Shadows of Ecstasy Read online

  “Hullo, Philip!” he said. “Had a good evening? How’s Rosamond?”

  “Very fit, thanks,” Philip answered. “Did you have a good time?”

  Sir Bernard nodded, and sat down leisurely. “Roger told us how he liked poetry,” he said, “and the explorer told us how he liked himself, and Mr. Nigel Considine told us how he disliked the University.”

  “Not in so many words?” Philip asked.

  “Contrapuntal,” Sir Bernard said. “When you’ve heard as many speeches as I have, you’ll find that’s the only interest in them: the intermingling of the theme proposed and the theme actual.”

  “I can never make out whether Roger’s serious,” Philip said. “He seems to be getting at one the whole time. Rosamond feels it too.”

  Sir Bernard thought it very likely. Rosamond Murchison was Isabel’s sister and Roger’s sister-in-law, but only in law. Rosamond privately felt that Roger was conceited and not quite nice; Roger, less privately, felt that Rosamond was stuck-up and not quite intelligent. When, as at present, she was staying with the Ingrams in Hampstead, it was only by Isabel’s embracing sympathy that tolerable relations were maintained. Sir Bernard almost wished that Philip could have got engaged to someone else. He was very fond of his son, and he was afraid that the approaching marriage would make, at the times when he visited them, an atmosphere in which, but for brief intervals, he would find it impossible to breathe. Philip’s mind by itself was at present earnest and persevering, if a trifle slow. But Philip’s mind surrounded and closed in by Rosamond’s promised, so far as he could see, to become merely static. He looked over at his son.

  “Roger’s serious enough,” he said. “But he still expects to get direct results instead of indirect. He never realizes that the real result of anything is always round the corner.”

  “What corner?” Philip asked.

  “The universal corner,” Sir Bernard said, “around which we are always on the point of turning—into a street where there are all the numbers except that of the house we’re looking for. Good heavens, I’m becoming philosophical. That’s the result of University dinners.”

  “I don’t think I quite follow you,” Philip said.

  “It doesn’t at all matter,” Sir Bernard answered. “I only meant that I should like you to believe that Roger’s quite serious, and a little unhappy.”

  “Unhappy!” Philip exclaimed. “Roger!”

  “Certainly unhappy,” Sir Bernard said. “He’s fanatic enough to believe passionately and not sufficiently fanatical to believe that other people ought to believe. Naturally also, being young, he thinks his own belief is the only real way of salvation, though he’d deny that if you asked him. So he’s in a continual unsuccessful emotional conflict, and therefore he’s unhappy.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Philip said. “Roger never goes to church. What does he believe in?”

  “Poetry,” Sir Bernard answered, and “O—poetry!” Philip exclaimed; “I thought you meant something religious. I don’t see why poetry should make him unhappy.”

  “Try living in a world where everyone says to you, quite insincerely, ‘O isn’t Miss Murchison charming!’” his father said drily. “Or alternatively, ‘I can’t think what you see in her.’ And then——”

  He was interrupted by the entrance of a third person.

  “Hullo, Ian,” he broke off; “how’s the Archbishop?”

  Ian Caithness was the vicar of a Yorkshire parish and Philip’s godfather. He was a tall man of about Sir Bernard’s age and looked like an ascetic priest, which was more by good luck than by merit, for he practised no extreme austerities. But he took life seriously, and (as often happens) attributed his temperament to his religion. He was therefore not entirely comfortable with other people of different temperaments who did the same thing, and a lifelong friendship with Sir Bernard had probably survived because the other remained delicately poised in a philosophy outside the Church. As a Christian Sir Bernard would have probably irritated his friend intolerably; he soothed him as a—it was difficult to say what; Sir Bernard occasionally alluded to himself as a neo-Christian, “meaning,” he said, “like most neos, one who takes the advantages without the disadvantages. As Neo-Platonist, neo-Thomist, and neolithic too, for all I know.” On the rare occasions when Caithness came to London he always stopped in Kensington; on the still rarer when Sir Bernard went to Yorkshire he always went to church.

  “Rather bothered,” Caithness said in answer to his friend’s greeting. “The Government papers are making capital out of the massacres of the missions, and demanding expeditions.”

  “What massacres?” Philip asked in surprise. “Being down in Dorset for a couple of weeks has cut away the papers.”

  “There’ve been a number of simultaneous native risings in the interior of Africa,” Caithness answered absently, “and so far as we can hear the Christian missionaries have been killed. The Archbishop’s very anxious that the Government shan’t use that as a reason for military operations.”

  “Why ever not?” Philip said staring.

  Caithness made an abrupt gesture with his hand. “Because it is their duty, their honour, to die, if necessary,” he said; “it is a condition of their calling. Because the martyrs of the Church must not be avenged by secular arms.”

  “A very unusual view for the Church to take,” Sir Bernard murmured. “Normally.… It’s a curious business altogether. I was told this afternoon that the Khedive has left Cairo for a British warship. Roger’s anthropological idols getting active, I suppose.”

  “The pressure on Egypt must be pretty bad, then,” Caithness said. “Well, that isn’t our business. We can’t, of course, object to any steps the Government think it wise to take in their own interests, so long as they don’t use the missions as a reason. The Archbishop has intimated to the Societies who sent them out that no material ought to be given to the papers—photographs or what not.”

  “Photographs!” Sir Bernard exclaimed suddenly. “It was—of course, it was. My mind would have done it, Ian, but thank you for helping it.” He got up and went across the room to a drawer in the lower part of one of the bookcases, whence he returned carrying a number of old yellowish photographic prints. Out of these as he turned them over he selected one, and sat down again.

  “Of course,” he said, “I was looking through these a day or two ago: that was what fidgeted me all the time Considine was telling us about old men and children. And if that isn’t Considine … he’s got his fingers curved in exactly the same way that he had to-night.”

  Philip moved round and looked over his father’s shoulder. The photograph showed two men, one of about seventy, the other some twenty years or so younger, sitting in basket chairs on a lawn with the corner of a verandah showing behind them. The clothes were late Victorian; the whole picture was Victorianly idyllic. Philip saw nothing surprising about it.

  “Which is your Mr. Considine?” he asked.

  “The one on the right,” Sir Bernard answered. “It’s an an exact likeness. When he was speaking to-night he had his head up and his fingers out and coiled just like that. And he wasn’t a day older.”

  “Who’s the other man?” Philip asked.

  “The other man,” Sir Bernard answered, leaning back in his chair and looking thoughtfully at the photograph, “is my grandfather. My grandfather died in 1886.”

  “Um!” said Philip. “Then of course it can’t be your Mr. Considine. He looks about fifty there, which would make him over a hundred now. His father, I suppose.”

  “It’s the most unusual likeness I ever saw, if it’s his father, or his grandfather, or his great-uncle, or his first, second, third or fourth cousin,” Sir Bernard protested.

  “But it must be,” Philip said. “You don’t suggest that this is Considine, do you?”

  “The probabilities against it are heavy,” his father allowed. “But aren’t the probabilities against two men looking so much alike also heavy?”

  Philip sm
iled. “But where one thing’s impossible the other must be true,” he said.

  “And which is impossible?” Sir Bernard asked perversely.

  “O come,” Philip protested. “If the other figure here is your grandfather this photograph must have been taken before 1886. So it’s impossible—or very, very unlikely that the other man is still alive, and he certainly wouldn’t be speaking at a dinner. Is it likely? Do you know who took the photograph, by the way?”

  “I took it myself,” the other said. “With my own little camera. Given me on my twelfth birthday. By my grandfather. I was staying with him for the summer.”

  “You don’t remember who this other man was?”

  Sir Bernard shook his head. “I remember being very pleased with the camera. And I remember that various people stayed at the house. And I photographed every one I could. But what he called himself then I couldn’t say.”

  “But if it was Considine then he’d be a hundred or more by now! Did he look it?”

  “If he looked it,” said Sir Bernard, “I shouldn’t be staring at this photograph. No, Philip, you’re right of course. But it’s unusual.”

  “It must have been,” Philip agreed.

  “Though if a man’s nerves and stomach were sound,” his father went on, “and if he kept himself fit, and had no accidents—on my word, mightn’t he look fifty when he was really a hundred? Perhaps he’s found the elixir of life in the swamps of the Zambesi.”

  Philip felt the conversation was becoming absurd. “If you take it that it’s his father and that there’s a strong family likeness, I don’t see that there’s any difficulty,” he said.

  “I know,” Sir Bernard answered. “But I want there to be a difficulty. So I want that photograph to be a photograph of him and not of his wife’s maiden aunt or whatever you suggested. You needn’t look superior. It’s exactly the way most people come to believe in religion. And if most people think like that, there must be something in it, Cogitatio populi, cogitatio Dei——, and so forth. O well, I shall go to bed. Perhaps I shall meet Mr. Considine again one day and be able to ask him. Good-night, Philip, good-night, Ian. Wake me if the Africans come.”

  Chapter Two

  SUICIDE WHILE OF UNSOUND MIND

  Philip was down the next morning before his father or his godfather, urged by a very strong anxiety to see the papers. Trouble in Africa, as it happened, was possibly going to affect not merely high national and political affairs but his own personal arrangements. Africa, of course, was a large place, and the Christian missions had been established, he had gathered, somewhere in the centre; he wasn’t much disturbed over them. But what his father had called “the pressure on Egypt” was another matter. Philip’s own job was engineering, and he had not long before come to an arrangement with a business company known as “The North African Rivers Development Syndicate,” by which he was to go out to whatever North African Rivers were to be developed as assistant constructing engineer. His chief, a man named Munro, was already out there, somewhere in Nigeria, and in a couple of months Philip was to join him. Meanwhile he was putting in some time at the London offices of the Syndicate, which was run by two brothers named Stuyvesant. But though these were the official heads it was generally understood in the City that the real force behind the company was a much richer man, a certain Simon Rosenberg, who, among his interests in railways and periodicals and fisheries and dyeworks, in South African diamonds and Persian oils and Chinese silks, in textiles and cereals and patent-medicines, rubber and coffee and wool, among all these had cast a careless eye on African rivers. In that side of the business Philip wasn’t very interested. Sir Bernard had satisfied himself that the company was as sound as could reasonably be expected, and a year’s work—or perhaps even two years—would give Philip a start in his profession. Then he would, all being well, come home and marry Rosamond, and see what jobs were going at home. Munro was a fairly big man and if Munro gave him a good word.…

  It was consequently something of a shock to him, when he opened the paper, to find two huge headlines competing. On the left a three-column space announced “Multi-millionaire Found Dead; Rosenberg Shot”; “Terrible Discovery in Rich Man’s Library.” On the right a similar space was filled with: “Africans Still Advancing”; “Hordes in Nile Valley”; “Rumours of Trouble in South Africa”; “French Defeat in Tangier.” Philip goggled at the thick type, and instinctively tried to read both accounts at once. He was still immersed when Caithness came in, just preceding Sir Bernard.

  “I say,” Philip cried to them, “Rosenberg’s shot himself.”

  “Rosenberg!” Sir Bernard exclaimed. “Whatever for?”

  “It doesn’t say,” Philip answered. “He was found in the study of his house late last night by the butler, who thought he heard a noise and went to see.”

  “And found he had,” Sir Bernard said. “Nasty for the butler.” He picked up his own paper, and opened it so that he and Caithness could look at it together. But the priest’s eyes went first to the columns of African news, and after his first glance Sir Bernard’s followed them. They read the brief obscure telegrams, the explanatory comments, the geographical addenda. It seemed that something very unusual was happening in Africa. To begin with, all communication with the interior had completely ceased. Telegraphs had ceased to function, railways had been cut, roads had been blocked. By such roads as had not been blocked there were emerging against all the outer districts hostile bodies of natives, some so small as to be less than a raid, some so large as to mean an invasion, and at that, wherever they appeared, a victorious invasion. The Egyptian army, which had for some weeks been moving leisurely south in order to suppress trouble in the southeast, was now retiring in considerable disorder and even more considerable haste. The French had “suffered a set-back”; the Spaniards had fallen back towards the coast. Communications with Kenya, with Nigeria, with Abyssinia, with Zanzibar, had ceased. Raids had taken place on the English territories in the South. Air-investigation was being undertaken. The Powers were in touch and were taking necessary steps.

  “But what,” Caithness said, “has happened to the air-investigation of the last month?”

  “It hasn’t come back,” Sir Bernard answered. “I was talking to a man in the War Office the other night, and he told me that they’ve sent out aeroplanes by the score, and hardly any have returned. Some have, I suppose, but what they reported is being kept dark. Philip, I think the African Rivers look like being in too much spate for your engineering.”

  “But what about Rosenberg?” Philip asked. “Do you suppose that’s what made him kill himself?”

  “Did he kill himself?” Sir Bernard said, turning to the other columns. “‘Butler hears shot … letter for the Coroner … police satisfied. Financial comment on page 10’; yes, well, we can wait till after breakfast for that. Curious, I wonder what decided him. Let’s just see whether the Archbishop said anything.”

  It appeared that the previous day had been agitated in both Houses. In the Commons the Prime Minister had announced that forces were being dispatched immediately to punish the various tribes guilty of the abominable massacres at the mission stations. Asked by half a dozen members of the Opposition at once whether he could promise that these expeditions should not develop into costly Imperialistic wars, and whether the action taken was by request of the ecclesiastical authorities, the Prime Minister said that the Archbishop had naturally deprecated further bloodshed but that he and other ecclesiastical authorities had recognized the right of the State to protect its citizens. Asked whether he would undertake that no further territory would be seized, he said that no annexations would be made except by mandate from the League of Nations. Asked whether other Governments were taking action, he said that the House should have all information as soon as he received it.

  This had been in the afternoon. In the evening the Archbishop had asked the Lord Chancellor for permission to make a statement, and had then said that—in consultation with such other Bishop
s as happened to be in London—he had written at once that morning to the Prime Minister, definitely stating that the ecclesiastical authorities were entirely opposed to the dispatch of punitive expeditions, and begging that none should be sent. The Bishops were of the opinion that no secular action should be taken to avenge the martyrdom of the slaughtered missionaries and converts, and wished to dissociate themselves from any such action. A noble and indignant peer—a lately returned Governor-General—asked the Archbishop whether he realized that natives understood nothing but force, and whether he meant that war and the use of force was a sin; whether in short the Archbishop were disloyal or merely stupid. The Archbishop had referred the noble peer to the theologians for discussions and determinations of the use of force. The use of force was an act which was neither good nor evil in itself; the use of force in circumstances like the present appeared to himself and his colleagues a breach of Christian principles. Another peer demanded whether, if the Government were to dispatch punitive expeditions, the Archbishop would seriously accuse them of acting in an unchristian manner? The Archbishop said that the noble peer would remember that Christianity assumed a readiness for martyrdom as a mere preliminary to any serious work, and that he was sure no noble lord who happened to hear him and was a Christian would be unwilling to suffer tortures and death without wishing a moment’s pain to his enemies. He apologized to the House for reminding them of what might be called the first steps in a religion of which many of his hearers were distinguished professors. The House rose at nine minutes past seven.