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

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what they gaze. In the night she was withdrawn; the substance of

illusion in her faded, and alongside his heavy sleep she changed

and changed, through all degrees of imbecile decay, till at last

she was quite dispelled.

 

He was alone. He lay awake, and waking became aware of his

ancient dream. Now he was near the end of his journey. He saw

below him the rope drawn nearer and nearer to the wall, if it were

a wall. He looked up; above him the rope seemed to end in the

moon, which shone so fully in the dark, millions of miles away.

Down all those miles he had slowly climbed. It was almost over

now; he was always a little lower, and when he stood up he did not

lose the dream. Through his bathing and dressing and going down

and finding a taxi he was still on his rope. He felt once for his

watch, and remembered he had not got it, and looked up at the

shining silver orb above, and found that that was his watch. It

was also a great public clock at which he was staring; but he

could not make it out—moon or watch or clock. The time was up

there; but he could not see it. He thought: “I shall be just in

time.” He was, and only just; as close to its end as to the end

of the rope.

 

He got into his taxi. It went off along the High Street, and then

was held up behind a policeman’s arm. He was looking out of the

window, when he thought a creaking voice said in his ear, as if a

very old woman was in the seat beside him: “Madame Tussaud’s.” He

did not look round, because no one was ever there, but he stared

at the great building which seemed to glow out of the darkness of

the side of the abyss, and there rose in him the figure of what it

contained. He had never been there, though in a humorous moment

he had once thought of taking Adela, but he knew what was in it-wax images. He saw them-exquisitely done, motionless, speechless,

thoughtless; and he saw them being shifted. Hanging on his rope,

he looked out through the square of light in the darkness and saw

them all—Caesar, Gustavus, Cromwell, Napoleon, Foch, and saw

himself carrying them from one corner to another, and putting them

down and picking them up and bringing them somewhere else and

putting them down. There were diagrams, squares and rectangles,

on the floor, to show where they should go; and as he ran across

the hall with a heavy waxen thing on his shoulder he knew it was

very important to put it down in the right diagram. So he did,

but just as he went away the diagram under the figure changed and

no longer fitted, and he had to go back and lift the thing up and

take it off to another place where the real diagram was. This was

always happening with each of them and all of them, so that six or

seven or more of him had to be about, carrying the images, and

hurrying past and after each other on their perpetual task. He

could never get the details correct; there was always a little

thing wrong, a thing as tiny as the shoulder-knots on the uniforms

of the Grand Duke’s Guard. Then the rope vibrated as the taxi

started again, and he was caught away; the last vestige of the

history of men vanished for ever. Vibration after vibration-he

was very near the bottom of his rope. He himself was moving now;

he was hurrying. The darkness rushed by. He stopped. His hand,

in habitual action, had gone to his pocket for silver, but his

brain did not follow it. His feet stepped, in habitual action,

off the rope on to the flat ground. Before him there was a tall

oblong opening in the dark, faintly lit. He had something in his

hand-he turned, holding it out; there was a silver gleam as it

left his hand, and he saw the whole million-mile-long rope

vanishing upward and away from him with incredible rapidity

towards the silver moon which ought to have been in his waistcoat

pocket, because it was the watch he had overwound. Seeing that

dazzling flight of the rope upwards into the very centre of the

shining circle, he thought again, “I’m just in time.” He was

standing on the bottom of the abyss; there remained but a short

distance in any method of mortal reckoning for him to take before

he came to a more secret pit where there is no measurement because

there is no floor. He turned towards the opening and began his

last journey.

 

He went a little way, and came into a wider place, where presently

there were hands taking off a coat he discovered himself to be

wearing. He was looking at himself; for an instant he had not

recognized his own face, but he did now, over a wide shining oval

thing that reminded him of the moon. He was wearing the moon in

front of him. But he was in black otherwise; he had put on a neat

fantastic dress of darkness. The moon, the darkness, and the—

only no rope, because that had gone away, and no watch, because he

had done something or other to it, and it had gone away too. He

tried to think what a watch was and how it told him the time.

There were marks on it which meant something to do with time, but

he didn’t know what. Voices came to him out of the air and drove

him along another corridor into another open space. And there

suddenly before him was Sir Aston Moffatt.

 

The shock almost restored him. If he had ever hated Sir Aston

because of a passion for austere truth, he might even then have

laid hold on the thing that was abroad in the world and been

saved. If he had been hopelessly wrong in his facts and yet

believed them so, and believed they were important in themselves,

he might have felt a touch of the fire in which the Marian martyr

had gone to his glory, and still been saved. In the world of the

suicides, physical or spiritual, he might have heard another voice

than his and seen another face. He looked at Sir Aston and

thought, not “He was wrong in his facts”, but “I’ve been cheated”.

It was his last consecutive thought.

 

Sir Aston was decidedly deaf and extremely talkative, and had a

sincere admiration for his rival. He came straight across to

Wentworth, and began to talk. The world, which Wentworth had

continuously and persistently denied in favour of himself, now

poured itself over him, and as if in a deluge from heaven drove

him into the depths. Very marvellous is the glorious

condescension of the Omnipotence; the myth of the fire which was

rained over the plain now incarnated itself in Sir Aston Moffatt.

Softly and gently, perpetually and universally, the chatty

sentences descended on the doomed man, each sentence a little

prick of fire, because, as he stood there, he realized with a

sickness at heart that a voice was talking and he did not know

what it was saying. He heard two sounds continually repeated:

“Wentworth, Wentworth.” He knew that those two noises meant

something, but he could not remember what. If all the faces that

were about him would go away he might remember, but they did not

go. They gathered round him, and carried him forward in the midst

of them, through a doorway. As he went through it he saw in front

of him tables, and with a last flash of memory knew that he had

come there to eat and drink. There was his chair, at the bottom

left corner, where he had always sat, his seat in the Republic.

He went to it with an eager trot. It was waiting for him as it

had always waited, for ever and ever; all his life and from the

creation of the world he had sat there, he would sit there at the

end, looking towards the—he could not think what was the right

name for the tall man at the other end, who had been talking to

him just now. He looked at him and tried to smile, but could not,

for the tall man’s eyes were blank of any meaning, and gazed at

him emptily. The Republic deserted him. His smile ceased. He

was at last by his chair; he would always sit there, always,

always. He sat down.

 

As he did so, he knew he was lost. He could not understand

anything about him. He could just remember that there had been

one moment when a sudden bright flash had parted from him, fleeing

swiftly across the sky into its source, and he wanted that moment

back; he wanted desperately to hold on to the rope. The rope was

not there. He had believed that there would be for him a

companion at the bottom of the rope who would satisfy him for

ever, and now he was there at the bottom, and there was nothing

but noises and visions which meant nothing. The rope was not

there. There were faces, which ceased to be faces, and became

blobs of whitish red and yellow, working and twisting in a

horrible way that yet did not surprise him, because nothing could

surprise him. They moved and leaned and bowed; and between them

were other things that were motionless now but might at any moment

begin to move and crawl. Away over them was a huge round white

blotch, with black markings on it, and two long black lines going

round and round, one very fast and one very slow. This was time,

too fast for his brain, too slow for his heart. If he only had

hold of the rope still, he could perhaps climb out of this

meaningless horror; at least, he could find some meaning and

relation in it all. He felt that the great blotch had somehow

slid up and obscured the shining silver radiance into which a

flash out of him had gone, and if he could get the rope he could

climb past, or, with great shuddering, even through the horrible

blotch, away out of this depth where anything might be anything,

and was anything, for he did not know what it was. The rope was

not there.

 

He shrank into himself, trying to shut his eyes and lose sight of

this fearful opposite of the world he had known. Quite easily he

succeeded. But he could not close his ears, for he did not know

how to manage the more complex coordination of shoulders and arms

and hands. So there entered into him still a small, steady,

meaningless flow of sound, which stung and tormented him with the

same lost knowledge of meaning; small burning flames flickered

down on his soul. His eyes opened again in mere despair. A

little hopeless voice came from his throat. He said, and rather

gasped than spoke: “Ah! ah!” Then everything at which he was

looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he

also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing

together, because in this place they drew towards each other

from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went

they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not

he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it,

and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it

reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels

of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them,