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

his service to Wentworth, where he sat in his own room

with the secret creature of substantial illusion at his feet

caressing his hand; for from that haunting, even while it was but

an unmaterialized anguish within his blood, Wentworth had had no

desire, more than the desire of maddened pride, to be exquisitely

free.

 

So devoted to the action of his spirit, Stanhope sat on among the

sounds of laughter and gaiety and half-serious wrangles that rose

around him. It was not a long while that he was left to sit

alone; perhaps Pauline had not more than partly advanced on her

return when someone came across to interrupt and consult him. He

gave a full attention, for that other concern is not measured by

time but by will. To give freedom to both, he would return to his

task when opportunity next offered; afterwards, when they had all

gone away, and he was alone. But that was rather for the sake-of

his own integrity of spirit than that more

was needed. The act of substitution was fully made; and if it had

been necessarily delayed for years (could that have been), but not

by his fault, still its result would have preceded it. In the

place of the

Omnipotence there is neither before nor after; there is only act.

 

Pauline went out through the open door of the house, for the Manor

was now almost a public building of happiness, and began to make

her way towards her home. just as she left, one of the other

girls, who was only then arriving for her part, had delayed her with a

question, a minute matter about a borrowed pattern for a dress,

and possible alterations. Pauline also had given her attention,

and now, walking down the road, went on thinking of it—and whether

Mary Frobisher would really be well advised to move the left

seam an eighth of an inch back, considering Mary Frobisher’s

figure. It was another thing for her, and the hang of the frock

had been as satisfactory as could be hoped. But Mary—she

stopped to smell the pinks in a garden she was passing. Pinks

were not very showy flowers, but they had a fragrance. It was

perhaps a pity they had so few in their own garden; she had

once or twice thought Of asking her grandmother to order the

gardener to get some more, since the gardener certainly

wouldn’t otherwise do it. But Mrs. Anstruther was always so

content with immediate existence that it seemed a shame to

bother her about proximate existence. Pauline wondered

if she, when she was ninety-seven, would be as little disturbed by

the proximate existence of death as her grandmother seemed to be.

Or would she be sorry to be compelled to abandon the pleasant

wonder of this world, which, when all allowances were made,

was a lovely place, and had—

 

She nearly came to a full stop; then, with slackened steps, she

went on, blinking at the sunlight. She realized she had been

walking along quite gaily. It was very curious. She looked down

the road. Nothing was in sight—except a postman. She wondered

whether anything would come into sight. But why was she so careless

about it? Her mind leapt back to Stanhope’s promise, and she knew that,

whatever the explanation might be, she had been less bothered for the

past ten minutes than ever before in any solitude of twenty years. But

supposing the thing came? Well, then it came, but till it came why

suppose it? If Peter Stanhope was taking trouble, as he was, because

he said he would, there was no conceivable reason for her to get into

trouble. She had promised to leave it to him; very well, she would.

Let him—with all high blessing and gratitude—get on with it. She had

promised, she had only to keep her promise.

 

So she put it to herself, but within herself she knew that, except

just to ratify her promise, even that act of her mind was

superfluous. it was an act purely of extra delight, an occasion of

obedience. She wouldn’t worry; no, because she couldn’t worry.

That was the mere truth-she couldn’t worry. She was, then and

there, whatever happened later,

entirely free. She was, then and there incapable of distress.

The world was beautiful about her, and she walked in it, enjoying.

He had been quite right; he had simply picked up her parcel. God

knew how he had done it, but he had. A thing had, everywhere and

all at once, happened. A violent convulsion of the laws of the

universe took place in her

mind; if this was one of the laws, the universe might be better or

worse, but it was certainly quite different from anything she had

ever supposed it to be. It was a place whose very fundamentals

she had suddenly discovered to be changed. She hadn’t any clear

idea of what Stanhope was doing, and that didn’t matter, except

that she ought,

as soon as possible, to find out and try to understand. That was

merely her duty, and might—the thought crossed her mind and was

gone—be her very great happiness. Meanwhile, she would go on

walking. And if, she came to her self, well she came to her self.

No doubt Peter Stanhope would be doing something about it. A

kitten on a wall caught her eye; it put its head down; she

stretched her arm and stood on tiptoe to stroke it, and so doing

for a while she forgot Stanhope and the universe and Pauline.

 

The rehearsal had long been over, and the Manor left again to its

owner. Stanhope had returned to his own proper activity of work,

when, exactly as the clock in his study chimed nine, the telephone

bell rang.

 

He took up the receiver.

 

“Peter Stanhope speaking,” he said.

 

“Pauline,” said a voice. “You told me to ring you up.”

 

“I was waiting for you,” he answered. “Well?”

 

“Well… there was a kitten and pinks and a pattern for a frock

and a postman who said the rain was holding off,” said the voice,

and paused.

 

“Cautious man,” said Stanhope, and waited.

 

“Well… that was all,” the voice explained.

 

“Really all?” Stanhope asked.

 

“Really all,” the voice answered. “I just went home. It is real,

I suppose?”

 

“Entirely,” said Stanhope. “Aren’t you sure of it?”

 

“Yes, O, yes,” said the voice. “It… I… I wanted to thank

you. I don’t know what you did—”

 

“But I’ve told you,” he murmured, and was cut short.

 

“—but I did want to thank you. Only-what happens now? I mean-do

I—” It stopped.

 

“I should think you did,” said Stanhope, gravely. “Don’t you? It

seems a perfectly good idea.”

 

“Ah, but do you mean that?” she protested. “It looks so like

taking advantage.”

 

“You’ll be as involved morally as you are verbally, if you talk

like that,” he said. “Taking advantage! O

my dear girl! Don’t be so silly! You’ve got your own job to do.”

 

“What’s that?” she asked.

 

“Being ready to meet it,” he answered. “It’ll be quite simple, no

doubt, and even delightful. But if I were you I’d keep my

faculties quiet for that. If meeting is a pleasure, as we so

often tell people, you may as well enjoy the pleasure.”

 

“I hadn’t really thought of it being that,” said the voice.

 

“But now?” he asked.

 

“Yes… I… I suppose it might,” she said.

 

“Do you see any reason whatever why it shouldn’t? Since we’re

agreed you won’t have any opportunity to be afraid,” he added.

 

“It’s funny,” she said, after another pause, “but do you know I

feel as if I’d never really looked at it till now. At least,

perhaps the first time, when I was quite small, but I was always

shut up when I talked about it, and then sometimes I saw it

when… when I didn’t like it.”

 

“I don’t quite follow,” Stanhope said. “When you didn’t like it?”

 

He couldn’t see the blush that held Pauline as she sat by the

telephone table, but he heard the voice become smaller and softer

as she said, “When I wasn’t being very good. There wasn’t much

money in the house, and once there was a shilling my mother lost,

and then there were sweets. It was just after I’d bought the

sweets that I saw it coming once. It was horrid to see it just

then, but it was beastly of me, I know.”

 

“Well, that’s as may be,” Stanhope said. “The limits of theft are

a high casuistical problem. Read Pascal and the Jesuits—especially

the Jesuits, who were more ordinary and more sensible. The triumph

of the bourgeois.”

 

“But I knew it was wrong,” Pauline exclaimed.

 

“Still your knowledge may have been wrong,” Stanhope demurred.

“However, don’t let’s argue that. I see what you mean. Self-respect

and all that. Well, it won’t do you any harm to feel it knows you.

Much the best thing, in fact.”

 

“Y-yes,” Pauline said. “Yes-I do think so really. And I’m not to

worry?”

 

“You are most emphatically to remember that I’ll do the worrying,”

Stanhope said. “Ring me up at any time-day or night; only if no

one answers at night remember that, as Miss, Fox so rightly told

us, sleep is

good, and sleep will undoubtedly be here. But sleep isn’t

separation in the Omnipotence. Go in peace, and wish me the same,

for friendship’s sake.”

 

“O how can I?” she said, startled. “How can I wish peace to you?

You are peace.”

 

“M’m,” Stanhope said. “But the more if you will have it so. Try.”

 

“Good night then,” she answered slowly. “Good night. Thank you.

Go… in peace.”

 

Her voice had faltered so that she could hardly speak the words,

and when she rose from her seat she was on fire from head to foot.

Guilt or shame, servile fear or holy fear, adoration

or desperation of obedience, it burned through her to a point of

physical pain. The blood rode in her face

and she panted a little in the heat. She could not have answered,

had anyone spoken to her; her tongue seemed to have said its last

words on earth. Never, never, her heart sang, let her speak

again, never let

the silence that followed her daring, her presumptuous invocation,

be broken. It had been compelled, she had been commanded; a god

had been with her-not Peter Stanhope, but whatever answered him

from her depth.

 

She looked at her watch; it was not yet time for her evening visit

to her grandmother.

 

She looked round; a book lay on the table. It was the volume of

Foxe with the account of her ancestor’s martyrdom; Mrs. Anstruther

had been reading it again. She walked to it, and with one hand,

the knuckles of the other pressed against her slowly cooling

cheek, turned the pages to find the place. Something from it was

vaguely coming to her mind. “They set him to the stake and put

the fire to the wood, and as the fire got

hold of him he gave a great cry and said, I have seen the

salvation of my God…. The Lord had done great things for him

there in the midst of the fire.” The Lord, she thought, made a

habit of doing things in the midst of a fire; he had just brought

her to say “Go in peace” in another. She glowed again to think of

it.

But it was the first phrase she had looked for; “I have seen the

salvation”. It had never occurred to her, any time she had read

or remembered the martyrdom, that Struther was anything but