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

about the dying,

and dispatched the dead to their doom with prayers and rites

which were not meant for the benefit of the dead alone. Rather,

they secured the living against ghostly oppression; they made

easy the way of the ghosts into their own world and hurried them

upon their way. They were sped on with unction and requiem, with

intercessions and masses; and the sword of exorcism waved at the

portal of their exodus against the return of any whom those

salutations of departure did not ease. But where superstition

and religion failed, where cemeteries were no longer forbidden

and no longer feared; where the convenient processes of cremation

encouraged a pretence of swift passage, where easy sentimentality

set up a pretence of friendship between the living and the dead—might

not that new propinquity turn to a fearful friendship in

the end? It was commonly accepted that the dead were anxious to

help the living, but what if the dead were only anxious for the

living to help them? or what if the infection of their experience

communicated itself across the too shallow grave? Men were

beginning to know, they were being compelled to know; at last the

living world was shaken by the millions of spirits who endured

that further permanent revelation. Hysteria of self-knowledge,

monotony of self-analysis, introspection spreading like disease,

what was all this but the infection communicated over the

unpurified borders of death? The spirits of the living world were

never meant to be so neighbourly with the spirits of that other.

“Grant to them eternal rest, O Lord. And let light eternal shine

upon them.” Let them rest in their own places of light; far, far

from us be their discipline and their endeavour. The phrases of

the prayers of intercession throb with something other than

charity for the departed; there is a fear for the living. Grant

them, grant them rest; compel them to their rest. Enlighten

them, perpetually enlighten them. And let us still enjoy our

refuge from their intolerable knowledge.

 

As if in a last communion with the natural terrors of man,

Margaret Anstruther endured a recurrent shock of fear. She

recalled herself. To tolerate such knowledge with a joyous

welcome was meant, as the holy Doctors had taught her, to be the

best privilege of man, and so remained. The best maxim towards

that knowledge was yet not the Know thyself of the Greek so much

as the Know Love of the Christian, though both in the end were

one. It was not possible for man to know himself and the world,

except first after some mode of knowledge, some art of discovery.

The most perfect, since the most intimate and intelligent, art

was pure love. The approach by love was the approach to fact; to

love anything but fact was not love. Love was even more

mathematical than poetry; it was the pure mathematics of the

spirit. It was applied also and active; it was the means as it

was the end. The end lived everlastingly in the means; the means

eternally in the end.

 

The girl and the old woman who lay, both awake, in that house

under the midnight sky, were at different stages of that way. To

the young mind of Pauline, by some twist of grace in the

operation of space and time, the Greek maxim had taken on a

horrible actuality; the older vision saw, while yet living,

almost into a world beyond the places of the dead. Pauline knew

nothing yet of the value of those night vigils, nor of the

fulfilment of the desire of truth. But Margaret had, through a

long life, practised the distinction, not only between experience

and experience, but in each experience itself between dream and

fact. It is not enough to say that some experiences are drugs to

the spirit; every experience, except the final, has a quality

which has to be cast out by its other quality of perfection,

expelled by healthy digestion into the sewers where the divine

scavengers labour. By a natural law Margaret’s spirit exercised

freely its supernatural functions and with increasing clearness

looked out on to the growing company of the Hill.

 

Lights in the houses opposite had long since been put out. The

whole rise of ground, lying like a headland, or indeed as itself

like some huge grave in which so many others had been dug, was

silent in the darkness, but for one sound; the sound of

footsteps. Margaret knew it very well; she had heard it on many

nights. Sometimes in the day as well, when the peace was deepest

within her and without, she could hear that faint

monotonous patter of feet reverberating from its surface. Its

distance was not merely in space, though it seemed that also, but

in some other dimension. Who it was that so walked for ever over

the Hill she did not know, though in her heart she did not

believe it to be good. The harsh phrase would have been alien to

her. She heard those feet not as sinister or dangerous, but

only—patter, patter—as the haste of a search for or a flight

from repose-perhaps both. Ingress and regress, desire and

repulsion, contended there. The contention was the only

equilibrium of that haunter of the Hill, and was pain. Patter,

patter. It sounded at a distance, like the hurrying feet of the

woman on her own garden path that afternoon. She had heard, in

old tales of magic, of the guardian of the threshold. She

wondered if the real secret of the terrible guardian were that he

was simply lost on the threshold. His enmity to man and heaven

was only his yearning to enter one without loss. It did not

matter, nor was it her affair. Her way did not cross that

other’s; only it was true she never sank into those circles of

other sensation and vision but what, far off, she heard—patter,

patter—the noise of the endless passage.

 

There moved within her the infinite business of the Hill into

which so much death had poured. First there came the creation of

new images instead of those of every day. Her active mind still

insisted on them; she allowed its due. The Hill presented itself

before her with all its buildings and populace; she saw them,

small and vivid, hurrying. She would even sometimes recognize

one or other, for the briefest second. She had seen, in that

recreation by night of the Hill by day, Pauline going into a

shop and Peter Stanhope talking in the street, and others. She

remembered now, idly, that she had never seen the woman who had

called on her that day, though she had seen Myrtle Fox running,

running hard, down a long street. Distinct though the vision was

it was but momentary. It was the equivalent of her worldly

affairs, and it lasted little longer; in a second it had gone.

 

It had enlarged rather. It reduplicated itself on each side, and

its inhabitants faded from it as it did so, seeming themselves to

pass into other hills. Presently there was no living form or

building on that original Hill, and it was no longer possible to

tell which had been the original, for a great range swept right

across the sky, and all those heights were only the upper slopes

of mountains, whose lower sides fell away beneath her vision.

The earth itself seemed to lie in each of those mountains, and on

each there was at first a populous region towards the summit, but

the summit itself rose individual and solitary. Mountains or

modes of consciousness, peaks or perceptions, they stood; on the

slopes of each the world was carried; and the final height of

each was a separate consummation of the whole. It was, as the

apprehended movement upon each of them died away, in the time

before the dawn that they rose there, nor had the sun risen,

though they were not in darkness. Either a light emanated from

themselves or some greater sun drew towards them from its own

depth.

 

Then-it was not to say that they faded, but rather that she lost

them, becoming herself one of them and ignorant of the rest. It

was very silent; only small sounds came up to her as if someone

was climbing below. The noises were so faint that in the air of

earth they would have been lost. Had she been woman she would

not have known them; now that she was not woman alone but

mountain, the mountain knew that it was not from its own nature

alone that the tiny disturbances came. There was movement

within it certainly; rush of streams, fall of rocks, roar of

winds through its chasms, but these things were not sound to it

as was that alien human step. Through all another single note

sounded once; a bell. Minutely she knew that the public clock of the

Hill had struck one. It was a remote translation of a thing, for the

dawn began.

 

It came from above, and as the light grew the mountain that was

she became aware again of its fellows, spread out around no longer

in a long range but in a great mass. They stretched away on all sides.

At the increase of the sun there grew also an increase of fugitive

sound; and she became aware of a few wandering shapes on the heights

about her. Some climbed on; others, instead of welcoming the light

as lost mountaineers should do, turned to escape it. They hurried

into such caves or crevasses as they could find. Here and there, on

a great open space, one lay fallen, twisting and dragging himself

along. They seemed all, even those who climbed, grotesque

obtrusions into that place of rock and ice and thin air and growing

sun, a world different from theirs, hers and not hers. A divided

consciousness lived in her, more intensely than ever before.

 

In the time of her novitiate it had seemed to her sometimes that,

though her brains and emotions acted this way or that, yet all

that activity went on along the sides of a slowly increasing mass

of existence made from herself and all others with whom she had

to do, and that strong and separate happiness-for she felt it as

happiness, though she herself might be sad; her sadness did but

move on it as the mountaineer on the side of a mountain-that

happiness was the life which she was utterly to become. Now she

knew that only the smallest fragility of her being clung

somewhere to the great height that was she and others and all the

world under her separate kind, as she herself was part of all the

other peaks; and though the last fragility was still a little

terrified of the dawn which was breaking everywhere, she knew

that when the dawn reached the corner where she lay it would,

after one last throb of piercing change under its power, light

but the mountain side, and all her other mighty knowledge would

after its own manner rejoice in it. She had not much strength in

these days-that she which was Margaret Anstruther and lay in her

bed on Battle Hill-but such as she had it was her business to

use. She set herself to crawl out of that darkened corner

towards the light. She turned from all the corner held—her

home, her memories, Stanhope’s plays, Pauline; with effort she

began her last journey. It might take hours, or days, or even

years, but it was certain; as she moved, crawling slowly over the

rock, she saw the light sweeping on to meet her. The moment of

death was accepted and accomplished in her first outward

movement; there remained only to die.

 

On her way and in her bed, she dozed a little, and in that light

sleep—dream within