Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams (best books to read txt) 📖

Chapter One - ENCOUNTERING DARKNESS

Roger Ingram’s peroration broke over the silent dining hall: “He and

such as he are one with the great conquerors, the great scientists,

the great poets; they have all of them cried of the unknown:

‘I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms’.”

 

He sat down amid applause, directed not to him but to the subject of

his speech. It was at a dinner given by the Geographical Faculty of

the University of London to a distinguished explorer just back from

South America. The explorer’s health had been proposed by the Dean of

the Faculty, and the Professor of Tropical Geography had been intended

to second it. Unfortunately the Professor had gone down with influenza

that very day, and Roger had been hastily made to take his place. The

other geographical professors, though vocationally more suitable, were

both learned and low-voiced, as also were their public addresses. The

Dean had refused to subject his distinguished guests, including the

explorer, to their instructive whispers. Roger might not be a

geographer, but he could make a better speech, and he belonged to the

University if to a different faculty, being Professor of Applied

Literature. This was a new Chair, endowed beneficently by a rich

Canadian who desired at once to benefit the Mother Country and to

recall her from the by-ways of pure art to the highroad of art as

related to action. Roger had been invited from a post in a Northern

University to fill the Chair, largely on the strength of his last

book, which was called “Persuasive Serpents: studies in English

Criticism”, and had been read with admiration by twenty-seven persons

and with complete misunderstanding by four hundred and eighty-two. Its

theme, briefly, was that most English critics had at all times been

wholly and entirely wrong in their methods and aims, and that

criticism was an almost undiscovered art, being a final austere

harmony produced by the purification of literature from everything

alien, which must still exist in the subjects of most prose and

poetry. However, the salary of the Chair of Applied Literature had

decided him to give an example of it in his own person, and he had

accepted.

 

He lent an ear, when the toast had been drunk, to his wife’s

“Beautiful, Roger: he loved it”, and to Sir Bernard Travers’ murmured

“Hug?”

 

“I know,” he said; “you wouldn’t hug it. You’d ask it to a light but

good dinner and send it away all pale and comfortable. I was good,

wasn’t I, Isabel? A little purple, but pleasing purple. Pleasing

purple for pleased people—that’s me after dinner.” He composed

himself to listen.

 

The explorer, returning thanks, was not indisposed to accept literally

the compliments which had been offered him. He touched on ordinary

lives, on the conditions of ordinary lives, on the ordinary office

clerk, and on the difference between such a man and himself. He

painted a picture of South America in black and scarlet; Roger

remarked to his wife in a whisper that crude scarlet was the worst

colour to put beside rich purple. He enlarged on the heroism of his

companions with an underlying suggestion that it was largely

maintained by his own. He made a joke at the expense of Roger’s

quotation, saying that he would never apply “for a divorce or even a

judicial separation from the bride Mr. Ingram has found me.” Roger

gnashed his teeth and smiled back politely, muttering “He isn’t worth

Macaulay and I gave him Shakespeare.” He would, in short, have been a

bore, had he not been himself.

 

At last he sat down. Sir Bernard, politely applauding, said: “Roger,

why are the English no good at oratory?”

 

“Because—to do the fool justice—they prefer to explore,” Roger said.

“You can’t be a poet and an orator too: it needs a different kind of

consciousness.”

 

Sir Bernard left off applauding; he said: “Roger why are the English

so good at oratory?”

 

“No,” Roger said, “anything in reason, but not that. They aren’t, you

know.”

 

“Need that prevent you finding a reason why they are?” Sir Bernard

asked.

 

“Certainly not,” Roger answered, “but it’d prevent you believing it. I

wish I were making all the speeches tonight; I’m going to be bored.

Isabel, shall we go?”

 

“Rather not,” Isabel said. “They’re going to propose the health of the

guests. I’m a guest. Mr. Nigel Considine will reply. Who’s Mr. Nigel

Considine?”

 

“A rich man, that’s all I know,” said her husband. “He gave a

collection of African images to the anthropological school, and

endowed a lectureship on—what was it?—on Ritual Transmutations of

Energy. As a matter of fact, I fancy there was some trouble about it,

because he wanted one man in it and the University wanted another.

They didn’t know anything about his man.”

 

“And what did they know of their own?” Sir Bernard put in.

 

“They knew he’d been at Birmingham or Leeds or somewhere—all quite

proper,” Roger answered, “and had written a book on the marriage rites

of the indigenous Caribs or some such people. He wasn’t married

himself, and he’d never been a Carib—at least not so far as was

known. Considine’s man was a native of Africa, so the Dean was afraid

he might start ritually transmuting energy in the lecture-room.”

 

“Was Mr. Considine annoyed?” Isabel asked.

 

“Apparently not, as he’s here tonight,” Roger answered. “Unless he’s

going to get his own back now. But I never met him, and never got

nearer to him than his collection of images.” His voice became more

serious, “They were frightfully impressive.”

 

“The adjective being emphatic or colloquial?” Sir Bernard asked, and

was interrupted by the health of the guests. He was a little startled

to find that he himself was still considered important enough to be

mentioned by name in the speech that proposed it. He had, in fact,

been a distinguished figure in the medical world of his day: he had

written a book on the digestive organs which had become a classic, in

spite of the ironic humour with which he always spoke of it. He had

attended the stomachs of High Personages, and had retired from active

life only the year before, after accepting a knighthood with an

equally serious irony.

 

Mr. Nigel Considine, on behalf of the guests, thanked their hosts. The

chief of those guests, the guest of honour, of honour in actual truth,

had already spoken. The intellectual value of the journey which they

had celebrated was certainly very high, and very valuable to the

scientific knowledge of the world which was so rapidly growing. “Yet,”

the full voice went on, “yet, if I hesitated at all at the view

which the most prominent guest tonight took of his own fine

achievement”—Roger’s eyes flashed up and down again—“it would have

been over one implication which he seemed to make. He set before us

the wonder and terror of those remote parts of the world which he has

been instrumental in helping to map out. Birds and beasts, trees and

flowers, all kinds of non-human life, he admirably described. But the

human life he appeared to regard as negligible. There is, it seems,

nothing for us of Europe to learn from them, except perhaps how to

starve on a few roots or to weave boughs into a shelter. It may be so.

But I think we should not be too certain of it. He spoke of some of

these peoples as being like children; he will pardon me if I dreamed

of an old man wandering among children. For the children are growing,

and the old man is dying. We who are here tonight are here as the

servants and the guests of a great University, a University of

knowledge, scholarship, and intellect. You do well to be proud of it.

But I have wondered whether there may not be colleges and faculties of

other experiences than yours, and whether even now in the far corners

of other continents powers not yours are being brought to fruition. I

have myself been something of a traveller, and every time I return to

England I wonder whether the games of those children do not hold a

more intense life than the talk of your learned men—a more intense

passion for discovery, a greater power of exploration, new raptures,

unknown paths of glorious knowledge; whether you may not yet sit at

the feet of the natives of the Amazon or the Zambesi: whether the

fakirs, the herdsmen, the witch-doctors may not enter the kingdom of

man before you. But, however this may be, it is not-” He turned

gracefully to renewed thanks and compliments, and sat down.

 

“Dotty,” said Roger, “but unusual. The transmutation of energy must

have been biting him pretty badly. I suppose all that was a get-back.”

 

“It sounded awfully thrilling,” Isabel said. “What did he mean?”

 

“My good child, how should I know?” her husband asked plaintively.

“The witch-doctors may. Fancy a witch-doctor entering the kingdom of

man before Sir Bernard! Rude of him. Sir Bernard, what did you think

of it?”

 

Sir Bernard turned thoughtful eyes on Roger. “I can’t remember,” he

said, “where I’ve seen your Mr. Considine before.”

 

“Perhaps you haven’t,” Roger answered, “in which case you naturally

wouldn’t remember.”

 

“O but I have,” Sir Bernard said positively. “I have; just lately. I

remember the way he curved his fingers. I can’t think where.”

 

“An unknown path of glorious knowledge,” Isabel murmured. “The Dean of

Geography looks quite annoyed.”

 

“He’s thinking of the other things that are being brought to

fruition,” Roger said, “all about South America. And of the old man

who is dying. D’you think Considine meant any one special? or just as

a whole?”

 

“I don’t think it was very nice of him,” Isabel said. “People might

take it the wrong way.”

 

“Well, if you know how to take it the right way…” her husband

protested. “I suppose he meant something? O heavens, they’re beginning

again.”

 

They were, but also they were approaching the end. The dinner hovered

over the point at which empty chairs begin to appear, and people

misjudge their moment and tiptoe out at the beginning of a speech, and

others reckon the chances of catching their distant friends before

they are gone. At this point every dinner contends with destiny, and

if it is fortunate concludes in a rapid and ecstatic climax; if it is

unfortunate it drags out a lingering death, and enters afterwards a

shuddering oblivion. This dinner was fortunate. The National Anthem

implored Deity on behalf of royalty, and dismissed many incredulous of

both. Sir Bernard accompanied Isabel from the room. Ingram,

buttonholed by a colleague or two, was delayed till most of those

present had gone, and when he reached the cloakroom counter, he found

it, but for himself, deserted. He was waiting a little impatiently for

his things when a voice behind him spoke. “And with what passion, Mr.

Ingram,” it said, “do you yourself encounter darkness?”

 

Roger turned and saw Nigel Considine. They had been some distance

apart at the dinner, and on the same side of the same table, so that

Considine’s personality had not been in play except through his rather

obscure words. Now, as