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

VIA MORTIS

Mrs. Parry and her immediate circle, among whom Adela Hunt was

determinedly present, had come, during Pauline’s private

meditations, to several minor decisions, one of which was to ask

Lawrence Wentworth to help with the costumes, especially the

costumes of the Grand Ducal Court and Guard. Adela had said

immediately that she would call on Mr. Wentworth at once, and

Mrs. Parry, with a brief discontent, had agreed. While,

therefore, Pauline was escaping from her ghostly twin, Adela and

Hugh went pleasantly along other roads of the Hill to Wentworth’s

house.

It stood not very far from the Manor House, a little lower

than that but still near to the rounded summit of the rise of

ground which had given the place half its name. Lawrence

Wentworth’s tenancy was peculiarly suitable to the other half,

for his intellectual concern was with the history of battle, and

battles had continually broken over the Hill. Their reality had

not been quite so neat as the diagrams into which he abstracted

and geometricized them. The black lines and squares had swayed

and shifted and been broken; the crimson curves, which had lain

bloody under the moon, had been a mass of continuous tiny

movement, a mass noisy with moans and screams. The Hill’s

chronicle of anguish had been due, in temporalities, to its

strategic situation in regard to London, but a dreamer might have

had nightmares of a magnetic attraction habitually there

deflecting the life of man into death. It had epitomized the

tale of the world. Prehistoric legends, repeated in early

chronicles, told of massacres by revolting Britons and roaming

Saxons, mornings and evenings of hardly-human sport. Later, when

permanent civilization arose, a medieval fortalice had been

built, and a score of civil feuds and pretended loyalties had

worn themselves out around it under kings who, though they were

called Stephen or John, were as remote as Shalmanezer or

Jeroboam. The Roses had twined there, their roots living on the

blood shed by their thorns; the castle had gone up one night in

fire, as did Rome, and the Manor House that followed had been

raised in the midst of another order. A new kind of human

civility entered; as consequence or cause of which, this Hill of

skulls seemed to become either weary or fastidious. In the

village that had stood at the bottom of the rise a peasant

farmer, moved by some wandering gospeller, had, under Mary Tudor,

grown obstinately metaphysical, and fire had been lit between

houses and manor that he might depart through it in a roaring

anguish of joy. Forty years later, under Elizabeth, the

whispering informers had watched an outlaw, a Jesuit priest, take

refuge in the manor, but when he was seized the Death of the Hill

had sent him to its Type in London for more prolonged ceremonies

of castration, as if it, like the men of the Renascence, seemed

to involve its brutal origin in complications of religion and

art. The manor had been forfeited to the Crown, but granted

again to another branch of the family, so that, through all human

changes, the race of owners had still owned. This endured, when

afterwards it was sold to richer men, and even when Peter

Stanhope had bought it back the house of his poetry remained

faintly touched by the dreadful ease that was given to it by the

labour and starvation of the poor.

The whole rise of ground therefore lay like a cape, a rounded

headland of earth, thrust into an ocean of death. Men, the lords

of that small earth, dominated it. The folklore of skies and

seasons belonged to it. But if the past still lives in its own

present beside our present, then the momentary later inhabitants

were surrounded by a greater universe. From other periods of its

time other creatures could crawl out of death, and invisibly

contemplate the houses and people of the rise. The amphibia of

the past dwelt about, and sometimes crawled out on, the slope of

this world, awaiting the hour when they should either retire to

their own mists or more fully invade the place of the living.

There had been, while the workmen had been creating the houses of

the new estate, an incident which renewed the habit of the Hill,

as if that magnetism of death was quick to touch first the more

unfortunate of mortals. The national margin of unemployment had

been reduced by the new engagement of labourers, and from the

work’s point of view reduced, in one instance, unwisely. A

certain unskilled assistant had been carelessly taken on; he was

hungry, he was ill, he was clumsy and slow. His name no one

troubled to know. He shambled among the rest, their humorous

butt. He was used to that; all his life he had been the butt of

the world, generally of an unkind world. He had been repeatedly

flung into the gutter by the turn of a hand in New York or Paris,

and had been always trying to scramble out of it again. He had

lost his early habit of complaining, and it only added to his

passive wretchedness that his wife kept hers. She made what

money she could by charing, at the market price, with Christmas

Day, St. Stephen, and such feasts deducted, and since she usually

kept her jobs, she could reasonably enjoy her one luxury of

nagging her husband because he lost his. His life seemed to him

an endless gutter down which ran an endless voice. The clerk of

the works and his foreman agreed that he was no good.

An accidental inspection by one of the directors decided his

discharge. They were not unkind; they paid him, and gave him an

extra shilling to get a bus some way back towards London. The

clerk added another shilling and the foreman sixpence. They told

him to go; he was, on the whole, a nuisance. He went; that night

he returned.

He went, towards the buses a mile off, tramping blindly away

through the lanes, coughing and sick. He saw before him the

straight gutter, driven direct to London across the lanes and

fields. At its long end was a miserable room that had a

perpetual shrill voice.

He longed to avoid them, and as if the Hill bade him a

placable farewell there came to him as he left it a quiet

thought. He could simply reject the room and its voice; he could

simply stop walking down the gutter. A fancy of it had grown in

him once or twice before. Then it had been a fancy of a

difficult act; now the act had suddenly become simple.

Automatically eating a piece of bread that one of the men had

given him, he sat down by the roadside, looking round him to find

the easiest way to what had suddenly become a resolve. Soft and

pitiless the country stretched away round him, unwilling that he

should die. He considered. There were brooks; he knew it was