Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗

a pinch,

he would vote for Suydler or Considine. Philip read it, and for almost

the first time in his life startled his father into real admiration by

saying that he should vote for fan Caithness. But Sir Bernard’s mind

illumined the answer with a drier light than Philip’s. He wrote of it

to the priest: “I congratulate you, my dear fan, on your

proselyte—you can instruct him further when you come up to marry him.

There’s a notion grown up that since his career’ll have to be

postponed or reorganized or reborn or something, it would be only

reasonable (“reasonable!” I also have my martyrdoms) that I should

make financial arrangements for him to be married at once. Rosamond’s

still recuperating at the cottage in Dorset, she sent me a pretty note

of thanks the other day in which she asked whether you didn’t know the

Archbishop fairly well. You’ll guess—as Suydler would say—what she

meant. I leave it to you to decide whether you do—well enough, I

mean. If he should be shot by a deacon who wanted to wear the

vestments of the See at a fancy dress ball I fancy Suydler would be

willing to offer you the Archiepiscopal mitre; he’s touchingly

grateful to someone, and went so far as to ask me if there was

anything I wanted. I told him I wanted justice and proportion which is

the daughter of justice, knowledge and abstraction which is the

daughter of knowledge. This dreadful tendency to personify and

(therefore) mythologize I attribute to you and the late Mr. Considine,

who was an entire mythology about himself. From Considine to you

(excuse me), from you to Philip, from Philip to Rosamond—behold the

history of religion! The High Executive disappears under the sea, and

leaves its brother of Canterbury to add a touch of richness to my

daughter-in-law’s wedding. If I had indulged myself in irony as long

as Providence, I should be a little tired of it by now, but I suppose

he has infinite patience with himself as well as with us. But mightn’t

he occasionally try a new note?”

 

Of Roger Sir Bernard said nothing, though he thought of him as he

wrote “the High Executive disappears under the sea.” For he was aware

that that was all that they knew, and even that they only surmised,

and he thought Roger was intensely aware of it too. But he did not

know how acutely, and Isabel did not tell him.

 

Nor had she told him of how much younger and older at once Roger had

seemed since his return. She missed in him something of warfare and

much of scorn. If he was arrogant still it was a more airy arrogance

than of old; if he mocked he mocked more tenderly. But she wondered

whether in his heart he—and she also—secretly awaited a return.

 

Roger himself could not have told her. He shut himself away from the

noisy European victories, from the talk and the congratulations. He

took up his work again, but as he made notes for a special address on

The Antithetical Couplet from Dryden to Johnson he was humbly aware

that this work was part of a greater work. It would be his fault if he

so touched the least detail of the divine art as to leave himself or

others less sensitive to its central passion—his fault, his most

grievous fault, his sad incompetence. But even sad incompetence might

recognize the Power it could hardly name. He would never cease any

more to acknowledge it, to search in it and for it, to believe in it,

to wait for it. Other people had their ways; this was his. What more—

 

What indeed had chanced? Had the submarine, plunging away from that

house of mingled death and life, carried with it but the dead body of

its lord? and had men somewhere far off, seen that body change beneath

inexorable corruption and committed it to the waters of the sea or to

the African earth? Did it there undergo the final doom of mortality in

slow change, or had some fiercer destruction, the shark or the tiger,

seized on it? He had dreams sometimes of sharks fighting round the

sinking body of Nigel Considine, and sometimes he had other dreams. He

saw the body carried to the submarine, he saw it carried off far into

the ocean, and then, sometimes in the vessel, sometimes out of it, he

saw it change. Sometimes he saw men in a narrow room watching by it,

crying out, hurrying to it, adoring it. But more often—though the

dream itself was not often—he saw it floating alone in the middle of

the sea, far away, far down, and he saw the eyes open and the hands

move, and the whole body stir. Life was rushing back into it; power,

spirit, imagination, whatever name sad incompetence found for it, was

re-animating the willing flesh. He saw it walking in the waters and

heard it calling through them. The creatures of the deep, octopus and

shark, greed and ferocity, fled before it. Behind it, as it came,

there was no more sea; in front of it the waters flowed into it and

became the man who moved in them. Back from the shore they swept, out

towards that advancing humanity, and all their mysteries were

swallowed up in his shining lucidity. This was the vast of experience,

currents and tides, streams and whirlpools, restless waves and

fathomless depths, absorbed by man. The salt that tinctured it, as the

salt of Sir Bernard’s amusement tinctured life, was absorbed also.

Valuable as that preservative salt was, in the end it was infinitely

less than the elements of which it was part, and to prefer it to the

renewed body would be to prefer the means to the end, detachment to

union. Irony might sustain the swimmer in the sea; it could not master

the sea. A greater than Sir Bernard did that now, if indeed now, up

the African sand or the English beach, that conqueror returned.

 

If he returned. If he carried out the experiment of his vision, the

purpose of his labours. If, first among his peers, when all believed

him lost, he thrust himself from the place of shades back into

immortal and transmuted life, if he held death at his disposal, if he

knew how the vivid ecstasy of experience dominated all shapes and

forms, all accidents of time and place. If he came now, humming those

last songs which the greatest of the poets had made from his own

vision of Ariel flying free, smiling at the blindness of extreme pain

and the paralysis of extreme possession, guardian of myths and

expositor of power…if he returned. If now, while the world shouted

over the defeat of his allies and subjects, while it drove its terror

back into its own unmapped jungles, and subdued its fiercer desires to

an alien government of sterile sayings, if now he came once more to

threaten and deliver it. If—ah beyond, beyond belief!—but if he

returned…

 

THE END