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

come.

 

The days went by, and still he was consoled. In the mornings it had

gone; in the early summer dawns it wakened him to whisper farewells, and

his heavy drugged sleep only understood that here also it was fulfilling

his need. He had not at first very clearly understood why or where it

was going, but he did not then care, for it promised him, leaning naked

over him, that it would always return. Whether it were then Adela or a

being like Adela he was too full of slumber to care; it was going; he

need not trouble; for whenever he needed her, it would return. If it

were Adela, she ought to get away; if it were not Adela, it ought still

to go away, because there would be the morning and the world…. So much

his drowsiness let through to him; and it went, showing him itself, in a

faithful copy of his half-realized wishes, to the end. For contenting

him with its caution, it gathered up the articles of its apparent dress,

and presently all clothed it stole across the room, and by the door it

turned, and with one gesture promised him itself again. In the dawn, at

once by that gesture clothed and unclothed, it had shone before him, a

pale light burning against the morning, the last flickering fire of the

corpse-candles of the insubstantial; then it had passed, and left him to

sleep. So when later they brought him his early tea, he was alone; but

that day while he drank, he found the thought of the Adela of past days a

little disagreeable-no longer troublesome or joyous but merely

disagreeable. He would have to meet her, no doubt, one day; meanwhile he

was entirely at peace, and he did not want to think of anything at all.

He lay and drank, and was still.

 

As the days went by, he found that his child kept her promise. He could

not conceive a way of coming that, sooner or later, she did not take, nor

a manner of love that, sooner or later, she did not fulfil. Since it was

more and more Adela, he was instinctively careful never to conceive a

meeting which conflicted with the possibilities of the actual Adela; he

asked of his nightly bedfellow nothing but secret advents or accidental

encounters. But these gradually he multiplied; and always it answered.

By chance, in the street, at first by late night, but afterwards earlier.

For once this Adela said to him, in a casual phrase, to which only his

own veiled knowledge gave a double meaning: “They won’t remember if they

see me.” So he dared to walk with it sometimes for variation, but then

they went always through the lower darker streets of the Hill, and at

first they met no one whom he knew, and presently no one at all. But

Adela Hunt wondered sometimes why she never seemed to run against

Lawrence Wentworth by chance in the streets of Battle Hill.

 

Yet, in the order of the single universe known to myriads of minds, the

time and place that belongs to each of those myriads has relation to

others; and though the measurement of their experiences may differ, there

is something common to them all in the end. Sometimes where time varies

place is stable; or where places intermingle time is secure, and

sometimes the equilibrium of both, which is maintained in so many living

minds, swings into the place of the dead. Sometimes the dead know it,

and sometimes the living; a single clock ticks or a single door opens in

two worlds at once. The chamber of that dark fundamental incest had had

the dead man for its earliest inhabitant, though his ways and Wentworth’s

had been far apart-as far as incest from murder, or as selfworship from

self-loathing, and either in essence false to all that is. But the

selfworship of the one was the potential source of cruelty, as the

self-loathing of the other was the actual effect of cruelty; between them

lay all the irresolute vacillations of mankind, nourishing the one and

producing the other. All who had lived, or did or could live, upon

Battle Hill, leaned to one or the other, save only those whom holy love

had freed by its revelation of something ever alien from and conjoined

with the self.

 

In Wentworth’s old dream he had climbed down a rope securely and not

unpleasantly, much as the world of our culture sways on the rope from the

end of which the outcasts of civilization swing in a strangled life.

Since the phantom of Adela had come to him the dream had disappeared. He

slept deeply. If he woke she would be there by his side, petting or

crooning to him; until one night he thought how pleasant it would be to

wake and look on her asleep, and the next time he woke, there indeed she

was, disposed to his wish. But he found it troubled him; as he looked at

her in the silence he began to wonder, and to think of the other Adela

sleeping in her own house. For a little he tried to find pleasure in

considering how in effect he possessed her without her knowledge or will,

but the effort was too much for his already enfeebled mind. He found

himself disliking the life of the actual Adela; he could be so happy with

the substance by him if only the other were dead. But to know that she

did not know… and that perhaps one day Hugh…. He had forgotten

Hugh in these last weeks, and in a hasty retreat to oblivion he woke the

creature from its apparent slumber, and in its yearnings and embraces

lost actuality again and lost himself. He whispered to her then that she

must never sleep when he woke, so drawing another veil between himself

and the truth.

 

It was some nights afterwards that the dream returned. For the first

time it troubled him. He was climbing in the darkness down that shining

rope of silver, even more peacefully than ever he had climbed before. He

was descending, he now vaguely imagined, towards a companion who waited

for him f’ar below, where the rope was fastened to the side of a cave@ in

an unseen wall. The companion had waited, was waiting, would wait; it

would never grow tired either of him or of waiting for him; that was why

it was there, with its soft bare arms, and its sweet eyes closed in the

dream of his approach. As he descended, in that warm expectation, a

terrible sound broke on him. The abyss groaned. From above and below,

from all sides, the rending grief of a hardly tolerable suffering caught

him; he clung horribly to his rope, and the rope shook in the sound. The

void became vocal with agony; the hollow above and the hollow below came

together in that groan of the very air, and it echoed from unseen walls,

and re-echoed, and slowly died. Only once it came. It was succeeded by

the ancient silence. He listened breathlessly, but it did not recur. It

had turned the dream into a nightmare for him; he shook on his rope, and

struggled in his body, and so he awoke, and there by his side, waking

also, was the companion he sought. He clutched it and hid himself

against it; he hid his ears between its breasts and its hands, lest the

night should groan again. in his haste to hide himself, as if like others

he bad@ the mountains fall on him and the hills cover him, and in the

darkness of the room, he did not see the inhuman countenance. It had

grown haggard and old; its fullness fell away; its eyes were blurred.

The meaning which he had given it had departed; an imbecile face stared

blankly over him. The movements its body made were sufficient to cover

his distress, but they had been jerky and inorganic, as if an automaton

repeated its mechanical motions, and as if the mechanism were running

down. For less than the time it took him to find refuge with her the

creature that lay there was millions of years older than the dying woman

by whom Pauline watched, while the pain of a god passed outwards from the

mountain depths, as from those where Prometheus hung, or downwards from

the cross that stood upon a hill that also was of skulls. It united

itself with all spiritual anguish that received and took part with it; it

fell away from the closed ears in the beds of Gomorrah. The dead man

looked at Margaret, Pauline thought of Stanhope and was at peace as it

ceased. The renewed phantasm of peace received again the desire that

sprang in the heart of its father and lover, and throve and grew

beautiful on it. Her terrible and infinite senility receded; Lawrence

Wentworth’s strong deceit forbade her to pass on to death and recalled

her to apparent life. The suicide in the body had lost the vision of his

destruction; the suicide in the soul had not yet reached his own. The

thing became lovely with Adela’s youth, and its lover slept.

 

In the morning, however, alone as usual, Wentworth was less at peace than

had been his wont since the thing had come to him. In those earlier

hours the night and his nightly companion were always indistinct. He

preferred that indistinctness; he preferred, in the bright July mornings,

to think of his work—the books he was reading, the book he was writing.

He remembered that he had still a letter to write against Aston Moffatt,

and had already begun it. But though he thought about his next unwritten

sentence he could not ever manage to write it down. He would often go to

his study in his dressing gown to get his papers, refusing to remember

why they were not, as in the old days they used to be, lying by his

bedside, or remembering only that it was because of the pleasant

fantasies of his brain. So long as he could, in those early hours,

pretend that it was only a mental fantasy he felt happier; he did not,

just for those hours, quite like to admit that it was physical, because

its actuality would have seemed in some way more immoral than a mental

indulgence. His mind was certainly losing power. Afterwards as the day

grew on, and the strength of his masculinity returned and swelled in him,

he came to repose on his knowledge of its actual presence. But that

morning he was troubled; he felt obscurely that something was attacking

his peace. He moved restlessly; he got up and walked about; he tried to

find refuge in this or the other thought; he failed. He would not go out

that day; he sat about the house. And as the day went on he became aware

that he feared to go out lest he should meet Adela Hunt, the real Adela

Hunt on some real errand. He could not bear that; he could not bear her.

What right had she to make his beloved a false image of her? It was

after a solitary lunch and a fretful hour of work that he allowed himself

at last to long for the succubus by day, and by day, knocking at his

door-and he guessed who knocked and hurried himself to open it-it came.

It sat in his room, and talked to him, with his own borrowed

intelligence. It spoke of Caesar and Napoleon, of generals and

campaigns-traditions it could not know, history it could not recall,

humanity it could not share. And still, though he was less unhappy, he

was unhappy, for all that day, till the sun began to go down, he was

haunted by a memory of