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

floated up, a balloon in which

everything harmful was borne away, busy, but not with him, he

would have been mildly pleased. He knew that that balloon was for

ever cut off from him. Moon, balloon, it could not drop anyone

among these shells of houses. If it did, whoever it dropped would

be caught in the shells. He had been a good-tempered little

victim, but there were one or two in the past whom he could

placidly have borne to see scrabbling and thrusting at the

scaffolding and cage. He did not exactly resent, in that quiet,

anything they had done-a foreman, a mate, a brother, a wife, but

perhaps, as the unmeasured time did pass, he felt a little more

strongly that he would enjoy his freedom more if he saw them

defeated. In the past they had taken everything from him. It

would not be unpleasant now to see them raging with a wish to get

at him, and, in that air, defeated.

 

He sat opposite his ladder, after a long, long while, and let the

fancy grow. It was then that he first noticed a change. The

light was growing stronger. It was, again, a long while between

the first faintest hint of it and any notice he took, and again

between his first faint wonder and his belief, and again between

belief and certainty. At the end of all those long periods, there

was not much perceptible difference in the sky. Centuries passed

before that difference grew more marked, but that too came. He

had sat watching it, dimly, peacefully. He rose then, not quickly

but more quickly than he had been used to move. He stirred with a

hardly discernible unease.

 

It seemed as if the light were spreading steadily down, from

somewhere away in the height. He did not positively see that any

patch of sky was whiter than the rest, but he was looking for such

a patch. The increase must have a centre of expansion. It must

come from somewhere. No moon, no sun, no cause of illumination.

Only sometimes a kind of wave of movement passed down the sky, and

then it was lighter. He did not like it.

 

If he had asked himself why, he could not have easily answered.

It did not disturb his quiet. He was as lonely and peaceful as

before. No sound was in his City, foot or voice. But vaguely the

light distracted him from his dim pleasure of imagining, imagining

disappointment. His imagination could hardly, by ordinary

standards, be said to be good or bad. It was a pleasure in

others’ anger, and bad; but the anger was that of tyrannical

malice, and the imagined disappointment of it was good. Some such

austere knowledge the Divine John saw in heaven, where

disappointed hell is spread and smokes before the Lamb. But the

Lamb and the angels do not imagine hell to satisfy their lust, nor

do he nor the angels determine it, but only those in hell; if it

is, it is a fact, and, therefore, a fact of joy. In that peace

which had been heaven to the vagrant, he had begun to indulge a

fancy of his own; he went beyond the fact to colour the fact.

 

Light grew. He began to walk. He had done so, often enough,

through that great period of recreation, for pure pleasure of

change. Now he had, for the first time, a purpose unacknowledged.

He wished to escape the light. It was desirable that he should

still be left alone. He did not trust the light to let him alone.

It was desirable that he should be free to make pictures for

himself and to tell himself tales. He did not trust the light to

let him do it. He moved gently; there was no need, here, to run.

The need that was not concealed from him, his first inclination to

run. He had run often enough for others’ pleasure, but this was

the first time he had been tempted to run for his own.

 

The light still gently spread. As gently he went away from it,

down the hill. His choice was in this direction; it was

brightest, by a little, at the top. As, through a still

unmeasured period, he went drifting, changes came on the hill. He

did not at first notice them. Long as he had wandered, he had not

marked detail of building there. But, unnoticed, details had

altered. It was now a town half-built, not ruined. When he had

climbed that skeleton shape of a house, or of himself, he had done

so in the midst of a devastation. As he went away from it towards

the bottom the devastation became incomplete erection. Houses were

unfinished, roads unmade, yet they were houses and roads. Roofs

were on, scaffolding gone. The change was irregular, more as if

some plants had outgrown others than as if order had been

established by man. He went soundlessly down the slope of the

thickening vegetation, and as on the bare height the light was

fullest, so here instead of light, shadows grew thicker. Between

them the pallid light of his experience grew stronger by contrast.

He would not look at the new light; there was increased for him by

opposition the presence of the old. He had gone some way, and

some time, unnoticing, inclined to linger upon his tales and

dreams, when he was startled into knowledge. He had turned his

back upon light and had not remarked erection. He saw suddenly, at

a distance in front of him, a flash. He stopped and stared. It was

no longer a flash but a gleam. He was looking at, far off, the

reflection of light upon glass—of what he would, in lost days,

have called the sun upon a window.

 

A thrust of fear took him; he could not, for a moment, go on. He

stood blinking; after a while, he turned his head. There was

behind him a long space of shadows and pale light, but beyond

that, away beyond the house where he had died, there was a broad

stretch of high ground, bare and rocky, rising higher than he had

ever thought, and all bright with, he supposed, the sun. A rich,

golden splendour, beyond all, at the height of all, played

flashing upon some other glittering surface; it was not glass

there, but ice. He stared back as he had stared forward. He could

not dare return to that, also he was unwilling to go on down

towards the gleaming window below. That meant the world; he could

not, after so much peace, return to the world. Why could he not

sit and imagine a moon and thwarted creatures dropped from the

moon into a world that mocked them? It was not much to ask.

 

It was too much; he could not have it. False as the Republic had

been to him, making his life dreadful, he had not deserved, or he

could not have, an infinity of recompense. He could not have this

in utter exchange for that. Exchange had been given; temporal

justice, for what it is worth, done. Now incidents were no more

counted, on this side or the other. He must take the whole—with

every swiftness of the Mercy, but the whole he must have.

 

He saw that the exhibition of light was moving towards him. It

had reached the house where he had died. He noticed, even in his

alarm, that the buildings now ended there. In his earlier

wanderings he had gone among the ruins both above and below it,

but now the bare rock rose above—or ice, as he had first thought.

It went up, in blocks and irregularities of surface, until, some

distance beyond, it opened on one broad sweep, smooth and

glittering, rounding towards the top of the Hill; upon it, by some

trick of sight, the sunlight seemed active. It was not changed,

but it ran. It hastened in sudden charges of intensity, now

across, now down. The unchanging rock beneath the unchanging sun

responded to that countermarching, evoked into apparent

reordination. It was perhaps this which terrified him, for there

the earth was earth still and yet alive. In the strict sense of

the words it was living stone.

 

He stood for some minutes staring, and entranced. But at some

sudden charge downwards from the height towards the house, and him

beyond it, he broke. He gave a little cry, and ran. He ran down

towards the bottom of the Hill, among the houses, towards that

house where the glass was. As he ran he saw, for the first time

since he had entered that world, other forms, inhabitants of a

state for which there were no doubt many names, scientific,

psychological, theological. He did not know the names; he knew

the fact.

 

The return of time upon itself, which is in the nature of death,

had caught him. Margaret Anstruther had, in a vision within a

dream, decided upon death, not merely in her own world but in that

other. Her most interior heart had decided, and the choice was so

profound that her past experiences and opacities could only obey.

She had no work of her present union with herself to achieve; that

was done. But this man had died from and in the body only.

Because he had had it all but forced on him, he had had

opportunity to recover. His recovery had brought to him a chance

of love. Because he had never chosen love, he did not choose it

then. Because he had never had an opportunity to choose love, nor

effectively heard the intolerable gospel proclaimed, he was to be

offered it again, and now as salvation. But first the faint hints

of damnation were permitted to appear.

 

He was running down a street. It was a street that closed in on

him. He did not notice, in his haste, that it was a street much

like those in which most of his life had been spent. He saw, in

front of him, at a great distance, two living forms, a man and a

girl; at which he ran with increased speed. Since he had begun to

go down the Hill he had lost his content in being alone; he smelt

solitude as if it were the odour of bare rock, and he hated it.

He heard, more vividly with every step, no sound. He could not

hear those forms walking, but he saw them; it was enough; he ran.

He was catching them-up, running very fast through his old life to

do it. When he was within a hundred yards the girl looked over

her shoulder. He checked in midpace, his foot heavily thudding

down, and he almost falling. He saw, with sharp clarity, the face

of the girl who had been his wife. Her mouth was opening and

shutting on words, though the words were silent. It had always

been opening and shutting. At once, without looking round, the

figure arm in arm with hers released itself, stopped, and as if

moving by the direction of that busily talking mouth, took’ a step

or two backwards. Then it paused, and with a weary care began

slowly to turn itself round. The dead man saw the movement. It

became terribly important that he should escape before the youth

he had been caught him and dragged him in or make a third with

them, and to listen again to that hated and loathed voice—always

perhaps; the prisoner of those two arms, the result and victim of

his early desire. He ran hastily back again up the street.

 

Presently he glanced behind him, and could not see them. He

trotted a little farther, looked round again, saw the street

empty-the street that was recovering the appearance of a street

upon the