Shadows of Ecstasy

by Charles Williams

  Sir Bernard recaptured a sense of proportion. “No-one who’s just in the throes of seeing Considine go off with a Zulu, a Jew, a clergyman, and an expert in the poets ought to talk of living on his memories,” he said to himself. He said to Isabel as tenderly as possible: “Why did you tell Roger to go?”

  “Because I wanted him to, since he wanted to,” she said. “More; for I wanted him to even more than he did, since I hadn’t myself to think of and he had.”

  Sir Bernard blinked. “I see,” he said. “But—I only ask—isn’t it a little risky … deciding what other people want?”

  “Dear Sir Bernard, I wasn’t deciding,” she said, “I was wanting. It isn’t quite the same thing. I want it—whatever he wants. I don’t want it unselfishly, or so that he may be happy, or because I ought to, or for any reason at all. I just want it. And then, since I haven’t myself to think of, I’m not divided or disturbed in wanting, so I can save him trouble. That’s all.”

  “O quite, quite,” Sir Bernard said. “That would be all. And is that what you call quiet affection?”

  Isabel looked a trifle perplexed. “I don’t call it anything,” she said. “There isn’t anything to call it. It’s the way things happen, if you love anyone.”

  “Of course,” Sir Bernard said. “Too much excitement has made me dull to-night. Of course, it’s the way things happen. The whole round world has noticed it. So you wanted Roger to go?”

  Isabel said, a little unhappily: “When you put it like that it sounds somehow as if I didn’t really, or only because he wanted to. Don’t you see I couldn’t want it because of him? He—somehow he wanted it in me. O I don’t know. I’m not as intelligent as you, but I know it was the one thing I had to have to make me happy.”

  Sir Bernard looked at her again, very steadily. “And does it make you happy?”

  “Utterly,” Isabel said. “O of course it’s dreadfully painful, but—yes, utterly.”

  On that rich and final word they fell into silence. Irony, even loving irony, could say no more. The mind accepted a fact which was a contradiction in terms, and knew itself defeated by that triumphant contradiction. Sir Bernard wished he could have heard Considine and Isabel arguing—not that Isabel would or could have argued. So far as he could see, she was saying exactly the opposite of Considine, and yet they curiously agreed. They were both beyond the places of logic and compromise, even amused compromise. They were both utterly, utterly—well, they were both utterly, and that was that. It was no wonder Isabel didn’t want to go to Africa.

  It was Philip who presently, wandering restlessly about the house, brought them news of the number of fugitives who were beginning to hurry along Kensington High Street. Sir Bernard, hearing, frowned. “This,” he said, “if it’s happening everywhere, may mean pure hell before long. Let’s go and look from upstairs.” There was an attic window which commanded the High Street, and from it they surveyed the increasing crowd. A few of the fugitives, turning aside, hurried through the square in which the house stood, but not many; most of them pressed frantically onwards.

  “I’d better make sure the front door’s fastened up,” Philip said suddenly. “We don’t want any of them pushing in.” He added, more carefully, “I suppose actually there’s no danger.”

  “Of course not,” Isabel said. “Mr. Considine said he wasn’t going to hurt London.”

  “I don’t really see,” Sir Bernard said, “how one can be expected to believe Mr. Considine. You can’t refuse your mind and yet have people accept your word, can you?”

  “But surely you do believe him?” Isabel said. “He said so.”

  “I know he said so,” Sir Bernard patiently explained. “What I’m trying——O very well. Besides, you’re right. I do believe him, but I can’t think why I should. The Second Evolution of Man, I suppose. Considine at the bottom of a well—and what a well!”

  “That man’s very tired,” Isabel said, watching a party of five; a woman carrying one child, a man with two, who had just turned into the square, and were stopping even in their haste for a necessary minute. “He oughtn’t to go on—nor ought she. Sir Bernard, don’t you think——”

  “Yes,” Sir Bernard said. “I suppose you want to rest, too. Good God, you do! And feed?”

  “Well,” Isabel said, blushing slightly, “I was thinking, if you’d got any milk, the children … I could just go and speak to them.”

  “Then Philip will go too,” Sir Bernard said. “Ecstasy has very curious forms sometimes, especially if it happens to be attacking anyone who isn’t.”

  “Isn’t what?” asked Isabel. “I thought you were talking about me.”

  Sir Bernard took her arm. “Come down,” he said. “Philip, go and open the door,” and as the young man obeyed, “Is that true?” he asked.

  She turned clear eyes upon him. “I’m no good at words,” she said, “and I’m a fool at knowing things, but when there’s something in you that has its way, and when Roger’s doing what he must do, and I too—— O every fibre of me’s aching for him and I could sing for joy all through me. Isn’t that all the ecstasy that I could bear? Come and let’s do something before it breaks my heart to be alive.”

  Chapter Eleven

  THE HOUSE BY THE SEA

  It was indeed by the sea that the house stood at which the car eventually arrived. Through the wide porch in front of which it stopped the light shone from the open door; a light in which expectant figures moved and waited. Roger got out, stiff and weary, and as he stretched himself wondered afresh at that strange company of travellers. His fellows seemed less weary than he; the old Jew’s movements were slow but not difficult, and Caithness, once out, glanced swiftly round him as if to discover any sign of the king. Oppression lay, Roger thought, on him alone, perhaps because he alone was yet unused to a deliberate co-habitation with belief. The past popularity, the long tradition of religion supported its diverse champions against a present neglect. But art had never been popular, and its lovers in all ages were few and solitary. His own belief was as passionate as that of the Jew or the Christian, but it was more often thwarted and more greatly troubled.

  They gathered in a group, waiting for that fourth of their company in whose train they had been brought there, the incarnate epiphany of immortal conquest. He delayed to speak to the driver, and as the others stood they savoured more fully the presence of the ocean. They could hear the faint sound of it in the darkness; they could smell and feel it in the air, as if the secret medium of all their journeys sensibly expressed itself to them. Fresh and everlasting, alien yet alluring, distant and deep yet delicate and close, it drew them together and unified them by its subtle existence. Caithness said unnecessarily: “We must be close to the shore; that’s the waves we hear.” Neither of the others answered him, and before the words had well died away Considine came up to them. He invited them with a gesture and they followed. In the porch Mottreux met them. He saluted his master and said: “All’s well: we’ve put the king in his room. He’s in a slight fever but otherwise he’s all right.”

  Considine nodded. “The captain’s not here yet?” he asked. “No; I hardly expected him. To-morrow. My friends will be tired; show them their rooms.”

  “I should like to see the king,” Caithness said, with a sound of challenge.

  Roger saw Considine’s smile leap out. “Take Mr. Caithness to him then,” he said to Mottreux, and then to the priest: “But do remember, Mr. Caithness, that the king, being a Christian, is not yet able to be negligent of material hurt. You and Sir Bernard insisted on his being liable to pain; you’ll no doubt teach him to endure pain.” He turned to the others. “Good-night, Mr. Rosenberg,” he said, “to-morrow we’ll talk of your journey. Good-night, Ingram; sleep.” His eyes looked into Roger’s and sent through him a doctrine of obedience. He and the ocean swept the young man up and away into themselves; Roger saluted and followed the gentleman who waited for him.

  They came into a hall which opened round them as if into dista
nces. The walls were hung or covered with some kind of deep grey from which light shone, almost as over a landscape. Its furniture was not merely furniture but natural to it; a chest showed like an antique boulder on a hillside; a table was a table certainly, but it had grown in its place, and had not been set there, a chair or two glowed darkly as if shrubs of glistening leaves reflected the sun. Roger walked after his guide with a sense of perfect proportion such as no room he had ever entered, however admirably decorated, had given him; the best had been but arranged art, pleasant to his judgement, while this was an art which answered his human nature and contented his blood. It communicated peace. He followed up a staircase, down a corridor, and was shown into a perfectly ordinary guest-room, where all necessities awaited him. His companion uttered a few courteous sentences, smiled, bowed, and left him. Roger went across to the window, but he could not see outside; the darkness was too deep. He thought of going back and switching off the light, took a step that way, and felt all through his body Considine’s voice saying: “Sleep.” To oppose that government was too much for him; he turned to the dressing-table.

  As he made ready for sleep he thought once more of Isabel. The knowledge of her moved him, yet differently. He had been apt to wonder what he could do for her; now indeed he wondered what he could do. There was all his knowledge, all his concern, but it opened up like a mountain lake from which as yet no irrigating streams ran to the plains below. The weight and darkness of this power pressed on him; he himself was the bank which closed those waters in, yet far away he was also the plain which needed those waters. They lay silent; they held such mysteries as verse held, and sometimes the surface of them was troubled by a wind which rippled it into words. “The passion and the life whose fountains are within …,” “felt in the blood and felt along the heart …” (what passion along what blood?), “in embalmèd darkness guess each sweet” (what hint of what discovery?), “Where the great vision of the guarded Mount … (“the guarded Mount”… what vision?), “fear no more the heat … fear no more …” (did that song come from within the vision of the guarded Mount wherein also the passion and the fountains of life lay?), “fear no more … merrily, merrily, shall I live now.” They did not answer each other; they flowed towards each other and intermingled, and dissolved each into others, meaning in sound, sound in meaning, and always fresh ripples rose and ran on that dark surface, away towards the bounded infinity, and in and between them all was the vast power of which they were but gleaming movement momently seen. Between them, as into that vast, received and to be strengthened, he sank to sleep. In the last second of mingling knowledge and dream he had a vision of a wide desolate plain, across which, coming swiftly towards him, ran a tall, young, uncouth, and violent figure, holding in a hand stretched high above his head what, even at that distance which was yet no distance, was known for a curiously tinted and involuted shell. It was running at great speed, and crying out as it came, crying in a great voice, “A god, yea, many gods,” and the dreamer suddenly recognized that runner and knew it for the passionate youth of Wordsworth, coming in his own dream of saving poetry from a world’s destruction, and crying out in his own divine voice across lands and waters how the shell was poetry and uttered voices, “voices more than all the winds, with power”; and the winds awoke in all the quarters of the vast heavens under which the intense young visionary ran, and roared down towards him and into the shell he was stretching out towards Roger, and they reverberated “power, power,” and the shell sang “power,” and the visitant with longer and wilder steps was leaping forward, and then darkness swept over all, and the vision lost itself in sleep.

  He woke the next morning, and lay for some moments wondering whether Muriel would be bringing the tea in soon, whether perhaps if he opened his eyes he would find that she had already brought it, and even that Isabel had already poured it out. As no-one said anything however, he opened his eyes, and almost immediately realized that his chance of tea was very small. At least, he rather doubted whether Considine’s household provided early cups of tea, and the doubt was justified. None appeared. Roger, telling himself that he didn’t mind, wondered for a second whether cups of tea at reasonable times weren’t actually more important than lines of poetry, or at least whether the two were entirely incompatible. Nobody objected to wine, and if he had to choose for the rest of his life between wine and tea he had no kind of doubt where the choice would rest. Poetry and such things could give him all the wine he wanted, whereas tea was unique, “a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.” “That’s right, misquote,” he said to himself crossly, and repeated the line correctly—“a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Under the sudden spell the immediate urgency of tea faded. It was silly to want tea so much when he had that power attending him. He said it again, slowly, and, much consoled, got up.

  Baths apparently Considine provided; he dressed and, hoping he was doing the right thing—it was close on nine—went downstairs. In the hall he found Mottreux, Caithness, and two or three more of Considine’s friends, the young Vereker among them. The hall struck him as being very cold, perhaps because the front door was wide open, and a rather helpless November sun was doing the best it could with a morning mist that lay about the house. He said almost as much to Vereker—Mottreux and Caithness were conducting a stilted conversation upon, so far as he could hear, their various visits to America—and Vereker answered that the door should be shut if he liked. “We don’t notice the cold,” he said.

  “Don’t you, indeed?” Roger said, feeling that it was like Vereker’s cheek. He was a younger man—he was apparently a younger man. Looks were nothing to go by; Considine himself was enough to go by, and at that his momentary irritation passed and he said sincerely: “Don’t you?”

  “The body, after all, ought to be able to manage that,” Vereker said, “to adjust itself, I mean, to whatever temperature it’s in and enjoy it; that’s why it’s the delicate thing it is.”

  Roger said: “And if you shut the door and turned on a furnace suddenly—then?”

  “Yes, then,” Vereker said laughing. “All this wrapping up and unwrapping—it’s so unnecessary. To do without food, that does take longer. But it’s the same principle. Here’s Nigel.”

  It was by the single Christian name (or the name which he had recovered from the misguided habits of the Christian church), Roger found, that his followers generally referred to him, partly in love, partly in submission, partly in mere recognition of his own unique quality, though they carried themselves to him with all the behaviour of respect possible.

  He came in now from the drive with a general word of greeting for his own people, and particular salutations for Roger and Caithness, to the former already intimate, to the latter courteous but distant, as if to some hostile ambassador. After the greetings he said generally: “We shall have news to-day. I’ve felt it already.”

  “A premonition?” Caithness asked politely.

  “Why do you despise premonitions?” Considine answered. “Let’s go to breakfast, shall we? Of course,” he went on, as they sat down, “if you mean the stupid blur of untrained sensation, that is, as it sounds, negligible. But if you can feel a country in its air can’t you feel its people too? All last night I heard and felt them, the voices of the great towns and the small villages, the talk and the doubt and the terror. Early this morning I felt it all gathering into one, the solitary thoughts of the peasants and the determination of the financiers; it swayed one way and another as it came to me, it veered and shifted as winds do, but it blew against my spirit at last as the wind on my face, and I smelt the news that went on it. Suydler will give way.”

  “Can you feel a whole nation?” Roger cried.

  “Why not?” Considine asked, almost gaily. “Didn’t you feel the crowd round your gate when you saved the king? can’t you, even in darkness, feel the passion of a crowd? And do you think it isn’t possible for me to feel the purpose of a wider, less certain crowd? I can feel England as you can feel English
verse. And they’ll yield; they’ll talk of peace.”

  “It’s less possible than for you to hear them,” the priest said. “They won’t yield so easily.” Roger heard the hostility of his voice, and remembered that to Caithness much more than to him, the figure which sat at the head of the table, breaking a thin piece of toast, was indeed the High Executive of Africa, by whose will the Christian missions had been massacred—priests and converts alike, going down before the rifles of their enemies. The thought shook him; lost in his own concern with what Sir Bernard mocked and he adored as the exalted imagination, he had forgotten of what the executive imagination was capable. It was not only debonair but ruthless. It had spared London, but rather from convenience and scorn, from the grace of its superior power, than from any more tender sentiment. He remembered, without any immediate connexion, that it was Wordsworth—the Wordsworth of his dream—who had exulted over the defeat of the English armies—certainly he had called it a truth most painful to record, but Roger, looking at Considine, excused Wordsworth. It was, certainly it was, a painful truth, but undeniably a truth, if any of the whole mad dream were true, that this was no matter of chat and comfort but of anguish and ecstasy. The quiet house had lulled him, as the sound of the sea in which men are at that moment drowning, and drowned men are furnishing food for shellfish, lulls the sleepy holiday-maker after food. Some other cold than November’s touched Roger; he tried to think, and Wordsworth ran through him again, crying “Yea, Carnage is Thy daughter.” Carnage … carnage … the High Executive was presiding over a changing world, and he who was following that summons was accepting the blood shed for that change. He was accepting blood, as all men do by living. But he knew it. He leaned back from the half-eaten breakfast. Considine was speaking.

  “I don’t say the English are frightened,” he said, “they desire what they think Tightness for Africa; also they do not willingly oppose ideas; also they—or some of them—desire wealth. They are divided, and Suydler will play for the rich. I can satisfy even the rich; I can buy them out. The Church fortunately has refused the secular arm.”