Descent into Hell, Charles Williams [top 100 books to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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to die, and the rope was on the platform above. He did not quite
understand why he was standing at the foot of the ladder, for he
seemed to remember that he had mounted it, up to his head, unless
he had jumped down to frighten something that had vanished, but
it did not matter. What mattered was that dawn was here and his
time was short. Unless he acted, his chance and he would be
lost. He went again, very quickly and anxiously, up the ladder.
At the top he got on to the platform and hurried to find the
rope. He had had it ready; he must not waste it. He looked
round for it. The rope was not there.
At first he did not believe. This was certainly the place,
though in the dawn which was less bright than the moon, and he
knew he had hated the moon because it watched him, the corners of
that stage between earth and sky were now in darkness. But he
went and peered into them and felt. Uselessly. He knelt down,
staring round, unaware of any sickness or exhaustion, only of
anxiety. He almost lay down, screwing up his eyes, dragging
himself round. It was all useless. The rope was not there.
By now, as he raised his head and looked out, the silence was
beginning to trouble him, and the pallid dawn. It was good that
the light should not grow, but also it was terrifying.
There had not been much time, or had there? He could not attend
to it; the absence of the rope preoccupied him. Could someone,
out of the world that was filled with his rich enemies, have
come, while he was down at the foot, doing something he could not
remember, and run up the ladder quietly, and stolen back his rope
as he himself had stolen it? Perhaps the men who had sent him off
that day, or even his wife, out of the room, stretching a lean
hand and snatching it, as she had snatched things before-but then
she would have snarled or shrilled at him; she always did. He
forgot his caution. He rose to his feet, and ran round and round
seeking for it. He failed again; the rope was not there.
By the ladder he stood still, holding on to it, utterly defeated
at last, in a despair that even he had never felt before. There
had always been present to him, unrecognized but secure, man’s
last hope, the possibility of death. It may be refused, but the
refusal, even the unrecognized refusal, admits hope. Without the
knowledge of his capacity of death, however much he fear it, man
is desolate. This had gone; he had no chance whatever. The rope
was gone; he could not die. He did not yet know that it was
because he was already dead.
The dead man stood there, a vast dead silence about him and
within him. He turned his head this way and that. He no longer
minded whether anyone came, and no one did come. He looked back
over his shoulder at his platform and its dark corners. Some
things were yet concealed. There was shadow; his eyes looked at
it for a long while, some days or weeks, without interest or
intelligence. Presently there was a stir in it, that presently
ceased. He had been looking at it all that time, over his
shoulder, still standing there and holding his ladder; his body,
or what seemed to him to be his body, his whole consciousness of
distances and shapes that seemed not to be he, slowly conforming
itself to its intelligence of this other world. The silence of
the dead was about him, the light of the dead was over him. He
did not like the corners of darkness or the stir in the corners,
and presently as he stood there he began to feel that he could
get away from them. He knew now that he would not find the rope,
that he would not take again the means he had once taken to
escape from pain and fear, but in that utter quiet his despair
began to discover itself to be more like contentment. He slid on
to the ladder, vaguely determined to get as far as he could from
the platform of transition. He went soundlessly down, and as he
came to ground and loosed his hold he sighed; he took a step or
two away and sighed again, and now for pure relief. He felt.
through all his new world, the absence of men, the mere absence
therefore of evil. The world which was to be represented, there,
by the grand culture of Battle Hill, could offer him, after his
whole life, no better thing than that it should keep away.
justice, so far, rescued him; what more there was had not yet
begun to work. He wandered away over the Hill.
QUEST OF HELL
It was in the house of the suicide that Lawrence Wentworth now
sat. The dead man’s corpse, discovered hanging in the morning,
had been hugger-mugger interred, the body that then existed being
then buried. With such bodies of past time the estate had no
concern except to be silent about them, which it very
successfully was. Wentworth, when he took the house, heard
nothing of the most unfortunate incident, nor had any idea of
what had happened in the space which now, properly closed and
ceilinged, he had taken for his bedroom, any more than he saw
through the window of his study the dead man occasionally. return
to the foot of the ladder which, in his world, still reached from
earth to scaffolding. Neither of them was aware of the other.
Wentworth had at least one advantage over many other military
historians; he had known war. He had served with some
distinction, partly from luck, and partly from his brain which
organized well. He had held a minor position on an army staff,
and he had been alert at moving masses of men about and fitting
them in, and removing them again. He could not win battles, but
he could devise occupation for armies. He could always, when
necessary, find somewhere for them to go and something for them
to do, and he could deal with any objections to their going or
doing that were raised. His mind reduced the world to diagrams,
and he saw to it that the diagrams fitted. And as some such
capacity is half of all ordinary leadership in war, he really had
an insight into the technical side of the great military
campaigns of the past. He could see what Caesar or Napoleon had
done, and why, and how; it was not to be expected that he could
have seen it, as they did, before it happened. He had never had
a friend or a lover; he had never, in any possible sense of the
word, been “in love”.
Yet, or perhaps therefore, his life had been pleasant to him,
partly by the Fortune which confirms or ruins the care of
generals, partly through his own instinctive tactical care. Only
of late, especially since he had come to the Hill, the
pleasantness had seemed to waver. He was not much over fifty,
but his body was beginning to feel that its future was
shortening, and that it had perhaps been too cautious in the
past. His large opaque eyes, set widely in a squarish face, were
acquiring a new restlessness. Also he had begun to dream.
Something moved more sharply in his sleep, as the apparition of
Pauline’s terror moved more surely in the streets; the invisible
life of the Hill quickening its pressure upon mental awareness.
It was a little dream, of no significance, as Mrs. Parry would
have said; it was only a particular development of a common
dream-thing, the state of something going on. He had no reason
for disliking it except that it recurred. It was not complex; it
was remarkably simple-simple and remarkable. He was climbing
down a rope; he did nothing but climb down a rope. It was a
white rope, so white that it shone of its own clarity in the
pitch-black darkness where it and he existed, and it stretched up
high above him, infinitely high, so that as he looked he could
not see where or to what it was fastened. But that it was
fastened both above and below was clear, for it was taut in his
hands and between his legs, twisted expertly round it. He was
not sliding down it; he was descending by the aid of knots which,
though he could feel them against his hands and legs, he could
never actually see in the rope as it emerged from his hands past
his eyes. The descent was perplexing, for he never felt himself
move and yet he knew he was continually farther down, down
towards the bottom of the rope, the point and the place where it
was secured beneath him. Once or twice he looked down and saw
only the twined white strands stretching away in the black abyss.
He felt no fear; he climbed, if he climbed, securely, and all the
infinite black void did not terrify him; he would not fall. Nor
did he fear the end—not fear; no monstrosity awaited him. On the
other hand, he did, waking, remember to have felt the very
slightest distaste, as if for a dentist. He remembered that he
wanted to remain on the rope, but though he saw neither top nor
bottom he was sure, in the dream, that that was impossible. A
million yards or years of rope stretched above him; there might
be a million years or yards below him. Or a hundred, or a score,
or indeed but two or three. He climbed down, or else the rope
climbed up, and about them was everlasting silence and the black
night in which he and the rope only were visible, and only
visible to himself.
It was mildly disagreeable; the more, and perhaps, if he had
thought about it, only, because dreams, though negligible on
waking, are so entirely ineluctable in sleep. Sleep had, all his
life, been a pleasant thing to Wentworth; he had made of it an
art. He had used himself to a composure that had readily
accommodated itself to him. He made it a rule to think of
pleasant things as he stretched himself in bed: his acquaintances
sometimes, or the reviews—most of the reviews of his last book,
or his financial security, or his intentions about his immediate
future work, or the permanent alterations he hoped he had caused
in universal thought concerning Caesar’s employment of Balearic
slingers during the campaigns in Gaul. Also, deliciously, his
fancies would widen and change, and Caesar would be drawing out
cheques to pay his London Library subscriptions, or the Balearic
slingers would be listening to him as he told them how they used
to use their slings, and the next thing he would know would be
either his housekeeper tapping at the door, or the light of
morning, or, sometimes, the dream.
For this assault in sleep there were at least two reasons in his
waking life, besides the nature of the haunter of his house; one
of them very much in front of his mind, the other secret and not
much admitted. The first was Aston Moffatt; the second was Adela
Hunt. Aston Moffatt was another military historian, perhaps the
only other worth mentioning, and Wentworth and he were engaged in
a long and complicated controversy on the problem of the least of
those skirmishes of the Roses which had been fought upon the
Hill. The question itself was unimportant; it would never
seriously matter to anyone but the controversialists whether
Edward
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