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there. He had come there

to die, and the rope was on the platform above. He did not quite

understand why he was standing at the foot of the ladder, for he

seemed to remember that he had mounted it, up to his head, unless

he had jumped down to frighten something that had vanished, but

it did not matter. What mattered was that dawn was here and his

time was short. Unless he acted, his chance and he would be

lost. He went again, very quickly and anxiously, up the ladder.

At the top he got on to the platform and hurried to find the

rope. He had had it ready; he must not waste it. He looked

round for it. The rope was not there.

 

At first he did not believe. This was certainly the place,

though in the dawn which was less bright than the moon, and he

knew he had hated the moon because it watched him, the corners of

that stage between earth and sky were now in darkness. But he

went and peered into them and felt. Uselessly. He knelt down,

staring round, unaware of any sickness or exhaustion, only of

anxiety. He almost lay down, screwing up his eyes, dragging

himself round. It was all useless. The rope was not there.

 

By now, as he raised his head and looked out, the silence was

beginning to trouble him, and the pallid dawn. It was good that

the light should not grow, but also it was terrifying.

There had not been much time, or had there? He could not attend

to it; the absence of the rope preoccupied him. Could someone,

out of the world that was filled with his rich enemies, have

come, while he was down at the foot, doing something he could not

remember, and run up the ladder quietly, and stolen back his rope

as he himself had stolen it? Perhaps the men who had sent him off

that day, or even his wife, out of the room, stretching a lean

hand and snatching it, as she had snatched things before-but then

she would have snarled or shrilled at him; she always did. He

forgot his caution. He rose to his feet, and ran round and round

seeking for it. He failed again; the rope was not there.

 

By the ladder he stood still, holding on to it, utterly defeated

at last, in a despair that even he had never felt before. There

had always been present to him, unrecognized but secure, man’s

last hope, the possibility of death. It may be refused, but the

refusal, even the unrecognized refusal, admits hope. Without the

knowledge of his capacity of death, however much he fear it, man

is desolate. This had gone; he had no chance whatever. The rope

was gone; he could not die. He did not yet know that it was

because he was already dead.

 

The dead man stood there, a vast dead silence about him and

within him. He turned his head this way and that. He no longer

minded whether anyone came, and no one did come. He looked back

over his shoulder at his platform and its dark corners. Some

things were yet concealed. There was shadow; his eyes looked at

it for a long while, some days or weeks, without interest or

intelligence. Presently there was a stir in it, that presently

ceased. He had been looking at it all that time, over his

shoulder, still standing there and holding his ladder; his body,

or what seemed to him to be his body, his whole consciousness of

distances and shapes that seemed not to be he, slowly conforming

itself to its intelligence of this other world. The silence of

the dead was about him, the light of the dead was over him. He

did not like the corners of darkness or the stir in the corners,

and presently as he stood there he began to feel that he could

get away from them. He knew now that he would not find the rope,

that he would not take again the means he had once taken to

escape from pain and fear, but in that utter quiet his despair

began to discover itself to be more like contentment. He slid on

to the ladder, vaguely determined to get as far as he could from

the platform of transition. He went soundlessly down, and as he

came to ground and loosed his hold he sighed; he took a step or

two away and sighed again, and now for pure relief. He felt.

through all his new world, the absence of men, the mere absence

therefore of evil. The world which was to be represented, there,

by the grand culture of Battle Hill, could offer him, after his

whole life, no better thing than that it should keep away.

justice, so far, rescued him; what more there was had not yet

begun to work. He wandered away over the Hill.

Chapter Three

QUEST OF HELL

 

It was in the house of the suicide that Lawrence Wentworth now

sat. The dead man’s corpse, discovered hanging in the morning,

had been hugger-mugger interred, the body that then existed being

then buried. With such bodies of past time the estate had no

concern except to be silent about them, which it very

successfully was. Wentworth, when he took the house, heard

nothing of the most unfortunate incident, nor had any idea of

what had happened in the space which now, properly closed and

ceilinged, he had taken for his bedroom, any more than he saw

through the window of his study the dead man occasionally. return

to the foot of the ladder which, in his world, still reached from

earth to scaffolding. Neither of them was aware of the other.

 

Wentworth had at least one advantage over many other military

historians; he had known war. He had served with some

distinction, partly from luck, and partly from his brain which

organized well. He had held a minor position on an army staff,

and he had been alert at moving masses of men about and fitting

them in, and removing them again. He could not win battles, but

he could devise occupation for armies. He could always, when

necessary, find somewhere for them to go and something for them

to do, and he could deal with any objections to their going or

doing that were raised. His mind reduced the world to diagrams,

and he saw to it that the diagrams fitted. And as some such

capacity is half of all ordinary leadership in war, he really had

an insight into the technical side of the great military

campaigns of the past. He could see what Caesar or Napoleon had

done, and why, and how; it was not to be expected that he could

have seen it, as they did, before it happened. He had never had

a friend or a lover; he had never, in any possible sense of the

word, been “in love”.

 

Yet, or perhaps therefore, his life had been pleasant to him,

partly by the Fortune which confirms or ruins the care of

generals, partly through his own instinctive tactical care. Only

of late, especially since he had come to the Hill, the

pleasantness had seemed to waver. He was not much over fifty,

but his body was beginning to feel that its future was

shortening, and that it had perhaps been too cautious in the

past. His large opaque eyes, set widely in a squarish face, were

acquiring a new restlessness. Also he had begun to dream.

Something moved more sharply in his sleep, as the apparition of

Pauline’s terror moved more surely in the streets; the invisible

life of the Hill quickening its pressure upon mental awareness.

 

It was a little dream, of no significance, as Mrs. Parry would

have said; it was only a particular development of a common

dream-thing, the state of something going on. He had no reason

for disliking it except that it recurred. It was not complex; it

was remarkably simple-simple and remarkable. He was climbing

down a rope; he did nothing but climb down a rope. It was a

white rope, so white that it shone of its own clarity in the

pitch-black darkness where it and he existed, and it stretched up

high above him, infinitely high, so that as he looked he could

not see where or to what it was fastened. But that it was

fastened both above and below was clear, for it was taut in his

hands and between his legs, twisted expertly round it. He was

not sliding down it; he was descending by the aid of knots which,

though he could feel them against his hands and legs, he could

never actually see in the rope as it emerged from his hands past

his eyes. The descent was perplexing, for he never felt himself

move and yet he knew he was continually farther down, down

towards the bottom of the rope, the point and the place where it

was secured beneath him. Once or twice he looked down and saw

only the twined white strands stretching away in the black abyss.

He felt no fear; he climbed, if he climbed, securely, and all the

infinite black void did not terrify him; he would not fall. Nor

did he fear the end—not fear; no monstrosity awaited him. On the

other hand, he did, waking, remember to have felt the very

slightest distaste, as if for a dentist. He remembered that he

wanted to remain on the rope, but though he saw neither top nor

bottom he was sure, in the dream, that that was impossible. A

million yards or years of rope stretched above him; there might

be a million years or yards below him. Or a hundred, or a score,

or indeed but two or three. He climbed down, or else the rope

climbed up, and about them was everlasting silence and the black

night in which he and the rope only were visible, and only

visible to himself.

 

It was mildly disagreeable; the more, and perhaps, if he had

thought about it, only, because dreams, though negligible on

waking, are so entirely ineluctable in sleep. Sleep had, all his

life, been a pleasant thing to Wentworth; he had made of it an

art. He had used himself to a composure that had readily

accommodated itself to him. He made it a rule to think of

pleasant things as he stretched himself in bed: his acquaintances

sometimes, or the reviews—most of the reviews of his last book,

or his financial security, or his intentions about his immediate

future work, or the permanent alterations he hoped he had caused

in universal thought concerning Caesar’s employment of Balearic

slingers during the campaigns in Gaul. Also, deliciously, his

fancies would widen and change, and Caesar would be drawing out

cheques to pay his London Library subscriptions, or the Balearic

slingers would be listening to him as he told them how they used

to use their slings, and the next thing he would know would be

either his housekeeper tapping at the door, or the light of

morning, or, sometimes, the dream.

 

For this assault in sleep there were at least two reasons in his

waking life, besides the nature of the haunter of his house; one

of them very much in front of his mind, the other secret and not

much admitted. The first was Aston Moffatt; the second was Adela

Hunt. Aston Moffatt was another military historian, perhaps the

only other worth mentioning, and Wentworth and he were engaged in

a long and complicated controversy on the problem of the least of

those skirmishes of the Roses which had been fought upon the

Hill. The question itself was unimportant; it would never

seriously matter to anyone but the controversialists whether

Edward

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