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

In silence they went back to the hall, then

Considine spoke. “Now you shall rest,” he said. “It’s failed this

time, but we shall succeed yet, and you’ll see it or hear of it.

Meanwhile, do what you can to make this sight part of you and make it

part of your will to immortality and victory. If you want food it’s

here. Presently I’ll come to you again; we’re hardly likely to move

to-day. But now I must go to the king.”

 

He nodded and moved off, and presently Caithness, sitting in talk by

the king’s bed in an upper room, heard the door open, and looking

round saw him in the entrance. The priest stood up abruptly and

Inkamasi stirred.

 

“How is our guest?” Considine asked. “Have you convinced him how

wasteful vengeance is, Mr. Caithness? and therefore what folly?”

 

Caithness said, with almost a sneer, “It’s fitting for you to talk of

folly and waste—you who spend the blood of the martyrs for your own

foolishness. Why have you come here?”

 

“For a better reason than you came to Hampstead not so long ago,”

Considine answered. “It wasn’t a wise night, that, for because of that

the king must choose his future to-day. You should have kept to your

pupils, Mr. Caithness, to the morals you understand and the dogmas

that you don’t. But you must leave us now for I must talk to the

king.”

 

Caithness looked at Inkamasi. “If you want me to stay,” he began but

the other shook his head. “Go, if you will,” he said; “it’s best that

he and I should understand each other. I’ll remember better this

time.”

 

Considine held the door for the priest, closed it, and came to the

chair by the bed. He paused there and smiled down at Inkamasi. “Have I

your permission to sit down, sir?” he asked, and his voice was moved

with strength such as the king never remembered in all their strange

intercourse.

 

“Is this another insult?” he asked, restraining anger.

 

“It isn’t anything of an insult,” Considine said, “and you should know

it. Haven’t I made you what you are, and could I insult the thing I’ve

restored? Therefore I will have an answer—have I your permission to

sit?”

 

The king made a movement with his hand. “I think you’ve only fooled

me,” he answered bitterly, “but you can play with me as you

choose—only I know it now. Sit or stand, do what you will, I can only

watch you and at bottom defy you.”

 

“I will not seek it,” the other replied. “It has been opened once and

it is enough. And you—are you sure that man can conquer till he has

been wholly defeated? are you sure that he can find plenitude till he

has known utter despair? You will not let him despair of himself, but

it may be that only in such a complete despair he finds that which

cannot despair and is something other than man.”

 

“There are many reasons for avoiding the work, and all religions have

excused man,” the other’s voice said. “Despair if you will, and hope

that despair may save you. Entreat the gods; I do not refuse you your

prayer.”

 

“There’s a submission we’re slow to understand,” Inkamasi cried out,

“a place where divinity triumphed—I believe in that.”

 

“Be it so,” the answer came; “but tell me then what you will do.”

 

There was a long pause before the king said: “I know there is no place

for me upon earth.”

 

“There is place and enough for Inkamasi,” Considine answered. “There

is no place in Africa for Inkamasi the king. You best know whether

there is a place in Europe. You know whether your friends downstairs

and in London receive that royalty as I receive it.”

 

“They have all courtesy and good will, but they have forgotten the

Crown,” Inkamasi said. “They do not mock me but they do not believe.”

 

“They are sons without a mother,” Considine went on, “for they know

neither the Crown nor the Republic. Royalty is a shade and Equality

not yet born. What is the difference between these traditions to me so

long as either is held and is a passion? But most men are empty of

both. And if I must choose I will choose the king and not the State,

for the king is flesh and blood and yet undying, and is a symbol of

that we seek.”

 

“Am I left,” Inkamasi asked, “to find my only servants in my enemies?”

 

“It seems,” Considine answered, “even so, that I and I only am the

friend of the king.”

 

“And what will the king’s friend offer the king in his

superfluousness?” Inkamasi asked again.

 

“I have only two things to give,” Considine said; “let the royalty of

the king choose which he will take from a believe in him. I will offer

a house and servants and money, all that he needs, and he may live

contented with his knowledge of his own inheritance. Or I will give

the king a royal death.”

 

“There will be none to hamper you then,” Inkamasi said with a sudden

smile.

 

“There is none to hamper me now,” Considine answered gravely. “For the

majesty of the king is in my care and on my side, and if the king

choose to live without his majesty, though the choice is his own, he

will choose to live in a dream. I am the keeper of the strength of

royalty; what is outside me is Europe, and that the king knows.”

 

“Yet I thought Europe would aid me to aid my people,” Inkamasi

meditated aloud—“law and medicine and science.”

 

“They are good in their place, but the question is whether these

things can take the place of greater,” Considine answered. “But the

choice is for the king. Only it must be to-day. Tomorrow the submarine

returns to Africa, and there are three ways in which the king may go

in her. I will have him taken to his people and set among them, that

he may try the fates between himself and the man who now rules them,

and who inherits royalty if Inkamasi dies. Or I will send him as my

friend till peace is signed and he may live a private man wherever he

chooses on the face of the earth.”

 

“And the third way?” Inkamasi asked.

 

“He shall go clothed with royalty and death,” Considine said. “I will

come when night falls to know the king’s mind.”

 

He stood up and went down on one knee, and then moved backwards to the

door. There in silence he waited a moment, opened it, and went out.

 

Inkamasi lay through the afternoon considering all that had been said.

The suggestion which had been made to him not only received additional

force from the fact that it had been presented as one among several

possibilities, but drew its chief strength from the tendencies of his

own mind. He knew very well that, of all those by whom he was, or was

likely to be surrounded, Considine alone had such intense appreciation

of royalty as he himself had. Nor did his own bitter dislike blind him

to the fact that his first attempt upon the other had failed, and that

to concentrate the rest of his life upon remedying that failure would

be not only undignified but treasonable. The king might hate, but his

duty was to his own kingship first and always. How to save and serve

that must be the first thing in his mind. But for this a life in

England among his new circle of friends seemed useless enough. He had

a sudden vision of himself growing old, harping upon the tradition

which was his, regarded at best as a feeble sentimental survival, at

worst as a mere bore. All his profound romanticism rejected the

prospect. But to live as Considine proposed would be little better. He

would be pitied by himself instead of by others; he would dig his own

pit of sentimentality instead of having it dug for him, but the pit

would be as deep and fatal.

 

There was a course Considine had not named, to try and forget that he

was the king, to settle down to ordinary work, here or abroad, and

submit himself to the idea of the Government, whatever it might be,

under which he might find himself: accepting his dispossession simply

and sincerely. And this, had there been no alternative, he might have

done. But once that alternative had been suggested the colour of the

thought of it tinged all his attempts to choose. For though the man

Inkamasi might not kill himself—so his creed taught—yet the king had

a duty to his kingship. So far as might be, it must never be

surrendered; and here was a way by which it might be surrendered in a

beauty and greatness equal to its own. Examining himself for the last

time, Inkamasi knew that in turning to Europe he had desired Europe

for the sake of Africa; that he had studied logic and medicine and law

for the sake of the king and his people, and that the king might the

better benefit and govern and be one with his people. He did not care

for the high abstractions of thought; when he talked of them it was

when he took his ease in his private circle and amused himself as

other kings had amused themselves with jest or hunt or song. And now,

the child of unknown things, he set his face to go up to Jerusalem,

that the king’s crown might be properly received by the unvestmenting

hands of Death. Peace entered in on him and he lay looking out of the

window, watching the November twilight gather, and uniting within

himself, not in such a twilight but in a more wonderful union of

opposites, the day of his own individual being and the mysterious

night of his holy and awful office.