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

Hill-and dropped to a walk. Only he could not go on

right to the end, though he had come thence, for he could see

across it a beam of faint but growing sun, as the ocean beams at

the end of a road. He did not think of the image, for he had not

seen the sea, since his childhood; and that time would not be

remembered until he reached it. An instinct, none the less,

warned him; so he did not make his way to where, ready for him, in

that twisting maze of streets and times, a gutter child played on

his only seaside holiday, and cried because a bigger boy had

bullied him. Sea or sun-sun to him-it was the light he wished to

avoid. He hesitated, and took a side turning, where under the

eaves some darkness was left.

 

The image was growing more complex and more crowded, for, as if

the descending light, the spreading harshness of rock and ice,

crowded them and the streets grew shorter, more involved,

themselves more populous with figures. Once it was a sneering

foreman, who drove his face-hidden shape towards him; once—how he

got there he did not know—it was someone’s back on a ladder

carrying a rope, going up no doubt, but perhaps coming down to

throw the rope round him before he slipped away. Once he turned

from a figure leaning against a lamp-post, quite still, with a

stealthy suspense, as if it might dodge round the lamp-post,

pretending that the post hid what it could not hide, and making to

play a game that was not a kind game. And each time he slipped

away or turned away, it was more like running away, and

continually he would see, here and there in the distance, the beam

of light on icy rock and sniff the bitter smell of the place of no

return.

 

So presently he was running very quickly, with a sense that they

were now after him. They had begun to be bolder, they were

leaning out of windows, stumbling out of streets, lurching,

shambling, toiling after him. He had read somewhere Of a man

being trampled to death, and he thought of that now, only he could

not envisage death, any more than Pauline the end of luxurious

dream. He could only think of trampling He ran faster then, for

he did not see how he would ever be able to get up, those

apparitions of his terror would be too many and too strong. For

the first time in that world he began to feel exhausted; and now

the streets were slipping by, and the feet were coming up, and in

a central daze that dance of time and truth all round him, he felt

himself stopping. He inwardly consented; he stood still.

 

As he did so, there came about him also a cessation. The street

was still; the feet silent. He drew a breath. He saw in front of

him a house, and at a window, a window with glass, where no light

gleamed, he saw a face, the face of an old woman, whom never in

all his life had he seen before. He saw her as a ghost in the

shadow, within the glass, but the glass was only a kind of faint

veil—of ceremony or of habit, though he

did not think of it so. He felt it did not matter, for he and the

other were looking directly at each other. He wanted to speak; he

could not find words to utter or control. He broke into a cry, a

little wail, such as many legends have recorded and many jokes

mocked. He said: “Ah! ah!” and did not think it could be heard.

 

The old face looked at him, and he was trembling violently,

shaking to see the apparitions of this world’s living, as they

shake to see the phantasms of the dead. He knew he was not

afraid, as they are often afraid; this was almost the first face

he had seen, in the body or out of the body, of which he was not

afraid. Fear, which separates man from man, and drives some to be

hostile, and some tyrannical, and some even to be friendly, and so

with spirits of that state of deathly time, abandoned him. Fear,

which never but in love deserts mortal man, deserted him there.

Only he could not do or say any more. He stared, hungrily,

hopefully. He waited, selfishly certain she would go, sweetly

sure she would stay. She said, as he waited: “My dear, how tired

you look!”

 

To Margaret herself the images were becoming confused. She did

not, for a good part of the time, know of any, being engaged

merely, beyond her own consciousness, in passing through that

experience which in her dream had meant crawling over the stretch

of open rock. Some hint of memory of it recurred to her at

moments. She had on this evening known nothing but a faint sense

of slow dragging in her limbs, an uneasiness in her body as if it

lay rough, a labouring in her breath as if she toiled. Then she

had felt herself lying on rock, holding a spike of rock, and

instinctively knew she had to do something, and clasped the spike

with energy-it had to do with Pauline; and a bell—the great bell

of the dead, or the bell of the living on the Hill, or her own

little bell, or all at once—had rung; and as it did so, she saw a

strange face looking at her from a crevice of darkness below.

Then she knew it; it was the face of the strange man in her dream.

She was aware that Pauline was coming over the rock through a door

of great stones like Stonehenge, but Pauline was behind, and

across in front of a gleam of mountain light that pierced her room

was the shadow of the weary and frightened face. She said with a

fresh spring of pure love, as if to Pauline or Phoebe or anyone:

“My dear, how tired you look!”

 

He tried to answer, to thank her, to tell her more, to learn

salvation from her. His life, in and out of the body, had

forgotten the time when a woman’s voice had last sounded with

friendship in his ears. He wanted to explain. his face was

neither light nor darkness but more tolerable and deeper than

either, as, he felt it, for it had leaned towards him in love. He

made efforts to speak, and seemed to himself to do no more than

cry out again, wordlessly and wailingly. The sound he made

communicated his fear, and she answered him from her withdrawn

experience of death, as from his less withdrawn spirit of poetry

Stanhope had answered Pauline—nothing could be worth such

distress. Or nothing, at least, but one thing-the coming out of

it into tender joy. She said: “But wait: wait for it.”

 

Pauline had come in from the garden, and as she ran through the

hall she was furiously angry with herself. She did not very well

know what the woman in the street had offered, beyond indefinable

sweet and thrilling excitements. But she felt, her foot on the

first stair, that she had regretted, that she had grudged and been

aggrieved with, the new change in her life. She had almost, if by

God’s mercy not quite, wished that Peter Stanhope had not

interfered. No range of invective—and she had a pretty, if

secret, range—sufficed her for herself. She struck her hand

against the wall as she ran, and wished that it was her head, or

that someone—Stanhope for preference, but it didn’t much matter;

anyone would do—would pick her up and throw her violently over the

banisters to the floor below, knocking the breath out of her body,

and leaving her bruised and gasping, looking like the fool she

was. She put all herself into despising herself, and her scorn

rode triumphant through her: a good thing under direction, but

dangerous to the lonely soul. So ambiguously repentant, she came

into her grandmother’s room, and saw suddenly that the justice of

the universe had taken her earlier word, and abandoned her.

 

It was not so, but at the window there was a face; and she had, in

the first shock, supposed it was hers. The obsession of her

visitation returned, through the double gate of her repining and

her rage. It was coming, it was come, it was here. Her wild

spirit sickened in her; and as she felt its power dissolve, she

sprang to the other power the knowledge of which, at least, her

anger had preserved. Ashamed of betrayal, unashamed of repentance

and dependence, she sprang. She knew with all her soul’s consent

that Peter Stanhope had taken over her fear; was, now, one with

it; and it was not, for he was in power over it. Among the leaves

of his eternal forest he set it, and turned it also to everlasting

verse. Evading or not evading, repining or not repining, raging

or not raging, she was Periel; she was the least of the things he

had created new; ecce, omnia nova facio. She was a line of his

verse, and beyond that-for the thought of him took that high

romantic self-annihilation and annihilated it in turn—she was

herself in all freedom and courage. She was herself, for the

meeting with herself. She stepped forward-lightly, almost with

laughter. It was not yet she.

 

As she gazed, she heard her grandmother speak. The room, for

those three spirits, had become a place on the unseen mountain.

they inhabited a steep. The rock was in them, and they in it. In

Margaret Anstruther it lived; it began to Put out its energy of

intellectual love. At least to the dead man it was felt as love,

as love that loved him, as he longingly and unknowingly desired.

This holy and happy thing was all that could be meant by God: it

was love and power. Tender to the least of its creatures, it

submitted itself to his need, but it is itself always that it

submits, and as he received it from those eyes and the sound of

that voice he knew that another thing awaited him-his wife, or the

light, or some renewal of his earlier

death. Universal, it demanded universality. The peace

communicated there was of a different kind from the earlier

revival of rest. And the woman said: “It’s done already; you’ve

only got to look for it.”

 

As Pauline had moved forward, the face at the window disappeared

from her sight. She drew breath; it had been an accident of

light; there had been no face. She turned to look at her

grandmother, and saw her lying very still, her eyes on the window

as if she could still see something there. Quiet as she lay, she

was in action. Her look, her voice, showed it: her voice, for she

spoke, but very low, and Pauline could not hear

the words. She caught the sound; lightly she threw herself on her

knees by the bed-and half fulfilled her earlier passionate desire

for subordination. For the first time in her young distracted

life her energy leapt to a natural freedom of love. She ran

swiftly down the way her master had laid open; she said, in words

almost identical with his: “Let me do something, let me carry it.

Darling, do let me help.” Margaret gave her hand a small gentle

pressure, but kept her eyes beyond her still.

 

The silence in that place became positive with their energies, and

its own. The three spirits were locked together, in the capacity

of Margaret’s living stone. The room about them, as if the

stillness expressed its nature in another mode, grew sharply and

suddenly cold,