Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams (that summer book txt) 📕

answered. “Why does a man die but because he had not

driven strength into the imagination of himself as living?”

 

Sir Bernard put his hand in the pocket of his dinner jacket, but he

paused before withdrawing it, as the subdued but powerful voice swept

on. “Caesar had the secret then, and if Antony had had it too Europe

might have been a place of lordlier knowledge to-day. For he could

have destroyed Octavian and he and the Queen of Egypt in their love

could have presented the capacities of love on a high stage before the

nations. But they wasted themselves and each other on the lesser

delights. And what failed at Alexandria was unknown in Judea. Ah, if

Christ had known love, what a rich and bounteous Church he could have

founded! He almost conquered death in his own way, but he was slain

like Caesar before he quite achieved. So Christianity has looked for

the resurrection in another world, not here. The Middle Ages wondered

at visions of the truth—alchemy, sorcery, fountains of youth, these

are part of the dream. The Renascence knew the splendour but lost the

meaning, and it was tempted by learning and scholarship, and ravaged

by Calvin and Ignatius with their systems, and it withered into the

eighteenth century. They did well to call that the Augustan age, for

Caesar had fallen and Christ was but a celestial consolation. But the

time is come very near now.”

 

Roger said, “But how? but how?”

 

Considine answered, “By the transmutation of your energies, evoked by

poetry or love or any manner of ecstasy, into the power of a greater

ecstasy.”

 

The photograph in Sir Bernard’s hand dropped on to the table; leaning

forward, he said, his eyes bright with a great curiosity, “But do you

tell us that you have done it?”

 

“I have done one thing,” Considine said. “I think I shall do the other

when I have made a place for it on earth. I live, except for accident,

as I choose and as long as I choose. It is two hundred years since I

was born, and how near am I tonight to any kind of natural death?”

 

He did not exalt over them or seem to speak boastfully. He leaned back

in his chair, and with an exalted certitude his eyes held them

motionless, while his voice put to them that serene inquiry. Clear and

triumphant, he smiled at them, and his gentlemen stood beside him, and

his wine, hardly touched, glowed in its glass, as his own spirit

seemed to glow in the purged and consummate flesh that held it. Philip

remembered Rosamond’s thrice-significant body, and yet this body was

more significant even than Rosamond’s, for here there arose no lovely

and mournful mist of unformulated desire. And Roger’s mind, but

half-consciously, sought to recall some great verbal wonder that

should serve to express this wonder, and failed. Sir Bernard’s

scepticism, forbidding incredulity, left him to savour the full

possession of an unrivalled and exquisite experience. Only the Zulu

king sat with his head on his hand and showed no knowledge of the talk

that proclaimed immortality present in the shape of a man.

 

The minutes seemed to pass as the others gazed, yet they did not seem

minutes, for time was lost. Nearer than ever before in their lives to

a sense of abandoned discipleship, the two young men trembled before

one who might be their predestined lord. It was Sir Bernard’s voice

that broke the stillness.

 

“And this other thing?” he said. “What else is there you foresee?”

 

Considine smiled once more. “This is only a part,” he said. “Because I

live, men shall live also. But they shall do greater works than I, or

perhaps I shall do them—I do not know. To live on—that is well. To

live on by the power not of food and drink but of the imagination

itself recalling into itself all the powers of desire—that is well

too. But to die and live again—that remains to be done, and will be

done. The spirit of a man shall go out from his body and return into

his body and revivify it. It may be done any day; perhaps one of you

shall do it. There have been some who tried it, and though they have

failed and are dead we know they were pioneers of man’s certain

empire. It is what your Christ announced—it is the formula of man

divinized—‘a little while and I am not with you, and again a little

while and I am with you’. He was the herald of the first conqueror of

death.”

 

There came at the door one of those discreet knocks, and a

gentleman-in-waiting went lightly and returned to murmur a message.

Considine listened and looked at his guests; then he added, ending

what he had been saying, “and I will show you the intention that

shall, one day, succeed.”

 

He murmured a few words to his servant who returned to the door and

went out. Considine looked round the table and rose. “Let’s go into

the other room for our coffee and perhaps you’ll be indulgent to me,”

he said. “I generally have music played after dinner—can you listen

for a few minutes without being bored?”

 

They murmured assurances, and stood up, following him as he moved from

the room and on to another door which a servant opened for them. It

was a long high room into which they came (to judge from the

proportions visible), but a part of it was cut off by hanging curtains

of an extraordinarily deep blue, a blue so deep that though it had not

the blaze it had the richness of sapphire. Sir Bernard exclaimed when

he saw it, and Considine said to him, “You see my travels also have

not been in vain.”

 

“Where did you find this, then?” Sir Bernard said. “It beats the best

stained glass I’ve ever seen.”

 

“It was woven for me once,” Considine answered, “in a village where

they see colour as well as St. John saw it in his vision. Sit down

here, won’t you?”

 

There were a group of comfortable chairs at the end of the room

farthest from the curtains, and to these the visitors were,

half-ceremonially, ushered. The gentleman in attendance offered cigars

and cigarettes to all but Considine; when they were settled, he went

over to the curtains and at a nod from his master drew them a little

back. Beyond, through the opening, they could glimpse similar panelled

walls to those between which they sat. Sir Bernard could see at the

farther end of the room a group of figures, a cello, and violins. The

gentleman in waiting, standing in the opening, made a sign with his

hand, withdrew to the door, and remained standing there. The music

began.

 

Both the Travers loved music; it was indeed—besides events—Sir

Bernard’s only emotional indulgence, and he was therefore more on his

guard against it than perhaps even his alert intelligence altogether

realized. Philip was not far advanced in its obedience; he, in a

despised but correct phrase, “knew what he liked,” and was humbly and

properly aware that “he didn’t know much about it.” He prepared to

listen, and for the first few minutes was engaged in trying to

recognize some of the phrases that floated to him. He seemed to have

heard them before, but he couldn’t place them; they were followed by

other sounds which he knew he couldn’t place. It was, he supposed,

“modern music”; there was at intervals something very like a discord.

But as he listened he began to lose touch with it, and to think more

and more of Rosamond. There was nothing surprising in this; he very

often did think of Rosamond, with or without music. But he was

thinking of her in harmony with the music. A rush and ripple of sound

went through him and in his brain it was not so much sound as

Rosamond’s visible form, the quivering line of her exquisite side; and

the violins swept up more quickly and her round full neck grew up, in

that beautiful dream and her chin became visible, and they slowed and

sighed, and there between her welcoming arms and her breasts was a

something of fullness and satisfaction which invited him, but not to

her. For the music that so created her form in his imagination at the

same time swept his imagination round and round her form, but its cry

drove him from her. She seemed to be there; almost she moved her hands

to him, the music moulded itself into her palms, but the force of it

kept him from them. More clearly than ever before in his waking

thoughts he saw the naked physical beauty that was Rosamond and would

have drawn her to his heart, but that, darkly and deeply as never

before, the energy of music which was in that beauty invited and

adjured him to attend to itself alone. His blood flowed, his breath

came heavily, in the growing intoxication of love, but the harmony

that caused it summoned him back from its image to its power. He felt

himself flowing away from Rosamond, with no less but with greater

passion than he had seemed to flow towards it. His passion had reached

a point of trembling stillness before, and had closed then, perhaps in

a kiss or an uncertain caress, perhaps in a separation and a

departure. But now it found no such sweet conclusion, and still as the

sources of his strength were opened up, and the currents of

masculinity released, still he, or whatever in that music was he,

seemed to control and compel them into subterranean torrents towards

hidden necessities within him. Flux and reflux existed at once, but he

could not name the end to which the reflux turned. It should be

dispelled into some purpose, but what? but what? He seemed to cry out,

and he heard an answer; he heard Considine saying, “It is two hundred

years since I was born, and how near am I to any kind of death?” That

might well be; this strength within might well carry him on through

two hundred years; time was only its measure, not its limit; its

condition, not its control. “Feed; feed and live,” he heard a voice

crying, and then the voice was itself but music, and the music

receded, and he heard it mighty at a distance, and then less mighty

but nearer, and at last, trembling all over, he realized how he was

sitting, shaken and troubled, in a chair by the fireside, and how

beyond the curtains the sound of the violins trembled also and died

away. He looked round and met Roger’s eyes, and knew that in them also

recognition was beginning slowly to return.

 

Roger never much cared for music, but he had not been sorry when it

was proposed to him; imposed upon him, he was inclined to think, would

have been a better term, since quite apart from politeness no-one

would have dared object to Considine’s obvious intention. At least,

Sir Bernard might; Sir Bernard could do most things, but Roger was

quite clear that neither Philip nor himself would. But he didn’t

object, even mentally; he rather welcomed the suggestion, since he,

not caring for music, would have a little while to order his confused

ideas. Considine’s conversation—especially with this two-century

climax—had got rather beyond them. Besides, he wanted to try and see

what he meant by agreeing to the statement that all great art seemed

to hold contemporaneous death and new life. He settled himself,

glanced indolently towards the distant musicians, and looked for a

line to experiment on. It ought to be a good line; he picked out, “And

thus the Filial Godhead answering