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Title: Descent into Hell
Author: Williams, Charles Walter Stansby (1886-1945)
Date of first publication: September 1937
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Faber & Faber, September 1937
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 15 September 2013
Date last updated: 15 September 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1111

This ebook was produced by the
Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






DESCENT INTO HELL


  by
  CHARLES WILLIAMS


  FABER AND FABER LIMITED
  24 Russell Square
  London




  _First published in September Mcmxxxvii
  By Faber and Faber Limited
  24 Russell Square London W.C.1
  Printed in Great Britain
  At the Bowering Press Plymouth
  All Rights Reserved_




CONTENTS


     I. The Magus Zoroaster      _page_       9

    II. Via Mortis                           29

   III. Quest of Hell                        45

    IV. Vision of Death                      69

     V. Return to Eden                      102

    VI. The Doctrine of Substituted Love    123

   VII. Junction of Travellers              154

  VIII. Dress Rehearsal                     172

    IX. The Tryst of the Worlds             208

     X. The Sound of the Trumpet            241

    XI. The Opening of Graves               258

   XII. Beyond Gomorrah                     290




Chapter I

THE MAGUS ZOROASTER


"It undoubtedly needs," Peter Stanhope said, "a final pulling together,
but there's hardly time for that before July, and if you're willing to
take it as it is, why----" He made a gesture of presentation and dropped
his eyes, thus missing the hasty reciprocal gesture of gratitude with
which Mrs. Parry immediately replied on behalf of the dramatic culture
of Battle Hill. Behind and beyond her the culture, some thirty faces,
unessentially exhibited to each other by the May sunlight, settled to
attention--naturally, efficiently, critically, solemnly, reverently.
The grounds of the Manor House expanded beyond them; the universal sky
sustained the whole. Peter Stanhope began to read his play.

Battle Hill was one of the new estates which had been laid out after
the war. It lay about thirty miles north of London and took its title
from the more ancient name of the broad rise of ground which it covered.
It had a quiet ostentation of comfort and culture. The poor, who had
created it, had been as far as possible excluded, nor (except as hired
servants) were they permitted to experience the bitterness of others'
stairs. The civil wars which existed there, however bitter, were
conducted with all bourgeois propriety. Politics, religion, art,
science, grouped themselves, and courteously competed for numbers and
reputation. This summer, however, had seen a spectacular triumph of
drama, for it had become known that Peter Stanhope had consented to
allow the restless talent of the Hill to produce his latest play.

He was undoubtedly the most famous inhabitant. He was a cadet of that
family which had owned the Manor House, and he had bought it back from
more recent occupiers, and himself settled in it before the war. He had
been able to do this because he was something more than a cadet of good
family, being also a poet in the direct English line, and so much after
the style of his greatest predecessor that he made money out of poetry.
His name was admired by his contemporaries and respected by the young.
He had even imposed modern plays in verse on the London theatre, and
two of them tragedies at that, with a farce or two, and histories for
variation and pleasure. He was the kind of figure who might be more
profitable to his neighbourhood dead than alive; dead, he would have
given it a shrine; alive, he deprecated worshippers. The young men at
the estate office made a refined publicity out of his privacy; the
name of Peter Stanhope would be whispered without comment. He endured
the growing invasion with a great deal of good humour, and was content
to see the hill of his birth become a suburb of the City, as in
another sense it would always be. There was, in that latest poetry, no
contention between the presences of life and of death; so little indeed
that there had been a contention in the _Sunday Times_ whether Stanhope
were a pessimist or an optimist. He himself said, in reply to an
interviewer's question, that he was an optimist and hated it.

Stanhope, though the most glorious, was not the only notorious figure
of the Hill. There was Mr. Lawrence Wentworth, who was the most
distinguished living authority on military history (perhaps excepting
Mr. Aston Moffatt). Mr. Wentworth was not in the garden on that
afternoon. Mrs. Catherine Parry was; it was she who would produce the
play, as in many places and at many times she had produced others.
She sat near Stanhope now, almost as tall as he, and with more active
though not brighter eyes. They were part of that presence which was
so necessary to her profession. Capacity which, in her nature, had
reached the extreme of active life, seemed in him to have entered the
contemplative, so much had his art become a thing of his soul. Where, in
their own separate private affairs, he interfered so little as almost
to seem inefficient, she was so efficient as almost to seem interfering.

In the curve of women and men beyond her, other figures, less generally
famous, sat or lay as the depth of their chairs induced them. There were
rising young men, and a few risen and retired old. There were ambitious
young women and sullen young women and loquacious young women. They
were all attentive, though, as a whole, a little disappointed. They had
understood that Mr. Stanhope had been writing a comedy, and had hoped
for a modern comedy. When he had been approached, however, he had been
easy but firm. He had been playing with a pastoral; if they would like a
pastoral, it was very much at their service. Hopes and hints of modern
comedies were unrealized: it was the pastoral or nothing. They had to
be content. He consented to read it to them; he would not do more. He
declined to make suggestions for the cast; he declined to produce. He
would like, for his own enjoyment, to come to some of the rehearsals,
but he made it clear that he had otherwise no wish to interfere.
Nothing--given the necessity of a pastoral--could be better; the
production would have all the advantage of his delayed death without
losing any advantage of his prolonged life. As this became clear, the
company grew reconciled. They gazed and listened, while from the long
lean figure, outstretched in its deck-chair, there issued the complex
intonation of great verse. Never negligible, Stanhope was often
neglected; he was everyone's second thought, but no one's first. The
convenience of all had determined this afternoon that he should be the
first, and his neat mass of grey hair, his vivid glance, that rose
sometimes from the manuscript, and floated down the rows, and sank
again, his occasional friendly gesture that seemed about to deprecate,
but always stopped short, received the concentration of his visitors,
and of Mrs. Parry, the chief of his visitors.

It became clear to Mrs. Parry, as the afternoon and the voice went on,
that the poet had been quite right when he had said that the play needed
pulling together. "It's all higgledy-piggledy," she said to herself,
using a word which a friend had once applied to a production of the
_Tempest_, and in fact to the _Tempest_ itself. Mrs. Parry thought
that this pastoral was, in some ways, rather like the _Tempest_. Mr.
Stanhope, of course, was not as good as Shakespeare, because Shakespeare
was the greatest English poet, so that Stanhope wasn't. But there was
a something. To begin with, it had no title beyond _A Pastoral_. That
was unsatisfactory. Then the plot was incredibly loose. It was of no
particular time and no particular place, and to any cultured listener
it seemed to have little bits of everything and everybody put in at odd
moments. The verse was undoubtedly Stanhope's own, of his latest, most
heightened, and most epigrammatic style, but now and then all kinds
of reminiscences moved in it. Once, during the second act, the word
_pastiche_ floated through Mrs. Parry's mind, but went away again on
her questioning whether a _pastiche_ would be worth the trouble of
production. There was a Grand Duke in it, who had a beautiful daughter,
and this daughter either escaped from the palace or was abducted--anyhow,
she came into the power of a number of brigands; and then there was a
woodcutter's son who frequently burned leaves, and he and the princess
fell in love, and there were two farmers who were at odds, and the Grand
Duke turned up in disguise, first in a village and then in the forest,
through which also wandered an escaped bear, who spoke the most complex
verse of all, excepting the Chorus. The Chorus had no kind of other
name; at first Mrs. Parry thought they might be villagers, then, since
they were generally present in the forest, she thought they might
be trees, or perhaps (with a vague reminiscence of _Comus_) spirits.
Stanhope had not been very helpful; he had alluded to them as an
experiment. By the end of the reading, it was clear to Mrs. Parry that
it was very necessary to decide what exactly this Chorus was to be.

She had discouraged discussion of the play during the intervals
between the four acts, and as soon as it was over tea was served. If,
however, the poet hoped to get away from discussion by means of tea
he was mistaken. There was a little hesitation over the correct word;
fantastic was dangerous, and poetic both unpopular and supererogatory,
though both served for variations on idyllic, which was Mrs. Parry's
choice and won by lengths. As she took her second cup of tea, however,
she began to close. She said: "Yes, idyllic, Mr. Stanhope, and so
significant!"

"It's very good of you," Stanhope murmured. "But you see I was right
about revision--the plot must seem very loose."

Mrs. Parry waved the plot up into benevolence. "But there are a few
points," she went on. "The Chorus now. I don't think I follow the
Chorus."

"The Chorus _could_ be omitted," Stanhope said. "It's not absolutely
necessary to a presentation."

Before Mrs. Parry could answer, a young woman named Adela Hunt, sitting
close by, leant forward. She was the leader of the younger artistic
party, who were not altogether happy about Mrs. Parry. Adela had some
thoughts of taking up production herself as her life-work, and it would
have been a great advantage to have started straight away with Peter
Stanhope. But her following was not yet strong enough to deal with Mrs.
Parry's reputation. She was determined, however, if possible, to achieve
a kind of collaboration by means of correction. "O, we oughtn't to omit
anything, ought we?" she protested. "A work of art can't spare anything
that's a part of it."

"My dear," Mrs. Parry said, "you must consider your audience. What will
the audience make of the Chorus?"

"It's for them to make what they can of it," Adela answered. "We can
only give them a symbol. Art's always symbolic, isn't it?"

Mrs. Parry pursed her lips. "I wouldn't say symbolic exactly," she said
slowly. "It has a significance, of course, and you've got to convey that
significance to the audience. We want to present it--to interpret."

As she paused, distracted by the presentation by the poet of two kinds
of sandwiches, Adela broke in again.

"But, Mrs. Parry, how can one interpret a symbol? One can only _mass_
it. It's all of a piece, and it's the total effect that creates the
symbolical force."

"Significant, not symbolical," said Mrs. Parry firmly. "You mustn't play
down to your audience, but you mustn't play away from them either. You
must"--she gesticulated--"intertwine ... harmonize. So you must make
it easy for them to get into harmony. That's what's wrong with a deal
of modern art; it refuses--it doesn't establish equilibrium with its
audience or what not. In a pastoral play you must have equilibrium."

"But the equilibrium's in the _play_," Adela urged again, "a balance of
masses. Surely that's what drama is--a symbolical contrast of masses."

"Well," Mrs. Parry answered with infuriating tolerance, "I suppose
you might call it that. But it's more effective to think of it as
significant equilibrium--especially for a pastoral. However, don't
let's be abstract. The question is, what's to be done about the Chorus?
Had we better keep it in or leave it out? Which would you prefer, Mr.
Stanhope?"

"I should prefer it in, if you ask me," Stanhope said politely. "But not
to inconvenience the production."

"It seems to be in the forest so often," Mrs. Parry mused, dismissing
cake. "There's the distant song in the first act, when the princess goes
away from the palace, and the choric dialogue when.... It isn't Dryads,
is it?"

A friend of Adela's, a massive and superb young man of twenty-five,
offered a remark. "Dryads would rather wreck the eighteenth century,
wouldn't they?"

"Watteau," said a young lady near Adela. "You could have them period."

Mrs. Parry looked at her approvingly. "Exactly, my dear," she said.
"A very charming fantasy it might be; we must take care it isn't
precious--only period. But, Mr. Stanhope, you haven't told us--are
they Dryads?"

"Actually," Stanhope answered, "as I told you, it's more an experiment
than anything else. The main thing is--was--that they are non-human."

"Spirits?" said the Watteau young lady with a trill of pleasure.

"If you like," said Stanhope, "only not spiritual. Alive, but with a
different life--even from the princess."

"Irony?" Adela exclaimed. "It's a kind of comment, isn't it, Mr.
Stanhope, on futility? The forest and everything, and the princess and
her lover--so transitory."

Stanhope shook his head. There was a story, invented by himself, that
_The Times_ had once sent a representative to ask for explanations about
a new play, and that Stanhope, in his efforts to explain it, had found
after four hours that he had only succeeded in reading it completely
through aloud: "Which," he maintained, "_was_ the only way of explaining
it."

"No," he said now, "not irony. I think perhaps you'd better cut them
out."

There was a moment's pause. "But we can't do that, Mr. Stanhope," said a
voice; "they're important to the poetry, aren't they?" It was the voice
of another young woman, sitting behind Adela. Her name was Pauline
Anstruther, and, compared with Adela, she was generally silent. Now,
after her quick question, she added hastily, "I mean--they come in when
the princess and the wood-cutter come together, don't they?" Stanhope
looked at her, and she felt as if his eyes had opened suddenly. He
said, more slowly:

"In a way, but they needn't. We could just make it chance."

"I don't think that would be nearly as satisfactory," Mrs. Parry said.
"I begin to see my way--the trees perhaps--leaves--to have the leaves of
the wood all so helpful to the young people--so charming!"

"It's a terribly sweet idea," said the Watteau young lady. "And so true
too!"

Pauline, who was sitting next her, said in an undertone: "True?"

"Don't you think so?" Watteau, whose actual name was Myrtle Fox, asked.
"It's what I always feel--about trees and flowers and leaves and so
on--they're so _friendly_. Perhaps you don't notice it so much; I'm
rather mystic about nature. Like Wordsworth. I should love to spend
_days_ out with nothing but the trees and the leaves and the wind. Only
somehow one never seems to have time. But I do believe they're all
breathing in with us, and it's such a comfort--here, where there are
so many trees. Of course, we've only to sink into ourselves to find
peace--and trees and clouds and so on all help us. One never need be
unhappy. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"

Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her
soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of
dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is
terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?"

"Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very."

"Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes
from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean
'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness."

"I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade
of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying,
are they?"

"It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I
only agreed."

"And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half-closed and
her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the
world than of him, "can they be good?"

He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are
our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?"

"We'll have them in shades of green then," Mrs. Parry broke in, "light
to dark, with rich gold sashes and embroidery running all over like
twigs, and each one carrying a conventionalized bough--different
lengths, I think. Dark gold stockings."

"To suggest the trunks?" asked Adela's friend Hugh Prescott.

"Quite," Mrs. Parry said, and then hesitated. "I'm not sure--perhaps
we'd better keep the leaf significances. When they're still--of course
they could stand with their legs twined...."

"What, with one another's?" Adela asked, in a conscious amazement.

"My dear child, don't be absurd," Mrs. Parry said. "Each pair of legs
just crossed, so"--she interlaced her own.

"I could never stand still like that," Miss Fox said, with great
conviction.

"You'd have your arms stretched out to people's shoulders on each side,"
Mrs. Parry said dubiously, "and a little gentle swaying wouldn't be
inappropriate. But perhaps we'd better not risk it. Better have green
stockings--we can manage some lovely groupings. Could we call them
'Chorus of Leaf-Spirits', Mr. Stanhope?"

"Sweet!" said Miss Fox. Adela, leaning back to Hugh Prescott, said in a
very low voice, "I told you, Hugh, she'll ruin the whole thing. She's
got no idea of mass. She ought to block it violently and leave it
without a name. I wouldn't even have 'Chorus'. I hope he won't give way,
but he's rather weak."

However, Stanhope was, in the politest language, declining to have
anything of the sort. "Call it the Chorus," he said, "or if you like
I'll try and find a name for the leader, and the rest can just dance
and sing. But I'm afraid 'Leaf-Spirits' would be misleading."

"What about 'Chorus of Nature-Powers'?" asked Miss Fox, but Stanhope
only said, smiling, "You will try and make the trees friendly," which no
one quite understood, and shook his head again.

Prescott asked: "Incidentally, I suppose they will be women?"

Mrs. Parry had said, "O, of course, Mr. Prescott," before the question
reached her brain. When it did, she added, "At least ... I naturally
took it for granted.... They are feminine, aren't they?"

Still hankering after mass, Adela said, "It sounds to me more like
undifferentiated sex force," and ignored Hugh's murmur, "There isn't
much fun in that."

"I don't know that they were meant to be either male or female,"
Stanhope said. "I told you they were more of an experiment in a
different kind of existence. But whether men or women are most like
that is another matter." He shed an apologetic smile on Mrs. Parry.

"If they're going to be leaves," Miss Fox asked, "couldn't they all
_wear_ huge leaves, so that no one would know if they were wearing
knee-breeches or skirts?"

There was a pause while everyone took this in, then Mrs. Parry said,
very firmly, "I don't think that would answer," while Hugh Prescott said
to Adela, "Chorus of Fig-leaves!"

"Why not follow the old pantomime or the present musical comedy,"
Stanhope asked, "and dress your feminine chorus in exquisite masculine
costume? That's what Shakespeare did with his heroines, as often as he
could, and made a diagram of something more sharp and wonderful than
either. I don't think you'll do better. Masculine voices--except
boys--would hardly do, nor feminine appearances."

Mrs. Parry sighed, and everyone contemplated the problem again. Adela
Hunt and Hugh Prescott discussed modernity between themselves. Pauline,
lying back, like Stanhope, in her chair, was thinking of Stanhope's
phrases, "a different life", "a terrible good", and wondering if they
were related, if this Chorus over which they were spending so much
trouble were indeed an effort to shape in verse a good so alien as to
be terrifying. She had never considered good as a thing of terror, and
certainly she had not supposed a certain thing of terror in her own
secret life as any possible good. Nor now; yet there had been an
inhumanity in the great and moving lines of the Chorus. She thought,
with an anger generous in its origin but proud and narrow in its
conclusion, that not many of the audience really cared for poetry or for
Stanhope's poetry--perhaps none but she. He was a great poet, one of a
very few, but what would he do if one evening he met himself coming up
the drive? _Doppelgnger_, the learned called it, which was no comfort.
Another poet had thought of it; she had had to learn the lines at
school, as an extra task because of undone work:

  _The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,_
  _Met his own image walking in the garden._

She had never done the imposition, for she had had nightmares that
night, after reading the lines, and had to go sick for days. But she
had always hated Shelley since for making it so lovely, when it wasn't
loveliness but black panic. Shelley never seemed to suggest that the
good might be terrible. What would Peter Stanhope _do_? what could he?
if he met himself?

They were going: people were getting up and moving off. Everyone was
being agreeably grateful to Stanhope for his lawn, his tea, and his
poetry. In her fear of solitude she attached herself to Adela and Hugh
and Myrtle Fox, who were all saying good-bye at once. As he shook
hands he said casually: "You don't think they are?" and she did not
immediately understand the reference to the measurement of Omnipotence
by mortal tremors. Her mind was on Myrtle, who lived near her. She hated
the pang of gratitude she felt, and hated it more because she despised
Miss Fox. But at least she wouldn't be alone, and the thing she hated
most only came, or had so far only come, when she was alone. She stuck
close to Myrtle, listening to Adela as they went.

"Pure waste," Adela was saying. "Of course, Stanhope's dreadfully
traditional"--how continually, Pauline thought, people misused words
like dreadful; if they knew what dread was!--"but he's got a kind of
weight, only he dissipates it. He undermines his mass. Don't you think
so, Pauline?"

"I don't know," Pauline said shortly, and then added with private and
lying malice: "I'm no judge of literature."

"Perhaps not," Adela said, "though I think it's more a question of
general sensitiveness. Hugh, did you notice how the Parry talked of
significance? Why, no one with a really _adult_ mind could possibly----
O, good-bye, Pauline; I may see you to-morrow." Her voice passed away,
accompanied by Hugh's temporary and lazy silence, and Pauline was left
to Myrtle's monologues on the comforting friendliness of sunsets.

Even that had to stop when they reached the Foxes' hole. Myrtle, in a
spasm of friendship for Messias, frequently called it that. As they
parted upon the easy joke, Pauline felt the rest of the sentence pierce
her. She took it to her with a sincerity of pain which almost excused
the annexation--"the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head." It was
the cry of her loneliness and fear, and it meant nothing to her mind but
the empty streets and that fear itself. She went on.

Not to think; to think of something else. If she could. It was so
hopeless. She was trying not to look ahead for fear she saw it, and also
to look ahead for fear she was yielding to fear. She walked down the
road quickly and firmly, remembering the many thousand times it had not
come. But the visitation was increasing--growing nearer and clearer
and more frequent. In her first twenty-four years she had seen it nine
times; at first she had tried to speak of it. She had been told, when
she was small, not to be silly and not to be naughty. Once, when she
was adolescent, she had actually told her mother. Her mother was
understanding in most things, and knew it. But at this the understanding
had disappeared. Her eyes had become as sharp as when her husband, by
breaking his arm, had spoiled a holiday in Spain which she--"for all
their sakes"--had planned. She had refused to speak any more to Pauline
that day, and neither of them had ever quite forgiven the other. But in
those days the _comings_--as she still called them--had been rare; since
her parents had died and she had been sent to live with and look after
her grandmother in Battle Hill they had been more frequent, as if the
Hill was fortunate and favourable to apparitions beyond men; a haunt of
alien life. There had been nine in two years, as many as in all the
years before. She could not speak of it to her grandmother, who was too
old, nor to anyone else, since she had never discovered any closeness of
friendship. But what would happen when the thing that was she came up
to her, and spoke or touched? So far it had always turned aside, down
some turning, or even apparently into some house; she might have been
deceived were it not for the chill in her blood. But if some day it did
not....

A maid came out of a house a little farther down a road, and crossed
the pavement to a pillar-box. Pauline, in the first glance, felt the
sickness at her heart. Relieved, she reacted into the admission that she
was only twenty-three houses away from her home. She knew every one of
them; she had not avoided so much measurement of danger. It had never
appeared to her indoors; not even on the Hill, which seemed to be so
convenient for it. Sometimes she longed always to stay indoors; it could
not be done, nor would she do it. She drove herself out, but the front
door was still a goal and a protection. She always seemed to herself to
crouch and cling before she left it, coveting the peace which everyone
but she had ... twenty-one, twenty.... She would _not_ run; she would
_not_ keep her eyes on the pavement. She would walk steadily forward,
head up and eyes before her ... seventeen, sixteen.... She would think
of something, of Peter Stanhope's play--"a terrible good". The whole
world was for her a canvas printed with unreal figures, a curtain apt to
roll up at any moment on one real figure. But this afternoon, under the
stress of the verse, and then under the shock of Stanhope's energetic
speech, she had fractionally wondered: a play--was there a play? a play
even that was known by some? and then not without peace ... ten, nine
... the Magus Zoroaster; perhaps Zoroaster had not been frightened.
Perhaps if any of the great--if Csar had met his own shape in Rome,
or even Shelley ... was there any tale of any who had?... six, five,
four....

Her heart sprang; there, a good way off--thanks to a merciful God--it
was, materialized from nowhere in a moment. She knew it at once, however
far, her own young figure, her own walk, her own dress and hat--had not
her first sight of it been attracted so? changing, growing.... It was
coming up at her pace--_doppelgnger_, _doppelgnger_: her control began
to give ... two ... she didn't run, lest it should, nor did it. She
reached her gate, slipped through, went up the path. If it should be
running very fast up the road behind her now? She was biting back the
scream and fumbling for her key. Quiet, quiet! "A terrible good." She
got the key into the keyhole; she would not look back; would it click
the gate or not? The door opened; and she was in, and the door banged
behind her. She all but leant against it, only the _doppelgnger_ might
be leaning similarly on the other side. She went forward, her hand at
her throat, up the stairs to her room, desiring (and with every atom of
energy left denying that her desire could be vain) that there should be
left to her still this one refuge in which she might find shelter.




Chapter II

VIA MORTIS


Mrs. Parry and her immediate circle, among whom Adela Hunt was
determinedly present, had come, during Pauline's private meditations,
to several minor decisions, one of which was to ask Lawrence Wentworth
to help with the costumes, especially the costumes of the Grand Ducal
Court and Guard. Adela had said immediately that she would call on Mr.
Wentworth at once, and Mrs. Parry, with a brief discontent, had agreed.
While, therefore, Pauline was escaping from her ghostly twin, Adela and
Hugh went pleasantly along other roads of the Hill to Wentworth's house.

It stood not very far from the Manor House, a little lower than that but
still near to the rounded summit of the rise of ground which had given
the place half its name. Lawrence Wentworth's tenancy was peculiarly
suitable to the other half, for his intellectual concern was with the
history of battle, and battles had continually broken over the Hill.
Their reality had not been quite so neat as the diagrams into which
he abstracted and geometricized them. The black lines and squares had
swayed and shifted and been broken; the crimson curves, which had lain
bloody under the moon, had been a mass of continuous tiny movement,
a mass noisy with moans and screams. The Hill's chronicle of anguish
had been due, in temporalities, to its strategic situation in regard
to London, but a dreamer might have had nightmares of a magnetic
attraction habitually there deflecting the life of man into death. It
had epitomized the tale of the world. Prehistoric legends, repeated in
early chronicles, told of massacres by revolting Britons and roaming
Saxons, mornings and evenings of hardly-human sport. Later, when
permanent civilization arose, a medieval fortalice had been built, and
a score of civil feuds and pretended loyalties had worn themselves out
around it under kings who, though they were called Stephen or John, were
as remote as Shalmanezer or Jeroboam. The Roses had twined there, their
roots living on the blood shed by their thorns; the castle had gone up
one night in fire, as did Rome, and the Manor House that followed had
been raised in the midst of another order. A new kind of human civility
entered; as consequence or cause of which, this Hill of skulls seemed to
become either weary or fastidious. In the village that had stood at the
bottom of the rise a peasant farmer, moved by some wandering gospeller,
had, under Mary Tudor, grown obstinately metaphysical, and fire had
been lit between houses and manor that he might depart through it
in a roaring anguish of joy. Forty years later, under Elizabeth, the
whispering informers had watched an outlaw, a Jesuit priest, take refuge
in the manor, but when he was seized the Death of the Hill had sent him
to its Type in London for more prolonged ceremonies of castration, as if
it, like the men of the Renascence, seemed to involve its brutal origin
in complications of religion and art. The manor had been forfeited to
the Crown, but granted again to another branch of the family, so that,
through all human changes, the race of owners had still owned. This
endured, when afterwards it was sold to richer men, and even when Peter
Stanhope had bought it back the house of his poetry remained faintly
touched by the dreadful ease that was given to it by the labour and
starvation of the poor.

The whole rise of ground therefore lay like a cape, a rounded headland
of earth, thrust into an ocean of death. Men, the lords of that small
earth, dominated it. The folklore of skies and seasons belonged to it.
But if the past still lives in its own present beside our present, then
the momentary later inhabitants were surrounded by a greater universe.
From other periods of its time other creatures could crawl out of
death, and invisibly contemplate the houses and people of the rise. The
amphibia of the past dwelt about, and sometimes crawled out on, the
slope of this world, awaiting the hour when they should either retire
to their own mists or more fully invade the place of the living.

There had been, while the workmen had been creating the houses of the
new estate, an incident which renewed the habit of the Hill, as if that
magnetism of death was quick to touch first the more unfortunate of
mortals. The national margin of unemployment had been reduced by the
new engagement of labourers, and from the work's point of view reduced,
in one instance, unwisely. A certain unskilled assistant had been
carelessly taken on; he was hungry, he was ill, he was clumsy and slow.
His name no one troubled to know. He shambled among the rest, their
humorous butt. He was used to that; all his life he had been the butt of
the world, generally of an unkind world. He had been repeatedly flung
into the gutter by the turn of a hand in New York or Paris, and had been
always trying to scramble out of it again. He had lost his early habit
of complaining, and it only added to his passive wretchedness that his
wife kept hers. She made what money she could by charing, at the market
price, with Christmas Day, St. Stephen, and such feasts deducted, and
since she usually kept her jobs, she could reasonably enjoy her one
luxury of nagging her husband because he lost his. His life seemed to
him an endless gutter down which ran an endless voice. The clerk of the
works and his foreman agreed that he was no good.

An accidental inspection by one of the directors decided his discharge.
They were not unkind; they paid him, and gave him an extra shilling to
get a bus some way back towards London. The clerk added another shilling
and the foreman sixpence. They told him to go; he was, on the whole, a
nuisance. He went; that night he returned.

He went, towards the buses a mile off, tramping blindly away through the
lanes, coughing and sick. He saw before him the straight gutter, driven
direct to London across the lanes and fields. At its long end was a
miserable room that had a perpetual shrill voice.

He longed to avoid them, and as if the Hill bade him a placable farewell
there came to him as he left it behind him a quiet thought. He could
simply reject the room and its voice; he could simply stop walking down
the gutter. A fancy of it had grown in him once or twice before. Then it
had been a fancy of some difficult act; now the act had suddenly become
simple.

Automatically eating a piece of bread that one of the men had given him,
he sat down by the roadside, looking round him to find the easiest way
to what had suddenly become a resolve. Soft and pitiless the country
stretched away round him, unwilling that he should die. He considered.
There were brooks; he knew it was impossible for him to hold himself
down in them while he drowned. There were motors, cars, or buses; apart
from his unwillingness to get other people into trouble, he feared lest
he should be merely hurt or maimed. He wanted to get himself completely
out of trouble. There were the half-finished buildings away behind him.
A magical and ghostly finger touched his mind; in one of those buildings
he remembered to have seen a rope. In a dim way, as he sat gnawing his
bread, he felt that this was the last trouble he would give to his
fellows. Their care this time would be as hasty and negligent as ever,
but it would be final. If the rope were not there, he would find some
other way, but he hoped for the best. He even believed in that best.

He got up, sometime in the early evening, and began to plod back. It was
not far and he was not old. In covering the short distance he covered
age also, toiling doubly through space and time. The Republic, of which
he knew nothing, had betrayed him; all the nourishment that comes from
friendship and common pain was as much forbidden to him as the poor
nourishment of his body. The Republic had decided that it was better one
man, or many men, should perish, than the people in the dangerous chance
of helping those many. It had, as always, denied supernatural justice.
He went on, in that public but unspectacular abandonment, and the sun
went down on him.

Under the moon he came on the Hill to a place which might have been an
overthrown rather than an arising city. The chaos of that revolution
which the Republic naturally refuses had rolled over it, or some
greater disaster, the Vesuvian terror of Pompeii, or an invisible lava
of celestial anger, as that which smote Thebes, or the self-adoring
Cities of the Plain. Unfinished walls, unfilled pits, roofless houses,
gaping holes where doors and windows were to be or had been spread
before him. His body was shaking, but he went on. Here and there a
ladder stretched upward; here and there a brazier burned. An occasional
footstep sounded. The cold moon lit up the skeletons of houses, and red
fires flickered rarely among them. He paused for a moment at the edge of
the town, but not in doubt, only to listen if a watchman were near. From
mere physical stress he whimpered a little now and then, but he did
not change his purpose, nor did the universe invite him to change. It
accepted the choice; no more preventing him than it prevents a child
playing with fire or a fool destroying his love. It has not our kindness
or our decency; if it is good, its goodness is of another kind than
ours. It allowed him, moving from shadow to shadow, cautious and rash,
to approach the house where he remembered to have seen the rope. All the
afternoon the rope had been visible to his eyes. He knew exactly where
it was; and there indeed it was. He slunk in and touched it, shivering
and senseless but for the simple sense of life. The air of that infected
place suffered his inhalations and filled his lungs as he dragged the
rope, gently and softly, towards the nearest ladder beyond.

The ladder frightened him, lest it should be too much boarded, or else,
bone-white in the moon, should, while he climbed, expose his yet living
body to those universals who would have him live. But it was open for
him, and he crouched within the lower shell of a room, holding the rope,
peering, listening, waiting for he did not guess what until it came. He
thought once he heard hurrying feet at a distance, but they were going
from him, and presently all was again quiet. The moonlight gently faded;
the white rungs grew shadowy; a cloud passed over the sky, and all was
obscured. The heavens were kind, and the moon did not, like the sun,
wait for a divine sacrifice in order to be darkened. A man served it as
well. He rose, and slipped to the foot of his ladder. He went softly up,
as the Jesuit priest had gone up his those centuries earlier, paying for
a loftier cause by a longer catastrophe. He went up as if he mounted on
the bones of his body built so carefully for this; he clambered through
his skeleton to the place of his skull, and receded, as if almost in a
corporeal ingression, to the place of propinquent death. He went up his
skeleton, past the skeleton frames of the ground floor, of the first
floor. At the second the poles of the scaffold stretched upward into
the sky. The roof was not on, nor his life built up. He dragged himself
dizzily on to the topmost landing, pulling the rope after him, and
there his crouching mind stayed. The cloud passed from the moon; another
was floating up. His flesh, in which only his spirit now lived, was
aware of the light. He still hoped for his best; he lay still.

Presently he peered over. The world allowed him to be capable and
efficient at last; no one had seen him. The long gutter of his process
was now coiled up into the rope he held; the room with its voice was
away in and looked on him from the silent moon. He breathed, and a cloud
floated over it again. There was nothing more to happen; everything had
already happened except for one trifle which would be over soon. He
tiptoed to the scaffold pole on his right hand, uncoiling the rope as
he went; he pulled and gently shook it. It was slender, but it seemed
strong. He took one end of the rope, began to fasten it to the end of
the pole, and suddenly hesitated. It was a long rope; suppose it were
too long, so that when he jumped he fell to the ground and was not dead
but broken. Then all those people, who, more fortunate than he, had
governed him and shoved him into his gutter, would come to him again--he
could hear a footstep or two of theirs upon the ground now, and lay
still while they sounded and ceased--they would come to him and mind
him and turn him out again, down a miry path under a perpetual talking
moon that knew no wane. This was his one chance, for ever and ever, of
avoiding them. He knew he must not miss it.

He measured out the rope to twice the length of his outstretched arms,
and when the ruined city was once more silent he peered over, letting
that measured section run through his hands. The end dangled much more
than his height from the ground, and at that he twisted and knotted the
next yard or two around the pole, straining against it, tugging it,
making certain it could not ease loose. The moon emerged as he finished,
and in a panic he dragged up the loose end, and shrank back from the
edge, well back, so that no watcher should see him from the road. There,
lying flat on his empty belly, he began his penultimate activity. He
knotted, as best he could, the end of the rope about his neck, with a
great and clumsy, but effective, slip knot. He tried it again and again,
more fearful than ever lest its failure, because of his own, should
betray him back into a life which his frenzy felt as already ghostly. He
felt that he could not bear that last betrayal, for he would never have
courage to repeat this mighty act of decision. The dreadful universe
perhaps would spare him that, if he were careful now. He was very
careful.

As, exhausted by the necessary labour, he lay flat on that stage of the
spectral ascent, amid the poles and unroofed walls, he did not consider
any future but unfortunate accident or fortunate death. He was almost
shut up in his moment, and his hope was only that the next moment might
completely close him in. No dichotomy of flesh and spirit distressed or
delighted him, nor did he know anything of the denial of that dichotomy
by the creed of Christendom. The unity of that creed has proclaimed,
against experience, against intelligence, that for the achievement of
man's unity the body of his knowledge is to be raised; no other fairer
stuff, no alien matter, but this--to be impregnated with holiness and
transmuted by lovely passion perhaps, but still this. Scars and prints
may disseminate splendour, but the body is to be the same, the very body
of the very soul that are both names of the single man. This man was not
even terrified by that future, for he did not think of it. He desired
only the end of the gutter and of the voice; to go no farther, to hear
no more, to be done. Presently he remembered that time was passing; he
must be quick or they would catch him, on his platform or as he fell,
and if he fell into the safety of their hands he would fall into his old
utter insecurity. All he knew of the comfort of the world meant only
more pain. He got awkwardly to his feet; he must be quick.

He was not very quick. Something that was he dragged at him, and as he
crawled to the edge dragged more frantically at something still in him.
He had supposed he had wanted to die, and only at the last even he
discovered that he wanted also not to die. Unreasonably and implacably,
he wanted not to die. But also he wanted not to live, and the two
rejections blurred his brain and shook his body. He half struggled to
his feet in his agony; he twisted round and hung half over, his back to
the abyss; he clutched at the rope, meaning to hold it and release it as
he fell, to such an extreme of indecision pretending decision did his
distress drive him, and then as the circling movement of his body ended,
twining the rope once more round his neck, he swayed and yelped, and
knew that he was lost, and fell.

He fell, and as he fell he thought for a moment he saw below him a stir
as of an infinite crowd, or perhaps, so sudden and universal was it, the
swift rush of a million insects towards shelter, away from the shock
that was he. The movement, in the crowd, in the insects, in the earth
itself, passed outward towards the unfinished houses, the gaps and holes
in half-built walls, and escaped. When at last he knew in his dazed mind
that he was standing securely on the ground, he knew also, under the
pale light which feebly shone over the unfashioned town, that he was
still alone.

He stood for a moment in extreme fear that something would break out
upon him from its hiding-place, but nothing moved, and as his fear
subsided he was at leisure to begin to wonder what he had to do there.
He recognized the place; it was the scene of his last job, the job from
which he had been dismissed, the place to which, for a reason, he had
returned. The reason? He looked round; all was quite still. There were
no footsteps; there were no braziers, such as he had half expected, for
he had thought a watch was set at night. There was no moon in the sky,
perhaps it was not night. Indeed it was too light for night; perhaps it
was dawn, but there was not yet a sun. As he thought of dawn and another
day, he remembered why he was there. He had come there to die, and the
rope was on the platform above. He did not quite understand why he was
standing at the foot of the ladder, for he seemed to remember that he
had mounted it, up to his head, unless he had jumped down to frighten
something that had vanished, but it did not matter. What mattered was
that dawn was here, and his time was short. Unless he acted, his chance
and he would be lost. He went again, very quickly and anxiously, up the
ladder. At the top he got on to the platform and hurried to find the
rope. He had had it ready; he must not waste it. He looked round for it.
The rope was not there.

At first he did not believe. This was certainly the place, though in the
dawn which was less bright than the moon, and he knew he had hated the
moon because it watched him, the corners of that stage between earth and
sky were now in darkness. But he went and peered into them and felt.
Uselessly. He knelt down, staring round, unaware of any sickness or
exhaustion, only of anxiety. He almost lay down, screwing up his eyes,
dragging himself round. It was all useless. The rope was not there.

By now, as he raised his head and looked out, the silence was beginning
to trouble him, and the pallid dawn. It was good that the light should
not grow, but also it was terrifying. There had not been much time, or
had there? He could not attend to it; the absence of the rope preoccupied
him. Could someone, out of the world that was filled with his rich
enemies, have come, while he was down at the foot, doing something he
could not remember, and run up the ladder quietly, and stolen back his
rope as he himself had stolen it? Perhaps the men who had sent him off
that day, or even his wife, out of the room, stretching a lean hand and
snatching it, as she had snatched things before--but then she would have
snarled or shrilled at him; she always did. He forgot his caution. He
rose to his feet, and ran round and round seeking for it. He failed
again; the rope was not there.

By the ladder he stood still, holding on to it, utterly defeated at
last, in a despair that even he had never felt before. There had always
been present to him, unrecognized but secure, man's last hope, the
possibility of death. It may be refused, but the refusal, even the
unrecognized refusal, admits hope. Without the knowledge of his capacity
of death, however much he fear it, man is desolate. This had gone; he
had no chance whatever. The rope was gone; he could not die. He did not
yet know that it was because he was already dead.

The dead man stood there, a vast dead silence about him and within him.
He turned his head this way and that. He no longer minded whether anyone
came, and no one did come. He looked back over his shoulder at his
platform and its dark corners. Some things were yet concealed. There
was shadow; his eyes looked at it for a long while, some days or weeks,
without interest or intelligence. Presently there was a stir in it, that
presently ceased. He had been looking at it all that time, over his
shoulder, still standing there and holding his ladder; his body, or
what seemed to him to be his body, his whole consciousness of distances
and shapes that seemed not to be he, slowly conforming itself to its
intelligence of this other world. The silence of the dead was about
him, the light of the dead was over him. He did not like the corners of
darkness or the stir in the corners, and presently as he stood there
he began to feel that he could get away from them. He knew now that he
would not find the rope, that he would not take again the means he had
once taken to escape from pain and fear, but in that utter quiet his
despair began to discover itself to be more like contentment. He slid
on to the ladder, vaguely determined to get as far as he could from the
platform of transition. He went soundlessly down, and as he came to
ground and loosed his hold he sighed; he took a step or two away and
sighed again, and now for pure relief. He felt, through all his new
world, the absence of men, the mere absence therefore of evil. The world
which was to be represented, there, by the grand culture of Battle Hill,
could offer him, after his whole life, no better thing than that it
should keep away. Justice, so far, rescued him; what more there was had
not yet begun to work. He wandered away over the Hill.




Chapter III

QUEST OF HELL


It was in the house of the suicide that Lawrence Wentworth now sat.
The dead man's corpse, discovered hanging in the morning, had been
hugger-mugger interred, the body that then existed being then buried.
With such bodies of past time the estate had no concern except to be
silent about them, which it very successfully was. Wentworth, when he
took the house, heard nothing of the most unfortunate incident, nor had
any idea of what had happened in the space which now, properly closed
and ceilinged, he had taken for his bedroom, any more than he saw
through the window of his study the dead man occasionally return to the
foot of the ladder which, in his world, still reached from earth to
scaffolding. Neither of them was aware of the other.

Wentworth had at least one advantage over many other military
historians; he had known war. He had served with some distinction,
partly from luck, and partly from his brain, which organized well. He
had held a minor position on an army staff, and he had been alert at
moving masses of men about, and fitting them in, and removing them
again. He could not win battles, but he could devise occupation for
armies. He could always, when necessary, find somewhere for them to go
and something for them to do, and he could deal with any objections to
their going or doing that were raised. His mind reduced the world to
diagrams, and he saw to it that the diagrams fitted. And as some such
capacity is half of all ordinary leadership in war, he really had an
insight into the technical side of the great military campaigns of the
past. He could see what Csar or Napoleon had done, and why, and how; it
was not to be expected that he could have seen it, as they did, before
it happened. He had never had a friend or a lover; he had never, in any
possible sense of the word, been "in love".

Yet, or perhaps therefore, his life had been pleasant to him, partly by
the Fortune which confirms or ruins the care of generals, partly through
his own instinctive tactical care. Only of late, especially since he had
come to the Hill, the pleasantness had seemed to waver. He was not much
over fifty, but his body was beginning to feel that its future was
shortening, and that it had perhaps been too cautious in the past. His
large opaque eyes, set widely in a squarish face, were acquiring a new
restlessness. Also he had begun to dream. Something moved more sharply
in his sleep, as the apparition of Pauline's terror moved more surely
in the streets; the invisible life of the Hill quickening its pressure
upon mental awareness.

It was a little dream, of no significance, as Mrs. Parry would have
said; it was only a particular development of a common dream-thing, the
state of something going on. He had no reason for disliking it except
that it recurred. It was not complex; it was remarkably simple--simple
and remarkable. He was climbing down a rope; he did nothing but climb
down a rope. It was a white rope, so white that it shone of its own
clarity in the pitch-black darkness where it and he existed, and it
stretched up high above him, infinitely high, so that as he looked he
could not see where or to what it was fastened. But that it was fastened
both above and below was clear, for it was taut in his hands and between
his legs, twisted expertly round it. He was not sliding down it; he was
descending by the aid of knots which, though he could feel them against
his hands and legs, he could never actually see in the rope as it
emerged from his hands past his eyes. The descent was perplexing, for he
never felt himself move and yet he knew he was continually farther down,
down towards the bottom of the rope, the point and the place where it
was secured beneath him. Once or twice he looked down and saw only the
twined white strands stretching away in the black abyss. He felt no
fear; he climbed, if he climbed, securely, and all the infinite black
void did not terrify him; he would not fall. Nor did he fear the
end--not _fear_; no monstrosity awaited him. On the other hand, he did,
waking, remember to have felt the very slightest distaste, as if for a
dentist. He remembered that he wanted to remain on the rope, but though
he saw neither top nor bottom he was sure, in the dream, that that was
impossible. A million yards or years of rope stretched above him; there
might be a million years or yards below him. Or a hundred, or a score,
or indeed but two or three. He climbed down, or else the rope climbed
up, and about them was everlasting silence and the black night in which
he and the rope only were visible, and only visible to himself.

It was mildly disagreeable; the more, and perhaps, if he had thought
about it, only, because dreams, though negligible on waking, are so
entirely ineluctable in sleep. Sleep had, all his life, been a pleasant
thing to Wentworth; he had made of it an art. He had used himself to a
composure that had readily accommodated itself to him. He made it a
rule to think of pleasant things as he stretched himself in bed: his
acquaintances sometimes, or the reviews--most of the reviews--of his
last book, or his financial security, or his intentions about his
immediate future work, or the permanent alterations he hoped he had
caused in universal thought concerning Csar's employment of Balearic
slingers during the campaigns in Gaul. Also, deliciously, his fancies
would widen and change, and Csar would be drawing out cheques to pay
his London Library subscriptions, or the Balearic slingers would be
listening to him as he told them how they used to use their slings, and
the next thing he would know would be either his housekeeper tapping at
the door, or the light of morning, or, sometimes, the dream.

For this assault in sleep there were at least two personal reasons in
his waking life, besides the nature of the Hill or the haunter of his
house; one of them very much in the forefront of his mind, the other
secret and not much admitted. The first was Aston Moffatt; the second
was Adela Hunt. Aston Moffatt was another military historian, perhaps
the only other worth mentioning, and Wentworth and he were engaged in a
long and complicated controversy on the problem of the least of those
skirmishes of the Roses which had been fought upon the Hill. The
question itself was unimportant; it would never seriously matter to
anyone but the controversialists whether Edward Plantagenet's cavalry
had come across the river with the dawn or over the meadows by the
church at about noon. But a phrase, a doubt, a contradiction, had
involved the two in argument. Aston Moffatt, who was by now almost
seventy, derived a great deal of intellectual joy from expounding his
point of view. He was a pure scholar, a holy and beautiful soul who
would have sacrificed reputation, income, and life, if necessary, for
the discovery of one fact about the horse-boys of Edward Plantagenet.
He had determined his nature. Wentworth was younger and at a more
critical point, at that moment when a man's real concern begins to
separate itself from his pretended, and almost to become independent
of himself. He raged secretly as he wrote his letters and drew up his
evidence; he identified scholarship with himself, and asserted himself
under the disguise of a defence of scholarship. He refused to admit that
the exact detail of Edward's march was not, in fact, worth to him the
cost of a single cigar.

As for Adela, he was very well aware of Adela, as he was aware of
cigars, but he did not yet know what he would give up for her, or
rather for the manner of life which included her. As Aston Moffatt was
bound either to lessen or heighten Wentworth's awareness of his own
reputation, so Adela was bound either to increase or abolish his
awareness of his age. He knew time was beginning to hurry; he could at
moments almost hear it scamper. He did not very well know what he wanted
to do about it.

He was sitting now in his study, his large body leaning forward over the
table, and his hands had paused in measuring the plan that lay in front
of him. He was finding the answer to Aston Moffatt's last published
letter difficult, yet he was determined that Moffatt could not be
right. He was beginning to twist the intention of the sentences in his
authorities, preferring strange meanings and awkward constructions,
adjusting evidence, manipulating words. In defence of his conclusion he
was willing to cheat in the evidence--a habit more usual to religious
writers than to historical. But he was still innocent enough to be
irritated; he felt, as it were, a roughness in the rope of his dream,
and he was intensely awake to any other slights from any quarter. He
looked sharply to see if there were more Moffatts in the world. At that
inconvenient moment on that evening Adela arrived, with Hugh. It was
long since he had seen her in the company of one young man: alone, or
with one woman, or with several young men and women, but not, as it
happened, so. He stood up when they were announced, and as they came
in, Adela's short red-and-cream thickness overshadowed by Hugh's rather
flagrant masculinity, he felt something jerk in him, as if a knot had
been first tied and then suddenly pulled loose. He had written but that
morning in an article on the return of Edward IV, "the treachery of the
Earl destroyed the balance". Remote, five hundred years away, he felt it
in the room; a destruction of balance. Then they were sitting down and
Adela was talking.

She explained, prettily, why they had come. Hugh, watching, decided that
she must not behave quite so prettily. Hugh had no jerks or quavers.
He had decided some time since that Adela should marry him when he was
ready, and was giving himself the pleasurable trouble of making this
clear to her. There was a touch too much gusto in her manner towards
Wentworth. She had been, as he had, and some others of the young, in the
habit of spending an evening, once a fortnight or so, at Wentworth's
house, talking about military history and the principles of art and the
nature of the gods. During the summer these informal gatherings were
less frequent, because of tennis and motor-rides and the nature of men
and women. Hugh meant that for Adela they should stop altogether. He
observed an intimacy; he chose that it should not continue, partly
because he wished Adela to belong to him and partly because the mere
action of breaking it would show how far Adela was prepared to go with
him. His mind made arrangements.

Adela explained. Wentworth said: "Very well, I'll do anything I can.
What is it you want?" He felt ungracious; he blamed Aston Moffatt.

"O, the costumes," Adela answered. "The Guard especially. The Grand Duke
has a guard, you see, though there didn't seem to be much point in it.
But it has a fight with the robbers, and if you'd see that it fought
reasonably well...." She did not trouble to enlarge on her own view that
the fight ought to be quite unrealistic; she knew that Mr. Wentworth did
not much care for non-realistic art, and till recently she had preferred
her mild satisfaction with her invasion of Wentworth's consciousness to
any bigotry of artistic interpretation.

Hugh said: "It'd be frightfully good of you to give me a hand with my
Guard, Mr. Wentworth." He infused the "Mister" with an air of courteous
deference to age, and as he ended the sentence he stretched and bent an
arm in the lazy good humour of youth. Neither of the others analysed
stress and motion, yet their blood was stirred, Adela faintly flushing
with a new gratification, Wentworth faintly flushing with a new anger.
He said, "Are you to be the Grand Duke then, Prescott?"

"So Mrs. Parry seems to suggest," Hugh answered, and added, as if a
thought had struck him, "unless--Adela, d'you think Mr. Wentworth would
take the part himself? Isn't that an idea?"

Before Adela could answer Wentworth said: "Nonsense; I've never acted in
my life."

"I'm quite sure," Hugh said, leaning comfortably forward with his elbows
on his knees and his strong hands interlocked, "that you'd be a better
father for the princess than I should. I think there's no doubt Adela'll
have to be the princess."

"O, I don't see that," said Adela, "though it's true Mrs. Parry ... but
there are lots of others. But, Mr. Wentworth, would you? You'd give it
a kind of ...", she thought of "age" and substituted "force". "I was
saying to Hugh as we came along that all it needs is force."

"I certainly wouldn't take it away from Prescott," Wentworth said. "He's
much better at these games than I could be." He had tried to give to
the words a genial and mature tolerance, but he heard them as merely
hostile; so did the others.

"Ah, but then," Hugh answered, "you know such a lot about battles and
history--battles long ago. You'd certainly be more suitable for Adela's
father--sir."

Wentworth said: "I'll keep myself for the Guard. What period did you
say?"

"They seem to think 1700," Adela said. "I know Mrs. Parry said something
about eighteenth-century uniforms. She's going to write to you."

Hugh stood up. "So we oughtn't to keep you," he added. "Adela and I are
going back to talk to her now. Come on, duchess--or whatever it is they
call you."

Adela obeyed. Wentworth noted, with an interior irritation, that she
really did. She moved to rise with something more than consent. It was
what he had never had--consent, yes, but not this obedience. Hugh had
given her his hand to pull her up, and in that strained air the movement
was a proclamation. He added, as she stood by his side: "Do change your
mind, sir, and show us all how to be a _Grand Sicle_ father. I'll ask
Mrs. Parry to put it to you."

"You certainly won't," Wentworth said. "I've no time to be a father."

"Odd way of putting it," Hugh said when they were outside. "I don't know
why your Mr. Wentworth should be so peeved at the idea. Personally, I
rather like it."

Adela was silent. She was well aware of the defiance--nor even a
defiance, the rumour of a struggle long ago--that Hugh had brought into
the conversation. Wentworth had been relegated, for those few sentences,
to his place in the shadowy past of Battle Hill. The notice he had taken
of her had been a dim flattery; now it was more dim and less flattering.
She had been increasingly aware, since she had met Hugh, of her militant
blood; of contemporary raid and real contest, as of some battle "where
they charge on heaps the enemy flying". But she did not quite wish to
lose Lawrence Wentworth; he had given her books, he had friends in
London, he could perhaps be useful. She desired a career. She could be
sensationally deferential on Thursday, if, as she expected, she went to
him on Thursday. There had been, at the last gathering, ten days before,
an agreement on next Thursday. She had just accomplished this decision
when Hugh said: "By the way, I wanted to ask you something. What about
next Thursday?"

"Next Thursday?" she said, startled.

"Couldn't you come out somewhere in the evening?"

"But ..." Adela paused, and Hugh went on: "I thought we might have
dinner in town, and go to a show if you liked."

"I'd love it," Adela said. "But it needn't be Thursday?"

"I'm afraid it must," Hugh answered. "There's tennis at the Foxes' on
Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday I shall be late at work, and Friday
we're to read the play, and the Parry's almost certain to want us on the
Saturday too."

Adela said again: "I'd love it, but I was going to Mr. Wentworth's on
Thursday. I mean, we've been going rather steadily, and last time I
practically promised."

"I know you did," said Hugh. "So did I, but we can't help it."

"Couldn't we go another week?" Adela asked.

"With this play about?" Hugh said sardonically. "My dear, we're going to
be clutched by rehearsals every evening. Of course, we can leave it if
you'd rather, but you said you'd like to see that thing _The Second
Pylon_--it's your style--and as it's only on till Saturday ... well, as
a matter of fact, I got a couple of tickets for Thursday on the chance.
I knew it'd be our only night."

"Hugh!" Adela exclaimed. "But I want frightfully to see it; they
say it's got the most marvellous example of this Surrealist plastic
cohesion. O, Hugh, how splendid of you! The only thing is...."

"Pauline'll be going to Wentworth's, won't she?" Hugh said. "And
probably others. He can talk to them."

They were both aware that this would be by no means the same thing.
They were equally both aware that it was what was about to happen; and
that by Thursday evening it would have happened. Adela found that her
hesitation about the future had already become a regret for the past:
the thing had been done. A willing Calvinist, she said: "I hope he won't
think it rude. He's been very nice."

"Naturally," Hugh answered. "But now it's up to you to be nice. Grand
Dukes ought to be gratified, oughtn't they?"

"You asked him to be the Grand Duke," Adela pointed out.

"I asked him to be your father," Hugh said. "I don't think I had any
notion of his being a Grand Duke."

He looked at her, laughing. "Write him a note on Wednesday," he said,
"and I'll ring him up on Thursday evening from London, and ask him to
make my excuses to you and Pauline and the rest."

"Hugh!" Adela exclaimed, "you couldn't!" Then, dimpling and gurgling,
she added: "He's been very kind to me. I should hate him to feel hurt."

"So should I," Hugh said gravely. "Very well; that's settled."

Unfortunately for this delicate workmanship, the two or three other
young creatures who had shared, with Adela, Hugh, and Pauline, the
coffee and culture of Wentworth's house, were also deflected from it
on that Thursday by tennis or the play; unfortunately, because the
incidents of the Saturday had left him more acutely conscious at once of
his need for Adela and of his need for flattery. He did not fully admit
either; he rather defended himself mentally against Hugh's offensiveness
than surrendered to his knowledge of his desire. Even so he refused to
admit that he was engaged in a battle. He demanded at once security and
victory, a habit not common to those great masters whose campaigns he
studied. He remembered the past--the few intimate talks with Adela, the
lingering hands, the exchanged eyes. Rather like Pompey, he refused
to take measures against the threat on the other side the Rubicon;
he faintly admitted that there was a Rubicon, but certainly not that
there might be a Csar. He assumed that the Rome which had, he thought,
admired him so much and so long, was still his, and he desired it to
make his ownership clear. He was prepared to overlook that Saturday as
not being Adela's fault as soon as the Thursday should bring him Adela's
accustomed propinquity; perhaps, for compensation's sake and for promise
of a veiled conclusion, a little more than propinquity. It was the more
shattering for him that her note only reached him by the late post an
hour or so before his guests usually arrived.

She had had, she said, to go to town that day to see about the stuff
for her costume; things would be rushed, and she hadn't liked to make
difficulties. She was dreadfully distressed; she might well be, he
thought, with a greater flush of anger than he knew. He glanced at
another note of excuse almost with indifference. But he was still
ruffled when Pauline arrived, and it was with a certain abruptness
that he told her he expected no one else but Prescott.

When, ten minutes later, the telephone bell rang, and he heard
Prescott's voice offering his own regrets and explaining that absolutely
unavoidable work kept him at the office: would Mr. Wentworth be so good
as to apologize to Adela?--he was not sure if he were glad or sorry. It
saved him from Prescott, but it left him tiresomely alone with Pauline.
Pauline had a recurrent tendency to lose the finer points of military
strategy in an unnecessary discussion of the sufferings of the rank and
file; neither of them knew that it was the comfort of his house and his
chairs--not to reckon her companionship with men in grief--which incited
her. He did not think he wanted to have to talk to Pauline, but he was
pleased to think he need not carry Hugh's message to Adela. He could
not, of course, know that Adela was then squeezed into the same
telephone box as Hugh. She had objected at first, but Hugh had
pleasantly overpersuaded her, and it was true she did want to know
exactly what he said--so as to know. And it was attractive to hear him
telephone apologies to her when she was close at his side, to listen
to the cool formality with which he dispatched ambassadorial messages
to phantom ears, so that her actual ears received the chill while her
actual eyes sparkled and kindled at his as he stood with the receiver at
his ear. He said--as Wentworth only realized when he had put down his
own receiver--"and would you be kind enough to make my apologies to
Adela?" She mouthed "and the others" at him, but he shook his head ever
so little, and when, as he put back the receiver, she said, "But you
ought to have sent your message to Pauline at least," he answered,
"Wentworth'll see to that; I wasn't going to mix you up." She said, "But
supposing he doesn't, it'll look so rude," expecting him to answer that
he didn't care. Instead of which, as they emerged from the call-box, he
said, "Wentworth'll see to it; he won't like not to." She sat down to
dinner infinitely more his accomplice than she had been when she had met
him first that evening.

In effect he was right. Wentworth had received a slight shock when the
single name reached his ears, but it was only on his way back to the
study that he realized that he was being invited to assist Prescott's
approach towards Adela. He must, of course, enlarge the apology,
especially since Adela anyhow wasn't there, as he hadn't troubled to
explain. Prescott could find that out for himself. Since he didn't
know--a throb of new suspicion held him rigid outside his study door.
It was incredible, because Prescott wouldn't have sent the message, or
any message, if he and Adela had been together. But they were both away,
and that (his startled nerves reported to his brain) meant that they
were together. His brain properly reminded him that it meant nothing
of the sort. But of that saving intelligence his now vibrating nervous
system took no notice whatever. It had never had a chance to disseminate
anarchy before, and now it took its chance. Fifty years of security
dissolved before one minute of invasion; Csar was over the Rubicon and
Pompey was flying from Rome. Wentworth strode back into the study and
looked at Pauline much as Pompey might have looked at a peculiarly
unattractive senator.

He said: "Prescott can't come either. He sends you his apologies," and
with an extreme impatience waited to hear whether she had any comment
to make upon this, which might show what and how much, if anything, she
knew. She only said, "I'm sorry. Is he working late?"

It was exactly what Wentworth wanted to know. He went back to his usual
seat at the corner of his large table, and put down his cigar. He said,
"So he says. It's unfortunate, isn't it, just the evening Adela couldn't
come?" He then found himself pausing, and added, "But we can go on
talking, can't we? Though I'm afraid it will be duller for you."

He hoped she would deny this at once; on the other hand he didn't want
her to stop. He wanted her to want to stop, but to be compelled to go
by some necessary event; so that her longing and disappointment could
partly compensate him for Adela's apparently volitional absence, but
without forcing him to talk. He wished her grandmother could be taken
worse suddenly. But she made no sign of going, nor did she offer him any
vivid tribute. She sat for a minute with her eyes on the floor, then she
looked at him and said: "There was something I thought of asking you."

"Yes?" Wentworth said. After all, Prescott probably was at his office,
and Adela probably--wherever she had to be.

Pauline had not formally intended to speak. But Lawrence Wentworth was
the only person she knew who might be aware of ... what these things
were and what they demanded. And since they were thus left together,
she consented to come so far as to ask. She disdained herself a little,
but she went on, her disdain almost audible in her voice: "Did you ever
come across"--she found she had to pause to draw equable breath; it was
difficult even to hint--"did you ever read of any tale of people meeting
themselves?"

Momentarily distracted, Wentworth said: "Meeting themselves? What, in
dreams?"

"Not dreams," Pauline said, "meeting themselves ... in the street ...
or anywhere." She wished now she hadn't begun, for to speak seemed to
invite its presence, as if it were likely to hover outside, if not
inside, the house; and she would have to go home by herself to-night
the whole way.... Or, since she had betrayed its privacy, supposing it
followed up her betrayal and came now....

"There's a picture of Rossetti's," Wentworth said; "were you thinking of
that?"

"Not a picture," Pauline said; "I mean, have you ever read of its
happening? Shelley says it happened to Zoroaster."

"Indeed," Wentworth said. "I don't remember that. Of course I've heard
of it as a superstition. Where have you come across it? Has anyone you
know been seeing themselves?"

His mind was drifting back to Adela; the question rang hard. Pauline
felt the obstruction, and stayed. She said, "I knew a girl who thought
she did. But don't let me bother you."

"You aren't bothering me," Wentworth said by force of habit. "On the
contrary. I never remember to have come across anything of the sort,
though I've a notion it was supposed to foretell death. But then almost
any unusual incident is supposed to foretell death by the savage--or
let's say the uncivilized--mind. Death, you see, is inevitably the most
unusual incident, and so--by correspondence--the lesser is related
to the greater. Anthropology is very instructive in that way. The
uneducated mind is generally known by its haste to see likeness where
no likeness exists. It evaluates its emotions in terms of fortuitous
circumstance. It objectifies its concerns through its imagination.
Probably your friend was a very self-centred individual."

Pauline said coldly, "I don't know that she was," while Wentworth
wondered if Adela and Prescott had finished the supper they were not, of
course, having together. Their absence was a fortuitous circumstance.
He evaluated his emotions in its terms, and (like any barbarian chief)
objectified his concerns by his imagination. She could find out the
difference between Prescott and himself. But he didn't mind; he didn't
mind. He curvetted on that particular horse for a while, and while
curvetting he took no notice of Pauline's remark until the silence
startled his steed into nearly throwing him. Still just remaining
seated, he said, "O, she isn't, isn't she?" and thought how lank,
compared to Adela, Pauline was--lank and blank. She had no capacity.
Exactly what capacity she lacked he did not carefully consider, assuming
it to be intellectual: the look, not the eyes; the gesture, not the
hand. It was Adela's mental alertness which he knew he would have
grudged Prescott, if he could grudge anybody anything. This conversation
about people seeing themselves was the dullest he had ever known; he
looked covertly at the clock on the mantelpiece; at the same moment
Pauline, also covertly, looked at her wrist-watch. She had been a fool
to say anything; the only result was to expose her more consciously to
that other approach. She had better get home, somehow, before she did
anything sillier. She said, "Thank you," and couldn't think of anything
else. She got up therefore, and said the only thing left.

"My grandmother's not been so well to-day. Would you forgive me if I
deserted you too? We're treating you shockingly, aren't we?"

Wentworth got up alertly. "Not a bit," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry
you feel you ought to go." It occurred to him that, later on, he might
walk down toward the station. If he met them together, he would at least
be justified. They might have met at Marylebone, of course, even if he
did meet them; and if he didn't, they might be coming by a later train.
He might wait for the next. Perhaps it would be wiser not to go--he
couldn't, in his position, hang about for ever and ever. People
chattered. But he would decide about that when this superfluous being
had been dismissed. He went with her to the door, was genial and bright,
said good night, snarled at the time she took getting to the gate, and
at last was free to make up his mind.

He could not do it. He was driven by his hunger as the dead man who had
come to that unbuilt house had been driven by his, and for some time
he wandered about his rooms as that other shape had gone through the
streets, seeking peace and finding none. At last he found himself in
his bedroom, looking out of the window, as the dead man had stood
there looking over the ruins of history, from the place of his skull.
Wentworth stood there now for some seconds, exercising a no more
conscious but a still more deliberate choice. He also yielded--to the
chaos within rather than the chaos without. The dead man had had reason
to suppose that to throw himself down would mean freedom from tyranny,
but Wentworth was not so much of a fool as to think that to thrust
himself into the way of possible discovery would mean any such freedom.
A remnant of intelligence cried to him that this was the road of mania,
and self-indulgence leading to mania. Self-preservation itself urged
him to remain; lucidity urged him, if not love. He stood and looked
and listened, as the dead man had looked and listened. He heard faint
hurrying footsteps somewhere on the Hill; the moon was covered by a
cloud. The shadow provoked him; in it they might be, now, passing the
end of his road. He must act before it was too late. He would not go
to spy; he would go for a walk. He went out of the room, down the soft
swift stairs of his mind, into the streets of his mind, to find the
phantoms of his mind. He desired hell.

He strode out on his evening walk. He walked down the length of his
road; if that led towards the station it could not be helped, nor if at
a point it joined the road which Adela would take from the station. He
was a man, and he had a right to his walk. He was not a child, neither
the child that had lost its toy and cried for it, nor the child that had
lost its toy and would not let itself care, nor the child that had lost
its toy and tried to recover it by pretending it never did care. It may
be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are
generally nothing else. But he was; he was a man, he was going for his
walk.

At the junction of roads, as at a junction of his mind, he stopped and
waited--to enjoy the night air. His enjoyment strained intently and
viciously to hear the sounds of the night, or such as were not of too
remote and piercing a quality to reach him. The wind among the hills was
fresh. He heard at a distance a train come in, and the whistle of its
departure. One or two travellers went by; one, a woman, hurrying, said
something to him as she passed--good night or good morning; it sounded,
in his strained joy, like both. He became aware that he was visible in
the moon; he moved back into shadow. If he saw them coming he could walk
away or walk on without seeming to be in ambush. He was not in ambush;
he was out for a walk.

An hour and more went by. He walked back, and returned. His physical
nature, which sometimes by its mere exhaustion postpones our more
complete damnation, did not save him. He was not overtired by his vigil,
nor in that extreme weariness was the vision of a hopeless honour
renewed. He paced and repaced, cannibal of his heart. Midnight passed;
the great tower clock struck one. He heard the last train come in. A
little up the road, concealed in the shadow, he waited. He heard the
light patter of quick feet; he saw, again, a woman go hurrying by. He
thought for a moment she was Adela, and then knew she was not. Other
feet came, slower and double. The moon was bright; he stood at the
edge of his own skull's platform; desire to hate and desire not to
hate struggled in him. In the moonlight, visible, audible, arm in arm,
talking and laughing, they came. He saw them pass; his eyes grew blind.
Presently he turned and went home. That night when at last he slept he
dreamed, more clearly than ever before, of his steady descent of the
moon-bright rope.




Chapter IV

VISION OF DEATH


Pauline's parents had both died a few years before, and she had been put
in Battle Hill to live with her grandmother for two reasons. The first
was that she had no money. The second was that her uncle refused "to
leave his mother to strangers". Since Pauline's mother had never liked
her husband's parents, the girl had practically never seen the old lady.
But the blood relationship, in her uncle's mind, connoted intimacy,
and he found an occupation for an orphan and a companion for a widow at
one stroke of mercy. Pauline was furious at the decisive kindness which
regulated her life, but she had not, at the time when it interfered,
found a job, and she had been so involved with the getting to Battle
Hill that she discovered herself left there, at last, with her
grandmother, a nurse, and a maid. Even so, it was the latent fear in
her life that paralysed initiative; she could respond but she could not
act. Since they had been on the Hill and the visitations had grown more
frequent, she felt that deep paralysis increasing, and she kept her hold
on social things almost desperately tight. Her alternative was to stop
in altogether, to bury herself in the house, and even so to endure, day
by day, the fear that her twin might resolve out of the air somewhere in
the hall or the corridor outside her own room. She hated to go out, but
she hated still more to stop in, and her intelligence told her that the
alternative might save her nothing in the end. Rigid and high-headed
she fled, with a subdued fury of pace, from house to gathering, and back
from gathering to house, and waited for her grandmother to die.

Her grandmother, ignoring the possible needs of the young, went on
living, keeping her room in the morning, coming down to lunch, and
after a light early dinner retiring again to her room. She made no great
demands on her granddaughter, towards whom indeed she showed a delicate
social courtesy; and Pauline in turn, though in a harsher manner,
maintained towards her a steady deference and patience. The girl was in
fact so patient with the old lady that she had not yet noticed that she
was never given an opportunity to be patient. She endured her own nature
and supposed it to be the burden of another's.

On an afternoon in early June they were both in the garden at the back
of the house; the walls that shut it in made it a part of the girl's
security. Pauline was learning her part, turning the typescript on her
knees, and shaping the words with silent lips. The trouble about some
of them was that they were so simple as to be almost bathos. Her fibres
told her that they were not bathos, until she tried to say them, and
then, it was no good denying, they sounded flat. She put the stress
here and there; she tried slowness and speed. She invoked her conscious
love to vocalize her natural passion, and the lines made the effort
ridiculous. She grew hot as she heard herself say them, even though
she did not say them aloud. Her unheard melody was less sweet than her
memory of Stanhope's heard, but she did not then think of him reading,
only of the lines he had read. They were simple with him; with her they
were pretentious and therefore defiled.

She looked up at Mrs. Anstruther, who was sitting with her eyes
closed, and her hands in her lap. Small, thin, wrinkled, she was almost
an ideal phenomenon of old age. Some caller, a day or two before,
had murmured to Pauline on leaving: "She's very fragile, isn't she?"
Pauline, gazing, thought that fragile was precisely not the word. Quiet,
gentle, but hardly passive and certainly not fragile. Even now, on
that still afternoon, the shut eyes left the face with a sense of
preoccupation--translucent rock. She was absent, not with the senility
of a spirit wandering in feeble memories, but with the attention of
a worker engrossed. Perhaps Stanhope looked so when he wrote verse.
Pauline felt that she had never seen her grandmother before and did not
quite know what to make of her now. A light sound came from the garden
beyond. Mrs. Anstruther opened her eyes and met Pauline's. She smiled.
"My dear," she said, "I've been meaning to ask you something for the
last day or two." Pauline thought it might be the hot afternoon that
gave the voice that effect of distance; it was clear, but small and
from afar. The words, the tone, were affectionate with an impersonal
love. Pauline thought: "She might be talking to Phoebe"--Phoebe being the
maid--and at the same time realized that Mrs. Anstruther did so talk to
Phoebe, and to everyone. Her good will diffused itself in all directions.
Her granddaughter lay in its way, with all things beside, and it mingled
with the warm sun in a general benediction.

Pauline said: "Yes, grandmother?"

"If by any chance I should die during the next few weeks," Mrs.
Anstruther said, "you won't let it interfere with your taking part in
the play, will you? It would be so unnecessary."

Pauline began to speak, and hesitated. She had been on the point of
beginning formally: "O, but----" when she felt, under the lucid gaze,
compelled to intelligence. She said slowly: "Well, I suppose I should
have...."

"Quite unnecessary," Mrs. Anstruther went on, "and obviously
inconvenient, especially if it were in the last few days. Or the last.
I hoped you wouldn't think of it, but it was better to make sure."

"It'll look very odd," said Pauline, and found herself smiling back.
"And what will the rest of them think?"

"One of them will be disappointed; the rest will be shocked but
relieved," Mrs. Anstruther murmured. "You've no proper understudy?"

"None of us have," Pauline said. "One of the others in the Chorus would
have to take my part ... if I were ill, I mean."

"Do any of them speak verse better than you?" Mrs. Anstruther asked,
with a mild truthfulness of inquiry.

Pauline considered the Chorus. "No," she said at last, sincerely. "I
don't think ... I'm sure they don't. Nor Adela," she added with a slight
animosity against the princess. Her grandmother accepted the judgment.
"Then it would be better for you to be there," she said. "So you'll
promise me? It will very nearly be a relief."

"I'll promise certainly," Pauline said. "But you don't feel worse, do
you, my dear? I thought you'd been stronger lately--since the summer
came in."

"'I have a journey, sir, shortly to go'," Mrs. Anstruther quoted. "And a
quieter starting-place than our ancestor."

"Our ancestor?" Pauline said, surprised. "O, but I remember. He was
martyred, wasn't he?"

Mrs. Anstruther quoted again: "'Then the said Struther being come to the
stake, cried out very loudly: _To him that hath shall be given_, and
one of the friars that went with him struck at him and said: _Naughty
heretic, and what of him that hath not?_ and he shouted with a great
laughter, pointing at the friar, and calling out: _He shall lose all
that he hath_, and again _The Lord hath sent away the rich with empty
bellies_. Then they stripped him, and when he was in his shirt he looked
up and said: _The ends of the world be upon me_; and so they set him at
the stake and put the fire to the wood, and as the fire got hold of him
he gave a loud cry and said: _I have seen the salvation of my God_, and
so many times till he died. Which was held for a testimony that the Lord
had done great things for him there in the midst of the fire, and under
the Lady Elizabeth the place was called Struther's Salvation for many
years.'"

Mrs. Anstruther stopped. "And perhaps the Lord did," she said, "though I
would not quite take Foxe's word for it."

Pauline shuddered. "It was a terrible thing," she said. "How he could
shout for joy like that!"

"Salvation," Mrs. Anstruther said mildly, "is quite often a terrible
thing--a frightening good."

"A ..." said Pauline, and paused. "Mr. Stanhope said something like
that," she ended.

"Peter Stanhope is a great poet," her grandmother answered. "But I don't
think many of you can possibly understand his play. You may; I can't
tell."

"Mrs. Parry understands it, all but the Chorus," Pauline said. "And
Adela and Myrtle Fox understand even that."

Mrs. Anstruther's look changed. She had been contemplating the fact
of Stanhope's poetry with a gaze of awe; there entered into that awe
a delicate and extreme delight. She said: "My dear, I used to know
Caroline Parry very well. No one has destroyed more plays by successful
production. I sometimes wonder--it's wrong--whether she has done the
same thing with her life. It's wrong; she is a good creature, and she
has behaved very well in all her unrehearsed effects. But I feel she
relies too much on elocution and not enough on poetry."

Pauline meditated on this. "I don't think I quite understand," she said.
"How the elocution?"

"You're a little inclined to it yourself, my dear," Mrs. Anstruther
answered. "Your elocution is very just and very effective, but a certain
breath of the verse is lacking. No one could have been kinder to me than
you have. We've done very well together--I as the patient and you as the
keeper. That's what I mean by elocution."

She turned on her granddaughter eyes full of delight and affection.
Pauline could only sit and stare. Then slowly a blush crept up her face,
and she looked hastily away.

"Ah, don't be distressed," the old woman said. "My dear, you've been
perfect. You're in trouble over something, and yet you've always been
kind. I wish I could have helped you."

"I'm not in any trouble," Pauline said with a slight harshness, "except
now. Have I been stupid, grandmother?"

"That," Mrs. Anstruther said, "was perhaps a little less than
intelligent. Why do you refuse to lean?"

"I don't," Pauline said bitterly, "but there's no----" She was on the
point of saying "no help in leaning"; she recovered herself, and changed
it to "no need to lean".

"O, my dear child," Mrs. Anstruther murmured gently, "that's almost like
the speech days at my school. Ask Peter Stanhope to tell you how to read
verse."

Confused between metaphor, implication, and rebuke, and the voice that
disseminated sweetness through all, Pauline was about to protest again
when Phoebe came out into the garden. She came up to her mistress, and
said: "Mrs. Lily Sammile has called, madam, and wants to know if you are
well enough to see her."

"Certainly," Mrs. Anstruther said. "Ask Mrs. Sammile to come out here."
And as Phoebe disappeared: "Do you know her, Pauline?"

Pauline, standing up and folding her typescript with a precision that
was almost respect, said: "Hardly _know_. She meets one continually, and
she's at things. She calls. I never met anyone who'd called on her, now
I come to think of it. I don't even know where she lives."

"There are all sorts of places to live on this hill," Mrs. Anstruther
said, and Pauline heard in the voice an undertone of ambiguity. For a
moment her fear took her; she looked hastily round. There was no sign
of her twin. "All sorts of places to live."

"Many habitations," she answered with forced lightness, and went to meet
the visitor who appeared from the house.

Mrs. Sammile was younger than Mrs. Anstruther, and much quicker in
movement. She was much more restless. Her feet pattered on the path, her
eyes glanced everywhere; she suggested by her whole bearing that time
was in a hurry, and there was very little time for--something. Perhaps
the contrast of Mrs. Anstruther's repose heightened this excitement.
She was shorter than Pauline, and her eyes looked up at the girl almost
anxiously. She said: "I've only just looked in. But it was so _long_
since I'd seen you."

"We met yesterday, if you remember," Pauline answered, smiling. "But it
was good of you to come."

"I don't, I hope, intrude?" Mrs. Sammile went on, as she shook hands
with the old woman. Mrs. Anstruther murmured something vague, and
Pauline said it more definitely: "Of course not, Mrs. Sammile, we're
delighted."

"Such glorious weather--but trying, isn't it?" the visitor prattled
nervously on, rather like a chicken fluttering round the glass walls of
a snake's cage. "I always think any weather's trying, heat or cold. And
it always seems to be one or other, doesn't it?"

"So pleasant," said Mrs. Anstruther politely. "Like sex, one can't
imagine anything not one or the other. Or, of course, a combination."

"If," Pauline added, valiant but aware of failure, "if we could make our
own weather...."

Lily Sammile slewed round a little towards her. "If we _could_!" she
said. "I thought yesterday that you were looking a little tired, my
dear."

"Was I?" Pauline answered. "Perhaps I was," and added agonizingly, "It's
the spring, I expect."

The other looked at her, turning still a little more away from Mrs.
Anstruther, and seeming to become a little quieter as she did so. She
said: "I do think the world's rather trying, don't you?"

"I do," Pauline said with a heartfelt throb of assent, and more
earnestly than she knew. "Very trying." It certainly was hot. She felt
that three in the garden were too many, and wondered if her grandmother,
in case she was feeling tired, ought to be offered an opportunity of
going indoors. If June were so sultry, what would July be? The time was
still; no sound came. A lifting palpitation took her; she shuddered. Her
grave: who walked on, or was it from, her grave? The thing she had so
often seen? into which--she knew now--she feared to be drawn, to be lost
or not to be lost, to be always herself as the enfeebled element in
something else. Never yet within walls, but the heat crept round her, a
preliminary invasion; the heat came over or through walls, and after the
heat its centre.

The violent sensation receded. She came to herself to find herself
staring rudely at Mrs. Sammile's face. It was a face that had been
beautiful, rounded and precious with delight, sustained just sufficiently
by its bones to avoid, as for instance Adela Hunt's hardly avoided,
the reproach of plumpness; and was still full in places, by the ears
and round the jaw; only the cheeks were a little macabre in their
withdrawal, and the eyes in their hint of hollows about them. Pauline,
stirred by the sad recollection of her other self, thought that Mrs.
Sammile looked more like death than her grandmother, more like a living
death, than which, on this hill where her own ancestor and so many
others had died, what could be more likely?

Mrs. Sammile was saying softly: "Perhaps she's asleep; I don't want to
wake her. You look so tired. If I could be any use...."

Pauline thought, as she looked back, that she had been unjust to Mrs.
Sammile's eyes. They were not restless, as she had thought. They were
soothing; they appealed and comforted at once. She said: "I've had bad
dreams."

Mrs. Sammile said: "I've had them too, sometimes," and Pauline almost
felt that even her dream, to call it that, was less trouble than those
other undescribed nightmares. But before she could speak the visitor
went on: "But there are cures, you know."

She had spoken, perhaps, a little more loudly, for Mrs. Anstruther's
voice answered equably: "There is, of course, sleep. Or waking. Is there
anything else?"

Mrs. Sammile looked round, and her answer held the earlier suggestion
of hostility. She said, defensively: "Pleasanter dreams. On a hill like
this, one ought to have a choice. There are so many."

Pauline said: "Can you change dreams, Mrs. Sammile?"

"O, everyone can," the other answered. She leant towards Pauline and
went on: "There are all sorts of ways of changing dreams." She put a
hand on the girl's. "All tales of the brain. Why not tell yourself a
comforting tale?"

"Because I could never make up a satisfying end," Pauline said, "and
the tale wouldn't stop--no tale that I could think of. There was always
something more that had got to happen and I could never feel--not in my
best tale--that I was quite certainly telling it."

"You must let me tell you tales instead," Lily Sammile answered. "Come
and see me."

"I'd like to, but I don't think I know where you live, Mrs. Sammile,"
Pauline said, and paused on the implied question.

Mrs. Sammile said: "O, we shall meet. And if we can't find a tale we'll
do as well. Cross my hand with silver, and I'll not only tell you a good
fortune, I'll make you one. Like the Bible--wine and milk without money,
or for so little it hardly counts."

Pauline looked at Mrs. Anstruther. "Mrs. Sammile is offering us all we
want without any trouble," she said. "Shall we take it and be grateful?"

"Exquisite rhetoric," her grandmother allusively answered, but faintly,
and Pauline went on to the visitor: "And would one always enjoy oneself
then?"

"Why not?" Mrs. Sammile said. "Everything lovely in you for a perpetual
companion, so that you'd never be frightened or disappointed or ashamed
any more. There are tales that can give you yourself completely and the
world could never treat you so badly then that you wouldn't neglect it.
One can get everything by listening or looking in the right way: there
are all sorts of turns."

Phoebe reappeared by Mrs. Anstruther's chair. "Miss Fox and Mr. Stanhope,
madam," she said, and retired with a message.

Pauline said, as she stood up, "It'd be too wonderful," and then,
"Aren't you rather tired, grandmother? Wouldn't you rather go upstairs
and let me see them indoors?"

"My dear," Mrs. Anstruther said, "as long as Peter Stanhope comes to
see me, I shall receive him. At least, until Mrs. Sammile gives us the
effect of Shakespeare without Shakespeare. Give me your arm."

She stood up, and leaning on the girl took a step or two forward, as
Myrtle Fox, followed by Stanhope, came into the garden, and hurried
across to her.

"Dear Mrs. Anstruther, how nice to see you again," Myrtle said. "It
seems such a long time, but you know how rushed one is! But I felt I
must come to-day. Do you know Mr. Stanhope? We met in the street and
came along together."

Mrs. Anstruther allowed herself to be embraced and kissed without any
further welcome than a smile; then she held out her hand.

"This is a great honour, Mr. Stanhope," she said. "I'm very glad to
welcome you here."

He bowed over her hand. "It's very kind of you, Mrs. Anstruther."

"I've owed you a great deal for a long while now," she said, "and I can
do no more than acknowledge it. But I'm grateful that I can do that. Do
you know Mrs. Sammile?"

Stanhope bowed again; Myrtle let out a new gush of greeting, and they
all sat down.

"I really came," Stanhope said after a little interchange, "to ask Miss
Anstruther if she had any preference in names."

"Me?" said Pauline. "What sort of names?"

"As the leader of the Chorus," Stanhope explained. "I promised Mrs.
Parry I'd try and individualize so far--for the sake of the audience--as
to give her a name. Myself, I don't think it'll much help the audience,
but as I promised--I wondered about something French, as it's to be
eighteenth century, La Lointaine or something like that. But Mrs. Parry
was afraid that'd make it more difficult. No one would understand (she
thought) why leaves--if they are leaves--should be _lointaine_...."

He was interrupted by Myrtle, who, leaning eagerly forward, said: "O,
Mr. Stanhope, that reminds me. I was thinking about it myself the other
day, and I thought how beautiful and friendly it would be to give all
the Chorus tree-names. It would look so attractive on the programmes,
Elm, Ash, Oak--the three sweet trees--Hawthorn, Weeping Willow, Beech,
Birch, Chestnut. D'you see? That would make it all quite clear. And then
Pauline could be the Oak. I mean, the Oak would have to be the leader of
the English trees, wouldn't he--or she?"

"Do let Mr. Stanhope tell us, Myrtle," Mrs. Anstruther said; and "You'd
turn them into a cosy corner of trees, Myrtle," Pauline interjected.

"But that's what we want," Myrtle pursued her dream, "we want to realize
that Nature can be consoling, like life. And Art--even Mr. Stanhope's
play. I think all art is so consoling, don't you, Mrs. Sammile?"

Mrs. Anstruther had opened her mouth to interrupt Myrtle, but now she
shut it again, and waited for her guest to reply, who said in a moment,
with a slight touch of tartness, "I'm sure Mr. Stanhope won't agree.
He'll tell you nightmares are significant."

"O, but we agreed that wasn't the right word," Myrtle exclaimed. "Or was
it! Pauline, was it significant or symbolical that we agreed everything
was?"

"I want to know my name," Pauline said, and Stanhope, smiling, answered,
"I was thinking of something like Periel. Quite insignificant."

"It sounds rather odd," said Myrtle. "What about the others?"

"The others," Stanhope answered firmly, "will not be named."

"O!" Myrtle looked disappointed. "I thought we might have had a song or
speech or something with all the names in it. It would sound beautiful.
And Art ought to be beautiful, don't you think? Beautiful words in
beautiful voices. I do think elocution is so important."

Pauline said, "Grandmother doesn't care for elocution."

"O, Mrs. Anstru----" Myrtle was beginning, when Mrs. Anstruther cut her
short.

"What does one need to say poetry, Mr. Stanhope?" she asked.

Stanhope laughed. "What but the four virtues, clarity, speed, humility,
courage? Don't you agree?"

The old lady looked at Mrs. Sammile. "Do _you_?" she asked.

Lily Sammile shrugged. "O if you're turning poems into labours," she
said. "But we don't all want to speak poetry, and enjoyment's a simple
thing for the rest of us."

"We do all want to speak it," Stanhope protested. "Or else verse and
plays and all art are more of dreams than they need be. They must always
be a little so, perhaps."

Mrs. Sammile shrugged again. "You make such a business of enjoying
yourself," she said with almost a sneer. "Now if I've a nightmare I
change it as soon as I can." She looked at Pauline.

"I've never had nightmares since I Coud them away," Myrtle Fox broke
in. "I say every night: 'Sleep is good, and sleep is here. Sleep is
good.' And I never dream. I say the same thing every morning, only I say
Life then instead of Sleep. 'Life is good and Life is here. Life is
good'."

Stanhope flashed a glance at Pauline. "Terribly good, perhaps," he
suggested.

"Terribly good, certainly," Myrtle assented happily.

Mrs. Sammile stood up. "I must go," she said. "But I don't see why you
don't enjoy yourselves."

"Because, sooner or later, there isn't anything to enjoy in oneself,"
Stanhope murmured, as she departed.

Pauline took her to the gate, and said good-bye.

"Do let's meet," Mrs. Sammile said. "I'm always about, and I think I
could be useful. You've got to get back now, but sometime you needn't
get back...." She trotted off, and as she went the hard patter of her
heels was the only sound that broke, to Pauline's ears, the heavy
silence of the Hill.

The girl lingered a little before returning. A sense of what Miss Fox
called "significance" hung in her mind; she felt, indeterminately,
that something had happened, or, perhaps, was beginning to happen.
The afternoon had been one of a hundred--the garden, a little talk,
visitors, tea--yet all that usualness had been tinged with difference.
She wondered if it were merely the play, and her concern with it,
that had heightened her senses into what was, no doubt, illusion. Her
hands lay on the top bar of the gate, and idly she moved her fingers,
separating and closing them one by one for each recollected point. Her
promise to her grandmother--death was not to interrupt verse; the memory
of her ancestor--death swallowed up in victory--Struther's Salvation,
Anstruther's salvation; elocution, rhetoric, poetry, Peter Stanhope,
Lily Sammile, the slight jar of their half-philosophical dispute; her
own silly phrase--"to make your own weather"; tales of the brain,
tales to be told, tales that gave you yourself in quiet, tales or
the speaking of verse, tales or rhetoric or poetry; "clarity, speed,
courage, humility". Or did they only prevent desirable enjoyment, as
Lily Sammile had hinted? One would have to be terribly good to achieve
them. And terribly careful about the tales. She looked down the street,
and for an instant felt that if she saw It coming--clarity, speed,
courage, humility--she might wait. She belonged to the Chorus of a great
experiment; a thing not herself.

  _The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,_
  _Met his own image walking in the garden._

If those four great virtues were needed, as Peter Stanhope had proposed,
even to say the verse, might Shelley have possessed them before he
discovered the verse? If she were wrong in hating them? if they had been
offered her as a classification, a hastening, a strengthening? if she
had to discover them as Shelley had done, and beyond them....

She must go back. She pulled herself from the gate. Mrs. Sammile had
just reached the corner. She looked back; she waved. The gesture
beckoned. Pauline waved back, reluctantly. Before she told herself
tales, it was needful to know what there was in verse. She must hear
more.

She was not offered more. The visitors were on the point of departure,
and Mrs. Anstruther was certainly tired. She roused herself to beg
Stanhope to come again, if he would, but no more passed, except indeed
that as Pauline herself said good-bye, Stanhope delayed a moment behind
Miss Fox to add: "The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not
the other way round."

"The substantive?" Pauline asked blankly.

"Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I'm keeping you. Good-bye,
Periel," and he was gone.

Later in the day, lying unsleeping but contented in her bed, Mrs.
Anstruther also reviewed the afternoon. She was glad to have seen Peter
Stanhope; she was not particularly glad to have seen Lily Sammile, but
she freely acknowledged, in the words of a too often despised poet, that
since God suffered her to be, she too was God's minister, and laboured
for some good by Margaret Anstruther not understood. She did not
understand clearly what Mrs. Sammile conceived herself to be offering.
It sounded so much like Myrtle Fox: "tell yourself tales".

She looked out of the window. There would be few more evenings during
which she could watch the departure of day, and the promise of rarity
gave a greater happiness to the experience. So did the knowledge of
familiarity. Rarity was one form of delight and frequency another. A
thing could even be beautiful because it did not happen, or rather the
not-happening could be beautiful. So long always as joy was not rashly
pinned to the happening; so long as you accepted what joys the universe
offered and did not seek to compel the universe to offer you joys of
your own definition. She would die soon; she expected, with hope and
happiness, the discovery of the joy of death.

It was partly because Stanhope's later plays had in them something of
this purification and simplicity that she loved them. She knew that,
since they were poetry, they must mean more than her individual being
knew, but at least they meant that. He discovered it in his style, in
words and the manner of the words he used. Whether his personal life
could move to the sound of his own lucid exaltation of verse she did not
know. It was not her business; perhaps even it was not primarily his.
His affair had been the powerful exploration of power after his own
manner; all minds that recognized power saluted him. Power was in that
strange chorus over which the experts of Battle Hill culture disputed,
and it lay beyond them. There was little human approach in it, though it
possessed human experience; like the _Dirge_ in _Cymbeline_ or the songs
of Ariel in the _Tempest_ it possessed only the pure perfection of fact,
rising in rhythms of sound that seemed inhuman because they were free
from desire or fear or distress. She herself did not yet dare to repeat
the Chorus; it was beyond her courage. Those who had less knowledge or
more courage might do so. She dared only to recollect it; to say it
would need more courage than was required for death. When she was dead,
she might be able to say Stanhope's poetry properly. Even if there were
no other joy, that would be a reason for dying well.

Here, more than in most places, it should be easy. Here there had,
through the centuries, been a compression and culmination of death as if
the currents of mortality had been drawn hither from long distances to
some whirlpool of invisible depth. The distances might be very long
indeed; from all places of predestined sepulchre, scattered through the
earth. In those places the movement of human life had closed--of human
life or human death, of the death in life which was an element in life,
and of those places the Hill on which she lived was one. An energy
reposed in it, strong to affect all its people; an energy of separation
and an energy of knowledge. If, as she believed, the spirit of a man at
death saw truly what he was and had been, so that whether he desired it
or not a lucid power of intelligence manifested all himself to him--then
that energy of knowledge was especially urgent upon men and women here,
though through all the world it must press upon the world. She felt, as
if by a communication of a woe not hers, how the neighbourhood of the
dead troubled the living; how the living were narrowed by the return
of the dead. Therefore in savage regions the houses of sepulchre were
forbidden, were taboo, for the wisdom of the barbarians set division
between the dead and the living, and the living were preserved. The
wisdom of other religions in civilized lands had set sacramental
ceremonies about the dying, and dispatched the dead to their doom with
prayers and rites which were not meant for the benefit of the dead
alone. Rather, they secured the living against ghostly oppression;
they made easy the way of the ghosts into their own world and hurried
them upon their way. They were sped on with unction and requiem, with
intercessions and masses; and the sword of exorcism waved at the portal
of their exodus against the return of any whom those salutations of
departure did not ease. But where superstition and religion failed,
where cemeteries were no longer forbidden and no longer feared; where
the convenient processes of cremation encouraged a pretence of swift
passage, where easy sentimentality set up a pretence of friendship
between the living and the dead--might not that new propinquity turn
to a fearful friendship in the end? It was commonly accepted that the
dead were anxious to help the living, but what if the dead were only
anxious for the living to help them? or what if the infection of their
experience communicated itself across the too shallow grave? Men were
beginning to know, they were being compelled to know; at last the
living world was shaken by the millions of spirits who endured that
further permanent revelation. Hysteria of self-knowledge, monotony of
self-analysis, introspection spreading like disease, what was all this
but the infection communicated over the unpurified borders of death?
The spirits of the living world were never meant to be so neighbourly
with the spirits of that other. "Grant to them eternal rest, O Lord. And
let light eternal shine upon them." Let them rest in their own places
of light; far, far from us be their discipline and their endeavour. The
phrases of the prayers of intercession throb with something other than
charity for the departed; there is a fear for the living. Grant them,
grant them rest; compel them to their rest. Enlighten them, perpetually
enlighten them. And let us still enjoy our refuge from their intolerable
knowledge.

As if in a last communion with the natural terrors of man, Margaret
Anstruther endured a recurrent shock of fear. She recalled herself.
To tolerate such knowledge with a joyous welcome was meant, as the
holy Doctors had taught her, to be the best privilege of man, and so
remained. The best maxim towards that knowledge was yet not the _Know
thyself_ of the Greek so much as the _Know Love_ of the Christian,
though both in the end were one. It was not possible for man to know
himself and the world, except first after some mode of knowledge,
some art of discovery. The most perfect, since the most intimate and
intelligent, art was pure love. The approach by love was the approach
to fact; to love anything but fact was not love. Love was even more
mathematical than poetry; it was the pure mathematics of the spirit. It
was applied also and active; it was the means as it was the end. The
end lived everlastingly in the means; the means eternally in the end.

The girl and the old woman who lay, both awake, in that house under the
midnight sky, were at different stages of that way. To the young mind of
Pauline, by some twist of grace in the operation of space and time, the
Greek maxim had taken on a horrible actuality; the older vision saw,
while yet living, almost into a world beyond the places of the dead.
Pauline knew nothing yet of the value of those night vigils, nor of the
fulfilment of the desire of truth. But Margaret had, through a long
life, practised the distinction, not only between experience and
experience, but in each experience itself between dream and fact. It is
not enough to say that some experiences are drugs to the spirit; every
experience, except the final, has a quality which has to be cast out by
its other quality of perfection, expelled by healthy digestion into the
sewers where the divine scavengers labour. By a natural law Margaret's
spirit exercised freely its supernatural functions and with increasing
clearness looked out on to the growing company of the Hill.

Lights in the houses opposite had long since been put out. The whole
rise of ground, lying like a headland, or indeed itself like some huge
grave in which so many others had been dug, was silent in the darkness,
but for one sound; the sound of footsteps. Margaret knew it very well;
she had heard it on many nights. Sometimes in the day as well, when the
peace was deepest within her and without, she could hear that faint
monotonous patter of feet reverberating from its surface. Its distance
was not merely in space, though it seemed that also, but in some other
dimension. Who it was that so walked for ever over the Hill she did not
know, though in her heart she did not believe it to be good. The harsh
phrase would have been alien to her. She heard those feet not as
sinister or dangerous, but only--patter, patter--as the haste of a
search for or a flight from repose--perhaps both. Ingress and regress,
desire and repulsion, contended there. The contention was the only
equilibrium of that haunter of the Hill, and was pain. Patter, patter.
It sounded at a distance, like the hurrying feet of the woman on her own
garden path that afternoon. She had heard, in old tales of magic, of
the guardian of the threshold. She wondered if the real secret of the
terrible guardian were that he was simply lost on the threshold. His
enmity to man and heaven was only his yearning to enter one without
loss. It did not matter, nor was it her affair. Her way did not cross
that other's; only it was true she never sank into those circles of
other sensation and vision but what, far off, she heard--patter,
patter--the noise of the endless passage.

There moved within her the infinite business of the Hill into which so
much death had poured. First there came the creation of new images
instead of those of every day. Her active mind still insisted on them;
she allowed its due. The Hill presented itself before her with all its
buildings and populace; she saw them, small and vivid, hurrying. She
would even sometimes recognize one or other, for the briefest second.
She had seen, in that re-creation by night of the Hill by day, Pauline
going into a shop and Peter Stanhope talking in the street, and others.
She remembered now, idly, that she had never seen the woman who had
called on her that day, though she had seen Myrtle Fox running, running
hard, down a long street. Distinct though the vision was, it was but
momentary. It was the equivalent of her worldly affairs, and it lasted
little longer; in a second it had gone.

It had enlarged rather. It reduplicated itself on each side, and its
inhabitants faded from it as it did so, seeming themselves to pass into
other hills. Presently there was no living form or building on that
original Hill, and it was no longer possible to tell which had been the
original, for a great range swept right across the sky, and all those
heights were only the upper slopes of mountains, whose lower sides fell
away beneath her vision. The earth itself seemed to lie in each of those
mountains, and on each there was at first a populous region towards the
summit, but the summit itself rose individual and solitary. Mountains or
modes of consciousness, peaks or perceptions, they stood; on the slopes
of each the world was carried; and the final height of each was a
separate consummation of the whole. It was, as the apprehended movement
upon each of them died away, in the time before the dawn that they rose
there, nor had the sun risen, though they were not in darkness. Either a
light emanated from themselves or some greater sun drew towards them
from its own depth.

Then--it was not to say that they faded, but rather that she lost them,
becoming herself one of them and ignorant of the rest. It was very
silent; only small sounds came up to her as if someone was climbing
below. The noises were so faint that in the air of earth they would have
been lost. Had she been woman she would not have known them; now that
she was not woman alone but mountain, the mountain knew that it was not
from its own nature alone that the tiny disturbances came. There was
movement within it certainly; rush of streams, fall of rocks, roar of
winds through its chasms, but these things were not sound to it as was
that alien human step. Through all another single note sounded once; a
bell. Minutely she knew that the public clock of the Hill had struck
one. It was a remote translation of a thing, for the dawn began.

It came from above, and as the light grew the mountain that was she
became aware again of its fellows, spread out around no longer in a
long range but in a great mass. They stretched away on all sides. At
the increase of the sun there grew also an increase of fugitive sound;
and she became aware of a few wandering shapes on the heights about
her. Some climbed on; others, instead of welcoming the light as lost
mountaineers should do, turned to escape it. They hurried into such
caves or crevasses as they could find. Here and there, on a great open
space, one lay fallen, twisting and dragging himself along. They seemed
all, even those who climbed, grotesque obtrusions into that place of
rock and ice and thin air and growing sun, a world different from
theirs, hers and not hers. A divided consciousness lived in her, more
intensely than ever before.

In the time of her novitiate it had seemed to her sometimes that, though
her brains and emotions acted this way or that, yet all that activity
went on along the sides of a slowly increasing mass of existence made
from herself and all others with whom she had to do, and that strong and
separate happiness--for she felt it as happiness, though she herself
might be sad; her sadness did but move on it as the mountaineer on the
side of a mountain--that happiness was the life which she was utterly to
become. Now she knew that only the smallest fragility of her being clung
somewhere to the great height that was she and others and all the world
under her separate kind, as she herself was part of all the other peaks;
and though the last fragility was still a little terrified of the dawn
which was breaking everywhere, she knew that when the dawn reached the
corner where she lay it would, after one last throb of piercing change
under its power, light but the mountain side, and all her other mighty
knowledge would after its own manner rejoice in it. She had not much
strength in these days--that she which was Margaret Anstruther and lay
in her bed on Battle Hill--but such as she had it was her business to
use. She set herself to crawl out of that darkened corner towards the
light. She turned from all the corner held--her home, her memories,
Stanhope's plays, Pauline; with an effort she began her last journey.
It might take hours, or days, or even years, but it was certain; as she
moved, crawling slowly over the rock, she saw the light sweeping on to
meet her. The moment of death was accepted and accomplished in her first
outward movement; there remained only to die.

On her way and in her bed, she dozed a little, and in that light
sleep--dream within dream or vision within vision--she seemed to be
walking again in the streets of Battle Hill, as if, having renounced it,
it was restored to her. It was still night there; the lamps were lit
in the streets; the rustle of the many trees was substituted for the
silence of the mountains. But the great mountains were there, and the
light of them, and their inhabitants; though the inhabitants did not
know the soil on which they lived. In a foretaste of the acute senses
of death she walked among them, but they did not see her. Outside her
own house she saw Pauline come out and look bitterly this way and the
other, and start to walk down the road, and presently as if from the
mountain side another Pauline had grown visible and came to meet the
first, her head high and bright as the summit, her eyes bright with the
supernatural dawn, her movements as free and yet disposed as the winds
that swept the chasms. She came on, her feet which at first made no
noise, beginning to sound on the pavement as she took on more and more
of mortal appearance, and the first Pauline saw her and turned and fled,
and the second pursued her, and far away, down the dark streets and
round the dark mountain, they vanished from sight. And then again, and
now she was not by her own house but in another street towards the top
of the hill, she saw a man walking hurriedly on, a man strange to her,
but after him followed a crowd of others, young men and children, and
all of them with his face. They pursued him, as the vision of Pauline
had pursued the vision of Pauline, but this time with angry or plaintive
cries, and he hurried on seeking something, for his restless eyes turned
every way and sometimes he peered at the gutter and sometimes he looked
up at the dark window, till presently he turned in at one of the gates,
and about the gate his company seemed to linger and watch and whisper.
Presently she saw him at a window, looking down; and there were at that
window two forms who did not seem to see each other, but the second she
knew, for he had been at her house once not so long ago, and it was
Lawrence Wentworth. He too was looking down, and after a little he was
coming out of the gate, and after him also came a figure, but this time
a woman, a young woman, who pursued him in his turn, and for whom also
he lay in wait.

But the other man too had now come out into the street, only it was no
more the street of a town but a ruined stretch of scaffolding or bone
or rock, all heights and edges and bare skeleton shapes. He was walking
there on the mountain though he did not know it, any more than he
noticed the light. He walked and looked up and round, and her eyes met
his, and he made a sudden movement of wonder and, she thought, of joy.
But as they looked, the dream, which was becoming more and more a dream,
shifted again, and she heard quick and loud the patter-patter of those
footsteps with which, as if they marked a region through or round which
she passed, such experiences always began and ended. She was on the
Hill, and all the houses were about her, and they stood all on graves
and bones, and swayed upon their foundations. A great stench went up
from them, and a cry, and the feet came quicker, and down the street ran
Lily Sammile, waving and calling, and checked and stood. She looked at
a gate; Pauline was standing there. The two neared each other, the gate
still between them, and began to talk. "No more hurt, no more pain, no
more but dreams", a voice said. Margaret Anstruther put out a hand; it
touched a projection in the rock on which she was lying in her journey
towards corporeal death. She clung to it, and pulled herself forward
towards Pauline. The nurse in the room heard her and turned. Mrs.
Anstruther said: "I should like to see Pauline; will you ask her----"
and at that she woke, and it was striking one.




Chapter V

RETURN TO EDEN


Margaret Anstruther had seen, in her vision, a single house, with two
forms leaning from the same window. Time there had disappeared, and the
dead man had been contemporaneous with the living. As if simultaneity
approached the Hill, the experiences of its inhabitants had there become
co-eval; propinquity no longer depended upon sequence.

The chance that brought Lawrence Wentworth into such close spiritual
contact with the dead was the mere manner of his ill luck. His was not
worse than any other's, though the hastening of time to its end made it
more strange. It grew in him, like all judgment, through his negligence.
A thing of which he had consistently refused to be aware, if action is
the test of awareness, drew close to him: that is, the nature of the
Republic. The outcast of the Republic had climbed a forlorn ladder to
his own death. His death entered into the Republic, and into the lives
of its other members. Wentworth had never acknowledged the unity. He
had never acknowledged the victims of oppression nor the presence of
victimization. It may be that such victimization is inevitable, and that
the Republic after its kind must be as false to its own good as the
lives of most of its children are to theirs. But Wentworth had neither
admitted nor rejected this necessity, nor even questioned and been hurt
by it; he had merely ignored it. He had refused the agony of the _res
publica_, and of temporal justice. Another justice sharpened the senses
of his _res privata_. He was doubly open to its approach--in his
scholarship, where the ignoring of others began to limit, colour, and
falsify his work, and in his awareness of supernatural neighbours, if
any should be near. One was.

The dead man had stood in what was now Wentworth's bedroom, and listened
in fear lest he should hear the footsteps of his kind. That past existed
still in its own place, since all the past is in the web of life nothing
else than a part of which we are not sensationally conscious. It was
drawing closer now to the present; it approached the senses of the
present. But between them still there went--patter, patter--the hurrying
footsteps which Margaret Anstruther had heard in the first circle of
the Hill. The dead man had hardly heard them; his passion had carried
him through that circle into death. But on the hither side were the
footsteps, and the echo and memory of the footsteps, of this world. It
was these for which Wentworth listened. He had come back into his own
room after he had heard those steady and mocking footsteps of Hugh and
Adela, and the voices and subdued laughter accompanying them. He had
himself wandered up and down, and come to a rest at last at the finished
window where, with no wall before him, the dead man had peered. He also
peered. He listened, and his fancy created for him the unheard melody
of the footsteps. His body renewed and absorbed the fatal knowledge of
his desire. He listened, in the false faith of desire. It could not be
that he would not hear, out of those double footsteps, one true pair
separating themselves, coming up the street, approaching the gate; that
he would not see a true form coming up the drive, approaching the door.
It must happen; his body told him it must happen. He must have what he
wanted, because ... but still those feet did not come. The dead man
stood by him, arm to arm, foot by foot, and listened, the rope in his
hand, and that night neither of them heard anything at all.

The evening and the morning were the first day, of a few hours, or a
few months, or both at once. Others followed. The business of the Hill
progressed; the play went forward. Pauline fled, and Margaret died, or
lived in process of death. Hugh went up and down to the City. Adela went
about the Hill. Wentworth, now possessed by his consciousness of her,
and demanding her presence and consent as its only fulfilment, went
about his own affairs. "Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended
in Me"; the maxim applies to many stones of stumbling, and especially to
all those of which the nature is the demand for a presence instead of
the assent to an absence; the imposition of the self upon complacency.
Wentworth made his spiritual voice hoarse in issuing orders to
complacency, and stubbed his toes more angrily every day against the
unmovable stone.

Once or twice he met Adela--once at Mrs. Parry's, where they had no
chance to speak. They smiled at each other--an odd smile; the faintest
hint of greed, springing from the invisible nature of greed, was in it
on both sides. Their greeds smiled. Again he ran into her one evening
at the post office--with Hugh, and Hugh's smile charged theirs with
hostility. It ordered and subdued Adela's; it blocked and repulsed
Wentworth's. It forced on him the fact that he was not only unsuccessful,
but old; he contended against both youth and a rival. He said: "How's
the play going?"

"We're all learning our parts," Adela said. "There doesn't seem to be
time for _anything_ but the play. Shall we ever get another evening with
you, Mr. Wentworth?"

He said: "I was sorry you could neither of you come." That, he thought,
would show that he hadn't been taken in.

"Yes," said Hugh; the word hung ambiguously. Wentworth, angered by it,
went on rashly: "Did you have a pleasant time?"

He might have meant the question for either or both. Adela said: "O
well, you know; it was rather a rush. Choosing colours and all that."

"But fortunately we ran into each other later," Hugh added, "and we
almost ran at each other--didn't we, Adela?--so we fed in a hurry and
dashed to a theatre. It might have been much worse."

Wentworth heard the steps in his brain. He saw Hugh take Adela's arm; he
saw her look up at him; he saw an exchanged memory. The steps went on
through him; double steps. He wanted to get away to give himself up to
them: life and death, satisfaction of hate and satisfaction of lust,
contending, and the single approach of the contention's result--patter,
patter, steps on the Hill. He knew they were laughing at him. He made
normal noises, and abnormally fled. He went home.

In his study he automatically turned over his papers, aware but
incapable of the organic life of the mind they represented. He found
himself staring at his drawings of costumes for the play, and had
an impulse to tear them, to refuse to have anything to do with the
grotesque mummery, himself to reject the picture of the rejection of
himself. But he did not trust his own capacity to manage a more remote
force than Adela--Mrs. Parry. Mrs. Parry meant nothing to him; she could
never become to him the nervous irritation, the obsession, which both
Aston Moffatt and Adela now were. His intelligence warned him that she
was, nevertheless, one of the natural forces which, like time and space,
he could not overcome. She wanted the designs, and she would have
them. He could refuse, but not reject, Adela; he could reject, but he
certainly could not refuse, Mrs. Parry. Irritated at his knowledge of
his own false strength, he flung down the rescued designs. Under them
were his first drafts; he tore them instead.

The evening wore into night. He could not bring himself to go to bed.
He walked about the room; he worked a little and walked, and walked a
little and worked. He thought of going to bed, but then he thought also
of his dream, and the smooth strange rope. He had never so much revolted
against it as now; he had never, waking, been so strongly aware of it as
now. It might have been coiled in some corner of the room, were it not
that he knew he was on it, in the dream. Physically and emotionally
weary, he still walked, and a somnambulism of scratched images closed
on him. His body twitched jerkily; the back of his eyes ached as if he
stared interiorly from the rope into a backward abysm. He stood
irritably still.

His eyes stared interiorly; exteriorly they glanced down and saw the
morning paper, which, by an accident, he had not opened. His hands took
it up, and turned the pages. In the middle he saw a headline: "Birthday
Honours", and a smaller headline: "Knighthood for Historian". His heart
deserted him: his puppet-eyes stared. They found the item by the name
in black type for their convenience: "Aston Moffatt".

There was presented to him at once and clearly an opportunity for
joy--casual, accidental joy, but joy. If he could not manage joy, at
least he might have managed the intention of joy, or (if that also were
too much) an effort towards the intention of joy. The infinity of grace
could have been contented and invoked by a mere mental refusal of
anything but such an effort. He knew his duty--he was no fool--he knew
that the fantastic recognition would please and amuse the innocent soul
of Sir Aston, not so much for himself as in some unselfish way for the
honour of history. Such honours meant nothing, but they were part of the
absurd dance of the world, and to be enjoyed as such. Wentworth knew he
could share that pleasure. He could enjoy; at least he could refuse not
to enjoy. He could refuse and reject damnation.

With a perfectly clear, if instantaneous, knowledge of what he did, he
rejected joy instead. He instantaneously preferred anger, and at once
it came; he invoked envy, and it obliged him. He crushed the paper in a
rage, then he tore it open, and looked again and again--there it still
was. He knew that his rival had not only succeeded, but succeeded at his
own expense; what chance was there of another historical knighthood
for years? Till that moment he had never thought of such a thing. The
possibility had been created and withdrawn simultaneously, leaving the
present fact to mock him. The other possibility--of joy in that present
fact--receded as fast. He had determined, then and for ever, for ever,
for ever, that he would hate the fact, and therefore facts.

He walked, unknowing, to the window, and stared out. He loomed behind
the glass, a heavy bulk of monstrous greed. His hate so swelled that he
felt it choking his throat, and by a swift act transferred it: he felt
his rival choking and staggering, he hoped and willed it. He stared
passionately into death, and saw before him a body twisting at the end
of a rope. Sir Aston Moffatt ... Sir Aston Moffatt.... He stared at the
faint ghost of the dead man's death, in that half-haunted house, and did
not see it. The dead man walked on his own Hill, but that Hill was not
to be Wentworth's. Wentworth preferred another death; he was offered it.

As he stood there, imagining death, close to the world of the first
death, refusing all joy of facts, and having for long refused all
unselfish agony of facts, he heard at last the footsteps for which he
had listened. It was the one thing which could abolish his anger; it
did. He forgot, in his excitement, all about Aston Moffatt; he lost
sight, exteriorly and interiorly, of the dangling figure. He stood
breathless, listening. Patter--patter; they were coming up the road.
Patter--patter; they stopped at the gate. He heard the faint clang. The
footsteps, softer now, came in. He stared intently down the drive. A
little way up it stood a woman's figure. The thing he had known must
happen had happened. She had come.

He pushed the window up--careful, even so, not to seem to go fast,
not to seem to want her. He leaned out and spoke softly. He said: "Is
that you?" The answer startled him, for it was Adela's voice and yet
something more than Adela's, fuller, richer, more satisfying. It said
"I'm here." He could only just hear the words, but that was right, for
it was after midnight, and she was beckoning with her hand. The single
pair of feet drawn from the double, the hand waving to him. He motioned
to her to come, but she did not stir, and at last, driven by his
necessity, he climbed through the window--it was easy enough, even for
him--and went down to meet her. As he came nearer he was puzzled again,
as he had been by the voice. It was Adela, yet it was not. It was her
height, and had her movement. The likeness appeased him, yet he did not
understand the faint unlikeness. For a moment he thought it was someone
else, a woman of the Hill, some one he had seen, whose name he did not
remember. He was up to her now, and he knew it could not be Adela, for
even Adela had never been so like Adela as this. That truth which is
the vision of romantic love, in which the beloved becomes supremely
her own adorable and eternal self, the glory and splendour of her own
existence, and her own existence no longer felt or thought as hers but
of and from another, that was aped for him then. The thing could not
astonish him, nor could it be adored. It perplexed. He hesitated.

The woman said: "You've been so long."

He answered roughly: "Who are you? You're not Adela."

The voice said: "Adela!" and Wentworth understood that Adela was not
enough, that Adela must be something different even from Adela if she
were to be satisfactory to him, something closer to his own mind and
farther from hers. She had been in relation with Hugh, and his Adela
could never be in relation with Hugh. He had never understood that
simplicity before. It was so clear now. He looked at the woman opposite
and felt a stirring of freedom in him.

He said: "You waved?" and she: "Or didn't you wave to me?"

He said, under her eyes: "I didn't think you'd be any use to me."

She laughed: the laugh was a little like Adela's, only better. Fuller;
more amused. Adela hardly ever laughed as if she were really amused; she
had always a small condescension. He said: "How could I know?"

"You don't think about yourself enough," she said; the words were tender
and grateful to him, and he knew they were true. He had never thought
enough about himself. He had wanted to be kind. He had wanted to be kind
to Adela; it was Adela's obstinate folly which now outraged him. He had
wanted to give himself to Adela out of kindness. He was greatly relieved
by this woman's words, almost as much as if he had given himself. He
went on giving. He said: "If I thought more of myself?"

"You wouldn't have much difficulty in finding it," she answered. "Let's
walk."

He didn't understand the first phrase, but he turned and went by her
side, silent while he heard the words. Much difficulty in finding what?
in finding it? the it that could be found if he thought of himself more;
that was what he had said or she had said, whichever had said that the
thing was to be found, as if Adela had said it, Adela in her real self,
by no means the self that went with Hugh; no, but the true, the true
Adela who was apart and his; for that was the difficulty all the while,
that she was truly his, and wouldn't be, but if he thought more of her
truly being, and not of her being untruly away, on whatever way, for the
way that went away was not the way she truly went, but if they did away
with the way she went away, then Hugh could be untrue and she true, then
he would know themselves, two, true and two, on the way he was going,
and the peace in himself, and the scent of her in him, and the her,
meant for him, in him; that was the she he knew, and he must think the
more of himself. A faint mist grew round them as they walked, and he
was under the broad boughs of trees, the trees of the Hill, going up the
Hill, up to the Adela he kept in himself, where the cunning woman who
walked by his side was taking him, and talking in taking. He had been
slow, slow, very slow not to see that this was true, that to get away
from Hugh's Adela was to find somewhere and somehow the true Adela, the
Adela that was his, since what he wanted was always and everywhere his;
he had always known that, yet that had been his hardship, for he must
know it was so, and yet it hadn't seemed so. But here in the mists under
the trees, with this woman, it was all clear. The mist made everything
clear.

She said: "In here." He went in; a wooden door swung before and behind
him.

It was quite dark. He stood. A hand slipped into his hand, and pressed
it gently. It drew him forward, and a little to one side. He said aloud:
"Where are we?" but there was no answer, only he thought he heard the
sound of water running, gently, a lulling and a lapping. It was not
worth while, against that sound, asking again where he was. The darkness
was quiet; his heart ceased to burn, though he could hear its beating,
in time with the lapping and lulling waters. He had never heard his
heart beating so loudly; almost as if he were inside his own body,
listening to it there. It would be louder then, he thought, unless
his senses were lulled and dulled. Likely enough that if he were inside
his own body his senses would be lulled, though how he got there or how
he would get out.... If he wanted to get out. Why? Why fly from that
shelter, the surest shelter of all, though he could not be quite there
yet because of the hand that guided him, round and round in some
twisting path. He knew that there were hundreds of yards, or was it
millions, of tubes or pipes or paths or ropes or something, coiled, many
coils, in his body; he would not want to catch his foot in them or be
twisted up in them--that was why the hand was leading him. He pressed
it, for acknowledgment; it replied. They were going downhill now, it
seemed, he and his guide, though he thought he could smell Adela, or if
not Adela, something like Adela, some growth like Adela, and the image
of a growth spread in his brain to trees and their great heavy boughs;
it was not a lapping but a rustling; he had come out of himself into a
wood, unless he was himself and a wood at the same time. Could he be a
wood? and yet walk in it? He looked at that question for a long time
while he walked, and presently found he was not thinking of that but of
something else; he was slipping his fingers along a wrist, and up an
arm--only a little way, for he still wished to be led on the way, though
everything was so quiet he could hardly think there was any need. He
liked going on, away, away, away, from something behind, or indeed
outside, outside the wood, outside the body, outside the door. The door
wouldn't open for anyone; it was his door, and though he hadn't fastened
it, it wouldn't open, because it knew his wish, and his wish was to
leave the two who had worried him outside the door. It was fun to think
they were playing games on him when he wasn't there; running round under
his windows, and he was quite away, and they would never know, even if
he saw them again, where and how and why he had been. It was good for
him to be here, and great fun; one day he would laugh, but laughter
would be tiring here, under trees and leaves, leaves--leaves and
eaves--eaves and eves; a word with two meanings, and again a word with
two meanings, eves and Eves. Many Eves to many Adams; one Eve to one
Adam; one Eve to each, one Eve to all. Eve....

They stopped. In the faint green light, light of a forest, faint mist in
a forest, a river-mist creeping among the trees, moon in the mist, he
could just see the shape of the woman beside him. He might be back again
in Eden, and she be Eve, the only man with all that belonged to the only
man. Others, those whose names he need not then remember, because they
were the waking animals of the world--others were inconsiderable to the
grand life that walked now in this glade. They hardly belonged to it
at all; they belonged outside, they were outside, outside the sealed
garden, no less sealed for being so huge, through a secret gate of which
he had entered, getting back to himself. He was inside and at peace. He
said aloud: "I won't go back."

His companion answered: "You needn't go back _really_--or you can take
it with you if you do. Wouldn't you like to?"

It took a while for this to reach him. He said, at last: "This? all
this, d'you mean?" He was a little disturbed by the idea that he might
have to go back among the shapes that ran about, harsh and menacing,
outside the glade or the garden or the forest, outside the mist. They
betrayed and attacked him. One had made fun of him and exposed him to
her paramour. That was outside; inside, he knew the truth, and the truth
was that she was quite subordinate to him. He breathed on her hand, and
it was turned into stone, so that she couldn't carry it, but it sank to
the ground, slowly, in that misty air, and she was held there, crying
and sobbing, by the weight of her petrified hand. He would go away for
a year or two, and perhaps when he came back he would decide to set her
free by blowing on the stone hand. The whole air of this place was his
breath; if he took a very deep breath, there would be no air left,
outside himself. He could stand in a vacuum, and nothing outside himself
could breathe at all, until he chose to breathe again; which perhaps he
wouldn't do, so that he could infinitely prevent anything at all from
existing merely by infinitely holding his breath. He held his breath for
a century or so, and all the beasts and shapes of the wilderness, a
tall young satyr and a plump young nymph among them, who were dancing to
the music of their own chuckles, fell slowly down and died. The woman
now beside him didn't die, but that was because she could live without
air, of which he was glad, for he wanted her to go on living, and if she
had needed air she would have died. He would have destroyed her without
meaning to.

She was saying, eagerly: "Yes, yes, yes: better than Eve, dearer than
Eve, closer than Eve. It's good for man to be alone. Come along, come
along: farther in, farther in: down under, down under."

Down under what? down under where? down under the air that was or
wasn't? but he was there under the air, on the point of breathing out
everything that would be just right. Why had he been so long content to
have things wrong? it all came out of that silly name of Eve, which had
prevented him realizing that he was what counted. Eve had never told him
he had made her, and so he wouldn't make her again, she should be left
all a twisted rag of skin in the vacuum, and he would have a world in
which no one went to the City, because there was no City unless he--but
no, he wouldn't have a City. Adela....

He found he had been holding his breath; he released it. He found he
was lying down, and that the woman was not there. He had exhaled, with
a deep permission to Adela to exist. Now he was sleeping after that
decision and act. He was awake in his sleep, and the moon was pouring
itself over him. He wasn't on a rope now. The moon was pouring down,
quite out of the sky; presently there wouldn't be any moon, only a hole
in the sky: down, down! He felt hands moving over him, the moonlight
changing to hands as it reached him, moon-hands, cool and thrilling.
The hands were delighting in him; these were what he would take back
to his own world, if he went. The moon would always be his, though all
the moonlight had poured down now, and there was a hole, a dark hole,
because the moon had emptied itself of its glory, and was not there any
more; he was at first in the smallest degree troubled, for if odd things
could disappear like this, could he be certain that his own Adela would
live? yes, because he was a god, and sometime he would make another
moon. He forgot it now; he was quite given up to the hands that caressed
him. He sank into oblivion; he died to things other than himself; he
woke to himself.

He lay quiet; beyond heart and lungs he had come, in the depth of the
Hill, to the bottom of the body. He saw before him, in the disappearing
moonlight, a place of cisterns and broad tanks, on the watery surface
of which the moon still shone and from which a faint mist still arose.
Between them, covering acres of ground, an enormous shape lay, something
like a man's; it lay on its face, its shoulders and buttocks rose in
mounds, and the head beyond; he could not see the legs lower than the
thighs, for that was where he himself lay, and they could not be seen,
for they were his own. He and the Adam sprang from one source; high over
him he felt his heart beat and his lungs draw breath. His machinery
operated, far away. He had decided that. He lay and waited for the
complete creation that was his own.

The Adam slept; the mist rose from the ground. The son of Adam waited.
He felt, coming over that vast form, that Hill of the dead and of the
living, but to him only the mass of matter from which his perfect
satisfaction was to approach, a road, a road up which a shape, no longer
vast, was now coming; a shape he distrusted before he discerned it. It
was coming slowly, over the mass of the Adam, a man, a poor ragged sick
man. The dead man, walking in his own quiet world, knew nothing of the
eyes to which his death-day walk was shown, nor of the anger with which
he was seen. Wentworth saw him, and grew demented; was he to miss and
be mocked again? what shape was this, and there? He sprang forward and
up, to drive it away, to curse it lest it interpolated its horrid need
between himself and his perfection. He would not have it: no canvassers,
no hawkers, no tramps. He shouted angrily, making gestures; it offended
him; it belonged to the City, and he would not have a City--no City, no
circulars, no beggars. No; no; no. No people but his, no loves but his.

It still came on, slowly, ploddingly, wearily, but it came; on down the
road that was the Adam in the bottom of Eden, determinedly plodding
as on the evening when it had trudged towards its death, inexorably
advancing as the glory of truth that broke out of the very air itself
upon the agonized Florentine in the Paradise of Eden: "ben sem, ben sem,
Beatrice"; the other, the thing seen, the thing known in every fibre to
be not the self, woman or beggar, the thing in the streets of the City.
No, no; no canvassers, no beggars, no lovers; and away, away from the
City into the wood and the mist, by the path that runs between past and
present, between present and present, that slides through each moment of
all experience, twisting and twining, plunging from the City and earth
and Eve and all otherness, into the green mist that rises among the
trees; by the path up which she was coming, the she of his longing, the
she that was he, and all he in the she--patter-patter, the she that went
hurrying about the Hill and the world, of whom it was said that they
whom she overtook were found drained and strangled in the morning, and
a single hair tight about the neck, so faint, so sure, so deathly, the
clinging and twisting path of the strangling hair. She whose origin is
with man's, kindred to him as he to his beasts, alien from him as he
from his beasts; to whom a name was given in a myth, Lilith for a name
and Eden for a myth, and she a stirring more certain than name or myth,
who in one of her shapes went hurrying about the refuge of that Hill
of skulls, and pattered and chattered on the Hill, hurrying, hurrying,
for fear of time growing together, and squeezing her out, out of the
interstices of time where she lived, locust in the rock; time growing
together into one, and squeezing her out, squeezing her down, out of
the pressure of the universal present, down into depth, down into the
opposite of that end, down into the ever and ever of the void.

He was running down the path, the path that coiled round the edge of
Eden, and the mist swooped to meet him. He had got right away from the
road which was the shape of the Adam outstretched in the sleep precedent
to the creation of fact, the separation of Eve, the making of things
other than the self. He ran away into the comforting mist, partly
because he liked it better, partly because there was nowhere else. He
ran from sight; he found sensation. Arms met and embraced, a mouth
kissed him, a sigh of content was loosed to him and from him. He was
held, consoled, nourished, satisfied. Adela; he; sleep.

The door swung after him. He was standing on Battle Hill, not far from
his house, but higher, towards the cemetery, towards the height. There,
waiting for him, was a girl. She exactly resembled Adela. She came
towards him softly, reached her hand to him, smiled at him, put up her
mouth to him. It was night on the Hill. They turned together and went
down it; after the single footsteps the double sounded again, his own
and the magical creature's drawn from his own recesses: she in him, he
in him. He was complacent; they went home.




Chapter VI

THE DOCTRINE OF SUBSTITUTED LOVE


Pauline sat back in her chair, and her arms lay along its arms. A
rehearsal was taking place in the grounds of the Manor House, and she
had ended her part in the first act. She was free to watch the other
performers, and to consider the play once more. By now they had all
got more or less accustomed to that speaking of verse aloud which our
uneducated mouths and ears find so difficult, being less instructed than
the more universal Elizabethan must have been. Pauline remembered again,
with a queer sense of inferiority, that no Elizabethan audience, gods
or groundlings, can have felt any shock of surprise or awkwardness at a
play opening with a high rhodomontade of sound. No modern audience would
put up with going to the first night of a new play to hear the curtain
sweep up on such an absurd and superb invocation as:

  _Hung be the heavens with black; yield, day, to night;_
  _Comets, importing change ..._

and so on. On the other hand, they accepted plays beginning with the
most ordinary prose. Even rhodomontade demands a peculiar capacity,
and to lose its bravery perhaps hampers some other bravery of the
spirit; to lose even one felicity is to be robbed of more than we have
a right to spare. Certainly Stanhope had spared them any overwhelming
magniloquence; his verse was subdued almost to conversation, though as
she listened and read and studied and spoke it, she became aware that
the rhythm of these conversations was a great deal more speedy and
vital than any she could ever remember taking part in. All Mrs. Parry's
efforts to introduce a stateliness of manner into the Grand Ducal court,
and a humorous but slow--O so slow--realism into the village, and
an enigmatic meandering meditativeness into the Chorus could not
sufficiently delay the celerity of the lines. Once or twice Stanhope,
having been consulted, had hinted that he would rather have the meaning
lost than too firmly explained, and that speed was an element, but after
a great deal of enthusiastic agreement they had all gone on as before.
She herself had been pleasantly ticked off by Mrs. Parry that very
afternoon for hurrying, and as Stanhope hadn't interfered she had done
her best to be adequately slow. It was some recompense to sit now and
listen to Adela and Mrs. Parry arguing with, or at least explaining
to, each other. Adela, true to her principles of massing and blocking,
arranged whole groups of words in chunks, irrespective of line and
meaning, but according to her own views of the emotional quality to be
stressed. She had just unexpectedly broken one line with a terrific
symbolical pause.

"I am," she said to her Woodcutter, and pausing as if she had invoked
the Name itself and waited for its Day of Judgment to appear, added in
one breath, "only the perception in a flash of love."

Pauline encouraged in herself a twinge of wonder whether there were
anything Adela Hunt were less only; then she felt ashamed of having
tried to modify the line into her own judgment, especially into a quite
unnecessary kind of judgment. She knew little enough of Adela, and the
result was that she lost the sound of the woodcutter's answer--"A
peremptory phenomenon of love". She thought, a little gloomily, that
malice could create a fair number of peremptory phenomena for itself,
not perhaps of love, but easily enjoyable, like Myrtle Fox's trees.
Malice was a much cosier thing than love. She was rather glad they were
not doing the last act to-day; that act in which Periel--male or female,
no matter!--spirit, only not spiritual--she--began and led the Chorus;
and where everyone came in, on the most inadequate excuses, the Princess
and her lover and the Grand Duke and the farmers and the banditti and
the bear; and through the woods went a high medley of wandering beauty
and rejoicing love and courtly intelligence and rural laughter and
bloody clamour and growling animalism, in mounting complexities of
verse, and over all, gathering, opposing, tossing over it, the naughting
cry of the all-surrounding and overarching trees.

It troubled her now, as it had not done when she first read it, as it
did not the others. She wondered whether it would have troubled her
if, since the day of his first call, she had not sometimes heard her
grandmother and Peter Stanhope talking in the garden. It was two or
three weeks ago, since he had first called, and she could not remember
that they had said anything memorable since except a few _dicta_ about
poetry--but everything they said was full and simple and unafraid. She
herself had rather avoided him; she was not yet altogether prepared in
so many words to accept the terror of good. It had occurred to her to
imagine those two--the old woman and the poet--watching the last act,
themselves its only audience, as if it were presented by the imagined
persons themselves, and by no planned actors. But what would happen when
the act came to an end she could not think, unless those two went up
into the forest and away into the sounds that they had heard, into the
medley of which the only unity was the life of the great poetry that
made it, and was sufficient unity. Under the influence of one of those
garden conversations she had looked up in her old school Shelley the
lines that had haunted her, and seen the next line to them. It ran:

  That apparition, sole of men, he saw;

and it referred, of course, to Zoroaster. But she couldn't, watching the
play, refrain from applying it to Stanhope. This apparition, sole of
men--so far as she had then discovered--he had seen; and she went back
to wonder again if in those three lines Shelley, instead of frightening
her, was not nourishing her. Supposing--supposing--that in this last act
Peter Stanhope had seen and imagined something more awful even than a
vision of himself; supposing he had contemplated the nature of the world
in which such visions could be, and that the entwined loveliness of his
verse was a mirror of its being. She looked at the hale and hearty young
man who was acting the bear, and she wondered whether perhaps her real
bear, if she had courage to meet it, would be as friendly as he. If only
the woodcutter's son had not learned the language of the leaves while
they burned in the fire! There was no doubt about that speech: the very
smell and noise of the fire was in it, and the conviction of the alien
song that broke out within the red flames. So perhaps the phoenix cried
while it burned.

Someone sat down in the next chair. She looked; it was Stanhope. Mrs.
Parry and Adela concluded their discussion; Adela seemed to be modifying
her chunks of words--sharpening ends and pushing them nearer till they
almost met. Presumably Mrs. Parry was relying on later rehearsals to
get them quite in touch, and even, if she were fortunate, to tie them
together. The rehearsal began again. Stanhope said: "You were, of
course, quite right."

She turned her head towards him, gravely. "You meant it like that then?"
she asked.

"Certainly I meant it like that," he said, "more like that, anyhow. Do
you suppose I want each line I made to march so many paces to the right,
with a meditation between each? But even if I could interfere it'd only
get more mixed than ever. Better keep it all of a piece."

"But you don't mind," she asked, "if I'm a little quicker than some of
them?"

"I should love to hear it," he answered. "Only I think it's probably
our business--yours and mine--to make our own feelings agreeable to the
company, as it were. This isn't a play; it's a pleasant entertainment.
Let's all be pleasantly entertaining together."

"But the poetry?" she said.

He looked at her, laughing. "And even that shall be Mrs. Parry's," he
said. "For this kind of thing is not worth the fretfulness of dispute;
let's save all that till we are among the doctors, who aren't fretful."

She said suddenly, "Would you read it to me again one day? is it too
absurd to ask you?"

"Of course I'll read it," he said. "Why not? If you'd like it. And now
in exchange tell me what's bothering you."

Taken aback, she stared at him, and stammered on her answer.
"But--but----" she began.

He looked at the performers. "Miss Hunt is determined to turn me into
the solid geometry of the emotions," he said. "But--but--tell me why you
always look so about you and what you are looking for."

"Do I?" she asked hesitatingly. He turned a serious gaze on her and her
own eyes turned away before it. He said, "There's nothing worth quite so
much vigilance or anxiety. Watchfulness, but not anxiety, not fear. You
let it in to yourself when you fear it so; and whatever it is, it's less
than your life."

"You talk as if life were good," she said.

"It's either good or evil," he answered, "and you can't decide that by
counting incidents on your fingers. The decision is of another kind. But
don't let's be abstract. Will you tell me what it is bothers you?"

She said, "It sounds too silly."

Stanhope paused, and in the silence there came to them Mrs. Parry's
voice carefully enunciating a grand ducal speech to Hugh Prescott. The
measured syllables fell in globed detachment at their feet, and Stanhope
waved a hand outwards.

"Well," he said, "if you think it sounds sillier than that. God is
good; if I hadn't been here they might have done the _Tempest_.
Consider--'Yea--all which--it inher-it--shall dis-solve. And--like
this--insub-stantial pag-eant fa-ded.' O certainly God is good. So what
about telling me?"

"I have a trick," she said steadily, "of meeting an exact likeness of
myself in the street." And as if she hated herself for saying it, she
turned sharply on him. "There!" she exclaimed. "Now you know. You know
exactly. And what will you say?"

Her eyes burned at him; he received their fury undisturbed, saying, "You
mean exactly that?" and she nodded. "Well," he went on mildly, "it's not
unknown. Goethe met himself once--on the road to Weimar, I think. But he
didn't make it a habit. How long has this been happening?"

"All my life," she answered. "At intervals--long intervals, I know.
Months and years sometimes, only it's quicker now. O, it's insane--no
one could believe it, and yet it's there."

"It's your absolute likeness?" he asked.

"It's me," she repeated. "It comes from a long way off, and it comes up
towards me, and I'm terrified--terrified--one day it'll come on and meet
me. It hasn't so far; it's turned away or disappeared. But it won't
always; it'll come right up to me--and then I shall go mad or die."

"Why?" he asked quickly, and she answered at once, "Because I'm afraid.
Dreadfully afraid."

"But," he said, "that I don't quite understand. You have friends;
haven't you asked one of them to carry your fear?"

"Carry my fear!" she said, sitting rigid in her chair, so that her arms,
which had lain so lightly, pressed now into the basket-work and her
long firm hands gripped it as if they strangled her own heart. "How can
anyone else carry my fear? Can anyone else see it and have to meet it?"

Still, in that public place, leaning back easily as if they talked of
casual things, he said, "You're mixing up two things. Think a moment,
and you'll see. The meeting it--that's one thing, and we can leave it
till you're rid of the other. It's the fear we're talking about. Has no
one ever relieved you of that? Haven't you ever asked them to?"

She said: "You haven't understood, of course.... I was a fool.... Let's
forget it. Isn't Mrs. Parry efficient?"

"Extremely," he answered. "And God redeem her. But nicely. Will you tell
me whether you've any notion of what I'm talking about? And if not, will
you let me do it for you?"

She attended reluctantly, as if to attend were an unhappy duty she owed
him, as she had owed others to others and tried to fulfil them. She said
politely, "Do it for me?"

"It can be done, you know," he went on. "It's surprisingly simple. And
if there's no one else you care to ask, why not use me? I'm here at your
disposal, and we could so easily settle it that way. Then you needn't
fear it, at least, and then again for the meeting--that might be a very
different business if you weren't distressed."

"But how can I not be afraid?" she asked, "It's hellish nonsense to talk
like that. I suppose that's rude, but----"

"It's no more nonsense than your own story," he said. "That isn't; very
well, this isn't. We all know what fear and trouble are. Very well--when
you leave here you'll think to yourself that I've taken this particular
trouble over instead of you. You'd do as much for me if I needed it, or
for any one. And I will give myself to it. I'll think of what comes to
you, and imagine it, and know it, and be afraid of it. And then, you
see, you won't."

She looked at him as if she were beginning to understand that at any
rate he thought he was talking about a reality, and as she did so
something of her feeling for him returned. It was, after all, Peter
Stanhope who was talking to her like this. Peter Stanhope was a great
poet. Were great poets liars? No. But they might be mistaken. Yes; so
might she. She said, very doubtfully: "But I don't understand. It isn't
_your_--you haven't seen it. How can you----"

He indicated the rehearsal before them. "Come," he said, "if you like
_that_, will you tell me that I must see in order to know? That's not
pride, and if it were it wouldn't matter. Listen--when you go from here,
when you're alone, when you think you'll be afraid, let me put myself
in your place, and be afraid instead of you." He sat up and leaned
towards her. "It's so easy," he went on, "easy for both of us. It needs
only the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to yourself
that since I am there to be troubled instead of you, therefore you
needn't be troubled? And what can be easier than for me to carry a
little while a burden that isn't mine?"

She said, still perplexed at a strange language: "But how can I cease to
be troubled? Will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is
it your resemblance that hurries up the street?"

"It is not," he said, "and you shall not pretend at all. The thing
itself you may one day meet--never mind that now, but you'll be free
from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven't you heard
it said that we ought to bear one another's burdens?"

"But that means----" she began, and stopped.

"I know," Stanhope said. "It means listening sympathetically, and
thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don't
say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ
or St. Paul, or whoever said _bear_, or whatever he Aramaically said
instead of _bear_, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel
instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it
instead of. If you're still carrying yours, I'm not carrying it for
you--however sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there's no need to
introduce Christ, unless you wish. It's a fact of experience. If you
give a weight to me, you can't be carrying it yourself; all I'm asking
you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn't sound very
difficult."

"And if I could," she said. "If I could do--whatever it is you mean,
would I? Would I push my burden on to anybody else?"

"Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself," he answered. "If
you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are common to us all, if
you want to live in pride and division and anger, you can. But if you
will be part of the rest of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed with
us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give your burden up
to someone else, and you must carry someone else's burden. I haven't
made the universe and it isn't my fault. But I'm sure that this is a law
of the universe, and not to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as
not to carry another's. You'll find it quite easy if you let yourself do
it."

"And what of my self-respect?" she said.

He laughed at her with a tender mockery. "O, if we are of that kind!"
he exclaimed. "If you want to respect yourself, if to respect yourself
you must go clean against the nature of things, if you must refuse the
Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you should want so
extremely to respect yourself is more than I can guess, why, go on and
respect. Must I apologize for suggesting anything else?"

He mocked her and was silent; for a while she stared back, still
irresolute. He held her; presently he held her at command. A long
silence had gone by before he spoke again.

"When you are alone," he said, "remember that I am afraid instead of
you, and that I have taken over every kind of worry. Think merely that;
say to yourself--'he is being worried', and go on. Remember it is mine.
If you do not see it, well; if you do, you will not be afraid. And since
you are not afraid...."

She stood up. "I can't imagine not being afraid," she said.

"But you will not be," he answered, also rising, certainty in his
voice, "because you will leave all that to me. Will you please me by
remembering that absolutely?"

"I am to remember," she said, and almost broke into a little trembling
laugh, "that you are being worried and terrified instead of me?"

"That I have taken it all over," he said, "so there is nothing left for
you."

"And if I see it after all?" she asked.

"But not 'after all'," he said. "The fact remains--but see how different
a fact, if it can't be dreaded! As of course it can't--by you. Go now,
if you choose, and keep it in your mind till--shall I see you to-morrow?
Or ring me up to-night, say about nine, and tell me you are being
obedient to the whole fixed nature of things."

"I'll ring up," she said. "But I ... it sounds so silly."

"It is silly sooth," he answered, "and dallies with the innocence of
love. Real sooth, real innocence, real love. Go with God." They shook
hands, and slowly, looking back once, just before she reached the lane,
she went out of his sight.

Stanhope, turning his eyes from her parting figure, looked at the
rehearsal and then settled himself more comfortably in his chair. A
certain superficial attention, alert and effective in its degree, lay
at the disposal of anyone who might need it, exactly as his body was
prepared to draw in its long outstretched legs if anyone wanted to
pass. Meanwhile he disposed the rest of his attention according to his
promise. He recollected Pauline; he visualized her going along a road,
any road; he visualized another Pauline coming to meet her. And as he
did so his mind contemplated not the first but the second Pauline;
he took trouble to apprehend the vision, he summoned through all his
sensations an approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself to that
fear, laying aside for awhile every thought of why he was doing it,
forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the strangeness and
the terror of that separate spiritual identity. His more active mind
reflected it in an imagination of himself going into his house and
seeing himself, but he dismissed that, for he desired to subdue himself
not to his own natural sensations, but to hers first, and then to let
hers, if so it should happen, be drawn back into his own. But it was
necessary first intensely to receive all her spirit's conflict. He sat
on, imagining to himself the long walk with its sinister possibility,
the ogreish world lying around, the air with its treachery to all sane
appearance. His own eyes began to seek and strain and shrink, his
own feet, quiet though actually they were, began to weaken with the
necessity of advance upon the road down which the girl was passing. The
body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden
of her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for her,
for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He endured her
sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there
is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which
Christendom itself has never understood, nor can.

Since he could not take, nor would have admitted, her hate and
rejection, her passion was received into the lucidity of his own spirit.
The experience itself, sharply as his body took it, was less sharp for
him; not that he willed it so, but because his senses received their
communication from within not from without, and there is in all holy
imagination from goodwill a quality of greatness which purifies and
stablizes experience. His goodwill went to its utmost, and utmost
goodwill can go very far. It went to all but actual vision, and it
excluded his intellectual judgment of that vision. Had he been asked, at
that moment, for his judgment, he would have answered that he believed
sincerely that Pauline believed sincerely that she saw, but whether
the sight was actual or not he could not tell. He would have admitted
that it might be but a fantastic obsession of her brain. That made no
difference to his action. If a man seems to himself to endure the
horrors of shipwreck, though he walks on dry land and breathes clear
air, the business of his friend is more likely to be to accept those
horrors as he feels them, carrying the burden, than to explain that
the burden cannot, as a matter of fact, exist. Given all reasonable
talk as well, wherever there is intelligence enough for exchange and
substitution to exist, there is place enough for action. Only when the
desire of an obsession has carried its subject beyond the interchanges
of love can the power of substituted love itself cease. It would have
been small use for any adept, however much greater than Peter Stanhope,
to have offered his service to Wentworth, where he sat in his own
room with the secret creature of substantial illusion at his feet
caressing his hand; for from that haunting, even while it was but an
unmaterialized anguish within his blood, Wentworth had had no desire,
more than the desire of maddened pride, to be exquisitely free.

So devoted to the action of his spirit, Stanhope sat on among the sounds
of laughter and gaiety and half-serious wrangles that rose around him.
It was not a long while that he was left to sit alone; perhaps Pauline
had not more than partly advanced on her return when someone came across
to interrupt and consult him. He gave a full attention, for that other
concern is not measured by time but by will. To give freedom to both, he
would return to his task when opportunity next offered; afterwards, when
they had all gone away, and he was alone. But that was rather for the
sake of his own integrity of spirit than that more was needed. The act
of substitution was fully made; and if it had been necessarily delayed
for years (could that have been), but not by his fault, still its result
would have preceded it. In the place of the Omnipotence there is neither
before nor after; there is only act.

Pauline went out through the open door of the house, for the Manor was
now almost a public building of happiness, and began to make her way
towards her home. Just as she left, one of the other girls, who was only
then arriving for her part, had delayed her with a question, a minute
matter about a borrowed pattern for a dress, and possible alterations.
Pauline also had given her attention, and now, walking down the road,
went on thinking of it--and whether Mary Frobisher would really be well
advised to move the left seam an eighth of an inch back, considering
Mary Frobisher's figure. It was another thing for her, and the hang of
the frock had been as satisfactory as could be hoped. But Mary--she
stopped to smell the pinks in a garden she was passing. Pinks were not
very showy flowers, but they had a fragrance. It was perhaps a pity they
had so few in their own garden; she had once or twice thought of asking
her grandmother to order the gardener to get some more, since the
gardener certainly wouldn't otherwise do it. But Mrs. Anstruther was
always so content with immediate existence that it seemed a shame to
bother her about proximate existence. Pauline wondered if she, when
she was ninety-seven, would be as little disturbed by the proximate
existence of death as her grandmother seemed to be. Or would she be
sorry to be compelled to abandon the pleasant wonder of this world,
which, when all allowances were made, was a lovely place, and had----

She nearly came to a full stop; then, with slackened steps, she went on,
blinking at the sunlight. She realized she had been walking along quite
gaily. It was very curious. She looked down the road. Nothing was in
sight--except a postman. She wondered whether anything would come into
sight. But why was she so careless about it? Her mind leapt back to
Stanhope's promise, and she knew that, whatever the explanation might
be, she had been less bothered for the past ten minutes than ever
before in any solitude of twenty years. But supposing the thing came?
Well, then it came, but till it came why suppose it? If Peter Stanhope
was taking trouble, as he was, because he said he would, there was no
conceivable reason for her to get into trouble. She had promised to
leave it to him; very well, she would. Let him--with all high blessing
and gratitude--get on with it. She had promised, she had only to keep
her promise.

So she put it to herself, but within herself she knew that, except just
to ratify her promise, even that act of her mind was superfluous. It was
an act purely of extra delight, an occasion of obedience. She wouldn't
worry; no, because she couldn't worry. That was the mere truth--she
couldn't worry. She was, then and there, whatever happened later,
entirely free. She was, then and there, incapable of distress. The world
was beautiful about her, and she walked in it, enjoying. He had been
quite right; he had simply picked up her parcel. God knew how he had
done it, but he had. A thing had, everywhere and all at once, happened.
A violent convulsion of the laws of the universe took place in her mind;
if this was one of the laws, the universe might be better or worse, but
it was certainly quite different from anything she had ever supposed
it to be. It was a place whose very fundamentals she had suddenly
discovered to be changed. She hadn't any clear idea of what Stanhope
was doing, and that didn't matter, except that she ought, as soon as
possible, to find out and try to understand. That was merely her duty,
and might--the thought crossed her mind and was gone--be her very great
happiness. Meanwhile, she would go on walking. And if she came to her
self, well she came to her self. No doubt Peter Stanhope would be doing
something about it. A kitten on a wall caught her eye; it put its head
down; she stretched her arm and stood on tiptoe to stroke it, and so
doing for a while she forgot Stanhope and the universe and Pauline.

The rehearsal had long been over, and the Manor left again to its owner.
Stanhope had returned to his own proper activity of work, when, exactly
as the clock in his study chimed nine, the telephone bell rang.

He took up the receiver.

"Peter Stanhope speaking," he said.

"Pauline," said a voice. "You told me to ring you up."

"I was waiting for you," he answered. "Well?"

"Well ... there was a kitten and pinks and a pattern for a frock and a
postman who said the rain was holding off," said the voice, and paused.

"Cautious man," said Stanhope, and waited.

"Well ... that was all," the voice explained.

"Really all?" Stanhope asked.

"Really all," the voice answered. "I just went home. It _is_ real, I
suppose?"

"Entirely," said Stanhope. "Aren't you sure of it?"

"Yes, O, yes," said the voice. "It ... I ... I wanted to thank you. I
don't know what you did----"

"But I've told you," he murmured, and was cut short.

"----but I did want to thank you. Only--what happens now? I mean--do
I----" It stopped.

"I should think you did," said Stanhope, gravely. "Don't you? It seems a
perfectly good idea."

"Ah, but do you mean that?" she protested. "It looks so like taking
advantage."

"You'll be as involved morally as you are verbally, if you talk like
that," he said. "Taking advantage! O my dear girl! Don't be so silly!
You've got your own job to do."

"What's that?" she asked.

"Being ready to meet it," he answered. "It'll be quite simple, no doubt,
and even delightful. But if I were you I'd keep my faculties quiet for
that. If meeting is a pleasure, as we so often tell people, you may as
well enjoy the pleasure."

"I hadn't really thought of it being that," said the voice.

"But now?" he asked.

"Yes ... I ... I suppose it might," she said.

"Do you see any reason whatever why it shouldn't? Since we're agreed you
won't have any opportunity to be afraid," he added.

"It's funny," she said, after another pause, "but do you know I feel as
if I'd never really looked at it till now. At least, perhaps the first
time, when I was quite small, but I was always shut up when I talked
about it, and then sometimes I saw it when ... when I didn't like
it...."

"I don't quite follow," Stanhope said. "When you didn't like it?"

He couldn't see the blush that held Pauline as she sat by the telephone
table, but he heard the voice become smaller and softer as she said,
"When I wasn't being very good. There wasn't much money in the house,
and once there was a shilling my mother lost, and then there were
sweets. It was just after I'd bought the sweets that I saw it coming
once. It was horrid to see it just then, but it was beastly of me, I
know."

"Well, that's as may be," Stanhope said. "The limits of theft are a
high casuistical problem. Read Pascal and the Jesuits--especially the
Jesuits, who were more ordinary and more sensible. The triumph of the
bourgeois."

"But I knew it was wrong," Pauline exclaimed.

"Still your knowledge may have been wrong," Stanhope demurred. "However,
don't let's argue that. I see what you mean. Self-respect and all that.
Well, it won't do you any harm to feel it knows you. Much the best
thing, in fact."

"Y--yes," Pauline said. "Yes--I do think so really. And I'm not to
worry?"

"You are most emphatically to remember that I'll do the worrying,"
Stanhope said. "Ring me up at any time--day or night; only if no one
answers at night remember that, as Miss Fox so rightly told us, sleep is
good, and sleep will undoubtedly be here. But sleep isn't separation in
the Omnipotence. Go in peace, and wish me the same, for friendship's
sake."

"O how can I?" she said, startled. "How can I wish peace to you? You are
peace."

"M'm," Stanhope said. "But the more if you will have it so. Try."

"Good night then," she answered slowly. "Good night. Thank you. Go ...
in peace."

Her voice had faltered so that she could hardly speak the words, and
when she rose from her seat she was on fire from head to foot. Guilt or
shame, servile fear or holy fear, adoration or desperation of obedience,
it burned through her to a point of physical pain. The blood rode in her
face and she panted a little in the heat. She could not have answered,
had anyone spoken to her; her tongue seemed to have said its last words
on earth. Never, never, her heart sang, let her speak again, never let
the silence that followed her daring, her presumptuous invocation, be
broken. It had been compelled, she had been commanded; a God had been
with her--not Peter Stanhope, but whatever answered him from her depth.

She looked at her watch; it was not yet time for her evening visit to
her grandmother. She looked round; a book lay on the table. It was
the volume of Foxe with the account of her ancestor's martyrdom; Mrs.
Anstruther had been reading it again. She walked to it, and with one
hand, the knuckles of the other pressed against her slowly cooling
cheek, turned the pages to find the place. Something from it was vaguely
coming to her mind. "They set him to the stake and put the fire to the
wood, and as the fire got hold of him he gave a great cry and said, _I
have seen the salvation of my God_.... The Lord had done great things
for him there in the midst of the fire." The Lord, she thought, made a
habit of doing things in the midst of a fire; he had just brought her to
say "Go in peace" in another. She glowed again to think of it. But it
was the first phrase she had looked for; "I have seen the salvation".
It had never occurred to her, any time she had read or remembered the
martyrdom, that Struther was anything but a demented fanatic; a faint
distaste that she should come of his blood had touched her. It now
occurred to her that Struther might have been talking flat realism.
She put the book down, and looked out of the window. It was--all of a
sudden--remarkably easy to look out of the window. She might even walk
down to the gate and look at the street. The parcel was completely in
some one else's care, and all she had to do was to leave it. She hoped
it was not troublesome to Peter Stanhope, but it wouldn't be. He and
whatever he meant by the Omnipotence would manage it quite well between
them. Perhaps, later on, she could give the Omnipotence a hand with
some other burden; everyone carrying everyone else's, like the Scilly
Islanders taking in each other's washing. Well, and at that, if it were
tiresome and horrible to wash your own clothes and easy and happy to
wash someone else's, the Scilly Islanders might be intelligent enough.
"Change here for Scilly," she said aloud as she came to the gate.

"My dear!" said a voice beside her.

Pauline jumped. It was a fairly high wall, and she had been preoccupied;
still, she ought to have seen the woman who was standing outside, alone
against the wall on her left. For a moment something jarred, but she
recovered. She said, "Oh, good evening, Mrs. Sammile. I didn't see you."

The other peered at her. "How's your grandmother?" she asked.

"Rather weaker, I'm afraid," Pauline said. "It's kind of you to ask."

"And how are you?" Lily Sammile went on. "I've been----" but Pauline
unintentionally cut through the sentence.

"Very well indeed," she murmured, with a deep breath of pleasure. "Isn't
it a lovely night?"

The other woman strained a little forward, as if, even in the June
evening, she could not see her clearly. She said, "I haven't seen you
about lately: you haven't wanted to see me. I thought perhaps you
might."

Pauline looked back smiling. How, in this quietness of spirit, could she
have thought she wanted anything changed? But the old lady had wanted to
help, and though now she did not need the help, the goodwill remained.
She said, leaning over the gate: "Oh, I'm much better now."

"That's good," the other woman said. "But take care of yourself. Think
of yourself; be careful of yourself. I could make you perfectly safe and
perfectly happy at the same time. You really haven't any idea of how
happy you could be."

Her voice was infinitely softer than Pauline could remember it. In the
full light of day, the other woman had seemed to her slightly hard,
her voice a light third hammer to her feet. She pattered everywhere,
upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber, in any chamber; but now her
figure was dim and her feet still, and her voice soft. As soft as the
dust the evening wind was blowing down the street. Dust of the dead,
dust of the Struther who had died in flame. Had he been happy? happy?
happy? Pauline was not sure whether she or her companion had spoken the
word again, but it hung in the air, floating through it above, and the
dust was stirred below, and a little dizziness took her and passed.
Lazily she swung the gate.

She said, as if to draw down the floating mist: "Happy? I ... I happy?"

The other murmured: "Happy, rich. Insatiate, yet satisfied. How
delicious everything would be! I could tell you tales that would shut
everything but yourself out. Wouldn't you like to be happy? If there's
anything that worries you, I can shut it away from you. Think what you
might be missing."

Pauline said: "I don't understand."

The other went on: "My dear, it's so simple. If you will come with me, I
can fill you, fill your body with any sense you choose. I can make you
feel whatever you'd choose to be. I can give you certainty of joy for
every moment of life. Secretly, secretly; no other soul--no other living
soul."

Pauline tingled as she listened. Shut up within herself--shut up till
that very day with fear and duty for only companions--with silence
and forbearance as only possibilities--she felt a vague thrill of
promised delight. Against it her release that day began already to seem
provisional and weak. She had found calm, certainly; only ten minutes
earlier that calm had seemed to her more than she could ever have hoped.
She loved it still; she owed to it this interval of indulgent communion
with something other than calm. The communion threatened the calm with
a more entrancing sensation of bliss; she felt almost that she had too
rashly abandoned her tribulation for a substitute that was but a cold
gift, when warm splendour had been waiting to enrapture her. In the
very strength of her new-found security she leaned from it, as from the
house itself; as within a tower of peace, with deliberate purpose she
swung the gate more wide. Inconceivably she all but regretted the fear
that would have been an excuse, even a just reason, for accepting a
promise of more excitement of satisfaction than peace and freedom could
give or could excuse. Peace had given her new judgment, and judgment
began to lament her peace. If she opened the gate, if the far vision of
her returning vision gave her speed and strength to leap from it to this
more thrilling refuge! And while her heart beat more quickly and her
mind laboured at once to know and not to know its desires, a voice slid
into her ear, teasing her, speeding her blood, provoking her purpose. It
spoke of sights and sounds, touches and thrills, and of entire oblivion
of harm; nothing was to be that she did not will, and everything that
she willed, to the utmost fulness of her heart, should be. She would be
enough for herself. She could dream for ever, and her dreams should for
ever be made real. "Come soon," it said, "come now. I'll wait for you
here. In a few minutes you'll be free, and then you'll come; you shall
be back soon. Give me your hand and I'll give you a foretaste now." A
hand came into hers, a pulse against her wrist beat with significance of
breathless abandonment to delirious joy. She delayed in a tremulous and
pleasurable longing.

"But how," she murmured, "how can all this happen? how do I know what
I want? I've never thought ... I don't know anyone ... and to be
alone...."

"Give me your hand," the other said, "then come and dream, till you
discover, so soon, the ripeness of your dreams." She paused, and added,
"You'll never have to do anything for others any more."

It was the last touch, and false, false because of the habit of her past
and because of Stanhope's promise. The fountain of beauty had sprung
upward in a last thrust; it broke against the arched roof of his world,
and the shock stung her into coldness. Never have to do anything--and
she had been promising herself that she would carry someone's parcel as
hers had been carried, that she would be what he said she could. Like it
or not, it had been an oath; rash or wise it stood.

"An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven." She had been reading more
verse of late, since she had had to speak Stanhope's, and the holy words
engulfed her in the sound which was so much more than she. "An oath, an
oath.... Shall I lay perjury upon my soul?" The wind, rising as if to a
storm, screamed "perjury" through the sky that held the Hill and all;
false, false! she perjured in that last false gleam. She was come;
"false, fleeting, perjured Clarence! Seize on him, Furies".... The word,
Antan, sprang hundred-voiced around her, and held her by every gripping
voice. Perjury, on her soul and in her blood, if now she slipped to buy
sweets with money that was not hers; never, till it was hers in all love
and princely good, by gift and gift and gift beyond excelling gift,
in no secrecy of greed but all glory of public exchange, law of the
universe and herself a child of the universe. Never till he--not Pascal
nor the Jesuits nor the old chattering pattering woman but he; not
moonlight or mist or clouding dust but he; not any power in earth or
heaven but he or the peace she had been made bold to bid him--till they
bade her take with all her heart what nothing could then forbid. An
oath, an oath, an oath in heaven, and heaven known in the bright oath
itself, where two loves struck together, and the serene light of
substitution shone, beyond her understanding but not beyond her deed.
She flung the gate shut, and snatched her hands away, and as it clanged
she was standing upright, her body a guard flung out on the frontier of
her soul. The other woman was at the gate--of garden or world or
soul--leaning to but not over it, speaking hurriedly, wildly, and the
voice rising on the wind and torn and flung on the wind: "Everything,
anything; anything, everything; kindness to me ... help to me ...
nothing to do for others, nothing to do with others ... everything,
everything...."

The door behind her was opened; the maid's voice said doubtfully: "Miss
Pauline?"

Pauline, rigid at her post, said, turning her head a little: "You wanted
me?"

Phoebe murmured: "Your grandmother's asking for you, Miss Pauline, if you
could come."

Pauline said, "I'm coming." She looked over the gate; she added in a
voice hard with an unreasoning hostility: "Good night." She ran in.




Chapter VII

JUNCTION OF TRAVELLERS


The dead man walked in his dead town. It was still, quiet and deserted;
he too was quiet in it. He had now, for long, no need to worry. Nagging
voice and niggling hunger were gone. It was heaven enough; he sought
nothing else. Dead or alive, or neither dead nor alive, he was free from
the sick fear which the Republic had imposed on him. The stigmata of
his oppression burned and ached no more. His tired feet had lightness;
his worn form energy. He did not know or care if he were in the body
or out of the body. For the first time he needed nothing, and nothing
distressed him. He walked, sat, stretched himself out. He did not sleep,
for he did not need sleep. Sometimes he wondered a little that he was
never hungry or thirsty. It was an odd place he was in, but he did not
grow tired of it any more than of walking through it. So much the better
if he were not hungry or thirsty or tired. As for luxuries, he could not
have missed them, for he had never had them, nor, then and there, was
it permitted him to feel any want.

The faint light persisted. Time had no measurement except by the slow
growth of his interior quiet, and to him none. All the capacities of
satisfaction in one ordinary life, which have their fulfilment in many
ways, in him there were concentrated on that quiet. Monotony could not
exist where all duration was a slow encouragement of rest. Presently he
even found himself looking up into the sky for the moon. The moon in his
mind was, since his death, connected with the world he had known, with
his single room and his wife, his enemies and tyrants. He felt, now,
safe from it; he seriously expected its appearance, knowing that he was
free. If the big pale ball had floated up, a balloon in which everything
harmful was borne away, busy but not with him, he would have been mildly
pleased. He knew that that balloon was for ever cut off from him. Moon,
balloon, it could not drop anyone among these shells of houses. If it
did, whoever it dropped would be caught in the shells. He had been a
good-tempered little victim, but there were one or two in the past whom
he could placidly have borne to see scrabbling and thrusting at the
scaffolding and cage. He did not exactly resent, in that quiet, anything
they had done--a foreman, a mate, a brother, a wife, but perhaps, as the
unmeasured time did pass, he felt a little more strongly that he would
enjoy his freedom more if he saw them defeated. In the past they had
taken everything from him. It would not be unpleasant now to see them
raging with a wish to get at him, and, in that air, defeated.

He sat opposite his ladder, after a long, long while, and let the fancy
grow. It was then that he first noticed a change. The light was growing
stronger. It was, again, a long while between the first faintest hint of
it and any notice he took, and again between his first faint wonder and
his belief, and again between belief and certainty. At the end of all
those long periods, there was not much perceptible difference in the
sky. Centuries passed before that difference grew more marked, but that
too came. He had sat watching it, dimly, peacefully. He rose then, not
quickly but more quickly than he had been used to move. He stirred with
a hardly discernible unease.

It seemed as if the light were spreading steadily down, from somewhere
away in the height. He did not positively see that any patch of sky was
whiter than the rest, but he was looking for such a patch. The increase
must have a centre of expansion. It must come from somewhere. No moon,
no sun, no cause of illumination. Only sometimes a kind of wave of
movement passed down the sky, and then it was lighter. He did not like
it.

If he had asked himself why, he could not have easily answered. It did
not disturb his quiet. He was as lonely and peaceful as before. No sound
was in his City, foot or voice. But vaguely the light distracted him
from his dim pleasure of imagining, imagining disappointment. His
imagination could hardly, by ordinary standards, be said to be good or
bad. It was a pleasure in others' anger, and bad; but the anger was that
of tyrannical malice, and the imagined disappointment of it was good.
Some such austere knowledge the Divine John saw in heaven, where
disappointed hell is spread and smokes before the Lamb. But the Lamb and
the angels do not imagine hell to satisfy their lust, nor do he nor the
angels determine it, but only those in hell; if it is, it is a fact,
and, therefore, a fact of joy. In that peace which had been heaven to
the vagrant, he had begun to indulge a fancy of his own; he went beyond
the fact to colour the fact.

Light grew. He began to walk. He had done so, often enough, through that
great period of re-creation, for pure pleasure of change. Now he had,
for the first time, a purpose unacknowledged. He wished to escape the
light. It was desirable that he should still be left alone. He did not
trust the light to let him alone. It was desirable that he should be
free to make pictures for himself and to tell himself tales. He did not
trust the light to let him do it. He moved gently; there was no need,
here, to run. The need that was not concealed from him, his first
inclination to run. He had run often enough for others' pleasure, but
this was the first time he had been tempted to run for his own. The
light still gently spread. As gently he went away from it, down the
hill. His choice was in this direction; it was brightest, by a little,
at the top.

As, through a still unmeasured period, he went drifting, changes came on
the hill. He did not at first notice them. Long as he had wandered, he
had not marked detail of building there. But, unnoticed, details had
altered. It was now a town half-built, not ruined. When he had climbed
that skeleton shape of a house, or of himself, he had done so in the
midst of a devastation. As he went away from it towards the bottom the
devastation became incomplete erection. Houses were unfinished, roads
unmade, yet they were houses and roads. Roofs were on, scaffolding gone.
The change was irregular, more as if some plants had outgrown others
than as if order had been established by man. He went soundlessly down
the slope of the thickening vegetation, and as on the bare height the
light was fullest, so here instead of light, shadows grew thicker.
Between them the pallid light of his experience grew stronger by
contrast. He would not look at the new light; there was increased for
him by opposition the presence of the old.

He had gone some way, and some time, unnoticing, inclined to linger upon
his tales and dreams, when he was startled into knowledge. He had turned
his back upon light and had not remarked erection. He saw suddenly, at a
distance in front of him, a flash. He stopped and stared. It was no
longer a flash but a gleam. He was looking at, far off, the reflection
of light upon glass--of what he would, in lost days, have called the sun
upon a window.

A thrust of fear took him; he could not, for a moment, go on. He stood
blinking; after a while, he turned his head. There was behind him a long
space of shadows and pale light, but beyond that, away beyond the house
where he had died, there was a broad stretch of high ground, bare and
rocky, rising higher than he had ever thought, and all bright with, he
supposed, the sun. A rich, golden splendour, beyond all, at the height
of all, played flashing upon some other glittering surface; it was not
glass there, but ice. He stared back as he had stared forward. He could
not dare return to _that_, also he was unwilling to go on down towards
the gleaming window below. That meant the world; he could not, after so
much peace, return to the world. Why could he not sit and imagine a moon
and thwarted creatures dropped from the moon into a world that mocked
them? It was not much to ask.

It was too much; he could not have it. False as the Republic had been
to him, making his life dreadful, he had not deserved, or he could
not have, an infinity of recompense. He could not have this in utter
exchange for that. Exchange had been given; temporal justice, for what
it is worth, done. Now incidents were no more counted, on this side or
the other. He must take the whole--with every swiftness of the Mercy,
but the whole he must have.

He saw that the exhibition of light was moving towards him. It had
reached the house where he had died. He noticed, even in his alarm,
that the buildings now ended there. In his earlier wanderings he had
gone among the ruins both above and below it, but now the bare rock
rose above--or ice, as he had first thought. It went up, in blocks and
irregularities of surface, until, some distance beyond, it opened on
one broad sweep, smooth and glittering, rounding towards the top of the
Hill; upon it, by some trick of sight, the sunlight seemed active. It
was not changed, but it ran. It hastened in sudden charges of intensity,
now across, now down. The unchanging rock beneath the unchanging sun
responded to that counter-marching, evoked into apparent reordination.
It was perhaps this which terrified him, for there the earth was earth
still and yet alive. In the strict sense of the words it was living
stone.

He stood for some minutes staring, and entranced. But at some sudden
charge downwards from the height towards the house, and him beyond it,
he broke. He gave a little cry, and ran. He ran down towards the bottom
of the Hill, among the houses, towards that house where the glass was.
As he ran he saw, for the first time since he had entered that world,
other forms, inhabitants of a state for which there were no doubt many
names, scientific, psychological, theological. He did not know the
names; he knew the fact.

The return of time upon itself, which is in the nature of death, had
caught him. Margaret Anstruther had, in a vision within a dream, decided
upon death, not merely in her own world but in that other. Her most
interior heart had decided, and the choice was so profound that her past
experiences and her present capacities could only obey. She had no work
of union with herself to achieve; that was done. But this man had died
from and in the body only. Because he had had it all but forced on him,
he had had opportunity to recover. His recovery had brought to him a
chance of love. Because he had never chosen love, he did not choose
it then. Because he had never had an opportunity to choose love, nor
effectively heard the intolerable gospel proclaimed, he was to be
offered it again, and now as salvation. But first the faint hints of
damnation were permitted to appear.

He was running down a street. It was a street that closed in on him. He
did not notice, in his haste, that it was a street much like those in
which most of his life had been spent. He saw, in front of him, at a
great distance, two living forms, a man and a girl; at which he ran with
increased speed. Since he had begun to go down the Hill he had lost his
content in being alone; he smelt solitude as if it were the odour of
bare rock, and he hated it. He heard, more vividly with every step, no
sound. He could not hear those forms walking, but he saw them; it was
enough; he ran. He was catching them up, running very fast through his
old life to do it. When he was within a hundred yards the girl looked
over her shoulder. He checked in midpace, his foot heavily thudding
down, and he almost falling. He saw, with sharp clarity, the face of the
girl who had been his wife. Her mouth was opening and shutting on words,
though the words were silent. It had always been opening and shutting.
At once, without looking round, the figure arm in arm with hers released
itself, stopped, and as if moving by the direction of that busily
talking mouth, took a step or two backwards. Then it paused, and with
a weary care began slowly to turn itself round. The dead man saw the
movement. It became terribly important that he should escape before the
youth he had been caught him and dragged him in, to make a third with
them, and to listen again to that hated and loathed voice--always
perhaps; the prisoner of those two arms, the result and victim of his
early desire. He ran hastily back again up the street.

Presently he glanced behind him, and could not see them. He trotted a
little farther, looked round again, saw the street still empty--the
street that was recovering the appearance of a street upon the
Hill--and dropped to a walk. Only he could not go on right to the end,
though he had come thence, for he could see across it a beam of faint
but growing sun, as the ocean beams at the end of a road. He did not
think of the image, for he had not seen the sea, since his childhood;
and that time would not be remembered until he reached it. An instinct,
none the less, warned him; so he did not make his way to where, ready
for him, in that twisting maze of streets and times, a gutter child
played on his only seaside holiday, and cried because a bigger boy had
bullied him. Sea or sun--sun to him--it was the light he wished to
avoid. He hesitated, and took a side turning, where under the eaves some
darkness was left.

The image was growing more complex and more crowded, for, as if the
descending light, the spreading harshness of rock and ice,[1] crowded
them into the streets grew shorter, more involved, themselves more
populous with figures. Once it was a sneering foreman, who drove his
face-hidden shape towards him; once--how he got there he did not
know--it was someone's back on a ladder carrying a rope, going up no
doubt, but perhaps coming down to throw the rope round him before he
slipped away. Once he turned from a figure leaning against a lamp-post,
quite still, with a stealthy suspense, as if it might dodge round the
lamp-post, pretending that the post hid what it could not hide, and
making to play a game that was not a kind game. And each time he
slipped away or turned away, it was more like running away, and
continually he would see, here and there in the distance, the beam of
light on icy rock and sniff the bitter smell of the place of no return.

  [1] It is evident that something is amiss with the syntax of
      this passage; the following is a suggested alternative
      sequence:

        (...) for, as if the descending light crowded them into the
        spreading harshness of rock and ice, the streets grew
        shorter (...)

So presently he was running very quickly, with a sense that they were
now after him. They had begun to be bolder, they were leaning out of
windows, stumbling out of streets, lurching, shambling, toiling after
him. He had read somewhere of a man being trampled to death, and he
thought of that now; only he could not envisage death, any more than
Pauline the end of luxurious dream. He could only think of trampling. He
ran faster then, for he did not see how he would ever be able to get up,
those apparitions of his terror would be too many and too strong. For
the first time in that world he began to feel exhausted; and now the
streets were slipping by, and the feet were coming up, and in a central
daze in that dance of time and truth all round him, he felt himself
stopping. He dimly consented; he stood still.

As he did so, there came about him also a cessation. The street was
still; the feet silent. He drew a breath. He saw in front of him a
house, and at a window, a window with glass where no light gleamed, he
saw a face, the face of an old woman, whom never in all his life had
he seen before. He saw her as a ghost in the shadow, within the glass,
but the glass was only a kind of faint veil--of ceremony or of habit,
though he did not think of it so. He felt it did not matter, for he and
the other were looking directly at each other. He wanted to speak; he
could not find words to utter or control. He broke into a cry, a little
wail, such as many legends have recorded and many jokes mocked. He said:
"Ah! ah!" and did not think it could be heard.

The old face looked at him, and he was trembling violently, shaking to
see the apparition of this world's living, as they shake to see the
phantasms of the dead. He knew he was not afraid, as they are often
afraid; this was almost the first face he had seen, in the body or out
of the body, of which he was not afraid. Fear, which separates man from
man, and drives some to be hostile, and some tyrannical, and some even
to be friendly, and so with spirits of that state of deathly time,
there abandoned him. Fear, which never but in love deserts mortal man,
deserted him there. Only he could not do or say any more. He stared,
hungrily, hopefully. He waited, selfishly certain she would go, sweetly
sure she would stay. She said, as he waited: "My dear, how tired you
look!"

To Margaret herself the images were becoming confused. She did not, for
a good part of the time, know of any, being engaged merely, beyond her
own consciousness, in passing through that experience which in her dream
had meant crawling over the stretch of open rock. Some hint of memory of
it recurred to her at moments. She had on this evening known nothing
but a faint sense of slow dragging in her limbs, an uneasiness in her
body as if it lay rough, a labouring in her breath as if she toiled.
Then she had felt herself lying on rock, holding a spike of rock, and
instinctively knew she had to do something, and clasped the spike with
energy--it had to do with Pauline; and a bell--the great bell of the
dead, or the bell of the living on the Hill, or her own little bell, or
all at once--had rung; and as it did so, she saw a strange face looking
at her from a crevice of darkness below. Then she knew it; it was the
face of the strange man in her dream. She was aware that Pauline was
coming over the rock through a door of great stones like Stonehenge, but
Pauline was behind, and across in front of a gleam of mountain light
that pierced her room was the shadow of the weary and frightened face.
She said with a fresh spring of pure love, as if to Pauline or Phoebe or
anyone: "My dear, how tired you look!"

He tried to answer, to thank her, to tell her more, to learn salvation
from her. His life, in and out of the body, had forgotten the time when
a woman's voice had last sounded with friendship in his ears. He wanted
to explain. This face was neither light nor darkness but more tolerable
and deeper than either, as he felt it, for it had lived towards him in
love. He made efforts to speak, and seemed to himself to do no more than
cry out again, wordlessly and wailingly. The sound he made communicated
his fear, and she answered him from her withdrawn experience of death,
as from his less withdrawn spirit of poetry Stanhope had answered
Pauline--nothing could be worth such distress. Or nothing, at least, but
one thing--the coming out of it into tender joy. She said: "But wait:
wait for it."

Pauline had come in from the garden, and as she ran through the hall she
was furiously angry with herself. She did not very well know what the
woman in the street had offered, beyond indefinable sweet and thrilling
excitements. But she felt, her foot on the first stair, that she had
regretted, that she had grudged and been aggrieved with, the new change
in her life. She had almost, if by God's mercy not quite, wished that
Peter Stanhope had not interfered. No range of invective--and she had a
pretty, if secret, range--sufficed her for herself. She struck her hand
against the wall as she ran, and wished that it was her head, or that
someone--Stanhope for preference, but it didn't much matter; anyone
would do--would pick her up and throw her violently over the banisters
to the floor below, knocking the breath out of her body, and leaving her
bruised and gasping, looking like the fool she was. She put all herself
into despising herself, and her scorn rode triumphant through her: a
good thing under direction, but dangerous to the lonely soul. So
ambiguously repentant, she came into her grandmother's room, and saw
suddenly that the justice of the universe had taken her earlier word
and abandoned her.

It was not so, but at the window there was a face; and she had, in the
first shock, supposed it was hers. The obsession of her visitation
returned, through the double gate of her repining and her rage. It was
coming, it was come, it was here. Her wild spirit sickened in her;
and as she felt its power dissolve, she sprang to the other power the
knowledge of which, at least, her anger had preserved. Ashamed of
betrayal, unashamed of repentance and dependence, she sprang. She knew
with all her soul's consent that Peter Stanhope had taken over her fear;
was, now, one with it; and it was not, for he was in power over it.
Among the leaves of his eternal forest he set it, and turned it also to
everlasting verse. Evading or not evading, repining or not repining,
raging or not raging, she was Periel; she was the least of the things
he had created new; _ecce, omnia nova facio_. She was a line of his
verse, and beyond that--for the thought of him took that high romantic
self-annihilation and annihilated it in turn--she was herself in all
freedom and courage. She was herself, for the meeting with herself. She
stepped forward--lightly, almost with laughter. It was not yet she.

As she gazed, she heard her grandmother speak. The room, for those three
spirits, had become a place on the unseen mountain: they inhabited a
steep. The rock was in them, and they in it. In Margaret Anstruther
it lived; it began to put out its energy of intellectual love. At least
to the dead man it was felt as love, as love that loved him, as he
longingly and unknowingly desired. This holy and happy thing was all
that could be meant by God: it was love and power. Tender to the least
of its creatures, it submitted itself to his need, but it is itself
always that it submits, and as he received it from those eyes and the
sound of that voice he knew that another thing awaited him--his wife, or
the light, or some renewal of his earlier death. Universal, it demanded
universality. The peace communicated there was of a different kind from
the earlier revival of rest. And the woman said: "It's done already;
you've only got to look for it."

As Pauline had moved forward, the face at the window disappeared from
her sight. She drew breath; it had been an accident of light; there had
been no face. She turned to look at her grandmother, and saw her lying
very still, her eyes on the window as if she could still see something
there. Quiet as she lay, she was in action. Her look, her voice, showed
it: her voice, for she spoke, but very low, and Pauline could not hear
the words. She caught the sound; lightly she threw herself on her
knees by the bed--and half fulfilled her earlier passionate desire for
subordination. For the first time in her young distracted life her
energy leapt to a natural freedom of love. She ran swiftly down the way
her master had laid open; she said, in words almost identical with his:
"Let me do something, let me carry it. Darling, do let me help."
Margaret gave her hand a small gentle pressure, but kept her eyes beyond
her still.

The silence in that place became positive with their energies, and
its own. The three spirits were locked together, in the capacity of
Margaret's living stone. The room about them, as if the stillness
expressed its nature in another mode, grew sharply and suddenly cold.
Pauline's mind took it as the occasional sharp alteration of a summer
evening; she moved to go and turn on the electric fire, for fear her
grandmother should feel the chill, and that natural act, in her new
good will, was no less than any high offer of goodness and grace. But
Margaret knew the other natural atmosphere of the icy mountain, where
earthly air was thin in the life of solitude and peak. It was the sharp
promise of fruition--her prerogative was to enter that transforming
chill. The dead man also felt it, and tried to speak, to be grateful, to
adore, to say he would wait for it and for the light. He only moaned a
little, a moan not quite of pain, but of intention and the first faint
wellings of recognized obedience and love. All his past efforts of good
temper and kindness were in it; they had seemed to be lost; and they
lived.

But that moan was not only his. As if the sound released something
greater than itself, another moan answered it. The silence groaned.
They heard it. The supernatural mountain on which they stood shook, and
there went through Battle Hill itself the slightest vibration from that
other quaking, so that all over it china tinkled, and papers moved,
and an occasional ill-balanced ornament fell. Pauline stood still and
straight. Margaret shut her eyes and sank more deeply into her pillow.
The dead man felt it and was drawn back away from that window into his
own world of being, where also something suffered and was free. The
groan was at once dereliction of power and creation of power. In it, far
off, beyond vision in the depths of all the worlds, a god, unamenable to
death, awhile endured and died.




Chapter VIII

DRESS REHEARSAL


Among the many individualized forms, dead or living, upon the Hill,
there was one neither dead nor living. It was the creature which had
lingered outside the illusion of Eden for the man who had consented to
its company. It had neither intellect nor imagination; it could not
criticize or create, for the life of its substance was only the magical
apparition of its father's desires. It is said in the old tales that the
devil longs to become incarnate that he may challenge the Divine Word
in his own chosen house of flesh and that he therefore once desired and
overshadowed a maid. But even at the moment of conception a mystical
baptism fell on the child, and the devil was cast out of his progeny at
the moment of entrance. He who was born of that purified intercourse
with angelic sacrilege was Merlin, who, wisest of magicians, prophesied
and prefigured the Grail-quest, and built a chapel to serve the Table
till Logres came to an end, and the Merciful Child Galahad discovered
the union in a Mass of the Holy Ghost which was sung by Messias among a
great company of angels. Since that frustrating transubstantiation the
devil has never come near to dominion over a mortal woman. His incubi
and succubi, which tempt and torment the piety of anchorites, are
phantasms, evoked from and clouded and thickened with the dust of the
earth or the sweat of the body or the shed seed of man or the water of
ocean, so as to bewilder and deceive longing eyes and eager hands.

The shape of Lawrence Wentworth's desire had emerged from the power of
his body. He had assented to that making, and again, outside the garden
of satisfied dreams, he had assented to the company of the shape which
could not be except by his will and was imperceptibly to possess his
will. Image without incarnation, it was the delight of his incarnation,
for it was without any of the things that troubled him in the
incarnation of the beloved. He could exercise upon it all arts but one;
he could not ever discover by it or practise towards it the freedom of
love. A man cannot love himself; he can only idolize it, and over the
idol delightfully tyrannize--without purpose. The great gift which
this simple idolatry of self gives is lack of further purpose; it is,
the saints tell us, a somewhat similar thing that exists in those
wholly possessed by their End; it is, human experience shows, the most
exquisite delight in the interchanges of romantic love. But in all loves
but one there are counterpointing times of purposes; in this only there
are none.

They had gone down the hill together, the man and that creature of
illusion which had grown like the flowers of Eastern magic between
the covering and uncovering of a seed. The feminine offspring of his
masculinity clung to him, pressing her shoulder against him, turning
eyes of adoration on him, stroking his fingers with her own. The seeming
trance prolonged itself in her in proportion as it passed from his own
senses; he could plunge again into its content whenever the creature
looked at or spoke to him. Their betrothal had been celebrated thus
before they began to walk down the hill, and in that betrothal a
fraction of his intelligence had slept never to wake. During the slow
walk his child dallied with his senses and had an exquisite perception
of his needs. Adela walked by him and cajoled him--in the prettiest
way--to love her. He was approached, appeased, flattered, entreated.
There flowed into him from the creature by his side the sensation of
his absolute power to satisfy her. It was what he had vehemently and in
secret desired--to have his own way under the pretext of giving her
hers. This was the seed which grew in his spirit and from which in turn
his spirit grew--the core of the fruit and also the fruit of the core.
The vagrant of matter murmured to him; it surrounded him with devotion,
as very well it could, seeing what the only reality of its devotion
was. He did not need to say much, nor himself to initiate approach. It
took all that activity upon itself; and the sweet reproaches which its
mouth offered him for having misunderstood and neglected and hurt it
were balm to his mind. He had hurt her--then he had not been hurt or she
did not know it. He was wanted--then he need not trouble to want or to
know he wanted. He was entreated by physical endearments--in languorous
joy he consented to gratify the awful ambiguity of his desire.

At his own gate they had paused. There, for a little, he almost
recovered himself; his habitual caution leapt into action. He thought
for himself: "Suppose anyone saw us?" and looked anxiously up at the
windows. They were dark; his servants were asleep in their own rooms
at the back of the house. He glanced up and down the road; no one was
about. But his caution, having struck one note, passed to another; he
looked down at the creature who stood opposite him. It was Adela in
every point, every member and article: its hair, its round ears, its
full face, its plump hands, its square nails, its pink palms, its
gestures, its glances. Only that appealing softness was new, and by that
same appealing softness he knew clearly for an instant that it was not
Adela who had returned by his side.

He stared at it and a shudder seized him; he took a half-step away,
and the first chance of escape was offered. He wondered, desperately,
perhaps in a little hope, if it would say good-night and go away. His
hand was on the latch of the gate, yet he hesitated to do anything so
certain as to go sharply through. He looked up and down the street;
perhaps someone would come. He had never before wanted to see Hugh
Prescott; now he did. If Hugh would come and slip his arm through
Adela's and take her away! But Hugh could not save him unless he wanted
the thing that was Hugh's, and not this other thing. The thought of Hugh
had done all it could when it reminded him of the difference between
the real and the unreal Adela. He must face jealousy, deprival, loss,
if he would be saved. He fled from that offer, and with a sudden
snarl clutched his companion by the arm. It leaned closer to him, and
otherwise circumstance lay still. It yearned to him as if it feared to
be disappointed, which indeed at the bottom of his heart he infinitely
did. It put one hand upon his heart. It said, in a breathless whisper:
"You won't send me away?" Adela and his refusal to know Adela in
relation to Hugh rose in him; sensuality and jealousy twined. He swung
open the gate. It said: "Be kind to me, be whatever you want, but don't
send me away." He had never been able to dream of a voice so full of
passion, and passion for him. The hand that smoothed his heart was the
hand that had lain in Hugh's, yet it was not; he crushed it in his own,
relieved from agony and released to a pretended vengeance. His mind
became giddy. He caught the whole form tighter, lest indeed Hugh should
come striding out of the night, tall as a house, and stretch out a huge
animal hand, and pull her from his arm. He moved to the threshold; as if
it swooned against him it drooped there with all its weight upon his
heart and side. He muttered thickly: "Come on, come on," but it seemed
past movement. Its voice still murmured incoherent passion, but its
limbs were without strength to take the step. He said: "Must I carry
you?" and the head fell back, and the voice in a trance of abandonment
answered: "Carry me, carry me." He gathered it to his arms and lifted
it; it lay there, no more than an easy weight.

As he moved, his mind spoke, or more than his mind. The whole air of the
Hill said in his ear, with a crisp intelligence: "You fool, that's not
Adela; you couldn't carry Adela. What do you think you'll get out of
anything that isn't Adela?" He recognized well enough that the real
Adela might have given him considerable trouble to lift, but his whole
damnation was that he would not choose the trouble to lift the real
Adela. This thing was light in his arms, though solid to his heart, and
his brain was dazed by its whispers. He came over the threshold, and
when they had entered the garden it found its feet again, and went along
with him to the complacency of his dream.

Since that night it had come to him often, as on that night it had
been all he could desire. It had been an ape of love's vitality, and a
parody also of its morality. It possessed a semblance of initiative, and
it had appeased, as is all lovers' duty, the fantasies of his heart;
it had fawned on him and provoked him. He had no need of the devices
against fertility which, wisely or unwisely, the terrible dilemmas of
men drive them to use, for he consummated a marriage whose infertility
was assured. This, which it made clear to him for his satisfaction, a
little troubled him, for it reminded him, until he managed to forget, of
its true nature. He was outraging his intelligence with this invited
deceit, and he did not wish to know it. But it passed, for he was
given good measure after his kind. There was no lack of invention and
pleasure, for the other forming of sterile growth from sterile root was
far off, lying in the necessity of the stir of distant leaves on the
side of the mountain where he had no thought to come.

The days went by, and still he was consoled. In the mornings it had
gone; in the early summer dawns it wakened him to whisper farewells, and
his heavy drugged sleep only understood that here also it was fulfilling
his need. He had not at first very clearly understood why or where it
was going, but he did not then care, for it promised him, leaning naked
over him, that it would always return. Whether it were then Adela or a
being like Adela he was too full of slumber to care; it was going; he
need not trouble; for whenever he needed her, it would return. If it
were Adela, she ought to get away; if it were not Adela, it ought still
to go away, because there would be the morning and the world.... So much
his drowsiness let through to him; and it went, showing him itself, in a
faithful copy of his half-realized wishes, to the end. For contenting
him with its caution, it gathered up the articles of its apparent dress,
and presently all clothed it stole across the room, and by the door it
turned, and with one gesture promised him itself again. In the dawn, at
once by that gesture clothed and unclothed, it had shone before him, a
pale light burning against the morning, the last flickering fire of the
corpse-candles of the insubstantial; then it had passed, and left him to
sleep. So when later they brought him his early tea, he was alone; but
that day while he drank, he found the thought of the Adela of past
days a little disagreeable--no longer troublesome or joyous but merely
disagreeable. He would have to meet her, no doubt, one day; meanwhile he
was entirely at peace, and he did not want to think of anything at all.
He lay and drank, and was still.

As the days went by, he found that his child kept her promise. He could
not conceive a way of coming that, sooner or later, she did not take,
nor a manner of love that, sooner or later, she did not fulfil. Since it
was more and more Adela, he was instinctively careful never to conceive
a meeting which conflicted with the possibilities of the actual Adela;
he asked of his nightly bedfellow nothing but secret advents or
accidental encounters. But these gradually he multiplied; and always
it answered. By chance, in the street, at first by late night, but
afterwards earlier. For once this Adela said to him, in a casual phrase,
to which only his own veiled knowledge gave a double meaning: "They
won't remember if they see me." So he dared to walk with it sometimes
for variation, but then they went always through the lower darker
streets of the Hill, and at first they met no one whom he knew, and
presently no one at all. But Adela Hunt wondered sometimes why she never
seemed to run against Lawrence Wentworth by chance in the streets of
Battle Hill.

Yet, in the order of the single universe known to myriads of minds, the
time and place that belongs to each of those myriads has relation to
others; and though the measurement of their experiences may differ,
there is something common to them all in the end. Sometimes where time
varies place is stable; or where places intermingle time is secure, and
sometimes the equilibrium of both, which is maintained in so many living
minds, swings into the place of the dead. Sometimes the dead know it,
and sometimes the living; a single clock ticks or a single door opens in
two worlds at once. The chamber of that dark fundamental incest had had
the dead man for its earliest inhabitant, though his ways and Wentworth's
had been far apart--as far as incest from murder, or as self-worship
from self-loathing, and either in essence false to all that is. But the
self-worship of the one was the potential source of cruelty, as the
self-loathing of the other was the actual effect of cruelty; between
them lay all the irresolute vacillations of mankind, nourishing the one
and producing the other. All who had lived, or did or could live, upon
Battle Hill, leaned to one or the other, save only those whom holy love
had freed by its revelation of something ever alien from and conjoined
with the self.

In Wentworth's old dream he had climbed down a rope securely and not
unpleasantly, much as the world of our culture sways on the rope from
the end of which the outcasts of civilization swing in a strangled life.
Since the phantom of Adela had come to him the dream had disappeared.
He slept deeply. If he woke she would be there by his side, petting or
crooning to him; until one night he thought how pleasant it would be to
wake and look on her asleep, and the next time he woke, there indeed she
was, disposed to his wish. But he found it troubled him; as he looked at
her in the silence he began to wonder, and to think of the other Adela
sleeping in her own house. For a little he tried to find pleasure in
considering how in effect he possessed her without her knowledge or
will, but the effort was too much for his already enfeebled mind. He
found himself disliking the life of the actual Adela; he could be so
happy with the substance by him if only the other were dead. But to
know that she did not know ... and that perhaps one day Hugh.... He had
forgotten Hugh in these last weeks, and in a hasty retreat to oblivion
he woke the creature from its apparent slumber, and in its yearnings and
embraces lost actuality again and lost himself. He whispered to her then
that she must never sleep when he woke, so drawing another veil between
himself and the truth.

It was some nights afterwards that the dream returned. For the first
time it troubled him. He was climbing in the darkness down that shining
rope of silver, even more peacefully than ever he had climbed before. He
was descending, he now vaguely imagined, towards a companion who waited
for him far below, where the rope was fastened to the side of a cave in
an unseen wall. The companion had waited, was waiting, would wait; it
would never grow tired either of him or of waiting for him; that was why
it was there, with its soft bare arms, and its sweet eyes closed in the
dream of his approach. As he descended, in that warm expectation, a
terrible sound broke on him. The abyss groaned. From above and below,
from all sides, the rending grief of a hardly tolerable suffering caught
him; he clung horribly to his rope, and the rope shook in the sound.
The void became vocal with agony; the hollow above and the hollow below
came together in that groan of the very air, and it echoed from unseen
walls, and re-echoed, and slowly died. Only once it came. It was
succeeded by the ancient silence. He listened breathlessly, but it did
not recur. It had turned the dream into a nightmare for him; he shook on
his rope, and struggled in his body, and so he awoke, and there by his
side, waking also, was the companion he sought. He clutched it and hid
himself against it; he hid his ears between its breasts and its hands,
lest the night should groan again. In his haste to hide himself, as if
like others he bade the mountains fall on him and the hills cover him,
and in the darkness of the room, he did not see the inhuman countenance.
It had grown haggard and old; its fulness fell away; its eyes were
blurred. The meaning which he had given it had departed; an imbecile
face stared blankly over him. The movements its body made were sufficient
to cover his distress, but they had been jerky and inorganic, as if an
automaton repeated its mechanical motions, and as if the mechanism were
running down. For less than the time it took him to find refuge with her
the creature that lay there was millions of years older than the dying
woman by whom Pauline watched, while the pain of a god passed outwards
from the mountain depths, as from those where Prometheus hung, or
downwards from the cross that stood upon a hill that also was of skulls.
It united itself with all spiritual anguish that received and took part
with it; it fell away from the closed ears in the beds of Gomorrah. The
dead man looked at Margaret, Pauline thought of Stanhope and was at
peace as it ceased. The renewed phantasm of peace received again the
desire that sprang in the heart of its father and lover, and throve
and grew beautiful on it. Her terrible and infinite senility receded;
Lawrence Wentworth's strong deceit forbade her to pass on to death and
recalled her to apparent life. The suicide in the body had lost the
vision of his destruction; the suicide in the soul had not yet reached
his own. The thing became lovely with Adela's youth, and its lover
slept.

In the morning, however, alone as usual, Wentworth was less at peace
than had been his wont since the thing had come to him. In those earlier
hours the night and his nightly companion were always indistinct. He
preferred that indistinctness; he preferred, in the bright July
mornings, to think of his work--the books he was reading, the book he
was writing. He remembered that he had still a letter to write against
Aston Moffatt, and had already begun it. But though he thought about his
next unwritten sentence he could not ever manage to write it down. He
would often go to his study in his dressing gown to get his papers,
refusing to remember why they were not, as in the old days they used to
be, lying by his bedside, or remembering only that it was because of the
pleasant fantasies of his brain. So long as he could, in those early
hours, pretend that it was only a mental fantasy he felt happier; he did
not, just for those hours, quite like to admit that it was physical,
because its actuality would have seemed in some way more immoral than
a mental indulgence. His mind was certainly losing power. Afterwards
as the day grew on, and the strength of his masculinity returned and
swelled in him, he came to repose on his knowledge of its actual
presence. But that morning he was troubled; he felt obscurely that
something was attacking his peace. He moved restlessly; he got up and
walked about; he tried to find refuge in this or the other thought; he
failed. He would not go out that day; he sat about the house. And as the
day went on he became aware that he feared to go out lest he should meet
Adela Hunt, the real Adela Hunt on some real errand. He could not bear
that; he could not bear her. What right had she to make his beloved a
false image of her? It was after a solitary lunch and a fretful hour of
work that he allowed himself at last to long for the succubus by day,
and by day, knocking at his door--and he guessed who knocked and hurried
himself to open it--it came. It sat in his room, and talked to him,
with his own borrowed intelligence. It spoke of Csar and Napoleon, of
generals and campaigns--traditions it could not know, history it could
not recall, humanity it could not share. And still, though he was less
unhappy, he was unhappy, for all that day, till the sun began to go
down, he was haunted by a memory of another Adela. Even when his hand
was on her bare arm, or hers caressing his, he was dimly troubled. He
wanted to pull the curtains, to lock the doors, to bar out what was in
his brain by barring his house, to be with what was irreconcilably not
the world. He wanted either to shut himself wholly away from the world
in a sepulchre of desire and satiety and renewed desire; or to destroy,
if not the world, at least one form that walked in the world.

His trouble was increased by the likelihood of the intrusion of the
world of the other Adela. He had, weeks since, sent to Mrs. Parry
drawings and descriptions for the Grand Ducal uniforms. She had rung
him up once or twice about them, and she was beginning to insist on his
going round to her house to approve the result. He did not want to go to
her house. He would be expected to be at the play, the performance of
which was approaching, and he did not want to be at the play. Adela
would be acting, and he didn't want to see her in her eighteenth-century
costume, or any more at all. He would have to speak to her and he did
not want to speak to her. He wanted to be alone with his fantasies. It
was all the busy world, with Adela as its chief, that still hampered
him. He could, of course, shut himself away, but if he were to enjoy the
phantasm of Adela as he wanted to, his servants must see her and bring
her tea and accept her as a visitor, and then what would they think if
they heard of the actual Adela being seen somewhere else at the same
time? Or if, by chance, the actual Adela should call?

It knew, with that accuracy with which it always prevented his desires,
that he was disturbed about something it could not, until night came,
cure. It spent on him a lingering gaze of love, and said: "I must go."
It caught and kissed his hand in a hungry fire, and it looked up at
him fervently and said: "To-night? Dear Lawrence, to-night?" He said
"To-night," and desired to add the name. But he had never yet been able
to do so--as if the name were indeed something actual, sacramental of
reality. He said "To-night," and pressed it and kissed it and took it to
the door, which he shut quickly, as he always did, for he had an uneasy
wonder whether it ever went anywhere, once it had parted from him, and
he did not wish to see it fade before his eyes into the air which, this
summer, was growing so intolerably bright.

The unusual brightness had been generally noticed. It was not a
heat-wave; the weather was too gay and airy for that. It was an increase
in luminous power; forms stood out more sharply, voices were heard more
clearly. There seemed to be a heightening of capacity, within and
without. The rehearsals of the play increased in effect, a kind of
swiftness moved in the air; all things hastened. People said: "What a
beautiful summer!" and went on saying it. One afternoon Pauline heard
Stanhope, who had replied to that phrase a score of times, vary the
reply by saying with some surprise: "O, the summer, do you think?" But
his interlocutor had already been wafted away.

It was two days since the promise of substituted love, and it was their
first meeting. She took advantage of her precursor's remark to say, as
she shook hands, and their glances exchanged affection: "What then, if
it isn't the summer?"

He shrugged delicately. "Only, does it seem like the summer?" he asked.

"Not very," she said. "But what do you think?"

"The air within the air, perhaps," he answered, half-serious. "The thing
that increases everything that is, and decreases everything that isn't."

Pauline said, not upon any impulse of conventional chatter, "And which
am I?"

"O _is_," he said, "_is_, decidedly. Unfortunately, perhaps, in many
ways, but final. You haven't had any meetings yet?"

She began to answer and was cut short by new arrivals. It was the day of
the dress rehearsal, and even the sophisticated practitioners of Battle
Hill felt a new excitement.

Climax was at hand. The young and more innocent actors triumphed in a
delight modified by fear of their incapacity; the more experienced
feared the incapacity of others. Adela Hunt, for instance, was anxious
that Periel and the Chorus should be her adequate background, and that
her dramatic lover should adore her urgently. He, a nice boy and shy,
was too conscious of the Chorus individually to rise quite to the height
of them in a mass. His voice still faltered with the smallest vibration
of awareness upon the invocation of the fire. Mrs. Parry had pointed out
to him that he must be used to burning leaves, and he had agreed; still,
at the height of the verse, he trembled a little with the stress. The
Bear, on the other hand, was distracted between his own wish to be
ursine and Mrs. Parry's to be period. His two great moments, however,
were in action rather than speech. One was a heavy pursuit of the
Princess; at the other he and Periel intertwined in a dance among all
the personages, drawing them into a complexity of union. He was not
a pantomime bear; no assistant completed quadrupedicity; he walked
bowed but upright, a bear's head, high furred boots, furred coat and
gauntlets, making up the design which signified or symbolized the
growling mass of animal life. Nor, though he and the spirit of the
spirits danced together, did they ever meet or speak; between them
always moved the mortal figures and harmonized their incommunicable
utterances.

It was the reputation of Peter Stanhope which had so largely increased
the excitement of this year's drama. Public attention was given to it;
articles appeared in New York and paragraphs in Paris. Seats had to be
reserved for a few--a very few--very distinguished visitors; many others
could be and had to be refused. The Press would be there. A palpitation
of publicity went through the cast; the world seemed to flow towards
Battle Hill. There was no denying that it was an event, almost a moment
in the history of the imagination; recognized as such by, at least, a
not inconsiderable minority of those who cared for such things, and
a quite inconsiderable minority of those who did not, but who read
everything in their papers. Even the cast were provided with tickets;
and the rehearsal itself was guarded by a policeman. A popular member of
the Chorus also stood by the gate and scrutinized all arrivals, as if
the bear and the spirit purged creation by power and knowledge.

The pressure of this outer world had modulated and unified the producer,
the performers, and every one else concerned with the play. Harmony
became so necessary that it was actually achieved, fate and free-will
coinciding. Stanhope became so desirable that he was compelled to
promise to say a few words at the end. A deference towards him exhibited
itself. Adela rebuked Pauline for speaking lightly of the great man.

"I didn't know that you admired him so much yourself," Pauline said.

Adela, with an unfailing grasp of the real values of the world, said:
"Even if I didn't, he is respected by some very fine judges. But I've
come to see there is more in him than I'd thought. He's got a number of
curiously modern streaks under his romanticism."

When Adela mentioned romanticism Pauline, and most other people, changed
the conversation. Otherwise it was a prelude to a long and complete
denunciation of all romantics as the enemies of true art. True art
had been recently defined, by a distinguished critic, as "the factual
oblique", and of the factual oblique romanticism, it seemed, was
incapable, being neither clear enough to be factual or clever enough to
be oblique. The factual oblique, incidentally, had not yet revealed to
Adela the oblique fact that she never mentioned romanticism when she was
with Hugh; any conversation in which it seemed likely to appear was
deflected before it arrived. Pauline, not having been able to deflect,
merely altered.

"There's Mr. Wentworth," she said. "I do hope he approves of the Guard."

"He ought to have looked at them before," Adela said severely. "He's
been terribly slack. I suppose you haven't seen him lately?"

"No, not with grandmother and the play and everything," Pauline
answered. "Have you?"

Adela shook her head. Wentworth was moving slowly across the lawn
towards them. His eyes were on the ground; he walked heavily, and it was
as if by accident that he at last drew level with them. Pauline said:
"Good afternoon, Mr. Wentworth."

He looked up at her, and blinked. It was true the air was very clear and
the sun very bright, yet Pauline was astonished by the momentary
difficulty he seemed to find in focusing her. When he had got her right,
he slowly smiled, and said: "Ah! Good afternoon, Miss Anstruther."

Adela Hunt abruptly said: "Mr. Wentworth!" He jumped. Slightly but
definitely he jerked, and only then looked round. He looked, and there
was perplexity in his eyes. He stared at the surprised Adela; he seemed
taken aback at seeing her, and almost to resent it. A disagreeable shock
showed in his face, and was gone, as he answered: "Oh, yes; Miss Hunt,"
a statement, not a greeting: a piece of information offered to the
inquiring mind. Adela could not help noticing it, and was almost too
astonished to smile. She couldn't believe the look had been acted, yet
he couldn't really be surprised. She wondered if he were indeed secretly
angry, if it were a poor mad insult of an outraged mind, and decided it
couldn't be.

She said briskly: "I hope you've approved of the uniforms." He took a
step back. He said, in real distress: "Oh, hush, hush, not so loud," and
in turn he blinked at her, as if, when he had taken in her words, they
surprised him more. Little though she could know it, they did. He had
supposed, in the night and the morning, that he had hated the Adela of
the world; he had had her in his imagination as an enemy and a threat.
He had overrated her. She was, in fact, nothing like what he had, and
now he had met her he had hardly recognized her. There had been a girl
talking to--to--the name had again escaped him--to the other girl, whose
shape had reminded him of his nightly mistress; she had turned her head,
and it had been his mistress, and then again it was not. It could not
be, for this one was remote and a little hostile; it was not, for this
one was nothing like as delightful, as warm, as close-bewildering. She
spoke, and it was strange, for he expected love; he did not want that
voice except in love, and now it--at first--said strange things. With
relief he realized it was not _his_ voice--so he called it, admirably
exact; this was not the voice of _his_ mistress, and his mistress was
most particularly he. This distressed him; it was loud, harsh, uncouth.
It was like the rest of the tiresome world into which he had been
compelled to enter--violent, smashing, bewildering by its harsh clamour,
and far from the soft sweetness of his unheard melody. It was not
without reason that Keats imagined the lover of unheard melody in
reverie on stone images; the real Greek dancers would have pleased him
less. But though Wentworth was shocked by the clumsy tread and the loud
voice, they relieved him also. He had hated once; but then he had not
wanted to hate--it disturbed him too much; and now he knew he did not.
He need not resent the grossness of the world; enough if, by flight, he
rejected it. He had his own living medicament for all trouble, and
distaste and oblivion for everything else--most of all for this noisome
parody of his peace.

Adela said, modulating her voice: "Have you got a headache? what a
shame! it's good of you to turn out, but we do want to be sure
everything's all right. I mean, if we must have uniforms. Personally
..."

Wentworth said, in a voice of exhaustion: "Oh, please!" In this
stridency, as it seemed to him, there was a suggestion of another
disastrous noise--the nightmare of a groan, tearing up the abyss,
setting the rope swinging. The dull, heavy, plain thing opposite him
became identified to his pained sense with that dreadful break-up of his
dream, and now he could not hide. He could not say to the hills of those
comforting breasts: "Cover me". The sound sang to his excruciated body,
as the sight oppressed it. The two imprisoned and split him: they held
him and searched his entrails. They _wanted_ something of him. He
refused to want anything but what he wanted.

While Adela stared, half offended by his curious moan, he withdrew
himself into his recesses, and refused to be wanted. Like the dead man
on his flight down the hill, he declined communion. But he, to whom more
room and beauty in life had been given, chances of clarity and devotion,
was not now made frightening to himself. He had not known fear, nor did
he find fear, nor was fear the instrument of salvation. He had what he
had. There were presented to him the uniforms of the Grand Ducal Guard.

A voice as loud but less devastating than Adela's, for it recalled no
unheard melodies, said behind him: "Mr. Wentworth! at last! we're all
ready for you. Pauline, the Guard are over by the beeches: take Mr.
Wentworth across. I'll be there in a minute." Mrs. Parry, having said
this, did not trouble to watch them do it. She went on.

Pauline smiled at Wentworth's dazed and Adela's irritated face. She
said: "I suppose we'd better. Would you, Mr. Wentworth?"

He turned to her with relief. The sound of her voice was quieter than
the rest. He had never before thought so, but now certainly it was. He
said, "Yes, yes; let's get away."

Pauline saw Adela as they turned from her, a Gorgon of incredulity. Her
heart laughed, and they went. As they passed over the grass, she said:
"I do hope you haven't a headache? They're so trying."

He answered, a little relieved to be away from the dull shouting
oppression of Adela: "People are so noisy. Of course ... anything I can
do ... but I can't stop long."

"I shouldn't think it would take more than a few minutes," Pauline said.
"You'll only have to say yes or no--practically. And," she added,
looking round at the whole chaos of glory, and instinctively discerning
Stanhope in the distance, "as it's too late for anything else, you might
be so very kind as to enjoy us for what we are, and say yes."

Hugh Prescott, grand-ducally splendid and dramatically middle-aged, ran
after them. He said, as he caught them up: "Hallo, Mr. Wentworth! I hope
my Guard'll be correct."

Wentworth had been soothed by Pauline's voice. It had to his mind, after
Adela's, something of that quality he desired. It mingled with him; it
attracted him; it carried him almost to that moment he knew so well,
when, as the desire that expressed his need awoke and grew in him, there
came a point of abandonment to his desire. He did not exactly will, but
he refused to avoid. Why, indeed, he had once asked himself, swiftly,
almost thoughtlessly, should he avoid? He asked himself no more; he
sighed, and as it were, nestled back into himself, and then it would
somehow be there--coming from behind, or speaking in his ear, or perhaps
not even that, but a breath mingling with his, almost dividing from his
to mingle with it, so that there were two where there had been one, and
then the breath seemed to wander away into his palm where his hand lay
half-closed, and became a hand in his own hand, and then a slow arm grew
against his, and so, a tender coil against him or a swift energy of
hunger, as his mood was, it was there, and when the form was felt, it
could at last be seen, and he sank into its deep inviting eyes. As he
listened to Pauline he suddenly knew all this, as he had never known it
before; he almost saw it happen as a thing presented. Her voice created,
but it separated. It brought him almost to his moment, and coiled away,
with him in its toils. It directed him to the Guard; it said, with an
intensity that Pauline had never uttered, but he in his crisis heard:
"Take us as we are, and say yes; say yes or no ... we are ... we are ...
say yes ...", and another voice, "Is the Grand Duke's Guard correct?"
They became, as he paused before the displayed magnificence, a chorus
swinging and singing: "We are ... we are ... we are.... Is the Guard
correct?... Say, say, O say ... is the Guard, is the Guard correct?"

It was not. In one flash he saw it. In spite of his diagrams and
descriptions, they had got the shoulder-knots all wrong. The eighteenth
century had never known that sort of thing. He looked at them, for the
first moment almost with the pure satisfaction of the specialist. He
almost, somewhere in him, joined in that insane jangle: "No, no, no; the
Guard is wrong--O, wrong. Say ... I say...." He looked, and he swung, as
if on his rope, as if at a point of decision--to go on or to climb up.
He walked slowly along the line, round the back, negligent of remarks
and questions, outwardly gazing, inwardly swinging. After that
first glance, he saw nothing else clearly. "Say yes or no...." The
shoulder-knots could be altered easily enough, all twelve, in an hour or
so's work. Or pass them--"take us as we are ... say yes." They could be
defended, then and there, with half a dozen reasons; they were no more
of a jumble than Stanhope's verse. But he was something of a purist; he
did not like them. His housekeeper, for that matter, could alter them
that evening under his direction, and save the costume-makers any
further trouble. "Is the Guard, is the Grand Duke's Guard, correct?"

A voice penetrated him. Hugh was saying: "One must have one's
subordinates exact, mustn't one?" There was the slightest stress on
"subordinates"--or was there? Wentworth looked askance at him; he
was strolling superb by his side. Pauline said: "We could alter some
things, of course." His silence had made her anxious. He stood away,
and surveyed the backs of the Guard. He could, if he chose, satisfy and
complete everything. He could have the coats left at his house after the
rehearsal; he could do what the honour of his scholarship commanded; he
could have them returned. It meant only his being busy with them that
one evening, and concerning himself with something different from his
closed garden. He smelt the garden.

Mrs. Parry's voice said: "Is the Guard correct?" He said: "Yes." It was
over; he could go.

He had decided. The jingle was in his ears no more. Everything was quite
quiet. The very colours were still. Then from a distance movement began
again. His future was secure, both proximate and ultimate. But his
present was decided for him; he was not allowed to go. The devil, for
that afternoon, promptly swindled him. He had cheated; he was at once
cheated. Mrs. Parry expected him to stop for the rehearsal and oversee
the movement of the Guard wherever, in its odd progress about the play,
it marched on or marched off. She made it clear. He chattered a protest,
to which she paid no attention. She took him to a chair, saw him in it,
and went off. He had no energy to oppose her. No one had. Over all that
field of actors and spectators--over Stanhope and Pauline, over Adela
and Hugh, over poetry and possession and sacred possession the capacity
of one really capable woman imposed itself. The moment was hers, and in
view of her determination the moment became itself. As efficient in her
kind as Margaret Anstruther in hers, Catherine Parry mastered creation,
and told it what to do. She had taken on her job, and the determination
to fulfil her job controlled the utterance of the poetry of Stanhope and
delayed the operation of the drugs of Lilith. Wentworth struggled and
was defeated, Adela writhed but obeyed, Peter Stanhope laughed and
enjoyed and assented. It was not perhaps the least achievement of his
art that it had given to his personal spirit the willingness to fulfil
the moment as the moment, so that, reserving his own apprehension of all
that his own particular business meant to him, he willingly subordinated
it to the business of others at their proper time. He seconded Mrs.
Parry as far as and in every way that he could. He ran errands, he took
messages, he rehearsed odd speeches, he fastened hooks and held weapons.
But he only seconded her. The efficiency was hers; and the Kingdom of
God which fulfilled itself in the remote recesses of his spacious verse
fulfilled itself also in her effective supremacy. She stood in the
middle of the field and looked around her. The few spectators were
seated; the actors were gathering. Stanhope stood by her side. The
Prologue, with his trumpet, ran hastily across the stage to the trees
which formed the background. Mrs. Parry said: "I think we're ready?"
Stanhope agreed. They retired to their chairs, and Mrs. Parry nodded
vigorously to the Prologue. The rehearsal began.

Wentworth, sitting near to Stanhope, secluded himself from it as much as
possible, reaching backward and forward with closed eyes into his own
secrecies. At the extreme other end of activity, Pauline, waiting with
the Chorus for the Woodcutter's Son's speech, upon which, as he fed the
flames, the first omnipotent song was to break, also gave herself up to
delight. If the heavens had opened, it was not for her to deny them,
or even too closely to question or examine them. She carried, in her
degree, Peter Stanhope and his fortunes--not for audience or other
publicity but for the achievement of the verse and the play itself. It
was all very well for Stanhope to say it was an entertainment and not a
play, and to be charmingly and happily altruistic about her, and since
he preferred her to fall in with Mrs. Parry's instructions she did it,
for everyone's sake including her own. But he was used, anyhow in his
imagination, to greater things; this was the greatest she had known
or perhaps was ever likely to know. If the apparition she had so long
dreaded came across the field she would look at it with joy. If it would
sit down till the rehearsal was over.... She smiled to herself at the
fantasy and laughed to think that she could smile. The Woodcutter's Son
from beside her went forward, carrying his burden of twigs. His voice
rose in the sublime speculations of fire and glory which the poet's
reckless generosity had given him. He spoke and paused, and Pauline and
all the Chorus, moving so that their own verdure showed among the trees,
broke into an answering song.

She was not aware, as the rehearsal proceeded, of any other sensation
than delight. But so clear and simple was that delight, and so
exquisitely shared by all the performers in their separate ways, that
as between the acts they talked and laughed together, and every one in
the field, with the exception of Lawrence Wentworth, joined in that
universal joy--so single and fundamental did it become that once,
while again she waited, it seemed to her as if the very words "dress
rehearsal" took on another meaning. She saw the ceremonial dress of the
actors, but it did not seem to her stranger than Mrs. Parry's frock
or Stanhope's light suit. All things, at all times and everywhere,
rehearsed; some great art was in practice and the only business anyone
had was to see that his part was perfect. And this particular rehearsal
mirrored the rest--only that this was already perfected from within,
and that other was not yet. The lumbering Bear danced; the Grand Duke
uttered his gnomic wisdom; the Princess and the Woodcutter's Son entered
into the lucid beauty of first love; the farmers counted their pence;
and the bandits fell apart within.

It was in the pause before the last act that the dark thought came to
her. She had walked a little away from the others to rest her soul, and,
turning, looked back. Around the place where lately the fire had burned,
the Prologue and some of the Guard were talking. She saw him lift his
trumpet; she saw them move, and the uniforms shone in the amazing
brightness of the sun, and suddenly there came to her mind another
picture; the woodcut in the old edition of the _Book of Martyrs_. There
too was a trumpet, and guards, and a fire, and a man in it. Here, the
tale said, and she had not remembered it till now, here where this
stage, perhaps where this fire lay, they had done him to death by fire.

She had had the last act in mind as she turned, the act in which
physical sensation, which is the play of love, and pardon, which is the
speed of love, and action, which is the fact of love, and almighty love
itself, all danced together; and now a shadow lay across it, the shadow
of death and cruelty, the living death. The sun was still bright,
colours vivid, laughter gay, and the shadow was the centre of them all.
The shadow was a hollow, filled with another, quite different, fact. She
felt the pang of the last hopelessness. If the living who walked in the
gutters of mind or spirit, if the present misery of the world, were
healed, or could be forgotten, still there sprang out of the hollow the
knowledge of the dead whose unrecompensed lives had gone before that
joy. The past accused her, made terrible by the certain history of
her house. His blood was in her and made demands on hers. He had gone
willingly to death, chosen it, insisted on it; his judges had been
willing enough to spare him if he would commit himself to a phrase or
two. But still in the end they had inflicted death, and agony in death;
and the world that had inflicted and enjoyed and nourished itself on
agony was too like the world in which she moved, too like Hugh and Adela
and Catherine Parry and the rest. She had been lost in a high marvel,
but if that joy were seriously to live it must somehow be reconciled
with the agony that had been; unless hollow and shell were one, there
was only hollow and shell.

She walked back, and as she did so Stanhope saw her and came across.

"Well," he said, "it all seems going very well."

She said, with a coldness in her voice that rose from the creeping
hollow of the darkness. "You think so?... did you know an ancestor of
mine was burnt alive just here?"

He turned to walk by her. "I did," he said. "I'd read it, of
course--after all, it's my house--and your grandmother spoke of it."

She said: "Well?" and then repentantly, "I'm sorry but ... we're all so
happy. The play, the fire--_our_ fire, it's all so wonderful. And yet we
can do _that_. How can we be happy, unless we forget? and how can we
forget? how can we dare forget?"

He said: "Forget nothing. Unless everything's justifiable, nothing is.
But don't you forget, perhaps, something else?"

She looked at him with question. He went on: "Mightn't his burden be
carried too?"

She stopped; she said staring: "But he's dead!"

"And so?" Stanhope asked mildly, and waited.

She said: "You mean ... you can't mean...?" As her voice hung baffled,
there arose gigantic before her the edge of a world of such incredible
dimensions that she was breathless at the faint hint. Her mouth opened;
her eyes stared. Her head was spinning. She said: "But...."

Stanhope took her arm to propel her gently forward; then, letting it go,
he said: "A good deal of our conversation consists of saying _but_ to
each other. However, who shall fail to follow when ... and so forth.
'But--' Periel?"

"But he's dead," she repeated. It was not what she meant to say.

"So you remarked," Stanhope said gently. "And I asked you what that had
to do with it. Or words to that effect. You might as well say he had red
hair, as for all I know he may have had. Yes, yes, Mrs. Parry."

He raised his voice and waved back. "We shall be delaying the
rehearsal," he said. "Come along--all things in their order."

She asked, inadvertently, as she quickened her steps to keep pace with
him: "Do you tell me to try and carry _his_ fear?"

"Well," he answered, "you can't make contract; so far, it's true, death
or red hair or what not interferes. But you might, in the Omnipotence,
offer him your--anything you've got. Only I should intend to have it
first."

"Intend to have it?" she asked breathlessly.

"Intend to have joy to offer," he said. "Be happy--take all the
happiness, if it's there, that you may not offer the Lord what costs
nothing. You must have a small private income to try and help support
even a Marian martyr. Heavens, they _are_ waiting. To your tent, O
Periel." As she ran he exclaimed after her. "Perhaps that's the
difference between Israel and Judah! they went to their own tents and
left David to his. Hence the Dispersion ... and the Disappearance."

"What disappearance, Mr. Stanhope?" Mrs. Parry asked.

He had come level with her while he was still speaking, and he made a
small gesture. "Nothing, Mrs. Parry. Of the saviour of his own life. How
well this act opens, doesn't it?"

As Pauline, escaping Mrs. Parry's eye, ran across the stage, and
threaded her way between the persons to her position, her mind was more
breathless than she. She felt again, as in a low but immense arc rising
above the horizon of her world, or perhaps of the earth itself, the hint
of a new organization of all things: a shape, of incredible difficulty
in the finding, of incredible simplicity found, an infinitely alien
arrangement of infinitely familiar things. The bottom had dropped out
of her universe, yet her astonished spirit floated and did not fall.
She was a little sick with running, running into this other world.
She halted, turned, addressed herself. She turned to the play where
martyrdom had been--to the martyrdom. "I have seen the salvation of my
God." The salvation throbbed in the air above her; it thrilled in the
mortal light. "'Unto him that hath shall be given' ... 'what of him
that hath not?'" A voice, neither of the martyr nor his executioner,
answered, singing, with a terrible clarity of assured fact--fact, the
only thing that can be loved: "from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he seemeth to have". A trumpet was crying, crying
for the execution of the justice of the Queen's Majesty on a convicted
and impenitent heretic. His blood was in her veins; dazed with her own
will, she struggled to pay the dues of her inheritance. The sudden
crowd of adorned figures thronged before her. He was not there; he
was dead centuries since. If centuries meant anything; perhaps they
didn't--perhaps everything was all at once, and interchanged devotion;
perhaps even now he burned, and she and her friends danced, and her
grandmother died and lived, and Peter Stanhope wrote his verse, and
all the past of the Hill was one with its present. It lived; it
intermingled; not among these living alone did the doctrine of
substituted love bear rule. Her intention rose, and was clear, and
withdrew, as the stage opened for her advance. About her the familiar
and transfigured personages moved; this was the condition and this the
air of supernatural life. _Ecce, omnia nova facio._ The incantation and
adoration of the true substance of experience sounded. She fulfilled her
part in a grave joy, aspiring to become part of that substance. All drew
to its close; the dress rehearsal ended. Remained only the performance
of the play.




Chapter IX

THE TRYST OF THE WORLDS


As if the world of that other life to which this in which Margaret
Anstruther lay was but spectral, and it to this, renewed itself with all
its force in the groan he heard, as if that groan had been but its own
energy of freeing itself, the dead man found when it ceased that he was
standing alone among the houses. He remembered the vanished apparitions
clearly enough, two images of beauty. He had seen an old woman and a
young, though the younger form had been faint with distance. The colour
which she hinted was obscured; in the older there was no colour but
softness of light. Now he was in the street. His back was to the house.
He was looking along the road, and he saw, beyond it, at the point where
the light of the sun, whatever sun, lay halted, the house and the ladder
he knew. He saw the light beyond it, softer than before, as it were
of one kind with that of the woman with whom he had spoken. The house
itself was dark; the ladder was white with a bony pallor against it, but
it held no sun. There it stood, waiting for him to go back.

There had been an opening up within him. He had run in his life after
other men, and in his second life away from other selves. His unapt
mind had been little use to him. It had been trying to please others
or himself, naturally and for long properly. He was relieved of this
necessity. There was only one way to go, and the only question if he
should go. He could move, or not. He knew this, yet, like Pauline when
she kept her promise to Stanhope, he knew that he had already chosen,
had come into obedience, and was no longer free. He began to walk. He
had not realized that the choice was there until the choice had been
made. Wentworth, turning from the Grand Ducal Guard, did not realize
it even then; as Macbeth did not know he had accepted his deed when he
accepted the means, and conceded his sin to his conviction of success.

In effect, the dead man's choice, like all choices of the kind, had been
less than it seemed. He could go, or he could wait till he was driven.
In the hastening or delaying of the end lies all distinction in the
knowledge of the end when at last it comes. At rare moments speed is
determined; all else is something else. He went, and with more energy
than he had ever known. The lost power of his missed youth awoke in him,
and of his defrauded manhood. It was needed. He had not taken a dozen
steps before the memory of his latest experience became as faint as the
old woman's voice had been. He did not again feel his old fear, but he
was intensely aware of ignorance. There were now no shapes. He was
alone, and the pallid ladder of the dark house stood before him. The
light beyond was soft, but promised nothing. As he went soundlessly he
had no thought but that it was better to do at once what must be done,
and that he had seen, if only in a fading apparition, the tender eyes of
love.

He passed the finished houses; he came among those which, by the past or
future, had been unbuilt. As he reached them he heard a faint sound. He
had come again into the peculiar territory of the dead. He heard behind
him a small rustle, as if of dead leaves or snakes creeping out from dry
sticks. He did not think of snakes or leaves, nor of the dead leaves of
a great forest, the still-existent nothingness of life. Those who had
known the green trees were tangled and torn in the dry. The tragedies of
Peter Stanhope carried the image of that pain-piercing nothing. The dead
man, like Pauline, had lived with thorns and hard wood, and at last
they had destroyed him as pitilessly as the Marian martyr. He did not
therefore conceive them now as anything but a mere sound. It went with
him along the road, and when he had come fully out at the end into the
space where the ladder of bone led again to a darkness of the grave, it
had become louder. He heard it on all sides. He stopped and turned.

The shapes were standing in a great crowd watching him. Mostly they had
his form and face, and they stood, in the infinite division of past
moments, but higgledy-piggledy, sombrely staring. He saw in front,
parodying earthly crowds, the children--different ages, different sizes,
all looking with his small pointed hungry face. In the massed multitude
behind there were, at points, different faces, faces of any few
creatures who for one reason or another had mattered to his mind. He saw
his wife in several places; he saw the face of a youth who had been the
nearest he had known to a friend; he saw those he had disliked. But, at
most, these others were few.

The crowd did not move, except that sometimes other single forms slipped
out of the ruined houses, swelling it as crowds are swelled in London
streets. It was useless, had he desired it, to attempt to return. He
turned away from them again, but this time not merely from them but
towards something, towards the ladder. He laid a hand on it. The long
hard dry rustle came again, as the whole crowd fell forward, bones
shifting and slipping as some moving vitality slid through them. They
closed towards him, their thronged circles twisting round the house and
him as if they were the snake. His mortal mind would have given way,
could it have apprehended such a strait between shadowy bone and shining
bone; his immortal, nourished by belief in the mother of his soul,
remained clear. His seeming body remained capable. He exercised his
choice, and began to go up the ladder. At once, with a horrid outbreak
of shifting leaves and snapping sticks and rustling bodies, they were
about its foot, looking up. The living death crowded round the ladder
of bone, which it could not ascend. White faces of unvitalized,
unsubstantial, yet real, existence, looked up at him mounting.
Nothingness stared and panted, with false breath, terrible to those who
live of choice in its phantasmal world. But for him, who rose above them
to that stage set in the sky, the expanded point and culminating area of
his last critical act, the place of skull and consciousness, of life and
death and life, for him there entered through the grasp he had on the
ladder shafts an energy. He looked neither down nor up; he went on. A
wind had risen about him, as if here the movement of the leaves, if
leaves, shook the air, and not the air the leaves. It was as if a last
invisible tentacle were sent up by the nothingness to draw him back into
the smooth undulations below, that its sterility might bury him in a
living sepulchre; the identities of the grave moving in a blind instinct
to overtake and seize him. Now and then some of them even began to mount
a few rungs, but they could get and keep no hold. They fell again to
their own level.

He did not see this, for his eyes were above. In the same sense of
nothing but action he climbed the last rungs, and stood on the stage
from which he had been flung. But he had hardly stepped on to it before
it changed. He had come back from his own manner of time to the point
in the general world of time from which he had fled, and he found it
altered. The point of his return was not determined by himself, but by
his salvation, by a direction not yet formulated, by the economy of
means of the Omnipotence, by the moment of the death of Margaret
Anstruther. Therefore he came into the built house, and the room where
Wentworth slept. The open stage closed round him as he came upon it.
The walls rose; there was a ceiling above. He knew he stood in a room,
though the details were vague. It was ghostly to him, like that other in
which, a short time before, he had stood. There the old woman had been
a vivid centre to him. Here he was not, at first, aware of a centre.
In this other world he had not been astonished at the manner in which
things happened, but now he was a little uncomfortable. He thought at
first it was because he could have had no business in such a room during
his earlier life. So perhaps it was, but if so, another cause had
aroused the old uneasiness--the faint hint of a slither of dry leaves,
such as he had heard behind him along the road, but now within the room.
It displeased and diseased him; he must remove himself. It was almost
his first quiet decision ever; he was on the point to enter into actions
of peace. The courtesy that rules the world of spirits took him, and
as the creature that lay in the room had not entered except under
Wentworth's compulsion, so this other made haste to withdraw from its
intrusion. Also he was aware that, having re-entered this place and
point of time, this station of an inhabited world, by the ladder of bone
from the other side, he must go now farther on the way. He had the City
in his mind; he had his wife in mind. He could not tell by what means or
in what shape he would find her, or if he would find her. But she was
his chief point of knowledge, and to that he directed himself. Of the
necessity of getting a living he did not think. Living, whether he liked
it or not, was provided; he knew that he did like. He went carefully
across the dim room and through the door; down the stairs, and reached
the front door. It opened of itself before him, so he thought, and he
peered out into the road. A great blackness was there; it changed as he
peered. As if it fled from him, it retreated. He heard the wind again,
but now blowing up the street. A shaft of light smote along with it.
Before wind and light and himself he saw the night turn, but it was not
the mere night; it was alive, it was made of moving and twisting shapes
hurrying away of their own will. Light did not drive them; they revealed
the light as they went. They rose and rushed; as they disappeared he saw
the long drive before him, and at its end, in the street proper, the
figure of a girl.

In a different darkness, mortally illumined, Pauline, not far away, had
that previous evening been sitting by her grandmother's bed. It was, to
her, the night after the rehearsal. She had come home to find Margaret
awake, alert, inquiring, and after she had spoken of the details of the
afternoon, she had not been able, nor wished, to keep from speaking of
the other thing that filled and threatened her mind. Her grandmother's
attention still seemed to her acute, even if remote. Indeed, all mortal
things were now remote to Margaret unless they were vividly consistent
with the slope over which she moved. She felt, at intervals, someone
being lifted and fed, someone hearing and speaking intelligible words.
Only sometimes did definiteness from that other casual state enter her;
then she and it were sharply present. For the rest she only saw vague
images of a great good, and they faded, and at rarer intervals in the
other single consciousness of slow--but slow!--movement over a surface,
an intense sweetness pierced her. She moaned then, for it was pain; she
moaned happily, for it was only the last inevitable sloth of her body
that made its pain, resisting, beyond her will, the translucent energy.
She always assented. She assented now to what Pauline was saying,
sitting by her bed, her fingers interlocked and pressed against her
knee, her body leaning forward, her breath drawn with a kind of slow
difficulty against the beating passion of her heart's presagements. She
was saying: "But how could one give backwards?"

Margaret could not, at that point of experience, explain metaphysics.
She said: "If it's like that, my dear?"

Pauline said: "But if he took it? I thought--there--I might: but now, I
daren't."

She saw Margaret's smile flash at her across rocks. It went and the
voice said: "You think it's yours?"

Pauline answered, abruptly checking abruptness: "I don't.... Do I?"

"You think one of the two's yours--joy or misery," Margaret said, "or
both. Why, if you don't, should you mind?"

Pauline for a minute struggled with this in silence: then, evading it,
she returned to time. "But four hundred years," she exclaimed.

"Child," her grandmother said, "I can touch Adam with my hand; you
aren't as far off."

"But how could he take it before I'd given it?" Pauline cried, and
Margaret said: "Why do you talk of _before_? If you give, you give to
It, and what does It care about _before_?"

Pauline got up and walked to the window. It was drawing towards night,
yet so translucent was the pale green sky that night and day seemed
alike unthinkable. She heard in the distance a single pair of hurrying
feet; patter, patter. She said, in a muffled voice: "Even the edge
frightens me."

"Peter Stanhope," Margaret said, "must have been frightened many
times."

"O--poetry!" Pauline exclaimed bitterly. "That's different; you know it
is, grandmother."

"In seeing?" Margaret asked. "And as for being, you must find out for
yourself. He can carry your parcels, but not you."

"Couldn't he?" Pauline said. "Not that I want him to."

"Perhaps," Margaret answered. "But I think only when you don't need it,
and your parcels when you do."

Her voice grew faint as she spoke, and Pauline came quickly back to the
bed.

"I'm tiring you," she said hastily. "I'm sorry: look, I'll go now. I
didn't mean to talk so much."

Margaret glanced at her, and said in a whisper: "But I'd so much rather
die talking." All talk of the divine thing was pleasant to her, even
if this beating of wings in the net, wings so dear and so close, was
exhausting in the thin air. Pauline, looking down for a second after her
good-night, thought that a change had taken place. The eyes had closed,
though the girl was by no means sure that they were not as alert now as
they had been when they were open and watching.

Yet a proportion between the old woman and external things had been
withdrawn; another system of relations might have been established, but
if so it was unapprehensible by others. But the change in customary
relations was definitely apprehensible. She looked small, and yet small
was hardly the word; she was different. The body had been affected by a
change of direction in the spirit, and only when the spirit was removed
would it regain for a little while its measurable place amongst
measurable things. It could be served and aided; but the ceremonies of
service were now made to something strange that existed among them. The
strangeness communicated itself, by a kind of opposition, to the very
bed in which that body was stretched; it became a mound of earth lifted
up to bear the visiting victim. The woman who was their companion had
half-changed into a visitor from another place, a visitor who knew
nothing of the world to which she was still half-native. The unknown and
the known mingled, as if those two great parents of humanity allowed
their mingled powers to be evident to whoever watched. The mound, in the
soft light of the room, presented itself to Pauline as if its low height
was the crown and peak of a life; the long journey had ended on this
cavity in the rounded summit of a hill. She considered it gravely so
before she turned and, leaving the nurse in charge, went to her own
room.

She was not asleep when later in the night she was called. Her
grandmother, the nurse said, needed her. Pauline pulled a dressing-gown
on her and went across. Mrs. Anstruther was sitting in the bed, propped
by pillows; her eyes looking away out of the room. As if she dared not
turn her gaze away, she said, as Pauline came up: "Is that you,
darling?"

"Me," the girl answered. "Did you want me?"

"Will you do something for me?" Mrs. Anstruther said. "Something rather
odd?"

"Why, of course," the girl said. "Anything. What is it?"

"Would you be so very charming as to go out and see if anyone wants
you?" Mrs. Anstruther said, quite distinctly. "Up by Mr. Wentworth's."

"She's wandering," the nurse whispered. Pauline, used to Mrs.
Anstruther's extremely unwandering habits, hesitated to agree. But it
was certainly rather odd. She said, with a tenderness a little fractured
by doubt, "Wants _me_, darling? Now?"

"Of course, _now_," her grandmother answered. "That's the point. I think
perhaps he ought to get back to the City." She looked round with a
little sigh. "Will you?"

Pauline had been about to make the usual unfelicitous efforts of the
healthy to persuade the sick that they are being rightly served. But
she could not do it. No principle and no wisdom directed her, nor any
conscious thought of love. She merely could not do it. She said: "By Mr.
Wentworth's? Very well, darling." She could have helped, but did not,
adding: "I don't think it's very likely."

"No," said Margaret, and Pauline was gripped by a complete sense of
folly. "'I don't think it's ... No.'" She said: "I don't know a thing.
I'll go." And turned. The nurse said, as she moved to the door: "Sweet
of you to be so nice. Come back in ten minutes or so. She won't realize
the time."

"I'm going," Pauline said, distantly and distinctly, "as far as Mr.
Wentworth's. I shall be as quick as I can." She saw a protest at the
nurse's mouth, and added: "At once."

She dressed quickly. Even so, in spite of her brave words to the nurse,
her doubts were quicker. In spite of her intention, she reasoned against
her promise. Three words dogmatized definition at her: "Her mind's
wandering; her mind's wandering." Why, obeying that wandering mind,
should she herself wander on the Hill? Why, in a lonely street, under
the pale shining sky, should she risk the last dreadful meeting? The
high clock struck one; time drew to the night's nadir. Why go? why go?
Sit here, she said, almost aloud, and say "Peace". Is it peace, Jehu?
cry peace where there is no peace; _faciunt solitudinem et pacem
vocant_. She would make a solitude round the dying woman and call it
peace; the dying woman would die and never know, or dying know and call
it well; the dying woman that would not die but see, or die and see; and
dead, see and know--know the solitude that her granddaughter had called
peace. Up and up, the wind was rising, and the shuffle of leaves under
the moon, and nothing was there for her to find, but to find nothing now
was to be saved from finding nothing in the place where whatever she
now did was hid and kept and saved. The edge of the other world was
running up along the sky, the world where everyone carried themselves
but everyone carried someone else's grief: Alice in Wonderland, sweet
Alice, Alice sit by the fire, the fire burned: who sat by the fire that
burned a man in another's blood on the grass of a poet's house, where
things were given backward, and rules were against rights and rights
against rules, and a ghost in the fire was a ghost in the street, and
the thing that had been was the thing that was to be and it was coming,
was coming; what was coming? what but herself? she was coming, she was
coming, up the street and the wind; herself--a terrible good, terror and
error, but the terror was error, and the error was in the terror, and
now all were in him, for he had taken them into himself, and he was
coming, down all the roads of Battle Hill, closing them in him, making
them straight: make straight the highways before our God, and they were
not for God took them, in the world that was running through this, its
wheel turning within this world's air, rolling out of the air. No peace
but peace, no joy but joy, no love but love. Behold, I come quickly.
Amen, even so, come....

She caught up a hat and flung herself at the door, her blood burning
within her, as the house burned around. The air was fiery to her sense;
she breathed a mingled life, as if the flames of poetry and martyrdom
rose together in the air within the air, and touched the outer
atmosphere with their interior force. She ran down the stairs, but
already her excitement, being more excitement than strength, flagged
and was pain. Action was not yet so united with reaction as to become
passion. The doubt she must have of what was to come took its old
habitual form. Her past pretended to rule her, _de facto_ sovereign, and
her past was fear. It was midnight, the Hill was empty, she was alone.
It could only be that her ghostly image lay, now, in wait for her to
emerge into its desolate kingdom. She grit her teeth. The thing must be
done. She had promised her grandmother; more important still, she had
promised the nurse. She might have confided to the first what she would
never concede to the second. It was that then she saw the telephone.

At first, as she paused a minute in the hall, to settle herself--to
settle her determination that that woman who had talked of wandering
minds should not find her foolish expectation fulfilled--at first she
did not think of Stanhope; then inevitably, with her grief stirring in
her, she did. To think of him was to think, at once, of speaking to him.
The telephone. She thought: "One o'clock and he's asleep; don't be a
fool." She thought: "'Any hour of the day or night'." She thought: "I
oughtn't to disturb him," and then with the clarity of that world of
perpetual exchange: "I ought to disturb him." It was her moral duty to
wake him up, if he was asleep and she could. She smiled, standing in the
hall where the new light of the summer sky dimly shone. Reversal had
reached its extreme; she who had made a duty of her arrogance had found
a duty in her need. Her need retreated beneath the shock. At precisely
the moment when she could have done without him she went to ask for him;
the glad and flagrant mockery of the Omnipotence lay peaceful in her
heart as she dialled his number, her finger slowing a little on the last
figure, as if the very motion were a delight too sweet to lose by haste.
The receiver at her ear, as if she leant to it, she waited. Presently
she heard his voice.

She said, again grave: "Are you awake enough to hear me?"

"Complete with attention," he answered. "Whatever it is, how very, very
right of you! That's abstract, not personal. Concede the occasion."

"The occasion," she said, "is that I'm going out up the Hill because my
grandmother's asked me to, and I was a little afraid just now ... I'm
not."

"O blessed, blessed," Stanhope murmured, but whether he thought of her
or the Omnipotence she did not know. He added, to her: "Go in peace.
Would you like me to come?"

"No, of course not," she answered, and lingering still a minute said: "I
thought I wanted to ring you up, but when I did I didn't. Forgive me."

"If it gives you any pleasure," he said, "but you might have needed
forgiveness in fact if you hadn't. God's, not mine. Pardon, Periel, like
love, is only ours for fun: essentially we don't and can't. But you want
to go..... You'll remember?"

"For ever," she said, "and ever and ever. Thank you." She put the
receiver firmly down, opened the door, and went out into the street. The
pure night received her. Darkness was thick round the houses, but the
streets lay clear. She was aware, immediately, of some unusualness, and
presently she knew what it was. She was used to shadows lying across
the pavements, but now it was not so. On either side of the street they
gathered and blocked and hid the buildings, climbing up them, creepers
of night, almost in visible movement. Between those masses the roads
lay like the gullies of a mountain down which an army might come--broad
and empty, prepared for an army, passes already closed by scouts and
outposts, and watched by the dazzling flashes which now and then and
here and there lit the sky, as if silver machines of air above the
world moved in escort of expected power. Apart from those momentary
dazzling flashes light was diffused through the sky. She could see
no moon, only once or twice in her walk, at some corner, between the
cliffs of darkness, far away on the horizon, she half-thought she saw
a star--Hesper or Phosphor, the planet that is both the end and the
beginning, Venus, omega and alpha, transliteration of speech. Once, far
behind her, she thought she heard hurrying footsteps, but as she went
on she lost them. She went quickly, for she had left behind her an
approaching point to which she desired to return, the point of hastening
death. She went peacefully, but while, days before, it had been Stanhope's
intervention that had changed her mood, now she had come, by the last
submissive laughter of her telephone call, into the ways of the world
he had no more than opened. She went with a double watchfulness, for
herself and for that other being whom her grandmother had sent her to
meet, but her watchfulness did not check her speed, nor either disturb
the peace. She turned, soon enough, into the street where Lawrence
Wentworth's house stood, not far from the top of the Hill in one
direction, from the Manor House in another, and, beyond all buildings,
from the silent crematorium in a third. The street, as she came into it,
looked longer than she had remembered. It had something of the effect by
which small suburban byways, far inland, seem to dip towards the sea,
though here it was no sea but a mere distance of road which received it.
She slackened her pace, and, flicking one hand with her gloves, walked
towards the house.

She reached it at last, and paused. There was at first no sign of any
living creature. She looked up at it; the shadows were thick on it,
seeming to expand and contract. The small occasional wind of the night,
intermittently rising, caught them and flung them against it; they were
beaten and bruised, if shadows could take the bruise, against its walls;
they hid windows and doors; there was only a rough shape of the house
discernible below them. She thought, in a faint fancy, too indistinct
to be a distress, of herself flung in that steady recurrence against a
bleak wall, and somehow it seemed sad that she should not be bruised. A
gratitude for material things came over her; she twisted her gloves in
her fingers and even struck her knuckles gently together, that the sharp
feel of them might assure her of firm flesh and plotted bone. As if that
slight tap had been at a door, to announce a visitor, she saw a man
standing outside the shadow, close by the house.

She could not, in the moon, see very clearly what he was. She thought,
by something in his form, that she had seen him before; then, that she
had not. She thought of her grandmother's errand, and that perhaps here
was its end. She waited, in the road, while he came down the drive, and
then she saw him clearly. He was small and rather bent; obviously a
working man and at that an unsuccessful working man, for his clothes
were miserably old, and his boots gaped. Yet he had presence; he
advanced on her with a quiet freedom, and when he came near she saw that
he was smiling. He put up his hand to his tattered cap; the motion had
in it the nature of an act--it had conclusion, it began and ended. He
said, almost with a conscious deference such as she could have imagined
herself feeling for Stanhope had she known nothing of him but his name:
"Good evening, miss. Could you tell me the way to London?"

There was the faintest sound of the city's metal in his voice: dimly she
knew the screech of London gate. She said: "Why, yes, but--you don't
mean to walk?"

He answered: "Yes, miss, if you'll be so kind as to tell me the right
road."

"But it's thirty miles," she cried, "and ... hadn't you better...." She
stopped, embarrassed by the difficulties of earth. He did not look
inferior enough to be offered money; money being the one thing that
could not be offered to people of one's own class, or to anybody one
respected. All the things that could be bought by money, but not money.
Yet unless she offered this man money he did not, from his clothes, look
as if he would get to London unless he walked.

He said: "I'd as soon walk, miss. It isn't more than a step."

"It seems to be considerably more," she said, and thought of her
grandmother's errand. "Must you go now or could you wait till the
morning? I could offer you a bed to-night." It seemed to her that this
must be the reason why she was here.

He said: "I'd as soon not, though thank you for offering. I'd rather
start now, if you'll tell me the way."

She hesitated before this self-possession; the idea that he needed money
still held her, and now she could not see any way to avoid offering it.
She looked in his serene quiet eyes, and said, with a gesture of her
hand, "If it's a question of the fare?"

He shook his head, still smiling, "It's only a matter of starting
right," he answered, and Pauline felt absurdly disappointed, as if some
one had refused a cup of coffee or of cold water that she had wanted to
bring. She was also a little surprised to find how easy it was to offer
money when you tried--or indeed to take it: celestially easy. She
answered his smile: "Well, if you won't...." she said, "Look then, this
is the best way."

They walked a few steps together, the girl and the dead man, till, at a
corner a little beyond Wentworth's house, she stopped.

"Down there," she said, pointing, "is the London road, you can just see
where it crosses this. Are you sure you won't stay to-night and go in
the morning--fare and all?" So she might have asked any of her friends,
whether it had been a fare or a book or love or something of no more and
no less importance.

"Quite, miss," he said, lifting his hand to his cap again in an
archangelic salute to the Mother of God. "It doesn't matter perhaps, but
I think I ought to get on. They may be waiting for me."

"I see," she said, and added with a conscious laughter, "One never
knows, does one?"

"O I wouldn't say _never_, miss," he answered. "Thank you again.
Good-night, miss."

"Good-night," she said, and with a last touch of the cap he was gone
down the road, walking very quickly, lightly, and steadily. He went
softly; she was not sure that she could hear his tread, though she knew
she had not been listening for it. She watched him for a minute; then
she turned her head and looked up the cross-road on the other side of
the street. That way ran up towards the Manor House; she thought of her
telephone call and wondered if Stanhope were asleep or awake. She looked
back at the departing figure, and said after it aloud, in an act of
remembered goodwill: "Go in peace!"

The words were hardly formed when it seemed to her that he stopped. The
figure surely stood still; it was swaying; it was coming back--not
coming back, only standing still, gesticulating. Its arms went up toward
heaven in entreaty; then they fell and it bent and clutched its head
with its hands. An agony had fallen on it. She saw and began to run.
As she did so, she thought that her ears caught for an instant a faint
sound from behind her, as of a trumpet, the echo of the trumpet of that
day's rehearsal done or of the next day's performance not yet begun, or
of a siren that called for the raising or lowering of a bridge.

So faintly shrill was the sound, coming to her between the cliffs of a
pass from a camp on the other side the height, that her senses answered
as sharply. The sound was transmitted into her and transmuted into sight
or the fear of sight. "The Magus ... my dead child ... his own image."
She was running fast; the stranger had gone an infinite distance in that
time; she was running as she had run from her own room, and now she knew
she had been right when she stopped, and it was a trap. Everything--she
was running, for she could not stop--had been a part of the trap; even
the shelter she had sometimes found had been meant only to catch her
more surely in the end. Ah, the Magus Zoroaster had set it for her,
all that time since, and her grandmother was part of its infinitely
complicated steel mechanism, which now shut her in, and was going
off--had gone off and was still going off, for ever and ever going off,
in the faint shrill sound that came from behind her where Stanhope sat
working it, for Zoroaster or Shelley were busy in front, and in front
was the spring of the death and the delirium, and she had been tricked
to run in that ingenious plot of their invention, and now she could no
more stop than she could cease to hear the shrill whirr of the wheel
that would start the spring, and when it cracked at last there would be
her twin shape in the road. It was for this that the inhuman torturer
who was Stanhope had pretended to save her, and the old creature who
was her grandmother and talked of God had driven her out into the wild
night, and the man who would not take her offer had fetched her to the
point and the instant. Earth and sky were the climax of her damnation;
their rods pressed her in. She ran; the trumpet sounded; the shape
before her lifted his head again and dropped his hands and stood still.

She was coming near to him, and the only fact of peace to which her
outraged mind could cling was that so far it was still he and not the
other. Every second that he so remained was a relief. His back might
open any moment and her own form leap hastily down from its ambush now
among his veins and canals or from his interior back-throbbing heart. It
did not; it became more definitely a man's back, as she neared it, but
she saw it shaking and jerking. It was a great back, clothed in some
kind of cloth doublet, with breeches below, and a heavy head of thick
hair above; and the arms suddenly went up again, and a voice sounded. It
said, in a shout of torment: "Lord God! Lord God!"

She stopped running a dozen yards off and stood still. It was not her
decision; she was brought to a stand. The cry freed her from fear and
delirium, as if it took over its own from her. She stood still, suddenly
alert. The trap, if there had been a trap, had opened, and she had come
out beyond it. But there was another trap, and this man was in it. He
cried again: "Lord God!"

The trumpet had ceased blowing. She said in a voice breathless only from
haste: "Can I help you?"

The man in front became rigid: he said: "Lord God, I cannot bear the
fear of the fire."

She said: "What fire?" and still with his back to her he answered: "The
fire they will burn me in to-day unless I say what they choose. Lord
God, take away the fear if it be thy will. Lord God, be merciful to a
sinner. Lord God, make me believe."

She was here. She had been taught what to do. She had her offer to make
now and it would not be refused. She herself was offered, in a most
certain fact, through four centuries, her place at the table of
exchange. The moment of goodwill in which she had directed to the City
the man who had but lately died had opened to her the City itself, the
place of the present and all the past. He was afraid, this martyr of her
house, and she knew what to do. There was no doubt about it at all. She
knew that the horror of the fire had overcome him. He was in the trap in
which she had been but now; the universe had caught him. His teacher,
his texts, his gospel had been its bars, and his judges and executioners
were springing it; and the Lord God himself was, in that desperate hour,
nothing but the spring that would press him into the torment. Once the
Lord had been something else; perhaps still.... He was praying
passionately: "Make me believe; make me believe." The choice was first
in her; Omnipotence waited her decision.

She knew what she must do. But she felt, as she stood, that she could
no more do it than he. She could never bear that fear. The knowledge of
being burnt alive, of the flames, of the faces, of the prolongation of
pain. She knew what she must do. She opened her mouth and could not
speak. In front of her, alone in his foul Marian prison, unaware of the
secret means the Lord he worshipped was working swiftly for his peace,
believing and unbelieving, her ancestor stood centuries off in his
spiritual desolation and preluding agony of sweat. He could not see
beyond the years the child of his house who strove with herself behind
and before him. The morning was coming; his heart was drained. Another
spasm shook him; even now he might recant. Pauline could not see the
prison, but she saw him. She tried to choose and to speak.

Behind her, her own voice said: "Give it to me, John Struther." He
heard it, in his cell and chains, as the first dawn of the day of his
martyrdom broke beyond the prison. It spoke and sprang in his drained
heart; and drove the riotous blood again through his veins: "Give it to
me, give it to me, John Struther." He stretched out his arms again: he
called: "Lord, Lord!" It was a devotion and an adoration; it accepted
and thanked. Pauline heard it, trembling, for she knew what stood behind
her and spoke. It said again: "Give". He fell on his knees, and in a
great roar of triumph he called out: "I have seen the salvation of my
God."

Pauline sighed deeply with her joy. This then, after so long, was their
meeting and their reconciliation: their perfect reconciliation, for this
other had done what she had desired, and yet not the other, but she, for
it was she who had all her life carried a fear which was not her fear
but another's, until in the end it had become for her in turn not hers
but another's. Her heart was warm, as if the very fire her ancestor had
feared was a comfort to her now. The voice behind her sang, repeating
the voice in front, "I have seen the salvation of my God."

Pauline turned. She thought afterwards that she had had no choice then,
but it was not so. It was a movement as swift, as instinctive, as that
with which one hand flies to balance the other, but it was deliberate.
She whirled on the thing she had so long avoided, and the glorious
creature looked past her at the shouting martyr beyond. She was
giddy with the still violence of this last evening; she shut her eyes
and swayed, but she was sustained by the air about her and did not
fall. She opened her eyes again; there--as a thousand times in her
looking-glass--there! The ruffled brown hair, the long nose, the firm
compressed mouth, the tall body, the long arms, her dress, her gesture.
It wore no supernatural splendour of aureole, but its rich nature burned
and glowed before her, bright as if mortal flesh had indeed become what
all lovers know it to be. Its colour bewildered by its beauty; its
voice was Pauline's, as she had wished it to be for pronouncing the
imagination of the grand art. But no verse, not Stanhope's, not
Shakespeare's, not Dante's, could rival the original, and this was the
original, and the verse was but the best translation of a certain manner
of its life. The glory of poetry could not outshine the clear glory of
the certain fact, and not any poetry could hold as many meanings as the
fact. One element co-ordinated original and translation; that element
was joy. Joy had filled her that afternoon, and it was in the power
of such joy that she had been brought to this closest propinquity to
herself. It had been her incapacity for joy, nothing else, that had
till now turned the vision of herself aside; her incapacity for joy had
admitted fear, and fear had imposed separation. She knew now that all
acts of love are the measure of capacity for joy; its measure and its
preparation, whether the joy comes or delays.

Her manifested joy whirled on her with her own habitual movement. She
sprang back from that immortality; no fear but a moment's truce of
wonder and bodily tremor. She looked in her own eyes and laboured to
speak; a shout was in her. She wished to assent to the choice her
beatitude had made. The shout sank within her and rose without; she had
assented, then or that afternoon or before this life began. She had
offered her joy to her betrayed ancestor; she heard now, though she saw
nothing but those brilliant and lucid eyes, the noise of his victorious
going. The unseen crowd poured and roared past her. Her debt was paid,
and now only she might know why and when she had incurred it. The
sacrifice had been accepted. His voice was shouting in her ears, as Foxe
said he had shouted, _To him that hath shall be given_. He had had; she
had been given to him. She had lived without joy that he might die in
joy, but when she lived she had not known and when she offered she had
not guessed that the sacrificial victim had died before the sacrificial
act was accomplished; that now the act was for resurrection in death.
Receding voices called still; they poured onwards to the martyrdom. The
confusion that was round him was her own confusion of hostile horror at
the fact of glory: her world's order contending with distraction--what
distraction!

One called: _What of him that hath not_? but who could be that had not?
so universal, in itself and through its means, was the sublime honour of
substituted love; what wretch so poor that all time and place would not
yield a vicar for his distress, beyond time and place the pure vicariate
of salvation? She heard the question, in that union of the centuries,
with her mortal ears, as she heard excited voices round her, and the
noise of feet, and the rattle at a distance of chains. She saw nothing,
except the streets of the Hill and herself standing on the Hill. She
felt no grief or fear; that was still to come or else it had been,
according to choice of chronology. Her other self, or the image in which
she saw both those choices in one vision, still stood opposite her, nor
was its glory dimmed though and as her own intensity absorbed it.

After the shouted question she did not hear a reply, other sounds
covered it. The scuffling, the rattling, the harsh alien voices went on;
then the voice she had heard calling on the Lord cried: _The ends of the
earth be upon me_. The roads had been doubled and twisted so that she
could meet him there; as wherever exchange was needed. She knew it now
from the abundant grace of the Hill or the hour: but exchange might be
made between many mortal hearts and none know what work was done in the
moment's divine kingdom. There was a pause, ominous down all the years;
a suspense of silence. Then suddenly she smelt burning wood; the fire
was lit, he in it. She heard the voice once more: _I have seen the
salvation of my God_.

He stood in the fire; he saw around him the uniforms--O uniforms of the
Grand Duke's Guard--the mounted gentlemen, the couple of friars, the
executioners--O the woodcutter's son singing in the grand art!--the
crowd, men and women of his village. The heat scorched and blinded
and choked him. He looked up through the smoke and flame that closed
upon him, and saw, after his manner, as she after hers, what might be
monstrous shapes of cherubim and seraphim exchanging powers, and among
them the face of his daughter's viternity. She only among all his
children and descendants had run by a sacrifice of heart to ease and
carry his agony. He blessed her, thinking her some angel, and in his
blessing her viternity was released to her, and down his blessing
beatitude ran to greet her, a terrible good. The ends of the world were
on them. He dead and she living were made one with peace. Her way was
haunted no more.

She heard the cry, and the sky over her was red with the glow of fire,
its smell in her nostrils. It did not last. Her beatitude leant forward
to her, as if to embrace. The rich presence enveloped her; out of a
broken and contrite heart she sighed with joy. On the inhaled breath her
splendour glowed again; on the exhaled it passed. She stood alone, at
peace. Dawn was in the air; _ecce omnia nova facio_.

Soon after, as she came back to the house, she saw Stanhope approaching.
She waited, outside her gate. He came up, saying with a smile: "Awake,
lute and harp"--he made a gesture of apology--"I myself will awake
right early." She put out her hand.

"I owe you this," she said. "I owe you this for ever."

He looked at her. "It's done then?" he asked, and she: "It's done. I
can't tell you now, but it's done."

He was silent, studying her, then he answered slowly: "Arise, shine;
your light is come; the glory of the Lord is risen upon you." His voice
quickened: "And you'll do it well, taking prettily and giving prettily,
but the Lord's glory, Periel, will manage to keep up with you, and I
shall try."

"Oh, you!" she said, pressing and releasing his hand: "but you've got
such a start!"

He shook his head. "No," he said, "our handicaps are all different, and
the race is equal. The Pharisees can even catch up the woman with the
mites. Those who do not insist on Gomorrah." She said: "Gomorrah?"
and the chill of the word struck even through her contemplation. She
remembered the unanswered question of her vision: _What of them that
have not?_ As if the answer had been reserved for these lower circles,
he gave it. He said: "The Lord's glory fell on the cities of the plain,
on Sodom and another. We know all about Sodom nowadays, but perhaps we
know the other even better. Men can be in love with men, and women with
women, and still be in love and make sounds and speeches, but don't you
know how quiet the streets of Gomorrah are? haven't you seen the pools
that everlastingly reflect the faces of those who walk with their own
phantasms, but the phantasms aren't reflected, and can't be. The lovers
of Gomorrah are quite contented, Periel; they don't have to put up with
our difficulties. They aren't bothered by alteration, at least till the
rain of the fire of the Glory at the end, for they lose the capacity
for change, except for the fear of hell. They're monogamous enough!
and they've no children--no cherubim breaking into being or babies as
tiresome as ours; there's no birth there, and only the second death.
There's no distinction between lover and beloved; they beget themselves
on their adoration of themselves, and they live and feed and starve on
themselves, and by themselves too, for creation, as my predecessor said,
is the mercy of God, and they won't have the facts of creation. No, we
don't talk much of Gomorrah, and perhaps it's as well and perhaps not."

"But where?" she cried.

"Where but here? When all's said and done there's only Zion or
Gomorrah," he answered. "But don't think of that now; go and sleep if
you can, or you'll be nervous this afternoon."

"Never," she said. "Not _nervous_."

"Well, that's as it may be," he said. "Still, sleep. The Sabbath and all
that, even for the cattle. Be a lamb, and sleep."

She nodded, went obediently through the gate, and paused, saying: "I
shall see you presently?"

"Making my concluding appearance," he said. "Unless the Lord decides to
take his own call. The author has seemed to be out of the house rather
often, but he may have been brought in at last. Till when, Periel, and
with God."




Chapter X

THE SOUND OF THE TRUMPET


Mrs. Parry, rising that morning to control the grand occasion, and
excluding from her mind as often as possible the image of a photograph
in the papers of herself and Peter Stanhope side by side, "author and
producer", found a note from Lawrence Wentworth waiting on her breakfast
table. It was short and frigid. It said only that he had caught a
feverish chill and would not be at the performance. Even so, it had
given him some trouble to write, for it had demanded contact, and only
a desire that he should not be, by some maddening necessary inquiry,
disturbed in his solitude, had compelled him to write it. He had sent
it round very early, and then had returned to sit in his study, with
curtains drawn, to help him in his sickness.

"Very odd weather to catch a feverish chill," Mrs. Parry thought,
looking through her window at the dancing sunlight. "And he might have
returned his ticket, and he might have sent good wishes." Good wishes
were precisely what Wentworth was incapable of sending anywhere, but
Mrs. Parry could not know that. It was difficult to imagine what either
Zion or Gomorrah would make of Mrs. Parry, but of the two it was
certainly Zion which would have to deal with her, since mere efficiency,
like mere being, is in itself admirable, and must be coloured with
definite evil before it can be lost. She made a note to tell the Seating
Committee there was a seat to spare. If there were no other absentee, if
none of the cast were knocked down by a car, blown up by a geyser, or
otherwise incapacitated, she would think herself fortunate. She had had
a private word with Pauline the day before, after the rehearsal. Rumours
of Mrs. Anstruther's condition had reached her, and she wanted, in
effect, to know what Periel was going to do about it. She had always
been a little worried about it, but one couldn't refuse parts to
suitable people because of elderly grandmothers. Periel, however, had
been entirely sensible; with the full consent, almost (Mrs. Parry
understood) under the direction of the grandmother. She would, under
God, be there. Mrs. Parry had not too much belief in God's punctuality,
but she was more or less satisfied, and left it at that. If misadventure
must come, the person best spared to it would be Peter Stanhope himself.
Mrs. Parry would willingly have immolated him on any altar, had she
had one, to ensure the presence of the rest, and the success of the
afternoon; it was why he admired her. She desired a public success,
but more ardently she desired success--the achievement. She would have
preferred to give a perfect performance to empty seats rather than, to
full, it should fail from perfection.

She was given her desire. Even the picture was supplied. Stanhope,
approached by photographers, saw to that. He caused her to be collected
from her affairs at a distance; he posed by her side; he directed a
light conversation at her; and there they both were: "Mr. Stanhope
chatting with the producer (Mrs. Catherine Parry)." She took advantage
of the moment to remind him that he had promised to say something at
the end of the play, "an informal epilogue". He assured her that he was
ready--"quite informal. The formal, perhaps, would need another speaker.
An archangel, or something."

"It's angelic of _you_, Mr. Stanhope," she said, touched to a new
courtesy by his, but he only smiled and shook his head.

The photographs--of them, of the chief personages, of the Chorus--had
been taken in a secluded part of the grounds before the performance.
Stanhope lingered, watching, until they were done; then he joined
Pauline.

"How good Mrs. Parry is!" he said sincerely. "Look how quiet and
well-arranged we all are! a first performance is apt to be much more
distracted, but it's as much as our lives are worth to be upset now."

She said thoughtfully: "She is good, but I don't think it's altogether
her: it's the stillness. Don't you feel it, Peter?"

"It doesn't weigh on us," he answered, smiling, "but--yes."

She said: "I wondered. My grandmother died this morning--five minutes
after I got back. I wondered if I was--imagining--the stillness from
that."

"No," he said thoughtfully, "but that may be in it. It's as if there
were silence in heaven--a fortunate silence. I almost wish it were the
_Tempest_ and not me. What a hope!

                            _I'll deliver all;_
  _And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales,_
  _And sail so expeditious, that shall catch_
  _Your royal fleet far off._"

His voice became incantation; his hand stretched upward in the air, as
if he invoked the motion of the influences, and the hand was magical
to her sight. The words sprang over her; auspicious gales, sail so
expeditious, and she away to the royal fleet far off, delivered, all
delivered, all on its way. She answered: "No; I'm glad it's you. You can
have your _Tempest_, but I'd rather this."

He said, with a mild protest: "Yet he wrote your part for you too; can
you guess where?"

"I've been educated," she answered, brilliant in her pause before they
parted. "Twice educated, Peter. Shall I try?

  _Merrily, merrily, shall I live now_
  _Under the blossom that hangs on the bough._

Bless me to it."

"Under the Mercy," he said, and watched her out of sight before he went
to find a way to his own seat.

The theatre was almost full; late-comers were hurrying in. The gate was
on the point of being closed--two minutes, as the notices had stated,
before the beginning of the play--when the last came. It was Mrs.
Sammile. She hurried through, and as she came she saw Stanhope. As he
bowed, she said breathlessly: "So nice, isn't it? Have you got
everything you want?"

"Or that we don't----" Stanhope began, but she chattered on: "But it's a
good thing not to have, isn't it? Perfection would be so dull, wouldn't
it? It's better to think of it than to have it, isn't it? I mean, who
was it said it's better to be always walking than to get there?"

"No, thank you very much," he said, laughing outright. "I'd rather have
perfection than think of it, though I don't see why we shouldn't do
both. But we mustn't stop; you've only a minute and a half. Where's your
ticket? This way." He took her round to her seat--at the end of a row,
towards the front--and as he showed it to her he said, gravely: "You
won't mind getting there for once, will you? Rather than travelling
hopefully about this place the whole afternoon."

She threw a look at him, as he ran from her to his own seat, which
perplexed him, it seemed so full of bitterness and despair. It was
almost as if she actually didn't want to sit down. He thought, as he
sank into his chair, "But if one hated to arrive? if one only lived by
not arriving? if one preferred avoiding to knowing? if unheard melodies
were only sweet because they weren't there at all? false, false ..." and
dismissed his thought, for the Prologue stood out before the trees, and
the moment of silence before the trumpet sounded was already upon them.

It sounded, annunciatory of a new thing. It called its world together,
and prepared union. It directed all attention forward, as, his blasts
done, the Prologue, actors ready behind and audience expectant before,
advanced slowly across the grass. But to one mind at least it did even
more. At the dress rehearsal it had announced speech to Pauline, as
to the rest; now it proclaimed the stillness. It sprang up out of the
stillness. She also was aware of a new thing--of speech in relation to
the silence in which it lived.

The pause in which the Prologue silently advanced exhibited itself to
her as the fundamental thing. The words she had so long admired did not
lose their force or beauty, but they were the mere feel of the texture.
The harmony of motion and speech, now about to begin, held and was
composed by the pauses: foot to foot, line to line, here a little and
there a little. She knew she had always spoken poetry against the
silence of this world; now she knew it had to be spoken against--that
perhaps, but also something greater, some silence of its own. She
recognized the awful space of separating stillness which all mighty
art creates about itself, or, uncreating, makes clear to mortal
apprehension. Such art, out of "the mind's abyss", makes tolerable, at
the first word or note or instructed glance, the preluding presence of
the abyss. It creates in an instant its own past. Then its significance
mingles with other significances; the stillness gives up kindred
meanings, each in its own orb, till by the subtlest graduations they
press into altogether other significances, and these again into others,
and so into one contemporaneous nature, as in that gathering unity of
time from which Lilith feverishly fled. But that nature is to us a
darkness, a stillness, only felt by the reverberations of the single
speech. About the song of the Woodcutter's Son was the stillness of the
forest. That living stillness had gathered the girl into her communion
with the dead; it had passed into her own spirit when the vision of
herself had closed with herself; it had surrounded her when she looked
on the dead face of Margaret; and now again it rose at the sound of the
trumpet--that which is before the trumpet and shall be after, which is
between all sentences and all words, which is between and in all speech
and all breath, which is itself the essential nature of all, for all
come from it and return to it.

She moved; she issued into the measured time of the play; she came out
of heaven and returned to heaven, speaking the nature of heaven. In
her very duty the doctrine of exchange held true, hierarchical and
republican. She owed the words to Stanhope; he owed the utterance to her
and the rest. He was over her in the sacred order, and yet in the sacred
equality they ran level. So salvation lay everywhere in interchange:
since, by an act only possible in the whole, Stanhope had substituted
himself for her, and the moan of a God had carried the moan of the dead.
She acted, and her acting was reality, for the stillness had taken it
over. The sun was blazing, as if it would pierce all bodies there, as if
another sun radiated from another sky exploring energies of brilliance.
But the air was fresh.

She was astonished in the interval to hear Myrtle Fox complaining of
the heat. "It's quite intolerable," Miss Fox said, "and these _filthy_
trees. Why doesn't Mr. Stanhope have them cut down? I do think one's
spirit needs _air_, don't you? I should die in a jungle, and this feels
like a jungle."

"I should have thought," Pauline said, but not with malice, "that you'd
have found jungles cosy."

"There's such a thing as being too cosy," Adela put in. "Pauline, I want
to speak to you a minute."

Pauline allowed herself to be withdrawn. Adela went on: "You're very
friendly with Mr. Stanhope, aren't you?"

"Yes," Pauline said, a little to her own surprise. She had rather meant
to say: "O not very" or "Aren't you?", or the longer and more idiotic
"Well I don't know that you'd call it friendly". But it struck her that
both they and every other living creature, from the Four-by-the-Throne
to the unseen insects in the air, would call it friendly. She therefore
said, "Yes," and waited.

"O!" said Adela, also a little taken aback. She recovered and went on:
"I've been thinking about this play. We've done so much with it--I and
Mrs. Parry and the rest...." She paused.

"Myrtle," Pauline said, "remarked yesterday that she felt deeply that it
was so much _ours_."

"O," said Adela again. The heat was heavy on her too and she was pinker
than strictly the Princess should have been. The conversation hung as
heavy as the heat. A determination that had hovered in her mind had got
itself formulated when she saw the deference exhibited towards him by
the outer world that afternoon, and now with a tardy selfishness she
pursued it. She said: "I wonder if you'd ask him something."

"Certainly--if I can decently," Pauline answered, wondering, as she
heard herself use the word, where exactly the limits of decency, if any,
in the new world lay. Peter, she thought, would probably find room for
several million universes within those limits.

"It's like this," Adela said. "I've always thought this a very
remarkable play." Pauline's heavenly nature said to her other, without
irritation but with some relevance, "The hell you have!" "And," Adela
went on, "as we've all been in it here, I thought it'd be jolly if we
could keep it ours--I mean, if he'd let us." She realized that she
hated asking favours of Pauline, whom she had patronized; she disliked
subordinating herself. The heat was prickly in her skin, but she
persevered. "It's not for myself so much," she said, "as for the general
principle...."

"O, Adela, be quick!" Pauline broke in. "What do you _want_?"

Adela was not altogether unpractised in the gymnastics of Gomorrah.
Her spirit had come near to the suburbs, and a time might follow when
the full freedom of the further City of the Plain would be silently
presented to her by the Prince of the City and Lilith his daughter and
wife. She believed--with an effort, but she believed--she was speaking
the truth when she said: "I don't want anything, but I think it would
be only right of Mr. Stanhope to let us have a hand in his London
production."

"Us?" Pauline asked.

"Me then," Adela answered. "He owes us something, doesn't he? and," she
hurried on, "if I could get hold of a theatre--a little one--O, I think
I could raise the money...."

"I should think you could," Pauline said, "for a play by Mr. Stanhope."

"Anyhow, I thought you might sound him--or at least back me up," Adela
went on. "You do see there's nothing personal about it?" She stopped,
and Pauline allowed the living stillness to rise again.

Nothing personal in this desire to clothe immortality with a career?
Nothing unnatural perhaps; nothing improper perhaps; but nothing
personal? Nothing less general than the dark pause and the trees and the
measured movements of verse? nothing less free than interchange of love?
She said: "Adela, tell me it's for yourself, only yourself, and I'll do
it if I can."

Adela, extremely offended, and losing her balance, said: "It isn't. We
shall be as good for him as he will be for us."

"A kind of mutual-profit system?" Pauline suggested. "You'd better get
back; they'll be ready. I'll do whatever you want--to-morrow."

"But----" Adela began; however, Pauline had gone; where Adela did not
quite see. It was the heat of the afternoon that so disjoined movement,
she thought. She could not quite follow the passage of people now--at
least, off the stage. They appeared and disappeared by her, as if the
air opened, and someone were seen in the midst of it, and then the air
closed up, and opened again, and there was someone else. She was getting
fanciful. Fortunately there was only one more act, and on the stage it
was all right; there people were where she expected them. Or, if not,
you could find fault; that refuge remained. She hurried to the place,
and found herself glad to be there. Lingering near was the Grand Duke.
He contemplated her as she came up.

"You look a little done," he said, gravely and affectionately.

"It's the heat," said Adela automatically.

"It's not so frightfully hot," Hugh answered. "Quite a good afternoon. A
little thunder about somewhere, perhaps."

The thunder, if it was thunder, was echoing distantly in Adela's ears;
she looked at Hugh's equanimity with dislike. He had something of Mrs.
Parry in him, and she resented it. She said: "I wish you were more
sensitive, Hugh."

"So long as I'm sensitive to _you_", Hugh said, "it ought to be enough.
You're tired, darling."

"Hugh, you'd tell me I was tired on the Day of Judgment," Adela
exclaimed. "I keep on saying it's the heat."

"Very well," Hugh assented; "it's the heat making you tired."

"I'm not tired at all," Adela said in a burst of exasperated rage,
"I'm hot and I'm sick of this play, and I've got a headache. It's very
annoying to be so continually misunderstood. After all, the play does
depend upon me a good deal, and all I have to do, and when I ask for a
little sympathy...."

Hugh took her arm. "Shut up," he said.

She stared back. "Hugh----" she began, but he interrupted her.

"Shut up," he said again. "You're getting above yourself, my girl; you
and your sympathy. I'll talk to you when this is over. You're the best
actor in the place, and your figure's absolutely thrilling in that
dress, and there's a lot more to tell you like that, and I'll tell you
presently. But it's time to begin now, and go and do as I tell you."

Adela found herself pushed away. There had been between them an amount
of half-pretended mastery and compulsion, but she was conscious of a
new sound in Hugh's voice. It struck so near her that she forgot about
Pauline and the heat and Stanhope, for she knew that she would have to
make up her mind about it, whether to reject or allow that authoritative
assumption. Serious commands were a new thing in their experience. Her
immediate instinct was to evade: the phrase which sprang to her mind
was: "I shall have to manage him--I can manage him." If she were going
to marry Hugh--and she supposed she was--she would either have to
acquiesce or pretend to acquiesce. She saw quite clearly what she
would do; she would assent, but she would see to it that chance never
assented. She knew that she would not revolt; she would never admit that
there was any power against which Adela Hunt could possibly be in a
state of revolt. She had never admitted it of Mrs. Parry. It was always
the other people who were in revolt against her. Athanasian in spirit,
she knew she was right and the world wrong. Unathanasian in method, she
intended to manage the world ... Stanhope, Mrs. Parry, Hugh. She would
neither revolt nor obey nor compromise; she would deceive. Her admission
to the citizenship of Gomorrah depended on the moment at which, of those
four only possible alternatives for the human soul, she refused to know
which she had chosen. "Tell me it's for yourself, only yourself...."
No, no, it's not for myself; it's for the good of others, her good, his
good, everybody's good: is it my fault if they don't see it? manage
them, manage them, manage her, manage him, and them. O, the Princess
managing the Woodcutter's Son, and the Chorus, the chorus of leaves,
this way, that way; minds twiddling them the right way; treachery better
than truth, for treachery was the only truth, there was no truth to be
treacherous to--and the last act beginning, and she in it, and the heat
crackling in the ground, in her head, in the air. On then, on to the
stage, and Pauline was to ask Stanhope to-morrow.

Pauline watched her as she went, but she saw the Princess and not Adela.
Now the process of the theatre was wholly reversed, for stillness cast
up the verse and the verse flung out the actors, and though she knew
sequence still, and took part in it, it was not sequence that mattered,
more than as a definition of the edge of the circle, and that relation
which was the exhibition of the eternal. Relation in the story, in the
plot, was only an accident of need: there had been a time when it
mattered, but now it mattered no longer, or for a while no longer.
Presently, perhaps, it would define itself again as a need of daily
life; she would be older than her master, or younger, or contemporaneous;
now they were both no more than mutual perceptions in a flash of love.
She had had relation with her ancestor and with that other man more
lately dead and with her grandmother--all the presently disincarnate
presences which lived burningly in the stillness, through which the fire
burned, and the stillness was the fire. She danced out of it, a flame
flung up, a leaf catching to a flame. They were rushing towards the end
of the play, an end, an end rushing towards the earth and the earth
rushing to meet it. The words were no longer separated from the living
stillness, they were themselves the life of the stillness, and though
they sounded in it they no more broke it than the infinite particles of
creation break the eternal contemplation of God in God. The stillness
turned upon itself; the justice of the stillness drew all the flames
and leaves, the dead and living, the actors and spectators, into its
power--percipient and impercipient, that was the only choice, and that
was for their joy alone. She sank deeper into it. The dance of herself
and all the others ceased, they drew aside, gathered up--O on how many
rehearsals, and now gathered! "Behold, I come quickly! Amen, even
so...." They were in the groups of the last royal declamations, and
swept aside, and the mighty stage was clear. Suddenly again, from
somewhere in that great abyss of clarity, a trumpet sounded, and then a
great uproar, and then a single voice. It was the beginning of the end;
the judgment of mortality was there. She was standing aside, and she
heard the voice and knew it; from the edge of eternity the poets were
speaking to the world, and two modes of experience were mingled in that
sole utterance. She knew the voice, and heard it; all else was still.
Peter Stanhope, as he had promised, was saying a few words at the close
of the play.

There was but one small contretemps. As, after moving on to the stage
and turning to face the audience, Stanhope began to speak, Mrs. Sammile
slid down in, and finally completely off, her chair, and lay in a heap.
She had been very bright all the afternoon; in fact, she had been
something of a nuisance to her immediate neighbours by the whispered
comments of admiration she had offered upon the display of sound and
colour before her. As the crash of applause broke out she had been
observed to make an effort to join in it. But her hands had seemed to
tremble and fail. Stanhope was to speak before the last calls, and the
applause crashed louder when he appeared. It was in the midst of that
enthusiasm that Mrs. Sammile fainted.




Chapter XI

THE OPENING OF GRAVES


Whatever mystery had, to Pauline's exalted senses, taken its place in
the world on that afternoon, it seemed to make no difference to the
world. Things proceeded. Her uncle had arrived from London during the
performance, and had had to have his niece's absence explained to him,
first by the maid and later by the niece. After the explanation Pauline
remembered without surprise in her shame that she used to dislike her
uncle.

Margaret Anstruther was buried on the next day but one, to the sound of
that apostolic trumpet which calls on all its hearers to rise from the
dead, and proclaims the creation on earth of celestial bodies, "sown in
corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonour, raised in glory;
sown in weakness, raised in power". "Be steadfast, unmovable ... your
labour is not in vain in the Lord." Pauline heard with a new attention;
these were no longer promises, but facts. She dared not use the awful
phrases for herself; only, shyly, she hoped that perhaps, used by some
other heavenly knowledge, they might not be altogether inapplicable to
herself. The epigram of experience which is in all dogma hinted itself
within her. But more than these passages another stranger imagination
struck her heart: "Why are they then baptized for the dead?" There,
rooted in the heart of the Church at its freshest, was the same strong
thrust of interchange. Bear for others; be baptized for others; and,
rising as her new vision of the world had done once and again, an even
more fiery mystery of exchange rolled through her horizons, turning and
glancing on her like the eyed and winged wheels of the prophet. The
central mystery of Christendom, the terrible fundamental substitution on
which so much learning had been spent and about which so much blood had
been shed, shewed not as a miraculous exception, but as the root of a
universal rule ... "behold, I shew you a mystery", as supernatural as
that Sacrifice, as natural as carrying a bag. She flexed her fingers by
her side as if she thought of picking one up.

The funeral over, her uncle hastened action. The moment for which they
had all been waiting had arrived; his mother was dead. So now they could
clear things up. The house could be sold, and most of the furniture.
Pauline could have a room in a London hostel, which he would find her,
and a job in a London office, which he had already found her. They
discussed her capacities; he hinted that it was a pity she hadn't made
more of the last few years. She might have learned German while sitting
with Margaret, and Spanish instead of taking part in plays. She would
have to be brisker and livelier. Pauline, suppressing a tendency to
point out that for years he had wished her to be not brisk or lively,
but obedient and loving, said she would remember. She added that she
would have a little money, enough to buy her bread. Her uncle said that
a woman couldn't live on bread, and anyhow a job was a good thing; he
didn't wish his niece to waste her time and energy. Pauline, thinking
that Stanhope had said the same thing differently, agreed. Her uncle,
having put everything he could into somebody's hands, left her to live
for a few days in the house with the maid, and rushed back to London
with his wife, whose conversation had been confined to assuring Pauline
that she would get over it presently.

Pauline might have believed this if she had been clear what it was that
she was expected to get over. Of one thing it was true; she no longer
expected to see the haunting figure of her childhood's acquaintance and
youthful fear. She remembered it now as one remembers a dream, a vivid
dream of separation and search. She had been, it seemed, looking for a
long while for someone, or perhaps some place, that was necessary to
her. She had been looking for someone who was astray, and at the same
time she had been sought. In the dream she had played hide-and-seek with
herself in a maze made up of the roads of Battle Hill, and the roads
were filled with many figures who hated--neither her nor any other
definite person, but hated. They could not find anything they could
spend their hate on, for they slipped and slithered and slid from and
through each other, since it was their hate which separated them. It was
no half-self-mocking hate, nor even an immoral but half-justified hate,
certainly not the terrible, enjoyable, and angry hate of ordinary men
and women. It was the hate of those men and women who had lost humanity
in their extreme love of themselves amongst humanity. They had been
found in their streets by the icy air of those mountain peaks of which
she had once heard her grandmother speak, and their spirits had frozen
in them. Among them she also had gone about, and the only thing that had
distinguished her from them was her fear lest they should notice her.
And while she hurried she had changed, in her bygone dream, and she was
searching for some poor shadow of herself that fled into the houses to
escape her. The dream had been long, for the houses had opened up, as
that shadow entered, into long corridors and high empty rooms, and there
was one dreadful room which was all mirrors, or what was worse than
mirrors, for the reflections in those mirrors were living, though they
hid for a while and had no being till the shadow at last came speeding
into the room, but then they were seen, and came floating out of their
flickering cells, and danced the shadow into some unintelligible
dissolution among them. It was from that end that she sought to save the
miserable fugitive. When in her memory she reached that point, when the
shadow was fleeing deeper into Gomorrah, and she fled after it on feet
that were so much swifter than its own and yet in those infinite halls
and corridors could never overtake it while it fled--when the moment of
approach down the last long corridor to the last utter manifestation of
illusion drew near, she heard far off a trumpet, and she could remember
nothing more but that she woke. She remembered that she woke swiftly, as
if a voice called her, but however hard she tried she could not well
recollect whose voice it was; perhaps that also was part of the dream,
or perhaps it was the nurse's voice that had called her on the morning
her grandmother had died. Perhaps; perhaps not. Under all the ceremonies
of the days, under the companionship of her people, under her solitude,
under her gradual preparations for departure and her practice of studies
which were to make her more efficient in whatever job her uncle and the
operation of the Immortals should find her, under sun and moon alike,
she waited. She waited, and remembered only as a dream the division
between herself and the glorious image by which the other was to be
utterly ensouled.

It was observable, however, on the Hill, how many of the inhabitants
were unwell. Mrs. Sammile had fainted, and had not been seen about
since. Someone had offered to take her home in a car, but she had
declined, declaring that she was all right, and had disappeared. Myrtle
Fox, though she had got through the performance, had gone home crying,
and had been in bed ever since. She could not sleep; a doctor had been
called in, but he did not help her. She took this and that, and nothing
did good. She would doze a little, and wake crying and sobbing. "It's
all this excitement," her mother said severely, and opinion began to
blame the play for Myrtle's illness. Lawrence Wentworth remained shut
in his house; even his servants hardly saw him, and the curtains of his
study were generally drawn. "It isn't human," his parlour-maid said to
next door's parlour-maid. Some of the actors and some of the audience
were also affected by what was generally called the local influenza
epidemic. The excitement of the play or the brightness of the summer
or the cold winds that even under such a sun swept the Hill, or some
infection more subtle than these, struck the inhabitants down.

Neither Adela nor Hugh were among them. Hugh, like Mrs. Parry, went on
efficiently dealing with the moment. Adela suffered, from the heat,
from the thunder, from suppressed anxiety, but she did not go to
bed. Pauline, even had she been free from her family, could not have
carried out her promise, for immediately after the performance Stanhope
disappeared for a few days; it was understood he had gone away for a
change. Pauline could do no more than assure Adela that, as soon as he
returned, she would look for an opportunity. "But I can't," she said,
"do more than that. I can't butt in on him with a club, Adela. If it's
for all of us, why not do it yourself? If it was for you personally,
of course you might feel awkward, but as it isn't...." Adela said it
certainly wasn't, and went off peevishly.

As a result the management of Hugh had to be postponed. He had not, in
fact, made that formal proposal which was necessary if Adela was to
feel, as she wished, that she had a right and a duty to manage him. In
order not to thwart him, Adela controlled herself more than was her
habit when they were together. Obedience and revolt being both out
of the question, she compromised temporarily that she might manage
permanently. It was in such a compromise that they had been walking
one evening on the Hill two or three days after Margaret Anstruther's
burial. By accident, on their return, they took a road which led past
the gates of the cemetery, and as they came by Hugh said idly: "I
suppose Pauline'll be going now her grandmother's dead."

Adela had not thought of this. She said immediately: "O, I shouldn't
wonder if she stopped--moved to a smaller house or something. She
_can't_ go yet."

Hugh said: "You didn't go to the funeral, darling?"

"Of course not," Adela answered. "I hate being morbid." As if to prove
it she lingered to look through the gates. "There are so _many_ of
them," she added.

"Yes," Hugh said, with what faintly struck Adela as unnecessary
obtuseness, "you can't get round death with any kind of adjective, can
you?"

"I don't want to get round anything with adjectives," Adela almost
snarled. "Thank God we've got away from any pretence. It's so unimportant
when one doesn't pretend. When one's dead, one's dead, and that's all
there is to it."

Hugh said, "Yes, but what's all there is to it? I'm that old-fashioned
thing, an agnostic; I don't know. I like to be clear on what I know and
what I don't know, and I don't like day-dreams, either nice or nasty, or
neither."

"O, nor do I," said Adela. "But you must sometimes think how nice it
would be if something particular happened. I call that common sense."

"Within limits," Hugh said, putting his arm over her shoulders. "I
sometimes let myself think, for a certain time, or a definite
distance--say, from here to your house--how pleasant something would
be--having fifty thousand pounds a year, say. But when I come to your
house, or wherever it is, I stop."

"Do you?" said Adela, more impressed than she admitted to herself.

"Always," said Hugh. "And then--O, concentrate on making another fifty.
Day-dreaming without limits is silly."

Adela shook her head. "I suppose I imagine rather intensely," she said.
"I seem to see things _obliquely_, if you know what I mean. They're
alongside the actual thing, a sort of tangent. I think really that's
what all art is--tangential."

The word had hardly left her lips when a voice, tangential to her ear,
said: "Do let me persuade you, Miss Hunt."

Adela, with a jump, looked round, and saw Lily Sammile. There was, at
that part of the cemetery wall, a lean-to erection of boards, a kind of
narrow shelter, almost a man's height, and having a rough swinging door
at the nearer end. It had been there before anyone could remember, and
it stayed there because no one could remember to have it taken away. It
was very old and very weather-stained. It was almost a tool-shed, but
then the necessary tools were, more conveniently, kept elsewhere.
Everyone supposed that someone else used it. At the door of this shed,
close to the cemetery railing, stood the woman who had spoken. She was
leaning forward, towards Adela, and holding on to a bar of the gate. Now
she put a hand on Adela's bare arm. It was gritty to the skin, which
felt as if a handful of rough dust was pressed down, and pricked and
rubbed it. The voice was rough too; it mumbled through a mouthful of
dust. Adela pulled her arm away; she could not answer; she thrust
closer to Hugh.

The woman said, after a pause during which they stared at her, and saw
her dishevelled, hatless, hair of grey ashes, and cheeks almost as grey:
"Come and get away. Dust--that's what you want; dust."

Hugh said easily: "Not a bit, Mrs. Sammile. We both want a great deal
more."

The woman answered: "You may, but she doesn't. She's a----"

They could not catch the word, her voice so muffled it. Adela took two
steps back, and said in a little squeak: "Hugh!"

Hugh slipped his arm round her. He said firmly, though less easily than
before: "Well, we must be getting on. Come along, darling."

Lily Sammile began to cry. The tears ran down her face and left streaks
in the greyness, as if they crept through and over grime. She said
miserably: "You'll wish you had; O, you'll wish you had." She was
standing with her back to the gate, leaning against it, and as she
ceased to speak she became rigid suddenly, as if she listened. Her eyes
widened; her nose came out over an indrawn lip; her cheeks hollowed in
her effort. There was no need for the effort. They could hear the sound
that held her; a faint rustle, a dry patter. It came from beyond her,
and she twisted her head round--only her head--and looked. So,
distracted by the movement, did the other two. They saw movement in the
graves.

Most were quiet enough; their inhabitants had passed beyond any recall
or return, and what influence they had on the Hill was by infection
rather than by motion. But the estate was still new, and the neat ranks
of sepulchres did not reach far into the enclosure. They lay along
the middle path mostly; the farthest away was the mound that covered
Margaret Anstruther. That too was quiet: its spirit could not conceive
return. It was between the earlier graves and hers that the disclosure
began, as if the enclosed space was turning itself over. The earth
heaved; they felt, where they stood, no quiver. It was local, but they
saw--there, and again there--the mounds swell and sway and fall in a
cascade of mould, flung over the green grass. Three or four in all, dark
slits in the ground, and beyond each a wide layer of dust. It did not
stop there. The earth was heaving out of the dark openings; it came
in bursts and rushes--in a spasmodic momentum, soon exhausted, always
renewed. It hung sometimes in the air, little clouds that threatened
to fall back, and never did, for they drifted slowly to one side, and
sank again on what had earlier dropped. Gravitation was reversed;
the slowness and uncertainty of the movement exposed the earth's own
initiation of it. The law of material things turned; somewhere in that
walled receptacle of the dead activity was twisted upon itself. The
backward movement of things capable of backward movement had begun. The
earth continued to rise in fountains, flung up from below; and always at
their height, their little height above the ground, the tops of those
fountains swayed, and hurled themselves sideways, and dropped, and the
rest fell back into the hidden depth of the openings, until it flung
itself up once more. The gentle low patter of rough earth on gravel
paths floated over the gates to the ears of the three who were still
standing there.

There was a more deathly silence without the gates than within. The old
woman, with twisted head, her body almost a pattern of faintly covered
bones against the iron bars, was rigid; so were Adela and Hugh. They
stood staring; incredulous, they gazed at the exhibited fact. So
incredible was it that they did not think of the dead; ghosts and
resurrections would have been easier to their minds, if more horrible,
than this obvious insanity, insanity obvious in its definite existence.
They were held; then, to instinctive terror, the frantic cause presented
itself. Adela screamed, and as the dead man's moan had been answered in
the mountain her scream was caught and prolonged in the other woman's
wailing shriek. The shriek was not human; it was the wind rushing up a
great hollow funnel in a mountain, and issuing in a wild shrill yell. It
tore itself out of the muffled mouth, and swept over the Hill, a rising
portent of coming storm. Myrtle Fox heard it in her long night of
wakefulness, and her body sickened. Pauline heard it, and felt more
intensely the peace that held her. Stanhope heard it, and prayed. Before
the sound had died, Lily Sammile had jerked from the gate, and thrown
herself at the dark shed, and disappeared within, and the swinging door
fell to behind her.

As she sprang, Adela sprang also. She screamed again and ran. She ran
wildly up the road, so fast that Hugh, who followed, was outdistanced.
He called after her. He shouted: "Adela, it's nothing. The earth was
loose and the wind was blowing. Stop." She did not stop. He kept up the
pursuit down a street or two, but his own action offended him. Much
though the vision had for the moment affected him, he was, as soon as he
began to move, more immediately affected and angered by his situation.
There might be explanations enough of what he thought he had seen--he
spared a curse for Lily Sammile--but more certain than what he thought
he had seen was what he knew Adela was doing. She was, faster than he,
running and screaming over Battle Hill. He was angry; suppose some one
met her! He raised in his own mind no reasonable pretext for abandoning
her, nor did he disguise his intention from himself, but after a corner
or two he simply stopped running. "Perfectly ridiculous!" he said
angrily. "The earth was loose, and the wind was blowing." He was free
as Pauline herself from Lilith, but without joy. There was, between the
group to which his soul belonged and hers, no difference, except only
that of love and joy, things which now were never to be separated in her
any more.

Adela ran. She had soon no breath for screaming. She ran. She did not
know where she was going. She ran. She heard a voice calling behind her:
"The earth's loose and the wind's blowing", and she ran more wildly. Her
flesh felt the touch of a gritty hand; a voice kept calling after her
and round her: "The earth's loose; the wind's blowing." She ran wildly
and absurdly, her full mouth open, her plump arms spasmodically working,
tears of terror in her eyes. She desired above all things immediate
safety--in some place and with some one she knew. Hugh had disappeared.
She ran over the Hill, and through a twisted blur of tears and fear
recognized by a mere instinct Lawrence Wentworth's house. She rushed
through the gate; here lived some one who could restore her to her own
valuation of herself. Hugh's shouted orders had been based on no assent
of hers to authority; however much she had played at sensual and
sentimental imitations of obedience, she hated the thing itself in any
and every mode. She wanted something to condone and console her fear.
There was a light in the study; she made for it; reached the window, and
hammered on the glass, hammered again and again, till Wentworth at last
heard and reluctantly drew himself from the stupor of his preoccupation,
came slowly across the room and drew back the curtain.

They confronted each other through the glass. Wentworth took a minute or
two to recognize whose was the working and mottled face that confronted
him, and when he recognized it, he made a motion to pull the curtain
again and to go away. But as she saw the movement she struck so violently
at the glass that even in his obsession he was terrified of others
hearing, and slowly and almost painfully he pushed the window up and
stood staring at her. She put her hands on the sill and leant inwards.

She said: "Lawrence, Lawrence, something's about!"

He still stood there, looking at her now with a heavy distaste, but he
said nothing, and when she tried to catch his hand he moved it away. She
looked up at him, and a deeper fear struck at her--that here was no
refuge for her. Gomorrah closed itself against her; she stood in the
outer wind of the plain. It was cold and frightful; she beat, literally,
on the wall. She sobbed, "Lawrence, help me."

He said, "I don't know you," and she fell back, astounded. She cried
out: "Lawrence, it's me, it's me, Adela. You know _me_; of course you
do. Here I am--I've come to you. There's something dreadful happening
and I've come to you."

He said dully: "I don't want to know you. Go away; you're disturbing
me." And he moved to shut the window down.

At this she leant right forward and stared up at his eyes, for her fear
desired very strongly to find that he was only defending himself against
her. But his eyes did not change; they gazed dully back, so dully and
so long that she was driven to turn her own away. And as she did so,
sending a wild glance around the room, so urgently had she sought to
find out his real desire and so strong was his rejection of her, and so
fast were all things drawing to their end, that she saw, away beyond the
light of the reading-lamp, a vague figure. It was in the shadows, but,
as if to meet her, it thrust its head forward, and so again fulfilled
its master's wish. For to Adela there appeared, stretched forward in
the light, her own face, infinitely perfected in sensual grace and
infinitely emptied of all meaning, even of evil meaning. Blank and dead
in a spiritual death it stared vacantly at her, but undoubtedly it was
she. She stood, staring back, sick and giddy at the horror, and she
heard Wentworth say: "Go away; I don't want to help you; I don't know
you. Go away."

He closed the window; he began to draw the curtains; the creature
disappeared from her sight. And by the wall of Gomorrah she fainted and
fell.

He saw her fall, and in his bemused mind he felt her as a danger to
his peace. He stood looking down at her, until, slowly turning a stiff
head, he saw the reflection of his doubt in the eyes of his mistress,
the gleam of anxiety which reflected his own because it was concerned
with himself. Reluctantly therefore he went out and half-lifted,
half-dragged the girl to the gate, and got her through it, and then
got her a little way down the road, and so left her lying. He mistily
wondered, with a flat realism, if she would awake while he laboured, but
the stupor of her horror was too deep. She lay there prone and still,
and he returned.

But, as if in that effort he had slid farther down the rope of his
dream, when he returned he was changed. He sat down and his creature
crept up to him and took and nuzzled his hand. As she did so he became
aware for the first time that he did not altogether want her. She was
not less preferable than she had been for long to the real Adela, but
she was less preferable now than his unimaged dream. He wanted to want
her; he did not want her to go; but he could not--not as he had done.
Even she was a betrayal, she was a thing outside. It was very good, as
it always was, observant of his slightest wish. It sat by him, blinking
at the fire. This year, in his room curtained from the sun, it was
cold; he had had a fire kept up for the last few days, in spite of his
servants' astonishment. He could not, as he sat, think what he wanted,
unless indeed to want her, for he feared somehow to let her go: when
he did he would be at the bottom of his rope. He had been given rope
enough, but there was a bottom, and a dark hole, and him in the hole. He
saw this dimly and was unwilling to slide lower, yet not to slide was to
stop out where other things and other images were, and he was unwilling
to be there also. He looked round several times, thinking that he would
see something else. He thought of a girl's body lying in the road, but
he could not get off his rope for that, not even if he wished, and most
certainly he did not wish. Something else: something connected with
his work, with the Grand Duke's Guard. What Grand Duke? The unbegotten
Adela by his side said, in a low voice which stammered now as it had
not before, as if it were as much losing control as was his own mind:
"W-what Grand D-Duke, darling? w-what w-work?" The Grand Duke's Guard--a
white square--a printed card--yes, a notice: a meaning and a message,
a meeting. He remembered now. It was the annual dinner of a small
historical society to which he and a few others belonged. He remembered
that he had been looking forward to it; he remembered that he would
enjoy going, though he could not remember for a few minutes who else
came to it. He did not trouble to say anything, however; he was too
tired--some drag, some pulling and thrusting had exhausted him more
than he knew; he had to roll a body in the uniform of the Grand Duke's
Guard, or to protect himself from hitting against its dark mass as he
swung on his rope; but that was over now, and he could forget, and
presently the two of them stirred and went--mumblingly and
habitually--to bed.

It could not be supposed, when Adela was found soon after by a young
constable on his beat, that Mr. Wentworth had had anything to do with
her. The constable found her name from letters in her handbag, and
presently he and others roused her people and she was got to her own
temporary place, her own room. She remained unconscious till the
morning; then she woke. Her temperature and her pulse were at first
normal, and at first she could not recall the night. But presently it
returned to her. She felt herself running again from the opening graves
to the sight of the meaningless face; Hugh was running after her. Hugh
was running out of the graves and driving her on to meet the face. She
too, like Myrtle Fox, screamed and vomited.

Her mother rang up Hugh. There was an acrimonious conversation. Mrs.
Hunt said that she had trusted Adela to Hugh's care. Hugh said that
Adela had insisted on being alone, which, considering the rate at which
she had run away, he felt was approximately true. Mrs. Hunt said that
Adela was actually at death's door. Hugh said she would probably be wise
enough not to ring the bell. Mrs. Hunt said that she herself insisted
on seeing him; Adela was in no state to see anybody. Hugh said he would
give himself the pleasure of leaving some flowers sometime. He knew
he was behaving brutally, and that he was in fact more angry and less
detached than he made his voice sound. He had left her to run, but had
presently gone round and had at last reached her home in time to observe
the confusion that attended her being brought home. He would have
spoken, but he hated Mrs. Hunt, and he hated scenes, especially scenes
at two in the morning, when his always equable passion for Adela was
at ebb. So he had gone home, and indulged irritation. Nevertheless he
intended to be efficient to the situation; the flowers should be taken
and Adela seen that evening. He had no intention of leaving any duty
unfulfilled--any duty of exterior act. He did not quite admit that there
was any other kind, except in so far as outer efficiency dictated the
interior.

Pursued by Hugh in her nightmares, Adela had no sense of ease or peace
in his image. She ran in that recurrent flight from him through an arch
that was Wentworth towards the waiting face, and as she was carried
towards it, it vanished, and she was beginning again. As she ran she
repeated lines and bits of lines of her part in the play; the part she
was continually trying and continually failing to learn, the part that
repeated to her a muddle of words about perception and love which she
could never get in the right order. Sometimes Mrs. Parry was running
beside her and sometimes Mrs. Sammile; at least, it had Mrs. Sammile's
head though the body was Peter Stanhope's, and it said as it ran: "What
you want is perception in a flash of love; what you love is a flash
in a want of perception; what you flash is the want in a love of
perception; what you want is what you want ..." and so always. Others of
her acquaintance were sometimes about her in the dream of chaos which
had but one element of identity, and that was the race she ran and
the conditions of the race. She came again under the arch that was
Wentworth, and this time there was a change, for she found Pauline
running beside her. Pauline's hand was in hers; she clutched it, and the
speed of her running dwindled, as if a steadiness entered it. She said
in a squeak: "Pauline!"

Pauline, leaning over the bed, and feeling her hand so fiercely
held--she had called as soon as she heard Adela was ill--said: "Yes, my
dear?"

Her voice gave its full value to the last word: it rang in the air of
the dream, a billow of comprehensible sound.

Adela stopped running. She said: "Will you help me?"

"Of course," Pauline said, thinking rather ruefully of asking Stanhope.
"What do you want me to do?"

Adela said breathlessly: "I want to stop. I want to know my part."

"But you did know your part," Pauline answered. "You knew it
beautifully, and you did it beau ... you did it."

Adela said: "No, no; I've got to find it, and she can give it to me."

"She?" Pauline asked.

"Lily, she ... Sammile, whatever she's called," Adela cried. "In the
shed by the cemetery."

Pauline frowned. She remembered Lily Sammile very well. She remembered
her as something more than an old woman by a gate, or if, then a very
old woman indeed by a very great gate, where many go in who choose
themselves, the gate of Gomorrah in the Plain, illusion and the end of
illusion; the opposite of holy fact, and the contradiction of sacred
love. She said, very quickly: "Let me run for you, Adela; you can keep
quiet. I can run faster than you," she added truthfully. "I've got
longer legs. Let me run instead of you. Don't worry about Mrs. ----"
she could not say the name; no name was enough for the spirit that
lay in Gomorrah, in the shed by the cemetery, till the graves were
opened--above or below, but opened.

Adela said, "No, no; no one can do anything. She can make my head
better. She can give me something. You can't do anything; you didn't
see it in the house."

Pauline said: "But let's try at least. Look, let me go and learn your
part." She was not quite sure, as she said it, whether this came under
the head of permissible interchanges. She had meant it but for the part
in the play, but this new fashion of identities was too strong for her;
the words were a definition of a substitution beyond her. Adela's past,
Adela's identity, was Adela's own. A god rather than she, unless she
were inhabited by a god, must carry Adela herself; the god to whom
baptism for the dead was made, the lord of substitution, the origin and
centre of substitution, and in the sides of the mountain of the power of
substitution the hermitages of happy souls restored out of substitution.
A fanfare of recovered identities surrounded her; the single trumpet
shrilled into diversities of music.

Adela said: "In the shed by the cemetery. I shall know my part there. Go
and ask her."

Her hand shook Pauline's in her agitation, and the movement was a
repulsion. Pauline, flung off upon her errand, was by the same energy
repelled from her errand. Her own body shook; she was tossed away from
the grand gate of Gomorrah where aged Lilith incunabulates souls. She
sprang up, driven by necessity, and Adela, opening her eyes which all
this while had been shut, met hers. They gazed for a moment, and then
Adela screamed. "Go away," she cried; "you won't, and if you do it'll be
worse. You're a devil; you want me not to know. Go away; go away."

"Adela, darling," Pauline said, oblivious of repulsion in a distressed
tenderness, "it's Pauline. Don't be unhappy; I'll do all I can."

"You won't, you won't," Adela screamed. "You'll spoil everything. You're
torturing me; you're tearing my bones out of me; you're scraping my
bones. I hate you, I hate you; go away."

Pauline heard Mrs. Hunt running up the stairs, drawn by that shriek of
denial. She exclaimed, torn herself by so much pain: "I'll go, I
promise. If you want----"

"No," Adela screamed, throwing her arm over her eyes, "you'll hurt us
all. You don't care about us; you don't love any of us. You'll help Hugh
to shut me up in the graves with it; he's got something in his room ...
it isn't me ... it isn't ..."

Her mother was by her, murmuring and soothing; her single look told
Pauline to go, and she went. She let herself out of the house, and
walked up the street, trying to settle her mind. It ought to be possible
to determine what to do. Was it good for Adela, but who was to decide
what was good for Adela? She--or Adela? Or someone else? Peter? but
she wouldn't ask Peter, only what would he say if she did? "The
Omnipotence"? Coming on the word, she considered it, and it worked
upward to her freeing. She would do what Adela wanted, for it was
Adela's need, and she had no reason against; she would do it in the
Omnipotence, in the wood where leaves sang. Whoever was found there was
subject to it, to the law of exchanged good. The Hill rose before her
in the sunshine, and on its farther side the place from which her twin,
now deeply one with her, had come. The mountains of impersonality have
yet their hidden sides, and she was climbing towards them, in the point
which was one with the universe. She knew herself going towards a thing
that must be done. The growth of earth into heaven and heaven into earth
approached in time a point it had already occupied in space. She could
see no one else in the streets; she went lonely, and repeated to herself
as she went those lines in which Peter's style individualized felicity.
Up, and still up ... where the brigands hid in a shelter and cave of
the wood, and shared but did not exchange. Oh, happy and happy to have
attributions of property for convenience of grace; thrice-happy that
convenience of grace could dispose of property: _tam antiqua, tam nova,
vita nova, nova creatura_, a new creature, no more in any sense but new,
not opposed to the old, but in union with the old; new without any trick
of under-meaning, new always, and now new. Up, and up, and presently
down again a little; she was looking out towards the City where she was
to be. She saw, away over open ground, the smoke of a train, it was
carrying to the City some of those who lived or had lived upon the Hill
and were leaving it or flying from it. Was the rest of the world shaken
with entranced joy? Perhaps that was not discoverable, for speech of
such things came only when it was permitted, and to one the world was
new and to one not, to one redeemed and to one not. Yet beyond such
differences there lay some act, and this was so whether or not, known
or not. Perhaps to Peter to-morrow--no, to-night, for she herself must
leave the Hill to-morrow, and never before had parting held such joy.
Parting was a fact; all facts are joyous; therefore parting was joyous.
With that unnecessary syllogism delicately exhibiting itself as a
knowledge of truth, she found herself at the shed by the hill.

There it was. She had seen it a hundred times. The rough door as usual
was swung to. She looked at it. This then was where Lily Sammile lived?
"I could live in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams." Was the counting of oneself king
of space when one lived in a nutshell one of the bad dreams? Unheard
melodies--the rigid figures on the Grecian vase? To enjoy nutshell as
nutshell, vase as vase! She rapped at the door; there came no other
sound. She rapped again; as if the wood thinned before her, she heard a
quick breathing from within. She did not knock again; she laid a hand on
the door and gently pressed.

It swung. She peered in. It was dark inside and very long and narrow and
deep. Its floor slid away, hundreds of yards downward. There was no end
to that floor. A little distance within the shed the woman was sitting
on the earth, where the floor began to slope. She was not alone; the
occupiers of the broken-up graves were with her. They were massed,
mostly, about the doorway; in the narrow space there was room for
infinities. They were standing there, looking at their nurse, and they
were hungry. The faces--those that were still faces--were bleak with
a dreadful starvation. The hunger of years was in them, and also a
bewildered surprise, as if they had not known they were starved till
now. The nourishment of the food of all their lives had disappeared at
once, and a great void was in their minds and a great sickness. They
knew the void and the sickness. The nourishment drawn from full lives
had carried Margaret Anstruther and her peers over the bare mountain,
and they had passed, but when the sun of the mountain struck on the
people of infinite illusion it struck on all their past lives and they
lived at last in the starvation they had sought. Religion or art, civic
sense or sensual desire, or whatever had drugged the spirit with its
own deceit, had been drawn from them; they stared famished at the dry
breasts of the ancient witch. They had been freed from the grave, and
had come, in their own faint presences, back to the Hill they knew,
but they could not come farther on to the Hill, in the final summer of
mortality, than to this mere outbuilding. Their enchantress sat there,
the last illusion still with her, the illusion of love itself; she could
not believe her breasts were dry. She desired infinitely to seem to
give suck; she would be kind and good, she who did not depend, on whom
others had depended. They stood there, but she would not see them; she
who was the wife of Adam before Eve, and for salvation from whom Eve was
devised after the mist had covered the land of Eden. She would not see,
and she would not go to the door because of that unacknowledged crowd,
but she sat there, cut off from the earth she had in her genius so long
universally inhabited, gazing, waiting, longing for some of the living
to enter, to ask her for oblivion and the shapes with which she
enchanted oblivion. No one came; oblivion had failed. Her dead had
returned to her; her living were left without her. The door swung.

Pauline saw her sitting, an old woman crouched on the ground. As the
girl gazed the old woman stirred and tried to speak; there issued
from her lips a meaningless gabble, such gabble as Dante, inspired,
attributes to the guardian of all the circles of hell. The angelic
energy which had been united with Pauline's mortality radiated from
her; nature, and more than nature, abhors a vacuum. Her mind and senses
could not yet receive comprehensibly the motions of the spirit, but
that adoring centre dominated her, and flashes of its great capacity
passed through her, revealing, if but in flashes, the single world
of existence. Otherwise, the senses of her redeemed body were hardly
capable yet of fruition; they had to grow and strengthen till, in their
perfection, they should give to her and the universe added delight.
They now failed from their beatitude, and lived neither with intuitive
angelic knowledge nor immediate angelic passage, but with the slower
movement of the ancient, and now dissolving, earth.

Lilith, checked in her monotonous gabble by the radiant vision who let
in the sun's new light, stared at it with old and blinking eyes. She
saw the shape of the woman; and did not know beatitude, however young.
She supposed this also to be in need of something other than the
Omnipotence. She said, separating with difficulty words hardly
distinguishable from gabble: "I can help you."

"That's kind of you," Pauline answered, "but I haven't come to you for
myself."

"I can help anyone," the old woman said, carefully enunciating the lie.

Pauline answered again: "Adela Hunt wants you." She could and would
say no more and no less. She recommended the words to the Omnipotence
(which, she thought, it was quite certain that Adela Hunt did want, in
one or both senses of the word).

The other said, in a little shriek of alarm, such as an old woman
pretending youth might have used for girlish fun, "I won't go out, you
know. She must come here."

"She can't do that," Pauline said, "because she's ill."

"I can cure everyone," the other answered, "anyone and everyone. You."

"Thank you very much, but I don't want anything," Pauline said.

The figure on the earth said: "You must. Everyone wants something. Tell
me what you want."

Pauline answered: "But I don't. You can't think how I don't. How could I
want anything but what is?"

The other made in the gloom a motion as if to crawl forward. Illusion,
more lasting than in any of her victims, was in her. At the moment of
destruction she still pressed nostrums upon the angelic visitor who
confronted her. She broke again into gabble, in which Pauline could
dimly make out promises, of health, of money, of life, or their
appearances, of good looks and good luck, or a belief in them, of peace
and content, or a substitute for them. She could almost have desired to
find it in her to pretend to be in need, to take pity, and herself to
help the thing that offered help, to indulge by her own goodwill the
spiritual necromancy of Gomorrah. It was not possible. The absolute and
entire sufficiency of existence rose in her. She could no more herself
deny than herself abandon it. She could ask for nothing but what
was--life in the instant mode of living. She said: "O don't, don't."

The woman seemed to have drawn nearer, through that wriggling upon the
ground; an arm poked out, and a hand clutched, too far off to catch.
A voice rose: "Anything, everything; everything, anything; anything,
everything: every----"

"But I don't _want_ anything," Pauline cried out; and as she heard her
own vain emphasis, added with a little despairing laugh: "How can I tell
you? I only want everything to be as it is--for myself, I mean."

"Change," said the shape. "I don't change."

Pauline cried out: "And if it changes, it shall change as it must, and I
shall want it as it is then." She laughed again at the useless attempt
to explain.

At the sound of that laugh Lilith stopped, in movement and speech, and
all the creatures that stood within vision turned their heads. The
sterile silence of the hidden cave exposed itself, and the single
laughter of the girl ran over it, and after the laughter the silence
itself awoke. As if the very air emanated power, the stillness became
warm; a haze of infinite specks of gold filled the darkness, as if the
laughter had for a moment made its joy, and more than its joy, visible.
The sombre air of the chill city of the plain was pierced by the joy of
the sons of God which exists even there. Lilith shrieked and flung up
her arms; and a sudden thin wail followed the shriek, the wail of all
those dead who cannot endure joy. The advent of that pure content struck
at the foundations of the Hill, and the wail went up from all the mortal
who writhed in sickness and all the immortal who are sick for ever.

There was a noise of cracking and breaking wood. A cloud of dust rose.
Pauline threw her head back, involuntarily shutting her eyes. The dust
was in her nostrils; she sneezed. As she recovered and opened her eyes,
she saw that the old shed had collapsed before her. It lay, a mass of
broken and discoloured wood, upon the ground. The thrust she had given
to the door had been too much for it, and it had fallen.




Chapter XII

BEYOND GOMORRAH


"Then this," Stanhope said, "is a last visit?"

"Yes," Pauline said. "I'm going up to London to-morrow morning."

"You'll like the work," Stanhope went on. "Odd--to know that when you
don't know what it is. You do know that?"

"Under the Mercy," she said. "I'm to see my uncle's man to-morrow at
twelve, and if he approves me I shall start work at once. So then, my
uncle says, I can stay with them for a few days till I've found rooms or
a room."

"You'll send me the address?" he asked.

She answered: "Of course. You'll stop here still?"

He nodded, and for the minute there was silence. Then she added: "Most
people seem to be trying to move."

"Most," he said, "but some won't and some can't and some needn't. You
must, of course. But I think I might as well stop. There are flowers,
and fruit, and books, and if anyone wants me, conversation, and so
on--till the plague stops."

She asked, looking at him: "Do you know how long it will last?"

He shrugged a little: "If it's what my grandmother would have called
it," he said, "one of the vials of the Apocalypse--why, perhaps a
thousand years, those of the millennium before the Judgment. On the
other hand, since that kind of thousand years is asserted to be a day,
perhaps till to-morrow morning. We're like the Elizabethan drama, living
in at least two time-schemes."

She said: "It is that?"

"'As a thief in the night'," he answered. "Could you have a better
description? Something is stealing from us our dreams and deceptions and
everything but actuality."

"Will they die?" she asked.

"I don't think anyone will die," he said, "unless--and God redeem us
all!--into the second death. But I think the plague will spread. The
dead were very thick here; perhaps that was why it began here."

"And Adela?" she asked, "and Myrtle?"

"Why, that is for them," he answered.

But she opened on him a smile of serenity, saying: "And for you."

"I will talk Nature to Miss Fox," he said, "and Art to Miss Hunt. If
they wish. But I think Prescott may be better for Miss Hunt; he's an
almost brutal realist, and I shall remain a little Augustan, even in
heaven."

"And I?" she asked, "I?"

"_Incipit vita nova_," he answered. "You--by the way, what train are you
catching to-morrow? I'll come and see you off."

"Half-past ten," she said, and he nodded and went on:

"You'll find your job and do it and keep it--in the City of our God,
even in the City of the Great King, and ... and how do I, any more than
you, know what the details of Salem will be like?"

She stood up, luxuriously stretching. "No," she said, "perhaps not. I
suppose poets are superfluous in Salem?"

"I have wondered myself," he admitted. "But you needn't realize it so
quickly. If the redeemed sing, presumably someone must write the songs.
Well--I'll see you at the station to-morrow?"

"Yes, please," she said, as they moved to the door, and then silently
down the drive under a night blazing with stars. At the gate she gave
him her hand. "It seems so funny to be talking about trains in the
easier circles of ..." As she hesitated he laughed at her.

"Are you afraid to name it?" he asked, and with a blush she said
hastily:

"... heaven. O good night."

"Till to-morrow and good night," he said. "Go with God."

She took two steps, paused and looked back. "Thank you for heaven," she
said. "Good night."

The next morning they were on the platform together, chatting of her
prospects and capacities, when as they turned in their walk Pauline
said: "Peter, look--there's Mr. Wentworth. Is he coming to London too?
He looks ill, doesn't he?"

"Very ill," Stanhope said gravely. "Shall we speak?" They moved down the
platform, and as Wentworth turned his head in her direction Pauline
smiled and waved. He looked at her vaguely, waggled a hand, and ceased.
They came to him.

"Good morning, Mr. Wentworth," Pauline said. "Are you going to London
too?"

He looked away from them with an action as deliberate as if he had
looked at them. He said in a low mumble: "Must excuse me ... bad chill
... bones feel it ... can't remember bones ... faces ... bones of faces,
I mean."

Stanhope said: "Wentworth! _Wentworth!_ ... stop here."

The voice seemed to penetrate Wentworth's mind. His eyes crawled back
along the platform, up to Stanhope's face; there they rested on the
mouth as if they could not get farther than the place of the voice, they
could not connect voice and eyes. He said: "Can't stop ... must get to
..." There, exhausted, he stopped.

Pauline heard their train coming. She said: "May I travel with you, Mr.
Wentworth?"

At that he came awake; he looked at her, and then again away. He said in
a tone of alarm: "No, no. Told you Guard was right. Travelling with a
lady. Good-bye, good-bye," and hastily and clumsily made off up the
platform as the train drew in. He scrambled into a distant compartment.
Pauline sprang into her own, and turning looked at Stanhope.

"O Peter!" she said, "what's wrong?"

He had been gazing after Wentworth; he turned back to her. "I think he
has seen the Gorgon's head that was hidden from Dante in Dis," he said.
"Well.... Pray for him, and for me, and for all. You will write?"

She stretched her hand from the window. "Will I write?" she said.
"Good-bye. But, Peter, ought I to do anything?"

"You can't do anything unless he chooses," he answered. "If he doesn't
choose.... Pray. Good-bye. Go in peace."

His eyes challenged her on the word; this time she did not pause. "Go
in peace," she said, "and thank you still." The train began to move; he
waved to her till she was out of sight, and then went out of the station
to walk in the streets and sit by the beds of Battle Hill.

Wentworth sat in his corner. He felt he had forgotten something, and
slowly and laboriously he went over in his mind all that he ought to
possess. He found it difficult to remember why he had left his house at
all. His servants had refused to stay; they had all gone that morning;
so he had had to go. He couldn't take the trouble to get others; he
hadn't enough energy. He would come to London, to an hotel; there he
would be quiet, and not see any ghosts. A horrible screaming ghost had
looked in through his window, a ghost that had fallen down in a fit, and
he had had to go out and drag it away so that other ghosts could find
it. He had been afraid of them since, and of those two just now who
had made mouths at him, calling him by a strange word. He was going
somewhere too. He was going to a supper. He had his evening things with
him in his bag. It would be necessary to dress for the supper, the
supper of scholars, of historical scholars, and he was an historical
scholar. He remembered what he was, if not who he was. It was true he
had said the Grand Duke's Guard was correct though it wasn't, but he was
an historical scholar, and he was going to his own kind of people, to
Aston Moffatt.

As the name came to him, Wentworth sat up in his corner and became
almost his own man again. He hated Aston Moffatt. Hate still lived in
him a little, and hate might almost have saved him, though nothing else
could, had he hated with a scholar's hate. He did not; his hate and his
grudge were personal and obscene. In its excitement nevertheless he
remembered what he had left behind--his watch. He had over-wound it
weeks ago, on some day when he had seen a bad play, and had put it by to
have it mended. But it was too much trouble, and now he had left it in
his drawer, and couldn't tell the time. There would be clocks in London,
clocks all round him, all going very quickly, because time went very
quickly. It went quickly because it was unending, and it was always
trying to get to its own end. There was only one point in it with which
he had any concern--the time of the last supper. It would be the last
supper; he would not go and meet Aston Moffatt again. But he would go
to-night because he had accepted and had his clothes, and to show he was
not afraid of Moffatt. That was the only time he wanted to know, the
time of his last supper. Afterwards, everything would look after itself.
He slept in his corner, his last sleep.

The train stopped at Marylebone, and he woke. He muddled on, with the
help of a porter, to the Railway Hotel. He had thought of that in the
train; it would save bother. He usually went to some other, but he
couldn't remember which. The ordinary habits of his body carried him on,
and the automatic habit of his mind, including his historic automatic.
History was his hobby, his habit; it had never been more. Its austerity
was as far from him now as the Eucharists offered in the Church of
St. Mary la Bonne, or the duties of the dead, or the ceremonies of
substituted love. He automatically booked a room, ate some lunch, and
then lay down. This time he did not sleep; the noise of London kept him
awake; besides he was alone. The creature that had been with him so
long was with him no more. It had gone upstairs with him for the last
time two nights before, and had his former faculties lived he would have
seen how different it was. After the passage of the dead man it had
never quite regained its own illusive apparition; senility and youth
had mingled in its face, and in their mingling found a third degree of
corruption. At the hour of the falling in of the shed of Lilith it had
thinned to a shape of twilight. Meaning and apparent power had gone out
of it. It was a thing the dead man might have met under his own pallid
sky, and less even than that. In the ghostly night that fell on the
ruins of Gomorrah it had tottered round its father and paramour, who did
not yet know through what destruction they went. His eyes were dimmed.
Those who look, in Stanhope's Dantean phrase, on the head of the Gorgon
in Dis, do not know, until Virgil has left them, on what they gaze. In
the night she was withdrawn; the substance of illusion in her faded, and
alongside his heavy sleep she changed and changed, through all degrees
of imbecile decay, till at last she was quite dispelled.

He was alone. He lay awake, and waking became aware of his ancient
dream. Now he was near the end of his journey. He saw below him the rope
drawn nearer and nearer to the wall, if it were a wall. He looked up;
above him the rope seemed to end in the moon, which shone so fully in
the dark, millions of miles away. Down all those miles he had slowly
climbed. It was almost over now; he was always a little lower, and when
he stood up he did not lose the dream. Through his bathing and dressing
and going down and finding a taxi he was still on his rope. He felt once
for his watch, and remembered he had not got it, and looked up at the
shining silver orb above, and found that that was his watch. It was also
a great public clock at which he was staring; but he could not make it
out--moon or watch or clock. The time was up there; but he could not see
it. He thought: "I shall be just in time." He was, and only just; as
close to its end as to the end of the rope.

He got into his taxi. It went off along the High Street, and then was
held up behind a policeman's arm. He was looking out of the window, when
he thought a creaking voice said in his ear, as if a very old woman
was in the seat beside him: "Madame Tussaud's". He did not look round,
because no one was ever there, but he stared at the great building which
seemed to glow out of the darkness of the side of the abyss, and there
rose in him the figure of what it contained. He had never been there,
though in a humorous moment he had once thought of taking Adela, but
he knew what was in it--wax images. He saw them--exquisitely done,
motionless, speechless, thoughtless; and he saw them being shifted.
Hanging on his rope, he looked out through the square of light in the
darkness and saw them all--Csar, Gustavus, Cromwell, Napoleon, Foch,
and saw himself carrying them from one corner to another, and putting
them down and picking them up and bringing them somewhere else and
putting them down. There were diagrams, squares and rectangles, on the
floor, to show where they should go; and as he ran across the hall with
a heavy waxen thing on his shoulder he knew it was very important to put
it down in the right diagram. So he did, but just as he went away the
diagram under the figure changed and no longer fitted, and he had to go
back and lift the thing up and take it off to another place where the
real diagram was. This was always happening with each of them and all of
them, so that six or seven or more of him had to be about, carrying the
images, and hurrying past and after each other on their perpetual task.
He could never get the details correct; there was always a little thing
wrong, a thing as tiny as the shoulder-knots on the uniforms of the
Grand Duke's Guard. Then the rope vibrated as the taxi started again,
and he was caught away; the last vestige of the history of men vanished
for ever.

Vibration after vibration--he was very near the bottom of his rope. He
himself was moving now; he was hurrying. The darkness rushed by. He
stopped. His hand, in habitual action, had gone to his pocket for
silver, but his brain did not follow it. His feet stepped, in habitual
action, off the rope, on to the flat ground. Before him there was a
tall oblong opening in the dark, faintly lit. He had something in his
hand--he turned, holding it out; there was a silver gleam as it left his
hand, and he saw the whole million-mile-long rope vanishing upward and
away from him with incredible rapidity towards the silver moon which
ought to have been in his waistcoat pocket, because it was the watch he
had overwound. Seeing that dazzling flight of the rope upwards into the
very centre of the shining circle, he thought again: "I'm just in time."
He was standing on the bottom of the abyss; there remained but a short
distance in any method of mortal reckoning for him to take before he
came to a more secret pit where there is no measurement because there is
no floor. He turned towards the opening and began his last journey.

He went a little way, and came into a wider place, where presently there
were hands taking off a coat he discovered himself to be wearing. He was
looking at himself; for an instant he had not recognized his own face,
but he did now, over a wide shining oval thing that reminded him of the
moon. He was wearing the moon in front of him. But he was in black
otherwise; he had put on a neat fantastic dress of darkness. The moon,
the darkness, and he--only no rope, because that had gone away, and no
watch, because he had done something or other to it, and it had gone
away too. He tried to think what a watch was and how it told him the
time. There were marks on it which meant something to do with time, but
he didn't know what. Voices came to him out of the air and drove him
along another corridor into another open space. And there suddenly
before him was Sir Aston Moffatt.

The shock almost restored him. If he had ever hated Sir Aston because of
a passion for austere truth, he might even then have laid hold on the
thing that was abroad in the world and been saved. If he had been
hopelessly wrong in his facts and yet believed them so, and believed
they were important in themselves, he might have felt a touch of the
fire in which the Marian martyr had gone to his glory, and still been
saved. In the world of the suicides, physical or spiritual, he might
have heard another voice than his and seen another face. He looked at
Sir Aston and thought, not "He was wrong in his facts", but "I've been
cheated". It was his last consecutive thought.

Sir Aston was decidedly deaf and extremely talkative, and had a sincere
admiration for his rival. He came straight across to Wentworth, and began
to talk. The world, which Wentworth had continuously and persistently
denied in favour of himself, now poured itself over him, and as if in
a deluge from heaven drove him into the depths. Very marvellous is the
glorious condescension of the Omnipotence; the myth of the fire which
was rained over the plain now incarnated itself in Sir Aston Moffatt.
Softly and gently, perpetually and universally, the chatty sentences
descended on the doomed man, each sentence a little prick of fire,
because, as he stood there, he realized with a sickness at heart that a
voice was talking and he did not know what it was saying. He heard two
sounds continually repeated: "Went-worth, Went-worth". He knew that
those two noises meant something, but he could not remember what. If all
the faces that were about him would go away he might remember, but they
did not go. They gathered round him, and carried him forward in the
midst of them, through a doorway. As he went through it he saw in front
of him tables, and with a last flash of memory knew that he had come
there to eat and drink. There was his chair, at the bottom left corner,
where he had always sat, his seat in the Republic. He went to it with an
eager trot. It was waiting for him as it had always waited, for ever and
ever; all his life and from the creation of the world he had sat there,
he would sit there at the end, looking towards the--he could not think
what was the right name for the tall man at the other end, who had been
talking to him just now. He looked at him and tried to smile, but could
not, for the tall man's eyes were blank of any meaning, and gazed at him
emptily. The Republic deserted him. His smile ceased. He was at last by
his chair; he would always sit there, always, always. He sat down.

As he did so, he knew he was lost. He could not understand anything
about him. He could just remember that there had been one moment when a
sudden bright flash had parted from him, fleeing swiftly across the sky
into its source, and he wanted that moment back; he wanted desperately
to hold on to the rope. The rope was not there. He had believed that
there would be for him a companion at the bottom of the rope who would
satisfy him for ever, and now he was there at the bottom, and there was
nothing but noises and visions which meant nothing. The rope was not
there. There were faces, which ceased to be faces, and became blobs of
whitish red and yellow, working and twisting in a horrible way that yet
did not surprise him, because nothing could surprise him. They moved
and leaned and bowed; and between them were other things that were
motionless now but might at any moment begin to move and crawl. Away
over them was a huge round white blotch, with black markings on it, and
two long black lines going round and round, one very fast and one very
slow. This was time, too fast for his brain, too slow for his heart. If
he only had hold of the rope still, he could perhaps climb out of this
meaningless horror; at least, he could find some meaning and relation in
it all. He felt that the great blotch had somehow slid up and obscured
the shining silver radiance into which a flash out of him had gone, and
if he could get the rope he could climb past, or, with great shuddering,
even through the horrible blotch, away out of this depth where anything
might be anything, and was anything, for he did not know what it was.
The rope was not there.

He shrank into himself, trying to shut his eyes and lose sight of this
fearful opposite of the world he had known. Quite easily he succeeded.
But he could not close his ears, for he did not know how to manage the
more complex co-ordination of shoulders and arms and hands. So there
entered into him still a small, steady, meaningless flow of sound, which
stung and tormented him with the same lost knowledge of meaning; small
burning flames flickered down on his soul. His eyes opened again in mere
despair. A little hopeless voice came from his throat. He said, and
rather gasped than spoke: "Ah! ah!" Then everything at which he was
looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also
was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because
in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion
of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another,
for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of
unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring
in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves
into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of
them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms
and they had had names. These had no names, and whether they were or
were not anything, and whether that anything was desirable or hateful he
did not know. He had now no consciousness of himself as such, for the
magical mirrors of Gomorrah had been broken, and the city itself had
been blasted, and he was out beyond it in the blankness of a living
oblivion, tormented by oblivion. The shapes stretched out beyond him,
all half turned away, all rigid and silent. He was sitting at the end,
looking up an avenue of nothingness, and the little flames licked his
soul, but they did not now come from without, for they were the power,
and the only power, his dead past had on him; the life, and the only
life, of his soul. There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing
shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it
there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The
silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded.
Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily,
everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the
void.




  By the same author

  WAR IN HEAVEN
  MANY DIMENSIONS
  THE PLACE OF THE LION
  THE GREATER TRUMPS
  SHADOWS OF ECSTASY




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE


The pre-title has been omitted and the list of other books by this
author, which faced the title page, has been moved to the end. Missing
punctuation has been added and minor spelling mistakes silently
corrected (e.g. actua / actual). Hyphenation is inconsistent, with, e.g.
overwound and over-wound both present. Williams frequently uses rare
words, or common words in obsolete ways (e.g. "steep" as a noun.)

In one paragraph towards the end of Chapter 7, the syntax appears
muddled; the text has been compared to the 1949 edition, which is
identical. A footnote at the end of the paragraph in question highlights
the issue and suggests a correction.





[End of Descent into Hell, by Charles Williams]
