War in Heaven

by Charles Williams

  The vibrating voice ceased, and it seemed to Sir Giles that the faintest of mists hung for a moment over the chalice and was dissolved; then, more urgently and in a lower tone the voice began again, but the phrases the listener caught were now far between. “… Adrianum filium tuum, ovem tuam … et omnia opera mea et sua … tu cujus sum et cujus erit … dimitte … dimitte.” It paused again, and then in a murmur through which the whole force of the celebrant seemed to pass, it came again. “Adrian, Adrian, Adrian …”

  Faint, but certain, the mist rose again from the wine; and Sir Giles, absorbedly drinking in the spectacle, saw Gregory’s eyes light up with recognition. He seemed without moving to draw near the altar and the chalice and the mist, his face was bent toward it; he spoke, carefully, quietly, and in English. “Adrian, it is I who speak, image to image, through this shadow of thee to thee. Adrian, well met. Know me again, O soul, and know me thy friend and master. In the world of flesh know me, in the world of shadows, and in the world of our lord. Many times I shall shape thine image thus, O child, my sacrifice and my oblation, and thou shalt come, more swiftly and more truly thou, when I desire thee. Image of Adrian, dissolve and return to Adrian, and may his soul and body, whence thou hast come, receive this message that thou bearest. I, dimissus es.”

  The mist faded again; the priest of these mysteries sank upon his knees. He laid the rod on the altar; he stretched out both hands and took the chalice into them; he lifted it to his lips and drank the consecrated wine. “Hic in me et ego in hoc et Tu, Pastor et Dominus, in utrisque.” He remained absorbed.

  The candles had burned half an inch more towards their sockets before, very wearily, he arose and extinguished them. Then he broke the circle, and slowly, in reverse order, laid away the magical implements. He took the Graal and set it inverted on the floor. He took off his cassock and put on—in a fantastic culmination—the dinner-jacket he had been wearing. Then he turned to Sir Giles. “Do what you will,” he said. “I am going to sleep.”

  Chapter Eight

  FARDLES

  “I have read,” said Kenneth Mornington, standing in the station of a small village some seven miles across country from Fardles, “that Paris dominates France. I wish London dominated England in the matter of weather.”

  Further letters exchanged between him and the Archdeacon had led to an agreement that he should spend the first Sunday of his holiday at the Rectory, arriving for lunch on the Saturday. The Saturday morning in London had been brilliant, and he had thought it would be pleasanter to walk along the chord of the monstrous arc which the railway made. But it had grown dull as the train left the London suburbs, and even as he jumped from his compartment the first drops of rain began to fall. By the time he had reached the outer exit they had grown to a steady drizzle, and the train had left the station.

  Kenneth turned up his collar and set out; the way at least was known to him. “But why,” he said, “do I always get out at the wrong times? If I had gone on I should have had to sit at Fardles station for an hour and a half, but I should have been dry. It is this sheep-like imitation of Adam which annoys me. Adam got out at the wrong time. But he was made to by the railway authorities. I will write,” he thought, and took to a footpath, “the diary of a man who always got out at the wrong time, beginning with a Caesarean operation. “And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripped.” A Modern Macduff, one might call it. And death? He might die inopportunely, before the one in advance had been moved on, so that all the angels on the line of his spiritual progress found themselves crowded with two souls instead of the one they were prepared for. “Agitation in Heaven. Excursionist unable to return. Trains to Paradise overcrowded. Strange scenes at the stations. Seraph Michael says rules to be enforced.” Stations … stages … it sounds like Theosophy. Am I a Theosophist? Oh, Lord, it’s worse than ever; I can’t walk to a strange Rectory through seven miles of this.”

  In a distance he discerned a shed by the side of the road, broke into a run, and, reaching it, took shelter with a bound which landed him in a shallow puddle lying just within the dark entrance. “Oh, damn and blast!” he cried with a great voice. “Why was this bloody world created?”

  “As a sewer for the stars,” a voice in front of him said. “Alternatively, to know God and to glorify Him for ever.”

  Kenneth peered into the shed, and found that there was sitting on a heap of stones at the back a young man of about his own age, with a lean, long face, and a blob of white on his knee which turned out in a few minutes to be a writing-pad.

  “Quite,” Kenneth said. “The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative. They might be con—con—consanguineous? contemporaneous? consubstantial? What is the word I want?”

  “Contemptible, concomitant, conditional, consequental, congruous, connectible, concupiscent, contaminable, considerable,” the stranger offered him. “The last is, I admit, weak.”

  “The question was considerable,” Kenneth answered. “You no doubt are considering it? You are even writing the answer down?”

  “A commentary upon it,” the other said. “But consanguineous was the word I wanted, or its brother.” He wrote.

  Kenneth sat down on the same heap of stones and watched till the writing was finished, then he said: “Circumstances almost suggest, don’t you think, that I might hear the context—if it’s what it looks?”

  “Context—there’s another,” the stranger said. “Contextual——‘And that contextual meaning flows Through all our manuscripts of rose.’ Rose—Persia—Hafix—Ispahan. Perhaps rose is a little ordinary. ‘And that contextual meaning streams Through all our manuscripts of dreams.’”

  “Oh, no, no,” Mornington broke in firmly. “That’s far too minor. Perhaps something modern—‘And that impotent contextual meaning stinks In all our manuscripts, of no matter what coloured inks.’ Better be modern than minor.”

  “I agree,” the other said. “But a man must fulfil his destiny, even to minority. Shall I ‘think the complete universe must be Subject to such a rag of it as me?’”

  He was interrupted by Kenneth kicking the earth with his heels and crying: “At last! at last! ‘Terror of darkness! O thou king of flames!’ I didn’t think there was another living man who knew George Chapman.”

  The stranger caught his arm. “Can you?” he said, made a gesture with his free hand, and began, Mornington’s voice joining in after the first few words:

  “That with thy music-footed horse dost strike

  The clear light out of crystal on dark earth,

  And hurl’st instructive fire about the world.”

  The conversation for the next ten minutes became a duet, and it was only at the end that Kenneth said with a sigh: “‘I have lived long enough, having seen one thing.’ But before I die—the context of consanguineous?”

  The stranger picked up his manuscript and read:

  “How does thy single heart possess

  A double mode of happiness

  In quiet and in busyness!

  Profundities of utter peace

  Do their own vehemence release

  Through rippling toils that never cease.

  Yet of those ripples’ changing mood,

  Thou, ignorant at heart, dost brood

  In a most solemn quietude.

  Thus idleness and industry

  Within that laden heart of thee

  Find their rich consanguinity.”

  “Yes,” Kenneth murmured, “yes. A little minor, but rather beautiful.”

  “The faults, or rather the follies, are sufficiently obvious,” the stranger said. “Yet I flatter myself it reflects the lady.”

  “You have printed?” Kenneth asked seriously, for they were now discussing important things, and in answer the other jumped to his feet and stood before him. “I have printed,” he said, “and you are the only man—besides the publisher—who knows about it.”

  “Really?” Mornington a
sked.

  “Yes,” said the stranger. “You will understand the horrible position I’m in if I tell you my name. I am Aubrey Duncan Peregrine Mary de Lisle D’Estrange, Duke of the North Ridings, Marquis of Craigmullen and Plessing, Earl and Viscount, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Sword and Cape, and several other ridiculous fantasies.”

  Mornington pinched his lip. “Yes, I see,” he said. “That must make it difficult to do anything with poetry.”

  “Difficult,” the other said, with almost a shout. “It makes it impossible.”

  “Oh well, come,” Kenneth said; “impossible? You can publish, and the reviews at least won’t flatter you.”

  “It isn’t the reviews,” the Duke said. “It’s just chatting with people and being the fellow who’s written a book or two—not very good books, but his books, and being able to quote things, and so on. How can I quote things to the people who come to see me? How can I ask the Bishop what he thinks of my stuff or tell him what I think of his? What will the Earl my cousin say about the Sitwells?”

  “No, quite,” Mornington answered, and for a few minutes the two young men looked at one another. Then the Duke grinned. “It’s so silly,” he said. “I really do care about poetry, and I think some of my stuff might be almost possible. But I can never find it anywhere to live for more than a few days.”

  “Anonymity?” Kenneth asked. “But that wouldn’t help.”

  “Look here,” the Duke said suddenly, “are you going anywhere in particular? No? Why not come up to the house with me and stop a few days?”

  Mornington shook his head regretfully. “I have promised to stop with the Archdeacon of Fardles over the week-end,” he said.

  “Well, after then?” the Duke urged. “Do, for God’s sake come and talk Chapman and Blunden with me. Look here, come up now, and I’ll run you over to Fardles in the car, and on Monday morning I’ll come and fetch you.”

  Kenneth assented to this, though he refused to leave his shelter. But within some half an hour the Duke had brought his car to the front of the shed and they were on the way to Fardles. As they drew near the village, approaching it from the cottage side of Cully, they passed another car in a side turning, in which Mornington seemed to see, as he was carried past, the faces of Gregory Persimmons and Adrian Rackstraw. But he was in a long controversy with the Duke on the merits of the Laureate’s new prosody, and though he wondered a little, the incident made hardly any impression on his mind.

  The Archdeacon, it appeared, knew the Duke; the Duke was rather detachedly acquainted with the Archdeacon. The detachment was perhaps due to the fact, which had emerged from the few minutes’ conversation the three had together, that the Duke of the North Ridings was a Roman Catholic (hence the Sword and Cape), so far as his obsession with poetry and his own misfortunes left him leisure to be anything. But he promised to come to lunch on Monday, and disappeared.

  “I forgot Batesby,” the Archdeacon said suddenly to Mornington, as the car drove off. “Dear me! I’m afraid the Duke and he won’t like one another. Batesby’s dreadfully keen on Reunion; he has a scheme of his own for it—an admirable scheme, I’m certain, if only he could get other people to see it in the same way.”

  “I should have thought the same thing was—officially—true of the Duke,” Mornington said as they entered the house.

  “But only because he’s part of an institution,” the Archdeacon said, “and one can more easily believe that institutions are supernatural than that individuals are. And an institution can believe in itself and can wait, whereas an individual can’t. Batesby can’t afford to wait; he might die.”

  At lunch Mornington had Mr. Batesby’s scheme of Reunion explained at length by its originator. It was highly complicated and, so far as Kenneth could understand, involved everyone believing that God was opposed to Communism and in favour of election as the only sound method of government. The Archdeacon remarked that discovering the constitution of the Catholic Church was a much pleasanter game than tennis, to which he had been invited that afternoon.

  “Though they know I don’t play,” he added plaintively. “So I was glad you were coming, and I had an excuse.”

  “How do you get exercise?” Kenneth asked idly.

  “Well, actually, I go in for fencing,” the Archdeacon said, smiling. “I used to love it as a boy romantically, and since I have outgrown romance I keep it up prosaically.”

  The constitution of the Catholic Church occupied the lunch so fully that not until Mr. Batesby had gone away to supervise the Lads’ Christian Cricket Club in his own parish, some ten miles off, did Kenneth see an opportunity of talking to his host about Christianity and the League of Nations. And even then, when they were settled in the garden, he found that by the accident of conversation the priest was already chatting about the deleted paragraph of Sacred Vessels in Folklore.

  “Who?” he asked suddenly, arrested by a name.

  “Persimmons,” the Archdeacon answered. “I wonder if he had anything to do with your firm. I seem to remember seeing him the day I called on you.”

  “But if it’s the man who’s taken a house near here called Mullins or Juggins or something, of course he’s something to do with our firm,” Mornington cried. “He’s Stephen’s father; he used to be the firm. Does he live at Buggins?”

  “He lives at Cully,” the Archdeacon said, “which may be what you mean.”

  “But how do you know he wanted the paragraph out?” Kenneth demanded.

  “Because Sir Giles told me so—confirmed by the fact that he tried to cheat me out of the Graal, and the other fact that he eventually had me knocked on the head and took it,” answered the Archdeacon.

  Kenneth looked at him, looked at the garden, looked across at the church. “I am not mad,” he murmured, “‘My pulse doth temperately keep time.’ … Yes, it does. ‘These are the thingummybobs, you are my what d’ye call it.’ But that a retired publisher should knock an Archdeacon on the head …”

  The Archdeacon flowed into the whole story, and ended with his exit from Cully. Mornington, listening, felt the story to be fantastic and ridiculous, and would have given himself up to incredulity, had it not been for the notion of the Graal itself. This, which to some would have been the extreme fantasy, was to him the easiest thing to believe. For he approached the idea of the sacred vessel, not as did Sir Giles, through antiquity and savage folklore, nor as did the Archdeacon, through a sense of religious depths in which the mere temporary use of a particular vessel seemed a small thing, but through exalted poetry and the high romantic tradition in literature. This living light had shone for so long in his mind upon the idea of the Graal that it was by now a familiar thing—Tennyson and Hawker and Malory and older writers still had made it familiar, and its familiarity created for it a kind of potentiality. To deny it would be to deny his own past. But this emotional testimony to the possibility of its existence had an intellectual support. Kenneth knew—his publicity work had made clear to him—the very high reputation Sir Giles had among the learned; a hundred humble reviews had shown him that. And if the thing were possible, and if the thing were likely.… But still, Gregory Persimmons.… He looked back at the Archdeacon.

  “You’re sure you saw it?” he asked. “Have you gone to the police?”

  “No,” the Archdeacon said. “If you don’t think I saw it, would the police be likely to?”

  “I do, I do,” Kenneth said hastily. “But why should he want it?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” the priest answered. “That’s what baffles me too. Why should anyone want anything as much as that? And certainly why should anyone want the Graal—if it is the Graal? He talked to me about being a collector, which makes me pretty sure he isn’t.”

  Kenneth got up and walked up and down. There was a silence for a few minutes, then the Archdeacon said: “However, we needn’t worry over it. What about me and the League of Nations?”

  “Yes,” Kenneth said absently, sitting down again. “Oh,
well, Stephen simply leapt at it. I read it, and I told him about it, and I suggested sending it to one of our tame experts—only I couldn’t decide between the political expert and the theological. At least, I was going to suggest it, but I didn’t have time. ‘By an Archdeacon? By an orthodox Archdeacon? Oh, take it, take it by all means, by all manner of means.’ He positively tangoed at it.”

  “This is very gratifying,” the Archdeacon answered, “and the haste is unexpected.”

  “Stephen,” Kenneth went on, “has a weakness for clerical books; I’ve noticed it before. Fiction is our stand-by, of course; but he takes all the manuscripts by clergymen that he decently can. I think he’s a little shy of some parts of our list, and likes to counterbalance them. We used to do a lot of occult stuff; a particular kind of occult. The standard work on the Black Mass and that sort of thing. That was before Stephen himself really got going, but he feels vaguely responsible, I’ve no doubt.”

  “Who ran it then?” the Archdeacon asked idly.

  “Gregory,” Mornington answered. He stopped suddenly, and the two looked at one another.

  “Oh, it’s all nonsense,” Mornington broke out. “The Black Mass, indeed!”

  “The Black Mass is all nonsense, of course,” the Archdeacon said; “but nonsense, after all, does exist. And minds can get drunk with nonsense.”

  “Do you really mean,” Mornington asked, “that a London publisher sold his soul to the devil and signed it away in his own blood and that sort of thing? Because I’m damned if I can see him doing it. Lots of people are interested in magic, without doing secret incantations under the new moon with the aid of dead men’s grease.”

  “You keep harping on the London publisher,” the other said. “If a London publisher has a soul—which you’re bound to admit—he can sell it if he likes: not to the devil, but to himself. Why not?” He considered. “I think perhaps, after all, I ought to try and recover that chalice. There are decencies. There is a way of behaving in these things. And the Graal, if it is the Graal,” he went on, unusually moved, “was not meant for the greedy orgies of a delirious tomtit.”