The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana
by Jess Nevins
"The Moon-Slave" (1901)
copyright © Jess Nevins 2022
“The Moon-Slave” was written by Barry Pain and first appeared in Stories in the Dark (1901). Pain (1865-1928) was a British humorist and fiction writer. His work, such as his crime stories about Constantine Dix, is usually entertaining, and he is, like Arnold Bennett and E.F. Benson, a writer more modern readers should know about than do. “The Moon-Slave” is a well-written horror story with a suitably nasty ending.
Princess Viola loves to dance. She has had “an inevitable submission” to it from her childhood: “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.”1 At sixteen she is betrothed to Prince Hugo. He loves her, but she does not care about him one way or another. At her betrothal banquet she is discontented at how mechanical and uninspired is the dancing of the men, and she slips away and wanders her estate. She finds an old, forsaken hedge maze, abandoned years before. Intrigued, she enters the maze, wandering aimlessly through it until she finds the open space at the heart of the maze. The moonlit summer sky is beautiful and she is inspired to dance, and she says
My beautiful, moonlit, lonely, old dancing room, why did I never find you before? But you need music–there must be music here. Sweet moon, make your white light come down in music into my dancing room here, and I will dance most deliciously for you to see. Ah! Sweet moon, do this for me and I will be your slave; I will be what you wilt.2
Music springs from nowhere, the sound of a great orchestra, and Viola dances to a slow saraband. It ends, and she demands more of it, and it returns, a music of caprice. She seems to see an old king watching her, “a king with the sordid history of the exhaustion of pleasure written on his flaccid face.”3 But she keeps dancing, and it is only when the music ceases again that she becomes afraid and flees from the maze. But the next month at the full moon she is drawn back to the maze to dance again, and then again the following full moon, and again every month. She finds herself helpless to resist and takes less and less pleasure from each dance, even as the call to dance grows ever more insistent. After several months she discovers that she can no longer remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer. She tries to be kinder to Prince Hugo, thinking that once they were married she could tell him about her monthly dances and that somehow he could protect her. On the night before her wedding, a night of a total eclipse, she is called again to dance and does so wonderfully. She dances to exhaustion, but the music starts up again, a slow waltz. She wearily resumes dancing. “As she did so she uttered a sudden shrill scream of horror, for in the dead darkness a hot hand caught her own and whirled her round, and she was no longer dancing alone.”4 The next day, during the search for the missing princess, Prince Hugo goes to the heart of the hedge maze and finds the sand around the edge of the center all worn down, as if someone had danced for a long time. He only finds 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.”5
“The Moon-Slave” is smoothly told. Pain builds the atmosphere nicely. The horror mounts slowly, and the reader knows something bad is going to happen, but is not sure what. The final appearance of the owner of the cloven hoof sharply increases the story’s horror. Pain is a witty writer, even in this relatively early story, and “The Moon-Slave” reads quickly and enjoyably. It also has a few lagniappes (Viola forgetting the Lord’s Prayer, her resolution to be kind to Hugo in the hope that he might protect her, the king “with a sordid history of the exhaustion of pleasure written on his flaccid face”6) which are not crucial to the story’s development but which add delightful frissons of terror.
“The Moon-Slave” is a typical–one might say the prototypical–portrayal of Pan in turn-of-the-century English fantastika.
The classical Greek god of pastures, forests, herds, and flocks was progressively adopted in late Victorian and Edwardian Gothic fiction as an emblem both of nature and of the anarchy and license that implicitly lay beyond and beneath the civilized world. The conventional image of the goat-foot god inevitably lends itself to the Gothic: Pan, with his cloven hooves, pointed beard, and horns is visually reminiscent of the Christian Satan. His lustful, fecund, and promiscuous sexuality likewise defies the shame and sinfulness associated with physical love in the Christian tradition. Thus, the sheer joy and irresponsibility of Pan’s countercultural rural idyll may tempt those who encounter him away from approved and purposeful patterns of conduct, whether these be social, moral, or religious.
Pan’s world conflates a paganism that is, ambiguously, both classical and contemporary with the fictionalization of desire realized and not denied. As Nick Freeman and others have argued, however, Pan is as complicated and contradictory an emblem as the paganism he seemingly personifies. Pan can represent innocent nature worship and reverent pantheism, but he can also represent anarchy, hedonism, and mindless self-indulgence. Likewise, Pan’s virility is, under the representation of different authors, variously heterosexual and homosexual, though his unique physiology suggests that Pan is always capable of being associated with the taboo of bestiality.7
Recommended Edition
Print: Hugh Lamb, ed., Three Men in the Dark: Tales of Terror by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain & Robert Barr. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.
Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012193009
1 Barry Pain, “The Moon-Slave,” Stories in the Dark (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 45.
2 Pain, “The Moon-Slave,” 49.
3 Pain, “The Moon-Slave,” 50.
4 Pain, “The Moon-Slave,” 57.
5 Pain, “The Moon-Slave,” 58.
6 Pain, “The Moon-Slave,” 50.
7 Hughes, Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature, 196.