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

Chapter Nine - THE RIOT AND THE RAID

Philip jumped on to a bus—any bus—the first he saw. He had been

walking for ever so long, and he must sit down. But also he must be

moving; he couldn’t be shut in. Things were worse than he had ever

imagined they could be; indeed he couldn’t quite imagine what exactly

they now were. The Hampstead flat was in a state of acute distress and

turmoil; he had arrived that evening innocently enough, to find half a

dozen policemen all arguing with Roger, who was glowering at Rosamond,

who was crying hysterically in Isabel’s arms, who was keeping, not

without difficulty, a grave sympathy with all of them. He had

naturally hurried to Rosamond, but not with the best effects; the

sight of him had seemed to distract her more than ever. Out of the

arguments and exclamations he had at last gathered—and more clearly

after the police had at last grimly withdrawn—that Considine had been

there, and that Rosamond, after she had realized who it really was,

had gone through a short period of conflict with herself on the right

thing to do. She said it had been conflict, and that only her duty…

whereas Roger, in a few words, implied that she had been delighted at

the chance, and that duty—except to herself—was a thing of which she

was entirely unconscious and incapable. Anyhow, after a very short

period she had rung up the police-station and explained to the

authorities there what was happening. Why the police hadn’t arrested

Considine Philip couldn’t understand. Isabel was concerned with her

sister, and Roger wasn’t very clear in his account. Somebody had gone

through the midst of somebody else; somebody had been like Pythian

Apollo. But he couldn’t bother about all that; he was too anxious

about Rosamond. Had he been challenged, he would have had to admit

that for a guest to try and have another visitor arrested in the

host’s drawing-room was not perhaps…though for Roger to call it

treachery was absurd. If anything, it was public spirit. He knew

nothing—Rosamond had seen to that—of such an orgy as the episode of

the chocolates which Isabel so clearly and reluctantly remembered; he

knew nothing of a greedy gobbling child, breaking suddenly away from

its ordinary snobbish pretences, giving way to the thrust of its

secret longings and vainly trying to conceal from others’ eyes the

force of its desires. She had cheated herself so long, consciously in

childhood, with that strange combination of perfect innocence and

deliberate sin which makes childhood so blameless and so guilty at one

and the same moment; less consciously in youth, as innocence faded and

the necessity of imposing some kind of image of herself on the world

grew stronger, till now in her first womanhood she had forgotten the

cheat, until her outraged flesh rebelled and clamoured from starvation

for food. And even now she would not admit it; she would neither fight

it nor flee from it nor yield to it nor compromise with it. She could

hardly even deny that it was there, for there was no place for it in

her mind. She, she of all people, could never be capable of abominably

longing to be near the dark prince of Africa; she couldn’t thrill to

the trumpets of conversion nor glow to the fires of ecstasy. Nor could

she hate herself for refusing them. But she could and inevitably did

hate the things that resembled them—Considine’s person and Roger’s

verse and Philip, all of Philip, for Philip to her agonized sense was

at once a detestable parody of what she wanted and a present reminder

of what she longed to forget. And now, like all men and all women who

are not masters of life, she swayed to and fro in her intention and

even in her desire. At Kensington she had shrunk away from Inkamasi

and fled from him; at Hampstead she thought of him and secretly longed

for him. Power was in her and she was terrified of it. She had been

self-possessed, but all herself was in the possessing and nothing in

the possessed; self-controlled, but she had: had only a void to

control. And now that nothing and that void were moved with fire and

darkness; the shadow of ecstasy lay over her life, and denying the

possibility of ecstasy she fled through its shadow as far as its edge,

and halted irresolute, and was drawn back by a fascination she loved

and hated. She was alive and she hated life; not with a free feeling

of judgement but with servile fear. She hated life, and therefore she

would hide in Hampstead; she lived, and therefore she would return to

Kensington. But neither in Hampstead nor Kensington, in Europe nor

Africa, in her vision of her unsubservient self, nor of her monstrous

master, was there any place for Philip, much less a Philip aware of

the exaltation of love.

 

But it was not till after, shocked and bewildered by the venom she had

flung at him in that dreadful scene, he had at last gone that she

began to fear that her relations with Kensington might have been

severed. And, not being there, she was determined to get back there.

She would run there and then run away, till the strait jacket of time

and place imprisoned her as it imprisons in the end all who suffer

from a like madness. It is perhaps why the asylum of material creation

was created, and we sit in our separate cells, strapped and

comparatively harmless, merely foaming a little and twitching our

fingers, while the steps and voices of unknown warders come to us from

the infinite corridors. But Rosamond was only beginning to hurl

herself against the walls of her cell, and the invisible warders had

not yet had occasion to take much notice of her. The jacket waited

her; when the paroxysm was done she would no doubt come to regard it

as becoming wear and in the latest fashion. Whether such a belief is

desirable is a question men have not yet been able to decide.

 

Since Roger was so cruel to her, so detestably unfair, she would go to

Sir Bernard; there was no other friend in London on whom she could

descend without notice. Sir Bernard would understand her motives; he’d

tried to get that hateful man arrested. Isabel tried her best to

prevent her, saying even that Roger might be going away. But this

didn’t seem to placate Rosamond, and at last Isabel said no more.

Roger said nothing at all until Rosamond had left them “to put some of

her things together.” Isabel said: “I’m not sure that it’s a bad

thing: Sir Bernard may be able to do something. What she needs is a

sleeping-draught.”

 

“What she needs”, Roger said, “is prussic acid.”

 

Meanwhile Philip had walked, walked millions of miles, it seemed,