Descent into Hell, Charles Williams [top 100 books to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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than delight. But so clear and simple was that delight, and so
exquisitely shared by all the performers in their separate ways, that as
between the acts they talked and laughed together, and every one in the
field, with the exception of Lawrence Wentworth, joined in that universal
joy-so single and fundamental did it become that once, while again she
waited, it seemed to her as if the very words “dress rehearsal” took on
another meaning. She saw the ceremonial dress of the actors, but it did
not seem to her stranger than Mrs. Parry’s frock or Stanhope’s light
suit. All things at all times and everywhere, rehearsed; some great art
was in practice and the only business anyone had was to see that his part
was perfect. And this particular rehearsal mirrored the rest-only that
this was already perfected from within, and that other was not yet. The
lumbering Bear danced; the Grand Duke uttered his gnomic wisdom; the
Princess and the Woodcutter’s Son entered into the lucid beauty of first
love; the farmers counted their pence; and the bandits fell apart within.
It was in the pause before the last act that the dark thought came to
her. She had walked a little away from the others to rest her soul, and,
turning, looked back. Around the place where lately the fire had burned,
the Prologue and some of the Guard were talking. She saw him lift his
trumpet; she saw them move, and the uniforms shone in the amazing
brightness of the sun, and suddenly there came to her mind another
picture; the woodcut in the old edition of the Book of Martyrs. There
too was a trumpet, and guards, and a fire, and a man in it. Here, the
tale said, and she had not remembered it till now, here where this stage,
perhaps where this fire lay, they had done him to death by fire.
She had had the last act in mind as she turned, the act in which physical
sensation, which is the play of love, and pardon, which is the speed of
love, and action, which is the fact of love, and almighty love itself,
all danced together: and now a shadow lay across it, the shadow of death
and cruelty, the living death. The sun was still bright, colours vivid,
laughter gay, and the shadow was the centre of them all. The shadow was
a hollow, filled with another, quite different, fact. She felt the pang
of the last hopelessness. If the living who walked in the gutters of
mind or spirit, if the present misery of the world, were healed, or could
be forgotten, still there sprang out of the hollow the knowledge of the
dead whose unrecompensed lives had gone before that joy. The past
accused her, made terrible by the certain history of her hous@. His
blood was in her and made demands on hers. He had gone willingly to
death, chosen it, insisted on it; his judges had been willing enough to
spare him if he would commit himself to a phrase or two. But still in
the end they had inflicted death, and agony in death; and the world that
had inflicted and enjoyed and nourished itself on agony was too like the
world in which she moved, too like Hugh and Adela and Catherine Parry and
the rest. She had been lost in a high marvel, but if that joy were
seriously to live it must somehow be reconciled with the agony that had
been; unless hollow and shell were one, there was only hollow and shell.
She walked back, and as she did so Stanhope saw her and came across.
“Well,” he said, “it all seems going very well.”
She said, with a coldness in her voice that rose from the creeping hollow
of the darkness. “You think so?… did you know an ancestor of mine was
burnt alive just here?”
He turned to walk by her. “I did,” he said. “I’d read it, of
course-after all, it’s my house-and your grandmother spoke of it.”
She said: “Well?” and then repentantly, “I’m sorry but… we’re all so
happy. The play, the fire-our fire, it’s all so wonderful. And yet we
can do that. How can we be happy, unless we forget? and how can we
forget? how can we dare forget?”
He said: “Forget nothing. Unless everything’s justifiable, nothing is.
But don’t you forget, perhaps, something else?”
She looked at him with question. He went on: “Mightn’t his burden be
carried too?”
She stopped; she said staring: “But he’s dead!”
“And so?” Stanhope asked mildly, and waited.
She said: “You mean… you can’t mean… ?” As her voice hung
baffled, there arose gigantic before her the edge of a world of such
incredible dimensions that she was breathless at the faint hint. Her
mouth opened; her eyes stared. Her head was spinning. She
said: “But….”
Stanhope took her arm to propel her gently forward; then, letting it go,
he said: “A good deal of our conversation consists of saying but to each
other. However, who shall fail to follow when… and so forth. ‘But—’
Periel?”
“But he’s dead,” she repeated. It was not what she meant to say.
“So you remarked,” Stanhope said gently. “And I asked you what that had
to do with it. Or words to that effect. You might as well say he had
red hair, as for all I know he may have had. Yes, yes, Mrs. Parry.”
He raised his voice and waved back. “We shall be delaying the
rehearsal,” he said. “Come along-all things in their order.”
She asked, inadvertently, as she quickened her steps to keep pace with
him: “Do you tell me to try and carry his fear?”
“Well,” he answered, “you can’t make contact; so far, it’s true, death or
red hair or what not interferes. But you might, in the Omnipotence,
offer him your—anything you’ve got. Only I should intend to have it
first.”
“Intend to have it?” she asked breathlessly.
“Intend to have joy to offer,” he said. “Be happy-take all the
happiness, if it’s there, that you may not offer the Lord what costs
nothing. You must have a small private income to try and help support
even a Marian martyr. Heavens, they are waiting. To your tent, O
Periel.” As she ran he exclaimed after her. “Perhaps that’s the
difference between Israel and Judah! they went to their own tents and
left David to his. Hence the Dispersion… and the Disappearance.”
“What disappearance, Mr. Stanhope?” Mrs. Parry asked.
He had come level with her while he was still speaking, and he made a
small gesture. “Nothing, Mrs. Parry. Of the saviour of his own life.
How well this act opens, doesn’t it?”
As Pauline, escaping Mrs. Parry’s eye, ran across the stage, and threaded
her way between the persons to her position, her mind was more breathless
than she. She felt again, as in a low but immense arc rising above the
horizon of her world, or perhaps of the earth itself, the hint of new
organization of all things: a shape, of incredible difficulty in the
finding, of incredible simplicity found, an infinitely alien arrangement
of infinitely familiar things. The bottom had dropped out of her
universe, yet her astonished spirit floated and did not fall. She was a
little sick with running, running into this other world. She halted,
turned, addressed herself. She turned to the play where martyrdom had
been—to the martyrdom. “I have seen the salvation of my God.” The
salvation throbbed in the air above her; it thrilled in the mortal light.
“‘Unto him that hath shall be given’… ‘what of him that hath not?’”
A voice, neither of the martyr nor his executioner, answered, singing,
With a terrible clarity of assured fact—fact, the only thing that can be
loved: “from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he
seemeth to have”. A trumpet was crying, crying for the execution of the
justice of the Queen’s Majesty on a convicted and impenitent heretic. His
blood was in her veins; dazed with her own will, she struggled to pay the
dues of her inheritance. The sudden crowd of adorned figures thronged
before her. He was not there; he was dead centuries since. If centuries
meant anything; perhaps they didn’t-perhaps everything was all at once,
and interchanged devotion; perhaps even now he burned, and she and her
friends danced, and her grandmother died and lived, and Peter Stanhope
wrote his verse, and all the past of the Hill was one with its present.
It lived; it intermingled; not among these living alone did the doctrine
of substituted love bear rule. Her intention rose, and was clear, and
withdrew, as the stage opened for her advance. About her the familiar
and transfigured personages moved; this was the condition and this the
air of supernatural life. Ecce, omnia nova facio. The incantation and
adoration of the true substance of experience sounded. She fulfilled her
part in a grave joy, aspiring to become part of that substance. All drew
to its close; the dress rehearsal ended. Remained only the performance of
the play.
THE TRYST OF THE WORLDS
As if the world of that other life to which this in which Margaret
Anstruther lay was but spectral, and it to this, renewed itself
with all its force in the groan he heard, as if that groan had
been but its own energy of freeing itself, the dead man found when
it ceased that he was standing alone among the houses. He
remembered the vanished apparitions clearly enough, two images of
beauty. He had seen an old woman and a young, though the younger
form had been faint with distance. The colour which she hinted
was obscured; in the older there was no colour but softness of
light. Now he was in the street. His back was to the house. He
was looking along the road, and he saw, beyond it at the point
where the light of the sun, whatever sun, lay halted, the house
and the ladder he knew. He saw the light beyond it, softer than
before, as it were of one kind with that of the woman with whom he
had spoken. The house itself was dark; the ladder was white with
a bony pallor against it, but it held no sun. There it stood,
waiting for him to go back.
There had been an opening up within him. He had run in his life
after other men, and in his second life away from other selves.
His unapt mind had been little use to him. It had been trying to
please others or himself, naturally and for long properly. He was
relieved of this necessity. There was only one way to go,
and the only question if he should go. He could move, or
not. He knew this, yet, like Pauline when she kept her
promise to Stanhope, he knew that he had already chosen, had
come into obedience, and was no longer free. He began to
walk. He had not realized that the choice was there until
the choice had been made. Wentworth, turning from the Grand
Ducal Guard, did not realize it even then; as Macbeth did not
know he had accepted his deed when he accepted the means, and
conceded his sin to his conviction of success.
In effect, the dead man’s choice, like all choices of the kind,
had been less than it seemed. He could go, or he could wait till
he was driven. In the hastening or delaying of the end lies all
distinction in the knowledge of the end when at last it
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