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

Chapter Four - THE MAJESTY OF THE KING

In the Tube Philip read the proclamation of the High Executive over

again, and, to the best of his ability, considered it. He was uneasily

conscious that Rosamond would have disapproved of this, and he

couldn’t help feeling that it was only by an oversight that she hadn’t

asked him to please her by leaving it alone. However, she hadn’t, so

he was morally free. There stirred vaguely in his mind the subtler

question of whether he were free by a strict or by an easy

interpretation of morals: did exact justice, did a proper honour,

demand that he should follow her choice or insist on his own? But the

question never got as far as definition; he was aware of a difficulty

turning over in its sleep—slouching towards Bethlehem but not

reaching it—and almost deliberately refrained from realizing it.

Because he did want to know, more accurately, what this alleged

declaration had said about love. Unlike Roger and, fortunately for

him, like Rosamond, he had no particular use for the masters of verse.

He was therefore ignorant of the cloud of testimony that had been

borne to the importance and significance of the passion that was

growing in him. He had certainly heard of Dante and Beatrice, of

Tristram and Iseult, of Lancelot and Guinevere, but there he stopped.

He had hardly heard, he had certainly never brooded over, that strange

identification of Beatrice with Theology and of Theology with Beatrice

by which one great poet has justified centuries of else doubtful

minds. But by that secular dispensation of mercy which has moved in

the blood of myriads of lovers, he had felt what he did not know and

experienced what he could not formularize. And the words which he now

read did not so much startle his innocent devotion by their

eccentricity as dimly disturb him with a sense of their justice. He

had had no use at all for the African peoples except in so far as they

gave him an opportunity to follow his European habits in providing

Rosamond with a home and a car and anything else she wanted. The

prospect of the great age of intellect being done, also left him

unmoved; he hadn’t realized that any special great age of intellect

had existed—except for a vague idea that a period of past history

known as the Middle Ages was considerably less intelligent than the

present, and that there had been a brief time when Athens, and a

rather longer time when Rome, was very intellectual. But when all that

seemed to him meaningless had been removed, there still remained the

fact that never before, never anywhere, had any words, printed or

spoken, come nearer to telling him what he really felt about Rosamond

than this paragraph which purported to come from the centre of Africa,

and from dark-skinned chiefs pouring up against the guns and rifles of

England. He knew it was silly, but he knew it said “adoration,”

“vision,” “apprehension of victory,” “conquest of death.” He knew it

was silly, but he knew also that he had felt through Rosamond, brief

and little understood, something which was indeed apprehension of

victory and conquest of death.

 

When he got home he found his godfather alone, and, rather against his

own intention, found himself approaching the subject. Caithness had

seen the proclamation and was inclined to be a little scornful of it:

which may partly have been due to the unrecognized fact that, while

Roger and Philip had both found their interior passions divined and

applauded, Caithness had had his referred to merely as “a misguided

principle.” He doubted the authenticity, and went on to add: “Rather

bombastic, don’t you think? I don’t pretend to know what it means.”

 

Philip said, “Roger seemed quite impressed by it.”

 

“O Roger!” the priest said good-humouredly. “I called it bombast but I

expect he’d call it poetry. I don’t mean that it hasn’t a kind of

thrill in it, but thrills aren’t the only thing—certainly they’re not

safe things to live by.”

 

Philip thought this over, and decided that he agreed with it. Only his

sensations about Rosamond were not—no, they were not thrills: and he

wasn’t at all clear that they weren’t things to live by. He said,

shamelessly involving Roger: “He made fun of me about it—he seemed to

think that part of it was meant for me. The paragraph about—O well,

some paragraph or other.”

 

Caithness looked down at the paper. “This about the exaltation of

love, I expect,” he said, with a rather charming smile. “Roger would

be all in favour of that; the poets are. But perhaps they’re more used

to living on the hilltops than the rest of us.”

 

“You don’t think it’s true then?” Philip asked, with a slight and

irrational feeling of disappointment. Irrational, because he hadn’t

actually expected Caithness to agree with a gospel, if it was a

gospel, out of Africa. Sir Bernard had once remarked that Caithness

limited himself to the Near East in the matter of gospels, “the near

East modified by the much nearer West.”

 

But over the direct question Caithness hesitated. “I wouldn’t care to

say it wasn’t true,” he said, “but all truth is not expedient. It’s no

use making people expect too much.”

 

“No,” Philip said, “I suppose it isn’t.” Was he expecting too much?

was he, in fact, expecting anything at all? Or could whatever he

expected or whatever happened alter the terribly important fact of the

shape of Rosamond’s ear? He also looked again at the paper, and words

leapt to his eyes. “Believe, imagine, live. Know exaltation and feed

on it-”

 

“You don’t then,” he said, unwontedly stirred, “really think one ought

to believe in it too much?”

 

“Why yes, my dear boy,” the priest answered. “Only these things are so

often deceptive; they change or they become familiar. One can’t trust

one’s own vision too far; that’s where religion comes in.”

 

Sir Bernard would no doubt have pointed out, what did not occur to

either of the others, that this merely meant that Caithness was

substituting his own hobby for Philip’s. But he wasn’t there, and so,

vaguely depressed, especially as he couldn’t feel that Rosamond’s ear

would ever change, the young man turned the conversation, and shut

away the appeal of the High Executive for the time being in whatever

corresponded in his mind to Roger Ingram’s bookshelves.

 

The African trouble, however, displayed, during the next few days, no

possibility of being shut away. The steps which the Powers, on the

unanimous testimony of their spokesmen, were harmoniously taking

produced no effect against the rebels (as the enemy was habitually

called). It became clear that the “hordes” consisted, in fact, of

highly disciplined and well-supplied armies. In the north of Africa

the territory held by the European forces grew daily smaller; all

Egypt, except Cairo, was lost; the French were pressed back to the

coast of Tangier; the Spaniards were hustled out of Morocco. The

Dominion of South Africa was sending out expeditions, of which no news

returned—certainly there had not been much time, but there was no

news at all, or none that was published. In England an official

censorship was attempted, but failed owing to the speedy growth of a