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

you a great deal for a long while now,” she said, “and

I can do no more than acknowledge it. But I’m grateful that I

can do that. Do you know Mrs. Sammile?”

 

Stanhope bowed again; Myrtle let out a new gush of greeting and

they all sat down.

 

“I really came”, Stanhope said after a little interchange, “to

ask Miss Anstruther if she had any preference in names.”

 

“Me?” said Pauline. “What sort of names?”

 

“As the leader of the Chorus,” Stanhope explained. “I promised

Mrs. Parry I’d try and individualize so far—for the sake of the

audience—as to give her a name. Myself, I don’t think it’ll

much help the audience, but as I promised, I wondered about

something French, as it’s to be eighteenth century, La Lointaine

or something like that. But Mrs. Parry was afraid that’d make it

more difficult. No one would understand (she thought) why

leaves—if they are leaves—should be lointaine….”

 

He was interrupted by Myrtle, who, leaning eagerly forward, said:

“O, Mr. Stanhope, that reminds me. I was thinking about it

myself the other day, and I thought how beautiful and friendly it

would be to give all the Chorus tree-names. It would look so

attractive on the programmes, Elm, Ash, Oak—the three sweet

trees—Hawthorn, Weeping Willow, Beech, Birch, Chestnut. D’you

see? That would make it all quite clear. And then Pauline could

be the Oak. I mean, the Oak would have to be the leader of the

English trees, wouldn’t he or she?”

 

“Do let Mr. Stanhope tell us, Myrtle,” Mrs. Anstruther said; and

“You’d turn them into a cosy corner of trees, Myrtle,” Pauline

interjected.

 

“But that’s what we want,” Myrtle pursued her dream, “we want to

realize that Nature can be consoling, like life. And Art—even

Mr. Stanhope’s play. I think all art is so consoling, don’t you,

Mrs. Sammile?”

 

Mrs. Anstruther had opened her mouth to interrupt Myrtle, but now

she shut it again, and waited for her guest to reply, who said in

a moment, with a slight touch of tartness, “I’m sure Mr. Stanhope

won’t agree. He’ll tell you nightmares are significant.”

 

“O, but we agreed that wasn’t the right word,” Myrtle exclaimed.

“Or was it! Pauline, was it significant or symbolical that we

agreed everything was?”

 

“I want to know my name,” Pauline said, and Stanhope, smiling,

answered, “I was thinking of something like Periel. Quite

insignificant.”

 

“It sounds rather odd,” said Myrtle. “What about the others?”

 

“The others,” Stanhope answered firmly, “will not be

named.”

 

“O!” Myrtle looked disappointed. “I thought we might have had a

song or speech or something with all the names in it. It would

sound beautiful. And Art ought to be beautiful, don’t you think?

Beautiful words in beautiful voices. I do think elocution is so

important.”

 

Pauline said, “Grandmother doesn’t care for elocution.”

 

“O, Mrs. Anstru—” Myrtle was beginning, when Mrs.

Anstruther cut her short.

 

“What does one need to say poetry, Mr. Stanhope?” she asked.

 

Stanhope laughed. “What but the four virtues, clarity, speed,

humility, courage? Don’t you agree?”

 

The old lady looked at Mrs. Sammile. “Do you?” she asked.

 

Lily Sammile shrugged. “O, if you’re turning poems into

labours,” she said. “But we don’t all want to speak poetry, and

enjoyment’s a simple thing for the rest of us.”

 

“We do all want to speak it,” Stanhope protested. “Or else verse

and plays and all art are more of dreams than they need be. They

must always be a little so, perhaps.”

 

Mrs. Sammile shrugged again. “You make such a business of

enjoying yourself,” she said with almost a sneer. “Now if I’ve a

nightmare I change it as soon as I can.” She looked at Pauline.

 

“I’ve never had nightmares since I willed them away,” Myrtle Fox

broke in. “I say every night: ‘Sleep is good, and sleep is here.

Sleep is good.’ And I never dream. I say the same thing every

morning, only I say Life then instead of Sleep. ‘Life is good

and Life is here. Life is good.”’

 

Stanhope flashed a glance at Pauline. “Terribly good, perhaps,”

he suggested.

 

“Terribly good, certainly,” Myrtle assented happily.

 

Mrs. Sammile stood up. “I must go,” she said. “But I don’t see

why you don’t enjoy yourselves.”

 

“Because, sooner or later, there isn’t anything to enjoy in

oneself,” Stanhope murmured, as she departed.

 

Pauline took her to the gate, and said goodbye.

 

“Do let’s meet,” Mrs. Sammile said. “I’m always about, and I

think I could be useful. You’ve got to get back now, but

sometime you needn’t get back……” She trotted off, and as she

went the hard patter of her heels was the only sound that

broke, to Pauline’s ears, the heavy silence of the Hill.

 

The girl lingered a little before returning. A sense of what

Miss Fox called “significance” hung in her mind; she felt,

indeterminately, that something had happened, or, perhaps, was

beginning to happen. The afternoon had been one of a hundred-the

garden, a little talk, visitors, tea—yet all that usualness had

been tinged with difference. She wondered if it were merely the

play, and her concern with it, that had heightened her senses

into what was, no doubt, illusion. Her hands lay on the top bar

of the gate, and idly she moved her fingers, separating and

closing them one by one for each recollected point. Her promise

to her grandmother—death was not to interrupt verse; the memory

of her ancestor—death swallowed up in victory—Struther’s

Salvation, Anstruther’s salvation; elocution, rhetoric, poetry,

Peter Stanhope, Lily Sammile, the slight jar of their

half-philosophical dispute; her own silly phrase—“to make your

own weather”; tales of the brain, tales to be told, tales that

gave you yourself in quiet, tales or the speaking of verse, tales

or rhetoric or poetry; “clarity, speed, courage, humility”. Or

did they only prevent desirable enjoyment, as Lily Sammile had

hinted? One would have to be terribly good to achieve them. And

terribly careful about the tales. She looked down the street,

and for an instant felt that if she saw It coming—clarity, speed,

courage, humility—she might wait. She belonged to the Chorus of a

great experiment; a thing not herself.

 

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image walking in the garden.

 

If those four great virtues were needed, as Peter Stanhope had

proposed, even to say the verse, might Shelley have possessed

them before he discovered the verse? If she were wrong in hating

them? if they had been offered her as a classification, a

hastening, a strengthening? if she had to discover them as

Shelley had done, and beyond them….

 

She must go back. She pulled herself from the gate. Mrs.

Sammile had just reached the corner. She looked back; she waved.

The gesture beckoned. Pauline waved back, reluctantly. Before

she told herself tales, it was needful to know what there was in

verse. She must hear more.

 

She was not offered more. The visitors were on the point of

departure, and Mrs. Anstruther was certainly tired. She roused

herself to beg Stanhope to come again, if he would, but no more

passed, except indeed that as Pauline herself said goodbye,

Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: “The

substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way

round.”

 

“The substantive?” Pauline asked blankly.

 

“Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I’m keeping you.

Goodbye, Periel,” and he was gone.

 

Later in the day, lying unsleeping but contented in her bed, Mrs.

Anstruther also reviewed the afternoon. She was glad to have

seen Peter Stanhope; she was not particularly glad to have seen

Lily Sammile, but she freely acknowledged, in the words of a too

often despised poet, that since God suffered her to be she too

was God’s minister, and laboured for some good by Margaret

Anstruther not understood. She did not under-, stand clearly

what Mrs. Sammile conceived herself to be offering. it sounded so

much like Myrtle Fox: “tell yourself tales”.

 

She looked out of the window. There would be few more evenings

during which she could watch the departure of day, and the

promise of rarity gave a greater happiness to the experience. So

did the knowledge of familiarity. Rarity was one form of delight

and frequency another. A thing could even be beautiful because

it did not happen, or rather the not-! happening could be

beautiful. So long always as joy was not rashly pinned to the

happening; so long as you accepted what joys the universe offered

and did not seek to compel the universe to offer you joys of your

own definition. She would die soon; she expected, with hope and

happiness, the discovery of the joy of death.

 

It was partly because Stanhope’s later plays had in them

something of this purification and simplicity that she loved

them. She knew that, since they were poetry, they must mean more

than her individual being knew, but at least they meant that. He

discovered it in his style, in words and the manner of the, words

he used. Whether his personal life could move to the sound of

his own lucid exaltation of verse she did not know. It was not

her business; perhaps even it was not primarily his. His affair

had been the powerful exploration of power after his own manner;

all minds that recognized power saluted him. Power was in that

strange chorus over which the experts of Battle Hill culture

disputed, and it lay beyond them. There was little human

approach in it, though it possessed human experience; like the

Dirge in Cymbeline or the songs of Ariel in the Tempest it

possessed only the pure perfection of fact, rising in rhythms of

sound that seemed inhuman because they were free from desire or

fear or distress. She herself did not yet dare to repeat the

Chorus; it was beyond her courage. Those who had less knowledge

or more courage might do so. She dared only to recollect it; to

say it would need more courage than was required for death. When

she was dead, she might be able to say Stanhope’s poetry

properly. Even if there were no other joy, that would be a

reason for dying well.

 

Here, more than in most places, it should be easy. Here there

had, through the centuries, been a compression and

culmination of death as if the currents of mortality had been

drawn hither from long distances to some whirlpool of invisible

depth. The distances might be very long indeed; from all places

of predestined sepulchre, scattered through the earth. In those

places the movement of human life had closed-of human life or

human death, of the death in life which was an element in life,

and of those places the Hill on which she lived was one. An

energy reposed in it, strong to affect all its people; an energy

of separation and an energy of knowledge. If, as she believed,

the spirit of a man at death saw truly what he was and had been,

so that whether he desired it or not a lucid power of

intelligence manifested all himself to him—then that energy of

knowledge was especially urgent upon men and women here, though

through all the world it must press upon the world. She felt, as

if by a communication of a woe not hers, how the neighbourhood of

the dead troubled the living; how the living were narrowed by the

return of the dead. Therefore in savage regions the houses of

sepulchre were forbidden, were taboo, for the wisdom of the

barbarians set division between the dead and the living, and the

living were preserved. The wisdom of other religions in

civilized lands had set sacramental ceremonies