Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (good books for 8th graders .txt) đź“–
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- Author: Charles Williams
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right to the end, though he had come thence, for he could see
across it a beam of faint but growing sun, as the ocean beams at
the end of a road. He did not think of the image, for he had not
seen the sea, since his childhood; and that time would not be
remembered until he reached it. An instinct, none the less,
warned him; so he did not make his way to where, ready for him, in
that twisting maze of streets and times, a gutter child played on
his only seaside holiday, and cried because a bigger boy had
bullied him. Sea or sun-sun to him-it was the light he wished to
avoid. He hesitated, and took a side turning, where under the
eaves some darkness was left.
The image was growing more complex and more crowded, for, as if
the descending light, the spreading harshness of rock and ice,
crowded them and the streets grew shorter, more involved,
themselves more populous with figures. Once it was a sneering
foreman, who drove his face-hidden shape towards him; once—how he
got there he did not know—it was someone’s back on a ladder
carrying a rope, going up no doubt, but perhaps coming down to
throw the rope round him before he slipped away. Once he turned
from a figure leaning against a lamp-post, quite still, with a
stealthy suspense, as if it might dodge round the lamp-post,
pretending that the post hid what it could not hide, and making to
play a game that was not a kind game. And each time he slipped
away or turned away, it was more like running away, and
continually he would see, here and there in the distance, the beam
of light on icy rock and sniff the bitter smell of the place of no
return.
So presently he was running very quickly, with a sense that they
were now after him. They had begun to be bolder, they were
leaning out of windows, stumbling out of streets, lurching,
shambling, toiling after him. He had read somewhere Of a man
being trampled to death, and he thought of that now, only he could
not envisage death, any more than Pauline the end of luxurious
dream. He could only think of trampling He ran faster then, for
he did not see how he would ever be able to get up, those
apparitions of his terror would be too many and too strong. For
the first time in that world he began to feel exhausted; and now
the streets were slipping by, and the feet were coming up, and in
a central daze that dance of time and truth all round him, he felt
himself stopping. He inwardly consented; he stood still.
As he did so, there came about him also a cessation. The street
was still; the feet silent. He drew a breath. He saw in front of
him a house, and at a window, a window with glass, where no light
gleamed, he saw a face, the face of an old woman, whom never in
all his life had he seen before. He saw her as a ghost in the
shadow, within the glass, but the glass was only a kind of faint
veil—of ceremony or of habit, though he
did not think of it so. He felt it did not matter, for he and the
other were looking directly at each other. He wanted to speak; he
could not find words to utter or control. He broke into a cry, a
little wail, such as many legends have recorded and many jokes
mocked. He said: “Ah! ah!” and did not think it could be heard.
The old face looked at him, and he was trembling violently,
shaking to see the apparitions of this world’s living, as they
shake to see the phantasms of the dead. He knew he was not
afraid, as they are often afraid; this was almost the first face
he had seen, in the body or out of the body, of which he was not
afraid. Fear, which separates man from man, and drives some to be
hostile, and some tyrannical, and some even to be friendly, and so
with spirits of that state of deathly time, abandoned him. Fear,
which never but in love deserts mortal man, deserted him there.
Only he could not do or say any more. He stared, hungrily,
hopefully. He waited, selfishly certain she would go, sweetly
sure she would stay. She said, as he waited: “My dear, how tired
you look!”
To Margaret herself the images were becoming confused. She did
not, for a good part of the time, know of any, being engaged
merely, beyond her own consciousness, in passing through that
experience which in her dream had meant crawling over the stretch
of open rock. Some hint of memory of it recurred to her at
moments. She had on this evening known nothing but a faint sense
of slow dragging in her limbs, an uneasiness in her body as if it
lay rough, a labouring in her breath as if she toiled. Then she
had felt herself lying on rock, holding a spike of rock, and
instinctively knew she had to do something, and clasped the spike
with energy-it had to do with Pauline; and a bell—the great bell
of the dead, or the bell of the living on the Hill, or her own
little bell, or all at once—had rung; and as it did so, she saw a
strange face looking at her from a crevice of darkness below.
Then she knew it; it was the face of the strange man in her dream.
She was aware that Pauline was coming over the rock through a door
of great stones like Stonehenge, but Pauline was behind, and
across in front of a gleam of mountain light that pierced her room
was the shadow of the weary and frightened face. She said with a
fresh spring of pure love, as if to Pauline or Phoebe or anyone:
“My dear, how tired you look!”
He tried to answer, to thank her, to tell her more, to learn
salvation from her. His life, in and out of the body, had
forgotten the time when a woman’s voice had last sounded with
friendship in his ears. He wanted to explain. his face was
neither light nor darkness but more tolerable and deeper than
either, as, he felt it, for it had leaned towards him in love. He
made efforts to speak, and seemed to himself to do no more than
cry out again, wordlessly and wailingly. The sound he made
communicated his fear, and she answered him from her withdrawn
experience of death, as from his less withdrawn spirit of poetry
Stanhope had answered Pauline—nothing could be worth such
distress. Or nothing, at least, but one thing-the coming out of
it into tender joy. She said: “But wait: wait for it.”
Pauline had come in from the garden, and as she ran through the
hall she was furiously angry with herself. She did not very well
know what the woman in the street had offered, beyond indefinable
sweet and thrilling excitements. But she felt, her foot on the
first stair, that she had regretted, that she had grudged and been
aggrieved with, the new change in her life. She had almost, if by
God’s mercy not quite, wished that Peter Stanhope had not
interfered. No range of invective—and she had a pretty, if
secret, range—sufficed her for herself. She struck her hand
against the wall as she ran, and wished that it was her head, or
that someone—Stanhope for preference, but it didn’t much matter;
anyone would do—would pick her up and throw her violently over the
banisters to the floor below, knocking the breath out of her body,
and leaving her bruised and gasping, looking like the fool she
was. She put all herself into despising herself, and her scorn
rode triumphant through her: a good thing under direction, but
dangerous to the lonely soul. So ambiguously repentant, she came
into her grandmother’s room, and saw suddenly that the justice of
the universe had taken her earlier word, and abandoned her.
It was not so, but at the window there was a face; and she had, in
the first shock, supposed it was hers. The obsession of her
visitation returned, through the double gate of her repining and
her rage. It was coming, it was come, it was here. Her wild
spirit sickened in her; and as she felt its power dissolve, she
sprang to the other power the knowledge of which, at least, her
anger had preserved. Ashamed of betrayal, unashamed of repentance
and dependence, she sprang. She knew with all her soul’s consent
that Peter Stanhope had taken over her fear; was, now, one with
it; and it was not, for he was in power over it. Among the leaves
of his eternal forest he set it, and turned it also to everlasting
verse. Evading or not evading, repining or not repining, raging
or not raging, she was Periel; she was the least of the things he
had created new; ecce, omnia nova facio. She was a line of his
verse, and beyond that-for the thought of him took that high
romantic self-annihilation and annihilated it in turn—she was
herself in all freedom and courage. She was herself, for the
meeting with herself. She stepped forward-lightly, almost with
laughter. It was not yet she.
As she gazed, she heard her grandmother speak. The room, for
those three spirits, had become a place on the unseen mountain.
they inhabited a steep. The rock was in them, and they in it. In
Margaret Anstruther it lived; it began to Put out its energy of
intellectual love. At least to the dead man it was felt as love,
as love that loved him, as he longingly and unknowingly desired.
This holy and happy thing was all that could be meant by God: it
was love and power. Tender to the least of its creatures, it
submitted itself to his need, but it is itself always that it
submits, and as he received it from those eyes and the sound of
that voice he knew that another thing awaited him-his wife, or the
light, or some renewal of his earlier
death. Universal, it demanded universality. The peace
communicated there was of a different kind from the earlier
revival of rest. And the woman said: “It’s done already; you’ve
only got to look for it.”
As Pauline had moved forward, the face at the window disappeared
from her sight. She drew breath; it had been an accident of
light; there had been no face. She turned to look at her
grandmother, and saw her lying very still, her eyes on the window
as if she could still see something there. Quiet as she lay, she
was in action. Her look, her voice, showed it: her voice, for she
spoke, but very low, and Pauline could not hear
the words. She caught the sound; lightly she threw herself on her
knees by the bed-and half fulfilled her earlier passionate desire
for subordination. For the first time in her young distracted
life her energy leapt to a natural freedom of love. She ran
swiftly down the way her master had laid open; she said, in words
almost identical with his: “Let me do something, let me carry it.
Darling, do let me help.” Margaret gave her hand a small gentle
pressure, but kept her eyes beyond her still.
The silence in that place became positive with their energies, and
its own. The three spirits were locked together, in the capacity
of Margaret’s living stone. The room about them, as if the
stillness expressed its nature in another mode, grew sharply and
suddenly cold,
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