Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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Considine spoke. “Now you shall rest,” he said. “It’s failed this
time, but we shall succeed yet, and you’ll see it or hear of it.
Meanwhile, do what you can to make this sight part of you and make it
part of your will to immortality and victory. If you want food it’s
here. Presently I’ll come to you again; we’re hardly likely to move
to-day. But now I must go to the king.”
He nodded and moved off, and presently Caithness, sitting in talk by
the king’s bed in an upper room, heard the door open, and looking
round saw him in the entrance. The priest stood up abruptly and
Inkamasi stirred.
“How is our guest?” Considine asked. “Have you convinced him how
wasteful vengeance is, Mr. Caithness? and therefore what folly?”
Caithness said, with almost a sneer, “It’s fitting for you to talk of
folly and waste—you who spend the blood of the martyrs for your own
foolishness. Why have you come here?”
“For a better reason than you came to Hampstead not so long ago,”
Considine answered. “It wasn’t a wise night, that, for because of that
the king must choose his future to-day. You should have kept to your
pupils, Mr. Caithness, to the morals you understand and the dogmas
that you don’t. But you must leave us now for I must talk to the
king.”
Caithness looked at Inkamasi. “If you want me to stay,” he began but
the other shook his head. “Go, if you will,” he said; “it’s best that
he and I should understand each other. I’ll remember better this
time.”
Considine held the door for the priest, closed it, and came to the
chair by the bed. He paused there and smiled down at Inkamasi. “Have I
your permission to sit down, sir?” he asked, and his voice was moved
with strength such as the king never remembered in all their strange
intercourse.
“Is this another insult?” he asked, restraining anger.
“It isn’t anything of an insult,” Considine said, “and you should know
it. Haven’t I made you what you are, and could I insult the thing I’ve
restored? Therefore I will have an answer—have I your permission to
sit?”
The king made a movement with his hand. “I think you’ve only fooled
me,” he answered bitterly, “but you can play with me as you
choose—only I know it now. Sit or stand, do what you will, I can only
watch you and at bottom defy you.”
“I will not seek it,” the other replied. “It has been opened once and
it is enough. And you—are you sure that man can conquer till he has
been wholly defeated? are you sure that he can find plenitude till he
has known utter despair? You will not let him despair of himself, but
it may be that only in such a complete despair he finds that which
cannot despair and is something other than man.”
“There are many reasons for avoiding the work, and all religions have
excused man,” the other’s voice said. “Despair if you will, and hope
that despair may save you. Entreat the gods; I do not refuse you your
prayer.”
“There’s a submission we’re slow to understand,” Inkamasi cried out,
“a place where divinity triumphed—I believe in that.”
“Be it so,” the answer came; “but tell me then what you will do.”
There was a long pause before the king said: “I know there is no place
for me upon earth.”
“There is place and enough for Inkamasi,” Considine answered. “There
is no place in Africa for Inkamasi the king. You best know whether
there is a place in Europe. You know whether your friends downstairs
and in London receive that royalty as I receive it.”
“They have all courtesy and good will, but they have forgotten the
Crown,” Inkamasi said. “They do not mock me but they do not believe.”
“They are sons without a mother,” Considine went on, “for they know
neither the Crown nor the Republic. Royalty is a shade and Equality
not yet born. What is the difference between these traditions to me so
long as either is held and is a passion? But most men are empty of
both. And if I must choose I will choose the king and not the State,
for the king is flesh and blood and yet undying, and is a symbol of
that we seek.”
“Am I left,” Inkamasi asked, “to find my only servants in my enemies?”
“It seems,” Considine answered, “even so, that I and I only am the
friend of the king.”
“And what will the king’s friend offer the king in his
superfluousness?” Inkamasi asked again.
“I have only two things to give,” Considine said; “let the royalty of
the king choose which he will take from a believe in him. I will offer
a house and servants and money, all that he needs, and he may live
contented with his knowledge of his own inheritance. Or I will give
the king a royal death.”
“There will be none to hamper you then,” Inkamasi said with a sudden
smile.
“There is none to hamper me now,” Considine answered gravely. “For the
majesty of the king is in my care and on my side, and if the king
choose to live without his majesty, though the choice is his own, he
will choose to live in a dream. I am the keeper of the strength of
royalty; what is outside me is Europe, and that the king knows.”
“Yet I thought Europe would aid me to aid my people,” Inkamasi
meditated aloud—“law and medicine and science.”
“They are good in their place, but the question is whether these
things can take the place of greater,” Considine answered. “But the
choice is for the king. Only it must be to-day. Tomorrow the submarine
returns to Africa, and there are three ways in which the king may go
in her. I will have him taken to his people and set among them, that
he may try the fates between himself and the man who now rules them,
and who inherits royalty if Inkamasi dies. Or I will send him as my
friend till peace is signed and he may live a private man wherever he
chooses on the face of the earth.”
“And the third way?” Inkamasi asked.
“He shall go clothed with royalty and death,” Considine said. “I will
come when night falls to know the king’s mind.”
He stood up and went down on one knee, and then moved backwards to the
door. There in silence he waited a moment, opened it, and went out.
Inkamasi lay through the afternoon considering all that had been said.
The suggestion which had been made to him not only received additional
force from the fact that it had been presented as one among several
possibilities, but drew its chief strength from the tendencies of his
own mind. He knew very well that, of all those by whom he was, or was
likely to be surrounded, Considine alone had such intense appreciation
of royalty as he himself had. Nor did his own bitter dislike blind him
to the fact that his first attempt upon the other had failed, and that
to concentrate the rest of his life upon remedying that failure would
be not only undignified but treasonable. The king might hate, but his
duty was to his own kingship first and always. How to save and serve
that must be the first thing in his mind. But for this a life in
England among his new circle of friends seemed useless enough. He had
a sudden vision of himself growing old, harping upon the tradition
which was his, regarded at best as a feeble sentimental survival, at
worst as a mere bore. All his profound romanticism rejected the
prospect. But to live as Considine proposed would be little better. He
would be pitied by himself instead of by others; he would dig his own
pit of sentimentality instead of having it dug for him, but the pit
would be as deep and fatal.
There was a course Considine had not named, to try and forget that he
was the king, to settle down to ordinary work, here or abroad, and
submit himself to the idea of the Government, whatever it might be,
under which he might find himself: accepting his dispossession simply
and sincerely. And this, had there been no alternative, he might have
done. But once that alternative had been suggested the colour of the
thought of it tinged all his attempts to choose. For though the man
Inkamasi might not kill himself—so his creed taught—yet the king had
a duty to his kingship. So far as might be, it must never be
surrendered; and here was a way by which it might be surrendered in a
beauty and greatness equal to its own. Examining himself for the last
time, Inkamasi knew that in turning to Europe he had desired Europe
for the sake of Africa; that he had studied logic and medicine and law
for the sake of the king and his people, and that the king might the
better benefit and govern and be one with his people. He did not care
for the high abstractions of thought; when he talked of them it was
when he took his ease in his private circle and amused himself as
other kings had amused themselves with jest or hunt or song. And now,
the child of unknown things, he set his face to go up to Jerusalem,
that the king’s crown might be properly received by the unvestmenting
hands of Death. Peace entered in on him and he lay looking out of the
window, watching the November twilight gather, and uniting within
himself, not in such a twilight but in a more wonderful union of
opposites, the day of his own individual being and the mysterious
night of his holy and awful office.
For some time after Considine had left him Roger did nothing. He sat
on the verandah and looked out over the grass lawn and the terrace at
the sea which lay beyond. And he thought to himself that never in his
life had he felt so much, so idiotically, like a baby as he did now.
Apart from that recurrent thought he couldn’t think. “It’s the shock,”
he said, half-aloud from time to time, but without convincing himself
of anything whatsoever, without indeed particularly wanting to
convince himself.
A movement or two of a dead hand, of the hand of a man whom even
Considine had now abandoned. It had failed, but it had come very near
to succeeding. Roger—product of at least a semi-culture of education
and intellect—sat there and felt that culture and education and
intellect had all vanished together, all but the very simplest
intellect. Even his passion for literature had disappeared; he simply
wasn’t up to it—he had no more wish or capacity for Milton or
Shakespeare than a small child, who might laugh if some of the lines
were mouthed at him but would be lost and vacant-eyed if anyone tried
to explain them or quoted them seriously. That dead hand moving had
abolished the whole edifice of his mind; he sat and stared at the sea.
In London things had been different; he had been thrilled and
romanticized. In London there was no sea, and no golden-hung rooms
with a couch on which a dead man lay. In London these things didn’t
happen. He had heard and believed, but here belief was abolished; he
was confronted with the simple fact. It had to be accepted, and its
acceptance
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