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

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Filial Godhead and mighty forms and encountering darkness and Macbeth.

I can’t do more—that way. I don’t know enough: I’m a baby in it,

after all.”

 

Isabel said quietly, “You want to know more?”

 

Roger answered, “I want—yes, I—the thing that’s me wants to know,

not like wanting apple tart with or without custard, but like wanting

breath. There’s air outside the windows, and I shall smash them to get

it or I shall die. There—you asked me.”

 

She came and stood by him, and he took her hand. “You don’t feel it

like that?” he said.

 

“No, not like that,” she answered. “But perhaps I can’t. I’ve been

thinking, Roger darling, and I’ve wondered whether perhaps women don’t

have to do it anyhow. I mean—perhaps it’s nothing very new, this

power your Mr. Considine talks of—perhaps women have always known it,

and that’s why they’ve never made great art. Perhaps they have turned

everything into themselves. Perhaps they must.”

 

He looked up at her, brooding. “I know,” he said, “you live and we

talk about it.”

 

“No,” Isabel said, sitting down by him in front of the fire.

“No, dearest, not only that. We only live on what you give

us—imaginatively, I mean; you have to find the greater powers. You

have to be the hunters and fishers and fighters when all’s said and

done. So perhaps you ought to go and hunt now. But we turn it more

easily into ourselves than you do—for bad and good alike. And we

generally do it very badly—but then you’ve given us so little to do

it with.”

 

“I don’t believe it,” Roger said. “I don’t believe in all this sex

differentiation. And yet-”

 

“And yet,” she said, “it doesn’t matter now. We needn’t waste our time

on talking abstractions. What do you want to do, sweetheart?”

 

“I don’t know what I can do,” he said. “I talk about smashing windows,

but that’s rather silly. I want to find this power and master it and

find what there is to be discovered. I want to live where they live.”

 

“They?” she asked.

 

“Considine and Michael Angelo and Epstein and Beethoven,” he answered.

“I can feel a bit of what they do, I want to feel more. I’ve been

trying to—don’t laugh. All the way home I’ve been saying things to

myself, and trying to see what’s the thing to do. There’s the feeling

every element in them first—not just seeing the words, but finding

out how one belongs to the words, how one’s own self answers to all

the different words, like criss-crossing currents. And then there’s

turning all that deeper into one’s own self, into one’s desire—and

that’s so hard because one hasn’t a desire, except general comfort!”

 

“O Roger dear, that’s not true! You have,” Isabel said.

 

Roger hesitated-“Well, perhaps!” he allowed. “Anyhow I kept losing

hold and just feeling all vague and dithery, so I tried to turn one

thrill on to another line—d’you see?—and I do think it might work.

But it’ll need a lot of doing, and I’m not sure-” he relapsed into

silence, and then said abruptly, “Has Philip been along?”

 

His wife was about to answer when Rosamond came into the room, and the

conversation returned hastily to ordinary things. She wasn’t looking

at all well, Roger thought, and she was getting positively hysterical

these days. Curious that she should be Isabel’s sister. But of course

Isabel was unusual. He reflected gloomily, while the women chatted,

that on Considine’s showing he probably wouldn’t have been married to

Isabel—the energy of love would have gone the other way, would have

been transmuted or something. Lots of people must have had to do it in

their time; lots of people must have been disappointed in love and

then—Yes, but most of them just blew along till the worst was over.

To use the worst and the best for something that was, as far as

ordinary knowledge went, different from both. The abolition of

death—the conquest of death.

 

The unnameable Muriel appeared in the room. She said, “Two gentlemen

to see you, sir. They didn’t give their names. But one of them sent

this—” She passed over a slip of card bearing a word or two—“‘How

goes it? N. C.’”

 

Roger jumped forward. “Here,” he exclaimed, “where are they? Bring

them—all right. I will.” He was out of the room and into the tiny

hall. There he saw Considine and Mottreux.

 

“Good God!” he said. “Come in. I thought you-”

 

Considine shook hands with a smile. It occurred to Roger that that

swift smile was always very near showing with Considine. It danced on

the surface of a deeper rapture, as if, to the world, that was all

that could be made of something within the world.

 

“We came”, he said, “Mottreux and I, to fill an hour. Do we

interrupt?”

 

“No,” Roger said. “Come in.” He turned to Isabel. “May I present my

wife?” he said. “You’ve never met Mr. Considine, have you, Isabel? And

Colonel Mottreux.” His eyes fell on Rosamond. “Miss Murchison—Mr.

Considine, Colonel Mottreux.”

 

As he found them seats he cursed Rosamond. Who wanted her there? Well,

she’d have to lump it. He stood back, and let his look rest on

Considine. Then he said, “But I thought Sir Bernard-”

 

“Certainly Sir Bernard,” Considine answered. “But I don’t think Sir

Bernard or Mr. Suydler either are likely to interfere with me. It

isn’t from them that my dangers now will ever come—except by literal

accident. So, since I was about, and since tonight I shall be busy,

and shall leave London—I came to see you.”

 

“Are you going to Africa?” Roger said before he could stop himself.

 

“I have come to ask you whether—if I go—you also will come,”

Considine said.

 

Roger was picking up a box of cigarettes from the table; he put it

down again and his face went pale. “I?” he said.

 

“I know that you believe,” Considine said, “and I offer you the

possibility.”

 

Roger, with a heroic effort, avoided looking at Isabel. He said in a

calm silly voice, “It’s awfully kind of you, of course, but I don’t

see how I can. Not this side of Christmas.”

 

Isabel said, “I think you might. It’ll be death if you don’t.”

 

He looked up at her, and she added, “It’ll be death to you, darling,

and then there’ll be nothing left for me. If you go, there may. And I

can do—what we were talking about.”

 

“But I can’t decide all on the moment,” Roger protested to Considine,

though he still looked at Isabel.

 

“You have decided,” Considine said. “But of course you may not do it.”

 

“And have I decided,” Roger said sardonically, “to live for a hundred

years and try all sorts of experiments with my unhappy body?”

 

“‘I will encounter darkness as a bride,’” Considine murmured. “Yes.”

 

It was true, and Roger knew it. Chance might thwart him, as (so he

understood) it might thwart Considine himself, but the decision was in

his blood and bones. He would have to follow this man—as once, he

had read, other men had thrown aside their work and their friends to

follow another voice. When explosions happened you were just blown.

Isabel would be all right as far as money went—and till he had

entered into this mystery he could never now serve Isabel rightly.

Those other men had followed a voice that went crying how it was not

come to send peace but a sword—the peace of the sword perhaps, the

reconciliation in a greater state of being which—

 

He pulled a chair forward. “Tell me about it,” he said. He was vaguely

aware, as he did so, that Rosamond had slipped from the room, and was

grateful. The four of them were left. Roger picked up the cigarettes

again and offered them to Isabel who took one, and to Considine and

Mottreux who refused. He himself hesitated.

 

“I don’t”, he said, “see any reason why I shouldn’t smoke, and yet

when I’m really concerned I don’t. Except by habit.”

 

“It absorbs energy,” Considine said. “When it’s a dominant habit it

absorbs less energy than the refusal demands, so naturally it has its

way. But when it’s not quite inevitable you’re conscious of the energy

wasted—of a divided concentration—and you hesitate.”

 

“Is that why you don’t smoke?” Roger asked.

 

“I don’t smoke just as I don’t eat—since you ask me,” Considine said,

the smile breaking out again, “because it doesn’t amuse me. Any more

than golfing or dancing or reading the newspaper. Certain things drop

away as one becomes maturer.”

 

“And eating’s one of them?” Roger asked, putting down the cigarettes.

 

“It’s necessary to an extent still,” Considine answered. “I suppose a

certain minimum of food may be necessary, until—afterwards. Then

perhaps not. But it’s nothing like as necessary as one thinks. There

are so many better things to feed on. Shall I quote your Messias

again? ‘I have meat to eat that ye know not of.’”

 

Isabel said, more suddenly than was her habit, “It was to do the will

of Him that sent him.”

 

“What else?” Considine answered. “What else could it be?”

 

“But you don’t claim to be doing that will?” Isabel said. “You’re not

in obedience, are you?”

 

“I am in obedience to all laws I have not yet mastered,” he answered.

“I am in danger of death—until I have mastered it—and therefore in

obedience to it, and a little to food and sleep.”

 

“But you said that danger-” Roger began.

 

“I said that danger will not come from my enemies,” Considine

answered; “isn’t there any other? There are laws that are very deep,

and one of them may be that every gospel has a denial within it and

every Church a treachery. You—whom I invite to join me—you yourself

may be a danger. It isn’t for me to fear you because of that chance.”

 

Roger leant forward. “That’s it,” he cried out, “there’s nothing that

may not betray.”

 

Isabel said softly, “Can’t Mr. Considine transform treachery too?”

 

“I can guard against it at least,” Considine answered; “I can read

men’s minds, under conditions, but the conditions may fail, and

then—could Christ do more?”

 

Isabel answered still softly, “Mightn’t the missionaries you killed

have joined with something which was greater than you because it had

known defeat? Have you known defeat?”

 

“No,” Considine said and stood up. “I’ve mastered myself from the

beginning and all things that I’ve needed are mine. Why should man

know defeat? You teach him to look and expect and wait for it; you

teach him to obey and submit; you heal his hurts and soothe his

diseases. But I will show him that in his hurts as in his happiness he

is greatly and intensely lord; he lives by them. He shall delight in

feeling, and his feeling shall be blood within his blood and body in

his body; it shall burn through him till that old business of

yes-and-no has fallen away from him, and then his diseases will have

vanished for they are nothing but the shadow of his wanting this and

the other, and when he is those things that he desires, where are the

shadows of them? Do I starve without food who do not need food? Do I

pine for love who do not need love? Do I doubt victory who am victory?

There is but one chance of defeat, and that is that death may strike

me before I have dared it in its own place. But even that cannot face

me; by ambush or treachery it might take