Descent into Hell, Charles Williams [top 100 books to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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be walking again in the streets of Battle Hill, as if, having
renounced it, it was restored to her. It was still night there;
the lamps were lit in the streets; the rustle of the many trees
was substituted for the silence of the mountains. But the great
mountains were there, and the light of them, and their
inhabitants; though the inhabitants did not know the soil on
which they lived. In a foretaste of the acute senses of death
she walked among them, but they did not see her. Outside her own
house she saw Pauline come out and look bitterly this way and the
other, and start to walk down the road, and presently as if from
the mountain side another Pauline had grown visible and came to
meet the first, her head high and bright as the summit, her eyes
bright with the supernatural dawn, her movements as free and yet
disposed as the winds that swept the chasms. She came on, her
feet which at first made no noise, beginning to sound on the
pavement as she took on more and more of mortal appearance, and
the first Pauline saw her and turned and fled, and the second
pursued her, and far away, down the dark streets and round the
dark mountain, they vanished from sight. And then again, and now
she was not by her own house but in another street towards the
top of the Hill, she saw a man walking hurriedly on, a man
strange to her, but after him followed a crowd of others, young
men and children, and all of them with his face. They pursued
him, as the vision of Pauline had pursued the vision of Pauline,
but this time with angry or plaintive cries, and he hurried on
seeking something, for his restless eyes turned every way and
sometimes he peered at the gutter and sometimes he looked up at
the dark window, till presently he turned in at one of the gates,
and about the gate his company seemed to linger and watch and
whisper. Presently she saw him at a window, looking down; and
there were at that window two forms who did not seem to see each
other, but the second she knew, for he had been at her house once
not so long ago, and it was Lawrence Wentworth. He too was
looking down, and after a little he was coming out of the gate,
and after him also came a figure, but this time a woman, a young
woman, who pursued him in his turn, and for whom also he lay in
wait.
But the other man too had now come out into the street, only it
was no more the street of a town but a ruined stretch of
scaffolding or bone or rock, all heights and edges and bare
skeleton shapes.. He was walking there on the mountain though he
did not know it, any more than he noticed the light. He walked
and looked up and round, and her eyes met his, and he made a
sudden movement of wonder and, she thought, of joy. But as they
looked, the dream, which was becoming more and more a dream,
shifted again, and she heard quick and loud the patter-patter
of those footsteps with which, as if they marked a region
through or round which she passed such experiences always
began and ended. She was on the Hill, and all the houses were
about her, and they stood all on graves and bones, and swayed
upon their foundations. A great stench went up from them, and a
cry, and the feet came quicker, and down the street ran Lily
Sammile, waving and calling, and checked and stood. She looked
at a gate; Pauline was standing there. The two neared each
other, the gate still between them, and began to talk. “No more
hurt, no more pain, no more bad dreams,” a voice said. Margaret
Anstruther put out a hand; it touched a projection in the rock on
which she was lying in her journey towards corporeal death. She
clung to it, and pulled herself forward towards Pauline. The
nurse in the room heard her and turned. Mrs. Anstruther said: “I
should like to see Pauline; will you ask her-” and at that she woke,
and it was striking one.
RETURN TO EDEN
Margaret Anstruther had seen, in her vision, a single house, with
two forms leaning from the same window. Time there had
disappeared, and the dead man had been contemporaneous with the
living. As if simultaneity approached the Hill, the experiences
of its inhabitants had there become co-eval; propinquity no
longer depended upon sequence.
The chance that brought Lawrence Wentworth into such close
spiritual contact with the dead was the mere manner of his ill
luck. His was not worse than any other’s, though the hastening of
time to its end made it more strange. It grew in him, like all
judgment, through his negligence. A thing of which he had
consistently refused to be aware, if action is the test of
awareness, drew close to him: that is, the nature of the Republic.
The outcast of the Republic had climbed a forlorn ladder to his
own death. His death entered into the Republic, and into the
lives of its other members. Wentworth had never acknowledged the
unity. He had never acknowledged the victims of oppression nor
the presence of victimization. It may be that such victimization
is inevitable, and that the Republic after its kind must be as
false to its own good as the lives of most of its children are to
theirs. But Wentworth had neither admitted nor rejected this
necessity, nor even questioned and been hurt by it; he had merely
ignored it. He had refused the agony of the res publica, and of
temporal justice. Another justice sharpened the senses of his res
private. He was doubly open to its approachin his scholarship,
where the ignoring of others began to limit, colour, and falsify
his work, and in his awareness of supernatural neighbours, if any
should be near. One was.
The dead man had stood in what was now Wentworth’s bedroom, and
listened in fear lest he should hear the footsteps of his kind.
That past existed still in its own place, since all the past is in
the web of life nothing else than a part, of which we are not
sensationally conscious. It was drawing closer now to
the present; it approached the senses of the present. But between
them still there went-patter, patter-the hurrying footsteps which
Margaret Anstruther had heard in the first circle of the Hill.
The dead man had hardly heard them; his passion had carried him
through that circle into death. But on the hither side were the
footsteps, and the echo and memory of the footsteps, of this
world. It was these for which Wentworth listened. He had come
back into his own room after he had heard those steady and mocking
footsteps of Hugh and Adela, and the voices and subdued laughter
accompanying them. He had himself wandered up and down, and come
to a rest at last at the finished window where, with no wall
before him, the dead man had peered. He also peered. He
listened, and his fancy created for him the unheard melody of the
footsteps. His body renewed and absorbed the fatal knowledge of
his desire. He listened, in the false faith of desire. It could
not be that he would not hear, out of those double footsteps, one
true pair separating themselves, coming up the street, approaching
the gate; that he would not see a true form coming up the drive,
approaching the door. It must happen; his body told him it must
happen. He must have what he wanted, because… but still those
feet did not come. The dead man stood by him, arm to arm, foot by
foot, and listened, the rope in his hand, and that night neither
of them heard anything at all.
The evening and the morning were the first day, of a few hours, or
a few months, or both at once. Others followed. The business of
the Hill progressed; the play went forward. Pauline fled, and
Margaret died, or lived in process of death. Hugh went up and
down to the City. Adela went about the Hill. Wentworth, now
possessed by his consciousness of her, and demanding her presence
and consent as its only fulfillment went about his own affairs.
“Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me”; the maxim
applies to many stones of stumbling, and especially to all those
of which the nature is the demand for a presence instead of the
assent to an absence; the imposition of the self upon complacency.
Wentworth made his spiritual voice hoarse in issuing orders to
complacency, and stubbed his toes more angrily every day against
the unmovable stone.
Once or twice he met Adela-once at Mrs. Parry’s, where they had no
chance to speak. They smiled at each other-an odd smile; the
faintest hint of greed, springing from the invisible nature of
greed, was in it on both sides. Their greeds smiled. Again he
ran into her one evening at the post office with Hugh, and Hugh’s
smile charged theirs with hostility. It ordered and subdued
Adela’s; it blocked and repulsed Wentworth’s. It forced on him
the fact that he was not only unsuccessful, but old; he contended
against both youth and a rival. He said: “How’s the play going?”
“We’re all learning our parts,” Adela said. “There doesn’t seem
to be time for anything but the play. Shall we ever get another
evening with you, Mr. Wentworth?”
He said: “I was sorry you could neither of you come.” That, he
thought, would show that he hadn’t been taken in.
“Yes,” said Hugh; the word hung ambiguously. Wentworth,
angered by it, went on rashly: “Did you have a pleasant time?”
He might have meant the question for either or both. Adela said:
“O well, you know; it was rather a rush. Choosing colours and all
that.”
“But fortunately we ran into each other later,” Hugh added, “and
we almost ran at each other—didn’t we,
Adela? so we fed in a hurry and dashed to a theatre. It might
have been much worse.”
Wentworth heard the steps in his brain. He saw Hugh take
Adela’s arm; he saw her look up at him; he saw an exchanged
memory. The steps went on through him; double steps. He
wanted to get away to give himself up to them: life and death,
satisfaction of hate and satisfaction of lust, contending, and the
single approach of the contention’s result—patter, patter, steps
on the Hill. He knew they were laughing at him. He made normal
noises, and abnormally fled. He went home.
In his study he automatically turned over his papers, aware but
incapable of the organic life of the mind they represented. He
found himself staring at his drawings of costumes for the play,
and had an impulse to tear them, to refuse to have anything
to do with the grotesque mummery, himself to reject the picture of
the rejection of himself. But he did not trust his own capacity
to manage a more remote force than Adela—Mrs. Parry. Mrs. Parry
meant nothing to him; she could never become to him the nervous
irritation, he obsession, which both Aston Moffatt and Adela now
were. His intelligence warned him that she was, nevertheless,
one of the natural forces which, like time and space, he could not
overcome. She wanted the designs, and she would have them. He
could refuse, but not reject, Adela; he could reject, but he
certainly could not refuse, Mrs. Parry. Irritated at his
knowledge of his own false strength,
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