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

answered; “as a matter of fact I came with-” he completed

an explanation with an introduction.

 

“But, of course I know Sir Bernard’s name,” Considine said. “Isn’t it

he who explained the stomach?”

 

“Temporarily only,” Sir Bernard answered.

 

Considine shrugged. “While man needs stomachs,” he said, “which may

not be for so very much longer. A very ramshackle affair at present,

don’t you think?”

 

“In default of a better”, Sir Bernard protested, “what would you have

us do?”

 

“But are we in default of a better?” Considine asked. “Surely we’re

not like that poor wretch Rosenberg who couldn’t live by his

imagination, but died starved, for all his stomach and his mind.”

 

“So far,” Sir Bernard said, “both the stomach and the mind seem

normally necessary to man.”

 

“O so far!” Considine answered, “and normally! But it’s the farther

and the abnormal to which we must look. When men are in love, when

they are in the midst of creating, when they are in a religious flame,

what do they need then either with the stomach or the mind?”

 

“Those”, Sir Bernard said, “are abnormal states from which they

return.”

 

“More’s the pity,” Roger said suddenly. “It’s true, you know. In the

real states of exaltation one doesn’t seem to need food.”

 

“So,” said Considine, smiling at him. “The poets have taught you

something, Mr. Ingram.”

 

“But one returns,” Sir Bernard protested plaintively, “and ‘then one

does need food. And reason,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

 

Considine was looking at Roger. “Will you say that one must?” he asked

in a lower voice; and “O how the devil do I know?” Roger said

impatiently. “I say that one does, but I daren’t say that one must.

And it’s folly either way.”

 

“Don’t believe it,” Considine answered, his voice low and vibrating.

“There’s more to it than that.”

 

The words left a silence behind them for a moment, as if they were a

summons. Roger kicked the pavement. Philip waited patiently. Presently

Sir Bernard said, “Do you know the legatees by any chance, Mr.

Considine?”

 

Considine’s eyes glowed. “Now there,” he said, “if you like irony you

have it. Yes, I know them—at least I know of them. I knew the family

very well once. They are strict Jews, living in London because they

are too poor to return to Jerusalem. They live in London and they

abominate the Gentiles of London. They are fanatically—insanely, you

would say—devoted to the tradition of Israel. They live, almost

without food, Sir Bernard, studying the Law and nourished by the Law.

They are the children of a second birth indeed, and they exist in the

other life to which they were born. What do you think they will do

with Simon Rosenberg’s fortune and Simon Rosenberg’s jewels?”

 

“They could, I suppose, refuse it,” Sir Bernard said.

 

“Couldn’t they use it to improve conditions in Palestine?” Philip

asked, willing to appear interested.

 

Considine looked at Roger, who said, “I don’t know the tradition of

Israel. Are jewels and fortunes any use to it?”

 

“Or will they think so?” Considine answered. “I do not know. But it

was a Jew who saw the foundations of the Holy City splendid with a

beauty for which the names of jewels were the only comparison. We

think of jewels chiefly as wealth, but I doubt if the John of the

Apocalypse did, and I doubt if the Rosenbergs will. Perhaps he saw

them as mirrors and shells of original colour. However, I suppose, as

one of the executors, it will be my business to find out soon.”

 

“It’s extraordinarily interesting,” Sir Bernard said. “Do, my dear Mr.

Considine, let us know. Come and dine with me one day. I’ve something

else I want to ask you.”

 

On the point of making his farewells Considine paused.

 

“Something you want to ask me?” he said.

 

“A mere nothing,” Sir Bernard answered. “I should like to know what

relation you are to a photograph of you that I took fifty years ago.”

 

Roger stared. Philip moved uneasily; his father did put things in the

most ridiculous way.

 

“A photograph of me,” Considine repeated softly, “that you took fifty

years ago…?”

 

“I do beg your pardon,” Sir Bernard said. “But that’s what it looks

like, though (unless you’ve improved the stomach out of all knowledge)

it probably isn’t. I wouldn’t have bothered you if other subjects for

discussion—jewels, digestion, and the tradition of Israel—hadn’t

cropped up. But unless you take that unfortunate coroner’s view of

‘mere talk’, do be kind and come.”

 

Considine smiled brilliantly. “I do a little,” he said, “but I allow

it is a purification, a ritual and actual purification of the

energies. I’m rather uncertain how much longer I shall be in England

for the present, but if it’s at all possible…Will you write or

telephone or something in a day or two? My address is 29, Rutherford

Gardens, Hampstead.”

 

“Hallo,” Roger said, “we’re up that way. My embalming workshop’s

there,” he added sardonically.

 

Sir Bernard turned his head, a little surprised. Roger caught his eyes

and nodded towards Considine.

 

“He knows,” he said. “I embalm poetry there–with the most popular

and best-smelling unguents and so on, but I embalm it all right. I

then exhibit the embalmed body to visitors at so much a head. They

like it much better than the live thing, and I live by it, so I

suppose it’s all right. No doubt the embalmers of Pharaoh were

pleasant enough creatures. They weren’t called to any nonsense of

following a pillar of fire between the piled waters of the Nile.”

 

“It’s burning in you now,” Considine said, “and you are on the

threshold of a doorway that the Angel of Death went in—not yours.”

 

“If I could believe it—” Roger said. “Ask me to dine too, Sir

Bernard. I want to ask Mr. Considine questions about Paradise

Regained.”

 

Chapter Three - THE PROCLAMATION OF THE HIGH EXECUTIVE

 

BY the time that Philip arrived home that evening the wildest rumours

about Africa were being spread. At the office things had been during

the last few days as bad as he had feared they might be, and he had

been as useless as Sir Bernard had expected. Nothing had been heard

from or of Munro for some weeks. Rosenberg’s suicide and, even more

distressingly, his will, had startled and bothered the Stuyvesants to

an indescribable degree. The motive power behind them, the object of

motion in front, had both disappeared in blood; and no-one had the

least idea what would happen. The Rosenberg legatees had been traced

by mid-day; they were living in small upper rooms in Houndsditch,

served by an old woman of their race. Extraordinary efforts had been

made to procure interviews with them; unsuccessfully, since they

merely refused to speak. There were, certainly, in the afternoon

papers, sketches of them, but that was hardly the same thing. Even

Governments were by way of being interested; high personages gazed at

the reproductions dubiously. The two brothers looked as if they might

be incapable of realizing the responsibilities of their present

position. Two old, bearded, and violent faces stared out at England

from journalistic pages. England stared back at them, and for the most

part, quite reasonably, abandoned its interest. The Chief Rabbi also

refused to be interviewed. Mr. Considine was interviewed, very

unsatisfactorily, since he in effect refused to foreshadow, forestall,

or foretell anybody’s intention. Philip read certainly that Mr.

Considine had said that he was sure that-there was no need for any

public anxiety, that good sense (a quality which the Jews, he was

reported to have declared, possessed to a marked degree) would

distinguish the actions of the Rosenberg brothers, and that in the

present critical times all minor racial prejudices must be set aside.

By which Philip understood him to mean that racial prejudice in regard

to Africa must swallow up the rest, as the serpent of Moses swallowed

the others. He didn’t feel quite convinced that Considine who on the

steps of the coroner’s court had exclaimed to Roger that a pillar of

fire was burning in him had said all that. In the other columns of the

papers racial prejudice was getting a firm hold.

 

There were articles by anthropologists, with diagrams of negro heads;

articles by explorers, with photographs of kraals; articles by

statisticians, with columns of figures; articles by historians, with

reproductions of paintings of Vasco da Gama, Thotmes III, Chaka, and

others; articles by bishops and famous preachers on missions, with

photographs of Christian negroes, converted and clothed; articles by

politicians on the balance of power in Africa with maps curiously

tinted; articles by military experts on possible strategy, with maps

lined and blobbed. There were letters from peace champions and war

invalids. There were, in short, all the signs of the interest which

the public was believed to feel. Philip at last abandoned them and

fell back on consideration.

 

Except for that one remark on the pillar of fire, and the mysterious

allusion to the foundations of the New Jerusalem, he hadn’t noticed

anything special in Considine’s conversation, but those two did rather

stand out. If Considine had not obviously been a…well, a

gentleman, Philip would have suspected him of belonging to the

Salvation Army. Of course, he had been talking to Roger, and Roger’s

own language was apt to be unbalanced. There were moments when Philip,

what with his father and Roger, and even his godfather, with his

refusal to allow martyrs to be avenged, felt that he was surrounded by

eccentrics. He thought with relief and delight of Rosamond; Rosamond

wasn’t eccentric. She was so right, so peaceful, so beautifully the

thing. She was a kind of centre, and all the others vibrated in

peculiar poses on the circumference. She herself had no circumference,

Philip thought, ignorant of how closely he was striving after St.

Augustine’s definition: “God is a circle, whose centre is everywhere

and His circumference nowhere.” She was small and dainty and she

moved, as it were, in little pounces. And yet she was so strong; it

was as if strength pretended to be weak. No, it wasn’t that, for after

all, she did need protection—his protection; she was strong enough to

need no other and weak enough to need his. Philip took that decision

quite seriously; in the economy of the universe he was not perhaps

finally wrong. For he was very innocent in love, and the awful

paradoxes which exist in that high passion and are an outrage to

rational argument were natural to him rather because of his innocence

than because of his egotism. That innocence might turn to egotism;

that candid belief of his heart be hardened by his pride and turned

from a simplicity to a stupidity. But at the moment he was very much

in love, and in love he had not yet reached an age capable of sin. He

was still a child of the new birth; maturity of intellect as of morals

was far distant.

 

Such a childhood he owed partly, surprised as he would have been to

heat it, to his father. The placid irony of Sir Bernard’s

contemplation of life distilled itself over the wisdom of this world

equally with that of every other. Dante was to him no more ridiculous

than Voltaire; disillusion was as much an illusion as illusion itself.

A thing that seemed had at least the truth of its seeming. Sir

Bernard’s mind refused to allow it more but it also refused to allow

it less. It was for each man to determine how urgent the truth of each

seeming was. Philip had not been discouraged from accepting the

seemings of his own world, of school, University, and