Shadows of Ecstasy Read online

  “It may be your duty,” Roger said, “I’m pretty certain it isn’t mine. You haven’t met him.”

  “Sir Bernard has and Sir Bernard agrees,” Caithness answered.

  “Sir Bernard and I don’t believe in the same things,” Roger said. “I can’t stop him but I won’t have anything to do with it.”

  Philip got up—for him violently. “Roger,” he cried out, “what are you talking about? Are you on this man’s side?”

  “Yes, I am,” Roger said. “At least I can’t go against him. He knows there’s something in it, and which of you all does that?”

  “I know it very well,” Inkamasi said, sitting rigid. “And I will kill him because of it.”

  “You’ve a right to do as you please,” Roger answered, “but I haven’t. I’ve no right except to follow what I know when I find it.” He looked over at his wife. “Aren’t I right?” he exclaimed to her.

  Isabel also stood up, and met his eyes full. “Yes, darling,” she said simply.

  “Roger,” Sir Bernard said dulcetly, “is it Mr. Considine’s feeling about poetry that affects you so much? Because the unfortunate white race has not been entirely silent. Was Dante a Bantu or Shakespeare a Hottentot? A few of us read it still.”

  “O read it!” Roger said contemptuously. “God knows I don’t want to live for ever, but I tell you this fellow knows. So do I—a little bit, and I believe it’s important. More important than anything else on earth. And I won’t help you to shut it up in a refrigerator when I ought to be helping to keep it alive.”

  “Can’t you leave that to God?” Caithness flung out.

  “No,” said Roger, “I damn well can’t, when he’s left it to me. I know your argument—it’s all been done, death has been conquered, and so as nothing ever dies somewhere else, we needn’t worry about it’s dying here. Well, thank you very much, but I do. What are you worrying about? I know I can’t stop you, but I won’t have a hand in it.”

  “I see,” Sir Bernard said, “that the white administration in Africa may easily have been absorbed. I’m sorry, Roger.”

  “Don’t be,” Roger said. “It’s not a thing to be sorry about.” He swept suddenly round. “What about it, Philip?” he cried. “Are you with them?”

  Philip, trying to keep his footing, said, “Don’t be a fool, Roger, we can’t not fight the Africans.”

  “We can ‘not fight’ them perfectly well,” Roger said, and it seemed to Isabel that his tall insolent figure dominated all the room except for the carven and royal darkness of the seated Zulu, “and you know it. Love and poetry are powers, and these people—will you deny it too?”

  “Really, Roger,” Sir Bernard put in, “must you dichotomize in this appalling way? It’s so barbarian; it went out with the Victorians. If you feel you’re betraying the Ode to the Nightingale or something by agreeing to my call on the Prime Minister, must you insist that your emotions are universal? Keep them private, my dear boy, or they’ll be merely provincial; and the provincial is the ruin of the public and the private at once.”

  He knew he was talking at random, but the whole room was filled with uncertainty and defiance and distress. A man had come out into the open from behind the fronds and leaves and it was Roger. A trumpet had answered the horns and drums that were crying to the world from the jungle of man’s being; and the trumpet was Roger’s voice. Was Africa then within? was all the war, were the armies and munitions and the transports but the shadow of the repression by which man held down their more natural energies? but images of the strong refusal which Europe had laid on capacities it had so long ruled that it had nearly forgotten their independent life? But things forgotten could rise; and old things did not always die. Poland—Ireland—Judah—man. Roger knew something; the voice that had discussed and lectured and gibed and repeated verse now cried its sworn loyalty: a schism was opening in civilization. Sir Bernard looked at Isabel, but she said nothing. She leaned on the mantelpiece and looked into the fire, and her face was very still. Roger relaxed slightly; he liked Sir Bernard, and they had often gently mocked each other. He said, “Yes, I know I can’t do anything. I think I’ll say good-night and get back to Hampstead. Coming, Isabel?”

  She turned her head towards him. “It’ll be very awkward, dearest,” she said. “The milkman’s been told not to call, and what shall we do for breakfast?” She spoke quite seriously, but her lips smiled; only a deeper seriousness and sadness grew in her eyes, and his own were sad as they encountered hers. She stood upright, as if to move, and yet lingered a little on that silent interchange.

  “I know, I know,” Roger said, answering her smile, “it’ll be most inconvenient, but can I stop here?” He looked round at them all and flung out his hands. “O you’re charming, you’re lovely, all of you, but how much do you care what the great ones are doing? And in these centuries you’ve nearly killed it, with your appreciations and your fastidious judgements, and your lives of this man and your studies in that. What do you know about ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live Like living men’? Power, power, it’s dying in you, and you don’t hunger to feel it live. What’s Milton, what’s Shakespeare, to you?”

  “If this is just a literary discussion——” Caithness began.

  “What d’you mean—just a literary discussion?” Roger said, his temper leaping. “D’you call Islam a mere theological distinction? Can’t you understand any other gospel than your own damned dogmas?”

  “Roger, Roger,” Sir Bernard murmured.

  “I beg your pardon,” Roger said, “and yours too, Sir Bernard. But I can’t stay here to-night. I know it seems silly, but I can’t.” He looked back at his wife. “But I shall be all right, darling,” he said, “if you’d rather stop. I can even go and buy a bottle of milk!”

  Isabel smiled at him. “I think I’ll come to-night,” she said. “To-night anyhow.” She looked down at her sister. “Rosamond, you might as well stop here, mightn’t you?”

  Rosamond looked up with a jerk. “Stop,” she exclaimed. “What, are you going back? O I can’t, I can’t. I’ll come.”

  They all stared at her. “I wasn’t just listening,” she went on hastily. “I was thinking of something else. Are you going at once, Isabel? I’ll get my things.” She was on her feet, when Philip’s hand took hold of her arm. She jerked it away. “Let me alone,” she cried out. “Aren’t you going with them?”

  Philip, in spite of his opposition to Roger, hadn’t been at all certain; or rather, he was extremely troubled about being certain. He couldn’t begin to imagine himself on the side of Considine and the Africans, but he had a curiously empty feeling somewhere when he thought of denying them. It was all so muddled, and he had hitherto thought that moral divisions, though painful, were clear: such as not cheating, and not telling lies except for urgent reasons, and being on your country’s side, and being polite to your inferiors, and in short playing the game. But this game was quite unlike any other he’d ever played; what with the piercing music that called him still, and the song Considine’s talk of love sent through his blood, and the urgent appeal to him to do what he so much wanted to do, to exult and live. But of course when Rosamond put it like that—no, he wasn’t. He was going to be on the side of his country and his duty and his fiancée. He said so.

  She said: “I thought not,” almost snapping at him. “Then leave me alone. I thought you wouldn’t.”

  The king at this moment stood up. He had been silent, concerned with his own thought of vengeance, while the breach between Roger and the rest had widened, and now he thrust himself up in the midst of them, an ally and yet a hostility, a dark whirlwind of confusion in their thoughts and in their midst. He came to his feet, and Rosamond, as if by the force of his rising, seemed flung against her sister. She clung to Isabel, and Isabel said, speaking of ordinary things in her own extraordinarily lovely voice: “Very well, darling, we’ll all go. Perhaps Sir Bernard will give us a loaf of bread.”

  Sir Bernard, almost disliking Rosamond
—he hadn’t wanted her there at all, but she’d insisted on coming, and without being rude to Philip he could hardly refuse—said: “Also the jug of wine, if it’s any good. The Sahara will no doubt presently serve for Paradise. Ian, will you come with me as far as Downing Street?”

  The breach widened indeed, but he was more aware of it than Roger, and as he became aware of it he refused and bridged it in his mind. He had been very nearly irritated, and irritation inflamed all the exquisite contemplative mind: he turned the cool spray of medicinal irony on himself till he was able to smile at Roger and say, “Well, if you will go—But let me be in at the death, won’t you? While gospels exist, let’s enjoy them as best we can. Good-night.”

  A little later he and Caithness, having telephoned for an appointment, came to Downing Street, where, parting from the priest, he was after some slight delay carried in to see Raymond Suydler himself; which attention and privilege he owed to the Prime Minister’s gratitude for a restored stomach.

  It was a long time since Sir Bernard had seen him; his attention to his stomach had been paid during the Prime Minister’s first administration, and this was his second. He was a man who had made not merely an opportunity but a political triumph out of the very loss of public belief in politics which afflicted the country. He had carried realism to its extreme, declaring publicly that the best any statesman could do was to guess at the solution of his various problems, and that his guesses had a habit of being right. In private he dropped only the last half of this statement, which left him fifty per cent of sincerity, and thus gave him an almost absurd advantage over most of his colleagues and opponents. It had taken some time certainly for his own party to reconcile themselves to the enormous placards “Guess with Suydler” which at the General Election outflamed the more argumentative shows of the other side. But the country, half mocking, half understanding, had laughed and followed, in that mingling of utter despair and wild faith which conceals itself behind the sedate appearance of the English. Chance, no doubt, had helped him by giving him an occasional opportunity of lowering taxation at home and increasing prestige abroad, but his denial of reason had done more. It was not cynicism; it was, and it was felt to be, truth, as Suydler saw it, and as most of the country did. In any state of things, the facts—all the facts—were unknown; circumstances were continually changing; instability and uncertainty were the only assured things. What was the use of rational discussion or fixed principles or far-sighted demonstrations? “Guess—guess with Suydler.” He was reported to have said that the English had only had one inspired fool as Prime Minister—Pitt; and two intelligent men—Melbourne and Disraeli, who were hampered by believing, one in a class, the other in a race. “I would rather guess with Pitt, if you’ll guess with me.”

  Sir Bernard remembered all this as he shook hands, and observed with a slight shock Suydler’s large, ungainly form. The one cartoon which had really succeeded against him had beencalled “The Guessing Gorilla,” and Sir Bernard recollected with pleasure that it was not his own obsession with Africa which had remarked the likeness. The ugly face, the long hanging arms, the curled fingers, the lumbering step, had a strange likeness to a great ape plunging about the room. He shook hands, and his visitor was quite glad not to feel those huge arms clutching him. There was, he thought, altogether too much Africa about, and he almost wondered for a moment whether indeed Suydler were preferable to Considine.… But he reminded himself that it wasn’t personalities but abstract states of existence with which he was concerned, and he took the chair the Prime Minister offered. The huge bulk swelled before him, loomed over him, was talking … talking.… Sir Bernard felt a great weariness come over him. The excitement, the incredibilities, of the last twenty-four hours had worn him out. And what was the good of trying to defend the intellect in this place of the death of the intellect? Witch-doctors were invading Europe, and he had gone running to an ape for help.…

  “—absurd talk about possible reasons,” the Prime Minister was saying. “The whole thing’s an example of the failure of organized thought. No-one can find out the root of the trouble.”

  “I wonder you ask them,” Sir Bernard said.

  “I don’t; they tell me,” Suydler answered. “There was a man yesterday—an ex-Governor—was talking to me. I had a kind of bet with myself how many synonyms he’d use for guess—I think it was about twenty-four. We may assume—not improbable—very likely—may it not be—reasonable assumption—working hypothesis—possible surmise—news suggests—my opinion is—better theory—never a plain straightforward guess. Never used the word once.”

  “It’s not a favourite, except with children; they love it,” Sir Bernard said. “Perhaps,” he added, struck by a sudden thought, “that’s why they’re nearer the kingdom of heaven. They’re more sincere. However, I came here to say that I’m not certain that I didn’t dine yesterday with the High Executive. I mean—I guess I did.”

  “That’s fair, anyhow,” Suydler answered. “Who did you guess he was? And—not that I mind, but as a concession to the Permanent Officials—why did you guess him?”

  Sir Bernard held out his papers. “It’s all there,” he said.

  Suydler put out an enormous hand—its shadow on the carpet stretched out, black and even more enormous—and took them. “How tidy you are,” he said, grinning, “but you always were, weren’t you? Your operations were always miracles of conciseness. If you’ve extracted the truth now, that’ll be another miracle. Excuse me while I look at them.”

  He didn’t take long over it; then he chuckled, put them down, and leaned back. “And you’ve got this Zulu king of yours?” he asked. “Ready to testify and identify and all that?”

  “Certainly,” Sir Bernard said.

  Suydler linked his fingers and stretched his arms out. “Well,” he said, “if you like—though I’ve met Considine a few times—but if you like to make a pattern with him in, I’m not sure that I won’t go with you. It’ll look awfully well.…‘Government discover High Executive.’ Why, as of minor interest, didn’t you come before?”

  “Because, until I’d got the king’s opinion—guess, if you like, I couldn’t,” Sir Bernard explained. “And he went off into a real stupor the minute he reached Kensington—as if he had to get his own faculties into order.”

  “Two hundred years—” Suydler said. “But what a price to pay! No women, no fun, no excitements. All, if I’ve got it right, squeezed back into yourself.” He pressed a bell. “It isn’t fair to let him go on suppressing himself and misleading others, is it?—‘A long life and a dull one’—that’s the end of all you theorists.”

  Sir Bernard stood up. “Well,” he said, “if you think I’m right I’ll go.”

  A secretary came in, but Suydler kept him waiting. “Right!” he said, “no, I don’t think you’re right. I think your mind and his may have—what shall I say?—coincided by chance. But there’s no such thing as ‘right.’ It’s all a question of preferring a particular momentary pattern of phenomena. There’s nothing more anywhere. How can there be? At this moment the past doesn’t exist, the future doesn’t exist, and we know nothing much about the present!”

  Avoiding any immediate discussion of the nature of existence, Sir Bernard got away. Walking down Downing Street he considered the Minister. “Considine and he both look into the abyss,” he thought, “but Considine sees it beating with passion, and Suydler sees nothing. A chaos or a void? Black men, or men who are no longer white?” He saw the intellect and logical reason of man no longer as a sedate and necessary thing, but rather a narrow silver bridge passing over an immense depth, around the high guarded entrance of which thronged clouds of angry and malign presences. Often mistaking the causes and often misjudging the effects of all mortal sequences, this capacity of knowing cause and effect presented itself nevertheless to him as the last stability of man. Always approaching truth, it could never, he knew, be truth, for nothing can be truth till it has become one with its object, and such union it was not
given to the intellect to achieve without losing its own nature. But in its divine and abstract reflection of the world, its passionless mirror of the holy law that governed the world, not in experiments or ecstasies or guesses, the supreme perfection of mortality moved. He saluted it as its child and servant, and dedicated himself again to it, for what remained to him of life, praying it to turn the light of its awful integrity upon him, and to preserve him from self-deception and greediness and infidelity and fear. “If A is the same as B,” he said, “and B is the same as C, then A is the same as C. Other things may be true; for all I know, they may be different at the same time; but this at least is true. And Considine will have to hypnotize me myself before I deny it. Suydler is wrong—a guess may be true once and twice and a thousand times, for man has known abstraction, and no gorilla of a politician can take it away from him.”

  Chapter Eight

  PASSING THROUGH THE MIDST OF THEM

  There followed a few days of uneasy quiet. The news from Africa was vague, but more cheerfully vague. It was generally understood that organized naval measures were being taken to overcome the submarine forces of the enemy, which had succeeded in making the African coasts so dangerous and had proceeded so far afield that until such measures had been concerted and carried out the landing of fresh troops had become impossible. It was even rumoured that attacks had been made on certain European harbours, but if this were so the Government concerned saw to it that no hint was allowed to appear in the Press. Energetic operations had been planned; the more energetic movements of the enemy seemed to have ceased, though the clearance of white troops from North Africa appeared to be proceeding slowly but systematically.

  The financial panic had also been stayed to some extent by Government action. For the Prime Minister had announced that, as the simplest means of meeting the emergency, the Administration had decided to make loans to the federated control of any particular industry which was seriously affected. Conditions of application, examination, payment and repayment were to be settled by a Commission set up for the purpose; the immediate affair was to steady the markets, and dazed directors of innumerable companies found themselves offered millions in order to buy up shares in their own concerns. Unfederated companies rushed to federate; all newspapers, for example, found themselves part of one large business, controlled by a common Board which immediately borrowed or was offered a subsidy of some millions, with which it repurchased the shares which Nehemiah and Ezekiel Rosenberg were throwing before the world. It looked therefore as if these devoted believers would secure their money as well as their jewels; and the coming of Messias or the building of the Temple be prepared for by the English in a general increase of taxation. Sir Bernard, as he contemplated the world, foresaw a possibility that the whole business, military and financial, would gradually expire, having ruined a great number of small shareholders, increased the financial strength of the larger, cost a great deal in armaments, and probably massacred a host of Africans in circumstances of more or less equal fighting.