War in Heaven by Charles Williams (books to read for self improvement txt) 📕
"Oh, mummie, don't sit down there, that's my table," he said.
"Darling, I'm so sorry," Barbara Rackstraw answered. "Had you got anything on it?"
"Well, I was going to put the dinner things," Adrian explained. "I'll just see if the chicken's cooked. Oh, it's lovely!"
"How nice!" Barbara said abstractedly. "Is it a large chicken?"
"Not a very large one," Adrian admitted. "There's enough for me and you and my Bath auntie."
"Oh," said Barbara, startled, "is your Bath auntie here?"
"Well, she may be coming," said Adrian. "Mummie, why do I have a Bath auntie?"
"Because a baby grew up into your Bath auntie, darling," his mother said. "Unintentional but satisfactory, as far as it goes. Adrian, do you think your father will like cold sausages? Because there doesn't seem to be anything else much."
"I don't want any cold sausages," Adrian said hurriedly.
"No, my angel, but it's the twenty-seventh of the month, an
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Gregory heard a movement outside the door; there was a tap. But he was too absorbed to speak. Then the door opened and the village doctor stood in the opening. At the same moment, as if she had waited for it, Barbara, still moving in that wild dance, threw up her hand and, carelessly and unconsciously tore open her light frock and underwear from the breast downwards. It hung, a moment, ripped and rent, from the girdle that caught it together; then it fell lower, and she shook her legs free without checking the movement of the dance.
Even Gregory was not very clear afterwards what had then happened. It had needed the three of them to bring her into some sort of subordination, and to bind her with such material as could be obtained. The doctor’s next act was to inject morphia, a proceeding which Gregory watched with considerable pleasure, having his own views on what result this was likely to bring about. She was carried into one of the spare rooms at Cully, and Lionel took up his station there also. “They’ll put another bed in presently,” Gregory told him. “And my man Ludding will sleep in the next room, so if you want anything ask him. Good heavens, it’s not seven yet! Now, about Adrian… He shall sleep in my room if he likes, that will distract him, and he’ll feel important. Hush, hush, my dear fellow, we must all do what we can. The doctor’s coming in again later.”
The doctor indeed, after asking a few questions, and looking at the box of harmless ointment, had been glad to get away and think over this unusual patient. Gregory, having made inquiries, found that Adrian was out in the gardens with Jessie, and strolled out to find them, just preventing himself from whistling cheerfully in case Lionel should hear. It occurred to him that it would be pleasant before the child went to bed to see if anything could be discovered about the stranger who had disturbed him earlier, but whom, warm with his present satisfaction, he was inclined to neglect. Still…
He suggested, therefore, to Adrian—who had allowed himself to be persuaded how delightful it would be to sleep in his uncle’s own room, and that his mother had better be left alone that evening—that another game at hidden pictures would be pleasant. The cup they had used before was not, it seemed, possible, but there were other means.
Installed therefore on a chair in front of a table bearing a shining black disc arranged in a sloping position, Adrian said anxiously:
“Now ask me what I can see.”
Gregory leant back in his chair opposite, fixed his eyes on Adrian, made an image of the stranger in his mind, and said slowly: “Can you see a tall man, with a grey suit on, and a soft hat?” He imposed the image on the child’s mind.
With hardly any hesitation Adrian answered: “Oh, yes, I can see him. He’s on a horse, and ever so many other people are all round him on horses, with long, long sticks. They’re all riding along. Oh, it’s gone.”
Gregory frowned a little. A cavalry regiment? Was his visitor merely a lieutenant in the Lancers? He concentrated more than ever. “What is he doing now?” he asked.
“He’s sitting on cushions,” Adrian poured out raptly. “And there’s a man in red and a man in brown. They’re both kneeling down. Oh, they’re giving him a piece of paper. Now he’s smiling, now they’re going. It’s gone again,” he ended in a tone of high delight.
Gregory brooded over this for some minutes. “Where does he come from?” he asked. “Can you see water or trains?”
“No,” said Adrian immediately, “but I can see a lot of funny houses and a lot of churches too. He’s coming out of one of the churches. He’s got a beautiful, beautiful coat on! And a crown! and there are a lot of people coming out with him, and they’ve all got crowns and swords! and flags! Now he’s on a horse and there are candles all round him and funny things going round in the air and smoke. Oh, it’s gone.”
Gregory, as delicately and as soon as possible, broke off the proceedings. There was something here he didn’t understand. He sent Adrian off to bed with promises of pleasant amusements the next day, and himself, after a short visit to Lionel, went out again into the grounds to await the doctor’s second call. Barbara, it seemed, was lying still; he wondered what exactly was happening. If the morphia was controlling her limbs, what about the energy that had wrung them? If it couldn’t work outward, was it working inward? Was the inner being that was Barbara being driven deeper and deeper into that flow of desire which was the unity and compulsion of man? What an unusual experience for a charming young housewife of the twentieth century! And perhaps she also would not be able to return.
Lionel Rackstraw leant by the open window and looked out over the garden. Behind him Barbara lay, in stillness and apparent sleep; below him at some distance Mr. Gregory Persimmons contemplated the moon. In an ordinary state of mind Lionel might have contemplated it too, as a fantasy less terrible than the sun, which appeared to him often as an ironical heat drawing out of the earth the noxious phantoms it bred therein. But the phantoms of his mind were lost in the horrible, and yet phantasmal, evil that had befallen him; his worst dreams were, if not truer than they had always been—that they could not be—at least more effectual and more omnipotent. The last barricade which material things offered had fallen; the beloved was destroyed, and the home of his repose broken open by the malice of invisible powers. Had she been false, had she left him for another—that would have been tolerable; probably, when he considered himself, he had always felt it. What was there about him to hold, in the calm of intense passion, that impetuous and adorable nature? But this unpredictable madness, without, so far as could be known, cause or explanation, this was the overwhelming of humanity by the spectral forces that mocked humanity. He gathered himself together in a persistent and hopeless patience.
He took out his case and lit a cigarette mechanically. She, he supposed, would never smoke cigarettes again, or, if she did, it would never be the same. At the same time, that question of ways and means which is never far from the minds of the vast majority of the English at any moment, which poisons their sorrows and modifies their joys, which insists on being settled before any experience can be properly tasted, and, if unsatisfactorily settled (as it most frequently is), turns love and death into dancing parodies of themselves, which ruins personal relationship and abstract thought and pleasant hours—this question presented itself also to him. What about money? what about Adrian? what about their home? what about the future? He couldn’t look after Adrian; he couldn’t afford to keep Barbara and a housekeeper; besides, he couldn’t, he supposed, have a housekeeper to live in the same house with Adrian and himself—unless she were old enough. And how did you get old housekeepers, and what did you pay them? Barbara might get better, but obviously after such an attack she couldn’t for a long time be left alone with Adrian; and if she didn’t get better? She had an aunt somewhere in Scotland—a strong Calvinistic Methodist; Lionel cursed as he thought of Adrian growing up in a Calvinistic household. Not, his irony reminded him, that he wasn’t something of a Calvinist himself, with his feeling about the universe; but his kind of Calvinism wouldn’t want to proselytize Adrian, and the aunt’s would. He himself had no available relations—and his friends? Well, friends were all very well, but you couldn’t dump a child on your friends indefinitely. Besides, his best friends—Kenneth, for instance—hadn’t the conveniences. What a world!
Mr. Persimmons, turning from the moon, looked up at the house, saw him, waved a hand, and walked towards the door. It crossed Lionel’s mind that it would be very satisfactory if Adrian could stop at Cully. It was no use his saying that he had no right to think of it; his fancy insisted on thinking of it, and was still doing so when Gregory, entering softly, joined him at the window.
“All quiet?” he asked in a low voice.
“All quiet,” Lionel answered bitterly.
“It occurred to me,” Gregory said—“I don’t know, of course—but it occurred to me that you might be worrying over the boy. You won’t, will you? There’s no need. He can stop with me, here or in London, as long as ever you like. He likes me and I like him.”
“It’s very kind of you,” Lionel said, feeling at once that this would solve a problem, and yet that the solving it would leave him with nothing but the horror of things to deal with. Even such a worrying question as what to do with Adrian was a slight change of torment. But that, he reflected sombrely, was selfish. Selfish, good heavens, selfish! And, after a long pause he said again, “It’s very kind of you.”
“Not a bit,” Gregory answered. “I should even—in a sense—like it. And you must be free. It’s most unfortunate. It seems sometimes as if there was an adverse fate in things—lying in ambush.”
“Ambush?” Lionel asked, relieved yet irritated at being made to talk. What did people like Gregory know of adverse fate? “Not much ambush, I think. It’s pretty obvious, once one’s had a glimpse of the world.”
Religion normally has a mildly stupefying effect on the minds of its disciples, and this Gregory had not altogether escaped. He had thought it would give him half an hour’s pleasant relaxation to worry Lionel, and he had not realized that Lionel was, even in his usual state, beyond this. He went on accordingly: “There seems a hitch in the way things work. Happiness is always just round the corner.”
“No hitch, surely,” Lionel said. “The whole scheme of things is malign and omnipotent. That is the way they work. ‘There is none that doeth good—no, not one.”’
“It depends perhaps on one’s definition of good,” Gregory answered. “There is at least satisfaction and delight.”
“There is no satisfaction and no delight that has not treachery within it,” Lionel said. “There is always Judas; the name of the world that none has dared to speak is Judas.”
Gregory turned his head to see better the young face from which this summary of life issued. He felt perplexed and uncertain; he had expected a door and found an iron barrier.
“But,” he said doubtfully, “had Judas himself no delight? There is an old story that there is rapture in the worship of treachery and malice and cruelty and sin.”
“Pooh,” Lionel said contemptuously; “it is the ordinary religion disguised; it is the church-going clerk’s religion. Satanism is the clerk at the brothel. Audacious little middleclass cock-sparrow!”
“You are talking wildly,” Gregory said a little angrily. “I have met people who have made me sure that there is a rapture of iniquity.”
“There is a rapture of anything, if you come to that,” Lionel answered; “drink or gambling or poetry or love or (I suppose)
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