Shadows of Ecstasy Read online

  The inspector struggled forward; it needed labour, so heavily was he oppressed by the depths into which the air had opened. He took a step and staggered as he did so. The eyes fixed on him saw him rock and steady himself; he said, holding himself upright, “Nigel Considine, I——”

  “I am Nigel Considine,” his great opponent answered, and also moved forward, and the quiver that went through them all answered the laughter in the voice. The inspector reeled again, half-falling sideways, and as he recovered footing a sudden hand went out towards him—whether it touched him or not they could not tell—and he stumbled backward once more. The wind swept into their faces, and on it a ringing laughter came, and in its midst Considine went on towards the the door, with Mottreux by him, sending towards Roger one imperious glance from eyes bright with joy. The uniforms thronged and shifted and were in confusion, and wind swirled in the room as if strength were released through it, and Roger, half-dazed, ran forward and saw the two visitors already in the hall. The inspector came heavily and blindly back; he called out; his men moved uncertainly after Considine who paused, turned, and paused again.

  “I am Nigel Considine,” he cried out. “Who takes me?”

  He flung out his arms as if in derisive submission, and took a step or two towards them. They recoiled; there was renewed confusion, men pressing back and pressing forward, men exclaiming and commanding. Someone slipped and crashed against the doorpost, someone else, thrust backward, tripped over a foot; there was falling and stumbling, and through it Roger saw the wide-armed figure offering itself in laughing scorn. Then, with a motion as if he gathered up the air and cast it against them, so that they blinked and thrust and shielded their eyes, he turned from that struggling mass of fallen and pushing bodies, and went to the front-door. A panting Muriel leaned against it; he laughed at her and signed, and hastily she drew away, opening it, and he and Mottreux went through.

  Roger gazed after him “I have lived,” he sighed. “I have seen the gods. Phoebus, Phoebus, Python-destroyer, hear and save.”

  Chapter Nine

  THE RIOT AND THE RAID

  Philip jumped on to a bus—any bus—the first he saw. He had been walking for ever so long, and he must sit down. But also he must be moving; he couldn’t be shut in. Things were worse than he had ever imagined they could be; indeed he couldn’t quite imagine what exactly they now were. The Hampstead flat was in a state of acute distress and turmoil; he had arrived that evening innocently enough, to find half a dozen policemen all arguing with Roger, who was glowering at Rosamond, who was crying hysterically in Isabel’s arms, who was keeping, not without difficulty, a grave sympathy with all of them. He had naturally hurried to Rosamond, but not with the best effects; the sight of him had seemed to distract her more than ever. Out of the arguments and exclamations he had at last gathered—and more clearly after the police had at last grimly withdrawn—that Considine had been there, and that Rosamond, after she had realized who it really was, had gone through a short period of conflict with herself on the right thing to do. She said it had been conflict, and that only her duty … whereas Roger, in a few words, implied that she had been delighted at the chance, and that duty—except to herself—was a thing of which she was entirely unconscious and incapable. Anyhow, after a very short period she had rung up the police-station and explained to the authorities there what was happening. Why the police hadn’t arrested Considine Philip couldn’t understand. Isabel was concerned with her sister, and Roger wasn’t very clear in his account. Somebody had gone through the midst of somebody else; somebody had been like Pythian Apollo. But he couldn’t bother about all that; he was too anxious about Rosamond. Had he been challenged, he would have had to admit that for a guest to try and have another visitor arrested in the host’s drawing-room was not perhaps … though for Roger to call it treachery was absurd. If anything, it was public spirit. He knew nothing—Rosamond had seen to that—of such an orgy as the episode of the chocolates which Isabel so clearly and reluctantly remembered; he knew nothing of a greedy gobbling child, breaking suddenly away from its ordinary snobbish pretences, giving way to the thrust of its secret longings and vainly trying to conceal from others’ eyes the force of its desires. She had cheated herself so long, consciously in childhood, with that strange combination of perfect innocence and deliberate sin which makes childhood so blameless and so guilty at one and the same moment; less consciously in youth, as innocence faded and the necessity of imposing some kind of image of herself on the world grew stronger, till now in her first womanhood she had forgotten the cheat, until her outraged flesh rebelled and clamoured from starvation for food. And even now she would not admit it; she would neither fight it nor flee from it nor yield to it nor compromise with it. She could hardly even deny that it was there, for there was no place for it in her mind. She, she of all people, could never be capable of abominably longing to be near the dark prince of Africa; she couldn’t thrill to the trumpets of conversion nor glow to the fires of ecstasy. Nor could she hate herself for refusing them. But she could and inevitably did hate the things that resembled them—Considine’s person and Roger’s verse and Philip, all of Philip, for Philip to her agonized sense was at once a detestable parody of what she wanted and a present reminder of what she longed to forget. And now, like all men and all women who are not masters of life, she swayed to and fro in her intention and even in her desire. At Kensington she had shrunk away from Inkamasi and fled from him; at Hampstead she thought of him and secretly longed for him. Power was in her and she was terrified of it. She had been self-possessed, but all herself was in the possessing and nothing in the possessed; self-controlled, but she had had only a void to control. And now that nothing and that void were moved with fire and darkness; the shadow of ecstasy lay over her life, and denying the possibility of ecstasy she fled through its shadow as far as its edge, and halted irresolute, and was drawn back by a fascination she loved and hated. She was alive and she hated life; not with a free feeling of judgement but with servile fear. She hated life, and therefore she would hide in Hampstead; she lived, and therefore she would return to Kensington. But neither in Hampstead nor Kensington, in Europe nor Africa, in her vision of her unsubservient self, nor of her monstrous master, was there any place for Philip, much less a Philip aware of the exaltation of love.

  But it was not till after, shocked and bewildered by the venom she had flung at him in that dreadful scene, he had at last gone that she began to fear that her relations with Kensington might have been severed. And, not being there, she was determined to get back there. She would run there and then run away, till the strait-jacket of time and place imprisoned her as it imprisons in the end all who suffer from a like madness. It is perhaps why the asylum of material creation was created, and we sit in our separate cells, strapped and comparatively harmless, merely foaming a little and twitching our fingers, while the steps and voices of unknown warders come to us from the infinite corridors. But Rosamond was only beginning to hurl herself against the walls of her cell, and the invisible warders had not yet had occasion to take much notice of her. The jacket waited her; when the paroxysm was done she would no doubt come to regard it as becoming wear and in the latest fashion. Whether such a belief is desirable is a question men have not yet been able to decide.

  Since Roger was so cruel to her, so detestably unfair, she would go to Sir Bernard; there was no other friend in London on whom she could descend without notice. Sir Bernard would understand her motives; he’d tried to get that hateful man arrested. Isabel tried her best to prevent her, saying even that Roger might be going away. But this didn’t seem to placate Rosamond, and at last Isabel said no more. Roger said nothing at all until Rosamond had left them “to put some of her things together.” Isabel said: “I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing: Sir Bernard may be able to do something. What she needs is a sleeping-draught.”

  “What she needs,” Roger said, “is prussic acid.”

  Meanwhile Philip had walked, walked millio
ns of miles, it seemed, till at a sudden last weariness struck him and he got on a bus. The heavens beyond that firmamental arm had been pouring anger and distraction and hatred down on him, and he didn’t understand it at all. He had been trying to please Rosamond—which, unlike most people who use similar phrases, he actually had. He sat on the bus and thought so for a long time, until he became aware that someone was speaking to him.

  The conductor had come up and was standing by him, peering out through the front of the bus, and saying something. Philip roused himself to attention, and heard him say: “There’s something up; can’t you hear it, sir?”

  Philip listened and looked round. The night was clear and he recognized in a mass that lay on his left Liverpool Street Station. The bus was going slowly, for it was interrupted and hampered by a number of people running down the road in the same direction. There was a sound in the distance which resolved itself, as he listened, into the noise of shouting.

  “What the devil is up?” he said.

  The conductor—a short rather gloomy fellow—gave a sinister smile. “I shouldn’t wonder but what I could guess,” he said. “I thought it’d happen sooner or later. I said it was a silly business, letting it be known all over the place that they’d millions and millions worth of jewels in the house. ‘Jewels to the Jews,’ I called it, when it got about. Everything gets about. And if it wasn’t jewels—and some say it wasn’t—it was money. Hark at that!”

  Another shout, nearer now as the bus moved on, brought Philip to his feet. “Is it the Rosenbergs?” he said. “But they can’t have got them here.”

  The bus, as he spoke, turned into Bishopsgate and was brought almost to a stop by an accumulating crowd. Philip jumped off and allowed himself to be carried in the steady stream that set towards one of the side turnings. He caught fragments of talk: “Say they’re going to bribe the negroes”; “know all about those bloody niggers”; “great jewels like turnips, been buying them for months”; “lowsy old Jews”; “Christ Almighty”; “bloody Jews.” But what had roused the crowd he wasn’t yet at all clear. His coat buttoned, and his collar turned up, his stick firmly grasped, he was carried round one corner after another. In the darkness he was aware of continually changing neighbours, among whom were certainly some of his own class and standing. He saw a brown lean face which he thought he recognized; a large fat face with an open mouth from which issued stridently a continual and monotonous cry of “Dirty Jews!”; a happy excited face—two or three of them all in a knot together. He was thrust backwards, sideways; the crowd lurched diversely and pinned him against some railings. A few feet ahead, it seemed to him, so far as he could judge in the darkness, that the crowd centred before a particular gate and house. There the shouting rose loudest, and sticks were rattled on the railings. He saw the helmets of two policemen within the gate and before the front door. Another call went up: “Come out, you bloody Jews!” “Come out and bring us the jewels!” “Come out and we’ll show you what we’ll do to the niggers!” He caught fresh fragments of the talk round him. A woman of sixty near by said with a sensuous shudder to her neighbour: “They do say that Jews eat babies,” “Ah,” said the neighbour, “foreigners’ll do anything,” and in a minute or two passed the information on in turn. Soon after, someone in front of the house shouted: “When did you eat the last baby?” and though a roar of laughter answered it, it was laughter with a hint of madness. Philip managed to edge a little farther towards the house, in the garden of which he now saw two or three hats and caps as well as the helmets. The police, however, at this made a sudden move, one man was flung sideways into the next narrow garden where he fell with a crash, another scrambled hastily the other way, and a third dropped flat on the ground. In the recoil that followed, Philip achieved the front of the house. “All right,” he said hurriedly to the police. “I’m with you. Let me in.” They took one comprehensive look at him, decided on the risk, and as the crowd swayed back he slipped through and turned to face it.

  “Who the hell are you?” half a dozen asked him. “Another baby-eater?”

  “Come to get the jewels,” another voice answered. “Come on, there’s only three of them.” Nevertheless Philip’s stick and the truncheons of the police held the front rank yet a little doubtful.

  In the pause a window opened over their heads and a voice said: “Why are you here?” A roar of laughter and abuse followed. “Hand out the jewels! Come out and meet us! Who’s afraid of the niggers? Who’s doing a bunk? Jew! Jew! Jew!”

  The voice said coldly: “Sons of abomination, what have we to do with you? Defilers of yourselves, who are you to come against the Holy One of Israel?”

  The laughter and abuse grew more violent. “’Ark at him,” said a thin hungry-looking man near Philip. “O my Gawd; the ’Oly one of Hisrael!”

  “You may destroy the house and all that is within it,” Rosenberg said, “and you shall be smitten with fire and pestilence and all the plagues of Egypt. But the jewels, even if they were here, you should not touch or see, for they are holy to the Lord. They are for the Temple of Zion and for Messias that shall be revealed.”

  “’Im and ’is Messias,” said a stout woman. “I ’opes Messias isn’t in a ’urry for them jewels!”

  A stone flew through the air, and at the same time a huge fellow pushed to the gate, where he looked up and spoke: “Look ’ere,” he said, “are you Rosenberg?”

  “I am Nehemiah Rosenberg,” the voice said.

  “Then you look ’ere. We ’appen to know that you’ve been in with the Government and the capitalists to get all this money out of the working classes and get away with it to the niggers as like as not. And we don’t ’old with it. Now we don’t want to ’urt you but we don’t let a lot of bloody Sheenies get away with our money to those blasted niggers, not much we don’t. Give us them jewels and I’ll see they’re put in safe keeping: I swear I will. And if you don’t I’ll damn well put a light to the house myself.”

  A roar of applause answered him, though the stout woman, who appeared to Philip to preserve an attitude of detachment worthy of Sir Bernard, said generally: “Ah, I don’t ‘old with Socialism,” and one of the policemen added agreeably: “You keep your mouth shut, Mike Cummings.”

  “Thank Gawd,” Mr. Cummings said, “I never could keep my mouth shut while honest men are being put on.”

  Rosenberg leaned out of the window. “I tell you,” he said, “the Lord shall avenge Himself upon His enemies. In the morning you shall say, ‘Would God it were night,’ and in the evening you shall say, ‘Would God it were day’; and His anger shall be with you in your secret chamber.…”

  Something flew through the air, struck the wall, and dropped at Philip’s feet; something smashed the glass of the window above him. He clutched at his stick, and at the same time saw one of the policemen dragged sideways and clubs and belts appearing around him. He was back against the front door, and heard it creaking as the rush of the crowd in a storm of shrieks, curses, and yells came against him. Something hit his shoulder, a large dirty chin came close to his eyes, and an elbow or a stick drove into his side. At the same moment the door gave and they all crashed into the narrow passage together. The first in were past him and up the stairs; the next few in their haste ignored him; and then it was all darkness and pandemonium. He heard a loud voice upstairs, overwhelmed by the louder tumult of the crowd, a sudden silence above, noticeable in a momentary cessation of the uproar without, and then a cry: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Chaos beyond anything he had known earlier in the riot broke out again, chaos of voices, but also now chaos of movement—part of the crowd in the house trying to get out, part trying to get upstairs, part uncertain and confused. Shouts of “the police” were heard from the street, the pressure round Philip lightened, and he found one of his former allies next to him again, trying to force a way upstairs. Exclamations of terror broke out, the crowd thinned, and when at last they entered the upper room, they were only in time to prev
ent the demonstrative Mr. Cummings from slipping away. Him the constable seized, while Philip, taking in the appearance of the room, with a taut rope stretched across it and out of the window, ran across to join Ezekiel who, torn and bleeding, was leaning out of it. He knew before he looked out what he would find, nor was it till he had helped to pull up the hanging body of Nehemiah that he found time to wonder why the crowd had so swiftly destroyed their prey. But as Ezekiel and he undid the cord, and laid and arranged the body on the table he gathered from Cummings’ persistent babble that nothing of the sort had been intended. The Jews were to be frightened into betraying the hiding-place of the money or the jewels, and the rope—meant for one of the packed boxes of luggage that stood by the wall—had been adjusted with that idea. And then Nehemiah had struggled, and the rope had slipped, and so “help me God” no-one was more surprised than he to hear that the Jew was dead.

  “Is it likely I’d mean to kill him? Me that’s never hurt a canary! It’s all a mistake.…”

  “The Lord gave,” Ezekiel said, standing up and looking at the body, “and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  By this time more police were in the room, some of them with prisoners. Philip explained his presence to the officer in charge, and when this was confirmed by the two original constables and he had given his address it was suggested that he might prefer to make his way home.