Descent into Hell - Charles Williams (an ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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There were motors, cars, or buses; apart from his unwillingness
to get other people into trouble, he feared lest he should be
merely hurt or maimed. He wanted to get himself completely out of
trouble. There were the half-finished buildings away behind him.
A magical and ghostly finger touched his mind; in one of those
buildings he remembered to have seen a rope. In a dim way, as he
sat gnawing his bread, he felt that this was the last trouble he
would give to his fellows. Their care this time would be as
hasty and negligent as ever, but it would be final. If the rope
were not there, he would find some other way, but he hoped for
the best. He even believed in that best.
He got up, sometime in the early evening, and began to plod back.
It was not far and he was not old. In covering the short
distance he covered age also, toiling doubly through space and
time. The Republic, of which he knew nothing, had betrayed him;
all the nourishment that comes from friendship and common pain
was as much forbidden to him as the poor nourishment of his body.
The Republic had decided that it was better one man, or many men,
should perish, than the people in the dangerous chance of helping
those many. It had, as always, denied supernatural justice. He
went on, in that public but unspectacular abandonment, and the
sun went down on him.
Under the moon he came on the Hill to a place which might have
been an overthrown rather than an arising city. The chaos of
that revolution which the Republic naturally refused had rolled
over it, or some greater disaster, the Vesuvian terror of
Pompeii, or an invisible lava of celestial anger, as that which
smote Thebes, or the self-adoring Cities of the Plain.
Unfinished walls, unfilled pits, roofless houses, gaping holes
where doors and windows were to be or had been spread before him.
His body was shaking, but he went on. Here and there a ladder
stretched upward; here and there a brazier burned. An occasional
footstep sounded. The cold moon lit up the skeletons of houses,
and red fires flickered rarely among them. He paused for a
moment at the edge of the town, but not in doubt, only to listen
if a watchman were near. From mere physical stress he whimpered
a little now and then, but he did not change his purpose, nor did
the universe invite him to change. It accepted the choice; no
more preventing him than it prevents a child playing with fire or
a fool destroying his love. It has not our kindness or our
decency; if it is good, its goodness is of another kind than
ours. It allowed him, moving from shadow to shadow, cautious and
rash, to approach the house where he remembered to have seen the
rope. All the. afternoon the rope had been visible to his eyes.
He knew exactly where it was; and there indeed it was. He slunk
in and touched it, shivering and senseless but for the simple
sense of life. The air of that infected place suffered his
inhalations and filled his lungs as he dragged the rope, gently
and softly towards the nearest ladder beyond.
The ladder frightened him, lest it should be too much boarded, or
else, bone-white in the moon, should, while he climbed, expose
his yet living body to those universals who would have him live.
But it was open for him, and he crouched within the lower shell
of a room, holding the rope, peering, listening, waiting for he
did not guess what until it came. He thought once he heard
hurrying feet at a distance, but they were going from him, and
presently all was again quiet. The moonlight gently faded; the
white rungs grew shadowy; a cloud passed over the sky, and all
was obscured. The heavens were kind, and the moon did not, like
the sun, wait for a divine sacrifice in order to be darkened. A
man served it as well. He rose, and slipped to the foot of his
ladder. He went softly up, as the Jesuit priest had gone up his
those centuries earlier paying for a loftier cause by a longer
catastrophe. He went up as if he mounted on the bones of his
body built so carefully for this; he clambered through his
skeleton to the place of his skull, and receded, as if almost in
a corporeal ingression, to the place of propinquent death. He
went up his skeleton, past the skeleton frames of the ground
floor, of the first floor. At the second the poles of the
scaffold stretched upward into the sky. The roof was not on, nor
his life built up. He dragged himself dizzily on to the topmost
landing, pulling the rope after him, and there his crouching mind
stayed. The cloud passed from the moon; another was floating up.
His flesh, in which only his spirit now lived, was aware of the
light. He still hoped for his best; he lay still.
Presently he peered over. The world allowed him to be capable
and efficient at last; no one had seen him. The long gutter of
his process was now coiled up into the rope he held; the room
with its voice was away in and looked on him from the silent
moon. He breathed, and a cloud floated over it again. There was
nothing more to happen; everything had already happened except
for one trifle which would be over soon. He tiptoed to the
scaffold pole on his right hand, uncoiling the rope as he went;
he pulled and gently shook it. It was slender, but it seemed
strong. He took one end of the rope, began to fasten it to the
end of the pole, and suddenly hesitated. It was a long rope;
suppose it was too long, so that when he jumped he fell to the
ground, not dead but broken. Then all those people more
fortunate than he, who had governed him and shoved him into the
gutter, would come to him again—he could hear a footstep or two
of theirs upon the ground now, and lay still while they sounded
and ceased—they would come to him and mind him and turn him out
again, down a miry path under a perpetual talking moon that knew
no wane. This was his one chance, for ever and ever, of avoiding
them. He knew he must not miss it.
He measured out the rope to twice the length of his outstretched
arms, and when the ruined city was once more silent he peered
over, letting that measured section run through his hands. The
end dangled much more than his height from the ground, and at
that he twisted and knotted the next yard or two around the pole,
straining against it, tugging it, making certain it could not
ease loose. The moon emerged as he finished, and in a panic he
dragged up the loose end, and shrank back from the edge, well
back, so that no watcher should see him from the road. There,
lying flat on his empty belly, he began his penultimate activity.
He knotted, as best he could, the end of the rope about his neck,
with a great and clumsy, but effective, slip knot. He tried it
again and again, more fearful than ever lest its failure, because
of his own, should betray him back into a life which his frenzy
felt as already ghostly. He felt that he could not bear that
last betrayal, for he would never have courage to repeat this
mighty act of decision. The dreadful universe perhaps would
spare him that, if he were careful now. He was very careful.
As, exhausted by the necessary labour, he lay flat on that stage
of the spectral ascent, amid the poles and unroofed walls, he did
not consider any future but unfortunate accident or fortunate
death. He was almost shut up in his moment, and his hope was
only that the next moment might completely close him in. No
dichotomy of flesh and spirit distressed or delighted him nor did
he know anything of the denial of that dichotomy by the creed of
Christendom. The unity of that creed has proclaimed, against
experience, against intelligence, that for the achievement of
man’s unity the body of his knowledge is to be raised; no other
fairer stuff, no alien matter, but this to be impregnated with
holiness and transmuted by lovely passion perhaps, but still
this. Scars and prints may disseminate splendour, but the body
is to be the same, the very body of the very soul that are both
names of the single man. This man was not even terrified by that
future, for he did not think of it. He desired only the end of
the gutter and of the voice; to go no farther, to hear no more,
to be done. Presently he remembered that time was passing; he
must be quick or they would catch him, on his platform or as he
fell, and if he fell into the safety of their hands he would fall
into his old utter insecurity. All he knew of the comfort of the
world meant only more pain. He got awkwardly to his feet; he
must be quick.
He was not very quick. Something that was he dragged at him, and
as he crawled to the edge dragged more frantically at something
still in him. He had supposed he had wanted to die, and only at
the last even he discovered that he wanted also not to die.
Unreasonably and implacably, he wanted not to die. But also he
wanted not to live, and the two rejections blurred his brain and
shook his body. He half struggled to his feet in his agony; he
twisted round and hung half over, his back to the abyss; he
clutched at the rope, meaning to hold it and release it as he
fell, to such an extreme of indecision pretending decision did
his distress drive him, and then as the circling movement of his
body ended, twining the rope once more round his neck, he swayed
and yelped and knew that he was lost, and fell.
He fell, and as he fell he thought for a moment he saw below him
a stir as of an infinite crowd, or perhaps, so sudden and
universal was it, the swift rush of a million insects toward
shelter, away from the shock that was he. The movement, in the
crowd, in the insects, in the earth itself, passed outward
towards the unfinished houses, the gaps and holes in half-built
walls, and escaped. When at last he knew in his dazed mind that
he was standing securely on the ground, he knew also, under the
pale light which feebly shone over the unfashioned town, that he
was still alone.
He stood for a moment in extreme fear that something would break
out upon him from its hiding-place, but nothing moved, and as his
fear subsided he was at leisure to begin to wonder what he had to
do there. He recognized the place; it was the scene of his last
job, the job from which he had been dismissed, the place to
which, for a reason, he had returned. The reason? He looked
round; all was quite still. There were no footsteps; there were
no braziers, such as he had half expected, for he had thought a
watch was set at night. There was no moon in the sky; perhaps it
was not night. Indeed it was too light for night; perhaps it was
dawn, but there was not yet a sun. As he thought of dawn and
another day, he remembered why he was
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