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

look, I’ll go

now. I didn’t mean to talk so much.”

 

Margaret glanced at her, and said in a whisper: “But I’d so much

rather die talking.” All talk of the divine thing was pleasant to

her, even if this beating of wings in the net, wings so dear and

so close, was exhausting in the thin air. Pauline, looking down

for a second after her good-night, thought that a change had taken

place. The eyes had closed, though the girl was by no means sure

that they were not as alert now as they had been when they were

open and watching.

 

Yet a proportion between the old woman and external things had

been withdrawn; another system of relations might have been

established, but if so it was unapprehensible by others. But the

change in customary relations was definitely apprehensible. She

looked small, and yet small was hardly the word; she was

different. The body had been affected by a change of direction in

the spirit, and only when the spirit was removed would it regain

for a little while its measurable place amongst measurable things.

It could be served and aided; but the ceremonies of service were

now made to something strange that existed among them. The

strangeness communicated itself, by a kind of opposition, to the

very bed in which that body was stretched; it became a mound of

earth lifted up to bear the visiting victim. The woman who was

their companion had half-changed into a visitor from another

place, a visitor who knew nothing of the world to which she was

still half-native. The unknown and the known mingled, as if those

two great parents of humanity allowed their mingled powers to be

evident to whoever watched. The mound, in the soft light of the

room, presented itself to Pauline as if its low height was the

crown and peak of a life; the longjourney had ended on this

cavity in the rounded summit of a hill. She considered it gravely

so before she turned and, leaving the nurse in charge, went to her

own room.

 

She was not asleep when later in the night she was called. Her

grandmother, the nurse said, needed her. Pauline pulled a

dressing-gown on her and went across. Mrs. Anstruther was sitting

in the bed, propped by pillows; her eyes looking away out of the

room. As if she dared not turn her gaze away, she said, as

Pauline came up: “Is that you, darling?”

 

“Me,” the girl answered. “Did you want me?”

 

“Will you do something for me?” Mrs. Anstruther said. “Something

rather odd?”

 

“Why, of course,” the girl said. “Anything. What is it?”

 

“Would you be so very charming as to go out and see if anyone

wants you?” Mrs. Anstruther said, quite distinctly. “Up by

Mr. Wentworth’s.”

 

“She’s wandering,” the nurse whispered. Pauline, used to Mrs.

Anstruther’s extremely unwandering habits, hesitated to

agree. But it was certainly rather odd. She said, with a

tenderness a little fractured by doubt, “Wants me, darling?

Now?”

 

“Of course, now,” her grandmother answered. “That’s the point. I

think perhaps he ought to get back to the City.” She looked round

with a little sigh. “Will you?”

 

Pauline had been about to make the usual unfelicitous efforts of

the healthy to persuade the sick that they are being rightly

served. But she could not do it. No principle and no wisdom

directed her, nor any conscious thought of love. She merely could

not do it. She said: “By Mr. Wentworth’s? Very well, darling.”

She could have helped, but did not, adding: “I don’t think it’s

very likely.”

 

“No,” said Margaret, and Pauline was gripped by a complete sense

of folly. “‘I don’t think it’s… No.’” She said:

“I don’t know a thing. I’ll go.” And turned. The nurse said as

she moved to the door: “Sweet of you to be so nice. Come back in

ten minutes or so. She won’t realize the time.”

 

“I’m going,” Pauline said, distantly, and distinctly, “as far as

Mr. Wentworth’s. I shall be as quick as I can.” She saw a protest

at the nurse’s mouth, and added: “At once.”

 

She dressed quickly. Even so, in spite of her brave words to the

nurse, her doubts were quicker. In spite of her intention, she

reasoned against her promise. Three words dogmatized definition

at her: “Her mind’s wandering; her mind’s wandering.” Why, obeying

that wandering mind, should she herself wander on the Hill? Why,

in a lonely street, under the pale shining sky, should she risk

the last dreadful meeting? The high clock struck one; time drew to

the night’s nadir. Why go? why go? Sit here, she said, almost

aloud, and say “Peace”. Is it peace, jehu? cry peace where there

is no peace; faciunt solitudinem et Pacem vocant. She would make

a solitude round the dying woman and call it peace; the dying

woman would die and never know, or dying know and call it well;

the dying woman that would not die but see, or die

and see; and dead, see and know—know the solitude that her

granddaughter had called peace. Up and up, the wind was rising,

and the shuffle of leaves under the moon, and nothing was there

for her to find, but to find nothing now was to be saved from

finding nothing in the place where whatever she now did was hid

and kept and saved. The edge of the other world was running up

along the sky, the world where everyone carried themselves but

everyone carried someone else’s grief—Alice in Wonderland, sweet

Alice, Alice sit by the fire, the fire burned: who sat by the fire

that burned a man in another’s blood on the grass of a poet’s

houses where things were given backward, and rules were against

rights and rights against rules, and a ghost in the fire was a

ghost in the street, and the thing that had been was the thing

that was to be and it was coming, was coming; what was coming;

what but herself? she was coming, she was coming, up the street

and the wind; herself—a terrible good, terror and error, but the

terror was error, and the error was in the terror, and now all

were in him, for he had taken them into himself, and he was

coming, down all the roads of Battle Hill, closing them in him,

making them straight: make straight the highways before our God,

and they were not for God took them, in the world that was running

through this, its wheel turning within this world’s air, rolling

out of the air. No peace but peace, no joy but joy, no love but

love. Behold, I come quickly. Amen, even so, come….

 

She caught up a hat and flung herself at the door, her blood

burning within her, as the house burned around. The air was fiery

to her sense; she breathed a mingled life, as if the flames of

poetry and martyrdom rose together in the air within the air, and

touched the outer atmosphere with their interior force.

She ran down the stairs, but already her excitement, being more

excitement than strength, flagged and was pain. Action was not

yet so united with reaction as to become passion. The doubt she

must have of what was to come took its old habitual form. Her

past pretended to rule her, defacto sovereign, and her past was

fear. It was midnight, the Hill was empty, she was alone. It

could only be that her ghostly image lay, now, in wait for her to

emerge into its desolate kingdom. She grit her teeth. The thing

must be done. She had promised her grandmother; more important

still, she had promised the nurse. She might have confided to the

first what she would never concede to the second, It was then that

she saw the telephone.

 

At first, as she paused a minute in the hall, to settle herself—

to settle her determination that that woman who had talked of

wandering minds should not find her foolish expectation fulfilled—at

first she did not think of Stanhope; then inevitably, with her

grief stirring in her, she did. To think of him was to think, at

once, of speaking to him. The telephone. She thought: “One

o’clock and he’s asleep; don’t be a fool.” She thought: “‘Any

hour of the day or night’.” She thought: “I oughtn’t to disturb

him,” and then with the clarity of that world of perpetual

exchange: “I ought to disturb him.” It was her moral duty to wake

him up, if he was asleep and she could. She smiled, standing in

the hall where the new light of the summer sky dimly shone.

Reversal had reached its extreme; she who had made a duty of her

arrogance had found a duty in her need. Her need retreated

beneath the shock. At precisely the moment when she could have

done without him she went to ask for him; the glad and flagrant

mockery of the Omnipotence lay peaceful in her heart as she

dialled his number, her finger slowing a little on the last

figure, as if the very notion were a delight too sweet to lose by

haste. The receiver at her ear, as if she leant to it, she

waited. Presently she heard his voice.

 

She said, again grave: “Are you awake enough to hear me?”

 

“Complete with attention,” he answered. “Whatever it is, how

very, very right of you! That’s abstract, not personal, Concede

the occasion.”

 

“The occasion,” she said, “is that I’m going out up the Hill

because my grandmother’s asked me to, and I was a little afraid

just now… I’m not.”

 

“O blessed, blessed,” Stanhope murmured, but whether he thought of

her or the Omnipotence she did not know. He added, to her: “Go in

peace. Would you like me to come?”

 

“No, of course not,” she answered, and lingering still a minute

said: “I thought I wanted to ring you up, but when I did I didn’t.

Forgive me.”

 

“If it gives you any pleasure,” he said, “but you might have

needed forgiveness in fact if you hadn’t. God’s not mine.

Pardon, Periel, like love, is only ours for fun: essentially we

don’t and can’t. But you want to go…. You’ll remember?”

 

“For ever,” she said, “and ever and ever. Thank you.” She put the

receiver firmly down, opened the door, and went out into the

street. The pure night received her. Darkness was thick round

the houses, but the streets lay clear. She was aware,

immediately, of some unusualness, and presently she knew what

it was. She was used to shadows lying across the pavements, but

now it was not so. On either side of the street they gathered and

blocked and hid the buildings, climbing up them, creepers of

night, almost in visible movement. Between those masses the roads

lay like the gullies of a mountain down which an army might

come—broad and empty, prepared for an army, passes already closed by

scouts and outposts, and watched by the dazzling flashes which now

and then and here and there lit the sky, as if silver machines of

air above the world moved in escort of expected power. Apart from

those momentary dazzling flashes light was diffused through the

sky. She could see no moon, only once or twice in her

walk, at some corner, between the cliffs of darkness, far away on

the horizon, she half-thought she saw a star-Hesper or Phosphor,

the planet that is both the end and the beginning, Venus, omega

and alpha, transliteration of speech. Once, far behind her, she

thought she heard hurrying footsteps, but as she went on she lost

them. She went quickly; for she had left behind her an

approaching point to which she desired