Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (ereader iphone .TXT) ๐
However, Stanhope was, in the politest language, declining to have anything of the sort. "Call it the Chorus," he said, "or if you like I'll try and find a name for the leader, and the rest can just dance and sing. But I'm afraid 'Leaf-Spirits' would be misleading."
"What about'Chorus of Nature-Powers'?" asked Miss Fox, but Stanhope only said, smiling, "You will try and make the trees friendly," which no one quite understood, and shook his head again.
Prescott asked: "Incidentally, I suppose they will be women?"
Mrs. Parry had said, "O, of course, Mr. Prescott," before the question reached her brain. When it did, she added, "At least...I naturally took it for granted.... They are feminine, aren't they?"
Still hankering after mass, Adela said, "It sounds
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and dispatched the dead to their doom with prayers and rites
which were not meant for the benefit of the dead alone. Rather,
they secured the living against ghostly oppression; they made
easy the way of the ghosts into their own world and hurried them
upon their way. They were sped on with unction and requiem, with
intercessions and masses; and the sword of exorcism waved at the
portal of their exodus against the return of any whom those
salutations of departure did not ease. But where superstition
and religion failed, where cemeteries were no longer forbidden
and no longer feared; where the convenient processes of cremation
encouraged a pretence of swift passage, where easy sentimentality
set up a pretence of friendship between the living and the deadโmight
not that new propinquity turn to a fearful friendship in
the end? It was commonly accepted that the dead were anxious to
help the living, but what if the dead were only anxious for the
living to help them? or what if the infection of their experience
communicated itself across the too shallow grave? Men were
beginning to know, they were being compelled to know; at last the
living world was shaken by the millions of spirits who endured
that further permanent revelation. Hysteria of self-knowledge,
monotony of self-analysis, introspection spreading like disease,
what was all this but the infection communicated over the
unpurified borders of death? The spirits of the living world were
never meant to be so neighbourly with the spirits of that other.
โGrant to them eternal rest, O Lord. And let light eternal shine
upon them.โ Let them rest in their own places of light; far, far
from us be their discipline and their endeavour. The phrases of
the prayers of intercession throb with something other than
charity for the departed; there is a fear for the living. Grant
them, grant them rest; compel them to their rest. Enlighten
them, perpetually enlighten them. And let us still enjoy our
refuge from their intolerable knowledge.
As if in a last communion with the natural terrors of man,
Margaret Anstruther endured a recurrent shock of fear. She
recalled herself. To tolerate such knowledge with a joyous
welcome was meant, as the holy Doctors had taught her, to be the
best privilege of man, and so remained. The best maxim towards
that knowledge was yet not the Know thyself of the Greek so much
as the Know Love of the Christian, though both in the end were
one. It was not possible for man to know himself and the world,
except first after some mode of knowledge, some art of discovery.
The most perfect, since the most intimate and intelligent, art
was pure love. The approach by love was the approach to fact; to
love anything but fact was not love. Love was even more
mathematical than poetry; it was the pure mathematics of the
spirit. It was applied also and active; it was the means as it
was the end. The end lived everlastingly in the means; the means
eternally in the end.
The girl and the old woman who lay, both awake, in that house
under the midnight sky, were at different stages of that way. To
the young mind of Pauline, by some twist of grace in the
operation of space and time, the Greek maxim had taken on a
horrible actuality; the older vision saw, while yet living,
almost into a world beyond the places of the dead. Pauline knew
nothing yet of the value of those night vigils, nor of the
fulfilment of the desire of truth. But Margaret had, through a
long life, practised the distinction, not only between experience
and experience, but in each experience itself between dream and
fact. It is not enough to say that some experiences are drugs to
the spirit; every experience, except the final, has a quality
which has to be cast out by its other quality of perfection,
expelled by healthy digestion into the sewers where the divine
scavengers labour. By a natural law Margaretโs spirit exercised
freely its supernatural functions and with increasing clearness
looked out on to the growing company of the Hill.
Lights in the houses opposite had long since been put out. The
whole rise of ground, lying like a headland, or indeed as itself
like some huge grave in which so many others had been dug, was
silent in the darkness, but for one sound; the sound of
footsteps. Margaret knew it very well; she had heard it on many
nights. Sometimes in the day as well, when the peace was deepest
within her and without, she could hear that faint
monotonous patter of feet reverberating from its surface. Its
distance was not merely in space, though it seemed that also, but
in some other dimension. Who it was that so walked for ever over
the Hill she did not know, though in her heart she did not
believe it to be good. The harsh phrase would have been alien to
her. She heard those feet not as sinister or dangerous, but
onlyโpatter, patterโas the haste of a search for or a flight
from repose-perhaps both. Ingress and regress, desire and
repulsion, contended there. The contention was the only
equilibrium of that haunter of the Hill, and was pain. Patter,
patter. It sounded at a distance, like the hurrying feet of the
woman on her own garden path that afternoon. She had heard, in
old tales of magic, of the guardian of the threshold. She
wondered if the real secret of the terrible guardian were that he
was simply lost on the threshold. His enmity to man and heaven
was only his yearning to enter one without loss. It did not
matter, nor was it her affair. Her way did not cross that
otherโs; only it was true she never sank into those circles of
other sensation and vision but what, far off, she heardโpatter,
patterโthe noise of the endless passage.
There moved within her the infinite business of the Hill into
which so much death had poured. First there came the creation of
new images instead of those of every day. Her active mind still
insisted on them; she allowed its due. The Hill presented itself
before her with all its buildings and populace; she saw them,
small and vivid, hurrying. She would even sometimes recognize
one or other, for the briefest second. She had seen, in that
recreation by night of the Hill by day, Pauline going into a
shop and Peter Stanhope talking in the street, and others. She
remembered now, idly, that she had never seen the woman who had
called on her that day, though she had seen Myrtle Fox running,
running hard, down a long street. Distinct though the vision was
it was but momentary. It was the equivalent of her worldly
affairs, and it lasted little longer; in a second it had gone.
It had enlarged rather. It reduplicated itself on each side, and
its inhabitants faded from it as it did so, seeming themselves to
pass into other hills. Presently there was no living form or
building on that original Hill, and it was no longer possible to
tell which had been the original, for a great range swept right
across the sky, and all those heights were only the upper slopes
of mountains, whose lower sides fell away beneath her vision.
The earth itself seemed to lie in each of those mountains, and on
each there was at first a populous region towards the summit, but
the summit itself rose individual and solitary. Mountains or
modes of consciousness, peaks or perceptions, they stood; on the
slopes of each the world was carried; and the final height of
each was a separate consummation of the whole. It was, as the
apprehended movement upon each of them died away, in the time
before the dawn that they rose there, nor had the sun risen,
though they were not in darkness. Either a light emanated from
themselves or some greater sun drew towards them from its own
depth.
Then-it was not to say that they faded, but rather that she lost
them, becoming herself one of them and ignorant of the rest. It
was very silent; only small sounds came up to her as if someone
was climbing below. The noises were so faint that in the air of
earth they would have been lost. Had she been woman she would
not have known them; now that she was not woman alone but
mountain, the mountain knew that it was not from its own nature
alone that the tiny disturbances came. There was movement
within it certainly; rush of streams, fall of rocks, roar of
winds through its chasms, but these things were not sound to it
as was that alien human step. Through all another single note
sounded once; a bell. Minutely she knew that the public clock of the
Hill had struck one. It was a remote translation of a thing, for the
dawn began.
It came from above, and as the light grew the mountain that was
she became aware again of its fellows, spread out around no longer
in a long range but in a great mass. They stretched away on all sides.
At the increase of the sun there grew also an increase of fugitive
sound; and she became aware of a few wandering shapes on the heights
about her. Some climbed on; others, instead of welcoming the light
as lost mountaineers should do, turned to escape it. They hurried
into such caves or crevasses as they could find. Here and there, on
a great open space, one lay fallen, twisting and dragging himself
along. They seemed all, even those who climbed, grotesque
obtrusions into that place of rock and ice and thin air and growing
sun, a world different from theirs, hers and not hers. A divided
consciousness lived in her, more intensely than ever before.
In the time of her novitiate it had seemed to her sometimes that,
though her brains and emotions acted this way or that, yet all
that activity went on along the sides of a slowly increasing mass
of existence made from herself and all others with whom she had
to do, and that strong and separate happiness-for she felt it as
happiness, though she herself might be sad; her sadness did but
move on it as the mountaineer on the side of a mountain-that
happiness was the life which she was utterly to become. Now she
knew that only the smallest fragility of her being clung
somewhere to the great height that was she and others and all the
world under her separate kind, as she herself was part of all the
other peaks; and though the last fragility was still a little
terrified of the dawn which was breaking everywhere, she knew
that when the dawn reached the corner where she lay it would,
after one last throb of piercing change under its power, light
but the mountain side, and all her other mighty knowledge would
after its own manner rejoice in it. She had not much strength in
these days-that she which was Margaret Anstruther and lay in her
bed on Battle Hill-but such as she had it was her business to
use. She set herself to crawl out of that darkened corner
towards the light. She turned from all the corner heldโher
home, her memories, Stanhopeโs plays, Pauline; with effort she
began her last journey. It might take hours, or days, or even
years, but it was certain; as she moved, crawling slowly over the
rock, she saw the light sweeping on to meet her. The moment of
death was accepted and accomplished in her first outward
movement; there remained only to die.
On her way and in her bed, she dozed a little, and in that light
sleepโdream within
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