Descent into Hell, Charles Williams [top 100 books to read TXT] 📗

Chapter One

THE MAGUS ZOROASTER

 

“It undoubtedly needs”, Peter Stanhope said, “a final pulling

together, but there’s hardly time for that before July, and if

you’re willing to take it as it is, why-” He made a gesture of

presentation and dropped his eyes, thus missing the hasty

reciprocal gesture of gratitude with which Mrs. Parry immediately

replied on behalf of the dramatic culture of Battle Hill. Behind

and beyond her the culture, some thirty faces, unessentially

exhibited to each other by the May sunlight, settled to

attention-naturally, efficiently, critically, solemnly,

reverently. The grounds of the Manor House expanded beyond them;

the universal sky sustained the whole. Peter Stanhope began to

read his play.

 

Battle Hill was one of the new estates which had been laid

out after the war. It lay about thirty miles north of London and

took its title from the more ancient name of the broad rise of

ground which it covered. It had a quiet ostentation of comfort

and culture. The poor, who had created it, had been as far as

possible excluded, nor (except as hired servants) were they

permitted to experience the bitterness of others’ stairs. The

civil wars which existed there, however bitter, were conducted

with all bourgeois propriety. Politics, religion, art, science,

grouped themselves, and courteously competed for numbers and

reputation. This summer, however, had seen a spectacular triumph

of drama, for it had become known that Peter Stanhope had

consented to allow the restless talent of the Hill to produce his

latest play.

 

He was undoubtedly the most famous inhabitant. He was a cadet of

that family which had owned the Manor House, and he had bought it

back from more recent occupiers, and himself settled in it before

the war. He had been able to do this because he was something

more than a cadet of good family, being also a poet in the direct

English line, and so much after the style of his greatest

predecessor that he made money out of poetry. His name was

admired by his contemporaries and respected by the young. He had

even imposed modern plays in verse on the London theatre, and two

of them tragedies at that, with a farce or two, and histories for

variation and pleasure. He was the kind of figure who might be

more profitable to his neighbourhood dead than alive; dead, he

would have given it a shrine; alive, he deprecated worshippers.

The young men at the estate office made a refined publicity out

of his privacy; the name of Peter Stanhope would be whispered

without comment. He endured the growing invasion with a great

deal of good humour, and was content to see the hill of his birth

become a suburb of the City, as in another sense it would always

be. There was, in that latest poetry, no contention between the

presences of life and of death; so little indeed that there had

been a contention in the Sunday Times whether Stanhope were a

pessimist or an optimist. He himself said, in reply to an

interviewer’s question, that he was an optimist and hated it.

 

Stanhope, though the most glorious, was not the only notorious

figure of the Hill. There was Mr. Lawrence Wentworth, who was

the most distinguished living authority on military history

(perhaps excepting Mr. Aston Moffatt). Mr. Wentworth was not in

the garden on that afternoon. Mrs. Catherine Parry was; it was

she who would produce the play, as in many places and at many

times she had produced others. She sat near Stanhope now, almost

as tall as he, and with more active though not brighter eyes.

They were part of that presence which was so necessary to her

profession. Capacity which, in her nature, had reached the

extreme Of active life, seemed in him to have entered the

contemplative, so much had his art become a thing of his soul.

Where, in their own separate private affairs, he interfered so

little as almost to seem inefficient, she was so efficient as

almost to seem interfering.

 

In the curve of women and men beyond her, other figures, less

generally famous, sat or lay as the depth of their chairs induced

them. There were rising young men, and a few risen and retired

old. There were ambitious young women and sullen young women and

loquacious young women. They were all attentive, though, as a

whole, a little disappointed. They had understood that Mr.

Stanhope had been writing a comedy, and had hoped for a modern

comedy. When he had been approached, however, he had been easy

but firm. He had been playing with a pastoral; if they would

like a pastoral, it was very much at their service. Hopes and

hints of modern comedies were unrealized: it was the pastoral or

nothing. They had to be content. He consented to read it to

them; he would not do more. He declined to make suggestions for

the cast; he declined to produce. He would like, for his own

enjoyment, to come to some of the rehearsals, but he made it

clear that he had otherwise no wish to interfere. Nothing-given

the necessity of a pastoral-could be better; the production would

have all the advantage of his delayed death without losing any

advantage of his prolonged life. As this became clear, the

company grew reconciled. They gazed and listened, while from the

long lean figure, outstretched in its deck-chair, there issued

the complex intonation of great verse. Never negligible,

Stanhope was often neglected; he was everyone’s second thought,

but no one’s first. The convenience of all had determined this

afternoon that he should be the first, and his neat mass of grey

hair, his vivid glance, that rose sometimes from the manuscript,

and floated down the rows, and sank again, his occasional

friendly gesture that seemed about to deprecate, but always

stopped short, received the concentration of his visitors, and of

Mrs. Parry, the chief of his visitors.

 

It became clear to Mrs. Parry as the afternoon and the voice

went on, that the poet had been quite right when he had said that

the play needed Pulling together. “It’s all higgledy-piggledy,”

she said to herself, using a word which a friend had once applied

to a production of the Tempest, and, in fact to the Tempest

itself. Mrs, Parry thought that this pastoral was in some Ways,

rather like the Tempest. Mr. Stanhope, of course, was not as

good as Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was the greatest English

poet, so that Stanhope wasn’t. But there was a something. To

begin with, it had no title beyond A Pastoral. That was

unsatisfactory. Then the Plot was incredibly loose. it was of no

particular time and no particular place, and to any cultured

listener it seemed to have little bits of everything and

everybody put in at odd moments. The verse was undoubtedly

Stanhope’s own, of his latest, most heightened, and most

epigrammatic style, but now and then all kinds of reminiscences

moved in it. Once, during the second act, the word Pastiche

floated through Mrs. Parry’s mind, but went away again on her

questioning whether a Pastiche would be worth the trouble of

Production. There was a Grand Duke in it who had a beautiful

daughter, and this daughter either escaped from the palace or was

abducted—anyhow, she came into the power of a number of

brigands; and then there was a woodcutter’s son who frequently

burned leaves, and he and the princess fell in love, and there

were two farmers who were at odds, and the Grand Duke turned up

in disguise, first in a village and then in the forest, through

which also wandered an escaped bear, who spoke the most Complex

verse, excepting the Chorus. The Chorus had no kind of other

name; at first Mrs. Parry thought they might be villagers, then,

since they were generally present in the forest, she thought they

might be trees, or perhaps (with a vague reminiscence of Comus)

spirits. Stanhope had not been very helpful; he had alluded to

them as an experiment. By the end of the reading, it was clear

to Mrs. Parry that it was very necessary to decide what exactly

this Chorus was to be.

 

She had discouraged discussion of the play during the intervals

between the four acts, and as soon as it was over tea was served.

If, however, the poet hoped to get away from discussion by means

of tea he was mistaken. There was a little hesitation over the

correct word; fantastic was dangerous, and poetic both unpopular

and supererogatory, though both served for variations on idyllic,

which was Mrs. Parry’s choice and won by lengths. As she took

her second cup of tea, however, she began to close. She said:

“Yes, idyllic, Mr. Stanhope, and so significant!”

 

“It’s very good of you,” Stanhope murmured. “But you see I was

right about revision—the plot must seem very loose.”

 

Mrs. Parry waved the plot up into benevolence. “But there are a

few points,” she went on. “The Chorus now. I don’t think I

follow the Chorus.”

 

“The Chorus could be omitted,” Stanhope said. “It’s not

absolutely necessary to a presentation.”

 

Before Mrs. Parry could answer, a young woman named Adela Hunt,

sitting close by, leant forward. She was the leader of the

younger artistic party, who were not altogether happy about Mrs.

Parry. Adela had some thoughts of taking up production herself

as her life-work, and it would have been a great advantage to

have started straight away with Peter Stanhope. But her

following was not yet strong enough to deal with Mrs. Parry’s

reputation. She was determined, however, if possible, to achieve

a kind of collaboration by means of correction. “O, we oughtn’t

to omit anything, ought we?” she protested. “A work of art can’t

spare anything that’s a part of it.”

 

“My dear,” Mrs. Parry said, “you must consider your audience.

What will the audience make of the Chorus?”

 

“It’s for them to make what they can of it,” Adela answered. “We

can only give them a symbol. Art’s always symbolic, isn’t it?”

 

Mrs. Parry pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t say symbolic exactly,”

she said slowly. “It has a significance, of course, and you’ve

got to convey that significance to the audience. We want to

present it—to interpret.”

 

As she paused, distracted by the presentation by the poet of two

kinds of sandwiches, Adela broke in again.

 

“But, Mrs. Parry, how can one interpret a symbol? One can only

mass it. It’s all of a piece, and it’s the total effect that

creates the symbolical force.”

 

“Significant, not symbolical,” said Mrs. Parry firmly. “You

mustn’t play down to your audience, but you mustn’t play away

from them either. You must”—she gesticulated “intertwine…

harmonize. So you must make it easy for them to get into

harmony. That’s what’s wrong with a deal of modern art; it

refuses—it doesn’t establish equilibrium with its audience or

what not. In a pastoral play you must have equilibrium.”

 

“But the equilibrium’s in the play,” Adela urged again, “a balance

of masses. Surely that’s what drama is-a symbolical contrast of

masses.”

 

“Well,” Mrs. Parry answered with infuriating tolerance, “I

suppose you might call it that. But it’s more effective to think

of it as significant equilibrium-especially for a pastoral.

However, don’t let’s be abstract. The question is,