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

than delight. But so clear and simple was that delight, and so

exquisitely shared by all the performers in their separate ways, that as

between the acts they talked and laughed together, and every one in the

field, with the exception of Lawrence Wentworth, joined in that universal

joy-so single and fundamental did it become that once, while again she

waited, it seemed to her as if the very words “dress rehearsal” took on

another meaning. She saw the ceremonial dress of the actors, but it did

not seem to her stranger than Mrs. Parry’s frock or Stanhope’s light

suit. All things at all times and everywhere, rehearsed; some great art

was in practice and the only business anyone had was to see that his part

was perfect. And this particular rehearsal mirrored the rest-only that

this was already perfected from within, and that other was not yet. The

lumbering Bear danced; the Grand Duke uttered his gnomic wisdom; the

Princess and the Woodcutter’s Son entered into the lucid beauty of first

love; the farmers counted their pence; and the bandits fell apart within.

It was in the pause before the last act that the dark thought came to

her. She had walked a little away from the others to rest her soul, and,

turning, looked back. Around the place where lately the fire had burned,

the Prologue and some of the Guard were talking. She saw him lift his

trumpet; she saw them move, and the uniforms shone in the amazing

brightness of the sun, and suddenly there came to her mind another

picture; the woodcut in the old edition of the Book of Martyrs. There

too was a trumpet, and guards, and a fire, and a man in it. Here, the

tale said, and she had not remembered it till now, here where this stage,

perhaps where this fire lay, they had done him to death by fire.

She had had the last act in mind as she turned, the act in which physical

sensation, which is the play of love, and pardon, which is the speed of

love, and action, which is the fact of love, and almighty love itself,

all danced together: and now a shadow lay across it, the shadow of death

and cruelty, the living death. The sun was still bright, colours vivid,

laughter gay, and the shadow was the centre of them all. The shadow was

a hollow, filled with another, quite different, fact. She felt the pang

of the last hopelessness. If the living who walked in the gutters of

mind or spirit, if the present misery of the world, were healed, or could

be forgotten, still there sprang out of the hollow the knowledge of the

dead whose unrecompensed lives had gone before that joy. The past

accused her, made terrible by the certain history of her hous@. His

blood was in her and made demands on hers. He had gone willingly to

death, chosen it, insisted on it; his judges had been willing enough to

spare him if he would commit himself to a phrase or two. But still in

the end they had inflicted death, and agony in death; and the world that

had inflicted and enjoyed and nourished itself on agony was too like the

world in which she moved, too like Hugh and Adela and Catherine Parry and

the rest. She had been lost in a high marvel, but if that joy were

seriously to live it must somehow be reconciled with the agony that had

been; unless hollow and shell were one, there was only hollow and shell.

She walked back, and as she did so Stanhope saw her and came across.

“Well,” he said, “it all seems going very well.”

She said, with a coldness in her voice that rose from the creeping hollow

of the darkness. “You think so?… did you know an ancestor of mine was

burnt alive just here?”

He turned to walk by her. “I did,” he said. “I’d read it, of

course-after all, it’s my house-and your grandmother spoke of it.”

She said: “Well?” and then repentantly, “I’m sorry but… we’re all so

happy. The play, the fire-our fire, it’s all so wonderful. And yet we

can do that. How can we be happy, unless we forget? and how can we

forget? how can we dare forget?”

He said: “Forget nothing. Unless everything’s justifiable, nothing is.

But don’t you forget, perhaps, something else?”

She looked at him with question. He went on: “Mightn’t his burden be

carried too?”

She stopped; she said staring: “But he’s dead!”

“And so?” Stanhope asked mildly, and waited.

She said: “You mean… you can’t mean… ?” As her voice hung

baffled, there arose gigantic before her the edge of a world of such

incredible dimensions that she was breathless at the faint hint. Her

mouth opened; her eyes stared. Her head was spinning. She

said: “But….”

Stanhope took her arm to propel her gently forward; then, letting it go,

he said: “A good deal of our conversation consists of saying but to each

other. However, who shall fail to follow when… and so forth. ‘But—’

Periel?”

“But he’s dead,” she repeated. It was not what she meant to say.

“So you remarked,” Stanhope said gently. “And I asked you what that had

to do with it. Or words to that effect. You might as well say he had

red hair, as for all I know he may have had. Yes, yes, Mrs. Parry.”

He raised his voice and waved back. “We shall be delaying the

rehearsal,” he said. “Come along-all things in their order.”

She asked, inadvertently, as she quickened her steps to keep pace with

him: “Do you tell me to try and carry his fear?”

“Well,” he answered, “you can’t make contact; so far, it’s true, death or

red hair or what not interferes. But you might, in the Omnipotence,

offer him your—anything you’ve got. Only I should intend to have it

first.”

“Intend to have it?” she asked breathlessly.

“Intend to have joy to offer,” he said. “Be happy-take all the

happiness, if it’s there, that you may not offer the Lord what costs

nothing. You must have a small private income to try and help support

even a Marian martyr. Heavens, they are waiting. To your tent, O

Periel.” As she ran he exclaimed after her. “Perhaps that’s the

difference between Israel and Judah! they went to their own tents and

left David to his. Hence the Dispersion… and the Disappearance.”

“What disappearance, Mr. Stanhope?” Mrs. Parry asked.

He had come level with her while he was still speaking, and he made a

small gesture. “Nothing, Mrs. Parry. Of the saviour of his own life.

How well this act opens, doesn’t it?”

As Pauline, escaping Mrs. Parry’s eye, ran across the stage, and threaded

her way between the persons to her position, her mind was more breathless

than she. She felt again, as in a low but immense arc rising above the

horizon of her world, or perhaps of the earth itself, the hint of new

organization of all things: a shape, of incredible difficulty in the

finding, of incredible simplicity found, an infinitely alien arrangement

of infinitely familiar things. The bottom had dropped out of her

universe, yet her astonished spirit floated and did not fall. She was a

little sick with running, running into this other world. She halted,

turned, addressed herself. She turned to the play where martyrdom had

been—to the martyrdom. “I have seen the salvation of my God.” The

salvation throbbed in the air above her; it thrilled in the mortal light.

“‘Unto him that hath shall be given’… ‘what of him that hath not?’”

A voice, neither of the martyr nor his executioner, answered, singing,

With a terrible clarity of assured fact—fact, the only thing that can be

loved: “from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he

seemeth to have”. A trumpet was crying, crying for the execution of the

justice of the Queen’s Majesty on a convicted and impenitent heretic. His

blood was in her veins; dazed with her own will, she struggled to pay the

dues of her inheritance. The sudden crowd of adorned figures thronged

before her. He was not there; he was dead centuries since. If centuries

meant anything; perhaps they didn’t-perhaps everything was all at once,

and interchanged devotion; perhaps even now he burned, and she and her

friends danced, and her grandmother died and lived, and Peter Stanhope

wrote his verse, and all the past of the Hill was one with its present.

It lived; it intermingled; not among these living alone did the doctrine

of substituted love bear rule. Her intention rose, and was clear, and

withdrew, as the stage opened for her advance. About her the familiar

and transfigured personages moved; this was the condition and this the

air of supernatural life. Ecce, omnia nova facio. The incantation and

adoration of the true substance of experience sounded. She fulfilled her

part in a grave joy, aspiring to become part of that substance. All drew

to its close; the dress rehearsal ended. Remained only the performance of

the play.