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

make the

king as comfortable as you can in the first car. The others will come

with me in the second.”

 

He swept them with him out to the door, to the large cars that waited

for them. Roger, obeying a gesture, got in and sat down with his back

to the engine; Caithness sat by him.

 

Opposite the priest was the Jew. Considine occupied the other seat.

Figures moved about the other car; from the doorway Isabel and Sir

Bernard silently watched. Considine raised a hand to them, and as the

car slid away he said to Roger, “There is defeat defeated. But you may

be at ease; there is again tonight no danger to them from my people.

And tomorrow, or if not tomorrow then the day after, the Government

will ask for peace.”

 

“Surely they won’t dare,” Roger said. “And if you’re not hurting

London, what are you doing?”

 

“I’m teaching London to feel,” Considine said, “to feel terribly. It

will know panic tonight such as it has never known. It will know the

depths which it has never dared to find. Blame its sterile

hopelessness for its suffering.”

 

“Is that why you bring the African armies here?” Caithness asked.

 

“Armies?” Considine laughed. “O I know I caused that tale to be

spread. But those of my people who are here are entering into their

greatest moment, and I give them the sacrifice they desire. Wait; you

shall see them.” He picked up the speaking-tube and said something to

the driver. The car ran swiftly northward, went round by Regent’s

Park, into St. John’s Wood, and came out at last round Primrose Hill

on to Haverstock Hill somewhere below Belsize Park Station. But a few

minutes showed that this way was impossible. The road was full of

people pressing downward, less thick below the station because of the

mob that surged round the entrance, which no vehicle could get

through. Beyond and above it the Hill was a noisy tumult of refugees,

and beyond in the midnight sky was a red glare, above which again the

useless searchlights crossed and wavered. Hysterical shrieks, curses,

the noise of many separate scuffles came to them. Near them two

wheelbarrows laden with bundles had come into collision, and the

owners were fighting wildly in the midst of their scattered goods.

Here and there a woman lay in a dead faint; in places the white robes

and black cloaks of the Dominicans of the Priory showed as they

laboured to create some sort of order. (“No doubt”, Considine murmured

to Caithness, “the Anglican clergy are somewhere about too. But of

course they haven’t the same advantage in dress.”) More and more

fugitives were hurrying from the side turnings. Even as the car slowed

down, to turn down one of these and escape, two young men scrambled on

to the driver’s seat. “This car is going to take us,” one said

drunkenly; the other hung on to the wheel. Roger glanced at Considine,

who, observant but motionless, was lying back in his corner. The

driver abandoned the wheel, and with what seemed but a light blow

knocked one sprawling into the road; the other let go the wheel to

protect himself, was dexterously flung overboard also, and the car

backed a little way down the Hill. Considine took up the tube again.

“Go round as far as is necessary,” he said. “I must come to the top.”

 

Eventually, after many pauses and very long detours, the thing was

done. They came back from the north on to the Hampstead ridge, and

heard beyond them a noise quite different to anything that had passed

before. “I will have the car opened,” Considine said to the driver.

“Go slowly till you come near Highgate and then bend away to the

stopping-place.”

 

The glare by now had become much stronger, and Roger saw Considine

suddenly stand up. Almost at the same moment a great cry in a strange

tongue roared out beyond them. A black soldier appeared running and

shouting beside the car, and another, and then, rushing towards them,

a whole group. He heard the steady beating of drums, and a cry

resolving itself into English: “Deathless! Deathless! Glory to the

Deathless One!” Considine, raising his right hand, made with it, high

in the air, a sudden gesture; the cry beat all round them and ceased

and broke out yet more wildly: “Glory to the Master of Love! Glory to

the Deathless One!” Negroes ran by the car, rushing up to it, to touch

it and fall back exhausted; they leapt and twisted at it.

 

He felt a sudden lurch and guessed insanely what the obstacle was they

had passed over. The cries, now in African, now in English, made an

arch of sound: “Death for the Deathless One!” he heard. “Glory to the

Lord of Death!” They were passing now between blazing fires each with

its own dance of whirling figures, which broke and hurled themselves

at the car, or flung themselves prostrate in adoration as it rolled

by. Opposite him the figure of Considine seemed to dilate in the red

glare; again and again he made the high mysterious gesture with his

right hand; every now and then he cried out in a great voice and a

strange tongue. Roger tore his eyes away and looked out over the

Heath, but beyond the light of the watch-fires it lay in darkness, a

darkness which seemed to him to be continually resolving itself into

these leaping, shrieking figures. Caithness was leaning back in his

corner, his eyes shut, his lips moving in swift murmured prayer.

 

Roger looked back as the car suddenly stopped and Considine, signing

for silence, began to speak. What he said Roger could not tell, but as

he ended and the car moved on again, a shout greater than any before

went up. He knew instinctively the meaning—it was that whereof the

rhythm leapt into the former English: “Death for the Deathless.”

 

But whatever the cries, Death itself began to accompany them on their

passage, for there was heard suddenly a revolver shot, and then

another, and as Roger, supposing for a moment that the English had

begun an attack, looked round him, he saw one of the running foaming

figures by the car stabbing at himself with a bayonet, and saw the

madness spreading to others, saw the steel glinting and

crimson-streaked faces in the light of the fires. Many of the negroes

had torn off their tunics, and some were already naked from head to

foot; among whom appeared here and there a yet wilder form in skins of

various kinds and high plumes of feathers, leading some eddy of the

general dance. Close by him two great negroes caught and held and

stabbed at each other with broad knives and more shots sounded around

them. Again and again he felt a horrid jerk and lurch of the car, and

still through it all Considine stood upright opposite him, and with an

exalted but unmoved face considered the revelry he had bidden to be.

 

At last this journey along a ridge of blazing watch-fires between two

seas of darkness came to an end. The crowds of negroes began to thin.

Considine threw up both hands, made a downward and outward gesture,

cried out once more, and sat down. The last negro halted, flung

himself on the earth, the car gathered strength, swept on, and after a

while issued at last into the darkness and silence of the open

country.

 

Caithness spoke bitterly, “Are you letting that horde of negroes loose

on London?” he asked.

 

“You heard me,” Considine answered. “You heard me an hour ago. I have

let the English feel panic, panic such as they have not felt since the

Vikings raided their coasts and burned their towns a thousand years

ago. They have been afraid of their feelings, of ecstasy and riot and

savage glee; they have frozen love and hated death. And I have shown

them these things wild and possibly triumphant; and what fear of a

thousand armies will not do, fear of their own passions will. They

will ask for peace. As for my Africans, they ask for death and they

shall have death. Most of them will kill themselves or one another

tonight; those who survive till tomorrow will die before your

soldiers. I do not pity them; they are not the adepts; all that they

are capable of I have given them. They die for the Undying. How many

martyrs would the Churches offer me of such a strain?”

 

“They die for your schemes,” Caithness said.

 

“They die for the Master of Death,” Considine answered, “either for me

or for another. If I do not achieve, another will. Do you think it is

an idle brag to call this year the First of the Second Evolution? It

is a truth the story of your Christ darkly foreshadowed. Him that you

ignorantly worship declare I unto you. Your martyrs in the past have

died, many of them, in such an agony of supreme rapture, and those of

many another faith. But I bring you achievement, I bring you the

fulfilment of desires, the lordship of love and death.”

 

There was a little silence; then he went on, slowly and almost to

himself: “It is a long work, and many have waited for it. My father

longed for it and did not see it, though he knew the beginning and

taught it to me. This was the beginning of sex when far away in the

ages the world divided itself in its primal dark instinct to destroy

death which seemed its doom. And when man came he desired immortality,

and deceived himself with begetting children and with religion and

with art. All these are not ecstasy, but the shadow of ecstasy.

Kingship and dynasties he created and cities and monuments and

science, and nothing satisfied that hungry desire. And then he created

love, and knew that that which existed between a man and a woman was

mysterious and powerful, but what to do with it he has not known. Only

a few have known, Caesar and a few others, and they have been struck

down. I think perhaps Chaka knew, for he was of the initiates. I

taught him what to do and how to govern his energies. But he had an

irresistible hunger for cruelty and destruction, and when the time

came he was destroyed. For the true adepts care for nothing but to

discover the secrets, and to enter into communion with ecstasy; and if

they shall govern the world, as they shall, they will do it to make

known to all men the things they themselves know. Fast and vigil they

keep for this, as my father taught me when r was a boy two centuries

ago. In trance and in waking they keep the end before them. I beheld

in a trance the making of sex, I went down to where in history and in

the individual being—which are one, as all the mystics know: inward

or backward, it is the same way—to where those high laboratories lie.

And there, in trance or in waking I do not know, I myself carried out

the great experiment, and I laid my imagination upon all the powers

and influences of sex and love and desire. In the adolescence of my

life I did this, and I have thriven upon that strength ever since. For

first I bent it to my own life. I set before myself three hundred

years from that night, and not two hundred have since gone by. I have

gathered from many women all that imagination desired, and I have

changed it to strength and cunning and length of days. I have never

kissed a woman; all that have lived with