Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
- Performer: -
Book online «Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗». Author Charles Williams
yellowish photographic prints. Out of these as he turned them over he
selected one, and sat down again.
“Of course,” he said, “I was looking through these a day or two ago:
that was what fidgeted me all the time Considine was telling us about
old men and children. And if that isn’t Considine…he’s got his
fingers curved in exactly the same way that he had tonight.”
Philip moved round and looked over his father’s shoulder. The
photograph showed two men, one of about seventy, the other some twenty
years or so younger, sitting in basket chairs on a lawn with the
corner of a verandah showing behind them. The clothes were late
Victorian; the whole picture was Victorianly idyllic. Philip saw
nothing surprising about it.
“Which is your Mr. Considine?” he asked.
“The one on the right,” Sir Bernard answered. “It’s an exact likeness.
When he was speaking tonight he had his head up and his fingers out
and coiled just like that. And he wasn’t a day older.”
“Who’s the other man?” Philip asked.
“The other man”, Sir Bernard answered, leaning back in his chair and
looking thoughtfully at the photograph, “is my grandfather. My
grandfather died in 1886.”
“Um!” said Philip. “Then of course it can’t be your Mr. Considine. He
looks about fifty there, which would make him over a hundred now. His
father, I suppose.”
“It’s the most unusual likeness I ever saw, if it’s his father, or his
grandfather, or his great-uncle, or his first, second, third or fourth
cousin,” Sir Bernard protested.
“But it must be,” Philip said. “You don’t suggest that this is
Considine, do you?”
“The probabilities against it are heavy,” his father allowed. “But
aren’t the probabilities against two men looking so much alike also
heavy?”
Philip smiled. “But where one thing’s impossible the other must be
true,” he said.
“And which is impossible?” Sir Bernard asked perversely.
“O come,” Philip protested. “If the other figure here is your
grandfather this photograph must have been taken before 1886. So it’s
impossible—or very, very unlikely that the other man is still alive,
and he certainly wouldn’t be speaking at a dinner. Is it likely? Do
you know who took the photograph, by the way?”
“I took it myself,” the other said. “With my own little camera. Given
me on my twelfth birthday. By my grandfather. I was staying with him
for the summer.”
“You don’t remember who this other man was?”
Sir Bernard shook his head. “I remember being very pleased with the
camera. And I remember that various people stayed at the house. And I
photographed every one I could. But what he called himself then I
couldn’t say.”
“But if it was Considine then he’d be a hundred or more by now! Did he
look it?”
“If he looked it,” said Sir Bernard, “I shouldn’t be staring at this
photograph. No, Philip, you’re right of course. But it’s unusual.”
“It must have been,” Philip agreed.
“Though if a man’s nerves and stomach were sound,” his father went on,
“and if he kept himself fit, and had no accidents—on my word,
mightn’t he look fifty when he was really a hundred? Perhaps he’s
found the elixir of life in the swamps of the Zambesi.”
Philip felt the conversation was becoming absurd. “If you take it that
it’s his father and that there’s a strong family likeness, I don’t see
that there’s any difficulty,” he said.
“I know,” Sir Bernard answered. “But I want there to be a difficulty.
So I want that photograph to be a photograph of him and not of his
wife’s maiden aunt or whatever you suggested. You needn’t look
superior. It’s exactly the way most people come to believe in
religion. And if most people think like that, there must be something
in it, Cogitatio populi, cogitatio Dei-, and so forth. O well, I shall
go to bed. Perhaps I shall meet Mr. Considine again one day and be
able to ask him. Goodnight, Philip, goodnight, Ian. Wake me if the
Africans come.”
Philip was down the next morning before his father or his godfather,
urged by a very strong anxiety to see the papers. Trouble in Africa,
as it happened, was possibly going to affect not merely high national
and political affairs but his own personal arrangements. Africa, of
course, was a large place, and the Christian missions had been
established he had gathered, somewhere in the centre; he wasn’t much
disturbed over them. But what his father had called “the pressure on
Egypt” was another matter. Philip’s own job was engineering, and he
had not long before come to an arrangement with a business company
known as “The North African Rivers Development Syndicate,” by which he
was to go out to whatever North African Rivers were to be developed as
assistant constructing engineer. His chief, a man named Munro, was
already out there, somewhere in Nigeria, and in a couple of months
Philip was to join him. Meanwhile he was putting in some time at the
London offices of the Syndicate, which was run by two brothers named
Stuyvesant. But though these were the official heads it was generally
understood in the City that the real force behind the company was a
much richer man, a certain Simon Rosenberg, who, among his interests
in railways and periodicals and fisheries and dyeworks, in South
African diamonds and Persian oils and Chinese silks, in textiles and
cereals and patent-medicines, rubber and coffee and wool, among all
these had cast a careless eye on African rivers. In that side of the
business Philip wasn’t very interested. Sir Bernard had satisfied
himself that the company was as sound as could reasonably be expected,
and a year’s work—or perhaps even two years—would give Philip a
start in his profession. Then he would, all being well, come home and
marry Rosamond, and see what jobs were going at home. Munro was a
fairly big man and if Munro gave him a good word…
It was consequently something of a shock to him, when he opened the
paper, to find two huge headlines competing. On the left a
three-column space announced “Multi-millionaire Found Dead; Rosenberg
Shot”; “Terrible Discovery in Rich Man’s Library.” On the right a
similar space was filled with: “Africans Still Advancing”; “Hordes in
Nile Valley”; “Rumours of Trouble in South Africa”; “French Defeat in
Tangier.” Philip goggled at the thick type, and instinctively tried to
read both accounts at once. He was still immersed when Caithness came
in, just preceding Sir Bernard.
“I say,” Philip cried to them, “Rosenberg’s shot himself.”
“Rosenberg!” Sir Bernard exclaimed. “Whatever for?”
“It doesn’t say,” Philip answered. “He was found in the study of his
house late last night by the butler, who thought he heard a noise and
went to see.”
“And found he had,” Sir Bernard said. “Nasty for the butler.” He
picked up his own paper, and opened it so that he and Caithness could
look at it together. But the priest’s eyes went first to the columns
of African news, and after his first glance Sir Bernard’s followed
them. They read the brief obscure telegrams, the explanatory comments,
the geographical addenda. It seemed that something very unusual was
happening in Africa. To begin with, all communication with the
interior had completely ceased. Telegraphs had ceased to function,
railways had been cut, roads had been blocked. By such roads as had
not been blocked there were emerging against all the outer districts
hostile bodies of natives, some so small as to be less than a raid,
some so large as to mean an invasion, and at that, wherever they
appeared, a victorious invasion. The Egyptian army, which had for some
weeks been moving leisurely south in order to suppress trouble in the
southeast, was now retiring in considerable disorder and even more
considerable haste. The French had “suffered a set-back”; the
Spaniards had fallen back towards the coast. Communications with
Kenya, with Nigeria, with Abyssinia, with Zanzibar, had ceased. Raids
had taken place on the English territories in the South.
Air-investigation was being undertaken. The Powers were in touch and
were taking necessary steps.
“But what “, Caithness said, “has happened to the air-investigation of
the last month?”
“It hasn’t come back,” Sir Bernard answered. “I was talking to a man
in the War Office the other night, and he told me that they’ve sent
out aeroplanes by the score, and hardly any have returned. Some have,
I suppose, but what they reported is being kept dark. Philip, I think
the African Rivers look like being in too much spate for your
engineering.”
“But what about Rosenberg?” Philip asked. “Do you suppose that’s what
made him kill himself?”
“Did he kill himself?” Sir Bernard said, turning to the other columns.
“‘Butler hears shot…letter for the Coroner…police satisfied.
Financial comment on page 10’; yes, well, we can wait till after
breakfast for that. Curious, I wonder what decided him. Let’s just see
whether the Archbishop said anything.”
It appeared that the previous day had been agitated in both Houses. In
the Commons the Prime Minister had announced that forces were being
dispatched immediately to punish the various tribes guilty of the
abominable massacres at the mission stations. Asked by half a dozen
members of the Opposition at once whether he could promise that these
expeditions should not develop into costly Imperialistic wars, and
whether the action taken was by request of the ecclesiastical
authorities, the Prime Minister said that the Archbishop had naturally
deprecated further bloodshed but that he and other ecclesiastical
authorities had recognized the right of the State to protect its
citizens. Asked whether he would undertake that no further territory
would be seized, he said that no annexations would be made except by
mandate from the League of Nations. Asked whether other Governments
were taking action, he said that the House should have all information
as soon as he received it.
This had been in the afternoon. In the evening the Archbishop had
asked the Lord Chancellor for permission to make a statement, and had
then said that—in consultation with such other Bishops as happened to
be in London—he had written at once that morning to the Prime
Minister, definitely stating that the ecclesiastical authorities were
entirely opposed to the dispatch of punitive expeditions, and begging
that none should be sent. The Bishops were of the opinion that no
secular action should be taken to avenge the martyrdom of the
slaughtered missionaries and converts, and wished to dissociate
themselves from any such action. A noble and indignant peer—a lately
returned Governor-General—asked the Archbishop whether he realized
that natives understood nothing but force, and whether he meant that
war and the use of force was a sin; whether in short the Archbishop
were disloyal or merely stupid. The Archbishop had referred the noble
peer to the theologians for discussions and determinations of the use
of force. The use of force was an act which was neither good nor evil
in itself; the use of force in circumstances like the present appeared
to himself and his colleagues a breach of Christian principles.
Another peer demanded whether, if the Government were to dispatch
punitive expeditions, the Archbishop would seriously accuse them of
acting in an unchristian manner? The Archbishop said that the noble
peer would remember that Christianity assumed a readiness for
martyrdom as a mere preliminary to any serious work, and that he was
sure no noble lord who happened to hear him and was a Christian would
be unwilling to suffer tortures and death without wishing a moment’s
pain to his enemies. He apologized to the House for reminding them of
Comments (0)