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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the voice, and heard it; all else was still. Peter Stanhope, as
he had promised, was saying a few words at the close of the play.
There was but one small contretemps. As, after moving to the
stage and turning to face the audience, Stanhope began to speak,
Mrs. Sammile slid down in, and finally completely off, her chair,
and lay in a heap. She had been very bright all the afternoon; in
fact, she had been something of a nuisance to her immediate
neighbours by the whispered comments of admiration she had offered
upon the display of sound and colour before her. As the crash of
applause broke out she had been observed to make an effort to join
in it. But her hands had seemed to tremble and fail. Stanhope
was to speak before the last calls, and the applause crashed
louder when he appeared. It was in the midst of that enthusiasm
that Mrs. Sammile fainted.
THE OPENING OF GRAVES
Whatever mystery had, to Pauline’s exalted senses, taken its place
in the world on that afternoon, it seemed to make no difference to
the world. Things proceeded. Her uncle had arrived from London
during the performance, and had had to have his niece’s absence
explained to him, first by the maid and later by the niece. After
the explanation Pauline remembered without surprise in her shame
that she used to dislike her uncle.
Margaret Anstruther was buried on the next day but one, to the
sound of that apostolic trumpet which calls on all its hearers to
rise from the dead, and proclaims the creation on earth of
celestial bodies, “sown in corruption, raised in incorruption;
sown in dishonour, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in
power”. “Be steadfast, unmovable… your labour is not in vain
in the Lord.” Pauline heard with a new attention; these were no
longer promises, but facts. She dared not use the awful phrases
for herself; only, shyly, she hoped that perhaps, used by some
other heavenly knowledge, they might not be altogether
inapplicable to herself. The epigram of experience which is in
all dogma hinted itself within her. But more than these passages
another stranger imagination struck her heart: “Why are they then
baptized for the dead?” There, rooted in the heart of the Church
at its freshest, was the same strong thrust of interchange.
Bear for others; be baptized for others; and, rising as her new
vision of the world had done once and again, an even more fiery
mystery of exchange rolled through her horizons, turning and
glancing on her like the eyed and winged wheels of the prophet.
The central mystery of Christendom, the terrible fundamental
substitution on which so much learning had been spent and about
which so much blood had been shed, showed not as a miraculous
exception, but as the root of a universal rule… “behold, I shew
you a mystery”, as supernatural as that Sacrifice, as natural as
carrying a bag. She flexed her fingers by her side as if she
thought of picking one up.
The funeral over, her uncle hastened action. The moment for which
they had all been waiting had arrived; his mother was dead. So
now they could clear things up. The house could be sold, and most
of the furniture. Pauline could have a room in a London hostel,
which he would find her, and a job in a London office, which he
had already found her. They discussed her capacities; he hinted
that it was a pity she hadn’t made more of the last few years.
She might have learned German while sitting with Margaret, and
Spanish instead of taking part in plays. She would have to be
brisker and livelier. Pauline, suppressing a tendency to point
out that for years he had wished her to be not brisk or lively,
but obedient and loving, said she would remember. She added that
she would have a little money, enough to buy her bread. Her uncle
said that a woman couldn’t live on bread, and anyhow a job was a
good thing; he didn’t wish his niece to waste her time and energy.
Pauline, thinking that Stanhope had said the same thing
differently, agreed. Her uncle, having put everything he could
into somebody’s hands, left her to live for a few days in the
house with the maid, and rushed back to London with his wife,
whose conversation had been confined to assuring Pauline that she
would get over it presently.
Pauline might have believed this if she had been clear what it was
that she was expected to get over. Of one thing it was true; she
no longer expected to see the haunting figure of’ her childhood’s
acquaintance and youthful fear. She remembered it now as one
remembers a dream, a vivid dream of separation and search. She
had been, it seemed, looking for a long while for someone, or
perhaps some place, that was necessary to her. She had been
looking for someone who was astray, and at the same time she had
been sought. In the dream she had played hide-and-seek with
herself in a maze made up of the roads of Battle Hill, and the
roads were filled with many figures who hated—neither her nor any
other definite person, but hated. They could not find anything
they could spend their hate on, for they slipped and slithered and
slid from and through each other, since it was their hate which
separated them. It was no half-self-mocking hate, nor even an
immoral but half-justified hate, certainly not the terrible,
enjoyable, and angry hate of ordinary men and women. It was the
hate of those men and women who had lost humanity in their extreme
love of themselves amongst humanity. They had been found in their
streets by the icy air of those mountain peaks of which she
had once heard her grandmother speak, and their spirits had frozen
in them. Among them she also had gone about, and the only thing
that had distinguished her from them was her fear lest they should
notice her. And while she hurried she had changed, in her bygone
dream, and she was searching for some poor shadow of herself that
fled into the houses to escape her. The dream had been long, for
the houses had opened up, as that shadow entered, into long
corridors and high empty rooms, and there was one dreadful room
which was all mirrors, or what was worse than mirrors, for the
reflections in those mirrors were living, though they hid for a
while and had no being till the shadow at last came speeding into
the room, but then they were seen, and came floating out of their
flickering cells, and danced the shadow into some unintelligible
dissolution among them. it was from that end that she sought to
save the miserable fugitive-. When in her memory she reached that
point, when the shadow was fleeing deeper into Gomorrah, and she
fled after it on feet that were so much swifter than its own and
yet in those infinite halls and corridors could never overtake it
while it fled-when the moment of approach down the last long
corridor to the last utter manifestation of allusion drew near,
she heard far off a trumpet, and she could remember nothing more
but that she woke. She remembered that she woke swiftly, as if a
voice called her, but however hard she tried she could not well
recollect whose voice it was; perhaps that also was part of the
dream, or perhaps it was the nurse’s voice that had called her on
the morning her grandmother had died. Perhaps; perhaps not.
Under all the ceremonies of the days, under the companionship of
her people, under her solitude, under her gradual preparations for
departure and her practice of studies which were to make her more
efficient in whatever job her uncle and the operation of the
Immortals should find her, under sun and moon alike, she waited.
She waited, and remembered only as a dream the division between
herself and the glorious image by which the other was to be
utterly ensouled.
It was observable, however, on the Hill, how many of the
inhabitants were unwell. Mrs. Sammile had fainted, and had not
been seen about since. Someone had offered to take her home in a
car, but she had declined, declaring that she was all right, and
had disappeared. Myrtle Fox, though she had got through the
performance, had gone home crying, and had been in bed ever since.
She could not sleep; a doctor had been called in, but he did not
help her. She took this and that, and nothing did good. She
would doze a little, and wake crying and sobbing. “It’s all this
excitement,” her mother said severely, and opinion began to blame
the play for Myrtle’s illness. Lawrence Wentworth remained shut
in his house; even his servants hardly saw him, and the curtains
of his study were generally drawn. “It isn’t human,” his parlour-maid
said to next door’s parlour-maid. Some of the actors and
some of the audience were also affected by what was generally
called the local influenza epidemic. The excitement of the play
or the brightness of the summer or the cold winds that even under
such a sun swept the Hill, or some infection more subtle than
these, struck the inhabitants down.
Neither Adela nor Hugh were among them. Hugh, like Mrs. Parry,
went on efficiently dealing with the moment. Adela suffered, from
the heat, from the thunder, from suppressed anxiety, but she did
not go to bed. Pauline, even had she been free from her family,
could not have carried out her promise, for immediately after the
performance Stanhope disappeared for a few days; it was understood
he had gone away for a change. Pauline could do no more than
assure Adela that, as soon as he returned, she would
look for an opportunity. “But I can’t,” she said, “do more than
that. I can’t butt in on him with a club, Adela. If it’s for all
of us, why not do it yourself? If it was for you personally, of
course you might feel awkward, but as it isn’t….” Adela said
it certainly wasn’t, and went off peevishly.
As a result the management of Hugh had to be postponed. He had
not, in fact, made that formal proposal which was necessary if
Adela was to feel, as she wished, that she had a right and a duty
to manage him, In order not to thwart him, Adela controlled
herself more than was her habit when they were together.
Obedience and revolt being both out of the question, she
compromised temporarily that she might manage permanently. It was
in such a compromise that they had been walking one evening on the
Hill two or three days after Margaret Anstruther’s burial. By
accident, on their return, they took a road which led past the
gates of the cemetery, and as they came by Hugh said idly: “I
suppose Pauline’ll be going now her grandmother’s dead.”
Adela had not thought of this. She said immediately: “O, I
shouldn’t wonder if she stopped—moved to a smaller house or
something. She can’t go yet.”
Hugh said: “You didn’t go to the funeral, darling?”
“Of course not,” Adela answered. “I hate being morbid.” As if to
prove it she lingered to look through the gates. “There are so
many of them,” she added.
“Yes,” Hugh said, with what faintly struck Adela as unnecessary
obtuseness, “you can’t get round death with any kind of adjective,
can you?”
“I don’t want to get round anything with adjectives,” Adela
almost snarled. “Thank God we’ve got away from any pretence.
It’s so unimportant when one doesn’t pretend. When one’s
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