Shadows of Ecstasy, Charles Williams [e ink epub reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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an explanation with an introduction.
“But, of course I know Sir Bernard’s name,” Considine said. “Isn’t it
he who explained the stomach?”
“Temporarily only,” Sir Bernard answered.
Considine shrugged. “While man needs stomachs,” he said, “which may
not be for so very much longer. A very ramshackle affair at present,
don’t you think?”
“In default of a better”, Sir Bernard protested, “what would you have
us do?”
“But are we in default of a better?” Considine asked. “Surely we’re
not like that poor wretch Rosenberg who couldn’t live by his
imagination, but died starved, for all his stomach and his mind.”
“So far,” Sir Bernard said, “both the stomach and the mind seem
normally necessary to man.”
“O so far!” Considine answered, “and normally! But it’s the farther
and the abnormal to which we must look. When men are in love, when
they are in the midst of creating, when they are in a religious flame,
what do they need then either with the stomach or the mind?”
“Those”, Sir Bernard said, “are abnormal states from which they
return.”
“More’s the pity,” Roger said suddenly. “It’s true, you know. In the
real states of exaltation one doesn’t seem to need food.”
“So,” said Considine, smiling at him. “The poets have taught you
something, Mr. Ingram.”
“But one returns,” Sir Bernard protested plaintively, “and ‘then one
does need food. And reason,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
Considine was looking at Roger. “Will you say that one must?” he asked
in a lower voice; and “O how the devil do I know?” Roger said
impatiently. “I say that one does, but I daren’t say that one must.
And it’s folly either way.”
“Don’t believe it,” Considine answered, his voice low and vibrating.
“There’s more to it than that.”
The words left a silence behind them for a moment, as if they were a
summons. Roger kicked the pavement. Philip waited patiently. Presently
Sir Bernard said, “Do you know the legatees by any chance, Mr.
Considine?”
Considine’s eyes glowed. “Now there,” he said, “if you like irony you
have it. Yes, I know them—at least I know of them. I knew the family
very well once. They are strict Jews, living in London because they
are too poor to return to Jerusalem. They live in London and they
abominate the Gentiles of London. They are fanatically—insanely, you
would say—devoted to the tradition of Israel. They live, almost
without food, Sir Bernard, studying the Law and nourished by the Law.
They are the children of a second birth indeed, and they exist in the
other life to which they were born. What do you think they will do
with Simon Rosenberg’s fortune and Simon Rosenberg’s jewels?”
“They could, I suppose, refuse it,” Sir Bernard said.
“Couldn’t they use it to improve conditions in Palestine?” Philip
asked, willing to appear interested.
Considine looked at Roger, who said, “I don’t know the tradition of
Israel. Are jewels and fortunes any use to it?”
“Or will they think so?” Considine answered. “I do not know. But it
was a Jew who saw the foundations of the Holy City splendid with a
beauty for which the names of jewels were the only comparison. We
think of jewels chiefly as wealth, but I doubt if the John of the
Apocalypse did, and I doubt if the Rosenbergs will. Perhaps he saw
them as mirrors and shells of original colour. However, I suppose, as
one of the executors, it will be my business to find out soon.”
“It’s extraordinarily interesting,” Sir Bernard said. “Do, my dear Mr.
Considine, let us know. Come and dine with me one day. I’ve something
else I want to ask you.”
On the point of making his farewells Considine paused.
“Something you want to ask me?” he said.
“A mere nothing,” Sir Bernard answered. “I should like to know what
relation you are to a photograph of you that I took fifty years ago.”
Roger stared. Philip moved uneasily; his father did put things in the
most ridiculous way.
“A photograph of me,” Considine repeated softly, “that you took fifty
years ago…?”
“I do beg your pardon,” Sir Bernard said. “But that’s what it looks
like, though (unless you’ve improved the stomach out of all knowledge)
it probably isn’t. I wouldn’t have bothered you if other subjects for
discussion—jewels, digestion, and the tradition of Israel—hadn’t
cropped up. But unless you take that unfortunate coroner’s view of
‘mere talk’, do be kind and come.”
Considine smiled brilliantly. “I do a little,” he said, “but I allow
it is a purification, a ritual and actual purification of the
energies. I’m rather uncertain how much longer I shall be in England
for the present, but if it’s at all possible…Will you write or
telephone or something in a day or two? My address is 29, Rutherford
Gardens, Hampstead.”
“Hallo,” Roger said, “we’re up that way. My embalming workshop’s
there,” he added sardonically.
Sir Bernard turned his head, a little surprised. Roger caught his eyes
and nodded towards Considine.
“He knows,” he said. “I embalm poetry there–with the most popular
and best-smelling unguents and so on, but I embalm it all right. I
then exhibit the embalmed body to visitors at so much a head. They
like it much better than the live thing, and I live by it, so I
suppose it’s all right. No doubt the embalmers of Pharaoh were
pleasant enough creatures. They weren’t called to any nonsense of
following a pillar of fire between the piled waters of the Nile.”
“It’s burning in you now,” Considine said, “and you are on the
threshold of a doorway that the Angel of Death went in—not yours.”
“If I could believe it—” Roger said. “Ask me to dine too, Sir
Bernard. I want to ask Mr. Considine questions about Paradise
Regained.”
Chapter Three - THE PROCLAMATION OF THE HIGH EXECUTIVE
BY the time that Philip arrived home that evening the wildest rumours
about Africa were being spread. At the office things had been during
the last few days as bad as he had feared they might be, and he had
been as useless as Sir Bernard had expected. Nothing had been heard
from or of Munro for some weeks. Rosenberg’s suicide and, even more
distressingly, his will, had startled and bothered the Stuyvesants to
an indescribable degree. The motive power behind them, the object of
motion in front, had both disappeared in blood; and no-one had the
least idea what would happen. The Rosenberg legatees had been traced
by mid-day; they were living in small upper rooms in Houndsditch,
served by an old woman of their race. Extraordinary efforts had been
made to procure interviews with them; unsuccessfully, since they
merely refused to speak. There were, certainly, in the afternoon
papers, sketches of them, but that was hardly the same thing. Even
Governments were by way of being interested; high personages gazed at
the reproductions dubiously. The two brothers looked as if they might
be incapable of realizing the responsibilities of their present
position. Two old, bearded, and violent faces stared out at England
from journalistic pages. England stared back at them, and for the most
part, quite reasonably, abandoned its interest. The Chief Rabbi also
refused to be interviewed. Mr. Considine was interviewed, very
unsatisfactorily, since he in effect refused to foreshadow, forestall,
or foretell anybody’s intention. Philip read certainly that Mr.
Considine had said that he was sure that-there was no need for any
public anxiety, that good sense (a quality which the Jews, he was
reported to have declared, possessed to a marked degree) would
distinguish the actions of the Rosenberg brothers, and that in the
present critical times all minor racial prejudices must be set aside.
By which Philip understood him to mean that racial prejudice in regard
to Africa must swallow up the rest, as the serpent of Moses swallowed
the others. He didn’t feel quite convinced that Considine who on the
steps of the coroner’s court had exclaimed to Roger that a pillar of
fire was burning in him had said all that. In the other columns of the
papers racial prejudice was getting a firm hold.
There were articles by anthropologists, with diagrams of negro heads;
articles by explorers, with photographs of kraals; articles by
statisticians, with columns of figures; articles by historians, with
reproductions of paintings of Vasco da Gama, Thotmes III, Chaka, and
others; articles by bishops and famous preachers on missions, with
photographs of Christian negroes, converted and clothed; articles by
politicians on the balance of power in Africa with maps curiously
tinted; articles by military experts on possible strategy, with maps
lined and blobbed. There were letters from peace champions and war
invalids. There were, in short, all the signs of the interest which
the public was believed to feel. Philip at last abandoned them and
fell back on consideration.
Except for that one remark on the pillar of fire, and the mysterious
allusion to the foundations of the New Jerusalem, he hadn’t noticed
anything special in Considine’s conversation, but those two did rather
stand out. If Considine had not obviously been a…well, a
gentleman, Philip would have suspected him of belonging to the
Salvation Army. Of course, he had been talking to Roger, and Roger’s
own language was apt to be unbalanced. There were moments when Philip,
what with his father and Roger, and even his godfather, with his
refusal to allow martyrs to be avenged, felt that he was surrounded by
eccentrics. He thought with relief and delight of Rosamond; Rosamond
wasn’t eccentric. She was so right, so peaceful, so beautifully the
thing. She was a kind of centre, and all the others vibrated in
peculiar poses on the circumference. She herself had no circumference,
Philip thought, ignorant of how closely he was striving after St.
Augustine’s definition: “God is a circle, whose centre is everywhere
and His circumference nowhere.” She was small and dainty and she
moved, as it were, in little pounces. And yet she was so strong; it
was as if strength pretended to be weak. No, it wasn’t that, for after
all, she did need protection—his protection; she was strong enough to
need no other and weak enough to need his. Philip took that decision
quite seriously; in the economy of the universe he was not perhaps
finally wrong. For he was very innocent in love, and the awful
paradoxes which exist in that high passion and are an outrage to
rational argument were natural to him rather because of his innocence
than because of his egotism. That innocence might turn to egotism;
that candid belief of his heart be hardened by his pride and turned
from a simplicity to a stupidity. But at the moment he was very much
in love, and in love he had not yet reached an age capable of sin. He
was still a child of the new birth; maturity of intellect as of morals
was far distant.
Such a childhood he owed partly, surprised as he would have been to
heat it, to his father. The placid irony of Sir Bernard’s
contemplation of life distilled itself over the wisdom of this world
equally with that of every other. Dante was to him no more ridiculous
than Voltaire; disillusion was as much an illusion as illusion itself.
A thing that seemed had at least the truth of its seeming. Sir
Bernard’s mind refused to allow it more but it also refused to allow
it less. It was for each man to determine how urgent the truth of each
seeming was. Philip had not been discouraged from accepting the
seemings of his own world, of school, University, and
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