Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗

a wood? and yet walk in it? He looked at that question

for a long time while he walked, and presently found he was not

thinking of that but of something else; he was slipping his

fingers along a wrist, and up an armonly a little way, for he

still wished to be led on the way, though everything was so quiet

he could hardly think there was any need. He liked going on,

away, away, away, from somewhere behind, or indeed outside,

outside the wood, outside the body, outside the door. The door

wouldn’t open for anyone; it was his door, and though he hadn’t

fastened it, it wouldn’t open, because it knew his wish, and his

wish was to leave the two who had worried him outside the door.

It was fun to think they were playing games on him when he wasn’t

there; running round under his windows, and he was quite away, and

they would never know, even if he saw them again, where and how

and why he had been. It was good for him to be here, and great

fun; one day he would laugh, but laughter would be tiring here,

under trees and leaves, leaves-leaves and eaves-eaves and eves; a

word with two meanings, and again a word with two meanings, eves

and Eves. Many Eves to many Adams; one Eve to one Adam; one Eve

to each, one Eve to all. Eve….

 

They stopped. In the faint green light, light of a forest, faint

mist in a forest, a river-mist creeping among the trees, moon in

the mist, he could just see the shape of the woman beside him. He

might be back again in Eden, and she be Eve, the only man with all

that belonged to the only man. Others, those whose names he need

not then remember, because they were the waking animals of the

world-others were inconsiderable to the grand life that walked now

in this glade. They hardly belonged to it at all; they belonged

outside, they were outside, outside the sealed garden, no less

sealed for being so huge through a secret gate of which he had

entered, getting back to himself He was inside and at peace. He

said aloud: “I won’t go back.”

 

His companion answered: “You needn’t go back really or you can

take it with you if you do. Wouldn’t you like to?”

 

It took a while for this to reach him. He said, at last: “This?

all this, d’you mean?” He was a little disturbed by the idea that

he might have to go back among the shapes that ran about, harsh

and menacing, outside the glade or the garden or the forest,

outside the mist. They betrayed and attacked him. One had made

fun of him and exposed him to her paramour. That was outside;

inside, he knew the truth, and the truth was that she was quite

subordinate to him. He breathed on her hand, and it was turned

into stone, so that she couldn’t carry it, but it sank to the

ground, slowly, in that misty air, and she was held there, crying

and sobbing, by the weight of her petrified hand. He would go

away for a year or two, and perhaps when he came back he would

decide to set her free by blowing on the stone hand. The whole

air of this place was his breath; if he took a very deep breath,

there would be no air left, outside himself. He could stand in a

vacuum, and nothing outside himself could breathe at all, until he

chose to breathe again; which perhaps he wouldn’t do, so that he

could infinitely prevent anything at all from existing merely by

infinitely holding his breath. He held his breath for a century

or so, and all the beasts and shapes of the wilderness, a tall

young satyr and a plump young nymph among them, who were dancing

to the music of their own chuckles, fell slowly down and died.

The woman now beside him didn’t die, but that was because she

could live without air, of which he was glad, for he wanted her to

go on living, and if she had needed air she would have died. He

would have destroyed her without meaning to.

 

She was saying, eagerly: “Yes, yes, yes: better than Eve, dearer

than Eve, closer than Eve. It’s good for man to be alone. Come

along, come along: farther in, farther in down under, down

under.”

 

Down under what? down under where? down under the air that was or

wasn’t? but he was there under the air, on the point of breathing

out everything that would be just right. Why had he been so long

content to have things wrong? it all came out of that silly name

of Eve, which had prevented him realizing that he was what

counted. Eve had never told him he had made her, and so he

wouldn’t make her again, she should be left all a twisted rag of

skin in the vacuum, and he would have a world in which no one

went to the City, because there was no city unless he—but no, he

wouldn’t have a City. Adela….

 

He found he had been holding his breath; he released it. He found

he was lying down, and that the woman was not there. He had

exhaled, with a deep permission to Adela to exist. Now he was

sleeping after that decision and act. He was awake in his sleep,

and the moon was pouring itself over him. He wasn’t on a rope

now. The moon was pouring down, quite out of the sky; presently

there wouldn’t be any moon, only a hole in the sky: down, down! He

felt hands moving over him, the moonlight changing to hands as it

reached him, moonhands, cool and thrilling. The hands were

delighting in him; these were what he would take back to his own

world, if he went. The moon would always be his, though all the

moonlight had poured down now, and there was a hole, a dark hole,

because the moon had emptied itself of its glory, and was not

there any more; he was at first in the smallest degree troubled,

for if odd things could disappear like this, could he be certain

that his own Adela would live? yes, because he was a god, and

sometime he would make another moon. He forgot it now; he was

quite given up to the hands that caressed him. He sank into

oblivion; he died to things other than himself; he woke to

himself.

 

He lay quiet; beyond heart and lungs he had come, in the depth of

the Hill, to the bottom of the body. He saw before him, in the

disappearing moonlight, a place of cisterns and broad tanks, on

the watery surface of which the moon still shone and from which a

faint mist still arose. Between them, covering acres of ground,

an enormous shape lay, something like a man’s; it lay on its face,

its shoulders and buttocks rose in mounds and the head beyond; he

could not see the legs lower than the thighs, for that was where

he himself lay, and they could not be seen, for they were his own.

He and the Adam sprang from one source. high over him he felt his

heart beat and his lungs draw breath. His machinery operated far

away. He had decided that. He lay and waited

for the complete creation that was his own.

 

The Adam slept; the mist rose from the ground. The son of Adam

waited. He felt, coming over that vast form, that Hill of the

dead and of the living, but to him only the mass of matter from

which his perfect satisfaction was to approach, a road, a road up

which a shape, no longer vast, was now coming; a shape he

distrusted before he discerned it. It was coming slowly, over the

mass of the Adam, a man, a poor ragged sick man. The dead man,

walking in his own quiet world, knew nothing of the eyes to which

his death-day walk was shown, nor of the anger with which he was

seen. Wentworth saw him, and grew demented; was he to miss and be

mocked again? what shape was this, and there? He sprang forward

and up, to drive it away, to curse it lest it interpolated its

horrid need between himself and his perfection. He would not have

it: no canvassers, no hawkers, no tramps. He shouted angrily,

making gestures; it offended him; it belonged to the City, and he

would not have a City-no City, no circulars no beggars. No; no;

no. No people but his, no loves but his.

 

It still came on, slowly, ploddingly, wearily, but it came: on

down the road that was the Adam in the bottom of Eden determinedly

plodding as on the evening when it had trudged towards its death,

inexorably advancing as the glory of truth that broke out of the

very air itself upon the agonized Florentine in the Paradise of

Eden: “ben sem, ben sem, Beatrice” the other, the thing seen, the

thing known in every fibre to be not the self, woman or beggar,

the thing in the streets of the City. No, no; no canvassers, no

beggars, no lovers; and away, away from the City into the wood and

the mist, by the path that runs between past and present, between

present and present, that slides through each moment of all

experience, twisting and twining, plunging from the City and earth

and Eve and all otherness, into the green mist that rises among

the trees; by the path up which she was coming, the she of his

longing, the she that was he, and all he in the she-patter-patter,

the she that went hurrying about the Hill and the world, of whom

it was said that they whom she overtook were found drained and

strangled in the morning, and a single hair tight about the neck,

so faint, so sure, so deathly, the clinging and twisting path of

the strangling hair. She whose origin is with man’s, kindred to

him as he to his beasts, alien from him as he from his beasts; to

whom a name was given in a myth, Lilith or a name and Eden for a

myth, and she a stirring more certain than name or myth, who in

one of her shapes went hurrying about the refuge of that Hill of

skulls, and pattered and chattered on the Hill, hurrying,

hurrying, for fear of time growing together, and squeezing her

out, out of the interstices, of time where she lived, locust in

the rock; time growing together into one, and squeezing her

out, squeezing her down, out of the pressure of the universal

present, down into depth, down into the opposite of that end, down

into the ever and ever of the void.

 

He was running down the path, the path that coiled round the edge

of Eden, and the mist swooped to meet him. He had got right away

from the road which was the shape of the Adam outstretched in the

sleep precedent to the creation of fact, the separation of Eve,

the making of things other than the self. He ran away into the

comforting mist, partly because he liked it better, partly because

there was nowhere else. He ran from sight; he found sensation.

Arms met and embraced, a mouth kissed him, a@ sigh of content was

loosed to him and from him. He was held, consoled, nourished,

satisfied. Adela; he; sleep.

 

The door swung after him. He was standing on Battle Hill, not far

from his house, but higher, towards the cemetery, towards the

height. There, waiting for him, was a girl. She exactly

resembled Adela. She came towards