He was
suddenly awakened, as he stated, by a peculiar noise, a sort of singing
he called it, and on peeping through the branches he saw Helen V.
playing on the grass with a “strange naked man,” who he seemed unable
to describe more fully. He said he felt dreadfully frightened and ran
away crying for his father. Joseph W. proceeded in the direction
indicated by his son, and found Helen V. sitting on the grass in the
middle of a glade or open space left by charcoal burners. He angrily
charged her with frightening his little boy, but she entirely denied
the accusation and laughed at the child’s story of a “strange man,” to
which he himself did not attach much credence. Joseph W. came to the
conclusion that the boy had woke up with a sudden fright, as children
sometimes do, but Trevor persisted in his story, and continued in such
evident distress that at last his father took him home, hoping that his
mother would be able to soothe him. For many weeks, however, the boy
gave his parents much anxiety; he became nervous and strange in his
manner, refusing to leave the cottage by himself, and constantly
alarming the household by waking in the night with cries of “The man in
the wood! father! father!”

[* Dr. Phillips tells me that he has seen the head in question, and
assures me that he has never received such a vivid presentment of
intense evil.]

From whatever cause arising, this second shock seemed too severe for
the boy Trevor, and at the present date he suffers from a weakness of
intellect, which gives but little promise of amending. The matter
caused a good deal of sensation at the time, and the girl Helen was
closely questioned by Mr. R., but to no purpose, she steadfastly
denying that she had frightened or in any way molested Trevor.

The second event with which this girl’s name is connected took place
about six years ago, and is of a still more extraordinary character.

At the beginning of the summer of 1882, Helen contracted a friendship
of a peculiarly intimate character with Rachel M., the daughter of a
prosperous farmer in the neighbourhood. This girl, who was a year
younger than Helen, was considered by most people to be the prettier of
the two, though Helen’s features had to a great extent softened as she
became older. The two girls, who were together on every available
opportunity, presented a singular contrast, the one with her clear,
olive skin and almost Italian appearance, and the other of the
proverbial red and white of our rural districts. It must be stated that
the payments made to Mr. R. for the maintenance of Helen were known in
the village for their excessive liberality, and the impression was
general that she would one day inherit a large sum of money from her
relative. The parents of Rachel were therefore not averse from their
daughter’s friendship with the girl, and even encouraged the intimacy,
though they now bitterly regret having done so. Helen still retained
her extraordinary fondness for the forest, and on several occasions
Rachel accompanied her, the two friends setting out early in the
morning, and remaining in the wood until dusk. Once or twice after
these excursions Mrs. M. thought her daughter’s manner rather peculiar;
she seemed languid and dreamy, and as it has been expressed, “different
from herself,” but these peculiarities seem to have been thought too
trifling for remark. One evening, however, after Rachel had come home,
her mother heard a noise which sounded like suppressed weeping in the
girl’s room, and on going in found her lying, half undressed, upon the
bed, evidently in the greatest distress. As soon as she saw her mother,
she exclaimed, “Ah, mother, mother, why did you let me go to the forest
with Helen?” Mrs. M. was astonished at so strange a question, and
proceeded to make inquiries. Rachel told her a wild story. She said—

Clarke closed the book with a snap, and turned his chair towards the
fire. When his friend sat one evening in that very chair, and told his
story, Clarke had interrupted him at a point a little subsequent to
this, had cut short his words in a paroxysm of horror. “My God!” he had
exclaimed, “think, think what you are saying. It is too incredible, too
monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world, where men and
women live and die, and struggle, and conquer, or maybe fail, and fall
down under sorrow, and grieve and suffer strange fortunes for many a
year; but not this, Phillips, not such things as this. There must be
some explanation, some way out of the terror. Why, man, if such a case
were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.”

But Phillips had told his story to the end, concluding:

“Her flight remains a mystery to this day; she vanished in broad
sunlight; they saw her walking in a meadow, and a few moments later she
was not there.”

Clarke tried to conceive the thing again, as he sat by the fire, and
again his mind shuddered and shrank back, appalled before the sight of
such awful, unspeakable elements enthroned as it were, and triumphant
in human flesh. Before him stretched the long dim vista of the green
causeway in the forest, as his friend had described it; he saw the
swaying leaves and the quivering shadows on the grass, he saw the
sunlight and the flowers, and far away, far in the long distance, the
two figures moved toward him. One was Rachel, but the other?

Clarke had tried his best to disbelieve it all, but at the end of the
account, as he had written it in his book, he had placed the
inscription:

Et Diabolus incarnatus est. Et homo factus est.