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
things drawing to their end, that she saw, away beyond the light
of the reading-lamp, a vague figure. It was in the shadows, but,
as if to meet her, it thrust its head forward, and so again
fulfilled its master’s wish. For to Adela there appeared,
stretched forward in the light, her own face, infinitely perfected
in sensual grace and infinitely emptied of all meaning, even of
evil meaning. Blank and dead in a spiritual death it stared
vacantly at her, but undoubtedly it was she. She stood, staring
back, sick and giddy at the horror, and she heard Wentworth say:
“Go away; I don’t want to help you; I don’t know you. Go away.”
He closed the window; he began to draw the curtains; the creature
disappeared from her sight. And by the wall of Gomorrah she
fainted and fell.
He saw her fall, and in his bemused mind he felt her as a danger
to his peace. He stood looking down at her, until, slowly turning
a stiff head, he saw the reflection of his doubt in the eyes of
his mistress, the gleam of anxiety which reflected his own because
it was concerned with himself. Reluctantly therefore he went out
and half-lifted, half-dragged the girl to the gate, and got her
through it, and then got her a little way down the road, and so
left her lying. He mistily wondered, with a flat realism, if she
would awake while he laboured, but the stupor of her horror was
too deep. She lay there prone and still, and he returned.
But, as if in that effort he had slid farther down the rope of his
dream, when he returned he was changed. He sat down and his
creature crept up to him and took and nuzzled his hand. As she
did so he became aware for the first time that he did not
altogether want her. She was not less preferable than she had
been for long to the real Adela, but she was less preferable now
than his unimaged dream. He wanted to want her; he did not want
her to go; but he could not-not as he had done. Even she was a
betrayal, she was a thing outside. It was very good, as it always
was, observant of his slightest wish. It sat by him, blinking at
the fire. This year, in his room curtained from the sun, it was
cold; he had had a fire kept up for the last few days, in spite of
his servants’ astonishment. He could not, as he sat, think
what he wanted, unless indeed to want her, for he feared somehow
to let her go: when he did he would be at the bottom of his rope.
He had been given rope enough, but there was a bottom, and a dark
hole, and him in the hole. He saw this dimly and was unwilling to
slide lower, yet not to slide was to stop out where other things
and other images were, and he was unwilling to be there also. He
looked round several times, thinking that he would see something
else. He thought of a girl’s body lying in the road, but he could
not get off his rope for that, not even if he wished, and most
certainly he did not wish. Something else: something connected
with his work, with the Grand Duke’s Guard. What Grand Duke? The
unbegotten Adela by his side said, in a low voice which stammered
now as it had not before, as if it were as much losing control as
was his own mind: “W-what Grand D-Duke, darling? w-what w-work?”
The Grand Duke’s Guard—a white square—a printed card—yes, a
notice: a meaning and a message, a meeting. He remembered now.
It was the annual dinner of a small historical society to which he
and a few others belonged. He remembered that he had been looking
forward to it; he remembered that he would enjoy going, though he
could not remember for a few minutes who else came to it. He did
not trouble to say anything, however; he was too tired-some drag,
some pulling and thrusting had exhausted him more than he knew; he
had to roll a body in the uniform of the Grand Duke’s Guard, or
to protect himself from hitting against its dark mass as he swung
on his rope; but that was over now, and he could forget, and
presently the two of them stirred and went—mumblingly and
habitually-to bed.
It could not be supposed, when Adela was found soon after by a
young constable on his beat, that Mr. Wentworth had had anything
to do with her. The constable found her name from letters in her
handbag, and presently he and others roused her people and she was
got to her own temporary place, her own room. She remained
unconscious till the morning; then she woke. Her temperature and
her pulse were at first normal, and at first she could not recall
the night. But presently it returned to her. She felt herself
running again from the opening graves to the sight of the
meaningless face; Hugh was running after her. Hugh was running
out of the graves and driving her on to meet the face. She too,
like Myrtle Fox, screamed and vomited.
Her mother rang up Hugh. There was an acrimonious conversation.
Mrs. Hunt said that she had trusted Adela to Hugh’s care. Hugh
said that Adela had insisted on being alone, which, considering
the rate at which she had run away, he felt was approximately
true. Mrs. Hunt said that Adela was actually at death’s door.
Hugh said she would probably be wise enough not to ring the bell.
Mrs. Hunt said that she herself insisted on seeing him; Adela was
in no state to see anybody. Hugh said he would give himself the
pleasure of leaving some flowers sometime. He knew he was
behaving brutally, and that he was in fact more angry and less
detached than he made his voice sound. He had left her to run,
but had presently gone round and had at last reached her home in
time to observe the confusion that attended her being brought
home. He would have spoken, but he hated Mrs. Hunt, and he hated
scenes, especially scenes at two in the morning, when his always
equable passion for Adela was at ebb. So he had gone home, and
indulged irritation. Nevertheless he intended to be efficient to
the situation; the flowers should be taken and Adela seen that
evening. He had no intention of leaving any duty unfulfilled-any
duty of exterior act. He did not quite admit that there was any
other kind, except in so far as outer efficiency dictated the
interior.
Pursued by Hugh in her nightmares, Adela had no sense of ease or
peace in his image. She ran in that recurrent flight from him
through an arch that was Wentworth towards the waiting face, and
as she was carried towards it, it vanished, and she was beginning
again. As she ran she repeated lines and bits of lines of her
part in the play; the part she was continually trying and
continually failing to learn, the part that repeated to her a
muddle of words about perception and love which she could never
get in the right order. Sometimes Mrs. Parry was running beside
her and sometimes Mrs. Sammile; at least, it had Mrs. Sammile’s
head though the body was Peter Stanhope’s, and it said as it ran:
What you want is perception in a flash of love; what you love is a
flash in a want of perception; what you flash is the want in a
love of perception; what you want is what you want…” and so
always. Others of her acquaintance were sometimes about her in
the dream of chaos which had but one element of identity, and that
was the race she ran and the conditions of the race. She came
again under the arch that was Wentworth, and this time there was a
change, for she found Pauline running beside her. Pauline’s hand
was in hers; she clutched it, and the speed of her running
dwindled, as if a steadiness entered it. She said in a squeak:
“Pauline!”
Pauline, leaning over the bed, and feeling her hand so fiercely
held—she had called as soon as she heard Adela was ill—said:
“Yes, my dear?”
Her voice gave its full value to the last word: it rang in the air
of the dream, a billow of comprehensible sound.
Adela stopped running. She said: “Will you help me?” “Of
course,” Pauline said, thinking rather ruefully of asking
Stanhope. “What do you want me to do?”
Adela said breathlessly: “I want to stop. I want to know my
part.”
“But you did know your part,” Pauline answered. “You knew it
beautifully, and you did it beau… you did it.”
Adela said: “No, no; I’ve got to find it, and she can give it to
me.”
“She?” Pauline asked.
“Lily, she… Sammile, whatever she’s called,” Adela cried. “In
the shed by the cemetery.”
Pauline frowned. She remembered Lily Sammile very well. She
remembered her as something more than an old woman by a gate, or
if, then a very old woman indeed by a very great gate, where many
go in who choose themselves, the gate of Gomorrah in the Plain,
illusion and the end of illusion; the opposite of holy fact, and
the contradiction of sacred love. She said, very quickly: “Let me
run for you, Adela; you can keep quiet. I can run faster than
you,” she added truthfully. “I’ve got longer legs. Let me run
instead of you. Don’t worry about Mrs. —” she could not say the
name; no name was enough for the spirit that lay in Gomorrah, in
the shed by the cemetery, till the graves were opened—above or
below, but opened.
Adela said: “No, no; no one can do anything. She can make my head
better. She can give me something. You can’t do anything; you
didn’t see it in the house.”
Pauline said: “But let’s try at least. Look, let me go and learn
your part.” She was not quite sure, as she said it, whether this
came under the head of permissible interchanges. She had meant it
but for the part in the play, but this new fashion of identities
was too strong for her; the words were a definition of a
substitution beyond her. Adela’s past, Adela’s identity, was
Adela’s own. A god rather than she, unless she were inhabited by
a god, must carry Adela herself; the god to whom baptism for the
dead was made, the lord of substitution, the origin and centre of
substitution, and in the sides of the mountain of the power of
substitution the hermitages of happy souls restored out of
substitution. A fanfare of recovered identities surrounded her;
the single trumpet shrilled into diversities of music.
Adela said: “In the shed by the cemetery. I shall know my part
there. Go and ask her.”
Her hand shook Pauline’s in her agitation, and the movement was a
repulsion. Pauline, flung off upon her errand, was by the same
energy repelled from her errand. Her own body shook; she was
tossed away from the grand gate of Gomorrah where aged Lilith
incunabulates souls. She sprang up, driven by necessity, and
Adela, opening her eyes which all this while had been shut, met
hers. They gazed for a moment, and then Adela screamed. “Go
away,” she cried; “you won’t, and if you do it’ll be worse.
You’re a devil; you want me not to know. Go away; go away.”
“Adela, darling,” Pauline said, oblivious of repulsion in a
distressed tenderness, “it’s Pauline. Don’t be unhappy;
Comments (0)