Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (ereader iphone .TXT) 📕

RETURN TO EDEN

Margaret Anstruther had seen, in her vision, a single house, with

two forms leaning from the same window. Time there had

disappeared, and the dead man had been contemporaneous with the

living. As if simultaneity approached the Hill, the experiences

of its inhabitants had there become co-eval; propinquity no

longer depended upon sequence.

The chance that brought Lawrence Wentworth into such close

spiritual contact with the dead was the mere manner of his ill

luck. His was not worse than any other’s, though the hastening of

time to its end made it more strange. It grew in him, like all

judgment, through his negligence. A thing of which he had

consistently refused to be aware, if action is the test of

awareness, drew close to him: that is, the nature of the Republic.

The outcast of the Republic had climbed a forlorn ladder to his

own death. His death entered into the Republic, and into the

lives of its other members. Wentworth had never acknowledged the

unity. He had never acknowledged the victims of oppression nor

the presence of victimization. It may be that such victimization

is inevitable, and that the Republic after its kind must be as

false to its own good as the lives of most of its children are to

theirs. But Wentworth had neither admitted nor rejected this

necessity, nor even questioned and been hurt by it; he had merely

ignored it. He had refused the agony of the res publica, and of

temporal justice. Another justice sharpened the senses of his res

private. He was doubly open to its approachin his scholarship,

where the ignoring of others began to limit, colour, and falsify

his work, and in his awareness of supernatural neighbours, if any

should be near. One was.

The dead man had stood in what was now Wentworth’s bedroom, and

listened in fear lest he should hear the footsteps of his kind.

That past existed still in its own place, since all the past is in

the web of life nothing else than a part, of which we are not

sensationally conscious. It was drawing closer now to

the present; it approached the senses of the present. But between

them still there went-patter, patter-the hurrying footsteps which

Margaret Anstruther had heard in the first circle of the Hill.

The dead man had hardly heard them; his passion had carried him

through that circle into death. But on the hither side were the

footsteps, and the echo and memory of the footsteps, of this

world. It was these for which Wentworth listened. He had come

back into his own room after he had heard those steady and mocking

footsteps of Hugh and Adela, and the voices and subdued laughter

accompanying them. He had himself wandered up and down, and come

to a rest at last at the finished window where, with no wall

before him, the dead man had peered. He also peered. He

listened, and his fancy created for him the unheard melody of the

footsteps. His body renewed and absorbed the fatal knowledge of

his desire. He listened, in the false faith of desire. It could

not be that he would not hear, out of those double footsteps, one

true pair separating themselves, coming up the street, approaching

the gate; that he would not see a true form coming up the drive,

approaching the door. It must happen; his body told him it must

happen. He must have what he wanted, because… but still those

feet did not come. The dead man stood by him, arm to arm, foot by

foot, and listened, the rope in his hand, and that night neither

of them heard anything at all.

The evening and the morning were the first day, of a few hours, or

a few months, or both at once. Others followed. The business of

the Hill progressed; the play went forward. Pauline fled, and

Margaret died, or lived in process of death. Hugh went up and

down to the City. Adela went about the Hill. Wentworth, now

possessed by his consciousness of her, and demanding her presence

and consent as its only fulfillment went about his own affairs.

“Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me”; the maxim

applies to many stones of stumbling, and especially to all those

of which the nature is the demand for a presence instead of the

assent to an absence; the imposition of the self upon complacency.

Wentworth made his spiritual voice hoarse in issuing orders to

complacency, and stubbed his toes more angrily every day against

the unmovable stone.

Once or twice he met Adela-once at Mrs. Parry’s, where they had no

chance to speak. They smiled at each other-an odd smile; the

faintest hint of greed, springing from the invisible nature of

greed, was in it on both sides. Their greeds smiled. Again he

ran into her one evening at the post office with Hugh, and Hugh’s

smile charged theirs with hostility. It ordered and subdued

Adela’s; it blocked and repulsed Wentworth’s. It forced on him

the fact that he was not only unsuccessful, but old; he contended

against both youth and a rival. He said: “How’s the play going?”

“We’re all learning our parts,” Adela said. “There doesn’t seem

to be time for anything but the play. Shall we ever get another

evening with you, Mr. Wentworth?”

He said: “I was sorry you could neither of you come.” That, he

thought, would show that he hadn’t been taken in.

“Yes,” said Hugh; the word hung ambiguously. Wentworth,

angered by it, went on rashly: “Did you have a pleasant time?”

He might have meant the question for either or both. Adela said:

“O well, you know; it was rather a rush. Choosing colours and all

that.”

“But fortunately we ran into each other later,” Hugh added, “and

we almost ran at each other—didn’t we,

Adela? so we fed in a hurry and dashed to a theatre. It might

have been much worse.”

Wentworth heard the steps in his brain. He saw Hugh take

Adela’s arm; he saw her look up at him; he saw an exchanged

memory. The steps went on through him; double steps. He

wanted to get away to give himself up to them: life and death,

satisfaction of hate and satisfaction of lust, contending, and the

single approach of the contention’s result—patter, patter, steps

on the Hill. He knew they were laughing at him. He made normal

noises, and abnormally fled. He went home.

In his study he automatically turned over his papers, aware but

incapable of the organic life of the mind they represented. He

found himself staring at his drawings of costumes for the play,

and had an impulse to tear them, to refuse to have anything

to do with the grotesque mummery, himself to reject the picture of

the rejection of himself. But he did not trust his own capacity

to manage a more remote force than Adela—Mrs. Parry. Mrs. Parry

meant nothing to him; she could never become to him the nervous

irritation, he obsession, which both Aston Moffatt and Adela now

were. His intelligence warned him that she was, nevertheless,

one of the natural forces which, like time and space, he could not

overcome. She wanted the designs, and she would have them. He

could refuse, but not reject, Adela; he could reject, but he

certainly could not refuse, Mrs. Parry. Irritated at his

knowledge of his own false strength,