War in Heaven - Charles Williams (reading the story of the .TXT) 📗

“I have read,” said Kenneth Mornington, standing in the station of a small village some seven miles across country from Fardles, “that Paris dominates France. I wish London dominated England in the matter of weather.”

Further letters exchanged between him and the Archdeacon had led to an agreement that he should spend the first Sunday of his holiday at the Rectory, arriving for lunch on the Saturday. The Saturday morning in London had been brilliant, and he had thought it would be pleasanter to walk along the chord of the monstrous arc which the railway made. But it had grown dull as the train left the London suburbs, and even as he jumped from his compartment the first drops of rain began to fall. By the time he had reached the outer exit they had grown to a steady drizzle, and the train had left the station.

Kenneth turned up his collar and set out; the way at least was known to him. “But why,” he said, “do I always get out at the wrong times? If I had gone on I should have had to sit at Fardles station for an hour and a half, but I should have been dry. It is this sheep-like imitation of Adam which annoys me. Adam got out at the wrong time. But he was made to by the railway authorities. I will write,” he thought, and took to a footpath, “the diary of a man who always got out at the wrong time, beginning with a Caesarean operation. And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. A Modern Macduff, one might call it. And death? He might die inopportunely, before the one in advance had been moved on, so that all the angels on the line of his spiritual progress found themselves crowded with two souls instead of the one they were prepared for. “Agitation in Heaven. Excursionist unable to return. Trains to Paradise overcrowded. Strange scenes at the stations. Seraph Michael says rules to be enforced.” Stations… stages… it sounds like Theosophy. Am I a Theosophist? Oh, Lord, it’s worse than ever; I can’t walk to a strange Rectory through seven miles of this.”

In a distance he discerned a shed by the side of the road, broke into a run, and, reaching it, took shelter with a bound which landed him in a shallow puddle lying just within the dark entrance. “Oh, damn and blast!” he cried with a great voice. “Why was this bloody world created?”

“As a sewer for the stars,” a voice in front of him said. “Alternatively, to know God and to glorify Him for ever.”

Kenneth peered into the shed, and found that there was sitting on a heap of stones at the back a young man of about his own age, with a lean, long face, and a blob of white on his knee which turned out in a few minutes to be a writing pad.

“Quite,” Kenneth said. “The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative. They might be con-con consanguineous? contemporaneous? consubstantial? What is the word I want?”

“Contemptible, concomitant, conditional, consequential, congruous, connectible, concupiscent, contaminable, considerable,” the stranger offered him. “The last is, I admit, weak.”

“The question was considerable,” Kenneth answered. “You no doubt are considering it? You are even writing the answer down?”

“A commentary upon it,” the other said. “But consanguineous was the word I wanted, or its brother.” He wrote.

Kenneth sat down on the same heap of stones and watched till the writing was finished, then he said: “Circumstances almost suggest, don’t you think, that I might hear the context—if it’s what it looks?”

“Context—there’s another,” the stranger said. “Contextual ‘And that contextual meaning flows Through all our manuscripts of rose.’ Rose? Persia? Hafix—Ispahan. Perhaps rose is a little ordinary. ‘And that contextual meaning streams Through all our manuscripts of dreams.”’

“Oh, no, no,” Mornington broke in firmly. “That’s far too minor. Perhaps something modern—‘And that impotent contextual meaning stinks In all our manuscripts, of no matter what coloured inks.’ Better be modern than minor.”

“I agree,” the other said. “But a man must fulfil his destiny, even to minority. Shall I ‘think the complete universe must be Subject to such a rag of it as me?’”

He was interrupted by Kenneth kicking the earth with his heels and crying: “At last! at last! ‘Terror of darkness! O thou king of flames!’ I didn’t think there was another living man who knew George Chapman.”

The stranger caught his arm. “Can you?” he said, made a gesture with his free hand, and began, Mornington’s voice joining in after the first few words:

“That with thy music—footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl’st instructive, fire about the world.”

The conversation for the next ten minutes became a duet, and it was only at the end that Kenneth said with a sigh: “‘I have lived long enough, having seen one thing.’ But before I die—the context of consanguineous?”

The stranger picked up his manuscript and read:

_”How does thy single heart possess A double mode of happiness In quiet and in busyness!

Profundities of utter peace Do their own vehemence release Through rippling toils that never cease.

Yet of those ripples’ changing mood, Thou, ignorant at heart, dost brood In a most solemn quietude.

Thus idleness and industry Within that laden heart of thee Find their rich consanguinity.“_

“Yes,” Kenneth murmured, “yes. A little minor, but rather beautiful.”

“The faults, or rather the follies, are sufficiently obvious,” the stranger said. “Yet I flatter myself it reflects the lady.”

“You have printed?” Kenneth asked seriously, for they were now discussing important things, and in answer the other jumped to his feet and stood before him. “I have printed,” he said, “and you are the only man—besides the publisher—who knows about it.”

“Really?” Mornington asked.

“Yes,” said the stranger. “You will understand the horrible position I’m in if I tell you my name. I am Aubrey Duncan Peregrine Mary de Lisle D’Estrange, Duke of the North Ridings, Marquis of Craigmullen and Plessing, Earl and Viscount, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Sword and Cape, and several other ridiculous fantasies.”

Mornington pinched his lip. “Yes, I see,” he said. “That must make it difficult to do anything with poetry.”

“Difficult,” the other said, with almost a shout. “It makes it impossible.”

“Oh well, come,” Kenneth said; “impossible? You can publish, and the reviews at least won’t flatter you.”

“It isn’t the reviews,” the Duke said. “It’s just chatting with people and being the fellow who’s written a book or two—not very good books, but his books, and being able to quote things, and so on. How can I quote things to the people who come to see me? How can I ask the Bishop what he thinks of my stuff or tell him what I think of his? What will the Earl my cousin say about the Sitwells?”

“No, quite,” Mornington answered, and for a few minutes the two young men looked at one another. Then the Duke grinned. “It’s so silly,” he said. “I really do care about poetry, and I think some of my stuff might be almost possible. But I can never find it anywhere to live for more than a few days.”

“Anonymity?” Kenneth asked. “But that wouldn’t help.”

“Look here,” the Duke said suddenly, “are you going any where in particular? No? Why not come up to the house with me and stop a few days?”

Mornington shook his head regretfully. “I have promised to stop with the Archdeacon of Fardles over the week-end,” he said.

“Well, after then?” the Duke urged. “Do, for God’s sake come and talk Chapman and Blunden with me. Look here, come up now, and I’ll run you over to Fardles in the car, and on Monday morning I’ll come and fetch you.”

Kenneth assented to this, though he refused to leave his shelter. But within some half an hour the Duke had brought his car to the front of the shed and they were on the way to Fardles. As they drew near the village, approaching it from the cottage side of Cully, they passed another car in a side turning, in which Mornington seemed to see, as he was carried past, the faces of Gregory Persimmons and Adrian Rackstraw. But he was in a long controversy with the Duke on the merits of the Laureate’s new prosody, and though he wondered a little, the incident made hardly any impression on his mind.

The Archdeacon, it appeared, knew the Duke; the Duke was rather detachedly acquainted with the Archdeacon. The detachment was perhaps due to the fact, which had emerged from the few minutes’ conversation the three had together, that the Duke of the North Ridings was a Roman Catholic (hence the Sword and Cape), so far as his obsession with poetry and his own misfortunes left him leisure to be anything. But he promised to come to lunch on Monday, and disappeared.

“I forgot Batesby,” the Archdeacon said suddenly to Mornington, as the car drove off. “Dear me! I’m afraid the Duke and he won’t like one another. Batesby’s dreadfully keen on Reunion; he has a scheme of his own for it—an admirable scheme, I’m certain, if only he could get other people to see it in the same way.”

“I should have thought the same thing was officially true of the Duke,” Mornington said as they entered the house.

“But only because he’s part of an institution,” the Archdeacon said, “and one can more easily believe that institutions are supernatural than that individuals are. And an institution can believe in itself and can wait, whereas an individual can’t. Batesby can’t afford to wait; he might die.”

At lunch Mornington had Mr. Batesby’s scheme of Reunion explained at length by its originator. It was highly complicated and, so far as Kenneth could understand, involved everyone believing that God was opposed to Communism and in favour of election as the only sound method of government. The Archdeacon remarked that discovering the constitution of the Catholic Church was a much pleasanter game than tennis, to which he had been invited that afternoon.

“Though they know I don’t play,” he added plaintively. “So I was glad you were coming, and I had an excuse.”

“How do you get exercise?” Kenneth asked idly.

“Well, actually, I go in for fencing,” the Archdeacon said, smiling. “I used to love it as a boy romantically, and since I have outgrown romance I keep it up prosaically.”

The constitution of the Catholic Church occupied the lunch so fully that not until Mr. Batesby had gone away to supervise the Lads’ Christian Cricket Club in his own parish, some ten miles off, did Kenneth see an opportunity of talking to his host