Descent into Hell Read online

  She said, still perplexed at a strange language: “But how can I cease to be troubled? will it leave off coming because I pretend it wants you? Is it your resemblance that hurries up the street?”

  “It is not,” he said, “and you shall not pretend at all. The thing itself you may one day meet—never mind that now, but you’ll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me. Haven’t you heard it said that we ought to bear one another’s burdens?”

  “But that means——” she began, and stopped.

  “I know,” Stanhope said. “It means listening sympathetically, and thinking unselfishly, and being anxious about, and so on. Well, I don’t say a word against all that; no doubt it helps. But I think when Christ or St. Paul, or whoever said bear, or whatever he Aramaically said instead of bear, he meant something much more like carrying a parcel instead of someone else. To bear a burden is precisely to carry it instead of. If you’re still carrying yours, I’m not carrying it for you—however sympathetic I may be. And anyhow there’s no need to introduce Christ, unless you wish. It’s a fact of experience. If you give a weight to me, you can’t be carrying it yourself; all I’m asking you to do is to notice that blazing truth. It doesn’t sound very difficult.”

  “And if I could,” she said. “If I could do—whatever it is you mean, would I? Would I push my burden on to anybody else?”

  “Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself,” he answered. “If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and anger, you can. But if you will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed with us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s burden. I haven’t made the universe and it isn’t my fault. But I’m sure that this is a law of the universe, and not to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as not to carry another’s. You’ll find it quite easy if you let yourself do it.”

  “And what of my self-respect?” she said.

  He laughed at her with a tender mockery. “O, if we are of that kind!” he exclaimed. “If you want to respect yourself, if to respect yourself you must go clean against the nature of things, if you must refuse the Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you should want so extremely to respect yourself is more than I can guess, why, go on and respect. Must I apologize for suggesting anything else?”

  He mocked her and was silent; for a while she stared back, still irresolute. He held her; presently he held her at command. A long silence had gone by before he spoke again.

  “When you are alone,” he said, “remember that I am afraid instead of you, and that I have taken over every kind of worry. Think merely that; say to yourself—‘he is being worried,’ and go on. Remember it is mine. If you do not see it, well; if you do, you will not be afraid. And since you are not afraid.…”

  She stood up. “I can’t imagine not being afraid,” she said.

  “But you will not be,” he answered, also rising, certainty in his voice, “because you will leave all that to me. Will you please me by remembering that absolutely?”

  “I am to remember,” she said, and almost broke into a little trembling laugh, “that you are being worried and terrified instead of me?”

  “That I have taken it all over,” he said, “so there is nothing left for you.”

  “And if I see it after all?” she asked.

  “But not ‘after all’,” he said. “The fact remains—but see how different a fact, if it can’t be dreaded! As of course it can’t—by you. Go now, if you choose, and keep it in your mind till—shall I see you to-morrow? Or ring me up to-night, say about nine, and tell me you are being obedient to the whole fixed nature of things.”

  “I’ll ring up,” she said. “But I … it sounds so silly.”

  “It is silly sooth,” he answered, “and dallies with the innocence of love. Real sooth, real innocence, real love. Go with God.” They shook hands, and slowly, looking back once, just before she reached the lane, she went out of his sight.

  Stanhope, turning his eyes from her parting figure, looked at the rehearsal and then settled himself more comfortably in his chair. A certain superficial attention, alert and effective in its degree, lay at the disposal of anyone who might need it, exactly as his body was prepared to draw in its long outstretched legs if anyone wanted to pass. Meanwhile he disposed the rest of his attention according to his promise. He recollected Pauline; he visualized her going along a road, any road; he visualized another Pauline coming to meet her. And as he did so his mind contemplated not the first but the second Pauline; he took trouble to apprehend the vision, he summoned through all his sensations an approaching fear. Deliberately he opened himself to that fear, laying aside for awhile every thought of why he was doing it, forgetting every principle and law, absorbing only the strangeness and the terror of that separate spiritual identity. His more active mind reflected it in an imagination of himself going into his house and seeing himself, but he dismissed that, for he desired to subdue himself not to his own natural sensations, but to hers first, and then to let hers, if so it should happen, be drawn back into his own. But it was necessary first intensely to receive all her spirit’s conflict. He sat on, imagining to himself the long walk with its sinister possibility, the ogreish world lying around, the air with its treachery to all sane appearance. His own eyes began to seek and strain and shrink, his own feet, quiet though actually they were, began to weaken with the necessity of advance upon the road down which the girl was passing. The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never understood, nor can.

  Since he could not take, nor would have admitted, her hate and rejection, her passion was received into the lucidity of his own spirit. The experience itself, sharply as his body took it, was less sharp for him; not that he willed it so, but because his senses received their communication from within not from without, and there is in all holy imagination from goodwill a quality of greatness which purifies and stabilizes experience. His goodwill went to its utmost, and utmost goodwill can go very far. It went to all but actual vision, and it excluded his intellectual judgment of that vision. Had he been asked, at that moment, for his judgment, he would have answered that he believed sincerely that Pauline believed sincerely that she saw, but whether the sight was actual or not he could not tell. He would have admitted that it might be but a fantastic obsession of her brain. That made no difference to his action. If a man seems to himself to endure the horrors of shipwreck, though he walks on dry land and breathes clear air, the business of his friend is more likely to be to accept those horrors as he feels them, carrying the burden, than to explain that the burden cannot, as a matter of fact, exist. Given all reasonable talk as well, wherever there is intelligence enough for exchange and substitution to exist, there is place enough for action. Only when the desire of an obsession has carried its subject beyond the interchanges of love can the power of substituted love itself cease. It would have been small use for any adept, however much greater than Peter Stanhope, to have offered his service to Wentworth, where he sat in his own room with the secret creature of substantial illusion at his feet caressing his hand; for from that haunting, even while it was but an unmaterialized anguish within his blood, Wentworth had had no desire, more than the desire of maddened pride, to be exquisitely free.

  So devoted to the action of his spirit, Stanhope sat on among the sounds of laughter and gaiety and half-serious wrangles that rose around him. It was not a long while that he was left to sit alone; perhaps Pauline had not more than partly advanced on her return when someone came across to interrupt and consult him. He gave a full attention, for that o
ther concern is not measured by time but by will. To give freedom to both, he would return to his task when opportunity next offered; afterwards, when they had all gone away, and he was alone. But that was rather for the sake of his own integrity of spirit than that more was needed. The act of substitution was fully made; and if it had been necessarily delayed for years (could that have been), but not by his fault, still its result would have preceded it. In the place of the Omnipotence there is neither before nor after; there is only act.

  Pauline went out through the open door of the house, for the Manor was now almost a public building of happiness, and began to make her way towards her home. Just as she left, one of the other girls, who was only then arriving for her part, had delayed her with a question, a minute matter about a borrowed pattern for a dress, and possible alterations. Pauline also had given her attention, and now, walking down the road, went on thinking of it—and whether Mary Frobisher would really be well advised to move the left seam an eighth of an inch back, considering Mary Frobisher’s figure. It was another thing for her, and the hang of the frock had been as satisfactory as could be hoped. But Mary—she stopped to smell the pinks in a garden she was passing. Pinks were not very showy flowers, but they had a fragrance. It was perhaps a pity they had so few in their own garden; she had once or twice thought of asking her grandmother to order the gardener to get some more, since the gardener certainly wouldn’t otherwise do it. But Mrs. Anstruther was always so content with immediate existence that it seemed a shame to bother her about proximate existence. Pauline wondered if she, when she was ninety-seven, would be as little disturbed by the proximate existence of death as her grandmother seemed to be. Or would she be sorry to be compelled to abandon the pleasant wonder of this world, which, when all allowances were made, was a lovely place, and had——

  She nearly came to a full stop; then, with slackened steps, she went on, blinking at the sunlight. She realized she had been walking along quite gaily. It was very curious. She looked down the road. Nothing was in sight—except a postman. She wondered whether anything would come into sight. But why was she so careless about it? Her mind leapt back to Stanhope’s promise, and she knew that, whatever the explanation might be, she had been less bothered for the past ten minutes than ever before in any solitude of twenty years. But supposing the thing came? Well, then it came, but till it came why suppose it? If Peter Stanhope was taking trouble, as he was, because he said he would, there was no conceivable reason for her to get into trouble. She had promised to leave it to him; very well, she would. Let him—with all high blessing and gratitude—get on with it. She had promised, she had only to keep her promise.

  So she put it to herself, but within herself she knew that, except just to ratify her promise, even that act of her mind was superfluous. It was an act purely of extra delight, an occasion of obedience. She wouldn’t worry; no, because she couldn’t worry. That was the mere truth—she couldn’t worry. She was, then and there, whatever happened later, entirely free. She was, then and there incapable of distress. The world was beautiful about her, and she walked in it, enjoying. He had been quite right; he had simply picked up her parcel. God knew how he had done it, but he had. A thing had, everywhere and all at once, happened. A violent convulsion of the laws of the universe took place in her mind; if this was one of the laws, the universe might be better or worse, but it was certainly quite different from anything she had ever supposed it to be. It was a place whose very fundamentals she had suddenly discovered to be changed. She hadn’t any clear idea of what Stanhope was doing, and that didn’t matter, except that she ought, as soon as possible, to find out and try to understand. That was merely her duty, and might—the thought crossed her mind and was gone—be her very great happiness. Meanwhile, she would go on walking. And if she came to her self, well she came to her self. No doubt Peter Stanhope would be doing something about it. A kitten on a wall caught her eye; it put its head down; she stretched her arm and stood on tiptoe to stroke it, and so doing for a while she forgot Stanhope and the universe and Pauline.

  The rehearsal had long been over, and the Manor left again to its owner. Stanhope had returned to his own proper activity of work, when, exactly as the clock in his study chimed nine, the telephone bell rang.

  He took up the receiver.

  “Peter Stanhope speaking,” he said.

  “Pauline,” said a voice. “You told me to ring you up.”

  “I was waiting for you,” he answered. “Well?”

  “Well … there was a kitten and pinks and a pattern for a frock and a postman who said the rain was holding off,” said the voice, and paused.

  “Cautious man,” said Stanhope, and waited.

  “Well … that was all,” the voice explained.

  “Really all?” Stanhope asked.

  “Really all,” the voice answered. “I just went home. It is real, I suppose?”

  “Entirely,” said Stanhope. “Aren’t you sure of it?”

  “Yes, O, yes,” said the voice. “It … I … I wanted to thank you. I don’t know what you did——”

  “But I’ve told you,” he murmured, and was cut short.

  “——but I did want to thank you. Only—what happens now? I mean—do I——” It stopped.

  “I should think you did,” said Stanhope, gravely. “Don’t you? It seems a perfectly good idea.”

  “Ah, but do you mean that?” she protested. “It looks so like taking advantage.”

  “You’ll be as involved morally as you are verbally, if you talk like that,” he said. “Taking advantage! O my dear girl! Don’t be so silly! You’ve got your own job to do.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Being ready to meet it,” he answered. “It’ll be quite simple, no doubt, and even delightful. But if I were you I’d keep my faculties quiet for that. If meeting is a pleasure, as we so often tell people, you may as well enjoy the pleasure.”

  “I hadn’t really thought of it being that,” said the voice.

  “But now?” he asked.

  “Yes … I … I suppose it might,” she said.

  “Do you see any reason whatever why it shouldn’t? Since we’re agreed you won’t have any opportunity to be afraid,” he added.

  “It’s funny,” she said, after another pause, “but do you know I feel as if I’d never really looked at it till now. At least, perhaps the first time, when I was quite small, but I was always shut up when I talked about it, and then sometimes I saw it when … when I didn’t like it.…”

  “I don’t quite follow,” Stanhope said. “When you didn’t like it?”

  He couldn’t see the blush that held Pauline as she sat by the telephone table, but he heard the voice become smaller and softer as she said, “When I wasn’t being very good. There wasn’t much money in the house, and once there was a shilling my mother lost, and then there were sweets. It was just after I’d bought the sweets that I saw it coming once. It was horrid to see it just then, but it was beastly of me, I know.”

  “Well, that’s as may be,” Stanhope said. “The limits of theft are a high casuistical problem. Read Pascal and the Jesuits—especially the Jesuits, who were more ordinary and more sensible. The triumph of the bourgeois.”

  “But I knew it was wrong,” Pauline exclaimed.

  “Still your knowledge may have been wrong,” Stanhope demurred. “However, don’t let’s argue that. I see what you mean. Self-respect and all that. Well, it won’t do you any harm to feel it knows you. Much the best thing, in fact.”

  “Y—yes,” Pauline said. “Yes—I do think so really. And I’m not to worry?”

  “You are most emphatically to remember that I’ll do the worrying,” Stanhope said. “Ring me up at any time—day or night; only if no one answers at night remember that, as Miss Fox so rightly told us, sleep is good, and sleep will undoubtedly be here. But sleep isn’t separation in the Omnipotence. Go in peace, and wish me the same, for friendship’s sake.”

  “O how can I
?” she said, startled. “How can I wish peace to you? You are peace.”

  “M’m,” Stanhope said. “But the more if you will have it so. Try.”

  “Good night then,” she answered slowly. “Good night. Thank you. Go … in peace.”

  Her voice had faltered so that she could hardly speak the words, and when she rose from her seat she was on fire from head to foot. Guilt or shame, servile fear or holy fear, adoration or desperation of obedience, it burned through her to a point of physical pain. The blood rode in her face and she panted a little in the heat. She could not have answered, had anyone spoken to her; her tongue seemed to have said its last words on earth. Never, never, her heart sang, let her speak again, never let the silence that followed her daring, her presumptuous invocation, be broken. It had been compelled, she had been commanded; a god had been with her—not Peter Stanhope, but whatever answered him from her depth.

  She looked at her watch; it was not yet time for her evening visit to her grandmother. She looked round; a book lay on the table. It was the volume of Foxe with the account of her ancestor’s martyrdom; Mrs. Anstruther had been reading it again. She walked to it, and with one hand, the knuckles of the other pressed against her slowly cooling cheek, turned the pages to find the place. Something from it was vaguely coming to her mind. “They set him to the stake and put the fire to the wood, and as the fire got hold of him he gave a great cry and said, I have seen the salvation of my God.… The Lord had done great things for him there in the midst of the fire.” The Lord, she thought, made a habit of doing things in the midst of a fire; he had just brought her to say “Go in peace” in another. She glowed again to think of it. But it was the first phrase she had looked for; “I have seen the salvation”. It had never occurred to her, any time she had read or remembered the martyrdom, that Struther was anything but a demented fanatic; a faint distaste that she should come of his blood had touched her. It now occurred to her that Struther might have been talking flat realism. She put the book down, and looked out of the window. It was—all of a sudden—remarkably easy to look out of the window. She might even walk down to the gate and look at the street. The parcel was completely in some one else’s care, and all she had to do was to leave it. She hoped it was not troublesome to Peter Stanhope, but it wouldn’t be. He and whatever he meant by the Omnipotence would manage it quite well between them. Perhaps, later on, she could give the Omnipotence a hand with some other burden; everyone carrying everyone else’s, like the Scilly Islanders taking in each other’s washing. Well, and at that, if it were tiresome and horrible to wash your own clothes and easy and happy to wash someone else’s, the Scilly Islanders might be intelligent enough. “Change here for Scilly,” she said aloud as she came to the gate.