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

moan of the dead. She

acted, and her acting was reality, for the stillness had taken it

over. The sun was blazing, as if it would pierce all bodies

there, as if another sun radiated from another sky exploring

energies of brilliance. But the air was fresh.

 

She was astonished in the interval to hear Myrtle Fox complaining

of the heat. “It’s quite intolerable,” Miss Fox said, “and these

filthy trees. Why doesn’t Mr. Stanhope have them cut down? I do

think one’s spirit needs air, don’t you? I should die in a jungle,

and this feels like a jungle.”

 

“I should have thought,” Pauline said, but not with malice, “that

you’d have found jungles cosy.”

 

“There’s such a thing as being too cosy,” Adela put in. “Pauline,

I want to speak to you a minute.”

 

Pauline allowed herself to be withdrawn. Adela went on: “You’re

very friendly with Mr. Stanhope, aren’t you?”

 

“Yes,” Pauline said, a little to her own surprise. She had rather

meant to say: “O not very” or “Aren’t you?”, or the longer and

more idiotic “Well I don’t know that you’d call it friendly”. But

it struck her that both they and every other living creature, from

the Four-by-the-Throne to the unseen insects in the air,

would call it friendly. She therefore said, “Yes”, and waited.

 

“O!” said Adela, also a little taken aback. She recovered and

went on: “I’ve been thinking about this play. We’ve done so much

with it-I and Mrs. Parry and the rest….” She paused.

 

“Myrtle”, Pauline said, “remarked yesterday that she felt

deeply that it was so much ours.”

 

“O,” said Adela again. The heat was heavy on her too and she was

pinker than strictly the Princess should have been. The

conversation hung as heavy as the heat. A determination that had

hovered in her mind had got itself formulated when she saw the

deference exhibited towards him by the outer world that afternoon,

and now with a tardy selfishness she pursued it. She said: “I

wonder if you’d ask him something.”

 

“Certainly—if I can decently,” Pauline answered, wondering, as

she heard herself use the word, where exactly the limits of

decency, if any, in the new world lay. Peter, she thought, would

probably find room for several million universes within those

limits.

 

“It’s like this,” Adela said. “I’ve always thought this a very

remarkable play.”

 

Pauline’s heavenly nature said to her other, without irritation but

with some relevance, “The hell you have!”

 

“And,” Adela went on, “as we’ve all been in it here, I thought

it’d be jolly if we could keep it ours—I mean, if he’d let us.”

She realized that she hated asking favours of Pauline, whom she

had patronized; she disliked subordinating herself. The heat was

prickly in her skin, but she persevered. “It’s not for myself so

much,” she said, “as for the general principle….”

 

“O, Adela, be quick!” Pauline broke in. “What do you want?”

 

Adela was not altogether unpractised in the gymnastics of

Gomorrah. Her spirit had come near to the suburbs, and a time

might follow when the full freedom of the further City of the

Plain would be silently presented to her by the Prince of the City

and Lilith his daughter and wife. She believed—with an effort,

but she believed-she was speaking the truth when she said: “I

don’t want anything, but I think it would be only right of Mr.

Stanhope to let us have a hand in his London production.”

 

“Us?” Pauline asked.

 

“Me then,” Adela answered. “He owes us something, doesn’t he?

and”, she hurried on, “if I could get hold of a theatre-a little

one—O, I think I could raise the money…”

 

“I should think you could”, Pauline said, “for a play by Mr.

Stanhope.”

 

“Anyhow, I thought you might sound him-or at least back me up,”

Adela went on. “You do see there’s nothing personal about it?”

She stopped, and Pauline allowed the living stillness to rise

again.

 

Nothing personal in, this desire to clothe immortality with a

career? Nothing unnatural perhaps; nothing improper perhaps; but

nothing personal? Nothing less general than the dark pause and the

trees and the measured movements of verse? nothing less free than

interchange of love? She said: “Adela, tell me it’s for yourself,

only yourself, and I’ll do it if I can.”

 

Adela, extremely offended, and losing her balance said: “It isn’t.

We shall be as good for him as he will be for us.”

 

“A kind of mutual-profit system?” Pauline suggested. “You’d

better get back; they’ll be ready. I’ll do whatever you

want—tomorrow.”

 

“But—” Adela began; however, Pauline had gone; where Adela did

not quite see. It was the heat of the afternoon that so disjoined

movement, she thought. She could not quite follow the passage of

people now-at least, off the stage. They appeared and disappeared

by her, as if the air opened, and someone were seen in the midst

of it, and then the air closed up, and opened again, and there was

someone else. She was getting fanciful. Fortunately there was

only one more act, and on the stage it was all right; there people

were where she expected them. Or, if not, you could find fault;

that refuge remained. She hurried to the place, and found herself

glad to be there. Lingering near was the Grand Duke. He

contemplated her as she came up.

 

“You look a little done,” he said, gravely and affectionately.

 

“It’s the heat,” said Adela automatically.

 

“It’s not so frightfully hot,” Hugh answered. “Quite a good

afternoon. A little thunder about somewhere, perhaps.”

 

The thunder, if it was thunder, was echoing distantly in Adela’s

ears; she looked at Hugh’s equanimity with dislike. He had

something of Mrs. Parry in him, and she resented it. She said: “I

wish you were more sensitive, Hugh.”

 

“So long as I’m sensitive to you,” Hugh said, “it ought to be

enough. You’re tired, darling.”

 

“Hugh, you’d tell me I was tired on the Day of judgment,” Adela

exclaimed. “I keep on saying it’s the heat.”

 

“Very well,” Hugh assented; “it’s the heat making you tired.”

 

“I’m not tired at all,” Adela said in a burst of exasperated rage,

“I’m hot and I’m sick of this play, and I’ve got a headache. It’s

very annoying to be so continually misunderstood. After all, the

play does depend upon me a good deal, and all I have to do, and

when I ask for a little sympathy….”

 

Hugh took her arm. “Shut up,” he said.

 

She stared back. “Hugh—” she began, but he interrupted her.

 

“Shut up,” he said again. “You’re getting above yourself, my

girl; you and your sympathy. I’ll talk to you when this is over.

You’re the best actor in the place, and your figure’s absolutely

thrilling in that dress, and there’s a lot more to tell you like

that, and I’ll tell you presently. But it’s time to begin now,

and go and do as I tell you.”

 

Adela found herself pushed away. There had been between them an

amount of half-pretended mastery and compulsion, but she was

conscious of a new sound in Hugh’s voice. It struck so near her

that she forgot about Pauline and the heat and Stanhope, for she

knew that she would have to make up her mind about it, whether to

reject or allow that authoritative assumption. Serious commands

were a new thing in their experience. Her immediate instinct was

to evade: the phrase which sprang to her mind was: “I shall have

to manage him—I can manage him.” If she were going to marry

Hugh—and she supposed she was—she would either have to acquiesce

or pretend to acquiesce. She saw quite clearly what she would do;

she would assent, but she would see to it that chance never

assented. She knew that she would not revolt; she would never

admit that there was any power against which Adela Hunt could

possibly be in a state of revolt. She had never admitted it of

Mrs. Parry. It was always the other people who were in revolt

against her. Athanasian in spirit, she knew she was right and the

world wrong. Unathanasian in method, she intended to manage

the world… Stanhope, Mrs. Parry, Hugh. She would neither

revolt nor obey nor compromise; she would deceive. Her admission

to the citizenship of Gomorrah depended on the moment at which, of

those four only possible alternatives for the human soul, she

refused to know which she had chosen. Tell me it’s for yourself,

only yourself….. No, no, it’s not for myself; it’s for the good

of others, her good, his good, everybody’s good: is it my fault if

they don’t see it? manage them, manage them, manage her, manage

him, and them. O, the Princess managing the Woodcutter’s Son, and

the Chorus, the chorus of leaves, this way, that way; minds

twiddling them the right way; treachery better than truth, for

treachery was the only truth, there was no truth to be treacherous

to—and the last act beginning, and she in it, and the heat

crackling in the ground, in her head, in the air. On then, on to

the stage, and Pauline was to ask Stanhope tomorrow.

 

Pauline watched her as she went, but she saw the Princess and not

Adela. Now the process of the theatre was wholly reversed, for

stillness cast up the verse and the verse flung out the actors,

and though she knew sequence still, and took part in it, it was

not sequence that mattered, more than as a definition of the edge

of the circle, and that relation which was the exhibition of the

eternal. Relation in the story, in the plot, was only an accident

of need: there had been a time when it mattered, but now it

mattered no longer, or for a while no longer. Presently, perhaps,

it would define itself again as a need of daily life; she would

be older than her master, or younger, or contemporaneous; now they

were both no more than mutual perceptions in a flash of love. She

had had relation with her ancestor and with that other man more

lately dead and with her grandmother—all the presently

disincarnate presences which lived burningly in the stillness,

through which the fire burned, and the stillness was the fire.

She danced out of it, a flame flung up, a leaf catching to a

flame. They were rushing towards the end of the play, an end, an

end rushing towards the earth and the earth rushing to meet it.

The words were no longer separated from the living stillness, they

were themselves the life of the stillness, and though they sounded

in it they no more broke it than the infinite particles of

creation break the eternal contemplation of God in God. The

stillness turned upon itself; the justice of the stillness drew

all the flames and leaves, the dead and living, the actors and

spectators, into its power-percipient and impercipient, that was

the only choice, and that was for their joy alone. She sank

deeper into it. The dance of herself and all the others

ceased, they drew aside, gathered up—O on how many rehearsals,

and now gathered! “Behold, I come quickly! Amen, even so….”

They were in the groups of the last royal declamations, and swept

aside, and the mighty stage was clear. Suddenly again, from

somewhere in that great abyss of clarity, a trumpet sounded, and

then a great uproar, and then a single voice. It was the

beginning of the end; the judgment of mortality was there. She

was standing aside, and she heard the voice and knew it; from the

edge of eternity the poets were speaking to the world, and two

modes of experience were