Descent into Hell Read online

  “But how could he take it before I’d given it?” Pauline cried, and Margaret said: “Why do you talk of before? If you give, you give to It, and what does It care about before?”

  Pauline got up and walked to the window. It was drawing towards night, yet so translucent was the pale green sky that night and day seemed alike unthinkable. She heard in the distance a single pair of hurrying feet; patter, patter. She said, in a muffled voice: “Even the edge frightens me.”

  “Peter Stanhope,” Margaret said, “must have been frightened many times.”

  “O—poetry!” Pauline exclaimed bitterly. “That’s different; you know it is, grandmother.”

  “In seeing?” Margaret asked. “And as for being, you must find out for yourself. He can carry your parcels, but not you.”

  “Couldn’t he?” Pauline said. “Not that I want him to.”

  “Perhaps,” Margaret answered. “But I think only when you don’t need it, and your parcels when you do.”

  Her voice grew faint as she spoke, and Pauline came quickly back to the bed.

  “I’m tiring you,” she said hastily. “I’m sorry: look, I’ll go now. I didn’t mean to talk so much.”

  Margaret glanced at her, and said in a whisper: “But I’d so much rather die talking.” All talk of the divine thing was pleasant to her, even if this beating of wings in the net, wings so dear and so close, was exhausting in the thin air. Pauline, looking down for a second after her good-night, thought that a change had taken place. The eyes had closed, though the girl was by no means sure that they were not as alert now as they had been when they were open and watching.

  Yet a proportion between the old woman and external things had been withdrawn; another system of relations might have been established, but if so it was unapprehensible by others. But the change in customary relations was definitely apprehensible. She looked small, and yet small was hardly the word; she was different. The body had been affected by a change of direction in the spirit, and only when the spirit was removed would it regain for a little while its measurable place amongst measurable things. It could be served and aided; but the ceremonies of service were now made to something strange that existed among them. The strangeness communicated itself, by a kind of opposition, to the very bed in which that body was stretched; it became a mound of earth lifted up to bear the visiting victim. The woman who was their companion had half-changed into a visitor from another place, a visitor who knew nothing of the world to which she was still half-native. The unknown and the known mingled, as if those two great parents of humanity allowed their mingled powers to be evident to whoever watched. The mound, in the soft light of the room, presented itself to Pauline as if its low height was the crown and peak of a life; the long journey had ended on this cavity in the rounded summit of a hill. She considered it gravely so before she turned and, leaving the nurse in charge, went to her own room.

  She was not asleep when later in the night she was called. Her grandmother, the nurse said, needed her. Pauline pulled a dressing-gown on her and went across. Mrs. Anstruther was sitting in the bed, propped by pillows; her eyes looking away out of the room. As if she dared not turn her gaze away, she said, as Pauline came up: “Is that you, darling?”

  “Me,” the girl answered. “Did you want me?”

  “Will you do something for me?” Mrs. Anstruther said. “Something rather odd?”

  “Why, of course,” the girl said. “Anything. What is it?”

  “Would you be so very charming as to go out and see if anyone wants you?” Mrs. Anstruther said, quite distinctly. “Up by Mr. Wentworth’s.”

  “She’s wandering,” the nurse whispered. Pauline, used to Mrs. Anstruther’s extremely unwandering habits, hesitated to agree. But it was certainly rather odd. She said, with a tenderness a little fractured by doubt, “Wants me, darling? Now?”

  “Of course, now,” her grandmother answered. “That’s the point. I think perhaps he ought to get back to the City.” She looked round with a little sigh. “Will you?”

  Pauline had been about to make the usual unfelicitous efforts of the healthy to persuade the sick that they are being rightly served. But she could not do it. No principle and no wisdom directed her, nor any conscious thought of love. She merely could not do it. She said: “By Mr. Wentworth’s? Very well, darling.” She could have helped, but did not, adding: “I don’t think it’s very likely.”

  “No,” said Margaret, and Pauline was gripped by a complete sense of folly. “‘I don’t think it’s … No.’” She said: “I don’t know a thing. I’ll go.” And turned. The nurse said as she moved to the door: “Sweet of you to be so nice. Come back in ten minutes or so. She won’t realize the time.”

  “I’m going,” Pauline said, distantly, and distinctly, “as far as Mr. Wentworth’s. I shall be as quick as I can.” She saw a protest at the nurse’s mouth, and added: “At once.”

  She dressed quickly. Even so, in spite of her brave words to the nurse, her doubts were quicker. In spite of her intention, she reasoned against her promise. Three words dogmatized definition at her: “Her mind’s wandering; her mind’s wandering.” Why, obeying that wandering mind, should she herself wander on the Hill? Why, in a lonely street, under the pale shining sky, should she risk the last dreadful meeting? The high clock struck one; time drew to the night’s nadir. Why go? why go? Sit here, she said, almost aloud, and say “Peace”. Is it peace, Jehu? cry peace where there is no peace; faciunt solitudinem et pacem vocant. She would make a solitude round the dying woman and call it peace; the dying woman would die and never know, or dying know and call it well; the dying woman that would not die but see, or die and see; and dead, see and know—know the solitude that her granddaughter had called peace. Up and up, the wind was rising, and the shuffle of leaves under the moon, and nothing was there for her to find, but to find nothing now was to be saved from finding nothing in the place where whatever she now did was hid and kept and saved. The edge of the other world was running up along the sky, the world where everyone carried themselves but everyone carried someone else’s grief: Alice in Wonderland, sweet Alice, Alice sit by the fire, the fire burned: who sat by the fire that burned a man in another’s blood on the grass of a poet’s house, where things were given backward, and rules were against rights and rights against rules, and a ghost in the fire was a ghost in the street, and the thing that had been was the thing that was to be and it was coming, was coming; what was coming? what but herself? she was coming, she was coming, up the street and the wind; herself—a terrible good, terror and error, but the terror was error, and the error was in the terror, and now all were in him, for he had taken them into himself, and he was coming, down all the roads of Battle Hill, closing them in him, making them straight: make straight the highways before our God, and they were not for God took them, in the world that was running through this, its wheel turning within this world’s air, rolling out of the air. No peace but peace, no joy but joy, no love but love. Behold, I come quickly. Amen, even so, come.…

  She caught up a hat and flung herself at the door, her blood burning within her, as the house burned around. The air was fiery to her sense; she breathed a mingled life, as if the flames of poetry and martyrdom rose together in the air within the air, and touched the outer atmosphere with their interior force. She ran down the stairs, but already her excitement, being more excitement than strength, flagged and was pain. Action was not yet so united with reaction as to become passion. The doubt she must have of what was to come took its old habitual form. Her past pretended to rule her, de facto sovereign, and her past was fear. It was midnight, the Hill was empty, she was alone. It could only be that her ghostly image lay, now, in wait for her to emerge into its desolate kingdom. She grit her teeth. The thing must be done. She had promised her grandmother; more important still, she had promised the nurse. She might have confided to the first what she would never concede to the second. It was then that she saw the telephone.

  At first, as she paus
ed a minute in the hall, to settle herself—to settle her determination that that woman who had talked of wandering minds should not find her foolish expectation fulfilled—at first she did not think of Stanhope; then inevitably, with her grief stirring in her, she did. To think of him was to think, at once, of speaking to him. The telephone. She thought: “One o’clock and he’s asleep; don’t be a fool.” She thought: “‘Any hour of the day or night’.” She thought: “I oughtn’t to disturb him,” and then with the clarity of that world of perpetual exchange: “I ought to disturb him.” It was her moral duty to wake him up, if he was asleep and she could. She smiled, standing in the hall where the new light of the summer sky dimly shone. Reversal had reached its extreme; she who had made a duty of her arrogance had found a duty in her need. Her need retreated beneath the shock. At precisely the moment when she could have done without him she went to ask for him; the glad and flagrant mockery of the Omnipotence lay peaceful in her heart as she dialled his number, her finger slowing a little on the last figure, as if the very notion were a delight too sweet to lose by haste. The receiver at her ear, as if she leant to it, she waited. Presently she heard his voice.

  She said, again grave: “Are you awake enough to hear me?”

  “Complete with attention,” he answered. “Whatever it is, how very, very right of you! That’s abstract, not personal. Concede the occasion.”

  “The occasion,” she said, “is that I’m going out up the Hill because my grandmother’s asked me to, and I was a little afraid just now … I’m not.”

  “O blessed, blessed,” Stanhope murmured, but whether he thought of her or the Omnipotence she did not know. He added, to her: “Go in peace. Would you like me to come?”

  “No, of course not,” she answered, and lingering still a minute said: “I thought I wanted to ring you up, but when I did I didn’t. Forgive me.”

  “If it gives you any pleasure,” he said, “but you might have needed forgiveness in fact if you hadn’t. God’s not mine. Pardon, Periel, like love, is only ours for fun: essentially we don’t and can’t. But you want to go.… You’ll remember?”

  “For ever,” she said, “and ever and ever. Thank you.” She put the receiver firmly down, opened the door, and went out into the street. The pure night received her. Darkness was thick round the houses, but the streets lay clear. She was aware, immediately, of some unusualness, and presently she knew what it was. She was used to shadows lying across the pavements, but now it was not so. On either side of the street they gathered and blocked and hid the buildings, climbing up them, creepers of night, almost in visible movement. Between those masses the roads lay like the gullies of a mountain down which an army might come—broad and empty, prepared for an army, passes already closed by scouts and outposts, and watched by the dazzling flashes which now and then and here and there lit the sky, as if silver machines of air above the world moved in escort of expected power. Apart from those momentary dazzling flashes light was diffused through the sky. She could see no moon, only once or twice in her walk, at some corner, between the cliffs of darkness, far away on the horizon, she half-thought she saw a star—Hesper or Phosphor, the planet that is both the end and the beginning, Venus, omega and alpha, transliteration of speech. Once, far behind her, she thought she heard hurrying footsteps, but as she went on she lost them. She went quickly, for she had left behind her an approaching point to which she desired to return, the point of hastening death. She went peacefully, but while, days before, it had been Stanhope’s intervention that had changed her mood, now she had come, by the last submissive laughter of her telephone call, into the ways of the world he had no more than opened. She went with a double watchfulness, for herself and for that other being whom her grandmother had sent her to meet, but her watchfulness did not check her speed, nor either disturb the peace. She turned, soon enough, into the street where Lawrence Wentworth’s house stood, not far from the top of the Hill in one direction, from the Manor House in another, and, beyond all buildings, from the silent crematorium in a third. The street, as she came into it, looked longer than she had remembered. It had something of the effect by which small suburban byways, far inland, seem to dip towards the sea, though here it was no sea but a mere distance of road which received it. She slackened her pace, and, flicking one hand with her gloves, walked towards the house.

  She reached it at last, and paused. There was at first no sign of any living creature. She looked up at it; the shadows were thick on it, seeming to expand and contract. The small occasional wind of the night, intermittently rising, caught them and flung them against it; they were beaten and bruised, if shadows could take the bruise, against its walls; they hid windows and doors; there was only a rough shape of the house discernible below them. She thought, in a faint fancy, too indistinct to be a distress, of herself flung in that steady recurrence against a bleak wall, and somehow it seemed sad that she should not be bruised. A gratitude for material things came over her; she twisted her gloves in her fingers and even struck her knuckles gently together, that the sharp feel of them might assure her of firm flesh and plotted bone. As if that slight tap had been at a door, to announce a visitor, she saw a man standing outside the shadow, close by the house.

  She could not, in the moon, see very clearly what he was. She thought, by something in his form, that she had seen him before; then, that she had not. She thought of her grandmother’s errand, and that perhaps here was its end. She waited, in the road, while he came down the drive, and then she saw him clearly. He was small and rather bent; obviously a working man and at that an unsuccessful working man, for his clothes were miserably old, and his boots gaped. Yet he had presence; he advanced on her with a quiet freedom, and when he came near she saw that he was smiling. He put up his hand to his tattered cap; the motion had in it the nature of an act—it had conclusion, it began and ended. He said, almost with a conscious deference such as she could have imagined herself feeling for Stanhope had she known nothing of him but his name: “Good evening, miss. Could you tell me the way to London?”

  There was the faintest sound of the city’s metal in his voice: dimly she knew the screech of London gate. She said: “Why, yes, but—you don’t mean to walk?”

  He answered: “Yes, miss, if you’ll be so kind as to tell me the right road.”

  “But it’s thirty miles,” she cried, “and … hadn’t you better.…” She stopped, embarrassed by the difficulties of earth. He did not look inferior enough to be offered money; money being the one thing that could not be offered to people of one’s own class, or to anybody one respected. All the things that could be bought by money, but not money. Yet unless she offered this man money he did not, from his clothes, look as if he would get to London unless he walked.

  He said: “I’d as soon walk, miss. It isn’t more than a step.”

  “It seems to be considerably more,” she said, and thought of her grandmother’s errand. “Must you go now or could you wait till the morning? I could offer you a bed to-night.” It seemed to her that this must be the reason why she was here.

  He said: “I’d as soon not, though thank you for offering. I’d rather start now, if you’ll tell me the way.”

  She hesitated before this self-possession; the idea that he needed money still held her, and now she could not see any way to avoid offering it. She looked in his serene quiet eyes, and said, with a gesture of her hand, “If it’s a question of the fare?”

  He shook his head, still smiling. “It’s only a matter of starting right,” he answered, and Pauline felt absurdly disappointed, as if some one had refused a cup of coffee or of cold water that she had wanted to bring. She was also a little surprised to find how easy it was to offer money when you tried—or indeed to take it; celestially easy. She answered his smile: “Well, if you won’t …” she said. “Look then, this is the best way.”

  They walked a few steps together, the girl and the dead man, till, at a corner a little beyond Wentworth’s house, she stopped.


  “Down there,” she said, pointing, “is the London road, you can just see where it crosses this. Are you sure you won’t stay to-night and go in the morning—fare and all?” So she might have asked any of her friends, whether it had been a fare or a book or love or something of no more and no less importance.

  “Quite, miss,” he said, lifting his hand to his cap again in an archangelic salute to the Mother of God. “It doesn’t matter perhaps, but I think I ought to get on. They may be waiting for me.”

  “I see,” she said, and added with a conscious laughter, “One never knows, does one?”

  “O I wouldn’t say never, miss,” he answered. “Thank you again. Good night, miss.”

  “Good night,” she said, and with a last touch of the cap he was gone down the road, walking very quickly, lightly, and steadily. He went softly; she was not sure that she could hear his tread, though she knew she had not been listening for it. She watched him for a minute; then she turned her head and looked up the cross-road on the other side of the street. That way ran up towards the Manor House; she thought of her telephone call and wondered if Stanhope were asleep or awake. She looked back at the departing figure, and said after it aloud, in an act of remembered goodwill: “Go in peace!”

  The words were hardly formed when it seemed to her that he stopped. The figure surely stood still; it was swaying; it was coming back—not coming back, only standing still, gesticulating. Its arms went up toward heaven in entreaty; then they fell and it bent and clutched its head with its hands. An agony had fallen on it. She saw and began to run. As she did so, she thought that her ears caught for an instant a faint sound from behind her, as of a trumpet, the echo of the trumpet of that day’s rehearsal done or of the next day’s performance not yet begun, or of a siren that called for the raising or lowering of a bridge.

  So faintly shrill was the sound, coming to her between the cliffs of a pass from a camp on the other side the height, that her senses answered as sharply. The sound was transmitted into her and transmuted into sight or the fear of sight. “The Magus … my dead child … his own image.” She was running fast; the stranger had gone an infinite distance in that time; she was running as she had run from her own room, and now she knew she had been right when she stopped, and it was a trap. Everything—she was running, for she could not stop—had been a part of the trap; even the shelter she had sometimes found had been meant only to catch her more surely in the end. Ah, the Magus Zoroaster had set it for her, all that time since, and her grandmother was part of its infinitely complicated steel mechanism, which now shut her in, and was going off—had gone off and was still going off, for ever and ever going off, in the faint shrill sound that came from behind her where Stanhope sat working it, for Zoroaster or Shelley were busy in front, and in front was the spring of the death and the delirium, and she had been tricked to run in that ingenious plot of their invention, and now she could no more stop than she could cease to hear the shrill whirr of the wheel that would start the spring, and when it cracked at last there would be her twin shape in the road. It was for this that the inhuman torturer who was Stanhope had pretended to save her, and the old creature who was her grandmother and talked of God had driven her out into the wild night, and the man who would not take her offer had fetched her to the point and the instant. Earth and sky were the climax of her damnation; their rods pressed her in. She ran; the trumpet sounded; the shape before her lifted his head again and dropped his hands and stood still.