Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (ereader iphone .TXT) 📕
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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who had come to that unbuilt house had been driven by his, and
for some time he wandered about his rooms as that other shape had
gone through the streets, seeking peace and finding none. At
last he found himself in his bedroom, looking out of the window,
as the dead man had stood there looking over the ruins of
history, from the place of his skull. Wentworth stood there now
for some seconds, exercising a no more conscious but a still more
deliberate choice. He also yielded—to the chaos within rather
than the chaos without. The dead man had had reason to suppose
that to throw himself down would mean freedom from tyranny, but
Wentworth was not so much of a fool as to think that to thrust
himself into the way of possible discovery would mean any such
freedom. A remnant of intelligence cried to him that this was
the road of mania, and self-indulgence leading to mania.
Self-preservation itself urged him to remain; lucidity urged him,
if not love. He stood and looked and listened, as the dead man
had looked and listened. He heard faint hurrying footsteps
somewhere on the Hill; the moon was covered by a cloud. The
shadow provoked him; in it they might be, now, passing the end of
his road. He must act before it was too late. He would not go
to spy; he would go for a walk. He went out of the room, down
the soft swift stairs of his mind, into the streets of his mind,
to find the phantoms of his mind. He desired hell.
He strode out on his evening walk. He walked down the length of
his road; if that led towards the station it could not be helped,
nor if at a point it joined the road which Adela would take from
the station. He was a man, and he had a right to his walk. He
was not a child, neither the child that had lost its toy and
cried for it, nor the child that had lost its toy and would not
let itself care, nor the child that had lost its toy and tried to
recover it by pretending it never did care. It may be a movement
towards becoming like little children to admit that we are
generally nothing else. But he was; he was a man, he was going
for his walk.
At the junction of roads, as at a junction of his mind, he
stopped and waited-to enjoy the night air. His enjoyment
strained intently and viciously to hear the sounds of the night,
or such as were not of too remote and piercing a quality to reach
him. The wind among the hills was fresh. He heard at a distance
a train come in, and the whistle of its departure. One or two
travellers went by; one, a woman, hurrying, said something to him
as she passed—good night or good morning; it sounded, in his
strained joy, like both. He became aware that he was visible in
the moon; he moved back into shadow. If he saw them coming he
could walk away or walk on without seeming to be in ambush. He
was not in ambush; he was out for a walk.
An hour and more went by. He walked back, and returned. His
physical nature, which sometimes by its mere exhaustion postpones
our more complete damnation, did not save him. He was not
overtired by his vigil, nor in that extreme weariness was the
vision of a hopeless honour renewed. He paced and repaced,
cannibal of his heart. Midnight passed; the great tower clock
struck one. He heard the last train come in. A little up the
road, concealed in the shadow, he waited. He heard the light
patter of quick feet; he saw, again, a woman go hurrying by. He
thought for a moment she was Adela, and then knew she was not.
Other feet came, slower and double. The moon was bright; he
stood at the edge of his own skull’s platform; desire to hate and
desire not to hate struggled in him. In the moonlight, visible,
audible, arm in arm, talking and laughing, they came. He saw
them pass; his eyes grew blind. Presently he turned and went
home. That night when at last he slept he dreamed, more clearly
than ever before, of his steady descent of the moon-bright rope.
VISION OF DEATH
Pauline’s parents had both died a few years before; she had been
put in Battle Hill to live with her grandmother for two reasons.
The first was that she had no money. The second was that her
uncle refused “to leave his mother to strangers”. Since
Pauline’s mother had never liked her husband’s parents, the girl
had practically never seen the old lady. But the blood
relationship, in her uncle’s mind connoted intimacy, and he found
an occupation for an orphan and a companion for a widow at one
stroke of mercy. Pauline was furious at the decisive kindness
which regulated her life, but she had not, at the time when it
interfered, found a job, and she had been so involved with the
getting to Battle Hill that she discovered herself left there, at
last, with her grandmother, a nurse, and a maid. Even so, it was
the latent fear in her life that paralysed initiative; she could
respond but she could not act. Since they had been on the Hill
and the visitations had grown more frequent, she felt that deep
paralysis increasing, and she kept her hold on social things
almost desperately tight. Her alternative was to stop in
altogether, to bury herself in the house, and even so to endure,
day by day, the fear that her twin might resolve out of the air
somewhere in the hall or the corridor outside her own room. She
hated to go out, but she hated still more to stop in, and her
intelligence told her that the alternative might save her nothing
in the end. Rigid and high-headed she fled, with a subdued fury
of pace, from house to gathering, and back from gathering to house,
and waited for her grandmother to die.
Her grandmother, ignoring the possible needs of the young, went
on living, keeping her room in the morning, coming down to lunch,
and after a light early dinner retiring again to her room. She
made no great demands on her granddaughter, towards whom indeed
she showed a delicate social courtesy; and Pauline in turn,
though in a harsher manner, maintained towards her a steady
deference and patience. The girl was in fact so patient with the
old lady that she had not yet noticed that she was never given an
opportunity to be patient. She endured her own nature and
supposed it to be the burden of another’s.
On an afternoon in early June they were both in the garden at the
back of the house; the walls that shut it in made it a part of
the girl’s security. Pauline was learning her part, turning the
typescript on her knees, and shaping the words with silent lips.
The trouble about some of them was that they were so simple as to
be almost bathos. Her fibres told her that they were not bathos
until she tried to say them, and then, it was no good denying,
they sounded flat. She put the stress here and there; she tried
slowness and speed. She invoked her conscious love to vocalize
her natural passion, and the lines made the effort ridiculous.
She grew hot as she heard herself say them, even though she did
not say them aloud. Her unheard melody was less sweet than her
memory of Stanhope’s heard, but she did not then think of him
reading, only of the lines he had read. They were simple with
him; with her they were pretentious and therefore defiled.
She looked up at Mrs. Anstruther, who was sitting with her eyes
closed, and her hands in her lap. Small, thin, wrinkled, she was
almost an ideal phenomenon of old age Some caller, a day or two
before, had murmured to Pauline on leaving: “She’s very fragile,
isn’t she?” Pauline, gazing, thought that fragile was precisely
not the word. Quiet, gentle, but hardly passive and certainly
not fragile. Even now, on that still afternoon, the shut eyes
left the face with a sense of preoccupation—translucent rock.
She was absent, not with the senility of a spirit wandering in
feeble memories, but with the attention of a worker engrossed.
Perhaps Stanhope looked so when he wrote verse. Pauline felt
that she had never seen her grandmother before and did not quite
know what to make of her now. A light sound came from the garden
beyond. Mrs. Anstruther opened her eyes and met Pauline’s. She
smiled. “My dear,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you
something for the last day or two.” Pauline thought it might be
the hot afternoon that gave the voice that effect of distance; it
was clear, but small and from afar. The words, the tone, were
affectionate with an impersonal love. Pauline thought: “She
might be talking to Phoebe”—Phoebe being the maid—and at the
same time realized that Mrs. Anstruther did so talk to Phoebe,
and to everyone. Her good will diffused itself in all
directions. Her granddaughter lay in its way, with all things
besides, and it mingled with the warm sun in a general
benediction.
Pauline said: “Yes, grandmother?”
“If by any chance I should die during the next few weeks,” Mrs.
Anstruther said, “you won’t let it interfere with your taking
part in the play, will you? It would be so unnecessary.”
Pauline began to speak, and hesitated. She had been on the
point of beginning formally: “O, but”, when she felt, under the
lucid gaze, compelled to intelligence. She said slowly:
“Well, I suppose I should have….”
“Quite unnecessary,” Mrs. Anstruther went on, “and obviously
inconvenient, especially if it were in the last few days. Or the
last. I hoped you wouldn’t think of it, but it was better to
make sure.”
“It’ll look very odd,” said Pauline, and found herself smiling
back. “And what will the rest of them think?”
“One of them will be disappointed, the rest will be shocked but
relieved,” Mrs. Anstruther murmured. “You’ve no proper
understudy?”
“None of us have,” Pauline said. “One of the others in the
Chorus would have to take my part… if I were ill, I mean.”
“Do any of them speak verse better than you?” Mrs. Anstruther
asked, with a mild truthfulness of inquiry.
Pauline considered the Chorus. “No,” she said at last,
sincerely. “I don’t think… I’m sure they don’t. Nor
Adela,” she added with a slight animosity against the princess.
Her grandmother accepted the judgment. “Then it would be better
for you to be there,” she said. “So you’ll promise me? It will
very nearly be a relief.”
“I’ll promise certainly,” Pauline said. “But you don’t feel
worse, do you, my dear? I thought you’d been stronger lately—since
the summer came in.”
“‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go,’” Mrs. Anstruther
quoted. “And a quieter starting-place than our ancestor.”
“Our ancestor?” Pauline said, surprised. “O, but I remember. He
was martyred wasn’t he?”
Mrs. Anstruther quoted again: “‘Then the said Struther being
come to the stake, cried out very loudly: To him that hath shall
be given, and one of the friars that went with him struck at him
and said: Naughty heretic, and what of him that hath not? and he
shouted with a great laughter, pointing at the friar, and calling
out: He shall lose all that he hath, and again the Lord hath sent
away the rich with empty bellies. Then they stripped him, and
when
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