Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (ereader iphone .TXT) đź“•
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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rare moments speed is determined; all else is something else. He
went, and with more energy than he had ever known. The lost power
of his missed youth awoke in him, and of his defrauded manhood.
It was needed. He had not taken a dozen steps before the memory
of his latest experience became as faint as the old woman’s voice
had been. He did not again feel his old fear, but he was
intensely aware of ignorance. There were now no shapes. He was
alone, and the pallid ladder of the dark house stood before him.
The light beyond was soft, but promised nothing. As he went
soundlessly he had no thought but that it was better to do at once
what must be done, and that he had seen, if only in a fading
apparition, the tender eyes of love.
He passed the finished houses; he came among those which, by the
past or future, had been unbuilt. As he reached them he heard a
faint sound. He had come again into the peculiar territory of the
dead. He heard behind him a small rustle, as if of dead leaves or
snakes creeping out from dry sticks. He did not think of snakes
or leaves, nor of the dead leaves of a great forest, the
still-existent nothingness of life. Those who had known the green
trees were tangled and torn in the dry. The tragedies of Peter Stanhope
carried the image of that pain-piercing nothing. The dead man,
like Pauline, had lived with thorns and hard wood, and at last
they had destroyed him as pitilessly as the Marian martyr. He did
not therefore conceive them now as anything but a mere sound. It
went with him along the road. and when he had come fully out at
the end into the space where the ladder of bone led again to a
darkness of the grave, it had become louder. He heard it on all
sides. He stopped and turned.
The shapes were standing in a great crowd watching him. Mostly
they had his form and face, and they stood, in the infinite
division of past moments, but higgledy-piggledy, sombrely staring.
He saw in front, parodying earthly crowds, the children—different
ages, different sizes, all looking with his small pointed
hungry face. In the massed multitude behind there were, at
points, different faces, faces of any few creatures who for one
reason or another had mattered to his mind. He saw his wife in
several places; he saw the face of a youth who had been the
nearest he had known to a friend; he saw those he had disliked.
But, at most, these others were few.
The crowd did not move, except that sometimes other single forms
slipped out of the ruined houses, swelling it as crowds are
swelled in London streets. It was useless, had he desired it, to
attempt to return. He turned away from them again, but this time
not merely from them but towards something, towards the
ladder. He laid a hand on it. The long hard dry rustle came
again, as the whole crowd fell forward, bones shifting and
slipping as some moving vitality slid through them. They closed
towards him, their thronged circles twisting round the house and
him as if they were the snake. His mortal mind would have given
way, could it have apprehended such a strait between shadowy bone
and shining bone; his immortal, nourished by belief in the mother
of his soul, remained clear. His seeming body remained capable.
He exercised his choice, and began to go up the ladder. At once,
with a horrid outbreak of shifting leaves and snapping sticks and
rustling bodies, they were about its foot, looking up. The living
death crowded round the ladder of bone, which it could not ascend.
White faces of unvitalized, unsubstantial, yet real,
existence, looked up at him mounting. Nothingness stared and
panted, with false breath, terrible to those who live of choice in
its phantasmal world. But for him, who rose above them to that
stage set in the sky, the expanded point and culminating area of
his last critical act, the place of skull and consciousness, of
life and death and life, for him there entered through the grasp
he had on the ladder shafts an energy. He looked neither down nor
up; he went on. A wind had risen about him, as if here the
movement of the leaves, if leaves, shook the
air, and not the air the leaves. It was as if a last invisible
tentacle were sent up by the nothingness to draw him back into the
smooth undulations below, that its sterility might bury him in a
living sepulchre; the identities of the grave moving in a blind
instinct to overtake and seize him. Now and then some of them
even began to mount a few rungs, but they could get and keep no
hold. They fell again to their own level.
He did not see this, for his eyes were above. In the same sense
of nothing but action he climbed the last rungs, and stood on the
stage from which he had been flung. But he had hardly stepped on
to it before it changed. He had come back from his own manner of
time to the point in the general world of time from which he had
fled, and he found it altered. The point of his return was not
determined by himself, but by his salvation, by a direction not
yet formulated, by the economy of means of the Omnipotence, by the
moment of the death of Margaret Anstruther. Therefore he came
into the built house, and the room where Wentworth slept. The
open stage closed round him as he came upon it. The walls rose;
there was a ceiling above. He knew he stood in a room, though the
details were vague. It was ghostly to him, like that other in
which, a short time before, he had stood. There the old woman had
been a vivid centre to him. Here he was not, at first, aware of a
centre. In this other world he had not been astonished at the
manner in which things happened, but now he was a little
uncomfortable. He thought at first it was because he could have
had no business in such a room during his earlier life. So
perhaps it was, but if so, another cause had aroused the old
uneasiness—the fainthint of a slither of dry leaves, such as he
had heard behind him along the road@ but now within the room. It
displeased and diseased him; he must remove himself. It was
almost his first quiet decision ever; he was on the point to enter
into actions of peace. The courtesy that rules the world of
spirits took him, and as the creature that lay in the room had not
entered except under Wentworth’s compulsion, so this other made
haste to withdraw from its intrusion. Also he was aware that,
having re-entered this place and point of time, this station of an
inhabited world, by the ladder of bone from the other side, he
must go now farther on the way. He had the City in his mind; he
had his wife in mind. He could not tell by what means or in what
shape he would find her, or if he would find her. But she was his
chief point of knowledge, and to that he directed himself. Of the
necessity of getting a living he did not think. Living, whether
he liked it or not, was provided; he knew that he did like. He
went carefully across the dim room and through the door; down the
stairs, and reached the front door. It opened of itself before
him, so he thought, and he peered out into the road. A great
blackness was there; it changed as he peered. As if it fled from
him, it retreated. He heard the wind again, but now blowing up
the street. A shaft of light smote along with it. Before wind
and light and himself he saw the night turn, but it was not the
mere night; it was alive, it was made of moving and twisting
shapes hurrying away of their own will. Light did not drive them;
they revealed the light as they went. They rose and rushed; as
they disappeared he saw the long drive before him, and at its end,
in the street proper, the figure of a girl.
In a different darkness, mortally illumined, Pauline, not far
away, had that previous evening been sitting by her grandmother’s
bed. It was, to her, the night after the rehearsal. She had come
home to find Margaret awake, alert, inquiring, and after she had
spoken of the details of the afternoon, she had not been able, nor
wished, to keep from speaking of the other thing that filled and
threatened her mind. Her grandmother’s attention still seemed to
her acute, even if remote. Indeed, all mortal things were now
remote to-Margaret unless they were vividly consistent with the
slope over which she moved. She felt, at intervals, someone being
lifted and fed, someone hearing and speaking intelligible words.
Only sometimes did definiteness from that other casual state enter
her; then she and it were sharply present. For the rest she only
saw vague images of a great good, and they faded, and at rarer
intervals in the other single consciousness of slow—but
slow!—movement over a surface, an intense sweetness pierced her.
She moaned then, for it was pain; she moaned happily, for it was only
the last inevitable sloth of her body that made its pain,
resisting, beyond her will, the translucent energy. She always
assented. She assented now to what Pauline was saying, sitting by
her bed, her fingers interlocked and pressed against her knee, her
body leaning forward, her breath drawn with a kind of slow
difficulty against the beating passion of her heart’s presagements.
She was saying: “But how could one give backwards?”
Margaret could not, at that point of experience, explain
metaphysics. She said: “If it’s like that, my dear?” Pauline
said: “But if he took it? I thought-there-I might: but now, I
daren’t.”
She saw Margaret’s smile flash at her across rocks. It went and
the voice said: “You think it’s yours?”
Pauline answered, abruptly checking abruptness: “I don’t…. Do
I?”
“You think one of the two’s yours—joy or misery,” Margaret said,
“or both. Why, if you don’t, should you mind?”
Pauline for a minute struggled with this in silence: then, evading
it, she returned to time. “But four hundred years,” she
exclaimed.
“Child,” her grandmother said, “I can touch Adam with my hand; you
aren’t as far off.”
“But how could he take it before I’d given it?” Pauline cried, and
Margaret said: “Why do you talk of before? If you give, you give
to It, and what does It care about before?”
Pauline got up and walked to the window. It was drawing towards
night, yet so translucent was the pale green sky that night and
day seemed alike unthinkable. She heard in the distance a single
pair of hurrying feet; patter, patter. She said, in a muffled
voice: “Even the edge frightens me.”
“Peter Stanhope,” Margaret said, “must have been frightened many
times.”
“O-poetry!” Pauline exclaimed bitterly. “That’s different; you
know it is, grandmother.”
“In seeing?” Margaret asked. “And as for being, you must find out
for yourself. He can carry your parcels, but not you.”
“Couldn’t he?” Pauline said. “Not that I want him to.”
“Perhaps,” Margaret answered. “But I think only when you don’t
need it, and your parcels when you do.”
Her voice grew faint as she spoke, and Pauline came quickly back
to the bed.
“I’m tiring you,” she said hastily. “I’m sorry:
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