Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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Filial Godhead and mighty forms and encountering darkness and Macbeth.
I can’t do more—that way. I don’t know enough: I’m a baby in it,
after all.”
Isabel said quietly, “You want to know more?”
Roger answered, “I want—yes, I—the thing that’s me wants to know,
not like wanting apple tart with or without custard, but like wanting
breath. There’s air outside the windows, and I shall smash them to get
it or I shall die. There—you asked me.”
She came and stood by him, and he took her hand. “You don’t feel it
like that?” he said.
“No, not like that,” she answered. “But perhaps I can’t. I’ve been
thinking, Roger darling, and I’ve wondered whether perhaps women don’t
have to do it anyhow. I mean—perhaps it’s nothing very new, this
power your Mr. Considine talks of—perhaps women have always known it,
and that’s why they’ve never made great art. Perhaps they have turned
everything into themselves. Perhaps they must.”
He looked up at her, brooding. “I know,” he said, “you live and we
talk about it.”
“No,” Isabel said, sitting down by him in front of the fire.
“No, dearest, not only that. We only live on what you give
us—imaginatively, I mean; you have to find the greater powers. You
have to be the hunters and fishers and fighters when all’s said and
done. So perhaps you ought to go and hunt now. But we turn it more
easily into ourselves than you do—for bad and good alike. And we
generally do it very badly—but then you’ve given us so little to do
it with.”
“I don’t believe it,” Roger said. “I don’t believe in all this sex
differentiation. And yet-”
“And yet,” she said, “it doesn’t matter now. We needn’t waste our time
on talking abstractions. What do you want to do, sweetheart?”
“I don’t know what I can do,” he said. “I talk about smashing windows,
but that’s rather silly. I want to find this power and master it and
find what there is to be discovered. I want to live where they live.”
“They?” she asked.
“Considine and Michael Angelo and Epstein and Beethoven,” he answered.
“I can feel a bit of what they do, I want to feel more. I’ve been
trying to—don’t laugh. All the way home I’ve been saying things to
myself, and trying to see what’s the thing to do. There’s the feeling
every element in them first—not just seeing the words, but finding
out how one belongs to the words, how one’s own self answers to all
the different words, like criss-crossing currents. And then there’s
turning all that deeper into one’s own self, into one’s desire—and
that’s so hard because one hasn’t a desire, except general comfort!”
“O Roger dear, that’s not true! You have,” Isabel said.
Roger hesitated-“Well, perhaps!” he allowed. “Anyhow I kept losing
hold and just feeling all vague and dithery, so I tried to turn one
thrill on to another line—d’you see?—and I do think it might work.
But it’ll need a lot of doing, and I’m not sure-” he relapsed into
silence, and then said abruptly, “Has Philip been along?”
His wife was about to answer when Rosamond came into the room, and the
conversation returned hastily to ordinary things. She wasn’t looking
at all well, Roger thought, and she was getting positively hysterical
these days. Curious that she should be Isabel’s sister. But of course
Isabel was unusual. He reflected gloomily, while the women chatted,
that on Considine’s showing he probably wouldn’t have been married to
Isabel—the energy of love would have gone the other way, would have
been transmuted or something. Lots of people must have had to do it in
their time; lots of people must have been disappointed in love and
then—Yes, but most of them just blew along till the worst was over.
To use the worst and the best for something that was, as far as
ordinary knowledge went, different from both. The abolition of
death—the conquest of death.
The unnameable Muriel appeared in the room. She said, “Two gentlemen
to see you, sir. They didn’t give their names. But one of them sent
this—” She passed over a slip of card bearing a word or two—“‘How
goes it? N. C.’”
Roger jumped forward. “Here,” he exclaimed, “where are they? Bring
them—all right. I will.” He was out of the room and into the tiny
hall. There he saw Considine and Mottreux.
“Good God!” he said. “Come in. I thought you-”
Considine shook hands with a smile. It occurred to Roger that that
swift smile was always very near showing with Considine. It danced on
the surface of a deeper rapture, as if, to the world, that was all
that could be made of something within the world.
“We came”, he said, “Mottreux and I, to fill an hour. Do we
interrupt?”
“No,” Roger said. “Come in.” He turned to Isabel. “May I present my
wife?” he said. “You’ve never met Mr. Considine, have you, Isabel? And
Colonel Mottreux.” His eyes fell on Rosamond. “Miss Murchison—Mr.
Considine, Colonel Mottreux.”
As he found them seats he cursed Rosamond. Who wanted her there? Well,
she’d have to lump it. He stood back, and let his look rest on
Considine. Then he said, “But I thought Sir Bernard-”
“Certainly Sir Bernard,” Considine answered. “But I don’t think Sir
Bernard or Mr. Suydler either are likely to interfere with me. It
isn’t from them that my dangers now will ever come—except by literal
accident. So, since I was about, and since tonight I shall be busy,
and shall leave London—I came to see you.”
“Are you going to Africa?” Roger said before he could stop himself.
“I have come to ask you whether—if I go—you also will come,”
Considine said.
Roger was picking up a box of cigarettes from the table; he put it
down again and his face went pale. “I?” he said.
“I know that you believe,” Considine said, “and I offer you the
possibility.”
Roger, with a heroic effort, avoided looking at Isabel. He said in a
calm silly voice, “It’s awfully kind of you, of course, but I don’t
see how I can. Not this side of Christmas.”
Isabel said, “I think you might. It’ll be death if you don’t.”
He looked up at her, and she added, “It’ll be death to you, darling,
and then there’ll be nothing left for me. If you go, there may. And I
can do—what we were talking about.”
“But I can’t decide all on the moment,” Roger protested to Considine,
though he still looked at Isabel.
“You have decided,” Considine said. “But of course you may not do it.”
“And have I decided,” Roger said sardonically, “to live for a hundred
years and try all sorts of experiments with my unhappy body?”
“‘I will encounter darkness as a bride,’” Considine murmured. “Yes.”
It was true, and Roger knew it. Chance might thwart him, as (so he
understood) it might thwart Considine himself, but the decision was in
his blood and bones. He would have to follow this man—as once, he
had read, other men had thrown aside their work and their friends to
follow another voice. When explosions happened you were just blown.
Isabel would be all right as far as money went—and till he had
entered into this mystery he could never now serve Isabel rightly.
Those other men had followed a voice that went crying how it was not
come to send peace but a sword—the peace of the sword perhaps, the
reconciliation in a greater state of being which—
He pulled a chair forward. “Tell me about it,” he said. He was vaguely
aware, as he did so, that Rosamond had slipped from the room, and was
grateful. The four of them were left. Roger picked up the cigarettes
again and offered them to Isabel who took one, and to Considine and
Mottreux who refused. He himself hesitated.
“I don’t”, he said, “see any reason why I shouldn’t smoke, and yet
when I’m really concerned I don’t. Except by habit.”
“It absorbs energy,” Considine said. “When it’s a dominant habit it
absorbs less energy than the refusal demands, so naturally it has its
way. But when it’s not quite inevitable you’re conscious of the energy
wasted—of a divided concentration—and you hesitate.”
“Is that why you don’t smoke?” Roger asked.
“I don’t smoke just as I don’t eat—since you ask me,” Considine said,
the smile breaking out again, “because it doesn’t amuse me. Any more
than golfing or dancing or reading the newspaper. Certain things drop
away as one becomes maturer.”
“And eating’s one of them?” Roger asked, putting down the cigarettes.
“It’s necessary to an extent still,” Considine answered. “I suppose a
certain minimum of food may be necessary, until—afterwards. Then
perhaps not. But it’s nothing like as necessary as one thinks. There
are so many better things to feed on. Shall I quote your Messias
again? ‘I have meat to eat that ye know not of.’”
Isabel said, more suddenly than was her habit, “It was to do the will
of Him that sent him.”
“What else?” Considine answered. “What else could it be?”
“But you don’t claim to be doing that will?” Isabel said. “You’re not
in obedience, are you?”
“I am in obedience to all laws I have not yet mastered,” he answered.
“I am in danger of death—until I have mastered it—and therefore in
obedience to it, and a little to food and sleep.”
“But you said that danger-” Roger began.
“I said that danger will not come from my enemies,” Considine
answered; “isn’t there any other? There are laws that are very deep,
and one of them may be that every gospel has a denial within it and
every Church a treachery. You—whom I invite to join me—you yourself
may be a danger. It isn’t for me to fear you because of that chance.”
Roger leant forward. “That’s it,” he cried out, “there’s nothing that
may not betray.”
Isabel said softly, “Can’t Mr. Considine transform treachery too?”
“I can guard against it at least,” Considine answered; “I can read
men’s minds, under conditions, but the conditions may fail, and
then—could Christ do more?”
Isabel answered still softly, “Mightn’t the missionaries you killed
have joined with something which was greater than you because it had
known defeat? Have you known defeat?”
“No,” Considine said and stood up. “I’ve mastered myself from the
beginning and all things that I’ve needed are mine. Why should man
know defeat? You teach him to look and expect and wait for it; you
teach him to obey and submit; you heal his hurts and soothe his
diseases. But I will show him that in his hurts as in his happiness he
is greatly and intensely lord; he lives by them. He shall delight in
feeling, and his feeling shall be blood within his blood and body in
his body; it shall burn through him till that old business of
yes-and-no has fallen away from him, and then his diseases will have
vanished for they are nothing but the shadow of his wanting this and
the other, and when he is those things that he desires, where are the
shadows of them? Do I starve without food who do not need food? Do I
pine for love who do not need love? Do I doubt victory who am victory?
There is but one chance of defeat, and that is that death may strike
me before I have dared it in its own place. But even that cannot face
me; by ambush or treachery it might take
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