War in Heaven - Charles Williams (reading the story of the .TXT) 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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Slowly, as they watched, the pillar of cloud began to sink, withdrawing into itself. The colour of it seemed to change also, from a dense black to a smoky and then to an ordinary grey. Quicker and quicker it fell, hovered for a few minutes, and at last collapsed entirely. There remained, in the place where the body had been, nothing but a spreading heap of dust.
The Duke, defeated in mind and body, and with too young a soul to dare the tempest, made yet some effort to assert the cause in which he believed. He raised himself on one hand as he lay and cried out in the great Latin he loved—loved rather perhaps as literature than as religion, but still as a strength more ancient and more enduring than himself. “Profiscere, anima Christiana,” he stammered, “de hoc mundo, in nomine Patris… “
“Be silent, you!” Manasseh snarled, and, with one of those grotesque movements which attend on all crises, took from the counter a small bottle as the nearest missile and flung it. It smashed on the floor, and the Greek’s eyes moved toward it and came to rest on the Duke. He stood up with an effort, and motioned to Gregory to draw the carpet again over the magnetized passage of death. When this was done, the three gathered round the Duke, who half rose to his feet and was overthrown again by the touch of the Greek’s hand.
“Will you not destroy him also?” Manasseh asked, half greedily, half timidly.
The Greek slowly shook his head. “I am very weary,” he said, “and the strength is gone from the figure. If that other had not despised us, I do not know whether I should have won. And, since he is here, unless you will kill him yourself, you should use him for what you desire to do.”
“How can we use him?” Gregory asked, meditatively prodding the Duke with his foot, his momentary fear gone.
“Let him write and tell this priest whom you hate that he and the Graal are here—and that which was the other—and that he must come quickly to free them.”
“But will he write?” Gregory asked.
“Certainly he will write,” the Greek said, “or one of us will write with his hand.”
“Do you write then,” Manasseh said, “for you are the greatest among us.”
“I will do it if you wish,” the Greek said. “Lift him partly up, and give me pencil and paper.”
As Gregory tore a page from his pocket-book, Manasseh dragged and pushed at the Duke till he sat at last leaning against the door. The Greek knelt down beside him, put one arm round his shoulders, and laid the right hand over his. To the Duke it seemed as if an enormous cloud of darkness had descended upon him, in the midst of which some unknown strength moved him at its will. In the conflict of his inner being with this tyranny the control of his body was lost; the battle was not in that outer region, but in a more central place. Ignorant and helpless, his hand wrote as the Greek’s controlling mind bade, though the handwriting was his own.
“Come, if you can by any means,” the letter ran, “for That and we are here. The bearer of this will tell you as much as he will, but believe him if he says that without you there is an end to all.—Ridings.”
The Greek released the Duke and rose. Gregory took the note, read it, and shook his head. “I do not think he will be deceived,” he said doubtfully.
“But what can he—” Manasseh began, but the Greek silenced him with a gesture and said, “He will do what he must do. There is more than we and he which moves about us now. I think he will come, for I think that the battle is joined, and till that which is with us or that which is with them is loosened it cannot end. Take care of your ways to-morrow.”
“And who is to be the bearer?” Gregory asked.
“That you shall be,” the Greek said.
“But how much shall I tell him?” Gregory asked again uncertainly.
The Greek turned upon him. “Fool,” he said, “I tell you—you cannot choose. You will do and say what is meant for you, and so will he. And to-morrow there shall be an end.”
Tea, tobacco, meditation, and sleep brought the inspector no nearer a solution of his problem. On the assumption that J. M. Pattison was the murdered man, there had still appeared no reason why Gregory Persimmons should have murdered him. It was true that so far he knew nothing of their relations. If Pattison had been blackmailing Persimmons now—but then why the scribblings in the Bible? Some ancient vengeance, he rather desperately wondered, some unreasoning hate? But he could not get away from a feeling that, even so, it was the wrong way round. Small nonentities did sometimes murder squires, bankers, or peers, but it was not normal that a squire should murder a small nonentity. Besides, religious mania seemed to come into it somewhere. But whether Mr. Persimmons or the deceased was affected by it, or both of them, the inspector could not decide. And why the devil? Why, in God’s name, the devil? The inspector’s view of the devil was roughly that the devil was something in which children believed, but which was generally known not to exist, certainly not as taking any active part in the affairs of the world; these, generally speaking, were run by three parties—the police, criminals, and the ordinary public. The inspector tended to see these last two classes as one; all specialists tend so to consider humanity as divided into themselves and the mass to be affected. Doctors see it in the two sections of themselves and patients potential or actual; clerics in themselves and disciples; poets in themselves and readers (or non-readers; but that is the mere wickedness of mankind); explorers in themselves and stay-at-homes; and so on. The inspector, however, was driven by the definitions of law to admit that the public was not as a whole and altogether criminal, and he inevitably tended to consider it more likely that Mr. Pattison should be guilty than that Mr. Persimmons should be. Only someone had strangled Mr. Pattison, and Mr. Pattison’s own expectation seemed to point direct to Mr. Persimmons.
Colquhoun went over in his mind the incidents which had led him to this point—his failure to connect anyone directly with the crime, his irritation with Stephen Persimmons and Lionel Rackstraw, his anger with Sir Giles, his discovery of Gregory’s connection with Stephen and Sir Giles, his not very hopeful descent on Fardles. His conflict with Ludding had relieved, but not enlightened him. He came to the events of the morning and the way in which the young stranger had recognized him. Of course, more people knew Tom Fool… no doubt, but he had a feeling that he knew the face. He thought of it vaguely, as Mrs. Lucksparrow and Ludding had done, as a foreigner’s. The Duke had thought of it in connection with the high friendships of his Oxford days; Kenneth as related to his intelligence of the Church and its order; Sir Giles had seen it with equal curiosity and fear—but this was almost purely intellectual, and did not suggest the revival of some past vivid experience. Gregory and the Archdeacon had answered to it more passionately, as somehow symbolical of a mode of real existence; as Barbara had recognized in it at once the safety and peace which had succoured her in the house of the infernal things. Nor, had Gregory remembered it—but the crisis of Kenneth’s death had put it out of his mind—was it without significance that the Greek had seemed to feel a power moving under and through the activities of his opponents.
But these things were not known to Colquhoun, who, nevertheless, found himself trying to recollect who the stranger was. He had met foreigners enough in his life, and he was driven at last to believe that it must have been on a visit of the Infanta of Spain some time before that their meeting had taken place; he had interviewed enough members of the Spanish police then for more than one face to have been seen and since forgotten, till chance rediscovered it. Chance also had directed the conversation with Mr. Batesby to fear and his past experiences, and so to the appeal of the late James Montgomery Pattison. At least, chance and the stranger between them, for it had been he who had asked the occasional helming question. He tried to consider whether this stranger could have had anything to do with the murder, but found himself foiled; when his mind brought the assumed Spaniard into relation with any other being one of them faded and was gone. It was chance, of course; and chance had done him a good turn—up to a point, anyhow.
He took his troubles to the Assistant Commissioner the next morning, who listened to his report carefully, and seemed disposed to make further inquiries. “On Monday,” he said, “Colonel Conyers mentioned Gregory Persimmons to me as having taken part with him in a curious little chase after a chalice which had been more or less stolen by the Duke of the North Ridings and the Archdeacon of Fardles. This Persimmons assured us he wouldn’t prosecute, and that made it very difficult for us to move. But I went to tea with the Duchess on Tuesday and had a chat with the Duke.”
“And did he admit that he’d stolen it?” the astonished inspector asked.
“Well, he seemed to think it really belonged to the Archdeacon,” the Assistant Commissioner answered, “but he was rather stiff about it, told me he had reason to believe that the most serious attempts were being made to obtain possession of it, and even talked of magic.”
“Talked of what?” the inspector asked, more bewildered than before.
“Magic,” the chief said. “The Arabian Nights, inspector, and people being turned into puppy-dogs. All rubbish, of course, but he must have had something in his mind—and connected with Persimmons apparently. I had Professor Ribblestone-Ridley tell me what’s known about Ephesian chalices, but it didn’t help much. There seem to be four or five fairly celebrated chalices that come from round there, but they’re all in the possession of American millionaires, except one which was at Kieff I did wonder whether it was that—a lot of these Russian valuables are drifting over here. But I still don’t see why the Duke should have bolted with it, or why Persimmons should have refused to get it back. Unless Persimmons had stolen it. Could the deceased Pattison have been mixed up in some unsavoury business of getting it over?”
“Bolsheviks, sir?” the inspector asked, with a grin.
“I know, I know,” the Assistant Commissioner said. “Still, ‘wolf,’ you know… there are Bolshevik affairs of the kind.”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Colquhoun allowed. “But, then, did Pattison mean the Bolsheviks by the devil?”
His chief shook his head. “Religion plays the deuce with a man’s sanity,” he said regretfully. “Your clergyman told you he thought he was saved, and in that state there’s nothing people won’t say or do.”
“It
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