Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) š
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him, smiled at him, put up her mouth to him. It was night on the
Hill. They turned together and went down it; after the single
footsteps the double sounded again, his own and the magical
creatureās drawn from his own recesses; she in him, he in him. He
was complacent; they went home.
THE DOCTRINE OF SUBSTITUTED LOVE
Pauline sat back in her chair, and her arms lay along its arms. A
rehearsal was taking place in the ground of the Manor House, and
she had ended her part in the first act. She was free to watch
the other performers, and to consider the play once more. By now they
had all got more or less accustomed to that speaking of verse
aloud which our uneducated mouths and ears find so difficult,
being less instructed than the more universal Elizabethan must have bee.
Pauline remembered again, with a queer sense of inferiority, that no
Elizabethan audience, gods or groundlings, can have felt any shock
of surprise or awkwardness at a play opening with a high rhodomontade
of sound. No modern audience would put up with going to the first
night of a new play to hear the curtain sweep up on such an absurd
and superb invocation as:
Hung be the heavens with black; yield, day, to night;
Comets, importing changeā¦
and so on. On the other hand, they accepted plays beginning with
the most ordinary prose. Even rhodomontade demands a peculiar
capacity, and to lose its bravery perhaps hampers some other
bravery of the spirit; to lose even one felicity is to be robbed
of more than we have a right to spare. Certainly Stanhope had
spared them any overwhelming magniloquence; his verse was subdued
almost to
conversation, though as she listened and read and studied and
spoke it, she became aware that the rhythm of these conversations
was a great deal more speedy and vital than any she could ever
remember taking part in. All Mrs. Parryās efforts to introduce a
stateliness of manner into the Grand Ducal court, and a humorous
but slowāO so slowārealism into the village, and an enigmatic
meandering meditativeness into
the Chorus could not sufficiently delay the celerity of the line.
Once or twice Stanhope, having been consulted, had hinted that he
would rather have the meaning lost than too firmly explained, and
that
speed was an element, but after a great deal of enthusiastic
agreement they had all gone on as before. She herself had been
pleasantly ticked off by Mrs. Parry that very afternoon for
hurrying, and as
Stanhope hadnāt interfered she had done her best to be adequately
slow. It was some recompense to sit now and listen to Adela and
Mrs. Parry arguing with, or at least explaining to, each other.
Adela,
true to her principles of massing and blocking, arranged whole
groups of words in chunks irrespective of line and meaning, but
according to her own views of the emotional quality to be
stressed. She had unexpectedly broken one line with a terrific
symbolical pause.
āI am,ā she said to her Woodcutter, and pausing as if she had
invoked the Name itself and waited for its Day of Judgment to
appear, added in one
breath, āonly the perception in a flash of love.ā
Pauline encouraged in herself a twinge of wonder whether there
were anything Adela Hunt were less only; then she felt ashamed of
having tried to modify the line into her own judgment, especially
into a quite
unnecessary kind of judgment. She knew little enough of Adela,
and the result was that she lost the sound of the woodcutterās
answerāāA peremptory phenomenon of loveā. She thought, a little
gloomily, malice could create a fair number of peremptory
phenomena for itself, not perhaps of love, but easily enjoyable,
like Myrtle Foxās trees.
Malice was a much cosier thing than love. She was rather glad
they were not doing the last act to-day; that act in which Perielāmale
or female, no matter!āspirit, but not spiritualāsheābegan
and led the Chorus; and everyone came in, on the most inadequate
excuses, the Princess and her lover and the Grand Duke and the
farmers and the banditti and the bear; and through the woods went
a high medley of wandering beauty and rejoicing love and courtly
intelligence and rural laughter and bloody clamour and growling
animalism, in mounting complexities of verse, and over all,
gathering, opposing, tossing over it, the naughting cry of the
all-surrounding and overarching trees.
It troubled her now, as it had not done when she first read it, as
it did not the others. She wondered whether it would have
troubled her if, since the day of his first call, she had not
sometimes heard her grandmother and Peter Stanhope talking in the
garden. It was two or three weeks ago, since he had first called,
and she could not remember that they had said anything memorable
since except a few dicta about poetry-but everything they said was
full and simple and unafraid. She herself had rather avoided him;
she was not yet altogether prepared in so many words to accept the
terror of good. It had occurred to her to imagine those two-the
old woman and the poet-watching the last act, themselves its only
audience, as if it were presented by the
imagined persons themselves, and by no planned actors. But
what would happen when the act came to an end she could not think,
unless those two went up into the forest and away into the sounds
that they had heard, into the medley of which the only unity was
the life of
the great poetry that made it, and was sufficient unity.
Under the influence of one of those garden conversations she had
looked up in her old school Shelley the lines that had haunted
her, and seen the next line to them. It ran:
That apparition, solo of men, he saw;
and it referred, of course, to Zoroaster. But she couldnāt,
watching the play, refrain from applying it to Stanhope. This
apparition, sole of menāso far as she had then discoveredāhe had
seen; and she went back to wonder again if in those three lines
Shelley, instead of frightening her, was not nourishing her.
Supposingāsupposingāthat in this last act Peter Stanhope had seen
and imagined something more awful even than a vision of himself;
supposing he had contemplated the nature of the world in which
such visions could be, and that the entwined loveliness of his
verse was a mirror of its being. She looked at the hale and
hearty young man who was acting the bear, and she wondered whether
perhaps her real bear, if she had courage to meet it, would be as
friendly as he. If only the woodcutterās son had not learned the
language of the leaves while they, burned in the fire! There was
no doubt about that speech: the very smell and noise of the fire
was in it, and the conviction of the alien song that broke out
within the red flames. So perhaps the phoenix cried while it
burned.
Someone sat down in the next chair. She looked; it was Stanhope.
Mrs. Parry and Adela concluded their discussion. Adela seemed to
be
modifying her chunks of wordsāsharpening ends and pushing them
nearer till they almost met. Presumably Mrs. Parry was relying on
later rehearsals to get them quite in touch, and even, if she were
fortunate, to tie them together. The rehearsal began again.
Stanhope said āYou were, of course, quite right.ā
She turned her head towards him, gravely. āYou meant like that
then?ā she asked.
āCertainly I meant it like that,ā he said, āmore like that,
anyhow. Do you suppose I want each line I made to march so many
paces to the right, with a meditation between each? But even if I
could interfere itād only get more mixed than ever. Better keep
it all of a
piece.ā
āBut you donāt mind,ā she asked, āif Iām a little quicker than
some of them?ā
āI should love to hear it,ā he answered. āOnly I think it is
probably our businessāyours and mineāto make our feelings
agreeable to the company, as it were. This isnāt a play; itās a
pleasant entertainment. Letās all be pleasantly entertaining
together.
āBut the poetry?ā she said.
He looked at her, laughing. āAnd even that shall be Mrs.
Parryās,ā he said. āFor this kind of thing is not worth the
fretfulness of dispute; letās save all that till we are among the
doctors, who arenāt fretful.ā
She said suddenly, āWould you read it to me again one day? is it
too absurd to ask you?ā
āOf course Iāll read it,ā he said. āWhy not? If youād like it.
And now in exchange tell me whatās bothering you.ā
Taken aback, she stared at him, and stammered on her answer.
āBut-butāā she began.
He looked at the performers. āMiss Hunt is determined to turn me
into the solid geometry of the emotions,ā he said. āButābut-tell
me why you always look so about you and what you are looking for.ā
āDo I?ā she asked hesitatingly. He turned a serious gaze on her
and her own eyes turned away before it. He said, āThereās nothing
worth quite so much vigilance or anxiety. Watchfulness, but not
anxiety, not fear. You let it in to yourself when you fear it so;
and whatever it is, itās less than your life.ā
āYou talk as if life were good,ā she said.
āItās either good or evil,ā he answered, āand you canāt t, decide
that by counting incidents on your fingers. The decision is of
another kind. But donāt letās be abstract. Will you tell me what
it is bothers you?ā
She said, āIt sounds too silly.ā
Stanhope paused, and in the silence there came to them Mrs.
Parryās voice carefully enunciating a grand ducal speech to Hugh
Prescott. The measured syllables fell in globed detachment at
their feet, and Stanhope waved a hand outwards.
āWell,ā he said, āif you think it sounds sillier than that.
God is good; if I hadnāt been here they might have done the
Tempest. ConsiderāāYeaāall whichāit inheritāshall disāsolve.
Andālike thisāinsubāstantial pagāeant faāded.ā O certainly
God is good. So what about telling me?ā
āI have a trick,ā she said steadily, āof meeting an exact likeness
of myself in the street.ā And as if she hated herself for saying
it, she turned sharply on him. āThere!ā she exclaimed. āNow you
know. You know exactly. And what will you say?ā
Her eyes burned at him; he received their fury undisturbed,
saying, āYou mean exactly that?ā and she nodded. āWell,ā he went
on mildly, āitās not unknown. Goethe met himself onceāon the
road to Weimar,
I think. But he didnāt make it a habit. How long has this been
happening?ā
āAll my life,ā she answered. āAt intervalsālong intervals, I
know. Months and years sometimes, only itās quicker now. O, itās
insaneāno one could believe it, and yet itās there.ā
āItās your absolute likeness?ā he asked.
āItās me,ā she repeated. āIt comes from a long way off, and@ it
comes up towards me, and Iām terrifiedāterrified-one day itāll
come on and meet me. It hasnāt so far; itās turned away or
disappeared. But
it wonāt always; itāll come right up to meāand then I shall go
mad or die.ā
āWhy?ā he asked quickly, and she answered at once āBecause Iām
afraid. Dreadfully afraid.ā
āBut,ā he said, āthat I donāt quite understand. You have friends;
havenāt you asked one of them to carry your fear?ā
āCarry my fear!ā she said, sitting rigid in her chair, so that her
arms, which had lain so lightly, pressed now into the basket-work
and her long firm hands
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