Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams (that summer book txt) đź“•
"Not in so many words?" Philip asked.
"Contrapuntal," Sir Bernard said. "When you've heard as many speeches as I have, you'll find that's the only interest in them: the intermingling of the theme proposed and the theme actual."
"I can never make out whether Roger's serious," Philip said. "He seems to be getting at one the whole time. Rosamond feels it too."
Sir Bernard thought it very likely. Rosamond Murchison was Isabel's sister and Roger's sister-in-law, but only in law. Rosamond privately felt that Roger was conceited and not quite nice; Roger, less privately, felt that Rosamond was stuckup and not quite intelligent. When, as at present, she was staying with the Ingrams in Hampstead, it was only by Isabel's embracing sympathy that tolerable relations were maintained. Sir Bernard almost wished that Philip could have got engaged to someone else. He was very fond of his son, and he was afraid that the approaching marriage would
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it nor allow for it. It is a habit man yields to, no more; and I will
be lord of that customary thing as I am of all, and draw power and
delight from it as I do from all. Who follows?”
Isabel, as if from a depth of meditation, answered: “But those that
die may be lordlier than you: they are obedient to defeat. Can you
live truly till you have been quite defeated? You talk of living by
your hurts, but perhaps you avoid the utter hurt that’s destruction.”
He smiled down at her. “Why, have it as you will,” he said. “But it
isn’t such submission and destruction that man desires.”
There was a little silence; then he said again, speaking to Roger:
“What. then will you do?”
Roger looked down at the floor, and only when a much longer silence
had gone by did he say, “Yes; I’ll come. You’re right—I’d decided
already, and I won’t go back.”
“Then”, Considine said, “tonight you will be at Bernard Travers’s
house, for I shall come there. And don’t fear for your wife, whatever
happens. I will not destroy London tonight.”
Roger looked up again sharply. “But-” he began.
There were voices in the hall; Muriel’s, Rosamond’s, others’. Roger
got up, looking over his shoulder, and turned. Isabel and Mottreux
also rose: only Considine stood motionless. The door opened and
Rosamond came in. Behind her were uniforms—a police inspector
followed, and another, and two or three men. The inspector said: “Mr.
Ingram?”
“What’s this about?” Roger asked staring.
“We’ve had information that there’s a man here whom we want,” the
inspector said, looking round, and letting his eyes rest on Considine.
“Mr. Nigel Considine?” he asked.
Considine did not speak or move.
“I’ve a warrant here for your arrest,” the inspector said, “on a
charge of high treason and conspiracy to murder.” He showed a paper
and stepped across the room. Mottreux said something, and the
inspector glanced at him. But he halted a pace or two away from
Considine, it might be to give his men time to come up, it might be
from hesitation in the sudden oppression that began to fill the room,
as if invisible waters flowed through it. The air weighed on them,
stifling them with its rich presence; the inspector put a finger to
his collar as he poised watchfully. Rosamond sank heavily on to a
chair; Roger drew deep breaths, sighing as he did sometimes in his
passion after repeating mighty verses aloud. The air spoke; in the
voice of Nigel Considine the element of life, echoing from all around,
said: “Whom?”
The inspector struggled forward; it needed labour, so heavily was he
oppressed by the depths into which the air had opened. He took a step
and staggered as he did so. The eyes fixed on him saw him rock and
steady himself; he said, holding himself upright, “Nigel Considine,
I-”
“I am Nigel Considine,” his great opponent answered, and also moved
forward, and the quiver that went through them all answered the
laughter in the voice. The inspector reeled again, half-falling
sideways, and as he recovered footing a sudden hand went out towards
him-whether it touched him or not they could not tell-and he stumbled
backward once more. The wind swept into their faces, and on it a
ringing laughter came, and in its midst Considine went on towards the
door, with Mottreux by him, sending towards Roger one imperious glance
from eyes bright with joy. The uniforms thronged and shifted and were
in confusion, and wind swirled in the room as if strength were
released through it, and Roger, half-dazed, ran forward and saw the
two visitors already in the hall. The inspector came heavily and
blindly back; he called out; his men moved uncertainly after Considine
who paused, turned, and paused again.
“I am Nigel Considine,” he cried out. “Who takes me?”
He flung out his arms as if in derisive submission, and took a step or
two towards them. They recoiled; there was renewed confusion, men
pressing back and pressing forward, men exclaiming and commanding.
Someone slipped and crashed against the doorpost, someone else, thrust
backward, tripped over a foot; there was falling and stumbling, and
through it Roger saw the wide-armed figure offering itself in
laughing scorn. Then, with a motion as if he gathered up the air and
cast it against them, so that they blinked and thrust and shielded
their eyes, he turned from that struggling mass of fallen and pushing
bodies, and went to the front-door. A panting Muriel leaned against
it; he laughed at her and signed, and hastily she drew away, opening
it, and he and Mottreux went through.
Roger gazed after him “I have lived,” he sighed. “I have seen the
gods. Phoebus, Phoebus, Python-destroyer, hear and save.”
Philip jumped on to a bus—any bus—the first he saw. He had been
walking for ever so long, and he must sit down. But also he must be
moving; he couldn’t be shut in. Things were worse than he had ever
imagined they could be; indeed he couldn’t quite imagine what exactly
they now were. The Hampstead flat was in a state of acute distress and
turmoil; he had arrived that evening innocently enough, to find half a
dozen policemen all arguing with Roger, who was glowering at Rosamond,
who was crying hysterically in Isabel’s arms, who was keeping, not
without difficulty, a grave sympathy with all of them. He had
naturally hurried to Rosamond, but not with the best effects; the
sight of him had seemed to distract her more than ever. Out of the
arguments and exclamations he had at last gathered—and more clearly
after the police had at last grimly withdrawn—that Considine had been
there, and that Rosamond, after she had realized who it really was,
had gone through a short period of conflict with herself on the right
thing to do. She said it had been conflict, and that only her duty…
whereas Roger, in a few words, implied that she had been delighted at
the chance, and that duty—except to herself—was a thing of which she
was entirely unconscious and incapable. Anyhow, after a very short
period she had rung up the police-station and explained to the
authorities there what was happening. Why the police hadn’t arrested
Considine Philip couldn’t understand. Isabel was concerned with her
sister, and Roger wasn’t very clear in his account. Somebody had gone
through the midst of somebody else; somebody had been like Pythian
Apollo. But he couldn’t bother about all that; he was too anxious
about Rosamond. Had he been challenged, he would have had to admit
that for a guest to try and have another visitor arrested in the
host’s drawing-room was not perhaps…though for Roger to call it
treachery was absurd. If anything, it was public spirit. He knew
nothing—Rosamond had seen to that—of such an orgy as the episode of
the chocolates which Isabel so clearly and reluctantly remembered; he
knew nothing of a greedy gobbling child, breaking suddenly away from
its ordinary snobbish pretences, giving way to the thrust of its
secret longings and vainly trying to conceal from others’ eyes the
force of its desires. She had cheated herself so long, consciously in
childhood, with that strange combination of perfect innocence and
deliberate sin which makes childhood so blameless and so guilty at one
and the same moment; less consciously in youth, as innocence faded and
the necessity of imposing some kind of image of herself on the world
grew stronger, till now in her first womanhood she had forgotten the
cheat, until her outraged flesh rebelled and clamoured from starvation
for food. And even now she would not admit it; she would neither fight
it nor flee from it nor yield to it nor compromise with it. She could
hardly even deny that it was there, for there was no place for it in
her mind. She, she of all people, could never be capable of abominably
longing to be near the dark prince of Africa; she couldn’t thrill to
the trumpets of conversion nor glow to the fires of ecstasy. Nor could
she hate herself for refusing them. But she could and inevitably did
hate the things that resembled them—Considine’s person and Roger’s
verse and Philip, all of Philip, for Philip to her agonized sense was
at once a detestable parody of what she wanted and a present reminder
of what she longed to forget. And now, like all men and all women who
are not masters of life, she swayed to and fro in her intention and
even in her desire. At Kensington she had shrunk away from Inkamasi
and fled from him; at Hampstead she thought of him and secretly longed
for him. Power was in her and she was terrified of it. She had been
self-possessed, but all herself was in the possessing and nothing in
the possessed; self-controlled, but she had: had only a void to
control. And now that nothing and that void were moved with fire and
darkness; the shadow of ecstasy lay over her life, and denying the
possibility of ecstasy she fled through its shadow as far as its edge,
and halted irresolute, and was drawn back by a fascination she loved
and hated. She was alive and she hated life; not with a free feeling
of judgement but with servile fear. She hated life, and therefore she
would hide in Hampstead; she lived, and therefore she would return to
Kensington. But neither in Hampstead nor Kensington, in Europe nor
Africa, in her vision of her unsubservient self, nor of her monstrous
master, was there any place for Philip, much less a Philip aware of
the exaltation of love.
But it was not till after, shocked and bewildered by the venom she had
flung at him in that dreadful scene, he had at last gone that she
began to fear that her relations with Kensington might have been
severed. And, not being there, she was determined to get back there.
She would run there and then run away, till the strait jacket of time
and place imprisoned her as it imprisons in the end all who suffer
from a like madness. It is perhaps why the asylum of material creation
was created, and we sit in our separate cells, strapped and
comparatively harmless, merely foaming a little and twitching our
fingers, while the steps and voices of unknown warders come to us from
the infinite corridors. But Rosamond was only beginning to hurl
herself against the walls of her cell, and the invisible warders had
not yet had occasion to take much notice of her. The jacket waited
her; when the paroxysm was done she would no doubt come to regard it
as becoming wear and in the latest fashion. Whether such a belief is
desirable is a question men have not yet been able to decide.
Since Roger was so cruel to her, so detestably unfair, she would go to
Sir Bernard; there was no other friend in London on whom she could
descend without notice. Sir Bernard would understand her motives; he’d
tried to get that hateful man arrested. Isabel tried her best to
prevent her, saying even that Roger might be going away. But this
didn’t seem to placate Rosamond, and at last Isabel said no more.
Roger said nothing at all until Rosamond had left them “to put some of
her things together.” Isabel said: “I’m not sure that it’s a bad
thing: Sir Bernard may be able to do something. What she needs is a
sleeping-draught.”
“What she needs”, Roger said, “is prussic acid.”
Meanwhile Philip had walked, walked millions of miles, it seemed,
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