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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hastening death. She went peacefully, but while, days before, it
had been Stanhope’s intervention that had changed her mood, now
she had come, by the last submissive laughter of her telephone
call, into the ways of the world he had no more than opened. She
went with a double watchfulness, for herself and for that other
being whom her grandmother had sent her to meet, but her
watchfulness did not check her speed, nor either disturb the
peace. She turned, soon enough, into the street where Lawrence
Wentworth’s house stood, not far from the top of the Hill in one
direction, from the Manor House in another, and, beyond all
buildings, from the silent crematorium in a third. The street, as
she came into it, looked longer than she had remembered. It had
something of the effect by which small suburban byways, far
inland, seem to dip towards the sea, though here it was no sea
but a mere distance of road which received it. She slackened her
pace, and, flicking one hand with her gloves, walked towards the
house.
She reached it at last, and paused. There was at first no sign of
any living creature. She looked up at it; the shadows were thick
on it, seeming to expand and contract. The small occasional wind
of the night, intermittently rising, caught them and flung them
against it; they were beaten and bruised, if shadows could take
the bruise, against its walls; they hid windows and doors; there
was only a rough shape of the house discernible below them. She
thought, in a faint fancy, too indistinct to be a distress, of
herself flung in that steady recurrence against a bleak wall,
and somehow it seemed sad that she should not be bruised. A
gratitude for material things came over her; she twisted her
gloves in her fingers and even struck her knuckles gently
together, that the sharp feel of them might assure her of firm
flesh and plotted bone. As if that slight tap had been at a door,
to announce a visitor, she saw a man standing outside the shadow,
close by the house.
She could not, in the moon, see very clearly what he was. She
thought, by something in his form, that she had seen him before;
then, that she had not. She thought of her grandmother’s errand,
and that perhaps here was its end. She waited, in the road, while
he came down the drive, and then she saw him clearly. He was
small and rather bent; obviously a working man and at that an
unsuccessful working man, for his clothes were miserably old, and
his boots gaped. Yet he had presence; he advanced on her with
a quiet freedom, and when he came near she saw that he was
smiling. He put up his hand to his tattered cap; the motion had
in it the nature of an act-it had conclusion, it began and ended.
He said, almost with a conscious deference such as she could have
imagined herself feeling for Stanhope had she known nothing of him
but his name: “Good evening, miss. Could you tell me the way to
London?”
There was the faintest sound of the city’s metal in his voice:
dimly she knew the screech of London gate. She said: “Why, yes,
but-you don’t mean to walk?”
He answered: “Yes, miss, if you’ll be so kind as to tell me the
right road.”
“But it’s thirty miles,” she cried, “and… hadn’t you better.
…” She stopped, embarrassed by the difficulties of earth. He
did not look inferior enough to be offered money; money being the
one thing that could not be offered to people of one’s own class,
or to anybody one respected. All the things that could
be bought by money, but not money. Yet unless she offered this
man money he did not, from his clothes, look as if he would get to
London unless he walked.
He said: “I’d as soon walk, miss. It isn’t more than a step.”
“It seems to be considerably more,” she said, and thought of her
grandmother’s errand, “Must you go now or could you wait till the
morning? I could offer you a bed tonight.” It seemed to her that
this must be the reason why she was here.
He said: “I’d as soon not, though thank you for offering. I’d
rather start now, if you’ll tell me the way.”
She hesitated before this self-possession; the idea that he needed
money still held her, and now she could not see any way to avoid
offering it. She looked in his serene quiet eyes, and said, with
a gesture of her hand, “If it’s a question of the fare?”
He shook his head, still smiling. “It’s only a matter of starting
right,” he answered, and Pauline felt absurdly disappointed, as if
some one had refused a cup of coffee or of cold water that she had
wanted to bring. She was also a little surprised to find how easy
it was to offer money when you tried—or indeed to take it;
celestially easy. She answered his smile: “Well, if you won’t..
..” she said. “Look then, this is the best way.”
They walked a few steps together, the girl and the dead man, till,
at a corner a little beyond Wentworth’s house, she stopped.
“Down there,” she said, pointing, “is the London road, you can
just see where it crosses this. Are you sure you won’t stay tonight
and go in the morning-fare and all?” So she might have asked
any of her friends, whether it had been a fare or a book or love
or something of no more and no less importance.
“Quite, miss,” he said, lifting his hand to his cap again in an
archangelic salute to the Mother of God. “It doesn’t matter
perhaps, but I think I ought to get on. They may be waiting for
me.”
“I see,” she said, and added with a conscious laughter, “One never
knows, does one?”
“O I wouldn’t say never, miss,” he answered. “Thank you again.
Good night, miss.”
“Good night,” she said, and with a last touch of the cap he was
gone down the road, walking very quickly, lightly, and steadily.
He went softly; she was not sure that she could hear his tread,
though she knew she had not been listening for it. She watched
him for a minute; then she turned her head and looked up the
cross-road on the other side of the street. That way ran up
towards the Manor House; she thought of her telephone call and
wondered if Stanhope were asleep or awake. She looked back at the
departing figure, and said after it aloud, in an act of remembered
goodwill: “Go in peace!”
The words were hardly formed when it seemed to her that he
stopped. The figure surely stood still; it was swaying; it was
coming back-not coming back, only standing still, gesticulating.
Its arms went up toward heaven in entreaty; then they fell and it
bent and clutched its head with its hands. An agony had fallen on
it. She saw and began to run. As she did so, she thought that
her ears caught for an instant a faint sound from behind her, as
of a trumpet, the echo of the trumpet of that day’s rehearsal done
or of the next day’s performance not yet begun, or of a siren that
called for the raising or lowering of a bridge.
So faintly shrill was the sound, coming to her between the cliffs
of a pass from a camp on the other side the height, that her
senses answered as sharply. The sound was transmitted into her
and transmuted into sight or the fear of sight. “The Magus… my
dead child… his own image.” She was running fast; the stranger
had gone an infinite distance in that time; she was running as she
had run from her own room, and now she knew she had been right
when she stopped, and it was a trap. Everything—she was running,
for she could not stop—had been a part of the trap; even the
shelter she had sometimes found had been meant only to catch her
more surely in the end. Ah, the Magus Zoroaster had set it for
her, all that time since, and her grandmother was part of its
infinitely complicated steel mechanism, which now shut her in,
and was going off-had gone off and was still going off, for ever
and ever going off, in the faint shrill sound that came from
behind her where Stanhope sat working it, for Zoroaster or Shelley
were busy in front, and in front was the spring of the death and
the delirium, and she had been tricked to run in that ingenious
plot of their invention, and now she could no more stop than she
could cease to hear the shrill whirr of the wheel that would start
the spring, and when it cracked at last there would be her twin
shape in the road. It was for this that the inhuman torturer who
was Stanhope had pretended to save her, and the old creature who
was her grandmother and talked of God had driven her out into the
wild night, and the man who would not take her offer had fetched
her to the point and the instant. Earth and sky were the climax
of her damnation; their rods pressed her in. She ran; the trumpet
sounded; the shape before her lifted his head again and dropped
his hands and stood still.
She was coming near to him, and the only fact of peace to which
her outraged mind could cling was that so far it was still he and
not the other. Every second that he so remained was a relief.
His back might open any moment and her own form leap hastily down
from its ambush now among his veins and canals or from his
interior back-throbbing heart. It did not; it became more
definitely a man’s back, as she neared it, but she saw it shaking
and jerking. It was a great back, clothed in some kind of cloth
doublet, with breeches below, and a heavy head of thick hair
above; and the arms suddenly went up again, and a voice sounded.
It said, in a shout of torment: “Lord God! Lord God!”
She stopped running a dozen yards off and stood still. It was not
her decision; she was brought to a stand. The cry freed her from
fear and delirium, as if it took over its own from her. She stood
still, suddenly alert. The trap, if there had been a trap, had
opened, and she had come out beyond it. But there was another
trap, and this man was in it. He cried again: “Lord God!”
The trumpet had ceased blowing. She said in a voice breathless
only from haste: “Can I help you?”
The man in front became rigid: he said: “Lord God, I cannot bear
the fear of the fire.”
She said: “What fire?” and still with his back to her he answered:
“The fire they will burn me in to-day unless I say what they
choose. Lord God, take away the fear if it be thy will. Lord
God, be merciful to a sinner. Lord God, make me believe.”
She was here. She had been taught what to do. She had her offer
to make now and it would not be refused. She herself was offered,
in a most certain fact, through four centuries, her place at the
table of exchange, The moment of goodwill in which she had
directed to the City the man who had but lately died had opened to
her the City itself, the place of the present
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