Descent into Hell Read online

  “And if things are terrifying,” Pauline put in, her eyes half-closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, “can they be good?”

  He looked down on her. “Yes, surely,” he said, with more energy. “Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?”

  “We’ll have them in shades of green then,” Mrs. Parry broke in, “light to dark, with rich gold sashes and embroidery running all over like twigs, and each one carrying a conventionalized bough—different lengths, I think. Dark gold stockings.”

  “To suggest the trunks?” asked Adela’s friend, Hugh Prescott.

  “Quite,” Mrs. Parry said, and then hesitated. “I’m not sure—perhaps we’d better keep the leaf significances. When they’re still—of course they could stand with their legs twined.…”

  “What, with one another’s?” Adela asked, in a conscious amazement.

  “My dear child, don’t be absurd,” Mrs. Parry said. “Each pair of legs just crossed, so”—she interlaced her own.

  “I could never stand still like that,” Miss Fox said, with great conviction.

  “You’d have your arms stretched out to people’s shoulders on each side,” Mrs. Parry said dubiously, “and a little gentle swaying wouldn’t be inappropriate. But perhaps we’d better not risk it. Better have green stockings—we can manage some lovely groupings. Could we call them ‘Chorus of Leaf-Spirits’, Mr. Stanhope?”

  “Sweet!” said Miss Fox. Adela, leaning back to Hugh Prescott, said in a very low voice, “I told you, Hugh, she’ll ruin the whole thing. She’s got no idea of mass. She ought to block it violently and leave it without a name. I wouldn’t even have ‘Chorus’. I hope he won’t give way, but he’s rather weak.”

  However, Stanhope was, in the politest language, declining to have anything of the sort. “Call it the Chorus,” he said, “or if you like I’ll try and find a name for the leader, and the rest can just dance and sing. But I’m afraid ‘Leaf-Spirits’ would be misleading.”

  “What about ‘Chorus of Nature-Powers’?” asked Miss Fox, but Stanhope only said, smiling, “You will try and make the trees friendly,” which no one quite understood, and shook his head again.

  Prescott asked: “Incidentally, I suppose they will be women?”

  Mrs. Parry had said, “O, of course, Mr. Prescott,” before the question reached her brain. When it did, she added, “At least … I naturally took it for granted.… They are feminine, aren’t they?”

  Still hankering after mass, Adela said, “It sounds to me more like undifferentiated sex force,” and ignored Hugh’s murmur, “There isn’t much fun in that.”

  “I don’t know that they were meant to be either male or female,” Stanhope said. “I told you they were more of an experiment in a different kind of existence. But whether men or women are most like that is another matter.” He shed an apologetic smile on Mrs. Parry.

  “If they’re going to be leaves,” Miss Fox asked, “couldn’t they all wear huge green leaves, so that no one would know if they were wearing knee-breeches or skirts?”

  There was a pause while everyone took this in, then Mrs. Parry said, very firmly, “I don’t think that would answer,” while Hugh Prescott said to Adela, “Chorus of Fig-leaves!”

  “Why not follow the old pantomime or the present musical comedy,” Stanhope asked, “and dress your feminine chorus in exquisite masculine costume? That’s what Shakespeare did with his heroines, as often as he could, and made a diagram of something more sharp and wonderful than either. I don’t think you’ll do better. Masculine voices—except boys—would hardly do, nor feminine appearances.”

  Mrs. Parry sighed, and everyone contemplated the problem again. Adela Hunt and Hugh Prescott discussed modernity between themselves. Pauline, lying back, like Stanhope, in her chair, was thinking of Stanhope’s phrases, “a different life,” “a terrible good,” and wondering if they were related, if this Chorus over which they were spending so much trouble were indeed an effort to shape in verse a good so alien as to be terrifying. She had never considered good as a thing of terror, and certainly she had not supposed a certain thing of terror in her own secret life as any possible good. Nor now; yet there had been an inhumanity in the great and moving lines of the Chorus. She thought, with an anger generous in its origin but proud and narrow in its conclusion, that not many of the audience really cared for poetry or for Stanhope’s poetry—perhaps none but she. He was a great poet, one of a very few, but what would he do if one evening he met himself coming up the drive? Doppelgänger, the learned called it, which was no comfort. Another poet had thought of it; she had had to learn the lines at school, as an extra task because of undone work:

  The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

  Met his own image walking in the garden.

  She had never done the imposition, for she had had nightmares that night, after reading the lines, and had to go sick for days. But she had always hated Shelley since for making it so lovely, when it wasn’t loveliness but black panic. Shelley never seemed to suggest that the good might be terrible. What would Peter Stanhope do? what could he? if he met himself?

  They were going: people were getting up and moving off. Everyone was being agreeably grateful to Stanhope for his lawn, his tea, and his poetry. In her fear of solitude she attached herself to Adela and Hugh and Myrtle Fox, who were all saying good-bye at once. As he shook hands he said casually: “You don’t think they are?” and she did not immediately understand the reference to the measurement of Omnipotence by mortal tremors. Her mind was on Myrtle, who lived near her. She hated the pang of gratitude she felt, and hated it more because she despised Miss Fox. But at least she wouldn’t be alone, and the thing she hated most only came, or had so far only come, when she was alone. She stuck close to Myrtle, listening to Adela as they went.

  “Pure waste,” Adela was saying. “Of course, Stanhope’s dreadfully traditional”—how continually, Pauline thought, people misused words like dreadful; if they knew what dread was!—“but he’s got a kind of weight, only he dissipates it. He undermines his mass. Don’t you think so, Pauline?”

  “I don’t know,” Pauline said shortly, and then added with private and lying malice: “I’m no judge of literature.”

  “Perhaps not,” Adela said, “though I think it’s more a question of general sensitiveness. Hugh, did you notice how the Parry talked of significance? Why, no one with a really adult mind could possibly——O, good-bye, Pauline; I may see you to-morrow.” Her voice passed away, accompanied by Hugh’s temporary and lazy silence, and Pauline was left to Myrtle’s monologues on the comforting friendliness of sunsets.

  Even that had to stop when they reached the Foxes’ hole. Myrtle, in a spasm of friendship for Messias, frequently called it that. As they parted upon the easy joke, Pauline felt the rest of the sentence pierce her. She took it to her with a sincerity of pain which almost excused the annexation—“the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.” It was the cry of her loneliness and fear, and it meant nothing to her mind but the empty streets and that fear itself. She went on.

  Not to think; to think of something else. If she could. It was so hopeless. She was trying not to look ahead for fear she saw it, and also to look ahead for fear she was yielding to fear. She walked down the road quickly and firmly, remembering the many thousand times it had not come. But the visitation was increasing—growing nearer and clearer and more frequent. In her first twenty-four years she had seen it nine times; at first she had tried to speak of it. She had been told, when she was small, not to be silly and not to be naughty. Once, when she was adolescent, she had actually told her mother. Her mother was understanding in most things, and knew it. But at this the understanding had disappeared. Her eyes had become as sharp as when her husband, by breaking his arm, had spoiled a holiday in Spain which she—“for all their sakes”—had planned. She had refused to speak any more to Pauline that day, and neither of them had ever quite forgiven the other. But in
those days the comings—as she still called them—had been rare; since her parents had died and she had been sent to live with and look after her grandmother in Battle Hill they had been more frequent, as if the Hill was fortunate and favourable to apparitions beyond men; a haunt of alien life. There had been nine in two years, as many as in all the years before. She could not speak of it to her grandmother, who was too old, nor to anyone else, since she had never discovered any closeness of friendship. But what would happen when the thing that was she came up to her, and spoke or touched? So far it had always turned aside, down some turning, or even apparently into some house; she might have been deceived were it not for the chill in her blood. But if some day it did not.…

  A maid came out of a house a little farther down a road, and crossed the pavement to a pillar-box. Pauline, in the first glance, felt the sickness at her heart. Relieved, she reacted into the admission that she was only twenty-three houses away from her home. She knew every one of them; she had not avoided so much measurement of danger. It had never appeared to her indoors; not even on the Hill, which seemed to be so convenient for it. Sometimes she longed always to stay indoors; it could not be done, nor would she do it. She drove herself out, but the front door was still a goal and a protection. She always seemed to herself to crouch and cling before she left it, coveting the peace which everyone but she had … twenty-one, twenty.… She would not run; she would not keep her eyes on the pavement. She would walk steadily forward, head up and eyes before her … seventeen, sixteen.… She would think of something, of Peter Stanhope’s play—“a terrible good”. The whole world was for her a canvas printed with unreal figures, a curtain apt to roll up at any moment on one real figure. But this afternoon, under the stress of the verse, and then under the shock of Stanhope’s energetic speech, she had fractionally wondered: a play—was there a play? a play even that was known by some? and then not without peace … ten, nine … the Magus Zoroaster; perhaps Zoroaster had not been frightened. Perhaps if any of the great—if Cæsar had met his own shape in Rome, or even Shelley … was there any tale of any who had? … six, five, four.…

  Her heart sprang; there, a good way off—thanks to a merciful God—it was, materialized from nowhere in a moment. She knew it at once, however far, her own young figure, her own walk, her own dress and hat—had not her first sight of it been attracted so? changing, growing.… It was coming up at her pace—doppelgänger, doppelgänger: her control began to give … two … she didn’t run, lest it should, nor did it. She reached her gate, slipped through, went up the path. If it should be running very fast up the road behind her now? She was biting back the scream and fumbling for her key. Quiet, quiet! “A terrible good.” She got the key into the keyhole; she would not look back; would it click the gate or not? The door opened; and she was in, and the door banged behind her. She all but leant against it, only the doppelgänger might be leaning similarly on the other side. She went forward, her hand at her throat, up the stairs to her room, desiring (and with every atom of energy left denying that her desire could be vain) that there should be left to her still this one refuge in which she might find shelter.

  Chapter Two

  VIA MORTIS

  Mrs. Parry and her immediate circle, among whom Adela Hunt was determinedly present, had come, during Pauline’s private meditations, to several minor decisions, one of which was to ask Lawrence Wentworth to help with the costumes, especially the costumes of the Grand Ducal Court and Guard. Adela had said immediately that she would call on Mr. Wentworth at once, and Mrs. Parry, with a brief discontent, had agreed. While, therefore, Pauline was escaping from her ghostly twin, Adela and Hugh went pleasantly along other roads of the Hill to Wentworth’s house.

  It stood not very far from the Manor House, a little lower than that but still near to the rounded summit of the rise of ground which had given the place half its name. Lawrence Wentworth’s tenancy was peculiarly suitable to the other half, for his intellectual concern was with the history of battle, and battles had continually broken over the Hill. Their reality had not been quite so neat as the diagrams into which he abstracted and geometricized them. The black lines and squares had swayed and shifted and been broken; the crimson curves, which had lain bloody under the moon, had been a mass of continuous tiny movement, a mass noisy with moans and screams. The Hill’s chronicle of anguish had been due, in temporalities, to its strategic situation in regard to London, but a dreamer might have had nightmares of a magnetic attraction habitually there deflecting the life of man into death. It had epitomized the tale of the world. Prehistoric legends, repeated in early chronicles, told of massacres by revolting Britons and roaming Saxons, mornings and evenings of hardly-human sport. Later, when permanent civilization arose, a medieval fortalice had been built, and a score of civil feuds and pretended loyalties had worn themselves out around it under kings who, though they were called Stephen or John, were as remote as Shalmanezer or Jeroboam. The Roses had twined there, their roots living on the blood shed by their thorns; the castle had gone up one night in fire, as did Rome, and the Manor House that followed had been raised in the midst of another order. A new kind of human civility entered; as consequence or cause of which, this Hill of skulls seemed to become either weary or fastidious. In the village that had stood at the bottom of the rise a peasant farmer, moved by some wandering gospeller, had, under Mary Tudor, grown obstinately metaphysical, and fire had been lit between houses and manor that he might depart through it in a roaring anguish of joy. Forty years later, under Elizabeth, the whispering informers had watched an outlaw, a Jesuit priest, take refuge in the manor, but when he was seized the Death of the Hill had sent him to its Type in London for more prolonged ceremonies of castration, as if it, like the men of the Renascence, seemed to involve its brutal origin in complications of religion and art. The manor had been forfeited to the Crown, but granted again to another branch of the family, so that, through all human changes, the race of owners had still owned. This endured, when afterwards it was sold to richer men, and even when Peter Stanhope had bought it back the house of his poetry remained faintly touched by the dreadful ease that was given to it by the labour and starvation of the poor.

  The whole rise of ground therefore lay like a cape, a rounded headland of earth, thrust into an ocean of death. Men, the lords of that small earth, dominated it. The folklore of skies and seasons belonged to it. But if the past still lives in its own present beside our present, then the momentary later inhabitants were surrounded by a greater universe. From other periods of its time other creatures could crawl out of death, and invisibly contemplate the houses and people of the rise. The amphibia of the past dwelt about, and sometimes crawled out on, the slope of this world, awaiting the hour when they should either retire to their own mists or more fully invade the place of the living.

  There had been, while the workmen had been creating the houses of the new estate, an incident which renewed the habit of the Hill, as if that magnetism of death was quick to touch first the more unfortunate of mortals. The national margin of unemployment had been reduced by the new engagement of labourers, and from the work’s point of view reduced, in one instance, unwisely. A certain unskilled assistant had been carelessly taken on; he was hungry, he was ill, he was clumsy and slow. His name no one troubled to know. He shambled among the rest, their humorous butt. He was used to that; all his life he had been the butt of the world, generally of an unkind world. He had been repeatedly flung into the gutter by the turn of a hand in New York or Paris, and had been always trying to scramble out of it again. He had lost his early habit of complaining, and it only added to his passive wretchedness that his wife kept hers. She made what money she could by charing, at the market price, with Christmas Day, St. Stephen, and such feasts deducted, and since she usually kept her jobs, she could reasonably enjoy her one luxury of nagging her husband because he lost his. His life seemed to him an endless gutter down which ran an endless voice. The clerk of the works and his foreman agreed that he
was no good.

  An accidental inspection by one of the directors decided his discharge. They were not unkind; they paid him, and gave him an extra shilling to get a bus some way back towards London. The clerk added another shilling and the foreman sixpence. They told him to go; he was, on the whole, a nuisance. He went; that night he returned.

  He went, towards the buses a mile off, tramping blindly away through the lanes, coughing and sick. He saw before him the straight gutter, driven direct to London across the lanes and fields. At its long end was a miserable room that had a perpetual shrill voice.

  He longed to avoid them, and as if the Hill bade him a placable farewell there came to him as he left it behind him a quiet thought. He could simply reject the room and its voice; he could simply stop walking down the gutter. A fancy of it had grown in him once or twice before. Then it had been a fancy of some difficult act; now the act had suddenly become simple.

  Automatically eating a piece of bread that one of the men had given him, he sat down by the roadside, looking round him to find the easiest way to what had suddenly become a resolve. Soft and pitiless the country stretched away round him, unwilling that he should die. He considered. There were brooks; he knew it was impossible for him to hold himself down in them while he drowned. There were motors, cars, or buses; apart from his unwillingness to get other people into trouble, he feared lest he should be merely hurt or maimed. He wanted to get himself completely out of trouble. There were the half-finished buildings away behind him. A magical and ghostly finger touched his mind; in one of those buildings he remembered to have seen a rope. In a dim way, as he sat gnawing his bread, he felt that this was the last trouble he would give to his fellows. Their care this time would be as hasty and negligent as ever, but it would be final. If the rope were not there, he would find some other way, but he hoped for the best. He even believed in that best.