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

and wondered as on

several other occasions in the last few days what the Hajji had meant

by saying ‘that the Name was upon her forehead. The Name of the God in

which she and Lord Arglay had decided to believe? What did you do if

you had decided to believe in God? So far as her early training served

her, she thought you gave up your will to His. _Non est enim rex ubi

dominatur voluntas_—for where the will rules there is no king. But

Bracton—damn her stupidity!—had been talking of feudal law, and yet…

She wandered slowly back and lifted from her handbag the Type of

the Stone that she carried, to lay it under her pillow for the night.

“The End of Desire ……. the Stone which is between you and me.” You

gave up your will, did you? Your will by itself produced pretty poor

results, it seemed. Attribuat igitur—let the king attribute to the law.

…But how to find the law? “The Way to the Stone which is in the

Stone.” The Stone, Lord Arglay, God, the End of Desire. Was this then

what her absurd childish prayers meant? “Our Father which art in

heaven,” she thought, “Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will

be done on earth as it is in heaven”—and what did that mean?

 

Of course if it all did mean something it was quite easy to believe she

hadn’t yet understood, but in that case she wanted, wanted very much,

to understand; and very much indeed, with her body and mind and

everything else, she desired the End of Desire. Still thinking about

it, still trying over to herself the first few phrases of that august

ritual of intercession she got into bed, laid the Type of the Stone

under her pillow, settled herself to sleep.

 

Or to think. But bed, as Chloe had on other occasions discovered, is

not really a good place in which to try and do both, even sequentially.

When she decided that she had thou thought enough and ought to go to

sleep, for fear the next day should find her making a muddle of more

quotations, she found it was too late. Bits of her previous thoughts

half imaged themselves to her, and disappeared before she could do more

than recognize them. She thought of getting up and reading, but she

couldn’t think of any book in her rooms which she wanted to read—not

even Mr. Ford Madox Ford’s novels or the life of Sir Edward Marshall-Hall (which, a fortnight before, had seemed to her to

unite law and interest—Chloe had never quite freed herself from the

idea that she ought to read in her leisure something that had a bearing

on her work). And an how—

 

She lay very still suddenly. Something, surely something had sounded.

Only the door-handle. But it had, ever so faintly clicked. Doors did

make noises in the night—but door-handles? She felt hastily round to

see if she could remember a door handle clicking. Was there somebody—had somebody come for the Stone? She thrust both hands under her pillow

in a panic, and her fingers closed about it. The moonlight came half

across the room, alongside her bed; surely no one at least could reach

its—and her—head, and the Stone, unseen. She began to strain her eyes

towards the foot; then she shut them, in case there was anyone, and

that she might be thought asleep; then she partly opened them that she

might see what was happening. There was a faint movement somewhere, as

if of a breath being loosed, then another silence. Chloe’s right hand

grasped the Stone; her left held the bed-clothes tightly.

 

What, what, if there was anyone there, was she to do? O for Lord Arglay

now!

 

She remembered suddenly, still desperately watching, what he had said,

“Come to me”-yes, but how was she to come?

O why wouldn’t he come to her? “Come to me.” But how—but of course the

Stone. She only had to make use of the Stone and all would be safe. In

the thrill of assured safety she all but made a face at the unknown, if

there were an unknown. And there was; for one second on the edge of the

dark an edge of a finger showed. Something was moving towards her in

the night. Well, that was all right; they could go on moving. She had

only to will and-She had only to will… to use the Stone. In a

horror of anguish she understood the choice that was presented to her.

 

Her thoughts went through her head like Niagara. Lord Arglay had told

her but even Lord Arglay didn’t feel like that about the Stone and she

had said to Frank she wouldn’t use it if she were starving and what was

the man doing and what would he do if she screamed and even if she did

perhaps Mrs. Webb wouldn’t come down this time and what could she do if

she did? O it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair! How could she use the Stone?

yet how could she bear not to if whoever it was came nearer? He was

probably trying to see if her hands were empty; well, they weren’t. He

won’t know if I ve got it in my hand or not, she thought. Could she sit

up, switch on the light, and with the Stone in her hand dare him to

move? No—it was too risky; he’d think of something she wasn’t prepared

for and perhaps snatch it from her. Then she would use it; after all

she was using it to save it. She was doing for it what it could not do

for itself. She was protecting it. Not being a reader of religious

history Chloe was ignorant what things have been done in the strength

of that plea, or with what passionate anxiety men have struggled to

protect the subordination of Omnipotence. But in her despair she

rejected what churches and kings and prelates have not rejected; she

refused to be

deceived, she refused to attempt to be helpful to the God, and being in

an agony she prayed more earnestly. The God purged her as she writhed;

lucidity entered into her; she turned upon her face, and with both

hands beneath her pillow holding the Stone, she lay still, saying only

silently in her panting breath: “Thy will,… do… do if Thou

wilt; or”- she imagined the touch of the marauder on the calf of her

leg and quivering in every nerve added-“or… not.”

 

In the darkness the Prince Ali almost made a movement of delight. He

had got into the house, by the aid of certain hangers-on of the

hangers-on of the Embassy; secret service, from which even a minor

Embassy is not entirely exempt, sets up connexions which are useful at

times, and judicious inquiries that afternoon by a gentleman in search

of lodgings had let him know which Chloe’s room was. The actual seizure

of the Stone he had not dared to entrust to anyone else, but he had

been disturbed to find Chloe still awake. He had reckoned on sleep,

darkness, and chloroform, but he had not dared cross the moonlight

while she lay awake, for he had some idea of how swiftly the Stone

would work and he had no wish to be confronted with an empty bed. Now

that she had turned on to her face, however, his opportunity was at

hand. He felt very carefully for the chloroformed pad, and at that

moment a cloud began gradually to obscure the moonlight. The Prince

hesitated and determined to wait for that fuller darkness; while he

waited he took out his electric torch with his left hand, and rehearsed

his movements. A few quiet steps to the top of the bed, the torchlight

on her head, the pad over her mouth. He was practically certain that

the Stone would be under her pillow—or perhaps in a bag round her neck;

at any rate once she was unconscious he would be able to search at

leisure, with the room light on. It would, he felt, have been more

satisfactory to his outraged creed to destroy the woman who had done

dishonour to the sacred thing even by possessing it, and to avenge upon

her the insult offered to his God. But this relief he could hardly

allow himself; Allah himself must punish. The moonlight had

disappeared; the room lay in darkness, he stepped forward, his finger

on the switch of the torch.

 

When Chloe had heaved herself round with that last movement her heart

had been beating wildly, and her breath coming in quick pants. Now as

she lay she felt both of them beginning to move more quietly and more

largely; she drew long and deep breaths and her heart composed itself

to a corresponding rhythm. She still saw before her mental vision the

edge of a finger against a darkness, or rather not now the edge but the

finger itself, and at its back an indeterminate shape as if it were

thrust a little forward from the whole hand; and she realized that it

was not the same finger which she had seen a few moments earlier.

Between these two palenesses therefore she lay, the one remembered, the

other beheld, yet both present, and, almost as if in the uncertainty

before sleep, she was vaguely conscious that the two came together and

formed one stream of pale but increasing light. From somewhere beyond

her, where her hands clasped the Stone, that narrow line of light

emerged; she lay within it and it passed through and about, her without

hindrance. The more clear it grew to her knowledge, the more clearly

within she enunciated the formula she had shaped with such pain and at

last unconsciously abandoned the formula itself for the meaning that

lay within it.

 

“Do, or do not,” she silently uttered, and fell even mentally into

stillness in order that unhindered that action might or might not take

place. The light grew suddenly around her; some encumbrance for a

moment touched her mouth and would have interrupted her appeal, had it

been vocal; a vibration went through her,as if a note of music had been

struck along her whole frame, and far off she heard as it were a single

trumpet at the gate of the house of Suleiman with a Prolonged blast

saluting the dawn.

 

The police-constable on his beat outside had come slowly

down the road, and from a few yards off saw a dark heap at the door of

Mrs. Webb’s house. He broke into a run, bent over it for a minute, then

straightened himself, and blew his whistle. It was the body of a man

that lay there; they found afterwards that it was burnt as if by

lightning and broken as if cast from an immense distance. The

constable’s whistle sounded again as if with a prolonged blast saluting

the dawn.