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

comes. At

rare moments speed is determined; all else is something else. He

went, and with more energy than he had ever known. The lost power

of his missed youth awoke in him, and of his defrauded manhood.

It was needed. He had not taken a dozen steps before the memory

of his latest experience became as faint as the old woman’s voice

had been. He did not again feel his old fear, but he was

intensely aware of ignorance. There were now no shapes. He was

alone, and the pallid ladder of the dark house stood before him.

The light beyond was soft, but promised nothing. As he went

soundlessly he had no thought but that it was better to do at once

what must be done, and that he had seen, if only in a fading

apparition, the tender eyes of love.

 

He passed the finished houses; he came among those which, by the

past or future, had been unbuilt. As he reached them he heard a

faint sound. He had come again into the peculiar territory of the

dead. He heard behind him a small rustle, as if of dead leaves or

snakes creeping out from dry sticks. He did not think of snakes

or leaves, nor of the dead leaves of a great forest, the

still-existent nothingness of life. Those who had known the green

trees were tangled and torn in the dry. The tragedies of Peter Stanhope

carried the image of that pain-piercing nothing. The dead man,

like Pauline, had lived with thorns and hard wood, and at last

they had destroyed him as pitilessly as the Marian martyr. He did

not therefore conceive them now as anything but a mere sound. It

went with him along the road. and when he had come fully out at

the end into the space where the ladder of bone led again to a

darkness of the grave, it had become louder. He heard it on all

sides. He stopped and turned.

 

The shapes were standing in a great crowd watching him. Mostly

they had his form and face, and they stood, in the infinite

division of past moments, but higgledy-piggledy, sombrely staring.

He saw in front, parodying earthly crowds, the children—different

ages, different sizes, all looking with his small pointed

hungry face. In the massed multitude behind there were, at

points, different faces, faces of any few creatures who for one

reason or another had mattered to his mind. He saw his wife in

several places; he saw the face of a youth who had been the

nearest he had known to a friend; he saw those he had disliked.

But, at most, these others were few.

 

The crowd did not move, except that sometimes other single forms

slipped out of the ruined houses, swelling it as crowds are

swelled in London streets. It was useless, had he desired it, to

attempt to return. He turned away from them again, but this time

not merely from them but towards something, towards the

ladder. He laid a hand on it. The long hard dry rustle came

again, as the whole crowd fell forward, bones shifting and

slipping as some moving vitality slid through them. They closed

towards him, their thronged circles twisting round the house and

him as if they were the snake. His mortal mind would have given

way, could it have apprehended such a strait between shadowy bone

and shining bone; his immortal, nourished by belief in the mother

of his soul, remained clear. His seeming body remained capable.

He exercised his choice, and began to go up the ladder. At once,

with a horrid outbreak of shifting leaves and snapping sticks and

rustling bodies, they were about its foot, looking up. The living

death crowded round the ladder of bone, which it could not ascend.

White faces of unvitalized, unsubstantial, yet real,

existence, looked up at him mounting. Nothingness stared and

panted, with false breath, terrible to those who live of choice in

its phantasmal world. But for him, who rose above them to that

stage set in the sky, the expanded point and culminating area of

his last critical act, the place of skull and consciousness, of

life and death and life, for him there entered through the grasp

he had on the ladder shafts an energy. He looked neither down nor

up; he went on. A wind had risen about him, as if here the

movement of the leaves, if leaves, shook the

air, and not the air the leaves. It was as if a last invisible

tentacle were sent up by the nothingness to draw him back into the

smooth undulations below, that its sterility might bury him in a

living sepulchre; the identities of the grave moving in a blind

instinct to overtake and seize him. Now and then some of them

even began to mount a few rungs, but they could get and keep no

hold. They fell again to their own level.

 

He did not see this, for his eyes were above. In the same sense

of nothing but action he climbed the last rungs, and stood on the

stage from which he had been flung. But he had hardly stepped on

to it before it changed. He had come back from his own manner of

time to the point in the general world of time from which he had

fled, and he found it altered. The point of his return was not

determined by himself, but by his salvation, by a direction not

yet formulated, by the economy of means of the Omnipotence, by the

moment of the death of Margaret Anstruther. Therefore he came

into the built house, and the room where Wentworth slept. The

open stage closed round him as he came upon it. The walls rose;

there was a ceiling above. He knew he stood in a room, though the

details were vague. It was ghostly to him, like that other in

which, a short time before, he had stood. There the old woman had

been a vivid centre to him. Here he was not, at first, aware of a

centre. In this other world he had not been astonished at the

manner in which things happened, but now he was a little

uncomfortable. He thought at first it was because he could have

had no business in such a room during his earlier life. So

perhaps it was, but if so, another cause had aroused the old

uneasiness—the fainthint of a slither of dry leaves, such as he

had heard behind him along the road@ but now within the room. It

displeased and diseased him; he must remove himself. It was

almost his first quiet decision ever; he was on the point to enter

into actions of peace. The courtesy that rules the world of

spirits took him, and as the creature that lay in the room had not

entered except under Wentworth’s compulsion, so this other made

haste to withdraw from its intrusion. Also he was aware that,

having re-entered this place and point of time, this station of an

inhabited world, by the ladder of bone from the other side, he

must go now farther on the way. He had the City in his mind; he

had his wife in mind. He could not tell by what means or in what

shape he would find her, or if he would find her. But she was his

chief point of knowledge, and to that he directed himself. Of the

necessity of getting a living he did not think. Living, whether

he liked it or not, was provided; he knew that he did like. He

went carefully across the dim room and through the door; down the

stairs, and reached the front door. It opened of itself before

him, so he thought, and he peered out into the road. A great

blackness was there; it changed as he peered. As if it fled from

him, it retreated. He heard the wind again, but now blowing up

the street. A shaft of light smote along with it. Before wind

and light and himself he saw the night turn, but it was not the

mere night; it was alive, it was made of moving and twisting

shapes hurrying away of their own will. Light did not drive them;

they revealed the light as they went. They rose and rushed; as

they disappeared he saw the long drive before him, and at its end,

in the street proper, the figure of a girl.

 

In a different darkness, mortally illumined, Pauline, not far

away, had that previous evening been sitting by her grandmother’s

bed. It was, to her, the night after the rehearsal. She had come

home to find Margaret awake, alert, inquiring, and after she had

spoken of the details of the afternoon, she had not been able, nor

wished, to keep from speaking of the other thing that filled and

threatened her mind. Her grandmother’s attention still seemed to

her acute, even if remote. Indeed, all mortal things were now

remote to-Margaret unless they were vividly consistent with the

slope over which she moved. She felt, at intervals, someone being

lifted and fed, someone hearing and speaking intelligible words.

Only sometimes did definiteness from that other casual state enter

her; then she and it were sharply present. For the rest she only

saw vague images of a great good, and they faded, and at rarer

intervals in the other single consciousness of slow—but

slow!—movement over a surface, an intense sweetness pierced her.

She moaned then, for it was pain; she moaned happily, for it was only

the last inevitable sloth of her body that made its pain,

resisting, beyond her will, the translucent energy. She always

assented. She assented now to what Pauline was saying, sitting by

her bed, her fingers interlocked and pressed against her knee, her

body leaning forward, her breath drawn with a kind of slow

difficulty against the beating passion of her heart’s presagements.

She was saying: “But how could one give backwards?”

 

Margaret could not, at that point of experience, explain

metaphysics. She said: “If it’s like that, my dear?” Pauline

said: “But if he took it? I thought-there-I might: but now, I

daren’t.”

 

She saw Margaret’s smile flash at her across rocks. It went and

the voice said: “You think it’s yours?”

 

Pauline answered, abruptly checking abruptness: “I don’t…. Do

I?”

 

“You think one of the two’s yours—joy or misery,” Margaret said,

“or both. Why, if you don’t, should you mind?”

 

Pauline for a minute struggled with this in silence: then, evading

it, she returned to time. “But four hundred years,” she

exclaimed.

 

“Child,” her grandmother said, “I can touch Adam with my hand; you

aren’t as far off.”

 

“But how could he take it before I’d given it?” Pauline cried, and

Margaret said: “Why do you talk of before? If you give, you give

to It, and what does It care about before?”

 

Pauline got up and walked to the window. It was drawing towards

night, yet so translucent was the pale green sky that night and

day seemed alike unthinkable. She heard in the distance a single

pair of hurrying feet; patter, patter. She said, in a muffled

voice: “Even the edge frightens me.”

 

“Peter Stanhope,” Margaret said, “must have been frightened many

times.”

 

“O-poetry!” Pauline exclaimed bitterly. “That’s different; you

know it is, grandmother.”

 

“In seeing?” Margaret asked. “And as for being, you must find out

for yourself. He can carry your parcels, but not you.”

 

“Couldn’t he?” Pauline said. “Not that I want him to.”

 

“Perhaps,” Margaret answered. “But I think only when you don’t

need it, and your parcels when you do.”

 

Her voice grew faint as she spoke, and Pauline came quickly back

to the bed.

 

“I’m tiring you,” she said hastily. “I’m sorry: