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

Chapter Six

THE DOCTRINE OF SUBSTITUTED LOVE

 

Pauline sat back in her chair, and her arms lay along its arms. A

rehearsal was taking place in the ground of the Manor House, and

she had ended her part in the first act. She was free to watch

the other performers, and to consider the play once more. By now they

had all got more or less accustomed to that speaking of verse

aloud which our uneducated mouths and ears find so difficult,

being less instructed than the more universal Elizabethan must have bee.

Pauline remembered again, with a queer sense of inferiority, that no

Elizabethan audience, gods or groundlings, can have felt any shock

of surprise or awkwardness at a play opening with a high rhodomontade

of sound. No modern audience would put up with going to the first

night of a new play to hear the curtain sweep up on such an absurd

and superb invocation as:

 

Hung be the heavens with black; yield, day, to night;

Comets, importing change…

 

and so on. On the other hand, they accepted plays beginning with

the most ordinary prose. Even rhodomontade demands a peculiar

capacity, and to lose its bravery perhaps hampers some other

bravery of the spirit; to lose even one felicity is to be robbed

of more than we have a right to spare. Certainly Stanhope had

spared them any overwhelming magniloquence; his verse was subdued

almost to

conversation, though as she listened and read and studied and

spoke it, she became aware that the rhythm of these conversations

was a great deal more speedy and vital than any she could ever

remember taking part in. All Mrs. Parry’s efforts to introduce a

stateliness of manner into the Grand Ducal court, and a humorous

but slow—O so slow—realism into the village, and an enigmatic

meandering meditativeness into

the Chorus could not sufficiently delay the celerity of the line.

Once or twice Stanhope, having been consulted, had hinted that he

would rather have the meaning lost than too firmly explained, and

that

speed was an element, but after a great deal of enthusiastic

agreement they had all gone on as before. She herself had been

pleasantly ticked off by Mrs. Parry that very afternoon for

hurrying, and as

Stanhope hadn’t interfered she had done her best to be adequately

slow. It was some recompense to sit now and listen to Adela and

Mrs. Parry arguing with, or at least explaining to, each other.

Adela,

true to her principles of massing and blocking, arranged whole

groups of words in chunks irrespective of line and meaning, but

according to her own views of the emotional quality to be

stressed. She had unexpectedly broken one line with a terrific

symbolical pause.

 

“I am,” she said to her Woodcutter, and pausing as if she had

invoked the Name itself and waited for its Day of Judgment to

appear, added in one

breath, “only the perception in a flash of love.”

 

Pauline encouraged in herself a twinge of wonder whether there

were anything Adela Hunt were less only; then she felt ashamed of

having tried to modify the line into her own judgment, especially

into a quite

unnecessary kind of judgment. She knew little enough of Adela,

and the result was that she lost the sound of the woodcutter’s

answer—“A peremptory phenomenon of love”. She thought, a little

gloomily, malice could create a fair number of peremptory

phenomena for itself, not perhaps of love, but easily enjoyable,

like Myrtle Fox’s trees.

Malice was a much cosier thing than love. She was rather glad

they were not doing the last act to-day; that act in which Periel—male

or female, no matter!—spirit, but not spiritual—she—began

and led the Chorus; and everyone came in, on the most inadequate

excuses, the Princess and her lover and the Grand Duke and the

farmers and the banditti and the bear; and through the woods went

a high medley of wandering beauty and rejoicing love and courtly

intelligence and rural laughter and bloody clamour and growling

animalism, in mounting complexities of verse, and over all,

gathering, opposing, tossing over it, the naughting cry of the

all-surrounding and overarching trees.

 

It troubled her now, as it had not done when she first read it, as

it did not the others. She wondered whether it would have

troubled her if, since the day of his first call, she had not

sometimes heard her grandmother and Peter Stanhope talking in the

garden. It was two or three weeks ago, since he had first called,

and she could not remember that they had said anything memorable

since except a few dicta about poetry-but everything they said was

full and simple and unafraid. She herself had rather avoided him;

she was not yet altogether prepared in so many words to accept the

terror of good. It had occurred to her to imagine those two-the

old woman and the poet-watching the last act, themselves its only

audience, as if it were presented by the

imagined persons themselves, and by no planned actors. But

what would happen when the act came to an end she could not think,

unless those two went up into the forest and away into the sounds

that they had heard, into the medley of which the only unity was

the life of

the great poetry that made it, and was sufficient unity.

Under the influence of one of those garden conversations she had

looked up in her old school Shelley the lines that had haunted

her, and seen the next line to them. It ran:

 

That apparition, solo of men, he saw;

 

and it referred, of course, to Zoroaster. But she couldn’t,

watching the play, refrain from applying it to Stanhope. This

apparition, sole of men—so far as she had then discovered—he had

seen; and she went back to wonder again if in those three lines

Shelley, instead of frightening her, was not nourishing her.

Supposing—supposing—that in this last act Peter Stanhope had seen

and imagined something more awful even than a vision of himself;

supposing he had contemplated the nature of the world in which

such visions could be, and that the entwined loveliness of his

verse was a mirror of its being. She looked at the hale and

hearty young man who was acting the bear, and she wondered whether

perhaps her real bear, if she had courage to meet it, would be as

friendly as he. If only the woodcutter’s son had not learned the

language of the leaves while they, burned in the fire! There was

no doubt about that speech: the very smell and noise of the fire

was in it, and the conviction of the alien song that broke out

within the red flames. So perhaps the phoenix cried while it

burned.

 

Someone sat down in the next chair. She looked; it was Stanhope.

Mrs. Parry and Adela concluded their discussion. Adela seemed to

be

modifying her chunks of words—sharpening ends and pushing them

nearer till they almost met. Presumably Mrs. Parry was relying on

later rehearsals to get them quite in touch, and even, if she were

fortunate, to tie them together. The rehearsal began again.

Stanhope said “You were, of course, quite right.”

 

She turned her head towards him, gravely. “You meant like that

then?” she asked.

 

“Certainly I meant it like that,” he said, “more like that,

anyhow. Do you suppose I want each line I made to march so many

paces to the right, with a meditation between each? But even if I

could interfere it’d only get more mixed than ever. Better keep

it all of a

piece.”

 

“But you don’t mind,” she asked, “if I’m a little quicker than

some of them?”

 

“I should love to hear it,” he answered. “Only I think it is

probably our business—yours and mine—to make our feelings

agreeable to the company, as it were. This isn’t a play; it’s a

pleasant entertainment. Let’s all be pleasantly entertaining

together.

 

“But the poetry?” she said.

 

He looked at her, laughing. “And even that shall be Mrs.

Parry’s,” he said. “For this kind of thing is not worth the

fretfulness of dispute; let’s save all that till we are among the

doctors, who aren’t fretful.”

 

She said suddenly, “Would you read it to me again one day? is it

too absurd to ask you?”

 

“Of course I’ll read it,” he said. “Why not? If you’d like it.

And now in exchange tell me what’s bothering you.”

 

Taken aback, she stared at him, and stammered on her answer.

“But-but—” she began.

 

He looked at the performers. “Miss Hunt is determined to turn me

into the solid geometry of the emotions,” he said. “But—but-tell

me why you always look so about you and what you are looking for.”

 

“Do I?” she asked hesitatingly. He turned a serious gaze on her

and her own eyes turned away before it. He said, “There’s nothing

worth quite so much vigilance or anxiety. Watchfulness, but not

anxiety, not fear. You let it in to yourself when you fear it so;

and whatever it is, it’s less than your life.”

 

“You talk as if life were good,” she said.

 

“It’s either good or evil,” he answered, “and you can’t t, decide

that by counting incidents on your fingers. The decision is of

another kind. But don’t let’s be abstract. Will you tell me what

it is bothers you?”

 

She said, “It sounds too silly.”

 

Stanhope paused, and in the silence there came to them Mrs.

Parry’s voice carefully enunciating a grand ducal speech to Hugh

Prescott. The measured syllables fell in globed detachment at

their feet, and Stanhope waved a hand outwards.

 

“Well,” he said, “if you think it sounds sillier than that.

God is good; if I hadn’t been here they might have done the

Tempest. Consider—‘Yea—all which—it inherit—shall dis—solve.

And—like this—insub—stantial pag—eant fa—ded.’ O certainly

God is good. So what about telling me?”

 

“I have a trick,” she said steadily, “of meeting an exact likeness

of myself in the street.” And as if she hated herself for saying

it, she turned sharply on him. “There!” she exclaimed. “Now you

know. You know exactly. And what will you say?”

 

Her eyes burned at him; he received their fury undisturbed,

saying, “You mean exactly that?” and she nodded. “Well,” he went

on mildly, “it’s not unknown. Goethe met himself once—on the

road to Weimar,

I think. But he didn’t make it a habit. How long has this been

happening?”

 

“All my life,” she answered. “At intervals—long intervals, I

know. Months and years sometimes, only it’s quicker now. O, it’s

insane—no one could believe it, and yet it’s there.”

 

“It’s your absolute likeness?” he asked.

 

“It’s me,” she repeated. “It comes from a long way off, and@ it

comes up towards me, and I’m terrified—terrified-one day it’ll

come on and meet me. It hasn’t so far; it’s turned away or

disappeared. But

it won’t always; it’ll come right up to me—and then I shall go

mad or die.”

 

“Why?” he asked quickly, and she answered at once “Because I’m

afraid. Dreadfully afraid.”

 

“But,” he said, “that I don’t quite understand. You have friends;

haven’t you asked one of them to carry your fear?”

 

“Carry my fear!” she said, sitting rigid in her chair, so that her

arms, which had lain so lightly, pressed now into the basket-work

and her long firm hands