Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗
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heart. “How can anyone else carry my fear? Can anyone else see
it and have to meet it?”
Still, in that public place, leaning back easily as if they talked
of casual things, he said, “You’re mixing up two things. Think a
moment, and you’ll see. The meeting it—that’s one thing, and we
can leave it till you’re rid of the other. It’s the fear we’re
talking about. Has no one ever relieved you of that? Haven’t you
ever asked them to?”
She said “You haven’t understood, of course…. I was a fool….
Let’s forget it. Isn’t Mrs. Parry efficient?”
“Extremely,” he answered. “And God redeem her. But nicely. Will
you tell me whether you’ve any notion of what I’m talking about?
And if not, will you let me do it for you?”
She attended reluctantly, as if to attend were an unhappy duty she
owed him, as she had owed others to others and tried to fulfill
them. She said politely, “Do it for me?”
“It can be done, you know,” he went on. “It’s surprisingly
simple. And if there’s no one else you care to ask, why not use
me? I’m here at your disposal, and we could so easily settle it
that way. Then you needn’t fear it, at least, and then again for
the meeting—that might be a very different business if you
weren’t distressed.”
“But how can I not be afraid?” she asked. “It’s hellish nonsense
to talk like that. I suppose that’s rude, but—”
“It’s no more nonsense than your own story,” he said. “That
isn’t; very well, this isn’t. We all know what fear and trouble
are. Very well-when you leave here you’ll think of yourself that
I’ve taken this particular trouble over instead of you. You’d do
as much for me if I needed it, or for any one. And I will give
myself to it. I’ll think of what comes to
you, and imagine it, and know it, and be afraid of it. And then,
you see, you won’t.”
She looked at him as if she were beginning to understand that at
any rate he thought he was talking about a reality, and as she did
so something of her feeling for him returned. It was, after all,
Peter Stanhope who was talking to her like this. Peter Stanhope
was a great poet. Were great poets liars? No. But they might be
mistaken. Yes; so might she. She said, very doubtfully: “But I
don’t understand. It isn’t your—you haven’t seen it. How can
you—”
He indicated the rehearsal before them. “Come,” he said, “if
you like that, will you tell me that I must see in order to know?
That’s not pride, and if it were it wouldn’t matter. Listen-when
you go from here,
when you’re alone, when you think you’ll be afraid, let me put
myself in your place, and be afraid instead of you.” He sat up
and leaned towards her.
“It’s so easy,” he went on, “easy for both of us. It needs only
the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to
yourself that since I am there to be troubled instead of you,
therefore you needn’t be troubled? And what can be easier than for
me to carry a little while a burden that isn’t mine?”
She said, still perplexed at a strange language: “But how can I
cease to be troubled? will it leave off coming because I pretend
it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?”
“It is not,” he said, “and you shall not pretend at all. The
thing itself you may one day meet-never mind that now, but you’ll
be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me.
Haven’t you heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s
burdens?”
“But that means-” she began, and stopped.
“I know,” Stanhope said. “It means listening sympathetically, and
thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I
don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think
when
Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he
Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more
like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden
is precisely to carry it instead of. If you’re still carrying
yours, I’m not carrying it for you—however sympathetic I may be.
And anyhow there’s no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish.
It’s a fact of experience. If you give
a weight to me, you can’t be carrying it yourself; all I’m asking
you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn’t sound very
difficult.”
“And if I could,” she said. “If I could do—whatever it is you
mean, would I? Would I push my burden on to anybody else?”
“Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself,” he
answered. “If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are
common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and
anger, you can. But if you
will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed
with us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give
your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s
burden.
I haven’t made the universe and it isn’t my fault. But I’m sure
that this is a law of the universe, and not
to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as not to carry
another’s. You’ll find it quite easy if you let
yourself do it.”
“And what of my self-respect?” she said.
He laughed at her with a tender mockery. “O, if we are of that
kind!” he exclaimed. “If you want to respect yourself, if to
respect yourself you must go clean against the nature of things,
if you must refuse
the Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you
should want so extremely to respect yourself is more than I can
guess, why, go on and respect. Must I apologize for suggesting
anything else?”
He mocked her and was silent; for a while she stared back, still
irresolute. He held her; presently he held her at command. A
long silence had gone by before he spoke again.
“When you are alone,” he said, “remember that I am afraid instead
of you, and that I have taken over every kind of worry. Think
merely that; say to yourself-‘he is being worried,’ and go on.
Remember it is
mine. If you do not see it, well; if you do, you will not be
afraid. And since you are not afraid….”
She stood up. “I can’t imagine not being afraid,” she said.
“But you will not be,” he answered, also
rising, certainty in his voice, “because you will leave all that
to me. Will you please me by remembering that absolutely?”
“I am to remember,” she said, and almost broke into a little
trembling laugh, “that you are being worried and terrified instead
of me?”
“That I have taken it all over,” he said, “so there is nothing
left for you.”
“And if I see it after all?” she asked.
“But not ‘after all’,” he said. “The fact remains-but see how
different a fact, if it can’t be dreaded! As of course it can’t—
by you. Go now, if you choose, and keep it in your mind till—
shall I see you tomorrow? Or ring me up tonight, say about nine,
and tell me you are being obedient to the whole fixed nature of things.”
“I’ll ring up,” she said. “But I… it sounds so silly.”
“It is silly sooth,” he answered, “and dallies with the innocence
of love. Real sooth, real innocence, real love. Go with God.”
They shook hands, and slowly, looking back once, just before she
reached the lane, she went out of his sight.
Stanhope, turning his eyes from her parting figure, looked at the
rehearsal and then settled himself more comfortably in his chair.
A certain superficial attention, alert and effective in its
degree, lay at the disposal of anyone who might need it, exactly
as his body was prepared to draw in its long outstretched legs if
anyone wanted to pass. Meanwhile he disposed the rest of his
attention according to his promise. He recollected Pauline; he
visualized her going along a road, any road; he visualized another
Pauline coming to meet her. And as he did so his mind
contemplated not the first but the second Pauline; he took trouble
to apprehend the vision, he summoned through all his sensations an
approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself to that
fear, laying aside for awhile every thought of why he was
doing it, forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the
strangeness and the terror of that separate spiritual identity.
His more
active mind reflected it in an imagination of himself going
into his house and seeing himself, but he dismissed that, for he
desired to subdue himself not to his own natural sensations, but
to hers first, and then to let hers, if so it should happen, be
drawn back into his own. But it was
necessary first intensely to receive all her spirit’s
conflict. He sat on, imagining to himself the long walk with its
sinister possibility, the ogreish world lying around, the air with
its treachery to all sane appearance. His own eyes began to seek
and strain and shrink, his own feet, quiet though actually they
were, began to weaken with the necessity of advance upon the road
down which the girl was passing. The body of his flesh received
her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of
her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for
her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He
endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution
there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central
mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never
understood, nor can. Since he could not take, nor would have
admitted, her hate and rejection, her passion was
received into the lucidity of his own spirit. The experience
itself, sharply as his body took it, was less sharp for him; not
that he willed it so, but because his senses received their
communication from within not from without, and there is in all
holy imagination from goodwill a
quality of greatness which purifies and stabilizes experience.
His goodwill went to its utmost, and utmost goodwill can go very
far. It went to all but actual vision, and it excluded his
intellectual judgment of that vision. Had he been asked, at that
moment, for his judgment, he would have answered that he believed
sincerely that Pauline believed sincerely that she saw, but
whether the sight was actual or not he could not tell. He would
have admitted that it might be but a fantastic obsession of her
brain. That made no difference to his action.
If a man seems to himself to endure the horrors of shipwreck,
though he walks on dry land and breathes clear air, the business
of his friend is more likely to be to accept those horrors, as he
feels them, carrying the burden, than to explain that the burden
cannot, as a matter of fact, exist. Given all reasonable talk as
well, wherever there is intelligence enough for exchange and
substitution to exist, there is place
enough for action. Only when the desire of an obsession has
carried its subject beyond the interchanges of love can the power
of substituted love itself cease. It would have been small use
for any adept, however much greater than Peter Stanhope, to have
offered
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