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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acted, and her acting was reality, for the stillness had taken it
over. The sun was blazing, as if it would pierce all bodies
there, as if another sun radiated from another sky exploring
energies of brilliance. But the air was fresh.
She was astonished in the interval to hear Myrtle Fox complaining
of the heat. “It’s quite intolerable,” Miss Fox said, “and these
filthy trees. Why doesn’t Mr. Stanhope have them cut down? I do
think one’s spirit needs air, don’t you? I should die in a jungle,
and this feels like a jungle.”
“I should have thought,” Pauline said, but not with malice, “that
you’d have found jungles cosy.”
“There’s such a thing as being too cosy,” Adela put in. “Pauline,
I want to speak to you a minute.”
Pauline allowed herself to be withdrawn. Adela went on: “You’re
very friendly with Mr. Stanhope, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Pauline said, a little to her own surprise. She had rather
meant to say: “O not very” or “Aren’t you?”, or the longer and
more idiotic “Well I don’t know that you’d call it friendly”. But
it struck her that both they and every other living creature, from
the Four-by-the-Throne to the unseen insects in the air,
would call it friendly. She therefore said, “Yes”, and waited.
“O!” said Adela, also a little taken aback. She recovered and
went on: “I’ve been thinking about this play. We’ve done so much
with it-I and Mrs. Parry and the rest….” She paused.
“Myrtle”, Pauline said, “remarked yesterday that she felt
deeply that it was so much ours.”
“O,” said Adela again. The heat was heavy on her too and she was
pinker than strictly the Princess should have been. The
conversation hung as heavy as the heat. A determination that had
hovered in her mind had got itself formulated when she saw the
deference exhibited towards him by the outer world that afternoon,
and now with a tardy selfishness she pursued it. She said: “I
wonder if you’d ask him something.”
“Certainly—if I can decently,” Pauline answered, wondering, as
she heard herself use the word, where exactly the limits of
decency, if any, in the new world lay. Peter, she thought, would
probably find room for several million universes within those
limits.
“It’s like this,” Adela said. “I’ve always thought this a very
remarkable play.”
Pauline’s heavenly nature said to her other, without irritation but
with some relevance, “The hell you have!”
“And,” Adela went on, “as we’ve all been in it here, I thought
it’d be jolly if we could keep it ours—I mean, if he’d let us.”
She realized that she hated asking favours of Pauline, whom she
had patronized; she disliked subordinating herself. The heat was
prickly in her skin, but she persevered. “It’s not for myself so
much,” she said, “as for the general principle….”
“O, Adela, be quick!” Pauline broke in. “What do you want?”
Adela was not altogether unpractised in the gymnastics of
Gomorrah. Her spirit had come near to the suburbs, and a time
might follow when the full freedom of the further City of the
Plain would be silently presented to her by the Prince of the City
and Lilith his daughter and wife. She believed—with an effort,
but she believed-she was speaking the truth when she said: “I
don’t want anything, but I think it would be only right of Mr.
Stanhope to let us have a hand in his London production.”
“Us?” Pauline asked.
“Me then,” Adela answered. “He owes us something, doesn’t he?
and”, she hurried on, “if I could get hold of a theatre-a little
one—O, I think I could raise the money…”
“I should think you could”, Pauline said, “for a play by Mr.
Stanhope.”
“Anyhow, I thought you might sound him-or at least back me up,”
Adela went on. “You do see there’s nothing personal about it?”
She stopped, and Pauline allowed the living stillness to rise
again.
Nothing personal in, this desire to clothe immortality with a
career? Nothing unnatural perhaps; nothing improper perhaps; but
nothing personal? Nothing less general than the dark pause and the
trees and the measured movements of verse? nothing less free than
interchange of love? She said: “Adela, tell me it’s for yourself,
only yourself, and I’ll do it if I can.”
Adela, extremely offended, and losing her balance said: “It isn’t.
We shall be as good for him as he will be for us.”
“A kind of mutual-profit system?” Pauline suggested. “You’d
better get back; they’ll be ready. I’ll do whatever you
want—tomorrow.”
“But—” Adela began; however, Pauline had gone; where Adela did
not quite see. It was the heat of the afternoon that so disjoined
movement, she thought. She could not quite follow the passage of
people now-at least, off the stage. They appeared and disappeared
by her, as if the air opened, and someone were seen in the midst
of it, and then the air closed up, and opened again, and there was
someone else. She was getting fanciful. Fortunately there was
only one more act, and on the stage it was all right; there people
were where she expected them. Or, if not, you could find fault;
that refuge remained. She hurried to the place, and found herself
glad to be there. Lingering near was the Grand Duke. He
contemplated her as she came up.
“You look a little done,” he said, gravely and affectionately.
“It’s the heat,” said Adela automatically.
“It’s not so frightfully hot,” Hugh answered. “Quite a good
afternoon. A little thunder about somewhere, perhaps.”
The thunder, if it was thunder, was echoing distantly in Adela’s
ears; she looked at Hugh’s equanimity with dislike. He had
something of Mrs. Parry in him, and she resented it. She said: “I
wish you were more sensitive, Hugh.”
“So long as I’m sensitive to you,” Hugh said, “it ought to be
enough. You’re tired, darling.”
“Hugh, you’d tell me I was tired on the Day of judgment,” Adela
exclaimed. “I keep on saying it’s the heat.”
“Very well,” Hugh assented; “it’s the heat making you tired.”
“I’m not tired at all,” Adela said in a burst of exasperated rage,
“I’m hot and I’m sick of this play, and I’ve got a headache. It’s
very annoying to be so continually misunderstood. After all, the
play does depend upon me a good deal, and all I have to do, and
when I ask for a little sympathy….”
Hugh took her arm. “Shut up,” he said.
She stared back. “Hugh—” she began, but he interrupted her.
“Shut up,” he said again. “You’re getting above yourself, my
girl; you and your sympathy. I’ll talk to you when this is over.
You’re the best actor in the place, and your figure’s absolutely
thrilling in that dress, and there’s a lot more to tell you like
that, and I’ll tell you presently. But it’s time to begin now,
and go and do as I tell you.”
Adela found herself pushed away. There had been between them an
amount of half-pretended mastery and compulsion, but she was
conscious of a new sound in Hugh’s voice. It struck so near her
that she forgot about Pauline and the heat and Stanhope, for she
knew that she would have to make up her mind about it, whether to
reject or allow that authoritative assumption. Serious commands
were a new thing in their experience. Her immediate instinct was
to evade: the phrase which sprang to her mind was: “I shall have
to manage him—I can manage him.” If she were going to marry
Hugh—and she supposed she was—she would either have to acquiesce
or pretend to acquiesce. She saw quite clearly what she would do;
she would assent, but she would see to it that chance never
assented. She knew that she would not revolt; she would never
admit that there was any power against which Adela Hunt could
possibly be in a state of revolt. She had never admitted it of
Mrs. Parry. It was always the other people who were in revolt
against her. Athanasian in spirit, she knew she was right and the
world wrong. Unathanasian in method, she intended to manage
the world… Stanhope, Mrs. Parry, Hugh. She would neither
revolt nor obey nor compromise; she would deceive. Her admission
to the citizenship of Gomorrah depended on the moment at which, of
those four only possible alternatives for the human soul, she
refused to know which she had chosen. Tell me it’s for yourself,
only yourself….. No, no, it’s not for myself; it’s for the good
of others, her good, his good, everybody’s good: is it my fault if
they don’t see it? manage them, manage them, manage her, manage
him, and them. O, the Princess managing the Woodcutter’s Son, and
the Chorus, the chorus of leaves, this way, that way; minds
twiddling them the right way; treachery better than truth, for
treachery was the only truth, there was no truth to be treacherous
to—and the last act beginning, and she in it, and the heat
crackling in the ground, in her head, in the air. On then, on to
the stage, and Pauline was to ask Stanhope tomorrow.
Pauline watched her as she went, but she saw the Princess and not
Adela. Now the process of the theatre was wholly reversed, for
stillness cast up the verse and the verse flung out the actors,
and though she knew sequence still, and took part in it, it was
not sequence that mattered, more than as a definition of the edge
of the circle, and that relation which was the exhibition of the
eternal. Relation in the story, in the plot, was only an accident
of need: there had been a time when it mattered, but now it
mattered no longer, or for a while no longer. Presently, perhaps,
it would define itself again as a need of daily life; she would
be older than her master, or younger, or contemporaneous; now they
were both no more than mutual perceptions in a flash of love. She
had had relation with her ancestor and with that other man more
lately dead and with her grandmother—all the presently
disincarnate presences which lived burningly in the stillness,
through which the fire burned, and the stillness was the fire.
She danced out of it, a flame flung up, a leaf catching to a
flame. They were rushing towards the end of the play, an end, an
end rushing towards the earth and the earth rushing to meet it.
The words were no longer separated from the living stillness, they
were themselves the life of the stillness, and though they sounded
in it they no more broke it than the infinite particles of
creation break the eternal contemplation of God in God. The
stillness turned upon itself; the justice of the stillness drew
all the flames and leaves, the dead and living, the actors and
spectators, into its power-percipient and impercipient, that was
the only choice, and that was for their joy alone. She sank
deeper into it. The dance of herself and all the others
ceased, they drew aside, gathered up—O on how many rehearsals,
and now gathered! “Behold, I come quickly! Amen, even so….”
They were in the groups of the last royal declamations, and swept
aside, and the mighty stage was clear. Suddenly again, from
somewhere in that great abyss of clarity, a trumpet sounded, and
then a great uproar, and then a single voice. It was the
beginning of the end; the judgment of mortality was there. She
was standing aside, and she heard the voice and knew it; from the
edge of eternity the poets were speaking to the world, and two
modes of experience were
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