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

for the rich. I can satisfy even the rich; I can

buy them out. The Church fortunately has refused the secular arm.”

 

“Do you mock at it then?” Caithness demanded, he also having ceased to

eat.

 

“It’s more purely Christian than ever before,” the other answered;

“its nature is in complete defeat; there and there only it thrives.

Your wife was right, Ingram; that’s the choice between defeat and

victory. But I’ve chosen victory and I have it. Will you eat no more?

Then,” he stood up, “you shall come with me, Ingram; for I’ve a visit

to make. Mr. Caithness may go to his penitent if he chooses, or make

his meditations anywhere about the house or the grounds. Presently

I’ll come to the king. Vereker, do you relieve the wireless man.

Mottreux, will you be about in case the captain comes?”

 

They saluted and rose to their feet, as, taking Roger by the arm, he

left the room. They went by corridors and stairs to the left wing of

the house stretched backwards towards the sea, corresponding to

another wing on the right. Between the two ran a verandah, a wide

lawn, and a terrace, from which steps led down to a lower terrace, and

so on to the edge of the cliffs. And as they went the young man felt

everywhere something of that sense of distance which he had

experienced in the hall on the previous night—a distance in which all

near things existed in a peculiar natural order. The house might have

been one of those mythical buildings which in various legends have

been lifted from the earth by music, as Troy rose to Apollo’s harping

or Pandemonium like an exhalation with the sound of dulcet symphonies.

 

There were no pictures, so far as he could see; instead, the walls

were covered with soft hangings, of different colours, but each colour

richer than ever he had seen it before. Here and there these deep

tapestries were worked with shapes, mostly, so far as he could

discern, symmetrical designs, though occasionally a human or non-human

figure showed—a man or a winged monster or even a small complex city

thick with houses and crowds. But Roger could not see them very well

and he was not allowed to pause to examine them. Considine walked on,

humming to himself, and again Roger recollected with a curious shock

that this mature easy form, moving so lightly and gaily beside him,

was the High Executive of African ecstasies. Suddenly he recognized

the words into which Considine had changed his humming and exclaimed,

almost stopping—“But that’s Shakespeare!”

 

“—shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough,

 

“Yes,” Considine answered. “D’you think Shakespeare didn’t know

something of it? Yet you must have lectured on the Tempest.”

 

“If you mean that Shakespeare believed in the Second Evolution of

Man-” Roger rather desperately began.

 

“He imagined its nature,” Considine answered. “Think of it—and read

Ariel’s songs. Not that you’ll understand them yet. Nor do I. Perhaps

no-one will—properly—until after the conquest of death. He is your

greatest poet because none but he has so greatly lived and died and

lived in his verse. ‘On the bat’s back’—that’s the purity of being.

He imagined it. But here”—he paused at the door of a room, and his

voice became graver—“is the physical experiment.”

 

He opened it and they went in. It was a large high room, and there

moved in it continually a little tender breeze, as of spring, though

there were no windows, or, if there were, they were hidden behind the

pale yellow hangings which here also hid the walls. They shook, ever

so faintly, in the movement of the air, and it seemed to Roger for a

few moments as if everywhere great fields of daffodils trembled in

that gentle wind. The vague suggestion passed, and left in its stead a

thought of a universal sun shedding a golden presence through clear

air, and then that again vanished, and he knew they were only

wonderfully wrought hangings, and some beautiful light diffused itself

over them. In the middle of the room there was a low divan, on which

lay a motionless figure. In one corner was a chair on which a man sat,

who, as they paused in the entrance, rose and came over to them.

Otherwise the room was bare.

 

Roger looked again at the motionless figure on the divan, gazing at it

in a sudden recollection. He knew the face, he had seen it rapt into

an ardent intention, offering itself to death and to the High

Executive of death. He turned sharply to Considine. “But it’s

Nielsen,” he said.

 

Considine nodded, and said to the watcher of the dead, “There’s no

news?”

 

“None, sir,” the man said. “He hasn’t stirred or breathed.”

 

“It’s seven days,” Considine said absently, and walked across the room

to the couch where the dead man lay. Roger followed him, his heart

beating more quickly than usual. What—what was expected, here and

now?

 

Considine seemed to feel the unspoken question. He said, still looking

at Nielsen: “We’re waiting for the result.”

 

Roger said: “You’re waiting for him to live?”

 

“If it may be,” Considine answered. “He was a strong spirit.” He knelt

down by the couch and looked intently into the dead man’s eyes. Roger

waited, growing more troubled every moment with terrible expectation.

This man had intended passionately to succeed in his unpreluded task;

he had meant to live. Could so high and strong a purpose break laws

which only gods and sons of gods had suspended in the past? Lazarus,

the tale ran, had been drawn back from death by supernatural grace,

but was it also—was it only—in the power of natural man by natural

laws to conquer death? Was the old symbolism of the mysteries true in

its reversal? was the supernatural itself but a visionary exhalation

of the natural, and could it hold nothing but what the natural held?

As he stood gazing a shock went through him, for it seemed to him that

a quiver passed over the dead man’s face. Considine stiffened where he

knelt, and threw out a hand to beckon the third watcher who ran

quietly and silently to the other side of the couch. He also knelt,

and together the two concentrated themselves on the again unchanging

figure. It was motionless in the self-closed stillness of the dead;

pallor had touched it, and yet a pallor which—and again the smallest

quiver seemed to pass through the dead face. Roger thought to himself,

“It’s a trance, it’s epilepsy, it’s-” But Considine was there, and he

did not believe—even in that wild rational effort to explain away a

thing which hadn’t happened and wouldn’t and couldn’t happen he did

not believe—that Considine made mistakes of this kind. The man had

meant to die; undoubtedly on that evening in Hampstead he had meant to

die. This was no booby show, no conjurer’s trick; it was man at the

extreme point of his powers sending all those powers to the

enlargement of his dominion. The master of the adepts kneeled there,

seeking to aid the initiate through the experiment which he himself,

called to a different duty, had not yet dared, as the Pope aided St.

Francis on a more glorious business than his own. Roger steadied

himself; if man could attempt this man could watch the attempt. This

was his first test and he would not fail. He would open himself to the

knowledge, to the experience of the sight, he would fill himself with

it; who could tell but one day he, he himself, might lie on such a

couch to await and compel such a…resurrection?

 

It was—it was happening. The eyelids flickered. Considine’s gaze was

fixed on them; he was leaning forward as if to catch the first glimpse

of the returning consciousness, to meet and hold it lest it should

fail. A ripple of darkness or light seemed to pass down the body; in

the infinitesimal vibration of all its hues none could tell whether it

were darkness or light that shook it. The eyelids flickered again;

Roger caught himself in the midst of a passionate wish that they

should open; they might hold madness or horror; they might strike him

and blast him with their power or splendour or ungodly terror. Or they

might be gay—gay beyond all dreaming: “merrily, merrily shall I live…”

No; he couldn’t bear such piercing glee-“on a bat’s back”-death

the bat ridden and flown by a laughing joy. He couldn’t bear it; he

looked at Considine, and for a brief fraction of a second Considine’s

eyes flashed at him and away, but in that swift meeting Roger felt

command and nourishment and burning expectation, and in its power he

set himself again to await revelation.

 

But for awhile it seemed as if all was done. The body was again rigid

and there lay before the straining eyes only the awful barricade of

death. Roger thought suddenly how absurd it was—all this abstraction

and personification; there was no such thing as death, there were only

dead men and dead things. Men tried to make dead men bearable,

comprehensible, friendly, by giving to them a general name. Death as

an imagined person might be terrifying, but he was, so imagined,

human. But Death was nothing of the sort; Death was neither Azrael nor

any other immortal shadowy being—it was only dead men and dead

things. “Insubstantial Death is amorous”—even the poets pretend; no,

not always—“O but to die and go we know not where…” and to come

back.

 

It moved. The hand extended along the couch moved, simultaneously with

what seemed a breath. Roger strangled a cry. The hand jerked again, so

tiny a jerk that only its force made it perceptible. Something was

trying to move that rigid organism, and not quite succeeding. But the

signs of its presence spasmodically showed. The nostrils quivered

slightly; the lips just parted. The fingers twitched.

 

Considine said: “Help him then,” and at once the third man leapt into

activity, and others who had silently entered the room behind Roger,

unnoticed by his fascinated attention, ran softly up. He thought

afterwards that some bell must have been rung by the other watcher

when first the body had stirred, and that these had gathered in

readiness. They were about the dead man; they concerned themselves

busily with it; they did this and the other, Roger didn’t very well

know what, for he was trying not to hope they would be unsuccessful.

All the time Considine hardly moved, save to put himself in a more

convenient position for the workers; all the time his eyes remained

fixed on those closed eyes, and his will waited for the moment when it

could unite itself with the restored will of the dead.

 

After so much toil and vigil they failed. What time was spent there

Roger hardly knew. But suddenly he knew a difference in the body about

which they stood or moved. It changed to a more dreadful pallor; a

greyness crept over it. Beyond the knowledge even of the adept it

endured withdrawal; the kingdom so nearly grasped fell away. The

neophyte of death was swallowed up in death; beyond all earlier

semblance, and before their eyes, he died indeed. Considine signed to

the workers to cease; he said to them: “Look,” and they obeyed. He

said again: “Look, look as masters. Don’t lose a moment; change this

into victory within you. Death here shall be life in you; feel it,

imagine it, draw it into yourselves; as with all experience, so with

this. Live by it; feed on it and live.”

 

But he himself rose to his feet, and with a sign to Roger to accompany

him went out of the room.