Shadows of Ecstasy - Charles Williams (electric book reader .txt) đ
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Year of the Second Evolution of Man.ââ
Roger stopped. Almost before his voice had ceased, Rosamond said:
âPhilip, darling, you havenât eaten anything. Have a cake?â Philip for
once took no notice. Roger said: âAbout a thousand wordsâa little
more. Allowing for recapitulations in its extremely rhetorical
styleâthe High Executive hasnât studied the best modelsâsay,
seven-fifty. Either pure waste or the most important seven-fifty words
Iâve ever read.â
âI havenât got the hang of it,â Philip said in bewilderment. âWhat
does it mean?â
âItâwhat did it say?âit calls to you more especially, Philip,â Roger
went on. âIt salutes you, because you have the vision of the conquest
of death in the exchanged adoration of love. It expects you to do
something about it all at once.â His eyes lingered on Isabel, and then
became abstracted. He sighed once and got to his feet. âIâll have some
more tea,â he said. âThe cup that cheers but not inebriates after
words that inebriate but do not cheer.â
Isabel, pouring out the tea, said: âDonât they cheer you, dearest?â
âNot one bit,â Roger answered. He leaned gloomily against the
mantelpiece, and after a pause said suddenly, âWell, Rosamond, and
what do you make of it?â
Rosamond answered coldly. âI wasnât listening, I donât think itâs very
nice, and really, Roger, I donât see why you need have read it.â
âThe High Executive of the African peoples asked me to,â Roger said
perversely. âWhat donât you like about itâgiving up intellect or
having the vision of the conquest of death?â
âI think youâre simply silly, Roger,â Rosamond exclaimed and stood up.
âAnd if it was written by a lot ofâŠa lot of Africans, that makes
it more disgusting than ever. I donât think it ought to have been
printed.â
Isabel spoke before Roger, sadistically watching Rosamond, could
reply. âDo you think itâs authentic, Roger?â she asked.
âMy dear, how can I guess?â her husband answered, more placably; then
he shifted his position, and added: âItâs authentic enough in one way;
there is something more.â
Isabel smiled at him. âBut need we think we didnât know it already?â
she asked softly. âIt isnât very new, is it?â
He was looking across the room at the high bookcase.
âIf they came alive,â he murmured, âif they are aliveâall shut up in
their cases, all nicely shelvedâshelvedâshelved. We put them in
their places in our minds, donât we? If they got out of their
bookcasesânot the pretty little frontispieces but the things beyond
the frontispieces, not the charming lines of type but the things the
type means. Dare you look for them, Isabel?â As he still stared at the
bookcase his voice altered into the deeper sound of a subdued chant.
âHe scarce had ceased when the superior fiend was moving towards the
shore:
ââHid in its vacant interlunar cave
And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake.ââ
Rosamond said sharply: âDo be quiet, Roger. You know I hate your
quoting.â
âQuoting!â Roger said, âquoting!â and stopped in despair. He looked at
Philip as if asking him whether he couldnât do something.
Philip didnât see the look; he was meditating. But the silence
affected him at last; he raised his eyes, and was on the point of
speaking when Rosamond interrupted, slipping her hand through his arm.
âDonât talk about it any more, darling,â she said; âitâs too horrid.
Look, shall I come as far as the Tube with you?â
He stirredârather heavily, Roger thoughtâbut as their eyes met he
smiled back at her, and only Isabelâs hand prevented her husband from
again quoting the High Executive on the exchanged adoration of love.
It was therefore with a slight but unusual formality that farewells
were spoken, and Philip departed for the station.
Roger remained propped against the mantelpiece, but he said,
viciously, âShe âwasnât listeningâ!â
Isabel looked at him a little anxiously. âDonât listen too carefully,
darling,â she said. âItâs not just cowardiceâto refuse to hear some
sounds.â
He pulled himself upright. âI must go and work,â he said. âI must
exquisitely water the wine so that it may be tolerable for weak
heads.â By the door he paused. âDo you remember your Yeats?â he asked.
âWhat rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born? I wonder. Also I wonder where exactly Bethlehem
is, and what are the prodigies of the birth.â
In the Tube Philip read the proclamation of the High Executive over
again, and, to the best of his ability, considered it. He was uneasily
conscious that Rosamond would have disapproved of this, and he
couldnât help feeling that it was only by an oversight that she hadnât
asked him to please her by leaving it alone. However, she hadnât, so
he was morally free. There stirred vaguely in his mind the subtler
question of whether he were free by a strict or by an easy
interpretation of morals: did exact justice, did a proper honour,
demand that he should follow her choice or insist on his own? But the
question never got as far as definition; he was aware of a difficulty
turning over in its sleepâslouching towards Bethlehem but not
reaching itâand almost deliberately refrained from realizing it.
Because he did want to know, more accurately, what this alleged
declaration had said about love. Unlike Roger and, fortunately for
him, like Rosamond, he had no particular use for the masters of verse.
He was therefore ignorant of the cloud of testimony that had been
borne to the importance and significance of the passion that was
growing in him. He had certainly heard of Dante and Beatrice, of
Tristram and Iseult, of Lancelot and Guinevere, but there he stopped.
He had hardly heard, he had certainly never brooded over, that strange
identification of Beatrice with Theology and of Theology with Beatrice
by which one great poet has justified centuries of else doubtful
minds. But by that secular dispensation of mercy which has moved in
the blood of myriads of lovers, he had felt what he did not know and
experienced what he could not formularize. And the words which he now
read did not so much startle his innocent devotion by their
eccentricity as dimly disturb him with a sense of their justice. He
had had no use at all for the African peoples except in so far as they
gave him an opportunity to follow his European habits in providing
Rosamond with a home and a car and anything else she wanted. The
prospect of the great age of intellect being done, also left him
unmoved; he hadnât realized that any special great age of intellect
had existedâexcept for a vague idea that a period of past history
known as the Middle Ages was considerably less intelligent than the
present, and that there had been a brief time when Athens, and a
rather longer time when Rome, was very intellectual. But when all that
seemed to him meaningless had been removed, there still remained the
fact that never before, never anywhere, had any words, printed or
spoken, come nearer to telling him what he really felt about Rosamond
than this paragraph which purported to come from the centre of Africa,
and from dark-skinned chiefs pouring up against the guns and rifles of
England. He knew it was silly, but he knew it said âadoration,â
âvision,â âapprehension of victory,â âconquest of death.â He knew it
was silly, but he knew also that he had felt through Rosamond, brief
and little understood, something which was indeed apprehension of
victory and conquest of death.
When he got home he found his godfather alone, and, rather against his
own intention, found himself approaching the subject. Caithness had
seen the proclamation and was inclined to be a little scornful of it:
which may partly have been due to the unrecognized fact that, while
Roger and Philip had both found their interior passions divined and
applauded, Caithness had had his referred to merely as âa misguided
principle.â He doubted the authenticity, and went on to add: âRather
bombastic, donât you think? I donât pretend to know what it means.â
Philip said, âRoger seemed quite impressed by it.â
âO Roger!â the priest said good-humouredly. âI called it bombast but I
expect heâd call it poetry. I donât mean that it hasnât a kind of
thrill in it, but thrills arenât the only thingâcertainly theyâre not
safe things to live by.â
Philip thought this over, and decided that he agreed with it. Only his
sensations about Rosamond were notâno, they were not thrills: and he
wasnât at all clear that they werenât things to live by. He said,
shamelessly involving Roger: âHe made fun of me about itâhe seemed to
think that part of it was meant for me. The paragraph aboutâO well,
some paragraph or other.â
Caithness looked down at the paper. âThis about the exaltation of
love, I expect,â he said, with a rather charming smile. âRoger would
be all in favour of that; the poets are. But perhaps theyâre more used
to living on the hilltops than the rest of us.â
âYou donât think itâs true then?â Philip asked, with a slight and
irrational feeling of disappointment. Irrational, because he hadnât
actually expected Caithness to agree with a gospel, if it was a
gospel, out of Africa. Sir Bernard had once remarked that Caithness
limited himself to the Near East in the matter of gospels, âthe near
East modified by the much nearer West.â
But over the direct question Caithness hesitated. âI wouldnât care to
say it wasnât true,â he said, âbut all truth is not expedient. Itâs no
use making people expect too much.â
âNo,â Philip said, âI suppose it isnât.â Was he expecting too much?
was he, in fact, expecting anything at all? Or could whatever he
expected or whatever happened alter the terribly important fact of the
shape of Rosamondâs ear? He also looked again at the paper, and words
leapt to his eyes. âBelieve, imagine, live. Know exaltation and feed
on it-â
âYou donât then,â he said, unwontedly stirred, âreally think one ought
to believe in it too much?â
âWhy yes, my dear boy,â the priest answered. âOnly these things are so
often deceptive; they change or they become familiar. One canât trust
oneâs own vision too far; thatâs where religion comes in.â
Sir Bernard would no doubt have pointed out, what did not occur to
either of the others, that this merely meant that Caithness was
substituting his own hobby for Philipâs. But he wasnât there, and so,
vaguely depressed, especially as he couldnât feel that Rosamondâs ear
would ever change, the young man turned the conversation, and shut
away the appeal of the High Executive for the time being in whatever
corresponded in his mind to Roger Ingramâs bookshelves.
The African trouble, however, displayed, during the next few days, no
possibility of being shut away. The steps which the Powers, on the
unanimous testimony of their spokesmen, were harmoniously taking
produced no effect against the rebels (as the enemy was habitually
called). It became clear that the âhordesâ consisted, in fact, of
highly disciplined and well-supplied armies. In the north of Africa
the territory held by the European forces grew daily smaller; all
Egypt, except Cairo, was lost; the French were pressed back to the
coast of Tangier; the Spaniards were hustled out of Morocco. The
Dominion of South Africa was sending out expeditions, of which no news
returnedâcertainly there had not been much time, but there was no
news at all, or none that was published. In England an official
censorship was attempted, but failed owing to the speedy growth of a
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