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

>impossible for him to hold himself down in them while he drowned.

There were motors, cars, or buses; apart from his unwillingness

to get other people into trouble, he feared lest he should be

merely hurt or maimed. He wanted to get himself completely out of

trouble. There were the half-finished buildings away behind him.

A magical and ghostly finger touched his mind; in one of those

buildings he remembered to have seen a rope. In a dim way, as he

sat gnawing his bread, he felt that this was the last trouble he

would give to his fellows. Their care this time would be as

hasty and negligent as ever, but it would be final. If the rope

were not there, he would find some other way, but he hoped for

the best. He even believed in that best.

 

He got up, sometime in the early evening, and began to plod back.

It was not far and he was not old. In covering the short

distance he covered age also, toiling doubly through space and

time. The Republic, of which he knew nothing, had betrayed him;

all the nourishment that comes from friendship and common pain

was as much forbidden to him as the poor nourishment of his body.

The Republic had decided that it was better one man, or many men,

should perish, than the people in the dangerous chance of helping

those many. It had, as always, denied supernatural justice. He

went on, in that public but unspectacular abandonment, and the

sun went down on him.

 

Under the moon he came on the Hill to a place which might have

been an overthrown rather than an arising city. The chaos of

that revolution which the Republic naturally refused had rolled

over it, or some greater disaster, the Vesuvian terror of

Pompeii, or an invisible lava of celestial anger, as that which

smote Thebes, or the self-adoring Cities of the Plain.

Unfinished walls, unfilled pits, roofless houses, gaping holes

where doors and windows were to be or had been spread before him.

His body was shaking, but he went on. Here and there a ladder

stretched upward; here and there a brazier burned. An occasional

footstep sounded. The cold moon lit up the skeletons of houses,

and red fires flickered rarely among them. He paused for a

moment at the edge of the town, but not in doubt, only to listen

if a watchman were near. From mere physical stress he whimpered

a little now and then, but he did not change his purpose, nor did

the universe invite him to change. It accepted the choice; no

more preventing him than it prevents a child playing with fire or

a fool destroying his love. It has not our kindness or our

decency; if it is good, its goodness is of another kind than

ours. It allowed him, moving from shadow to shadow, cautious and

rash, to approach the house where he remembered to have seen the

rope. All the. afternoon the rope had been visible to his eyes.

He knew exactly where it was; and there indeed it was. He slunk

in and touched it, shivering and senseless but for the simple

sense of life. The air of that infected place suffered his

inhalations and filled his lungs as he dragged the rope, gently

and softly towards the nearest ladder beyond.

The ladder frightened him, lest it should be too much boarded, or

else, bone-white in the moon, should, while he climbed, expose

his yet living body to those universals who would have him live.

But it was open for him, and he crouched within the lower shell

of a room, holding the rope, peering, listening, waiting for he

did not guess what until it came. He thought once he heard

hurrying feet at a distance, but they were going from him, and

presently all was again quiet. The moonlight gently faded; the

white rungs grew shadowy; a cloud passed over the sky, and all

was obscured. The heavens were kind, and the moon did not, like

the sun, wait for a divine sacrifice in order to be darkened. A

man served it as well. He rose, and slipped to the foot of his

ladder. He went softly up, as the Jesuit priest had gone up his

those centuries earlier paying for a loftier cause by a longer

catastrophe. He went up as if he mounted on the bones of his

body built so carefully for this; he clambered through his

skeleton to the place of his skull, and receded, as if almost in

a corporeal ingression, to the place of propinquent death. He

went up his skeleton, past the skeleton frames of the ground

floor, of the first floor. At the second the poles of the

scaffold stretched upward into the sky. The roof was not on, nor

his life built up. He dragged himself dizzily on to the topmost

landing, pulling the rope after him, and there his crouching mind

stayed. The cloud passed from the moon; another was floating up.

His flesh, in which only his spirit now lived, was aware of the

light. He still hoped for his best; he lay still.

 

Presently he peered over. The world allowed him to be capable

and efficient at last; no one had seen him. The long gutter of

his process was now coiled up into the rope he held; the room

with its voice was away in and looked on him from the silent

moon. He breathed, and a cloud floated over it again. There was

nothing more to happen; everything had already happened except

for one trifle which would be over soon. He tiptoed to the

scaffold pole on his right hand, uncoiling the rope as he went;

he pulled and gently shook it. It was slender, but it seemed

strong. He took one end of the rope, began to fasten it to the

end of the pole, and suddenly hesitated. It was a long rope;

suppose it was too long, so that when he jumped he fell to the

ground, not dead but broken. Then all those people more

fortunate than he, who had governed him and shoved him into the

gutter, would come to him again—he could hear a footstep or two

of theirs upon the ground now, and lay still while they sounded

and ceased—they would come to him and mind him and turn him out

again, down a miry path under a perpetual talking moon that knew

no wane. This was his one chance, for ever and ever, of avoiding

them. He knew he must not miss it.

 

He measured out the rope to twice the length of his outstretched

arms, and when the ruined city was once more silent he peered

over, letting that measured section run through his hands. The

end dangled much more than his height from the ground, and at

that he twisted and knotted the next yard or two around the pole,

straining against it, tugging it, making certain it could not

ease loose. The moon emerged as he finished, and in a panic he

dragged up the loose end, and shrank back from the edge, well

back, so that no watcher should see him from the road. There,

lying flat on his empty belly, he began his penultimate activity.

He knotted, as best he could, the end of the rope about his neck,

with a great and clumsy, but effective, slip knot. He tried it

again and again, more fearful than ever lest its failure, because

of his own, should betray him back into a life which his frenzy

felt as already ghostly. He felt that he could not bear that

last betrayal, for he would never have courage to repeat this

mighty act of decision. The dreadful universe perhaps would

spare him that, if he were careful now. He was very careful.

 

As, exhausted by the necessary labour, he lay flat on that stage

of the spectral ascent, amid the poles and unroofed walls, he did

not consider any future but unfortunate accident or fortunate

death. He was almost shut up in his moment, and his hope was

only that the next moment might completely close him in. No

dichotomy of flesh and spirit distressed or delighted him nor did

he know anything of the denial of that dichotomy by the creed of

Christendom. The unity of that creed has proclaimed, against

experience, against intelligence, that for the achievement of

man’s unity the body of his knowledge is to be raised; no other

fairer stuff, no alien matter, but this to be impregnated with

holiness and transmuted by lovely passion perhaps, but still

this. Scars and prints may disseminate splendour, but the body

is to be the same, the very body of the very soul that are both

names of the single man. This man was not even terrified by that

future, for he did not think of it. He desired only the end of

the gutter and of the voice; to go no farther, to hear no more,

to be done. Presently he remembered that time was passing; he

must be quick or they would catch him, on his platform or as he

fell, and if he fell into the safety of their hands he would fall

into his old utter insecurity. All he knew of the comfort of the

world meant only more pain. He got awkwardly to his feet; he

must be quick.

 

He was not very quick. Something that was he dragged at him, and

as he crawled to the edge dragged more frantically at something

still in him. He had supposed he had wanted to die, and only at

the last even he discovered that he wanted also not to die.

Unreasonably and implacably, he wanted not to die. But also he

wanted not to live, and the two rejections blurred his brain and

shook his body. He half struggled to his feet in his agony; he

twisted round and hung half over, his back to the abyss; he

clutched at the rope, meaning to hold it and release it as he

fell, to such an extreme of indecision pretending decision did

his distress drive him, and then as the circling movement of his

body ended, twining the rope once more round his neck, he swayed

and yelped and knew that he was lost, and fell.

 

He fell, and as he fell he thought for a moment he saw below him

a stir as of an infinite crowd, or perhaps, so sudden and

universal was it, the swift rush of a million insects toward

shelter, away from the shock that was he. The movement, in the

crowd, in the insects, in the earth itself, passed outward

towards the unfinished houses, the gaps and holes in half-built

walls, and escaped. When at last he knew in his dazed mind that

he was standing securely on the ground, he knew also, under the

pale light which feebly shone over the unfashioned town, that he

was still alone.

 

He stood for a moment in extreme fear that something would break

out upon him from its hiding-place, but nothing moved, and as his

fear subsided he was at leisure to begin to wonder what he had to

do there. He recognized the place; it was the scene of his last

job, the job from which he had been dismissed, the place to

which, for a reason, he had returned. The reason? He looked

round; all was quite still. There were no footsteps; there were

no braziers, such as he had half expected, for he had thought a

watch was set at night. There was no moon in the sky; perhaps it

was not night. Indeed it was too light for night; perhaps it was

dawn, but there was not yet a sun. As he thought of dawn and

another day, he remembered why he was