Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗

I’ll

do all I can.”

 

“You won’t, you won’t,” Adela screamed. “You’ll spoil everything.

You’re torturing me; you’re tearing my bones out of me; you’re

scraping my bones. I hate you, I hate you; go away.”

 

Pauline heard Mrs. Hunt running up the stairs, drawn by that

shriek of denial. She exclaimed, torn herself by so much pain:

“I’ll go, I promise. If you want-”

 

“No,” Adela screamed, throwing her arm over her eyes, “you’ll hurt

us all. You don’t care about us; you don’t love any of us.

You’ll help Hugh to shut me up in the graves with it; he’s got

something in his room… it isn’t me… it isn’t…”

 

Her mother was by her, murmuring and soothing; her single look

told Pauline to go, and she went. She let herself out of the

house, and walked up the street, trying to settle her mind. It

ought to be possible to determine what to do. Was it good for

Adela, but who was to decide what was good for Adela? She-or

Adela? Or someone else? Peter? but she wouldn’t ask Peter, only

what would he say if she did? “The Omnipotence”? Coming on the

word, she considered it, and it worked upward to her freeing. She

would do what Adela wanted, for it was Adela’s need, and she had

no reason against; she would do it in the Omnipotence, in the wood

where leaves sang. Whoever was found there was subject to it, to

the law of exchanged good. The Hill rose before her in the

sunshine, and on its farther side the place from which her twin,

now deeply one with her, had come. The mountains of impersonality

have yet their hidden sides, and she was climbing towards them, in

the point which was one with the universe. She knew herself going

towards a thing that must be done. The growth of earth into

heaven and heaven into earth approached in time a point it had

already occupied in space. She could see no one else in the

streets; she went lonely, and repeated to herself as she went

those lines in Which Peter’s style individualized felicity. Up,

and still up… where the brigands hid in a shelter and cave of

the wood, and shared but did not exchange. Oh, happy and happy to

have attributions of property for convenience of grace; thrice-happy that convenience of grace could dispose of property: tam

antiqua, tam nova, vita nova, nova creatura, a new creature, no

more in any sense but new, not opposed to the

old, but in union with the old; new without any trick of

undermeaning, new always, and now new. Up, and up, and presently

down again a little; she was looking out towards the City where

she was to be. She saw, away over open ground, the smoke of a

train, it was carrying to the City some of those who lived or

had lived upon the Hill and were leaving it or flying from it.

Was the rest of the world shaken with entranced joy? Perhaps that

was not discoverable, for speech of such things came only when it

was permitted, and to one the world was new and to one not, to one

redeemed and to one not. Yet beyond such differences there lay

some act, and this was so whether or not, known or not. Perhaps

to Peter tomorrow—no, tonight, for she herself must leave the

Hill tomorrow, and never before had parting held such joy.

Parting was a fact; all facts are joyous; therefore parting was

joyous. With that unnecessary syllogism delicately exhibiting

itself as a knowledge of truth, she found herself at the shed by

the hill.

 

There it was. She had seen it a hundred times. The rough door as

usual was swung to. She looked at it. This then was

where Lily Sammile lived? “I could live in a nutshell and count

myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad

dreams.” Was the counting of oneself king of space when one lived

in a nutshell one of the bad dreams? Unheard melodies—the rigid

figures on the Grecian vase? To enjoy nutshell as nutshell, vase

as vase! She rapped at the door; there came no other sound. She

rapped again; as if the wood thinned before her, she heard a quick

breathing from within. She did not knock again; she laid a hand

on the door and gently pressed.

 

It swung. She peered in. It was dark inside and very long and

narrow and deep. Its floor slid away, hundreds of yards downward.

There was no end to that floor. A little distance within the shed

the woman was sitting on the earth, where the floor began to

slope. She was not alone; the occupiers of the broken-up graves

were with her. They were massed, mostly, about the doorway; in

the narrow space there was room for infinities. They were

standing there, looking at their nurse, and they were hungry. The

faces—those that were still faces—were bleak with a dreadful

starvation. The hunger of years was in them, and also a

bewildered surprise, as if they had not known they were starved

till now. The nourishment of the food of all their lives had

disappeared at once, and a great void was in their minds and a

great sickness. They knew the void and the sickness. The

nourishment drawn from full lives had carried Margaret Anstruther

and her peers over the bare mountain, and they had passed, but

when the sun of the mountain struck on the people of infinite

illusion it struck on all their past lives and they lived at last

in the starvation they had sought. Religion or art, civic sense

or sensual desire, or whatever had drugged the spirit with its own

deceit, had been drawn from them; they stared famished at the dry

breasts of the ancient witch. They had been freed from the grave,

and had come, in their own faint presences, back to the Hill they

knew, but they could not come farther on to the Hill, in the final

summer of mortality, than to this mere outbuilding. Their

enchantress sat there, the last illusion still with her, the

illusion of love itself, she could not believe her breasts were

dry. She desired infinitely to seem to give suck; she would be

kind and good, she who did not depend, on whom others had

depended. They stood there, but she would not see them; she who

was the wife of Adam before Eve, and for salvation from whom Eve

was devised after the mist had covered the land of Eden. She

would not see, and she would not go to the door because of that

unacknowledged crowd, but she sat there, cut off from the earth

she had in her genius so long universally inhabited, gazing,

waiting, longing for some of the living to enter, to ask her for

oblivion and the shapes with which she enchanted oblivion. No one

came; oblivion had failed. Her dead had returned to her; her

living were left without her. The door swung.

 

Pauline saw her sitting, an old woman crouched on the ground. As

the girl gazed the old woman stirred and tried to speak; there

issued from her lips a meaningless gabble, such gabble as Dante,

inspired, attributes to the guardian of all the circles of hell.

The angelic energy which had been united with Pauline’s mortality

radiated from her; nature, and more than nature, abhors a vacuum.

Her mind and senses could not yet receive comprehensibly the

motions of the spirit, but that adoring centre dominated her, and

flashes of its great capacity passed through her, revealing, if

but in flashes, the single world of existence. Otherwise, the

senses of her redeemed body were hardly capable yet of fruition;

they had to grow and strengthen till, in their perfection, they

should give to her and the universe added delight. They now

failed from their beatitude, and lived neither with intuitive

angelic knowledge nor immediate angelic passage, but with the

slower movement of the ancient, and now dissolving, earth.

 

Lilith, checked in her monotonous gabble by the radiant vision who

let in the sun’s new light, stared at it with old and

blinking eyes. She saw the shape of the woman; and did not know

beatitude, however young. She supposed this also to be in need of

something other than the Omnipotence. She said, separating with

difficulty words hardly distinguishable from gabble: “I can help

you.”

 

“That’s kind of you,” Pauline answered, “but I haven’t come to you

for myself.”

 

“I can help anyone,” the old woman said, carefully enunciating the

lie.

 

Pauline answered again: “Adela Hunt wants you.” She could and

would say no more and no less. She recommended the words to the

Omnipotence (which, she thought, it was quite certain that Adela

Hunt did want, in one or both senses of the word).

 

The other said, in a little shriek of alarm, such as an old

woman pretending youth might have used for girlish fun, “I won’t

go out, you know. She must come here.”

 

“She can’t do that,” Pauline said, “because she’s ill.”

 

“I can cure everyone,” the other answered, “anyone and everyone.

You.”

 

“Thank you very much, but I don’t want anything,” Pauline said.

 

The figure on the earth said: “You must. Everyone wants

something. Tell me what you want.”

 

Pauline answered: “But I don’t. You can’t think how I don’t. How

could I want anything but what is?”

 

The other made in the gloom a motion as if to crawl forward.

Illusion, more lasting than in any of her victims, was in her. At

the moment of destruction she still pressed nostrums upon the

angelic visitor who confronted her. She broke again into gabble,

in which Pauline could dimly make out promises, of health, of

money, of life, or their appearances, of good looks and good luck,

or a belief in them, of peace and content, or a substitute for

them. She could almost have desired to find it in her to pretend

to be in need, to take pity, and herself to help the thing that

offered help, to indulge by her own goodwill the spiritual

necromancy of Gomorrah. It was not possible. The absolute and

entire sufficiency of existence rose in her. She could no more

herself deny than herself abandon it. She could ask for nothing

but what was-life in the instant mode of living. She said: “O

don’t, don’t.”

 

The woman seemed to have drawn nearer, through that wriggling upon

the ground; an arm poked out, and a hand clutched, too far off to

catch. A voice rose: “Anything, everything; everything, anything;

anything, everything; every—”

 

“But I don’t want anything,” Pauline cried out; and as she heard

her own vain emphasis, added with a little despairing laugh: “How

can I tell you? I only want everything to be as it is-for myself,

I mean.”

 

“Change,” said the shape. “I don’t change.”

 

Pauline cried out: “And if it changes, it shall change as it must,

and I shall want it as it is then.” She laughed again at the

useless attempt to explain.

 

At the sound of that laugh Lilith stopped, in movement and speech,

and all the creatures that stood within vision turned their heads.

The sterile silence of the hidden cave exposed itself, and the

single laughter of the girl ran over it, and after the laughter

the silence itself awoke. As if the very air emanated power, the

stillness became warm; a haze of infinite specks of gold filled

the darkness, as if the laughter had for a moment made its joy,

and more than its joy, visible. The sombre air of the chill city

of the plain was pierced by the joy of the