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
so hopeless. She was trying not to look ahead for fear she saw
it, and also to look ahead for fear she was yielding to fear.
She walked down the road quickly and firmly, remembering the many
thousand times it had not come. But the visitation was
increasing-growing nearer and clearer and more frequent. In her
first twenty-four years she had seen it nine times; at first she
had tried to speak of it. She had been told, when she was small,
not to be silly and not to be naughty. Once, when she was
adolescent, she had actually told her mother. Her mother was
understanding in most things, and knew it. But at this the
understanding had disappeared. Her eyes had become as sharp as
when her husband, by breaking his arm, had spoiled a holiday in
Spain which she—“for all their sakes”—had planned. She had
refused to speak any more to Pauline that day, and neither of
them had ever quite forgiven the other. But in those days the
comings—as she still called them—had been rare; since her
parents had died and she had been sent to live with and look
after her grandmother in Battle Hill they had been more frequent,
as if the Hill was fortunate and favourable to apparitions beyond
men; a haunt of alien life. There had been nine in two years, as
many as in all the years before. She could not speak of it to
her grandmother, who was too old, nor to anyone else, since she
had never discovered any closeness of friendship. But what would
happen when the thing that was she came up to her, and spoke or
touched? So far it had always turned aside, down some turning, or
even apparently into some house; she might have been deceived
were it not for the chill in her blood. But if some day it did
not….
A maid came out of a house a little farther down a road, and
crossed the pavement to a pillar-box. Pauline, in the first
glance, felt the sickness at her heart. Relieved, she reacted
into the admission that she was only twenty-three houses away
from her home. She knew every one of them; she had not avoided
so much measurement of danger. it had never appeared to her
indoors; not even on the Hill, which seemed to be so convenient
for it. Sometimes she longed always to stay indoors; it could
not be done, nor would she do it. She drove herself out, but the
front door was still a goal and a protection. She always seemed
to herself to crouch and cling before she left it, coveting the
peace which everyone but she had… twenty-one, twenty…. She
would not run; she would not keep her eyes on the pavement. She
would walk steadily forward, head up and eyes before her…
seventeen, sixteen…. She would think of something, of Peter
Stanhope’s play-“a terrible good”. The whole world was for her a
canvas printed with unreal figures, a curtain apt to roll up at
any moment on one real figure. But this afternoon, under the
stress of the verse, and then under the shock of Stanhope’s
energetic speech, she had fractionally wondered: a play—was
there a play? a play even that was known by some? and then not
without peace… ten, nine… the Magus Zoroaster; perhaps
Zoroaster had not been frightened. Perhaps if any of the great—
if Caesar had met his own shape in Rome, or even Shelley…..
was there any tale of any who had?… six, five, four….
Her heart sprang; there, a good way off-thanks to a merciful
God—it was, materialized from nowhere in a moment. She knew it
at once, however far, her own young figure, her own walk, her own
dress and hat-had not her first sight of it been attracted so?
changing, growing…. It was coming up at her pace—doppelgaenger,
doppelgaenger—her control began to give… two… she
didn’t run, lest it should, nor did it. She reached her
gate, slipped through, went up the path. If it should be running
very fast up the road behind her now? She was biting back the
scream and fumbling for her key. Quiet, quiet! “A terrible
good.” She got the key into the keyhole; she would not look back;
would it click the gate or not? The door opened; and she was in,
and the door banged behind her. She all but leant against it,
only the doppelgaenger might be leaning similarly on the other
side. She went forward, her hand at her throat, up the stairs to
her room, desiring (and every atom of energy left denying that
her desire could be vain) that there should be left to her still
this one refuge in which she might find shelter.
VIA MORTIS
Mrs. Parry and her immediate circle, among whom Adela Hunt was
determinedly present, had come, during Pauline’s private
meditations, to several minor decisions, one of which was to ask
Lawrence Wentworth to help with the costumes, especially the
costumes of the Grand Ducal Court and Guard. Adela had said
immediately that she would call on Mr. Wentworth at once, and
Mrs. Parry, with a brief discontent, had agreed. While,
therefore, Pauline was escaping from her ghostly twin, Adela and
Hugh went pleasantly along other roads of the Hill to Wentworth’s
house.
It stood not very far from the Manor House, a little lower
than that but still near to the rounded summit of the rise of
ground which had given the place half its name. Lawrence
Wentworth’s tenancy was peculiarly suitable to the other half,
for his intellectual concern was with the history of battle, and
battles had continually broken over the Hill. Their reality had
not been quite so neat as the diagrams into which he abstracted
and geometricized them. The black lines and squares had swayed
and shifted and been broken; the crimson curves, which had lain
bloody under the moon, had been a mass of continuous tiny
movement, a mass noisy with moans and screams. The Hill’s
chronicle of anguish had been due, in temporalities, to its
strategic situation in regard to London, but a dreamer might have
had nightmares of a magnetic attraction habitually there
deflecting the life of man into death. It had epitomized the
tale of the world. Prehistoric legends, repeated in early
chronicles, told of massacres by revolting Britons and roaming
Saxons, mornings and evenings of hardly-human sport. Later, when
permanent civilization arose, a medieval fortalice had been
built, and a score of civil feuds and pretended loyalties had
worn themselves out around it under kings who, though they were
called Stephen or John, were as remote as Shalmanezer or
Jeroboam. The Roses had twined there, their roots living on the
blood shed by their thorns; the castle had gone up one night in
fire, as did Rome, and the Manor House that followed had been
raised in the midst of another order. A new kind of human
civility entered; as consequence or cause of which, this Hill of
skulls seemed to become either weary or fastidious. In the
village that had stood at the bottom of the rise a peasant
farmer, moved by some wandering gospeller, had, under Mary Tudor,
grown obstinately metaphysical, and fire had been lit between
houses and manor that he might depart through it in a roaring
anguish of joy. Forty years later, under Elizabeth, the
whispering informers had watched an outlaw, a Jesuit priest, take
refuge in the manor, but when he was seized the Death of the Hill
had sent him to its Type in London for more prolonged ceremonies
of castration, as if it, like the men of the Renascence, seemed
to involve its brutal origin in complications of religion and
art. The manor had been forfeited to the Crown, but granted
again to another branch of the family, so that, through all human
changes, the race of owners had still owned. This endured, when
afterwards it was sold to richer men, and even when Peter
Stanhope had bought it back the house of his poetry remained
faintly touched by the dreadful ease that was given to it by the
labour and starvation of the poor.
The whole rise of ground therefore lay like a cape, a rounded
headland of earth, thrust into an ocean of death. Men, the lords
of that small earth, dominated it. The folklore of skies and
seasons belonged to it. But if the past still lives in its own
present beside our present, then the momentary later inhabitants
were surrounded by a greater universe. From other periods of its
time other creatures could crawl out of death, and invisibly
contemplate the houses and people of the rise. The amphibia of
the past dwelt about, and sometimes crawled out on, the slope of
this world, awaiting the hour when they should either retire to
their own mists or more fully invade the place of the living.
There had been, while the workmen had been creating the houses of
the new estate, an incident which renewed the habit of the Hill,
as if that magnetism of death was quick to touch first the more
unfortunate of mortals. The national margin of unemployment had
been reduced by the new engagement of labourers, and from the
work’s point of view reduced, in one instance, unwisely. A
certain unskilled assistant had been carelessly taken on; he was
hungry, he was ill, he was clumsy and slow. His name no one
troubled to know. He shambled among the rest, their humorous
butt. He was used to that; all his life he had been the butt of
the world, generally of an unkind world. He had been repeatedly
flung into the gutter by the turn of a hand in New York or Paris,
and had been always trying to scramble out of it again. He had
lost his early habit of complaining, and it only added to his
passive wretchedness that his wife kept hers. She made what
money she could by charing, at the market price, with Christmas
Day, St. Stephen, and such feasts deducted, and since she usually
kept her jobs, she could reasonably enjoy her one luxury of
nagging her husband because he lost his. His life seemed to him
an endless gutter down which ran an endless voice. The clerk of
the works and his foreman agreed that he was no good.
An accidental inspection by one of the directors decided his
discharge. They were not unkind; they paid him, and gave him an
extra shilling to get a bus some way back towards London. The
clerk added another shilling and the foreman sixpence. They told
him to go; he was, on the whole, a nuisance. He went; that night
he returned.
He went, towards the buses a mile off, tramping blindly away
through the lanes, coughing and sick. He saw before him the
straight gutter, driven direct to London across the lanes and
fields. At its long end was a miserable room that had a
perpetual shrill voice.
He longed to avoid them, and as if the Hill bade him a
placable farewell there came to him as he left it a quiet
thought. He could simply reject the room and its voice; he could
simply stop walking down the gutter. A fancy of it had grown in
him once or twice before. Then it had been a fancy of a
difficult act; now the act had suddenly become simple.
Automatically eating a piece of bread that one of the men had
given him, he sat down by the roadside, looking round him to find
the easiest way to what had suddenly become a resolve. Soft and
pitiless the country stretched away round him, unwilling that he
should die. He considered. There were brooks; he knew it was
Comments (0)