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

Lionel Rackstraw leant by the open window and looked out over the garden. Behind him Barbara lay, in stillness and apparent sleep; below him at some distance Mr. Gregory Persimmons contemplated the moon. In an ordinary state of mind Lionel might have contemplated it too, as a fantasy less terrible than the sun, which appeared to him often as an ironical heat drawing out of the earth the noxious phantoms it bred therein. But the phantoms of his mind were lost in the horrible, and yet phantasmal, evil that had befallen him; his worst dreams were, if not truer than they had always been—that they could not be—at least more effectual and more omnipotent. The last barricade which material things offered had fallen; the beloved was destroyed, and the home of his repose broken open by the malice of invisible powers. Had she been false, had she left him for another—that would have been tolerable; probably, when he considered himself, he had always felt it. What was there about him to hold, in the calm of intense passion, that impetuous and adorable nature? But this unpredictable madness, without, so far as could be known, cause or explanation, this was the overwhelming of humanity by the spectral forces that mocked humanity. He gathered himself together in a persistent and hopeless patience.

He took out his case and lit a cigarette mechanically. She, he supposed, would never smoke cigarettes again, or, if she did, it would never be the same. At the same time, that question of ways and means which is never far from the minds of the vast majority of the English at any moment, which poisons their sorrows and modifies their joys, which insists on being settled before any experience can be properly tasted, and, if unsatisfactorily settled (as it most frequently is), turns love and death into dancing parodies of themselves, which ruins personal relationship and abstract thought and pleasant hours—this question presented itself also to him. What about money? what about Adrian? what about their home? what about the future? He couldn’t look after Adrian; he couldn’t afford to keep Barbara and a housekeeper; besides, he couldn’t, he supposed, have a housekeeper to live in the same house with Adrian and himself—unless she were old enough. And how did you get old housekeepers, and what did you pay them? Barbara might get better, but obviously after such an attack she couldn’t for a long time be left alone with Adrian; and if she didn’t get better? She had an aunt somewhere in Scotland—a strong Calvinistic Methodist; Lionel cursed as he thought of Adrian growing up in a Calvinistic household. Not, his irony reminded him, that he wasn’t something of a Calvinist himself, with his feeling about the universe; but his kind of Calvinism wouldn’t want to proselytize Adrian, and the aunt’s would. He himself had no available relations—and his friends? Well, friends were all very well, but you couldn’t dump a child on your friends indefinitely. Besides, his best friends—Kenneth, for instance—hadn’t the conveniences. What a world!

Mr. Persimmons, turning from the moon, looked up at the house, saw him, waved a hand, and walked towards the door. It crossed Lionel’s mind that it would be very satisfactory if Adrian could stop at Cully. It was no use his saying that he had no right to think of it; his fancy insisted on thinking of it, and was still doing so when Gregory, entering softly, joined him at the window.

“All quiet?” he asked in a low voice.

“All quiet,” Lionel answered bitterly.

“It occurred to me,” Gregory said—“I don’t know, of course—but it occurred to me that you might be worrying over the boy. You won’t, will you? There’s no need. He can stop with me, here or in London, as long as ever you like. He likes me and I like him.”

“It’s very kind of you,” Lionel said, feeling at once that this would solve a problem, and yet that the solving it would leave him with nothing but the horror of things to deal with. Even such a worrying question as what to do with Adrian was a slight change of torment. But that, he reflected sombrely, was selfish. Selfish, good heavens, selfish! And, after a long pause he said again, “It’s very kind of you.”

“Not a bit,” Gregory answered. “I should even—in a sense—like it. And you must be free. It’s most unfortunate. It seems sometimes as if there was an adverse fate in things—lying in ambush.”

“Ambush?” Lionel asked, relieved yet irritated at being made to talk. What did people like Gregory know of adverse fate? “Not much ambush, I think. It’s pretty obvious, once one’s had a glimpse of the world.”

Religion normally has a mildly stupefying effect on the minds of its disciples, and this Gregory had not altogether escaped. He had thought it would give him half an hour’s pleasant relaxation to worry Lionel, and he had not realized that Lionel was, even in his usual state, beyond this. He went on accordingly: “There seems a hitch in the way things work. Happiness is always just round the corner.”

“No hitch, surely,” Lionel said. “The whole scheme of things is malign and omnipotent. That is the way they work. ‘There is none that doeth good—no, not one.”’

“It depends perhaps on one’s definition of good,” Gregory answered. “There is at least satisfaction and delight.”

“There is no satisfaction and no delight that has not treachery within it,” Lionel said. “There is always Judas; the name of the world that none has dared to speak is Judas.”

Gregory turned his head to see better the young face from which this summary of life issued. He felt perplexed and uncertain; he had expected a door and found an iron barrier.

“But,” he said doubtfully, “had Judas himself no delight? There is an old story that there is rapture in the worship of treachery and malice and cruelty and sin.”

“Pooh,” Lionel said contemptuously; “it is the ordinary religion disguised; it is the church-going clerk’s religion. Satanism is the clerk at the brothel. Audacious little middleclass cock-sparrow!”

“You are talking wildly,” Gregory said a little angrily. “I have met people who have made me sure that there is a rapture of iniquity.”

“There is a rapture of anything, if you come to that,” Lionel answered; “drink or gambling or poetry or love or (I suppose)