Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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not to forbid. There must be those who make the effort and some may
never come again, but one at any moment shall. Go, if you will; master
corruption and the grave; make mortal imagination more than immortal;
die and live.”
Nielsen dropped on a knee, but his face was turned upwards to
Considine’s who, stooping, laid his hands on the other’s shoulders.
Behind the two exalted figures the deep blue of the curtains seemed to
be troubled as if distance itself were shaken with the cry and the
command. The splendour of colour quivered with the neighbourhood of
the ecstasy of man imagining the truth of his being, and creating
colour by the mere movements of his imagination. The two were alone,
alone in a profound depth of azure distance, so greatly did their
passion communicate itself to the things that had been made out of
like passion. The woven colour and the woven music had been made at
some similar depth of devotion, and all that mingled intensity swept
through and filled the room, so that the imaginations of Roger and
Philip felt and moved in it, and Philip, panting almost with terror,
felt the music he had heard and the colour he saw and the figures
before him gather and lose themselves in one piercing consciousness of
Rosamond, which yet was not Rosamond but that of which Rosamond was a
shape and a name; and Roger felt phrases, words, half-lines, pressing
on him, and yet not words or lines but that which they defined and
conveyed-and before them Considine cried again to the ardent postulant
of transmuted energy: “Die then, die, exult and live.”
Only the Zulu king lay back as if asleep in his chair, and in his Sir
Bernard, freed from the temptation of music, watched and savoured and
keenly enjoyed every moment of the incredibly multitudinous and
changing fantasy which was mankind. He wouldn’t deny that he was
looking at a man two hundred years old telling a man of, say, seventy
to die and live again; it might be—it was unusual but it might be. He
couldn’t imagine himself wanting to die and live, because that (it
seemed to him) would be to spoil the whole point of death. The worst
of death was that it was the kind of experience it was very difficult
to appreciate in the detached mood of the spectator, let alone the
connoisseur. But he had done his best in his own case by rehearsing to
himself—and occasionally to Philip—all the ironies which the
approach of death often releases on a man. “I may babble obscenities
or make a pious confession to Caithness,” he had said. “Or I may just
lie about and cry for days. One never knows. Try and enjoy it for me,
Philip, if I’m past it. I should like to feel that somebody did, and
death so often undoes all one’s own hypotheses, even the hypothesis
that one isn’t important.” But he feared that Philip wouldn’t find it
easy to enjoy.
He thought of this for a moment as he watched Nielsen rising slowly to
his feet; he thought of it as he looked at the benediction which
Considine’s face shed on the new adventurer. They were still speaking
to each other but he couldn’t hear what was being said; he saw
Mottreux come forward, and then he saw the Colonel and Nielsen bowing
and going to the door. He drew a deep breath and lay back in his
chair, but he was immediately distracted by Philip who said in a low
voice, “I can’t stand any more of this; I’m going.”
On the other side Roger also moved. “It’s true,” he said. “He’s
right.”
Sir Bernard, a little startled, looked at him. Was Roger becoming a
convert to this new gospel? He said, “You believe in him?”
“No,” Roger said, “but I believe he knows what poetry is, and I’ve
never met a man before who did.”
Before Sir Bernard could answer Considine came over to them, and
instinctively, in fear or hostility or homage, they all rose. “You
see,” he said, “there are those who will try the experiment.”
“Must I really believe,” Sir Bernard said, “that that friend of yours
is going to commit suicide with the idea of animating his body all
over again?”
“Exactly that,” Considine said.
Sir Bernard sighed a little. “It is a religion,” he said. “And I hoped
that man was becoming sane. I think I should dislike you, Mr.
Considine, if dislike were ever really worth while.”
“And I should have despised you once, Sir Bernard,” Considine
answered, “but not now. Before you die you shall know that the world
is being made anew.”
He had hardly spoken when they heard without, as if it echoed,
applauded, and proclaimed his words, a sound distant indeed but
recognizable, though for a moment they doubted. It was the noise of
guns firing. Faint and certain it reached them. Philip and Roger
jumped, and even Sir Bernard turned his head towards the window.
Considine, watching them, smiled. “Can it be the African planes?” he
asked ironically. “Has intellect failed to guard its capital?”
A shout or two came up to them from without, the noise of running
feet, a whistle, several cars passing at great speed. Sir Bernard
looked back at Considine. “Are you bombing London then?” he asked
politely.
“I,” Considine laughed at him. “Am I the High Executive? Ask the Jews
who believe in Messias, or Mr. Ingram who believes in poetry, or your
son who (I think) believes in love, or the king who believes in
kingship, ask them what power threatens London tonight. And ask them
if they think glory can be defeated by gunpowder.”
“I should think it might, if glory is making use of petrol,” Sir
Bernard said. “I’m sorry that in the circumstances perhaps we’d better
go. If your friend’s blown to bits by a bomb he’ll find it a trifle
difficult to revivify his body, won’t he?”
“The Christian Church for a considerable time believed it could be
done,” Considine said. “But I forget that you’re not even a
Christian.”
Roger broke in. “My God!” he said, harshly, “are you bombing London?”
Considine changed in an instant from mockery to seriousness. “Be at
ease,” he said. “Mrs. Ingram’s perfectly safe—except indeed from the
mobs whom alone your wise brains have left to be the degraded servants
of ecstasy. The only deaths tonight will be sacrifices of devotion.”
Sir Bernard walked towards the door; a white and bewildered Philip
went along with him. Roger lingered a moment.
“I don’t know whether I hate or adore you,” he said, “and I don’t know
whether you’re mad or I. But—”
“But either way,” Considine interrupted, “there is more in verse
than talk about similes and metres, and you know it. Hark, hark, there
is triumph speaking to man.”
The guns sounded again and Roger ran after his friends.
Before Sir Bernard and Philip reached Colindale Square, peace had
again filled the night. The raid, if raid it had been, seemed to have
been driven off, although the house, when they reached it, was awake
and vocal. Caithness was waiting for them in the library, anxious but
not perturbed. He knew nothing more than they did, the guns had been
sounding, at intervals and at a distance, for something under an hour,
then they had ceased. The police had been hastily instructed to spread
the news that all was clear, and (in less loud tones) that no damage
whatever had been done. Materially this might be true, but not
mentally. The agitation which shook London was as much worse than that
which the German raids had caused as the fear of negro barbarism was
more fundamental than that of the Prussian. London hid and trembled;
the jungles were threatening it and the horrors that dwelled in them.
It was but for a few minutes—less than an hour—but it had happened.
The morning would perhaps increase the fear when it was uttered; for
the moment darkness and separation made it private.
Caithness listened with profound attention to the account Sir Bernard
gave him. But he showed a distant tendency to discuss it in language
which, though hostile, was far too like Considine’s to please his
friend or reassure Philip. He seemed to find most difficulty in
accepting the possibility of Considine’s age—which, as Sir Bernard
pointed out, was due to the fact that he disapproved of Considine’s
ideas. “If you thought he was a saint—your kind of saint—you’d think
it might be a miracle,” he complained. “You will fall back on the
supernatural to explain the unusual. But that doesn’t matter: the real
problem is whether he’s the High Executive.”
“You say he talked as if he was,” Caithness said.
“Yes, but this magniloquent kind of rhetoric can never be trusted,”
Sir Bernard said. “He might be merely mad. And if he is there’s no
sense in talking to the Prime Minister about him. Even if I do he
won’t be there, of course.”
“The man I’m thinking about”, Caithness said, “is the Zulu. You told
me last night he said he was a Christian.”
“In a parenthesis, while we were talking stomach,” Sir Bernard said.
“To explain the strength of his digestion, no doubt.”
“And tonight,” Caithness went on, unheeding the last remark,
“tonight he was different?”
“My dear Ian, you haven’t begun to understand Mr. Considine,” Sir
Bernard answered. “Every one was different. Roger went off plunged in
a reverie, which is very unlike Roger. And-” he glanced at his son and
changed the sentence-“and I was quite incapable of connected thought.
And the king—as everybody calls him, so let’s—the king was
comatose.”
Caithness began walking up and down the room. “I don’t like it,” he
said. “I don’t like the sound of any of it. And especially I don’t
like a Christian to be under this man’s influence or in his power. If
he can affect you-”
“What on earth harm-” Sir Bernard began, and was interrupted by the
priest.
“He evidently thinks he’s got hold of some infernal power,” Caithness
went on, “and if—if by the wildest possibility he were mixed up with
this African delirium—are we to leave one of the Faith exposed to his
control? He’s done it harm enough already. God knows what he may be
doing to him. He may have hypnotized him into obedience.”
“Literally”, Sir Bernard asked, “or metaphorically?”
“What does it matter which?” Caithness threw back. “D’you suppose
one’s worse than the other? Are we to have a Christian spiritually
martyred here among us?”
“Certainly not,” Sir Bernard said. “St. Iago, and charge, Spain!
Where?”
But Caithness took no notice; he stood still and silent for a minute,
and Sir Bernard observed, with interest, that he was praying.
Caithness, he reflected, had always been a little inclined to call up
his own spiritual reserves under such a quite honest pretence of
invoking direction, though he was always rather careful to keep the
command in his own hands: Sir Bernard couldn’t remember that God had
ever been known to disagree with Ian, anyhow in ecclesiastical
affairs. It was therefore with a sense of gratified accuracy that he
heard the priest say, “Well, I’m going up there.”
“What, now?” he asked curiously.
“Certainly,” Caithness answered. “And if this Zulu is still there I
shall insist on seeing him.”
“And supposing Mr. Considine refuses?” Sir Bernard asked.
Caithness looked at him abstractedly. “O I don’t think he’ll refuse,”
he said. “He either won’t care to or he won’t dare to. Will you come
and
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