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

to return, the point of

hastening death. She went peacefully, but while, days before, it

had been Stanhope’s intervention that had changed her mood, now

she had come, by the last submissive laughter of her telephone

call, into the ways of the world he had no more than opened. She

went with a double watchfulness, for herself and for that other

being whom her grandmother had sent her to meet, but her

watchfulness did not check her speed, nor either disturb the

peace. She turned, soon enough, into the street where Lawrence

Wentworth’s house stood, not far from the top of the Hill in one

direction, from the Manor House in another, and, beyond all

buildings, from the silent crematorium in a third. The street, as

she came into it, looked longer than she had remembered. It had

something of the effect by which small suburban byways, far

inland, seem to dip towards the sea, though here it was no sea

but a mere distance of road which received it. She slackened her

pace, and, flicking one hand with her gloves, walked towards the

house.

 

She reached it at last, and paused. There was at first no sign of

any living creature. She looked up at it; the shadows were thick

on it, seeming to expand and contract. The small occasional wind

of the night, intermittently rising, caught them and flung them

against it; they were beaten and bruised, if shadows could take

the bruise, against its walls; they hid windows and doors; there

was only a rough shape of the house discernible below them. She

thought, in a faint fancy, too indistinct to be a distress, of

herself flung in that steady recurrence against a bleak wall,

and somehow it seemed sad that she should not be bruised. A

gratitude for material things came over her; she twisted her

gloves in her fingers and even struck her knuckles gently

together, that the sharp feel of them might assure her of firm

flesh and plotted bone. As if that slight tap had been at a door,

to announce a visitor, she saw a man standing outside the shadow,

close by the house.

 

She could not, in the moon, see very clearly what he was. She

thought, by something in his form, that she had seen him before;

then, that she had not. She thought of her grandmother’s errand,

and that perhaps here was its end. She waited, in the road, while

he came down the drive, and then she saw him clearly. He was

small and rather bent; obviously a working man and at that an

unsuccessful working man, for his clothes were miserably old, and

his boots gaped. Yet he had presence; he advanced on her with

a quiet freedom, and when he came near she saw that he was

smiling. He put up his hand to his tattered cap; the motion had

in it the nature of an act-it had conclusion, it began and ended.

He said, almost with a conscious deference such as she could have

imagined herself feeling for Stanhope had she known nothing of him

but his name: “Good evening, miss. Could you tell me the way to

London?”

 

There was the faintest sound of the city’s metal in his voice:

dimly she knew the screech of London gate. She said: “Why, yes,

but-you don’t mean to walk?”

 

He answered: “Yes, miss, if you’ll be so kind as to tell me the

right road.”

 

“But it’s thirty miles,” she cried, “and… hadn’t you better.

…” She stopped, embarrassed by the difficulties of earth. He

did not look inferior enough to be offered money; money being the

one thing that could not be offered to people of one’s own class,

or to anybody one respected. All the things that could

be bought by money, but not money. Yet unless she offered this

man money he did not, from his clothes, look as if he would get to

London unless he walked.

 

He said: “I’d as soon walk, miss. It isn’t more than a step.”

 

“It seems to be considerably more,” she said, and thought of her

grandmother’s errand, “Must you go now or could you wait till the

morning? I could offer you a bed tonight.” It seemed to her that

this must be the reason why she was here.

 

He said: “I’d as soon not, though thank you for offering. I’d

rather start now, if you’ll tell me the way.”

 

She hesitated before this self-possession; the idea that he needed

money still held her, and now she could not see any way to avoid

offering it. She looked in his serene quiet eyes, and said, with

a gesture of her hand, “If it’s a question of the fare?”

 

He shook his head, still smiling. “It’s only a matter of starting

right,” he answered, and Pauline felt absurdly disappointed, as if

some one had refused a cup of coffee or of cold water that she had

wanted to bring. She was also a little surprised to find how easy

it was to offer money when you tried—or indeed to take it;

celestially easy. She answered his smile: “Well, if you won’t..

..” she said. “Look then, this is the best way.”

 

They walked a few steps together, the girl and the dead man, till,

at a corner a little beyond Wentworth’s house, she stopped.

 

“Down there,” she said, pointing, “is the London road, you can

just see where it crosses this. Are you sure you won’t stay tonight

and go in the morning-fare and all?” So she might have asked

any of her friends, whether it had been a fare or a book or love

or something of no more and no less importance.

 

“Quite, miss,” he said, lifting his hand to his cap again in an

archangelic salute to the Mother of God. “It doesn’t matter

perhaps, but I think I ought to get on. They may be waiting for

me.”

 

“I see,” she said, and added with a conscious laughter, “One never

knows, does one?”

 

“O I wouldn’t say never, miss,” he answered. “Thank you again.

Good night, miss.”

 

“Good night,” she said, and with a last touch of the cap he was

gone down the road, walking very quickly, lightly, and steadily.

He went softly; she was not sure that she could hear his tread,

though she knew she had not been listening for it. She watched

him for a minute; then she turned her head and looked up the

cross-road on the other side of the street. That way ran up

towards the Manor House; she thought of her telephone call and

wondered if Stanhope were asleep or awake. She looked back at the

departing figure, and said after it aloud, in an act of remembered

goodwill: “Go in peace!”

 

The words were hardly formed when it seemed to her that he

stopped. The figure surely stood still; it was swaying; it was

coming back-not coming back, only standing still, gesticulating.

Its arms went up toward heaven in entreaty; then they fell and it

bent and clutched its head with its hands. An agony had fallen on

it. She saw and began to run. As she did so, she thought that

her ears caught for an instant a faint sound from behind her, as

of a trumpet, the echo of the trumpet of that day’s rehearsal done

or of the next day’s performance not yet begun, or of a siren that

called for the raising or lowering of a bridge.

 

So faintly shrill was the sound, coming to her between the cliffs

of a pass from a camp on the other side the height, that her

senses answered as sharply. The sound was transmitted into her

and transmuted into sight or the fear of sight. “The Magus… my

dead child… his own image.” She was running fast; the stranger

had gone an infinite distance in that time; she was running as she

had run from her own room, and now she knew she had been right

when she stopped, and it was a trap. Everything—she was running,

for she could not stop—had been a part of the trap; even the

shelter she had sometimes found had been meant only to catch her

more surely in the end. Ah, the Magus Zoroaster had set it for

her, all that time since, and her grandmother was part of its

infinitely complicated steel mechanism, which now shut her in,

and was going off-had gone off and was still going off, for ever

and ever going off, in the faint shrill sound that came from

behind her where Stanhope sat working it, for Zoroaster or Shelley

were busy in front, and in front was the spring of the death and

the delirium, and she had been tricked to run in that ingenious

plot of their invention, and now she could no more stop than she

could cease to hear the shrill whirr of the wheel that would start

the spring, and when it cracked at last there would be her twin

shape in the road. It was for this that the inhuman torturer who

was Stanhope had pretended to save her, and the old creature who

was her grandmother and talked of God had driven her out into the

wild night, and the man who would not take her offer had fetched

her to the point and the instant. Earth and sky were the climax

of her damnation; their rods pressed her in. She ran; the trumpet

sounded; the shape before her lifted his head again and dropped

his hands and stood still.

 

She was coming near to him, and the only fact of peace to which

her outraged mind could cling was that so far it was still he and

not the other. Every second that he so remained was a relief.

His back might open any moment and her own form leap hastily down

from its ambush now among his veins and canals or from his

interior back-throbbing heart. It did not; it became more

definitely a man’s back, as she neared it, but she saw it shaking

and jerking. It was a great back, clothed in some kind of cloth

doublet, with breeches below, and a heavy head of thick hair

above; and the arms suddenly went up again, and a voice sounded.

It said, in a shout of torment: “Lord God! Lord God!”

 

She stopped running a dozen yards off and stood still. It was not

her decision; she was brought to a stand. The cry freed her from

fear and delirium, as if it took over its own from her. She stood

still, suddenly alert. The trap, if there had been a trap, had

opened, and she had come out beyond it. But there was another

trap, and this man was in it. He cried again: “Lord God!”

 

The trumpet had ceased blowing. She said in a voice breathless

only from haste: “Can I help you?”

 

The man in front became rigid: he said: “Lord God, I cannot bear

the fear of the fire.”

 

She said: “What fire?” and still with his back to her he answered:

“The fire they will burn me in to-day unless I say what they

choose. Lord God, take away the fear if it be thy will. Lord

God, be merciful to a sinner. Lord God, make me believe.”

 

She was here. She had been taught what to do. She had her offer

to make now and it would not be refused. She herself was offered,

in a most certain fact, through four centuries, her place at the

table of exchange, The moment of goodwill in which she had

directed to the City the man who had but lately died had opened to

her the City itself, the place of the present