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

was what reduced him to a state of infancy.

 

The sea—he couldn’t look at the shore from where he sat; only at the

terrace and the sea beyond—the sea was different. He wondered,

vaguely, whether it was Africa, or whether both sea and Africa were

names for something else, a full power, an irresistible mass:

irresistible if it moved, but then it didn’t move. Or hadn’t. Hadn’t

was a better word, because it might. All that mass of waters might

gather itself up and surge forward—surge or creep, swiftly or slowly,

anyhow irresistible. But he, sitting there, with the memory of that

dead hand jerking—as if a sudden wave had flopped forward out of the

sea over the green lawn, and then retreated again, and the whole vast

mass had swung silent and removed once more. If the mass followed

after a while, followed the wave? He would live in it, he would be

changed so as to breathe and bear it; he would see what other

inhabitants peopled it—there might be one chief thing, a fish of

sorts, a swift phosphorescent fish which was called Considine on earth

before the sea came. Or if the sea were merely a flat plain for

something else to slide over, a huge Africa in the shape he knew from

maps sliding over the water—only of course not sliding, but marching,

millions on millions of black manikins, so small, so very small, but

so many, marching forward, yet keeping that mapped shape, and he would

be just their size and be marching with them—left, right; left,

right. Whether they were alive or dead he couldn’t say; the fellow who

was marching either opposite him or alongside him—it wasn’t clear

which—kept quivering and jerking his hand. Hosts of them—Lord of

hosts; he had known the Lord of hosts when he was called Considine,

and rode on a bat’s back; these were the bats. Why was he here among

this crowd of bats with negro faces that rose out of that ocean, now

throbbing free from the ties which had so long held it? And all the

bats were singing—“Fathom five, fathom five; rich and strange.” There

they were, all coming on; he himself had called them and they were

coming.

 

He heard, but did not notice, a step beside him. Then a voice he

half-recognized said: “Here you are!” It was Caithness’s voice, and

with the recognition Roger’s trance broke. He shifted, looked round,

realized that he was cold, stood up, stamped once or twice, and said:

“Yes, here I am. But don’t,” he added, as his mind came more to

itself, “ask me where.”

 

“It’s a strange place,” Caithness said. “He must have many of them,

scattered about. Near London, for the airships to land. How’s he kept

himself hidden all these years?”

 

“I suppose,” Roger said flippantly, “the exalted imagination suggested

it. Shakespeare was a good business man.”

 

He found a certain relief in talking to the priest, however different

their views of Considine, as an ordinary Christian might find it

easier to talk to an atheist than to a saint. It wouldn’t last, but

just for a little it was pleasant and easy.

 

But Caithness, not having gone so far, was not so desirous of

reaction. He said, looking gloomily at the young man: “I don’t know

what you find in him. Where did he take you?”

 

Roger looked out to sea again, and half-unconsciously said, “There.”

The sea should give up its dead, out of the sea of universal shipwreck

the dead sailors of humanity should rise again, their bodies purified

by the salt of that ocean, running up to a land which perhaps then

they would feel and know for the first time in its full perfection:

matter made purely sensitive to matter, and all the secrets of the

passion of life revealed. Who could tell what wonders waited then,

when emotion was full and strong and sufficient, no longer greedy and

grasping, when the senses could take in colour and essence and respond

to all the delicate vibrations which now their clumsy dullness missed,

when deprivation itself should be an intense means of experiencing

both the deprived self and the thing of which it was deprived, when—O

when space and time were no more hindrances, when (for all one could

tell) the body itself might multiply itself, as certain magicians had

been said to do, and truly be here and there at once, or—“Come

then,” he prayed, but did not know to whom, “master of life, come

quickly.”

 

“It’s cold out here,” he heard Caithness say abruptly, “let’s go in.

Have you seen Rosenberg?”

 

Roger, as he half-reluctantly turned to follow, thought of the Jew

with a shock. “No,” he said. “I’d forgotten him.”

 

“I wonder what this man means to do with him,” the priest went on.

“Colonel Mottreux has brought the famous jewels.” There was a light

sneer in his voice, and Roger knew that the desire and delight of the

late Simon Rosenberg was utterly incomprehensible to Caithness. Yet it

should not have been so, he thought, for was there after all so much

difference between minds that longed to see their own natures made

manifest, the one in converted and beautiful souls adorned with

virtues, the other in a chosen and beautiful body adorned with jewels?

Certainly Caithness thought it was for the good of the souls, but no

doubt Rosenberg thought that his wife enjoyed wearing the jewels, and

very likely she did. Certainly, also, on Caithness’s hypothesis, the

souls were likely to enjoy their kind of beauty for a much longer time

than Mrs. Rosenberg, even if she hadn’t died when she did, could

possibly have enjoyed hers. So that Caithness was actually likely to

get more satisfaction out of his externalized desire than Rosenberg.

But for that you must have a supernatural hypothesis, and the fact

that a supernatural hypothesis had quite definite advantages didn’t

make it true. The fact that man wanted a thing very much never did

make it true—or the body that lay within would now perhaps be walking

in the house and even coming up to speak to him…He shuddered

involuntarily, no more in servile than in holy fear, and to escape

from that hovering awe said: “Have they been given to Rosenberg yet?”

 

“No,” Caithness answered. “I don’t fancy Considine’s all that anxious

to part with them.”

 

Roger looked at him in surprise. They had come into the room where

they had breakfasted, from which doors of an exquisitely clear glass

led on to the lawn in front of the house. The priest walked across and

looked out. Roger said, rather coldly: “That’s utterly unnecessary. Do

you hate him so much?”

 

“I don’t hate him,” Caithness said, “except that he’s set himself

against God, like Antichrist which is to come.”

 

“O don’t be silly,” Roger said crossly. “Antichrist indeed! What on

earth has he done to make you think he’d steal a lot of jewels?”

 

“What’s he done,” the priest said over his shoulder, “to make you

think he wouldn’t? Hasn’t he put many men to death and stolen the

minds of others? If he wants the jewels he’ll take them.”

 

“But he won’t want them,” Roger exclaimed; “that’s the whole point. I

may, or for all I know Mottreux may, but he’s no more likely to want

them than you are, to be fair to you,” he added with a half-humorous

admission of Caithness’s own integrity.

 

The door opened, and Mottreux and Rosenberg came into the room. The

old Jew looked at them for a moment and then went across to the other

side of the room and sat down. Mottreux paused by the door, seeming

not to have expected to find the other two there. His dark and hungry

eyes rested on Roger and moving towards him, he said in a low voice,

“I hear Nielsen has really died.”

 

The sentence itself seemed fatal; in its note of hopelessness it

conveyed death. Roger, not finding words to answer, nodded. Mottreux

walked slowly over to Rosenberg, to whom he began to talk in a low

voice. Caithness, after a minute or so, went over to join them. Roger

considered doing the same thing and decided not to. He didn’t want to

chat, and he couldn’t see what, besides mere chat, Mottreux and

Rosenberg could have to say to each other. Mottreux, he remembered,

was supposed to be waiting for the captain, whoever the captain was.

His mind went back to the sea, and he thought suddenly of submarines.

Perhaps that was what Considine had meant by “moving.” It was all such

a mad mixture, purple rhetoric and precise realism, doctrines of

transmutation and babble about African witch-doctors and airships and

submarines. He wondered what Isabel was doing, and whether perhaps

after all he would have been wiser to stop…but he couldn’t, he

couldn’t; the thing that for years had torn at his heart and brain had

to be satisfied. He and she had alike to choose necessity. But if his

necessity could have lain with hers…And Sir Bernard—what would he

have made of this house where servants of impossibilities talked by

the hearth, and he himself waited for the next moment of explication?

Staring at his toes, Roger thought that that was all he did seem to be

doing—waiting. Was he wasting his time? had Considine meant him to be

doing something all this while? He ought to have been working, to have

imagined intensely the…

 

Considine was in the room. To Roger’s preoccupied mind he might have

materialized out of the air, but apparently he hadn’t. He said,

“There’s no message yet. Mottreux, I’ll dictate the alternative

dispositions for the generals, if you will come. These gentlemen will

be able to amuse themselves a little.” He came over to Roger and

looked into his eyes, then he said, smiling, “You’ve been running

after your fancies, Ingram; you’ve not been driving even their faint

power through you. Do you think it will happen by itself?”

 

“I know,” Roger said. “I was thinking so—‘They heard and were abashed

and up they sprang.’”

 

“So,” Considine answered. “Turn on to that all your heart; and then

turn that on to yourself. Don’t let yourself grow too tired, but never

quite let go. We’ll talk again soon.” He turned.

 

“Mottreux?”

 

The other joined him and they went across the hall into another room,

where a case stood on the table. “There are Rosenberg’s jewels,”

Considine said. “We’ll give them to him presently; let’s look at them

once.” He took a key from his pocket and opened the case as he spoke,

and then poured upon the table a glowing heap of jewels. They shone

and sparkled; they gleamed and glinted—some set, many unset; stones

of every kind revealing the life of stone, colour revealing the power

of colour. Considine stood and looked at them, and if Roger had been

there he might have thought that the heap of jewels and the human

figure reflected each other, and that intense life leapt and re-leapt

between them. The man’s form seemed to hold in itself depths of

mysterious tint; so clear and mysterious was the corporeal presence,

disciplined and purged and nourished through many decades by supreme

passion. The deep smile broke out again as he gazed, exulting in the

joy of beauty, absorbing it, and almost visibly transmuting it into

his own dominating awareness of it. He stretched out his hand and

picked up one or two, and a whole diadem of splendour faded by the

unparalleled delicacy of consummated mortality which held it. He laid

them down and laughed softly as he did so, humming again to himself,

“‘Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’ All this,” he added

aloud, “but one blossom under which