Descent into Hell by Charles Williams (good books for 8th graders .txt) đź“–
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- Author: Charles Williams
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arm, or hers caressing his, he was dimly troubled. He wanted to pull the
curtains, to lock the doors, to bar out what was in his brain by barring
his house, to be with what was irreconcilably not the world. He wanted
either to shut himself wholly away from the world in a sepulchre of
desire and satiety and renewed desire; or to destroy if not the world,
at least one form that walked in the world.
His trouble was increased by the likelihood of the intrusion of the world
of the other Adela. He had, weeks since, sent to Mrs. Parry drawings and
descriptions for the Grand Ducal uniforms. She had rung him up once or
twice about them, and she was beginning to insist on his going round to
her house to approve the result. He did not want to go to her house. He
would be expected to be at the play, the performance of which was
approaching, and he did not want to be at the play. Adela would be
acting, and he didn’t want to see her in her eighteenth-century costume,
or any more at all. He would have to speak to her and he did not want to
speak to her. He wanted to be alone with his fantasies. It was all the
busy world, with Adela as its chief, that still hampered him. He could,
of course, shut himself away, but if he were to enjoy the phantasm of
Adela as he wanted to, his servants must see her and bring her tea and
accept her as a visitor, and then what would they think if they heard of
the actual Adela being seen somewhere else at the same time? Or if, by
chance, the actual Adela should call? It knew, with that accuracy with
which it always prevented his desires, that he was disturbed about
something it-could not, until night came, cure. It spent on him a
lingering gaze of love, and said “I must go.” It caught and kissed his
hand in a hungry fire, and it looked up at him fervently and said:
“Tonight? Dear Lawrence, tonight?” He said “Tonight”, and desired to
add the name. But he had never yet been able to do so-as if the name
were indeed something actual, sacramental of reality. He said
“Tonight”, and pressed it and kissed it and took it to the door, which
he shut quickly, as he always did, for he had an uneasy wonder whether it
ever went anywhere, once it had parted from him, and he did not wish to
see it fade be-fore his eyes into the air which, this summer, was growing
so intolerably bright.
The unusual brightness had been generally noticed. It was not a
heat-wave; the weather was too gay and airy for that. It was an increase
in luminous power; forms stood out more sharply, voices were heard more
clearly. There seemed to be a heightening of capacity, within and
without. The rehearsals of the play increased in effect, a kind of
swiftness moved in the air; all things hastened. People said: “What a
beautiful summer!” and went on saying it. One afternoon Pauline heard
Stanhope, who had replied to that phrase a score of times, vary the reply
by saying with some surprise: “O, the summer, do you think?” But his
interlocutor had already been wafted away.
It was two days since the promise of substituted love, and it was their
first meeting. She took advantage of her precursor’s remark to say, as
she shook hands, and their glances exchanged affection: “What then, if it
isn’t the summer?”
He shrugged delicately. “Only, does it seem like the summer?” he asked.
“Not very,” she said. “But what do you think?”
“The air within the air, perhaps,” he answered, half-serious. “The thing
that increases everything that is, and decreases everything that isn’t.”
Pauline said, not upon any impulse of conventional chatter, “And which am
I?”
“O is,” he said, “is, decidedly. Unfortunately, perhaps, in many ways,
but final. You haven’t had any meetings yet?”
She began to answer and was cut short by new arrivals. It was the day of
the dress rehearsal, and even the sophisticated practitioners of Battle
Hill felt a new excitement.
Climax was at hand. The young and more innocent actors triumphed in a
delight modified by fear of their incapacity; the more experienced feared
the incapacity of others. Adela Hunt, for instance, was anxious that
Periel and the Chorus should be her adequate background, and that her
dramatic lover should adore her urgently. He, a nice boy and shy, was
too conscious of the Chorus individually to rise quite to the height of
them in a mass. His voice still faltered with the smallest vibration of
awareness upon the invocation of the fire. Mrs. Parry had pointed out to
him that he must be used to burning leaves, and he had agreed; still, at
the height of the verse, he trembled a little with the stress. The Bear,
on the other hand, was distracted between his own wish to be ursine and
Mrs. Parry’s to be period. His two great moments, however, were in
action rather than speech. One was a heavy pursuit of the Princess; at
the other he and Periel intertwined in a dance among all the personages,
drawing them into a complexity of union. He was not a pantomime bear; no
assistant completed quadrupedicity; he walked bowed but upright, a bear’s
head, high furred boots, furred coat and gauntlets, making up the design
which signified or symbolized the growling mass of animal life. Nor,
though he and the spirit of the spirits danced together, did they ever
meet or speak; between them always moved the mortal figures and
harmonized their incommunicable utterances.
It was the reputation of Peter Stanhope which had so largely increased
the excitement of this year’s drama. Public attention was given to it;
articles appeared in New York and paragraphs in Paris. Seats had to be
reserved for a few-a very fewvery distinguished visitors; many others
could be and had to be refused. The Press would be there. A palpitation
of publicity went through the cast; the world seemed to flow towards
Battle Hill. There was no denying that it was an event, almost a moment
in the history of the imagination; recognized as such by, at least, a not
inconsiderable minority of those who cared for such things, and a quite
inconsiderable minority of those who did not, but who read everything in
their papers. Even the cast were provided with tickets; and the
rehearsal itself was guarded by a policeman. A popular member of the
Chorus also stood by the gate and scrutinized all arrivals, as if the
bear and the spirit purged creation by power and knowledge.
The pressure of this outer world had modulated and unified the producer,
the performers, and every one else concerned with the play. Harmony
became so necessary that it was actually achieved, fate and free-will
coinciding. Stanhope became so desirable that he was compelled to promise
to say a few words at the end. A deference towards him exhibited itself.
Adela rebuked Pauline for speaking lightly of the great man.
“I didn’t know that you admired him so much yourself,” Pauline said.
Adela, with an unfailing grasp of the real values of the world, said:
“Even if I didn’t, he is respected by some very fine judges. But I’ve
come to see there is more in him than I’d thought. He’s got a number of
curiously modern streaks under his romanticism.”
When Adela mentioned romanticism Pauline, and most other people, changed
the conversation. Otherwise it was a prelude to a long and complete
denunciation of all romantics as the enemies of true art. True art had
been recently defined, by a distinguished critic, as “the factual
oblique”, and of the factual oblique romanticism, it seemed, was
incapable, being neither clear enough to be factual or clever enough to
be oblique. The factual oblique, incidentally, had not yet revealed to
Adela the oblique fact that she never mentioned romanticism when she was
with Hugh; any conversation in which it seemed likely to appear was
deflected before it arrived. Pauline, not having been able to reflect,
merely altered.
“There’s Mr. Wentworth,” she said. “I do hope he approves of the Guard.”
“He ought to have looked at them before,” Adela said severely. “He’s
been terribly slack. I suppose you haven’t seen him lately?”
“No, not with grandmother and the play and everything,” Pauline answered.
“Have you?”
Adela shook her head. Wentworth was moving slowly across the lawn
towards them. His eyes were on the ground; he walked heavily, and it was
as if by accident that he at last drew level with them. Pauline said:
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wentworth.”
He looked up at her and blinked. It was true the air was very clear and
the sun very bright, yet Pauline was astonished by the momentary
difficulty he seemed to find in focusing her. When he had got her right,
he slowly smiled, and said: “Ah! Good afternoon, Miss Anstruther.”
Adela Hunt abruptly said: “Mr. Wentworth!” He jumped. Slightly but
definitely he jerked, and only then looked round. He looked, and there
was perplexity in his eyes. He stared at the surprised Adela; he seemed
taken aback at seeing her, and almost to resent it. A disagreeable shock
showed in his face, and was gone, as he answered: “Oh, yes; Misss Hunt”;
a statement, not a greeting: a piece of information offered to the
inquiring mind. Adela could not help noticing it, and was almost too
astonished to smile. She couldn’t believe the look had been acted, yet
he couldn’t really be surprised. She wondered if he were indeed secretly
angry, if it were a poor mad insult of an outraged mind, and decided it
couldn’t be.
She said briskly: “I hope you’ve approved of the uniforms.” He took a
step back. He said, in real distress: “Oh, hush, hush, not so loud,”
and in turn he blinked at her, as if, when he had taken in her words,
they surprised him more. Little though she could know it, they did. He
had supposed, in the night and the morning, that he had hated the Adela
of the world; He had had her in his imagination as an enemy and a
threat. He had overrated her. She was, in fact, nothing like what he
had, and now he had met her he had hardly recognized her. There had been
a girl, talking to—to—the name had again escaped him—to the other girl,
whose shape had reminded him of his nightly mistress; she had turned her
head, and it had been his mistress, and then again it was not. It could
not be, for this one was remote and a little hostile; it was not, for
this one was nothing like as delightful, as warm, as close-bewildering.
She spoke, and it was strange, for he expected love; he did not want
that voice except in love, and now it—at first—said strange things.
With relief he realized it was not his voice—so he called it, admirably
exact; this was not the voice of his mistress, and his mistress was most
particularly he. This distressed him; it was loud, harsh, uncouth. It
was like the rest of the tiresome world into which he had been compelled
to enter—violent, smashing, bewildering by its harsh clamour, and far
from the soft sweetness of his unheard melody. It was not without
reason that Keats imagined the lover of unheard melody in reverie on
stone images; the real Greek dancers would have pleased him less. But
though Wentworth was shocked by the clumsy tread and the loud voice,
they relieved him also.
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