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

“But do remember,

Mr. Caithness, that the king, being a Christian, is not yet able to be

negligent of material hurt. You and Sir Bernard insisted on his being

liable to pain; you’ll no doubt teach him to endure pain.” He turned

to the others. “Goodnight, Mr. Rosenberg,” he said, “tomorrow we’ll

talk of your journey. Goodnight, Ingram; sleep.” His eyes looked into

Roger’s and sent through him a doctrine of obedience. He and the ocean

swept the young man up and away into themselves; Roger saluted and

followed the gentleman who waited for him.

 

They came into a hall which opened round them as if into distances.

The walls were hung or covered with some kind of deep grey from which

light shone, almost as over a landscape. Its furniture was not merely

furniture but natural to it; a chest showed like an antique boulder on

a hillside; a table was a table certainly, but it had grown in its

place, and had not been set there, a chair or two glowed darkly as if

shrubs of glistening leaves reflected the sun. Roger walked after his

guide with a sense of perfect proportion such as no room he had ever

entered, however admirably decorated, had given him; the best had been

but arranged art, pleasant to his judgement, while this was an art

which answered his human nature and contented his blood. It

communicated peace. He followed up a staircase, down a corridor, and

was shown into a perfectly ordinary guest-room, where all necessities

awaited him. His companion uttered a few courteous sentences, smiled,

bowed, and left him. Roger went across to the window, but he could not

see outside; the darkness was too deep. He thought of going back and

switching off the light, took a step that way, and felt all through

his body Considine’s voice saying: “Sleep.” To oppose that government

was too much for him; he turned to the dressing-table.

 

As he made ready for sleep he thought once more of Isabel. The

knowledge of her moved him, yet differently. He had been apt to wonder

what he could do for her; now indeed he wondered what he could do.

There was all his knowledge, all his concern, but it opened up like a

mountain lake from which as yet no irrigating streams ran to the

plains below. The weight and darkness of this power pressed on him; he

himself was the bank which closed those waters in, yet far away he was

also the plain which needed those waters. They lay silent; they held

such mysteries as verse held, and sometimes the surface of them was

troubled by a wind which rippled it into words. “The passion and the

life whose fountains are within…” “felt in the blood and felt

along the heart…” (what passion along what blood?), “in embalmed

darkness guess each sweet” (what hint of what discovery?), “Where the

great vision of the guarded Mount…(“the guarded Mount”…what

vision?), “fear no more the heat…fear no more…”(did that song

come from within the vision of the guarded Mount wherein also the

passion and the fountains of life lay?), “fear no more…merrily,

merrily, shall I live now.” They did not answer each other; they

flowed towards each other and intermingled, and dissolved each into

others, meaning in sound, sound in meaning, and always fresh ripples

rose and ran on that dark surface, away towards the bounded infinity,

and in and between them all was the vast power of which they were but

gleaming movement momently seen. Between them, as into that vast,

received and to be strengthened, he sank to sleep. In the last second

of mingling knowledge and dream he had a vision of a wide desolate

plain, across which, coming swiftly towards him, ran a tall, young,

uncouth, and violent figure, holding in a hand stretched high above

his head what, even at that distance which was yet no distance, was

known for a curiously tinted and involuted shell. It was running at

great speed, and crying out as it came, crying in a great voice, “A

god, yea, many gods,” and the dreamer suddenly recognized that runner

and knew it for the passionate youth of Wordsworth, coming in his own

dream of saving poetry from a world’s destruction, and crying out in

his own divine voice across lands and waters how the shell was poetry

and uttered voices, “voices more than all the winds, with power”; and

the winds awoke in all the quarters of the vast heavens under which

the intense young visionary ran, and roared down towards him and into

the shell he was stretching out towards Roger, and they reverberated

“power, power,” and the shell sang “power,” and the visitant with

longer and wilder steps was leaping forward, and then darkness swept

over all, and the vision lost itself in sleep.

 

He woke the next morning, and lay for some moments wondering whether

Muriel would be bringing the tea in soon, whether perhaps if he opened

his eyes he would find that she had already brought it, and even that

Isabel had already poured it out. As no-one said anything however, he

opened his eyes, and almost immediately realized that his chance of

tea was very small. At least, he rather doubted whether Considine’s

household provided early cups of tea, and the doubt was justified.

None appeared. Roger, telling himself that he didn’t mind, wondered

for a second whether cups of tea at reasonable times weren’t actually

more important than lines of poetry, or at least whether the two were

entirely incompatible. Nobody objected to wine, and if he had to

choose for the rest of his life between wine and tea he had no kind of

doubt where the choice would rest. Poetry and such things could give

him all the wine he wanted, whereas tea was unique, “a thing of beauty

and a joy for ever.” “That’s right, misquote,” he said to himself

crossly, and repeated the line correctly—“a thing of beauty is a joy

for ever.” Under the sudden spell the immediate urgency of tea faded.

It was silly to want tea so much when he had that power attending him.

He said it again, slowly, and, much consoled, got up.

 

Baths apparently Considine provided; he dressed and, hoping he was

doing the right thing—it was close on nine—went downstairs. In the

hall he found Mottreux, Caithness, and two or three more of

Considine’s friends, the young Vereker among them. The hall struck him

as being very cold, perhaps because the front door was wide open, and

a rather helpless November sun was doing the best it could with a

morning mist that lay about the house. He said almost as much to

Vereker—Mottreux and Caithness were conducting a stilted

conversation upon, so far as he could hear, their various visits to

America—and Vereker answered that the door should be shut if he

liked. “We don’t notice the cold,” he said.

 

“Don’t you, indeed?” Roger said, feeling that it was like Vereker’s

cheek. He was a younger man—he was apparently a younger man. Looks

were nothing to go by; Considine himself was enough to go by, and at

that his momentary irritation passed and he said sincerely: “Don’t

you?”

 

“The body, after all, ought to be able to manage that,” Vereker said,

“to adjust itself, I mean, to whatever temperature it’s in and enjoy

it; that’s why it’s the delicate thing it is.”

 

Roger said: “And if you shut the door and turned on a furnace

suddenly—then?”

 

“Yes, then,” Vereker said laughing. “All this wrapping up and

unwrapping—it’s so unnecessary. To do without food, that does take

longer. But it’s the same principle. Here’s Nigel.”

 

It was by the single Christian name (or the name which he had

recovered from the misguided habits of the Christian church), Roger

found, that his followers generally referred to him, partly in love,

partly in submission, partly in mere recognition of his own unique

quality, though they carried themselves to him with all the behaviour

of respect possible.

 

He came in now from the drive with a general word of greeting for his

own people, and particular salutations for Roger and Caithness, to the

former already intimate, to the latter courteous but distant, as if to

some hostile ambassador. After the greetings he said generally: “We

shall have news to-day. I’ve felt it already.”

 

“A premonition?” Caithness asked politely.

 

“Why do you despise premonitions?” Considine answered. “Let’s go to

breakfast, shall we? Of course,” he went on, as they sat down, “if you

mean the stupid blur of untrained sensation, that is, as it sounds,

negligible. But if you can feel a country in its air can’t you feel

its people too? All last night I heard and felt them, the voices of

the great towns and the small villages, the talk and the doubt and the

terror. Early this morning I felt it all gathering into one, the

solitary thoughts of the peasants and the determination of the

financiers; it swayed one way and another as it came to me, it veered

and shifted as winds do, but it blew against my spirit at last as the

wind on my face, and I smelt the news that went on it. Suydler will

give way.”

 

“Can you feel a whole nation?” Roger cried.

 

“Why not?” Considine asked, almost gaily. “Didn’t you feel the crowd

round your gate when you saved the king? can’t you, even in darkness,

feel the passion of a crowd? And do you think it isn’t possible for me

to feel the purpose of a wider, less certain crowd? I can feel England

as you can feel English verse. And they’ll yield; they’ll talk of

peace.”

 

“It’s less possible than for you to hear them,” the priest said. “They

won’t yield so easily.” Roger heard the hostility of his voice, and

remembered that to Caithness much more than to him, the figure which

sat at the head of the table, breaking a thin piece of toast, was

indeed the High Executive of Africa, by whose will the Christian

missions had been massacred—priests and converts alike, going down

before the rifles of their enemies. The thought shook him; lost in his

own concern with what Sir Bernard mocked and he adored as the exalted

imagination, he had forgotten of what the executive imagination was

capable. It was not only debonair but ruthless. It had spared London,

but rather from convenience and scorn, from the grace of its superior

power, than from any more tender sentiment. He remembered, without any

immediate connexion, that it was Wordsworth—the Wordsworth of his

dream—who had exulted over the defeat of the English armies—certainly

he had called it a truth most painful to record, but Roger,

looking at Considine, excused Wordsworth. It was, certainly it was, a

painful truth, but undeniably a truth, if any of the whole mad dream

were true, that this was no matter of chat and comfort but of anguish

and ecstasy. The quiet house had lulled him, as the sound of the sea

in which men are at that moment drowning, and drowned men are

furnishing food for shellfish, lulls the sleepy holiday-maker after

food. Some other cold than November’s touched Roger; he tried to

think, and Wordsworth ran through him again, crying “Yea, Carnage is

Thy daughter.” Carnage…carnage…the High Executive was

presiding over a changing world, and he who was following that summons

was accepting the blood shed for that change. He was accepting blood,

as all men do by living. But he knew it. He leaned back from the

half-eaten breakfast. Considine was speaking.

 

“I don’t say the English are frightened,” he said, “they desire what

they think rightness for Africa; also they do not willingly oppose

ideas; also they—or some of them—desire wealth. They are divided,

and Suydler will play