Many Dimensions, Charles Williams [black authors fiction TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Williams
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fortune in gallipots and other pottery ware and is called Angus M.
Sheldrake. He is an American and may have left London by now.”
“But,” Chloe cried, “do you mean he’s sold his one Stone already?”
“No,” Lord Arglay said. “He has divided it and sold the new one.”
“But he was going to have it set!” Chloe said.
“But he had a chance of meeting Angus M. Sheldrake, who is the richest
man that ever motored across Idaho, and as Angus was leaving London,
Reginald scrapped the setting, took an hour to convince him, and did
it. While Bruce Cumberland was talking to me about the necessity of
caution. Caution! With Reginald being creative. Do you know I entirely
forgot he could do that? Ring up the Savoy and see if the unmentionable
Sheldrake is still there.”
Chloe leapt to the telephone. After a few minutes-“He’s left London
till Monday,” she said.
“And to-day’s Friday,” Lord Arglay said. “I wish I had Reginald in the
dock on an embezzlement charge. Well—I don’t want to see the Ambassador
till I’ve seen Giles; not after this morning. You know I’m terrified in
case he does start multiplying—either he or Reginald. But I can’t bring
him back quicker; if I try he’ll just stop away. I really don’t see
what else we can do—till Monday. I can talk to Reginald of course, and
I will.”
“Do you believe in it?” Chloe asked.
“In the Stone?” Arglay said. “I suppose I do—in a sense. I don’t know
what your friend means by calling it the end of desire.”
“What do you think he meant by saying that the way to the Stone was in
the Stone?” Chloe asked again. “And what is the way?’
“I do not know what he meant,” Arglay answered, “though certainly the
way to any end is in that end itself For as you cannot know any study
but by learning it, or gain any virtue but by practising it, so you
cannot be anything but by becoming it. And that sounds obvious enough,
doesn’t it? And yet,” he went on as if to himself, “by becoming one
thing a man ceases to be that which he was, and no one but he can tell
how tragic that change may be. What do you want to be, Chloe?”
The use of her name was natural enough to pass outwardly unheeded, if
not unnoticed by some small function of her mind which made a sudden
movement of affection towards him. “I do not know,” she said.
“Nor I,” he said, “for myself any more than for you. I am what I am,
but it is not enough.”
“You—the Chief Justice,” she said.
“I am the Chief Justice,” he answered, “but the way is in the end, and
how far have I become justice? Still”-he recovered lightness and
pointed to the typescript of Organic Law -“still we do what we can.
Well-Look here now, you can’t do anything till Monday. If there are
any developments I will let you know.”
“Are you sure I can’t do anything?” she said doubtfully.
“Neither of us can,” Arglay answered. “You may as well clear off now.
Would you like to use the Stone to go home by?”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I think I’m afraid of the Stone.”
“Don’t think of it more than you can help between now and Monday,”
Arglay advised her. “Go to the theatre to-night if you can. If anything
happens messenger boys in a procession such as preceded the queen of
Sheba when she came to Suleiman shall be poured out to tell you all.”
“I was going to the theatre,” she said, “but I thought of postponing
it.”
“Nonsense,” said the ChiefJustice. “Come on Monday and we’ll tackle Sir
Giles and the Ambassador and Angus M.
Sheldrake and Reginald and the Hajji and-Bruce Cumberland—and if there
are any more we will deal with them also. Run along.”
By midnight however Chloe almost wished she had not followed Lord
Arglay’s advice. For she was conscious that the evening had not been a
success, and that the young man who accompanied her was conscious of it
too. This annoyed her, for in matters of pleasure she had a high sense
of duty, and not to cause gaiety appeared to her as a failure in
morals. Besides, Frank Lindsay was working very hard—for some
examination in surveying and estate agency—working in an office all day
and then at home in the evening, and he ought to be made as happy as
possible. But all her efforts and permissions and responses had been
vain; she had said good night to her companion with an irritable sense
of futility which she just prevented herself expressing. He had, as a
matter of fact, been vainly contending all the evening, without knowing
it, against two preoccupations in Chloe’s mind—the Stone and Lord
Arglay. Not only did the Stone lie there, a palpitating centre of
wonder and terror, but against the striving endeavour of Frank
Lindsay’s rather pathetic culture moved the assured placidity of Lord
Arglay’s. It did not make Frank less delightful in the exchanges
discoverable by him and her together, but it threw into high relief the
insufficiency of those exchanges as more than an occupation and a means
of oblivion; it managed to spoil them while providing no substitute and
no answer for the desires that thrilled her.
It seemed to her that all things did just so much and no more. As,
lying awake that night, she reviewed her activities and preoccupations,
there appeared nothing that consumed more than a little part of her
being, or brought her, by physical excitement or mental concentration,
more than forgetfulness. Nothing justified her existence. The immortal
sadness of youth possessed her, and a sorrow of which youth is not
always conscious, the lucid knowledge of her unsatisfied desires. There
was nothing, she thought, that could be trusted; the dearest delight
might betray, the gayest friendship open upon a treachery and a
martyrdom. Of her friends, of her young male friends especially,
pleasant as they were, , there was not one, she thought, who held that
friendship important for her sake rather than for his own enjoyment.
Even that again was but her own selfishness; what right had she to the
devotion of any other? And was there any devotion beyond the sudden
overwhelming madness of sex? And in that hot airless tunnel of emotion
what pleasure was there and what joy? Laughter died there, and
lucidity, and the clear intelligence she loved, and there was nothing
of the peace for which she hungered.
Her thought went off at a tangent to Reginald Montague’s preoccupation
with the Stone. If there could be an end to desire, was it thus that
it should be used? Was it only that men might hurry the more and hurl
themselves about as if the speed of Chloe Burnett or Reginald
Montague were of moment to the universe? She hated Montague, she hated
Sir Giles, she hated Frank Lindsay—poor dear!— she
hated—no, she did not hate Lord Arglay, but she hated the old man who
had come to her and talked of kings and prophets and
heroes till she was dizzy with happiness and dread. Most of all she
hated herself. The dark mystery of being that possessed
her held no promise of light, but she turned to it and sank into it
content so to avoid the world.
VISION IN THE STONE
Lord Arglay spent some part of the same. evening in trying to define
the process of his thought on organic law and a still larger part in
contemplation of the Stone in his possession. The phrase that had most
struck him in Chloe’s account of her conversation with Hajji Ibrahim
was not, as with her, “the Way to the Stone which is in the Stone,” but
the more definite “movement in time and place and thought.” The same
question that had struck Sir Giles inevitably occurred to him; if in
place, then why not in time? He wondered whether Sir Giles and
Palliser, whoever Palliser might be, were making experiments with it
that very evening at Birmingham. The difficulty, he thought, was
absurdly simple, and consisted merely in the fact of the Stone itself.
Supposing you willed to return a year, and to be again in those exact
conditions, interior and exterior,in which you had been a year ago—why
then, either you would have the Stone with you or you would not. If you
had, you were not the same: if you had not, then how did you return,
short of living through the intervening period all over again? Lord
Arglay shuddered at the possibility. It would be delightful, he
thought, to know again the thrill which had gone through him when he
had heard of his appointment to the office he held. But to have to go
again through all those years of painful appeals, difficult judgements,
distressing decisions, which so often meant unhappiness to the
innocent—no. Besides—supposing you did. When you reached again this
moment you would again return by virtue of the Stone—and so for ever.
An infinite series of repetitions of those same few years, a being
compelled to grow
no older, a consciousness forbidden to expand or to die. So far as Lord
Arglay could see five minutes’ return would be fatal; if, now, he
willed himself back at the beginning of his meditations necessity would
keep him thinking precisely those thoughts through an everlasting
sequence. For if you willed yourself back you willed yourself precisely
to be without the Stone; otherwise you were not back in the past as the
past had truly been. And Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone
would be purely logical.
Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense, were the rules of its pure
logic? How could you exist in that past again except by virtue of the
Stone? if that were not there you yourself could not be there. The
thing was a contradiction in terms; you could not be in the past
without the Stone yet with the Stone you could not be in the past. Then
the Stone could not act in time. But Chloe’s visitor had said it could.
And a Stone that could create itself out of itself and could deal as it
had dealt with space ought to be able to deal in some way or other with
time. For time was the same thing as space, or rather duration was a
method of extension—that was elementary. “Extension,” he thought, “I
extend myself into—into what? Nothingness; the past is not; it doesn’t
exist.” He shook his head; so simple a solution had never appealed to
him. Every infinitesimal fraction of a second the whole universe peeled
off, so to speak, and passed out of consciousness, except for the
extremely blurred pictures of memory, whatever memory might be. Out of
existence? that was his difficulty; was it out of existence? He
remembered having read somewhere once a fantastic theory that whenever
a man made a choice, a real choice—whenever he definitely did one of
two things he also did at the same moment the other and brought an
entire new universe into being that he might do so. For otherwise an
infinite number of potentialities would exist for ever unfulfilled—which, the writer had said, though Lord Arglay had forgotten his
reasons, was absurd. It had occasionally consoled him, or at least had
appeared
to him as a not disagreeable hope, when the Court had rejected an
appeal from a sentence of death, to think that at the same time, in a
new universe parting from this one as the Stone before him
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