Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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what they gaze. In the night she was withdrawn; the substance of
illusion in her faded, and alongside his heavy sleep she changed
and changed, through all degrees of imbecile decay, till at last
she was quite dispelled.
He was alone. He lay awake, and waking became aware of his
ancient dream. Now he was near the end of his journey. He saw
below him the rope drawn nearer and nearer to the wall, if it were
a wall. He looked up; above him the rope seemed to end in the
moon, which shone so fully in the dark, millions of miles away.
Down all those miles he had slowly climbed. It was almost over
now; he was always a little lower, and when he stood up he did not
lose the dream. Through his bathing and dressing and going down
and finding a taxi he was still on his rope. He felt once for his
watch, and remembered he had not got it, and looked up at the
shining silver orb above, and found that that was his watch. It
was also a great public clock at which he was staring; but he
could not make it out—moon or watch or clock. The time was up
there; but he could not see it. He thought: “I shall be just in
time.” He was, and only just; as close to its end as to the end
of the rope.
He got into his taxi. It went off along the High Street, and then
was held up behind a policeman’s arm. He was looking out of the
window, when he thought a creaking voice said in his ear, as if a
very old woman was in the seat beside him: “Madame Tussaud’s.” He
did not look round, because no one was ever there, but he stared
at the great building which seemed to glow out of the darkness of
the side of the abyss, and there rose in him the figure of what it
contained. He had never been there, though in a humorous moment
he had once thought of taking Adela, but he knew what was in it-wax images. He saw them-exquisitely done, motionless, speechless,
thoughtless; and he saw them being shifted. Hanging on his rope,
he looked out through the square of light in the darkness and saw
them all—Caesar, Gustavus, Cromwell, Napoleon, Foch, and saw
himself carrying them from one corner to another, and putting them
down and picking them up and bringing them somewhere else and
putting them down. There were diagrams, squares and rectangles,
on the floor, to show where they should go; and as he ran across
the hall with a heavy waxen thing on his shoulder he knew it was
very important to put it down in the right diagram. So he did,
but just as he went away the diagram under the figure changed and
no longer fitted, and he had to go back and lift the thing up and
take it off to another place where the real diagram was. This was
always happening with each of them and all of them, so that six or
seven or more of him had to be about, carrying the images, and
hurrying past and after each other on their perpetual task. He
could never get the details correct; there was always a little
thing wrong, a thing as tiny as the shoulder-knots on the uniforms
of the Grand Duke’s Guard. Then the rope vibrated as the taxi
started again, and he was caught away; the last vestige of the
history of men vanished for ever. Vibration after vibration-he
was very near the bottom of his rope. He himself was moving now;
he was hurrying. The darkness rushed by. He stopped. His hand,
in habitual action, had gone to his pocket for silver, but his
brain did not follow it. His feet stepped, in habitual action,
off the rope on to the flat ground. Before him there was a tall
oblong opening in the dark, faintly lit. He had something in his
hand-he turned, holding it out; there was a silver gleam as it
left his hand, and he saw the whole million-mile-long rope
vanishing upward and away from him with incredible rapidity
towards the silver moon which ought to have been in his waistcoat
pocket, because it was the watch he had overwound. Seeing that
dazzling flight of the rope upwards into the very centre of the
shining circle, he thought again, “I’m just in time.” He was
standing on the bottom of the abyss; there remained but a short
distance in any method of mortal reckoning for him to take before
he came to a more secret pit where there is no measurement because
there is no floor. He turned towards the opening and began his
last journey.
He went a little way, and came into a wider place, where presently
there were hands taking off a coat he discovered himself to be
wearing. He was looking at himself; for an instant he had not
recognized his own face, but he did now, over a wide shining oval
thing that reminded him of the moon. He was wearing the moon in
front of him. But he was in black otherwise; he had put on a neat
fantastic dress of darkness. The moon, the darkness, and the—
only no rope, because that had gone away, and no watch, because he
had done something or other to it, and it had gone away too. He
tried to think what a watch was and how it told him the time.
There were marks on it which meant something to do with time, but
he didn’t know what. Voices came to him out of the air and drove
him along another corridor into another open space. And there
suddenly before him was Sir Aston Moffatt.
The shock almost restored him. If he had ever hated Sir Aston
because of a passion for austere truth, he might even then have
laid hold on the thing that was abroad in the world and been
saved. If he had been hopelessly wrong in his facts and yet
believed them so, and believed they were important in themselves,
he might have felt a touch of the fire in which the Marian martyr
had gone to his glory, and still been saved. In the world of the
suicides, physical or spiritual, he might have heard another voice
than his and seen another face. He looked at Sir Aston and
thought, not “He was wrong in his facts”, but “I’ve been cheated”.
It was his last consecutive thought.
Sir Aston was decidedly deaf and extremely talkative, and had a
sincere admiration for his rival. He came straight across to
Wentworth, and began to talk. The world, which Wentworth had
continuously and persistently denied in favour of himself, now
poured itself over him, and as if in a deluge from heaven drove
him into the depths. Very marvellous is the glorious
condescension of the Omnipotence; the myth of the fire which was
rained over the plain now incarnated itself in Sir Aston Moffatt.
Softly and gently, perpetually and universally, the chatty
sentences descended on the doomed man, each sentence a little
prick of fire, because, as he stood there, he realized with a
sickness at heart that a voice was talking and he did not know
what it was saying. He heard two sounds continually repeated:
“Wentworth, Wentworth.” He knew that those two noises meant
something, but he could not remember what. If all the faces that
were about him would go away he might remember, but they did not
go. They gathered round him, and carried him forward in the midst
of them, through a doorway. As he went through it he saw in front
of him tables, and with a last flash of memory knew that he had
come there to eat and drink. There was his chair, at the bottom
left corner, where he had always sat, his seat in the Republic.
He went to it with an eager trot. It was waiting for him as it
had always waited, for ever and ever; all his life and from the
creation of the world he had sat there, he would sit there at the
end, looking towards the—he could not think what was the right
name for the tall man at the other end, who had been talking to
him just now. He looked at him and tried to smile, but could not,
for the tall man’s eyes were blank of any meaning, and gazed at
him emptily. The Republic deserted him. His smile ceased. He
was at last by his chair; he would always sit there, always,
always. He sat down.
As he did so, he knew he was lost. He could not understand
anything about him. He could just remember that there had been
one moment when a sudden bright flash had parted from him, fleeing
swiftly across the sky into its source, and he wanted that moment
back; he wanted desperately to hold on to the rope. The rope was
not there. He had believed that there would be for him a
companion at the bottom of the rope who would satisfy him for
ever, and now he was there at the bottom, and there was nothing
but noises and visions which meant nothing. The rope was not
there. There were faces, which ceased to be faces, and became
blobs of whitish red and yellow, working and twisting in a
horrible way that yet did not surprise him, because nothing could
surprise him. They moved and leaned and bowed; and between them
were other things that were motionless now but might at any moment
begin to move and crawl. Away over them was a huge round white
blotch, with black markings on it, and two long black lines going
round and round, one very fast and one very slow. This was time,
too fast for his brain, too slow for his heart. If he only had
hold of the rope still, he could perhaps climb out of this
meaningless horror; at least, he could find some meaning and
relation in it all. He felt that the great blotch had somehow
slid up and obscured the shining silver radiance into which a
flash out of him had gone, and if he could get the rope he could
climb past, or, with great shuddering, even through the horrible
blotch, away out of this depth where anything might be anything,
and was anything, for he did not know what it was. The rope was
not there.
He shrank into himself, trying to shut his eyes and lose sight of
this fearful opposite of the world he had known. Quite easily he
succeeded. But he could not close his ears, for he did not know
how to manage the more complex coordination of shoulders and arms
and hands. So there entered into him still a small, steady,
meaningless flow of sound, which stung and tormented him with the
same lost knowledge of meaning; small burning flames flickered
down on his soul. His eyes opened again in mere despair. A
little hopeless voice came from his throat. He said, and rather
gasped than spoke: “Ah! ah!” Then everything at which he was
looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he
also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing
together, because in this place they drew towards each other
from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went
they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not
he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it,
and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it
reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels
of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them,
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