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

rejection of her, and so fast were all

things drawing to their end, that she saw, away beyond the light

of the reading-lamp, a vague figure. It was in the shadows, but,

as if to meet her, it thrust its head forward, and so again

fulfilled its master’s wish. For to Adela there appeared,

stretched forward in the light, her own face, infinitely perfected

in sensual grace and infinitely emptied of all meaning, even of

evil meaning. Blank and dead in a spiritual death it stared

vacantly at her, but undoubtedly it was she. She stood, staring

back, sick and giddy at the horror, and she heard Wentworth say:

“Go away; I don’t want to help you; I don’t know you. Go away.”

 

He closed the window; he began to draw the curtains; the creature

disappeared from her sight. And by the wall of Gomorrah she

fainted and fell.

 

He saw her fall, and in his bemused mind he felt her as a danger

to his peace. He stood looking down at her, until, slowly turning

a stiff head, he saw the reflection of his doubt in the eyes of

his mistress, the gleam of anxiety which reflected his own because

it was concerned with himself. Reluctantly therefore he went out

and half-lifted, half-dragged the girl to the gate, and got her

through it, and then got her a little way down the road, and so

left her lying. He mistily wondered, with a flat realism, if she

would awake while he laboured, but the stupor of her horror was

too deep. She lay there prone and still, and he returned.

 

But, as if in that effort he had slid farther down the rope of his

dream, when he returned he was changed. He sat down and his

creature crept up to him and took and nuzzled his hand. As she

did so he became aware for the first time that he did not

altogether want her. She was not less preferable than she had

been for long to the real Adela, but she was less preferable now

than his unimaged dream. He wanted to want her; he did not want

her to go; but he could not-not as he had done. Even she was a

betrayal, she was a thing outside. It was very good, as it always

was, observant of his slightest wish. It sat by him, blinking at

the fire. This year, in his room curtained from the sun, it was

cold; he had had a fire kept up for the last few days, in spite of

his servants’ astonishment. He could not, as he sat, think

what he wanted, unless indeed to want her, for he feared somehow

to let her go: when he did he would be at the bottom of his rope.

He had been given rope enough, but there was a bottom, and a dark

hole, and him in the hole. He saw this dimly and was unwilling to

slide lower, yet not to slide was to stop out where other things

and other images were, and he was unwilling to be there also. He

looked round several times, thinking that he would see something

else. He thought of a girl’s body lying in the road, but he could

not get off his rope for that, not even if he wished, and most

certainly he did not wish. Something else: something connected

with his work, with the Grand Duke’s Guard. What Grand Duke? The

unbegotten Adela by his side said, in a low voice which stammered

now as it had not before, as if it were as much losing control as

was his own mind: “W-what Grand D-Duke, darling? w-what w-work?”

The Grand Duke’s Guard—a white square—a printed card—yes, a

notice: a meaning and a message, a meeting. He remembered now.

It was the annual dinner of a small historical society to which he

and a few others belonged. He remembered that he had been looking

forward to it; he remembered that he would enjoy going, though he

could not remember for a few minutes who else came to it. He did

not trouble to say anything, however; he was too tired-some drag,

some pulling and thrusting had exhausted him more than he knew; he

had to roll a body in the uniform of the Grand Duke’s Guard, or

to protect himself from hitting against its dark mass as he swung

on his rope; but that was over now, and he could forget, and

presently the two of them stirred and went—mumblingly and

habitually-to bed.

 

It could not be supposed, when Adela was found soon after by a

young constable on his beat, that Mr. Wentworth had had anything

to do with her. The constable found her name from letters in her

handbag, and presently he and others roused her people and she was

got to her own temporary place, her own room. She remained

unconscious till the morning; then she woke. Her temperature and

her pulse were at first normal, and at first she could not recall

the night. But presently it returned to her. She felt herself

running again from the opening graves to the sight of the

meaningless face; Hugh was running after her. Hugh was running

out of the graves and driving her on to meet the face. She too,

like Myrtle Fox, screamed and vomited.

 

Her mother rang up Hugh. There was an acrimonious conversation.

Mrs. Hunt said that she had trusted Adela to Hugh’s care. Hugh

said that Adela had insisted on being alone, which, considering

the rate at which she had run away, he felt was approximately

true. Mrs. Hunt said that Adela was actually at death’s door.

Hugh said she would probably be wise enough not to ring the bell.

Mrs. Hunt said that she herself insisted on seeing him; Adela was

in no state to see anybody. Hugh said he would give himself the

pleasure of leaving some flowers sometime. He knew he was

behaving brutally, and that he was in fact more angry and less

detached than he made his voice sound. He had left her to run,

but had presently gone round and had at last reached her home in

time to observe the confusion that attended her being brought

home. He would have spoken, but he hated Mrs. Hunt, and he hated

scenes, especially scenes at two in the morning, when his always

equable passion for Adela was at ebb. So he had gone home, and

indulged irritation. Nevertheless he intended to be efficient to

the situation; the flowers should be taken and Adela seen that

evening. He had no intention of leaving any duty unfulfilled-any

duty of exterior act. He did not quite admit that there was any

other kind, except in so far as outer efficiency dictated the

interior.

 

Pursued by Hugh in her nightmares, Adela had no sense of ease or

peace in his image. She ran in that recurrent flight from him

through an arch that was Wentworth towards the waiting face, and

as she was carried towards it, it vanished, and she was beginning

again. As she ran she repeated lines and bits of lines of her

part in the play; the part she was continually trying and

continually failing to learn, the part that repeated to her a

muddle of words about perception and love which she could never

get in the right order. Sometimes Mrs. Parry was running beside

her and sometimes Mrs. Sammile; at least, it had Mrs. Sammile’s

head though the body was Peter Stanhope’s, and it said as it ran:

What you want is perception in a flash of love; what you love is a

flash in a want of perception; what you flash is the want in a

love of perception; what you want is what you want…” and so

always. Others of her acquaintance were sometimes about her in

the dream of chaos which had but one element of identity, and that

was the race she ran and the conditions of the race. She came

again under the arch that was Wentworth, and this time there was a

change, for she found Pauline running beside her. Pauline’s hand

was in hers; she clutched it, and the speed of her running

dwindled, as if a steadiness entered it. She said in a squeak:

“Pauline!”

 

Pauline, leaning over the bed, and feeling her hand so fiercely

held—she had called as soon as she heard Adela was ill—said:

“Yes, my dear?”

 

Her voice gave its full value to the last word: it rang in the air

of the dream, a billow of comprehensible sound.

 

Adela stopped running. She said: “Will you help me?” “Of

course,” Pauline said, thinking rather ruefully of asking

Stanhope. “What do you want me to do?”

 

Adela said breathlessly: “I want to stop. I want to know my

part.”

 

“But you did know your part,” Pauline answered. “You knew it

beautifully, and you did it beau… you did it.”

 

Adela said: “No, no; I’ve got to find it, and she can give it to

me.”

 

“She?” Pauline asked.

 

“Lily, she… Sammile, whatever she’s called,” Adela cried. “In

the shed by the cemetery.”

 

Pauline frowned. She remembered Lily Sammile very well. She

remembered her as something more than an old woman by a gate, or

if, then a very old woman indeed by a very great gate, where many

go in who choose themselves, the gate of Gomorrah in the Plain,

illusion and the end of illusion; the opposite of holy fact, and

the contradiction of sacred love. She said, very quickly: “Let me

run for you, Adela; you can keep quiet. I can run faster than

you,” she added truthfully. “I’ve got longer legs. Let me run

instead of you. Don’t worry about Mrs. —” she could not say the

name; no name was enough for the spirit that lay in Gomorrah, in

the shed by the cemetery, till the graves were opened—above or

below, but opened.

 

Adela said: “No, no; no one can do anything. She can make my head

better. She can give me something. You can’t do anything; you

didn’t see it in the house.”

 

Pauline said: “But let’s try at least. Look, let me go and learn

your part.” She was not quite sure, as she said it, whether this

came under the head of permissible interchanges. She had meant it

but for the part in the play, but this new fashion of identities

was too strong for her; the words were a definition of a

substitution beyond her. Adela’s past, Adela’s identity, was

Adela’s own. A god rather than she, unless she were inhabited by

a god, must carry Adela herself; the god to whom baptism for the

dead was made, the lord of substitution, the origin and centre of

substitution, and in the sides of the mountain of the power of

substitution the hermitages of happy souls restored out of

substitution. A fanfare of recovered identities surrounded her;

the single trumpet shrilled into diversities of music.

 

Adela said: “In the shed by the cemetery. I shall know my part

there. Go and ask her.”

 

Her hand shook Pauline’s in her agitation, and the movement was a

repulsion. Pauline, flung off upon her errand, was by the same

energy repelled from her errand. Her own body shook; she was

tossed away from the grand gate of Gomorrah where aged Lilith

incunabulates souls. She sprang up, driven by necessity, and

Adela, opening her eyes which all this while had been shut, met

hers. They gazed for a moment, and then Adela screamed. “Go

away,” she cried; “you won’t, and if you do it’ll be worse.

You’re a devil; you want me not to know. Go away; go away.”

 

“Adela, darling,” Pauline said, oblivious of repulsion in a

distressed tenderness, “it’s Pauline. Don’t be unhappy;