Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (good books for 8th graders .txt) 📖
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- Author: Charles Williams
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everything harmful was borne away, busy, but not with him, he
would have been mildly pleased. He knew that that balloon was for
ever cut off from him. Moon, balloon, it could not drop anyone
among these shells of houses. If it did, whoever it dropped would
be caught in the shells. He had been a good-tempered little
victim, but there were one or two in the past whom he could
placidly have borne to see scrabbling and thrusting at the
scaffolding and cage. He did not exactly resent, in that quiet,
anything they had done-a foreman, a mate, a brother, a wife, but
perhaps, as the unmeasured time did pass, he felt a little more
strongly that he would enjoy his freedom more if he saw them
defeated. In the past they had taken everything from him. It
would not be unpleasant now to see them raging with a wish to get
at him, and, in that air, defeated.
He sat opposite his ladder, after a long, long while, and let the
fancy grow. It was then that he first noticed a change. The
light was growing stronger. It was, again, a long while between
the first faintest hint of it and any notice he took, and again
between his first faint wonder and his belief, and again between
belief and certainty. At the end of all those long periods, there
was not much perceptible difference in the sky. Centuries passed
before that difference grew more marked, but that too came. He
had sat watching it, dimly, peacefully. He rose then, not quickly
but more quickly than he had been used to move. He stirred with a
hardly discernible unease.
It seemed as if the light were spreading steadily down, from
somewhere away in the height. He did not positively see that any
patch of sky was whiter than the rest, but he was looking for such
a patch. The increase must have a centre of expansion. It must
come from somewhere. No moon, no sun, no cause of illumination.
Only sometimes a kind of wave of movement passed down the sky, and
then it was lighter. He did not like it.
If he had asked himself why, he could not have easily answered.
It did not disturb his quiet. He was as lonely and peaceful as
before. No sound was in his City, foot or voice. But vaguely the
light distracted him from his dim pleasure of imagining, imagining
disappointment. His imagination could hardly, by ordinary
standards, be said to be good or bad. It was a pleasure in
others’ anger, and bad; but the anger was that of tyrannical
malice, and the imagined disappointment of it was good. Some such
austere knowledge the Divine John saw in heaven, where
disappointed hell is spread and smokes before the Lamb. But the
Lamb and the angels do not imagine hell to satisfy their lust, nor
do he nor the angels determine it, but only those in hell; if it
is, it is a fact, and, therefore, a fact of joy. In that peace
which had been heaven to the vagrant, he had begun to indulge a
fancy of his own; he went beyond the fact to colour the fact.
Light grew. He began to walk. He had done so, often enough,
through that great period of recreation, for pure pleasure of
change. Now he had, for the first time, a purpose unacknowledged.
He wished to escape the light. It was desirable that he should
still be left alone. He did not trust the light to let him alone.
It was desirable that he should be free to make pictures for
himself and to tell himself tales. He did not trust the light to
let him do it. He moved gently; there was no need, here, to run.
The need that was not concealed from him, his first inclination to
run. He had run often enough for others’ pleasure, but this was
the first time he had been tempted to run for his own.
The light still gently spread. As gently he went away from it,
down the hill. His choice was in this direction; it was
brightest, by a little, at the top. As, through a still
unmeasured period, he went drifting, changes came on the hill. He
did not at first notice them. Long as he had wandered, he had not
marked detail of building there. But, unnoticed, details had
altered. It was now a town half-built, not ruined. When he had
climbed that skeleton shape of a house, or of himself, he had done
so in the midst of a devastation. As he went away from it towards
the bottom the devastation became incomplete erection. Houses were
unfinished, roads unmade, yet they were houses and roads. Roofs
were on, scaffolding gone. The change was irregular, more as if
some plants had outgrown others than as if order had been
established by man. He went soundlessly down the slope of the
thickening vegetation, and as on the bare height the light was
fullest, so here instead of light, shadows grew thicker. Between
them the pallid light of his experience grew stronger by contrast.
He would not look at the new light; there was increased for him by
opposition the presence of the old. He had gone some way, and
some time, unnoticing, inclined to linger upon his tales and
dreams, when he was startled into knowledge. He had turned his
back upon light and had not remarked erection. He saw suddenly, at
a distance in front of him, a flash. He stopped and stared. It was
no longer a flash but a gleam. He was looking at, far off, the
reflection of light upon glass—of what he would, in lost days,
have called the sun upon a window.
A thrust of fear took him; he could not, for a moment, go on. He
stood blinking; after a while, he turned his head. There was
behind him a long space of shadows and pale light, but beyond
that, away beyond the house where he had died, there was a broad
stretch of high ground, bare and rocky, rising higher than he had
ever thought, and all bright with, he supposed, the sun. A rich,
golden splendour, beyond all, at the height of all, played
flashing upon some other glittering surface; it was not glass
there, but ice. He stared back as he had stared forward. He could
not dare return to that, also he was unwilling to go on down
towards the gleaming window below. That meant the world; he could
not, after so much peace, return to the world. Why could he not
sit and imagine a moon and thwarted creatures dropped from the
moon into a world that mocked them? It was not much to ask.
It was too much; he could not have it. False as the Republic had
been to him, making his life dreadful, he had not deserved, or he
could not have, an infinity of recompense. He could not have this
in utter exchange for that. Exchange had been given; temporal
justice, for what it is worth, done. Now incidents were no more
counted, on this side or the other. He must take the whole—with
every swiftness of the Mercy, but the whole he must have.
He saw that the exhibition of light was moving towards him. It
had reached the house where he had died. He noticed, even in his
alarm, that the buildings now ended there. In his earlier
wanderings he had gone among the ruins both above and below it,
but now the bare rock rose above—or ice, as he had first thought.
It went up, in blocks and irregularities of surface, until, some
distance beyond, it opened on one broad sweep, smooth and
glittering, rounding towards the top of the Hill; upon it, by some
trick of sight, the sunlight seemed active. It was not changed,
but it ran. It hastened in sudden charges of intensity, now
across, now down. The unchanging rock beneath the unchanging sun
responded to that countermarching, evoked into apparent
reordination. It was perhaps this which terrified him, for there
the earth was earth still and yet alive. In the strict sense of
the words it was living stone.
He stood for some minutes staring, and entranced. But at some
sudden charge downwards from the height towards the house, and him
beyond it, he broke. He gave a little cry, and ran. He ran down
towards the bottom of the Hill, among the houses, towards that
house where the glass was. As he ran he saw, for the first time
since he had entered that world, other forms, inhabitants of a
state for which there were no doubt many names, scientific,
psychological, theological. He did not know the names; he knew
the fact.
The return of time upon itself, which is in the nature of death,
had caught him. Margaret Anstruther had, in a vision within a
dream, decided upon death, not merely in her own world but in that
other. Her most interior heart had decided, and the choice was so
profound that her past experiences and opacities could only obey.
She had no work of her present union with herself to achieve; that
was done. But this man had died from and in the body only.
Because he had had it all but forced on him, he had had
opportunity to recover. His recovery had brought to him a chance
of love. Because he had never chosen love, he did not choose it
then. Because he had never had an opportunity to choose love, nor
effectively heard the intolerable gospel proclaimed, he was to be
offered it again, and now as salvation. But first the faint hints
of damnation were permitted to appear.
He was running down a street. It was a street that closed in on
him. He did not notice, in his haste, that it was a street much
like those in which most of his life had been spent. He saw, in
front of him, at a great distance, two living forms, a man and a
girl; at which he ran with increased speed. Since he had begun to
go down the Hill he had lost his content in being alone; he smelt
solitude as if it were the odour of bare rock, and he hated it.
He heard, more vividly with every step, no sound. He could not
hear those forms walking, but he saw them; it was enough; he ran.
He was catching them-up, running very fast through his old life to
do it. When he was within a hundred yards the girl looked over
her shoulder. He checked in midpace, his foot heavily thudding
down, and he almost falling. He saw, with sharp clarity, the face
of the girl who had been his wife. Her mouth was opening and
shutting on words, though the words were silent. It had always
been opening and shutting. At once, without looking round, the
figure arm in arm with hers released itself, stopped, and as if
moving by the direction of that busily talking mouth, took’ a step
or two backwards. Then it paused, and with a weary care began
slowly to turn itself round. The dead man saw the movement. It
became terribly important that he should escape before the youth
he had been caught him and dragged him in or make a third with
them, and to listen again to that hated and loathed voice—always
perhaps; the prisoner of those two arms, the result and victim of
his early desire. He ran hastily back again up the street.
Presently he glanced behind him, and could not see them. He
trotted a little farther, looked round again, saw the street
empty-the street that was recovering the appearance of a street
upon the
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