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

gripped it as if they strangled her own

heart. “How can anyone else carry my fear? Can anyone else see

it and have to meet it?”

 

Still, in that public place, leaning back easily as if they talked

of casual things, he said, “You’re mixing up two things. Think a

moment, and you’ll see. The meeting it—that’s one thing, and we

can leave it till you’re rid of the other. It’s the fear we’re

talking about. Has no one ever relieved you of that? Haven’t you

ever asked them to?”

 

She said “You haven’t understood, of course…. I was a fool….

Let’s forget it. Isn’t Mrs. Parry efficient?”

 

“Extremely,” he answered. “And God redeem her. But nicely. Will

you tell me whether you’ve any notion of what I’m talking about?

And if not, will you let me do it for you?”

 

She attended reluctantly, as if to attend were an unhappy duty she

owed him, as she had owed others to others and tried to fulfill

them. She said politely, “Do it for me?”

 

“It can be done, you know,” he went on. “It’s surprisingly

simple. And if there’s no one else you care to ask, why not use

me? I’m here at your disposal, and we could so easily settle it

that way. Then you needn’t fear it, at least, and then again for

the meeting—that might be a very different business if you

weren’t distressed.”

 

“But how can I not be afraid?” she asked. “It’s hellish nonsense

to talk like that. I suppose that’s rude, but—”

 

“It’s no more nonsense than your own story,” he said. “That

isn’t; very well, this isn’t. We all know what fear and trouble

are. Very well-when you leave here you’ll think of yourself that

I’ve taken this particular trouble over instead of you. You’d do

as much for me if I needed it, or for any one. And I will give

myself to it. I’ll think of what comes to

you, and imagine it, and know it, and be afraid of it. And then,

you see, you won’t.”

 

She looked at him as if she were beginning to understand that at

any rate he thought he was talking about a reality, and as she did

so something of her feeling for him returned. It was, after all,

Peter Stanhope who was talking to her like this. Peter Stanhope

was a great poet. Were great poets liars? No. But they might be

mistaken. Yes; so might she. She said, very doubtfully: “But I

don’t understand. It isn’t your—you haven’t seen it. How can

you—”

 

He indicated the rehearsal before them. “Come,” he said, “if

you like that, will you tell me that I must see in order to know?

That’s not pride, and if it were it wouldn’t matter. Listen-when

you go from here,

when you’re alone, when you think you’ll be afraid, let me put

myself in your place, and be afraid instead of you.” He sat up

and leaned towards her.

 

“It’s so easy,” he went on, “easy for both of us. It needs only

the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to

yourself that since I am there to be troubled instead of you,

therefore you needn’t be troubled? And what can be easier than for

me to carry a little while a burden that isn’t mine?”

 

She said, still perplexed at a strange language: “But how can I

cease to be troubled? will it leave off coming because I pretend

it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?”

 

“It is not,” he said, “and you shall not pretend at all. The

thing itself you may one day meet-never mind that now, but you’ll

be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me.

Haven’t you heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s

burdens?”

 

“But that means-” she began, and stopped.

 

“I know,” Stanhope said. “It means listening sympathetically, and

thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I

don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think

when

Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he

Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more

like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden

is precisely to carry it instead of. If you’re still carrying

yours, I’m not carrying it for you—however sympathetic I may be.

And anyhow there’s no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish.

It’s a fact of experience. If you give

a weight to me, you can’t be carrying it yourself; all I’m asking

you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn’t sound very

difficult.”

 

“And if I could,” she said. “If I could do—whatever it is you

mean, would I? Would I push my burden on to anybody else?”

 

“Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself,” he

answered. “If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are

common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and

anger, you can. But if you

will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed

with us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give

your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s

burden.

I haven’t made the universe and it isn’t my fault. But I’m sure

that this is a law of the universe, and not

to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as not to carry

another’s. You’ll find it quite easy if you let

yourself do it.”

 

“And what of my self-respect?” she said.

 

He laughed at her with a tender mockery. “O, if we are of that

kind!” he exclaimed. “If you want to respect yourself, if to

respect yourself you must go clean against the nature of things,

if you must refuse

the Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you

should want so extremely to respect yourself is more than I can

guess, why, go on and respect. Must I apologize for suggesting

anything else?”

 

He mocked her and was silent; for a while she stared back, still

irresolute. He held her; presently he held her at command. A

long silence had gone by before he spoke again.

 

“When you are alone,” he said, “remember that I am afraid instead

of you, and that I have taken over every kind of worry. Think

merely that; say to yourself-‘he is being worried,’ and go on.

Remember it is

mine. If you do not see it, well; if you do, you will not be

afraid. And since you are not afraid….”

 

She stood up. “I can’t imagine not being afraid,” she said.

 

“But you will not be,” he answered, also

rising, certainty in his voice, “because you will leave all that

to me. Will you please me by remembering that absolutely?”

 

“I am to remember,” she said, and almost broke into a little

trembling laugh, “that you are being worried and terrified instead

of me?”

 

“That I have taken it all over,” he said, “so there is nothing

left for you.”

 

“And if I see it after all?” she asked.

 

“But not ‘after all’,” he said. “The fact remains-but see how

different a fact, if it can’t be dreaded! As of course it can’t—

by you. Go now, if you choose, and keep it in your mind till—

shall I see you tomorrow? Or ring me up tonight, say about nine,

and tell me you are being obedient to the whole fixed nature of things.”

 

“I’ll ring up,” she said. “But I… it sounds so silly.”

 

“It is silly sooth,” he answered, “and dallies with the innocence

of love. Real sooth, real innocence, real love. Go with God.”

They shook hands, and slowly, looking back once, just before she

reached the lane, she went out of his sight.

 

Stanhope, turning his eyes from her parting figure, looked at the

rehearsal and then settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

A certain superficial attention, alert and effective in its

degree, lay at the disposal of anyone who might need it, exactly

as his body was prepared to draw in its long outstretched legs if

anyone wanted to pass. Meanwhile he disposed the rest of his

attention according to his promise. He recollected Pauline; he

visualized her going along a road, any road; he visualized another

Pauline coming to meet her. And as he did so his mind

contemplated not the first but the second Pauline; he took trouble

to apprehend the vision, he summoned through all his sensations an

approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself to that

fear, laying aside for awhile every thought of why he was

doing it, forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the

strangeness and the terror of that separate spiritual identity.

His more

active mind reflected it in an imagination of himself going

into his house and seeing himself, but he dismissed that, for he

desired to subdue himself not to his own natural sensations, but

to hers first, and then to let hers, if so it should happen, be

drawn back into his own. But it was

necessary first intensely to receive all her spirit’s

conflict. He sat on, imagining to himself the long walk with its

sinister possibility, the ogreish world lying around, the air with

its treachery to all sane appearance. His own eyes began to seek

and strain and shrink, his own feet, quiet though actually they

were, began to weaken with the necessity of advance upon the road

down which the girl was passing. The body of his flesh received

her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of

her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for

her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He

endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution

there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central

mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never

understood, nor can. Since he could not take, nor would have

admitted, her hate and rejection, her passion was

received into the lucidity of his own spirit. The experience

itself, sharply as his body took it, was less sharp for him; not

that he willed it so, but because his senses received their

communication from within not from without, and there is in all

holy imagination from goodwill a

quality of greatness which purifies and stabilizes experience.

His goodwill went to its utmost, and utmost goodwill can go very

far. It went to all but actual vision, and it excluded his

intellectual judgment of that vision. Had he been asked, at that

moment, for his judgment, he would have answered that he believed

sincerely that Pauline believed sincerely that she saw, but

whether the sight was actual or not he could not tell. He would

have admitted that it might be but a fantastic obsession of her

brain. That made no difference to his action.

If a man seems to himself to endure the horrors of shipwreck,

though he walks on dry land and breathes clear air, the business

of his friend is more likely to be to accept those horrors, as he

feels them, carrying the burden, than to explain that the burden

cannot, as a matter of fact, exist. Given all reasonable talk as

well, wherever there is intelligence enough for exchange and

substitution to exist, there is place

enough for action. Only when the desire of an obsession has

carried its subject beyond the interchanges of love can the power

of substituted love itself cease. It would have been small use

for any adept, however much greater than Peter Stanhope, to have

offered