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

we live for a moment. Yet they are

almost worthy Messias.”

 

But Mottreux leant nearer them, and turned an agonized face towards

his master.

 

“You are giving them back,” he whispered. “You won’t surely?” His

hands trembled forward towards the heap. “It’s…it’s life,” he said

grasping, and fell on his knees by the table.

 

Considine looking down at him laid a hand on his shoulder. “Do you

feel them so?” he asked, and felt the answer shudder through the

kneeling man’s limbs as he turned his face upwards.

 

“Don’t give them back,” he moaned, “don’t shut them up! they’re

breath, they’re everything, they’re me! Don’t keep them in a

box—unless I keep it! Give them to me! You don’t want them. You don’t

care for their life, you’ve got all the life you want. I tell you

they’re like woman, they’re more than woman: who ever saw a woman

quiver like that? quiver and be so still? I want to grow to them,

don’t take them away. I haven’t asked you much, I’ll do anything you

want. Tell me someone to kill. I’ll give you his blood for these

stones. I’ll give you my blood for them—only let me love them a

little, let me hold them while you kill me. O they’ll kill me

themselves, they’re so merciless. Can’t you feel them? Can’t you feel

them melting into you? Or is it that I’m melting? I…I…” His voice

choked with his passion and stopped.

 

Considine leant over him. “Now, Mottreux, now,” he said, “remember the

end of the experiment. Be master of love, be master of death! Change

delight that is agony into that agony that is delight. Not for

possession, not for yourself, achieve and transmute desire.” Standing

behind him he pressed his hands on the other’s shoulders, till

Mottreux crouched under the weight. “Not for a dream like the poor

wretch who died but for the power and glory of life, for the marriage

of death and love, and for the dominion that comes from them.

Mottreux, Mottreux! you that live to beauty, die to beauty!”

 

But Mottreux, as the pressure relaxed, sprang to his feet and leant

half over the table with a snarl.

 

“They are my life,” he said, “who touches them touches me.”

 

“Remember those who have failed on the threshold of achievement,”

Considine answered. “You seek a deeper thing than these stones

hold-you seek the mastery of death. Destroy them then, and enter

farther into the chambers of death. But if you touch one to keep or to

destroy, for greed or desire, or lest others should gain, you are

lost, Mottreux. If you possess you are lost.”

 

“It’s not true,” the tormented creature exclaimed, and went on

hurriedly. “Don’t you possess—money and houses and lands? Don’t you

say that a man can grow by the ecstasy which the things he possesses

give him? a miser by gold, and a lover by woman?”

 

“If the chance of the world throws things into his hands, let him take

them,” Considine answered; “if it tears them from him let him forsake

them. It need make no difference to him. As for me, I use what I have

for the purpose of the schools. But if it were all caught away

tomorrow what change would it cause in me? The man who prefers

possession to abandonment is lost. You’ve come far, Mottreux, by

experience of hunting and war; you’ve grown and thriven on that

rapture. Thrive now on this; all this pain is but your power seeking

its proper end.”

 

“Nielsen sought it and he’s dead,” the other cried out. “It can’t be

done; it’s wilder than all dreams. Haven’t others in Uganda and

Nigeria tried it and failed?”

 

“And Jersey and London,” Considine said. “More than you’ll ever know.

Will you disbelieve because a million have failed? One shall succeed

and others and their children shall have it in their blood. Leave

Nielsen; leave all. Leave this.”

 

He moved to face the other and meeting his eyes held them with so

strong a power that Mottreux turned his own eyes away.

 

But he moaned desperately, “I can’t—not this. Anything else—not

this.”

 

“Are you a fool?” Considine said, “it’s always anything else, and it’s

always this. How will you die indeed if you daren’t die now? There’s

not a man in all this world who doesn’t have to relinquish; it’s given

to us to do it willingly and make our profit from it. Strike and live

in the wound.”

 

“But you won’t give them back?” Mottreux cried. “At least keep them

yourself; don’t give them away.”

 

“Certainly I shall give them,” Considine answered, “for it’s better

that they should serve a myth than a man, and if I were to keep them

now I should take the kingdom of man away from you-”

 

As he paused, there was a sharp knock at the door. Considine thrust

Mottreux round so that the tormented face was hidden, and cried a word

over his shoulder. Vereker came into the room. “Sir, the message is

here,” he said.

 

“I’ll come,” Considine answered, and as Vereker went out he gathered

the jewels in his hands and poured them back into the case. Mottreux

leaned against the table; he could not speak; he gazed as the

traveller whose camel has just fallen might stare after the vanished

mirage or as a young boy might when the beloved of his heart gives her

sacred hand into another’s charge. Considine locked the case, dropped

it back on the table, slipped his hand into Mottreux’s arm, and drew

him from the room.

 

Meanwhile the three guests, centrifugally repulsed by the very ardour

which united them, remained for some time in the one room. They were

aware, as they sat there, of increased movement in the house; new

voices came to them, and the occasional sound of cars arriving or

departing. The expectancy of crisis was heightened, and Caithness who

was the most open to external impressions, was the first to give way.

Ezekiel still sat, lost in meditation on antique words, by the

fireplace; brooding over the manner in which the High and Holy One had

in the secret story of Joseph or of David, in the hidden sayings of

Ruth or Esther, signified the return of Israel to His pardon. Roger,

concerned with other texts, sought to bring into his memory of them

the emotion awakened by the sight he had endured; he attempted to

realize the august periods of time and space which exist in and are

measured by the mastery of poetry. Lines came to him from a distance,

but it was not exterior distance; it was himself whose leagues lay

between himself and their origin, and all that space of self was no

longer void but tremulous with unapprehended life. He had always, it

seemed, been too close to them; he understood how small his feeble

little understanding was. They rose from an abyss—they had always

said so—“the mind’s abyss”—“that awful Power rose from the mind’s

abyss”—his mind’s abyss-it would lead him into the abyss—it would

define the abyss for him—the powers that inhabited it were his powers

-O how little, how little, did the most ardent reader know what

mysteries lay in “the mystery of words”

 

There darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things work

endless changes; there as in a mansion like their proper home

he wondered for a fantastic instant if it were this house which was

indeed their home.

 

But Caithness’s mind was not on such exploration. The nature of his

intellect and the necessities of his office had directed his attention

always not towards things in themselves but towards things in

immediate action. He defined men by morality; it was perhaps

inevitable that he should define God in the same way. The most

difficult texts for him to explain away had always been those which

obscurely hint at the origin of evil itself in the Unnameable, “the

lying spirit” of Zedekiah, the dark question of Isaiah—“Shall there

be evil in the city and I the Lord have not done it?” He was always

trying to avoid Dualism, and falling back on the statement that

Omniscience might permit what it did not and could not originate, yet

other origin (outside Omniscience) there be none. It is true he always

added that it was a mystery, but a safer line was to insist that good

and evil were facts, whatever the explanation was. True as this might

be, it had the slight disadvantage that he saw everything in terms of

his own good and evil, and so imperceptibly to resist evil rather than

to follow good became the chief concern of his exhortations. So

perhaps the great energies are wasted; so perhaps even evil is not

sufficiently resisted. His mind now was full of Inkamasi’s defiance;

his own pet miracle seemed to justify him, and he thought of himself

in relation to the king as the chief champion of Christendom against

Antichrist. It was also a little annoying to be treated as if he were

in an elementary stage of his own religion, and a personal rancour

unconsciously reinforced the devotion of his soul to its hypothesis.

 

He went out of the room, intending to go back to the Zulu, and saw

that the house was indeed more populated than it had been. He saw

several new faces in the hall; there were two or three officers in a

strange dark-green uniform. One man had a face like an Arab; there was

another who might be an Italian. He heard a voice say “Feisul Pasha,”

and saw a third cross the hall from the front door. He turned

abruptly, ran up the stairs, and on the first landing met Mottreux.

 

The colonel was coming slowly along; his face was pale and wrenched.

As he saw Caithness he paused, and the priest instinctively stood

still also. So for a few moments they waited, duellists uncertain of

what was to come. Mottreux said at last—as if it were not what he

meant: “You’re going to the king?”

 

“And if so?” Caithness asked. Something in Mottreux’s voice puzzled

him. It seemed to wish to delay him; it hesitated; he could have

believed that it inquired about something which had not been

mentioned.

 

Mottreux said abruptly: “I suppose you think we’re all wrong?”

 

Caithness very shortly said he did, but the other did not step away.

He added: “I suppose you—want us to fail?”

 

Caithness, again shortly, agreed. Mottreux came close up to him,

looked round, began to whisper, and was suddenly taken by a spasmodic

shudder. He caught the priest’s arm and then let it go sharply, as if

he had touched something hateful. He said in a low voice, “If one

could…” and his voice died away.

 

In the tone of a director of souls Caithness said: “Could?”

 

“If one could—make peace,” Mottreux whispered. “Would there—would

there be room for a man who could make peace?”

 

He was close up against Caithness, and the priest, feeling his

agitation and shaken by it, dropped his voice to an equal whisper,

“But how can—we shan’t take his terms.”

 

Mottreux said, “But without his terms?”

 

“How can you make peace without him?” Caithness asked.

 

“He isn’t human,” Mottreux jerked out. “If…if one caught a mad

ape…”

 

The truth flashed into Caithness’s mind—the possible truth, and the

possibility possessed him. In this strange house, amid strange

inhabitants, had come the strangest whisper of all, a whisper of

antagonism in the very heart of the enemy. His brain ran before him,

forgetting everything but this impossible chance. He leaned a little

closer yet, and said, “If you can’t cage it-”

 

Mottreux answered, “You know the Prime