The Great God Pan | Page 5

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 corner, 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