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

Chapter Thirteen - THE MEETING OF THE ADEPTS

It was already dark. The sea was lost, and the drive in front of the

house. Roger was alone, for Caithness had not returned from the king,

and Rosenberg, though it was but late afternoon, had with a few

muttered words gone back to his own room. No-one of the others had

come in. Roger had read a little in one or other of the books

scattered about-they were mostly what are called the “classics” of

various times and languages. They were all in “privately printed”

editions, exquisitely done with types he did not recognize and

bindings whose colours were strange and beautiful combinations. There

was one volume of the fragments of Sappho, another of the Song of

Solomon, an AEschylus, a Gallic War, a Macbeth; there were one or two

Chinese texts, and one or two which Roger supposed must be African—at

least, the characters were altogether strange to him. There was a

manuscript book, half filled with delicate mysterious writing, also in

strange characters. He had read in some and looked at others; he had

tried to search in them for the power which reposed there, and of

which those Greek or English or unknown characters were sacramental

symbols. And when he ceased and for a while half abandoned the search

he was aware that he did not abandon it, as so often before, to return

to an outer world of things different from the secret paths he had

been following. Sometimes when he had been reading at home he had

looked up to feel the rooms, the furniture—tolerable and even

pleasant as it all was—in some sense alien to the sacred syllables.

His own writing-table, comfortable and useful, blinked rather

awkwardly at him when he returned from the visit of Satan to Eden or

the nightingale in the embalmed darkness. But here there was no such

difficulty or distinction; all was natural. As a result of that most

fortunate combination of mental and visible or audible things, the

tiredness which often seized him in those moments was absent. For it

was never great things in their own medium which wearied him; they—he

had always known and now more than ever knew—were strength and

refreshment; it was the change from one medium to another, the passing

from their clear darkness to the fog of daily experience. But here

there was no need to return; all was one.

 

He walked to the window, and looked out. But he could see nothing

except the lights of a car standing in front of the door; he turned

back into the room, and after hesitating for a minute or two went

across it and out into the hall. There he saw a group of men, gathered

round Considine. They were breaking up even while he glanced; each of

them went off as on separate business. Considine stood alone. He

stretched himself easily, smiled at Roger, and walked towards him.

 

“All’s done,” he said. “They’ve communicated from Africa. Your people

are in touch with mine. I knew they would begin soon.”

 

Roger, still struggling with a scepticism in political things which he

had abandoned in spiritual, said: “It can’t be possible that…”

 

“It’s certain,” Considine answered. “Suydler—what can Suydler do

against us? He won’t trust himself to flog the English on, nor to

cheat the Powers that will want to cheat him. South Africa I will

leave for fifty years or so; at the end of that time they’ll be

begging to come in. Let’s go outside, shall we?”

 

They went out on to the verandah, and, as the coldness of the evening

took them, veils seemed to fall away from Considine. Roger felt

himself in the presence of maturity and power beyond his thought,

perhaps something of that power into which he had been experimentally

searching. The man by his side threw off the habitual disguise of

years and behaviour which he wore; he moved like a “giant form,” and

though his eyes, when they rested on Roger, were friendly, their

friendliness was tremendous and wise and, as it might have been,

archangelic. He walked lightly, pacing the verandah, and seemed not to

depend on the floor to support him; Roger felt clumsy and awkward

beside him, earth and a child of earth beside earth purified, infused

and transmuted.

 

Considine said: “We shall go tonight. I’ve got one more thing to do

here, and there’s time enough for that.”

 

“You always seem to have time to spare,” Roger answered.

 

“Why not?” the other asked. “Every second is an infinity, once you can

enter it. But man’s mind sits outside its doors moaning, and leaves

his activity to run about the world in a fever of excitement. You will

leave that presently.”

 

“How did you set out on this?” Roger asked diffidently. The impetuous

angry Roger of London had disappeared; he walked as a child and as a

child referred to his adults.

 

In the darkness Considine smiled. “This morning,” he said, “a girl

jilted a boy, and the boy said, ‘Why do I suffer helplessly? This also

is I—all this unutterable pain is I, and I grow everywhere through it

into myself.’ I could show you the street where it happened—they

haven’t yet pulled it down—where the boy said, ‘If this pain were

itself power…” So he imagined it as himself and himself as it, and

because it was greater than himself he knew that he also was greater

than himself, and as old and as strong as he chose. The girl’s dead

long ago; she was a pretty baby.”

 

“But then?” Roger asked.

 

“Then—a little later-before noon,” the voice answered, “the boy found

another girl and loved her. But as that love spread through him he

remembered the vastness of his pain and what had seemed to him

possible because of it, and he asked himself whether love were not

meant for something more than wantonness and child-bearing and the

future that closes in death. He taught himself how this also was to

charge his knowledge of what man could be, and he poured physical

desire and mental passion into his determination of life. Then he was

free.”

 

Roger said: “But why Africa?”

 

“My father was a surgeon,” the other answered, “though not a poor man,

and he went on a ship, taking me with him. The ship was wrecked—it

wasn’t unusual then—but he and I were saved, and came to shore. I’ve

told you that my father knew something of the old magical

traditions—things I haven’t much concerned myself with; such as are

of value are natural properties of the developing and unstunted nature

of man, and the rest are of no value—but by such tricks he made

himself feared by the sorcerers. We went far into the inland before he

died, and there I found that things which I’d discovered with pain

were taught to the priestly initiates. But they held them secret and

were afraid of them, and I knew they were for the world when the time

should come. And now it has come.”

 

“And the end,” Roger cried out in a sudden access of desperation and

hope, “what is the end?”

 

The other turned to confront him, but in the darkness Roger, full of

cloudy memories and fiery prophecies, was uncertain what he faced.

There had been in the movement something of Isabel, but it was not

Isabel; he wondered whether it were not rather the lofty head of

Milton, doctrinal yet mysterious, at which he was looking, but the

eyes were not Milton’s, for Milton was blind, and these eyes were

shining at him in the night. It was rather—this figure—something

that had to do with the sea the sound of which came to him still, the

sea that had come up from its borders and been talking with him though

he had not known it for what it was. So it was not eyes, it was light

under the sea which he saw, and he was being swept away from human

beings into the ocean gulfs and currents. He struck out as if he were

swimming, but that did not ease the choking in his throat and nostrils

nor the clamour in his ears. With all his power he drove upwards, and

it seemed that his head broke out from the waves and beheld not very

far off a shore on which his friends walked. He saw Sir Bernard

looking ironically out over the waters in which he struggled, looking

ironically at him, as if with a smile to see how the rash fool who has

sailed on such a voyage now agonized for one plank to cling to. He saw

Rosamond, her arm in Philip’s, bending him away from the foam, and

drawing him safely towards the highroads beyond. He saw Isabel, and

her dress was drenched with spray, her dress and her hair, and she had

stretched one firm arm towards the sea, and stood on the extreme edge

of the land; but her eyes did not see him, and he could not tread

water—he was whirled down again as if into the noise of a roaring

dance, and again he choked and agonized and sprang upward through a

thousand fathoms of water and emerged to see them again, but small,

very small. As he gazed a tiny distant