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

satanism. But the one certainty is that the traitor is always and everywhere present in evil and good alike, and all is horrible in the end.”

“There is a way to delight in horror,” Gregory said.

“There is no way to delight in the horrible,” Lionel answered. “Let us pray only that immortality is a dream. But I don’t suppose it is,” he added coldly.

A silence fell upon them, and Gregory was suddenly conscious that he felt a trifle sick. He felt dizzy; he shut his eyes and leant against the wall to save himself lurching. Lionel’s face, as it looked out over the garden, frightened him; it was like a rock seen very far off. He opened his eyes and studied it again, then he glanced back over his shoulder at Barbara lying on the bed. This was Cully; Adrian was asleep in his room; he had overthrown Barbara’s mind. And now he was driven against something else, something immovable, something that affected him as if he had found himself suddenly in a deep pit of smooth rock. Lionel, who had been pursuing his own thoughts, began to speak suddenly, in the high voice of incantation with which he was given to quoting poetry,

“Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still gaping to devour me opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

Gregory stamped his foot, and managed to change it into a mere shifting of position. After all, he wasn’t going to quarrel with Lionel just now, though if he had time he would smash him into splinters. A clerk at a brothel!

“Well,” he said, “there’s just one thing I should like to say. If the doctor doesn’t seem much good when he comes, I have been thinking that I know an old man in London who’s seen some curious things and has funny bits of knowledge. I’ll get him on the telephone to-morrow and ask him to come down. He mayn’t be any good, but he may.”

“It’s really very kind of you,” Lionel said. “But how can anyone do anything?”

“Well, we shall see,” Gregory answered cheerfully. “Hallo, there is the doctor. And Sir Giles. Shall we go and meet them?”

Sir Giles, who had been out all day on an antiquarian visit, had run into the doctor at the gates. They walked up the drive a little distance apart, and at the door he made to annex Persimmons, who, however, put him aside till he had spoken with the doctor. A new examination of the patient brought no new light. The doctor, who refused to stay for the night, but promised to call again in the morning, went off. Lionel returned to his vigil, and Gregory, having patted him on the shoulder, and said cheerfully, “Well, well, don’t despair. We’ll ring up old Manasseh first thing,” went off with Sir Giles to his own room.

“What’s the idea?” Tumulty asked. “And who is old Manasseh, anyhow?”

“Ah, you don’t know everyone yet,” Gregory answered in high glee. “Pity you weren’t here; you’d have liked to see how Mrs. Rackstraw went on. Quite unusual, for an English lady. Unusual for an English doctor, too. Did you think he was a bit bewildered, Tumulty? But you’ll meet Manasseh in the morning.”

“Coming down, is he?” Sir Giles asked. “Well, there’s someone else down here too.”

“Yes,” Gregory said. “The masquerading fellow in grey? Now, if you can tell me who he is—”

“I knew you’d go mad,” Sir Giles said, with satisfaction. “What fellow in grey? I don’t know what hell’s clothes he was wearing, something from his own suburban tape-twister, I expect.”

“Why suburban?” Gregory asked. “He didn’t look to me like the suburbs. And what did he mean by his name being John?”

“His name may be Beelzebub,” Sir Giles answered, “but the man is that lump-cheeked inspector who’s trying to find out who committed the murder. He’s down here.”

Gregory stared. “What, that?” he said. “Why, I thought they’d dropped all that. There’s absolutely nothing to show—What does he want here?”

“Probably either me or you,” Sir Giles answered. “Well, I told you at the beginning, Persimmons, I’m going to damn well see to it he doesn’t have me. I don’t care what insane May dance you get up to, but I’m not going to be dragged in. If the police are after you, they can have you for all I care. I’m leaving to-morrow, and I’m off to Baghdad next week. And, if he asks me anything, I shall tell him.”

“Tell him that you told me you were going to ask Rackstraw to have lunch with you, so that the room—” Gregory began.

“Tell him you’ve been waking up in the night shrieking ‘blood, blood,’ if it’s necessary,” Sir Giles said. “The English police are corrupt enough, of course, but the trouble is one doesn’t know where they’re corrupt, and you may hit on the wrong man. Besides, I’ll see that lurching sewer-rat in Hinnom before I spend good money on him.”

“You’re making a ridiculous fuss,” Gregory said. “You don’t really think he’s got evidence?”

“I don’t care a curse,” Sir Giles answered. “You’re not interesting enough to run any risks for, Persimmons; you’re merely an overgrown hobbledehoy stealing beer—the drainings in other people’s pots. And I’m not going to have to poison myself for you. And now who’s this reptile in grey you’re bleating about?”

Gregory had grown used to neglecting half of Sir Giles’s conversation, but for a moment he remembered Lionel’s remark earlier in the evening, and looked nastily across at the other. However, he pulled himself in, and said carelessly, “Oh, a mad fellow we met in the drive. Talked like a clergyman and said he knew seventy kings.”

“Only seventy?” Sir Giles asked. “No other introduction?”

“I didn’t like him,” Gregory admitted, “and he made Ludding foam at the mouth. But he wasn’t doing anything except wander about the drive. He mentioned he was a priest and king himself.” He dropped his voice and came a little nearer. “I wondered at first whether he was anything to do with—the shop. You know what I mean. But somehow he didn’t fit in.”

Sir Giles sat erect. “Priest and king,” he said, half sceptically. “You’re sure you’re not mad, Persimmons?” He stood up sharply. “And his name was John?” he asked intently.

“He said so,” Gregory answered. “But John what?”

Sir Giles walked to the window and looked out, then he came back and looked with increasing doubt at Gregory. “Look here,” he said, “you take my advice and leave that damned bit of silver gilt trumpery alone. Ludding told me about your all going off after it. You may be up against something funnier than you think, Master Gregory.”

“But who is he?” Gregory asked impatiently yet anxiously. “What’s he got to do with the—the Graal?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” Sir Giles said flatly. “I never knew any good come of trying to pretend things mightn’t be when they might. I’ve heard tales—lies, very likely—but tales. Out about Samarcand I heard them and down in Delhi too—and it wasn’t the Dalai Lama either that made the richest man in Bengal give all he had to the temples and become a fakir. I don’t believe in God yet, but I wonder sometimes whether men haven’t got the idea of God from that fellow—if it’s the same one.”

“What have I to do with God?” Gregory said.

“I don’t know whether the Graal belongs to him or he belongs to the Graal,” Sir Giles went on, unheeding. “But you can trace it up to a certain point and you can trace it back from a certain point, and someone had it in between. And if it was he, you’d better go and ask the Archdeacon to pray for you—if he will.”

“Will you tell me who he is?” Gregory asked.

“No, I won’t,” Sir Giles said. “I’ve seen too much to chatter about him. You drop it, while there’s time.”

“I suppose it’s Jesus Christ come to look for His own property?” Gregory sneered.

“Jesus Christ is dead or in heaven or owned by the clergy,” Sir Giles answered. “But they say this man is what he told you—he is king and priest and his name is John. They say so. I don’t know, and I tell you I funk it.” He looked at the open window again.

“Well, run then,” Gregory said. “But I and my great lord will know him and meet him.”

“So you may, for me,” Sir Giles answered, and with no more words disappeared to his own room.

The child Adrian slept long and peacefully, and only his angel, in another state of the created universe, knew what his dreams were. But, except for him and the servants, the night was, for those in Cully, empty of sleep. Lionel lay on the couch that had been hastily made up, watching and listening for any movement from his wife. How far she slept none could tell. She lay motionless, but Lionel doubted, when he was near her, whether it were more than a superimposed and compulsory immobility. Her eyes were shut, but her breath trembled as if some interior haste shook it, and every now and then there issued from her lips a faint and barely perceptible moan, faint but profound. Lionel brooded over this companion of his way, torn apart into the depths of some jungle whose terror he could not begin to conceive. He himself would have been, to however small an extent, prepared; but that Barbara, with her innocent concentration on window-curtains and the novels of Mr. Wodehouse and Adrian’s meals, should be plunged into it, was a fatality against which even his pessimism felt the temptation to rebel.

Not far from his room Sir Giles also lay wakeful, considering episodes and adventures of his past. Brutal with himself no less than with others, he did not attempt to hide from himself that the new arrivals in the village caused him some anxiety. He had known, in his exploration of that zone of madness which encloses humanity, certain events which had been referred by those who had spoken of them to a mysterious power whose habitation was unknown and whose interference was deadly. Once indeed, in a midnight assembly in Beyrout, he had, he thought, dimly seen him; there had been panic and death, and in the midst of the shrinking and alarmed magicians a half-visible presence, clouded and angry and destructive. At the time he had thought that he also had been affected by a general hallucination, but he knew that hallucination was a word which, in these things, meant no more than that certain things seemed to be. Whether they were or not… he promised himself again to leave England as soon as possible, and to leave Cully certainly to-morrow.

Gregory, after some consideration, had dismissed Sir Giles’s warnings as, on the whole, silly. Things were going very well; by the next night he hoped that both the Graal and Adrian would be, for a while, in his hands or those of his friends. Of all those who lay awake under those midnight stars he was the only one who had a naturally religious spirit; to him only the unknown beyond man’s life presented itself as alive with hierarchical presences arrayed in rising orders to the central throne. To him alone sacraments were living realities; the ointment and the Black Mass, the ritual and order of worship. He beyond any of them demanded a response from the darkness; a rush of ardent faith believed that it came; and in full dependence on that faith acted and influenced his circumstances. Prayer was natural to him as it was not to Sir Giles or Lionel, or, indeed,