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

he was in his shirt he looked up and said: The ends of the

world be upon me; and so they set him at the stake and put the

fire to the wood, and as the fire got hold of him he gave a loud

cry—and said—I have seen the salvation of my God, and so many

times till he died. Which was held for a testimony that the Lord

had done great things for him there in the midst of the fire, and

under the Lady Elizabeth the place was called Struther’s

Salvation for many years.’”

 

Mrs. Anstruther stopped. “perhaps the Lord did,” she said,

“though I would not quite take Foxe’s word for it.”

 

Pauline shuddered. “It was a terrible thing,” she said. “How he

could shout for joy like that!”

 

“Salvation,” Mrs. Anstruther said mildly, “is quite often a

terrible thing-a frightening good.”

 

“A…” said Pauline, and paused. “Mr. Stanhope said

something like that,” she ended.

 

“Peter Stanhope is a great poet,” her grandmother answered. “But

I don’t think many of you can possibly understand his play. You

may; I can’t tell.”

 

“Mrs. Parry understands it, all but the Chorus”, Pauline said.

“And Adela and Myrtle Fox understand even that.”

 

Mrs. Anstruther’s look changed. She had been contemplating the

fact of Stanhope’s poetry with a gaze of awe; there entered into

that awe a delicate and extreme delight. She said: “My dear, I

used to know Catherine Parry very well. No one has destroyed

more plays by successful production. I sometimes wonder—it’s

wrong—whether she has done the same thing with her life. It’s

wrong; she is a good creature, and she has behaved very well in

all her unrehearsed effects. But I feel she relies too much on

elocution and not enough on poetry.”

 

Pauline meditated on this. “I don’t think I quite understand,”

she said. “How the elocution?”

 

“You’re a little inclined to it yourself, my dear,” Mrs.

Anstruther answered. “Your elocution is very just and very

effective, but a certain breath of the verse is lacking. No one

could have been kinder to me than you have. We’ve done very well

together—I as the patient and you as the keeper. That’s what I

mean by elocution.”

 

She turned on her granddaughter eyes full of delight and

affection. Pauline could only sit and stare. Then slowly a

blush crept up her face, and she looked hastily away.

 

“Ah, don’t be distressed,” the old woman said. “My dear, you’ve

been perfect. You’re in trouble over something, and yet you’ve

always been kind. I wish I could have helped you.”

 

“I’m not in any trouble,” Pauline said with a slight harshness,

“except now. Have I been stupid, grandmother?”

 

“That,” Mrs. Anstruther said, “was perhaps a little less than

intelligent. Why do you refuse to lean?”

 

“I don’t,” Pauline said bitterly, “but there’s no—” She was on

the point of saying “no help in leaning”; she recovered herself,

and changed it to “no need to lean”.

 

“O, my dear child,” Mrs. Anstruther murmured gently, “that’s

almost like the speech days at my school. Ask Peter Stanhope to

tell you how to read verse.”

 

Confused between metaphor, implication, and rebuke, and the voice

that disseminated sweetness through all, Pauline was about to

protest again when Phoebe came out into the garden. She came up

to her mistress, and said: “Mrs. Lily Sammile has called, madam,

and wants to know if you are well enough to see her.”

 

“Certainly,” Mrs. Anstruther said. “Ask Mrs. Sammile to come out

here.” And as Phoebe disappeared: “Do you know her, Pauline?”

 

Pauline, standing up and folding her typescript with a precision

that was almost respect, said: “Hardly know. She meets one

continually, and she’s at things. She calls. I never met anyone

who’d called on her, now I come to think of it. I don’t even

know where she lives.”

 

“There are all sorts of places to live on this hill,” Mrs.

Anstruther said, and Pauline heard in the voice an undertone of

ambiguity. For a moment her fear took her; she looked hastily

round. There was no sign of her twin. “All sorts of places to

live.”

 

“Many habitations,” she answered with forced lightness, and went

to meet the visitor who appeared from the house.

 

Mrs. Sammile was younger than Mrs. Anstruther, and much quicker

in movement. She was much more restless. Her feet pattered on

the path, her eyes glanced everywhere; she suggested by her whole

bearing that time was in a hurry, and there was very little time

for-something. Perhaps the contrast of Mrs.

Anstruther’s repose heightened this excitement. She was shorter

than Pauline and her eyes looked up at the girl almost anxiously.

She said: “I’ve only just looked in. But it was so long since

I’d seen you.”

 

“We met yesterday, if you remember,” Pauline answered, smiling.

“But it was good of you to come.”

 

“I don’t, I hope, intrude?” Mrs. Sammile went on, as she shook

hands with the old woman. Mrs. Anstruther murmured something

vague, and Pauline said it more definitely: “Of course not, Mrs.

Sammile, we’re delighted.”

 

“Such glorious weather-but trying, isn’t it?” the visitor

prattled nervously on, rather like a chicken fluttering round the

glass walls of a snake’s cage. “I always think any weather’s

trying, heat or cold. And it always seems to be one or other,

doesn’t it?”

 

“So pleasant,” said Mrs. Anstruther politely. “Like sex, one

can’t imagine anything not one or the other. Or, of course, a

combination.”

 

“If,” Pauline added, valiant but aware of failure, “if we could

make our own weather….”

 

Lily Sammile slewed round a little towards her. “If we could!”

she said. “I thought yesterday that you were looking a little

tired, my dear.”

 

“Was I?” Pauline answered. “Perhaps I was,” and added

agonizingly, “It’s the spring, I expect.”

 

The other looked at her, turning still a little more away from

Mrs. Anstruther, and seeming to become a little quieter as she

did so. She said: “I do think the world’s rather trying, don’t

you?”

 

“I do,” Pauline said with a heartfelt throb of assent, more

earnestly than she knew. “Very trying.” It certainly hot. She

felt that three in the garden were too many, and wondered if her

grandmother, in case she was feeling tired, ought to be offered

an opportunity of going indoors. If June were so sultry, what

would July be? The time was still; no sound came. A lifting

palpitation took her; she shuddered. Her grave: who walked on, or

was it from, her grave? The thing she had so often seen? into which

—she knew now she feared to be drawn, to be lost or not to be

lost, to be always herself as the enfeebled element in something

else. Never yet within walls, but the heat crept round her, a

preliminary invasion; the heat came over or through walls, and after

the heat its centre.

 

The violent sensation receded. She came to herself to find

herself staring rudely at Mrs. Sammile’s face. It was a face

that had been beautiful, rounded and precious with delight,

sustained just sufficiently by its bones to avoid, as for

instance Adela Hunt’s hardly avoided, the reproach of plumpness;

and was still full in places, by the ears and round the jaw; only

the cheeks were a little macabre in their withdrawal, and the

eyes in their hint of hollows about them. Pauline, stirred by

the sad recollection of her other self, thought that Mrs. Sammile

looked more like death than her grandmother, more like a living

death, than which, on this hill where her own ancestor and so

many others had died, what could be more likely?

 

Mrs. Sammile was saying softly: “Perhaps she’s asleep; I don’t

want to wake her. You look so tired. If I could be any use.”

 

Pauline thought, as she looked back, that she had been unjust to

Mrs. Sammile’s eyes. They were not restless, as she had thought.

They were soothing; they appealed and comforted at once. She

said: “I’ve had bad dreams.”

 

Mrs. Sammile said: “I’ve had them too, sometimes,” and Pauline

almost felt that even her dream, to call it that, was less

trouble than those other undescribed nightmares. But before she

could speak the visitor went on: “But there are cures, you know.”

 

She had spoken, perhaps, a little more loudly, for Mrs.

Anstruther’s voice answered equably: “There is, of course, sleep.

Or waking. Is there anything else?”

 

Mrs. Sammile looked round and her answer held the suggestion of

hostility. She said, defensively: “Pleasanter dreams. On a hill

like this, one ought to have a choice. There are so many.”

 

Pauline said: “Can you change dreams, Mrs. Sammile?”

 

“O, everyone can,” the other answered. She leant toward Pauline

and went on: “There are all sorts of ways of changing dreams.”

She put a hand on the girl’s. “All tales of the brain. Why not

tell yourself a comforting tale?”

 

“Because I could never make up a satisfying end,” Pauline said,

“and the tale wouldn’t stop—no tale that I could think of. There

was always something more that had to happen, and I could never

feel—not in my best tale—that I was certainly telling it.”

 

“You must let me tell you tales instead,” Lily Sammile answered.

“Come and see me.”

 

“I’d like to, but I don’t think I know where you live Mrs.

Sammile,” Pauline said, and paused on the implied question.

 

Mrs. Sammile said: “O, we shall meet. And if we can’t find a

tale we’ll do as well. Cross my hand with silver, and I’ll not

only tell you a good fortune, I’ll make you one. Like the

Bible—wine and milk without money, or for so little it hardly

counts.”

 

Pauline looked at Mrs. Anstruther. “Mrs. Sammile is offering us

all we want without any trouble,” she said. “Shall we take it

and be grateful?”

 

“Exquisite rhetoric,” her grandmother allusively answered but

faintly, and Pauline went on to the visitor: “And would one

always enjoy oneself then?”

 

“Why not?” Mrs. Sammile said. “Everything lovely in you for a

perpetual companion, so that you’d never be frightened or

disappointed or ashamed any more. There are tales that can give

you yourself completely and the world could never treat you so

badly then that you wouldn’t neglect it. One can get

everything by listening or looking in the right way: there are

all sorts of turns.”

 

Phoebe reappeared by Mrs. Anstruther’s chair. “Miss Fox and Mr.

Stanhope, madam,” she said, and retired with a message.

 

Pauline said, as she stood up, “It’d be too wonderful,” and

then, “Aren’t you rather tired, grandmother? Wouldn’t you rather

go upstairs and let me see them indoors?”

 

“My dear,” Mrs. Anstruther said, “as long as Peter Stanhope comes

to see me, I shall receive him. At least, until Mrs. Sammile

gives us the effect of Shakespeare without Shakespeare. Give me

your arm.” She stood up, and leaning on the girl took a step or

two forward, as Myrtle Fox, followed by Stanhope, came into the

garden, and hurried across to her.

 

“Dear Mrs. Anstruther, how nice to see you again,” Myrtle said.

“It seems such a long time, but you know how rushed one is! But I

felt I must come to-day. Do you know Mr. Stanhope? We met in the

street and came along together.”

 

Mrs. Anstruther allowed herself to be embraced and kissed without

any further welcome than a smile; then she held out her hand.

 

“This is a great honour, Mr. Stanhope,” she said. “I’m very glad

to welcome you here.”

 

He bowed over her hand. “It’s very kind of you, Mrs.

Anstruther.”

 

“I’ve owed