Many Dimensions, Charles Williams [black authors fiction TXT] 📗

minutes while she gallantly strove to keep her mind

fixed on the diagram at which she was gazing, and the unfortunate Mr.

Pondon, and Lord Arglay’s almost unintelligibly fixed passion for

restoring him, and such difficult and remote things, it

seemed to her as if an inner voice very like Arglay’s said firmly: “My

dear child, don’t blether. You know perfectly well you don’t care about

this at all. Do let us be accurate. Now.”

 

She made, or so she thought, a general vague protest that

she was anxious to do what he wanted, but Arglay, or the Stone, or

whatever it was that was dominating her, swept this aside; she forgot

it in the sudden rush of her consciousness to its next point of rest.

And this point seemed to be the memory of Mr. Frank Lindsay. She found

herself remembering with a double poignancy at once how satisfactory

and how unsatisfactory he was. The poor dear did and was everything he

could be; he held her hand pleasantly, he kissed well, he displayed

becoming zeal, and if his talk was a little dull… yes, but his talk

was not dull but alien. Talk, they all—and two or three other young men

arose in Chloe’s mind—they all failed to be memorable in talk. There

came to her almost a cloud of phrases and sentences in different

voices—preceding, accompanying, following, incidents that had certainly

not been talk. They had been extremely delightful—incidents and

companions alike—she was an ungrateful creature. But her palm rested on

something that was warmer and closer and steadier than any kiss on that

palm had been, and the ends of her fingers touched a hand that was warm

and intimate and serene. And again the voice that was Arglay’s or the

Stone’s said within her: “Go on, child.” In a sudden reaction it seemed

to her that she hated that intimate but austere government. She hung

suspended between it and Frank Lindsay. Times upon times seemed to pass

as she waited, without the power of choice between this and that,

hating to lose and fearing to gain either because of the loss of the

other that such gain must bring. She must, she thought vaguely, be

getting very old, too old to be loved or desired, too old to desire.

Her memories were spectral now; her companions and peers very faint and

circling round her in an unnoticing procession. And besides them what

else had there been in her life? There came to her a phrase -he Survey

of Organic Law.-Organic Law had never meant very much to her, and this

increasing loneliness and age was law, organic law. But again there

pierced through that loneliness the double strength upon which her hand

rested. The words grew sacramental; they had not existed by themselves

but as the communication—little enough understood—of a stored and

illuminated mind. Who was it, long before, had used those words? And

suddenly at a great distance she saw the figure of Lord Arglay as he

stood in Sir Giles’s room holding the Stone -the justice of England,

direct in the line of the makers and expositors of law. Other names

arose, Suleiman and Charleniagne and Augustus, the Khalifs and Caesars

of the world, of a world in which a kiss was for a moment but their

work for a longer time, and though they grew old their work was final,

each in its degree, and endured. Between those figures and her young

lovers, now, in her increasing age, she could not stop to choose;

immediately and infinitesimally her mind shifted and she forgot her

throbbing past. It avenged itself at once; the names grew cold and the

figures vague as she dwelled in them. She seemed to meet the eyes of

the ghostly Arglay, and he smiled and shook his head. No longer strong

but very faint the same voice said to her: “Go on, child.” But where

and how was she to go? A cold darkness was about her and within her,

and at the end of that darkness the high vision of instruction and fair

companionship was fading also in the night. Despairingly she called to

it; despairingly with all her soul she answered: “I will go on, I will,

but tell me how.” The phantom did not linger gently to mock or comfort

her; it was gone, and around her was an absolute desolation which she

supposed must be death. All the pain of heart-ache she had ever known,

all negligences, desertions, and betrayals, were gathered here, and

were shutting themselves up with her alone. Beyond any memory of a hurt

and lonely youth, beyond any imagination of an unwanted and miserable

age, this pain fed on itself and abolished time. She lay stupefied in

anguish.

 

From somewhere a voice spoke to her, an outer voice, increasing in

clearness; she heard it through the night. “Child,” Lord Arglay was

saying with a restrained anxiety, and then, still carefully, “Chloe!

Chloe, child!” She made a small effort

towards him, and suddenly the pain passed from her and the outer world

began to appear. But in the less than second in which that change took

place she saw, away beyond her, glowing between the darkness and the

returning day, the mild radiance of the Stone. Away where the

apparition of Lord Arglay had seemed to be, it shone, white

interspersed with gold, dilating and lucid from within. Only in the

general alteration of her knowledge she was aware of that perfection,

and catching up her breath at the vision she loosed it again in the

study and found the Chief Justice watching her.

 

Lord Arglay’s own experience had been much more definable. He shaped in

his mind the image of the room in which he had seen the three men,

formulated as clearly as he could his desire to offer Pondon a way of

return, and made an effort towards submitting the whole thing to

whatever Power reposed in the Stone. He took all possible care to avoid

any desire towards an active imposition of his will, since it appeared

to him that such a desire involved not only danger to himself, but

probable failure in his attempt. Less moved, in spite of his

protestations, by the mere romanticism of the thing than Chloe,

unaffected by titles and traditions and half-ceremonial fables, he yet

arrived at something of the same attitude by a process of rationalism.

He did not know how far the Stone was capable of action—perhaps not at

all; but until he did know a great deal more about its potentialities

than he did at the moment, he refused to do more than make an attempt

to provide Pondon with a way of return. How far, and in what manner,

such a return would present itself to the consciousness of Sir Giles’s

victim, he could not tell; the endeavour was bound to be experimental

only. But he did not primarily wish to move himself to the building at

Birmingham; he wanted to bring that complex of minds and place and time

again into the presence of the Stone. He resolved his thoughts into

lucidity and sat waiting.

 

For what seemed a long while nothing happened. Concentrated on his

thought he remained unconscious of the look of strain that gradually

occupied Chloe’s face; at first he was vaguely conscious of her, then

he lost her altogether, For though there was at first no change either

in his surroundings or in his thought yet change there was. Something

was pressing against his eyes from within; he felt unnaturally

detached, floating, as it were, in his chair. A slight nausea attacked

him and passed; his brain was swimming in a sudden faintness. The room

about him was the same and yet not the same. The table at his right

hand seemed to be multiplied; a number of identical tables appeared

beyond it in a long line stretching out to a vague infinity, and all

around him the furniture multiplied itself so. Walls that were and yet

were not transparent sometimes obscured it and sometimes dissolved and

vanished. He saw himself in different positions, now here, now there,

and seemed to recognize them. Whenever his mind paused on any one of

these eidola of himself it seemed to be fixed, and all the rest to

fade, and then his mind would relax and again the phantastmagoria would

close in, shifting, vanishing, reappearing. He became astonishingly

aware of himself sitting there, much more acutely so than in any normal

action; a hand was still on his, but it was not Chloe’s or was it

Chloe’s? No, it was another s hand, masculine, more aged; it was…

it was the Hajji’s. Lord Arglay began to think: “But this is Friday

then,”-with an effort abolished the thought, and went on keeping the

problem in his mind clear. The myriad images of himself that

vacillated about him were vastly disconcerting—and there

were other people too, his servant, the Hajji, Chloe. He was

doing or saying something with each of them. It was like a

dream, yet it was not like a dream for distinct memory hovered

round him and he found that only by a strong inhibition could

he prevent himself submitting to it and being conscious only of some

precise moment. The apprehensions began to deepen downwards and

outwards but not by the mere inclusion of neighbouring space. An

entirely new plane of things thrust itself in and across various of the

appearances; in an acute angle almost like a wedge a different room

thrust itself down over a picture of himself talking to the Hajji, but

within this wedge itself were infinite appearances, swelling like a

huge balloon with a painted cover and loosing fresh balloons and new

thrusting wedges in all directions. In one group of superimposed layers

he was aware of Giles doing a thousand things, and then suddenly, as if

in a streak of white light driving right across the whole mirage he was

aware of Giles watching. In a new resolution he turned from Giles to

Pondon, but he couldn’t see Pondon, or not at all clearly; it seemed to

him certainly that Pondon now and again was walking about, was walking

towards him, down a floor that ran level with his eyes, straight

towards the bridge of his nose. The physical discomfort of the

sensation was almost unbearable, but Lord Arglay held on. Pondon now

like a tiny speck was right up against him, and then the discomfort

vanished. A hand—not Chloe’s, not the Hajji’s, was closing round the

Stone in his own hand. Lord Arglay made another act of submission to

the Stone; all times were here and equal—if the captive of the past

could understand. The Stone seemed to melt, and almost before he had

realized it to reharden; the intruding hand was gone. There was a faint

crash somewhere, a sensation of rushing violence. Lord Arglay found

himself on his feet and gasping for breath while before him Chloe lay

pallid and silent and with shut eyes in her chair.

 

He stood still for a few seconds till he was breathing more normally

and had become more conscious of his surroundings; then, feeling

slightly uncertain of his balance, he sat down again. He became aware

that his hand and Chloe’s were now closely interlocked; in the hollow

between the two he felt the Stone. He looked more carefully at his

secretary; he put out his other hand and felt the table near him; then

he sighed a little. “And I wonder,” he said to himself, “if anything

has happened. Heavens, how tired I am! And what on earth is happening

to this child? She looks as if she were going through it too. Dare one

do anything?… I wonder why Giles shot across like that. He didn’t

seem to do anything. I wonder—I wonder about it all. Where is Pondon?

Where is