Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
- Performer: -
Book online «Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗». Author Charles Williams
now. I didn’t mean to talk so much.”
Margaret glanced at her, and said in a whisper: “But I’d so much
rather die talking.” All talk of the divine thing was pleasant to
her, even if this beating of wings in the net, wings so dear and
so close, was exhausting in the thin air. Pauline, looking down
for a second after her good-night, thought that a change had taken
place. The eyes had closed, though the girl was by no means sure
that they were not as alert now as they had been when they were
open and watching.
Yet a proportion between the old woman and external things had
been withdrawn; another system of relations might have been
established, but if so it was unapprehensible by others. But the
change in customary relations was definitely apprehensible. She
looked small, and yet small was hardly the word; she was
different. The body had been affected by a change of direction in
the spirit, and only when the spirit was removed would it regain
for a little while its measurable place amongst measurable things.
It could be served and aided; but the ceremonies of service were
now made to something strange that existed among them. The
strangeness communicated itself, by a kind of opposition, to the
very bed in which that body was stretched; it became a mound of
earth lifted up to bear the visiting victim. The woman who was
their companion had half-changed into a visitor from another
place, a visitor who knew nothing of the world to which she was
still half-native. The unknown and the known mingled, as if those
two great parents of humanity allowed their mingled powers to be
evident to whoever watched. The mound, in the soft light of the
room, presented itself to Pauline as if its low height was the
crown and peak of a life; the longjourney had ended on this
cavity in the rounded summit of a hill. She considered it gravely
so before she turned and, leaving the nurse in charge, went to her
own room.
She was not asleep when later in the night she was called. Her
grandmother, the nurse said, needed her. Pauline pulled a
dressing-gown on her and went across. Mrs. Anstruther was sitting
in the bed, propped by pillows; her eyes looking away out of the
room. As if she dared not turn her gaze away, she said, as
Pauline came up: “Is that you, darling?”
“Me,” the girl answered. “Did you want me?”
“Will you do something for me?” Mrs. Anstruther said. “Something
rather odd?”
“Why, of course,” the girl said. “Anything. What is it?”
“Would you be so very charming as to go out and see if anyone
wants you?” Mrs. Anstruther said, quite distinctly. “Up by
Mr. Wentworth’s.”
“She’s wandering,” the nurse whispered. Pauline, used to Mrs.
Anstruther’s extremely unwandering habits, hesitated to
agree. But it was certainly rather odd. She said, with a
tenderness a little fractured by doubt, “Wants me, darling?
Now?”
“Of course, now,” her grandmother answered. “That’s the point. I
think perhaps he ought to get back to the City.” She looked round
with a little sigh. “Will you?”
Pauline had been about to make the usual unfelicitous efforts of
the healthy to persuade the sick that they are being rightly
served. But she could not do it. No principle and no wisdom
directed her, nor any conscious thought of love. She merely could
not do it. She said: “By Mr. Wentworth’s? Very well, darling.”
She could have helped, but did not, adding: “I don’t think it’s
very likely.”
“No,” said Margaret, and Pauline was gripped by a complete sense
of folly. “‘I don’t think it’s… No.’” She said:
“I don’t know a thing. I’ll go.” And turned. The nurse said as
she moved to the door: “Sweet of you to be so nice. Come back in
ten minutes or so. She won’t realize the time.”
“I’m going,” Pauline said, distantly, and distinctly, “as far as
Mr. Wentworth’s. I shall be as quick as I can.” She saw a protest
at the nurse’s mouth, and added: “At once.”
She dressed quickly. Even so, in spite of her brave words to the
nurse, her doubts were quicker. In spite of her intention, she
reasoned against her promise. Three words dogmatized definition
at her: “Her mind’s wandering; her mind’s wandering.” Why, obeying
that wandering mind, should she herself wander on the Hill? Why,
in a lonely street, under the pale shining sky, should she risk
the last dreadful meeting? The high clock struck one; time drew to
the night’s nadir. Why go? why go? Sit here, she said, almost
aloud, and say “Peace”. Is it peace, jehu? cry peace where there
is no peace; faciunt solitudinem et Pacem vocant. She would make
a solitude round the dying woman and call it peace; the dying
woman would die and never know, or dying know and call it well;
the dying woman that would not die but see, or die
and see; and dead, see and know—know the solitude that her
granddaughter had called peace. Up and up, the wind was rising,
and the shuffle of leaves under the moon, and nothing was there
for her to find, but to find nothing now was to be saved from
finding nothing in the place where whatever she now did was hid
and kept and saved. The edge of the other world was running up
along the sky, the world where everyone carried themselves but
everyone carried someone else’s grief—Alice in Wonderland, sweet
Alice, Alice sit by the fire, the fire burned: who sat by the fire
that burned a man in another’s blood on the grass of a poet’s
houses where things were given backward, and rules were against
rights and rights against rules, and a ghost in the fire was a
ghost in the street, and the thing that had been was the thing
that was to be and it was coming, was coming; what was coming;
what but herself? she was coming, she was coming, up the street
and the wind; herself—a terrible good, terror and error, but the
terror was error, and the error was in the terror, and now all
were in him, for he had taken them into himself, and he was
coming, down all the roads of Battle Hill, closing them in him,
making them straight: make straight the highways before our God,
and they were not for God took them, in the world that was running
through this, its wheel turning within this world’s air, rolling
out of the air. No peace but peace, no joy but joy, no love but
love. Behold, I come quickly. Amen, even so, come….
She caught up a hat and flung herself at the door, her blood
burning within her, as the house burned around. The air was fiery
to her sense; she breathed a mingled life, as if the flames of
poetry and martyrdom rose together in the air within the air, and
touched the outer atmosphere with their interior force.
She ran down the stairs, but already her excitement, being more
excitement than strength, flagged and was pain. Action was not
yet so united with reaction as to become passion. The doubt she
must have of what was to come took its old habitual form. Her
past pretended to rule her, defacto sovereign, and her past was
fear. It was midnight, the Hill was empty, she was alone. It
could only be that her ghostly image lay, now, in wait for her to
emerge into its desolate kingdom. She grit her teeth. The thing
must be done. She had promised her grandmother; more important
still, she had promised the nurse. She might have confided to the
first what she would never concede to the second, It was then that
she saw the telephone.
At first, as she paused a minute in the hall, to settle herself—
to settle her determination that that woman who had talked of
wandering minds should not find her foolish expectation fulfilled—at
first she did not think of Stanhope; then inevitably, with her
grief stirring in her, she did. To think of him was to think, at
once, of speaking to him. The telephone. She thought: “One
o’clock and he’s asleep; don’t be a fool.” She thought: “‘Any
hour of the day or night’.” She thought: “I oughtn’t to disturb
him,” and then with the clarity of that world of perpetual
exchange: “I ought to disturb him.” It was her moral duty to wake
him up, if he was asleep and she could. She smiled, standing in
the hall where the new light of the summer sky dimly shone.
Reversal had reached its extreme; she who had made a duty of her
arrogance had found a duty in her need. Her need retreated
beneath the shock. At precisely the moment when she could have
done without him she went to ask for him; the glad and flagrant
mockery of the Omnipotence lay peaceful in her heart as she
dialled his number, her finger slowing a little on the last
figure, as if the very notion were a delight too sweet to lose by
haste. The receiver at her ear, as if she leant to it, she
waited. Presently she heard his voice.
She said, again grave: “Are you awake enough to hear me?”
“Complete with attention,” he answered. “Whatever it is, how
very, very right of you! That’s abstract, not personal, Concede
the occasion.”
“The occasion,” she said, “is that I’m going out up the Hill
because my grandmother’s asked me to, and I was a little afraid
just now… I’m not.”
“O blessed, blessed,” Stanhope murmured, but whether he thought of
her or the Omnipotence she did not know. He added, to her: “Go in
peace. Would you like me to come?”
“No, of course not,” she answered, and lingering still a minute
said: “I thought I wanted to ring you up, but when I did I didn’t.
Forgive me.”
“If it gives you any pleasure,” he said, “but you might have
needed forgiveness in fact if you hadn’t. God’s not mine.
Pardon, Periel, like love, is only ours for fun: essentially we
don’t and can’t. But you want to go…. You’ll remember?”
“For ever,” she said, “and ever and ever. Thank you.” She put the
receiver firmly down, opened the door, and went out into the
street. The pure night received her. Darkness was thick round
the houses, but the streets lay clear. She was aware,
immediately, of some unusualness, and presently she knew what
it was. She was used to shadows lying across the pavements, but
now it was not so. On either side of the street they gathered and
blocked and hid the buildings, climbing up them, creepers of
night, almost in visible movement. Between those masses the roads
lay like the gullies of a mountain down which an army might
come—broad and empty, prepared for an army, passes already closed by
scouts and outposts, and watched by the dazzling flashes which now
and then and here and there lit the sky, as if silver machines of
air above the world moved in escort of expected power. Apart from
those momentary dazzling flashes light was diffused through the
sky. She could see no moon, only once or twice in her
walk, at some corner, between the cliffs of darkness, far away on
the horizon, she half-thought she saw a star-Hesper or Phosphor,
the planet that is both the end and the beginning, Venus, omega
and alpha, transliteration of speech. Once, far behind her, she
thought she heard hurrying footsteps, but as she went on she lost
them. She went quickly; for she had left behind her an
approaching point to which she desired
Comments (0)