Descent into Hell Read online

  For this assault in sleep there were at least two personal reasons in his waking life, besides the nature of the Hill or the haunter of his house; one of them very much in the forefront of his mind, the other secret and not much admitted. The first was Aston Moffatt; the second was Adela Hunt. Aston Moffatt was another military historian, perhaps the only other worth mentioning, and Wentworth and he were engaged in a long and complicated controversy on the problem of the least of those skirmishes of the Roses which had been fought upon the Hill. The question itself was unimportant; it would never seriously matter to anyone but the controversialists whether Edward Plantagenet’s cavalry had come across the river with the dawn or over the meadows by the church at about noon. But a phrase, a doubt, a contradiction, had involved the two in argument. Aston Moffatt, who was by now almost seventy, derived a great deal of intellectual joy from expounding his point of view. He was a pure scholar, a holy and beautiful soul who would have sacrificed reputation, income, and life, if necessary, for the discovery of one fact about the horse-boys of Edward Plantagenet. He had determined his nature. Wentworth was younger and at a more critical point, at that moment when a man’s real concern begins to separate itself from his pretended, and almost to become independent of himself. He raged secretly as he wrote his letters and drew up his evidence; he identified scholarship with himself, and asserted himself under the disguise of a defence of scholarship. He refused to admit that the exact detail of Edward’s march was not, in fact, worth to him the cost of a single cigar.

  As for Adela, he was very well aware of Adela, as he was aware of cigars, but he did not yet know what he would give up for her, or rather for the manner of life which included her. As Aston Moffatt was bound either to lessen or heighten Wentworth’s awareness of his own reputation, so Adela was bound either to increase or abolish his awareness of his age. He knew time was beginning to hurry; he could at moments almost hear it scamper. He did not very well know what he wanted to do about it.

  He was sitting now in his study, his large body leaning forward over the table, and his hands had paused in measuring the plan that lay in front of him. He was finding the answer to Aston Moffatt’s last published letter difficult, yet he was determined that Moffatt could not be right. He was beginning to twist the intention of the sentences in his authorities, preferring strange meanings and awkward constructions, adjusting evidence, manipulating words. In defence of his conclusion he was willing to cheat in the evidence—a habit more usual to religious writers than to historical. But he was still innocent enough to be irritated; he felt, as it were, a roughness in the rope of his dream, and he was intensely awake to any other slights from any quarter. He looked sharply to see if there were more Moffatts in the world. At that inconvenient moment on that evening Adela arrived with Hugh. It was long since he had seen her in the company of one young man: alone, or with one woman, or with several young men and women, but not, as it happened, so. He stood up when they were announced, and as they came in, Adela’s short red-and-cream thickness overshadowed by Hugh’s rather flagrant masculinity, he felt something jerk in him, as if a knot had been first tied and then suddenly pulled loose. He had written but that morning in an article on the return of Edward IV, “the treachery of the Earl destroyed the balance”. Remote, five hundred years away, he felt it in the room; a destruction of balance. Then they were sitting down and Adela was talking.

  She explained, prettily, why they had come. Hugh, watching, decided that she must not behave quite so prettily. Hugh had no jerks or quavers. He had decided some time since that Adela should marry him when he was ready, and was giving himself the pleasurable trouble of making this clear to her. There was a touch too much gusto in her manner towards Wentworth. She had been, as he had, and some others of the young, in the habit of spending an evening, once a fortnight or so, at Wentworth’s house, talking about military history and the principles of art and the nature of the gods. During the summer these informal gatherings were less frequent, because of tennis and motor-rides and the nature of men and women. Hugh meant that for Adela they should stop altogether. He observed an intimacy; he chose that it should not continue, partly because he wished Adela to belong to him and partly because the mere action of breaking it would show how far Adela was prepared to go with him. His mind made arrangements.

  Adela explained. Wentworth said: “Very well, I’ll do anything I can. What is it you want?” He felt ungracious; he blamed Aston Moffatt.

  “O, the costumes,” Adela answered. “The Guard especially. The Grand Duke has a guard, you see, though there didn’t seem to be much point in it. But it has a fight with the robbers, and if you’d see that it fought reasonably well.…” She did not trouble to enlarge on her own view that the fight ought to be quite unrealistic; she knew that Mr. Wentworth did not much care for non-realistic art, and till recently she had preferred her mild satisfaction with her invasion of Wentworth’s consciousness to any bigotry of artistic interpretation.

  Hugh said: “It’d be frightfully good of you to give me a hand with my Guard, Mr. Wentworth.” He infused the “Mister” with an air of courteous deference to age, and as he ended the sentence he stretched and bent an arm in the lazy good humour of youth. Neither of the others analysed stress and motion, yet their blood was stirred, Adela faintly flushing with a new gratification, Wentworth faintly flushing with a new anger. He said, “Are you to be the Grand Duke then, Prescott?”

  “So Mrs. Parry seems to suggest,” Hugh answered, and added, as if a thought had struck him, “unless—Adela, d’you think Mr. Wentworth would take the part himself? Isn’t that an idea?”

  Before Adela could answer Wentworth said: “Nonsense; I’ve never acted in my life.”

  “I’m quite sure,” Hugh said, leaning comfortably forward with his elbows on his knees and his strong hands interlocked, “that you’d be a better father for the princess than I should. I think there’s no doubt Adela’ll have to be the princess.”

  “O, I don’t see that,” said Adela, “though it’s true Mrs. Parry … but there are lots of others. But, Mr. Wentworth, would you? You’d give it a kind of …” she thought of “age” and substituted “force”. “I was saying to Hugh as we came along that all it needs is force.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t take it away from Prescott,” Wentworth said. “He’s much better at these games than I could be.” He had tried to give to the words a genial and mature tolerance, but he heard them as merely hostile; so did the others.

  “Ah, but then,” Hugh answered, “you know such a lot about battles and history—battles long ago. You’d certainly be more suitable for Adela’s father—sir.”

  Wentworth said: “I’ll keep myself for the Guard. What period did you say?”

  “They seem to think 1700,” Adela said. “I know Mrs. Parry said something about eighteenth-century uniforms. She’s going to write to you.”

  Hugh stood up. “So we oughtn’t to keep you,” he added. “Adela and I are going back to talk to her now. Come on, duchess—or whatever it is they call you.”

  Adela obeyed. Wentworth noted, with an interior irritation, that she really did. She moved to rise with something more than consent. It was what he had never had—consent, yes, but not this obedience. Hugh had given her his hand to pull her up, and in that strained air the movement was a proclamation. He added, as she stood by his side: “Do change your mind, sir, and show us all how to be a Grand Siècle father. I’ll ask Mrs. Parry to put it to you.”

  “You certainly won’t,” Wentworth said. “I’ve no time to be a father.”

  “Odd way of putting it,” Hugh said when they were outside. “I don’t know why your Mr. Wentworth should be so peeved at the idea. Personally, I rather like it.”

  Adela was silent. She was well aware of the defiance—nor even a defiance, the rumour of a struggle long ago—that Hugh had brought into the conversation. Wentworth had been relegated, for those few sentences, to his place in the shadowy past of Battle Hill. The notice he h
ad taken of her had been a dim flattery; now it was more dim and less flattering. She had been increasingly aware, since she had met Hugh, of her militant blood; of contemporary raid and real contest, as of some battle “where they charge on heaps the enemy flying”. But she did not quite wish to lose Lawrence Wentworth; he had given her books, he had friends in London, he could perhaps be useful. She desired a career. She could be sensationally deferential on Thursday, if, as she expected, she went to him on Thursday. There had been, at the last gathering, ten days before, an agreement on next Thursday. She had just accomplished this decision when Hugh said: “By the way, I wanted to ask you something. What about next Thursday?”

  “Next Thursday?” she said, startled.

  “Couldn’t you come out somewhere in the evening?”

  “But …” Adela paused, and Hugh went on: “I thought we might have dinner in town, and go to a show if you liked.”

  “I’d love it,” Adela said. “But it needn’t be Thursday?”

  “I’m afraid it must,” Hugh answered. “There’s tennis at the Foxes’ on Monday, and Tuesday and Wednesday I shall be late at work, and Friday we’re to read the play, and the Parry’s almost certain to want us on the Saturday too.”

  Adela said again: “I’d love it, but I was going to Mr. Wentworth’s on Thursday. I mean, we’ve been going rather steadily, and last time I practically promised.”

  “I know you did,” said Hugh. “So did I, but we can’t help it.”

  “Couldn’t we go another week?” Adela asked.

  “With this play about?” Hugh said sardonically. “My dear, we’re going to be clutched by rehearsals every evening. Of course, we can leave it if you’d rather, but you said you’d like to see that thing The Second Pylon—it’s your style—and as it’s only on till Saturday … well, as a matter of fact, I got a couple of tickets for Thursday on the chance. I knew it’d be our only night.”

  “Hugh!” Adela exclaimed. “But I want frightfully to see it; they say it’s got the most marvellous example of this Surrealist plastic cohesion. O, Hugh, how splendid of you! The only thing is.…”

  “Pauline’ll be going to Wentworth’s, won’t she?” Hugh said. “And probably others. He can talk to them.”

  They were both aware that this would be by no means the same thing. They were equally both aware that it was what was about to happen; and that by Thursday evening it would have happened. Adela found that her hesitation about the future had already become a regret for the past: the thing had been done. A willing Calvinist, she said: “I hope he won’t think it rude. He’s been very nice.”

  “Naturally,” Hugh answered. “But now it’s up to you to be nice. Grand Dukes ought to be gratified, oughtn’t they?”

  “You asked him to be the Grand Duke,” Adela pointed out.

  “I asked him to be your father,” Hugh said. “I don’t think I had any notion of his being a Grand Duke.”

  He looked at her, laughing. “Write him a note on Wednesday,” he said, “and I’ll ring him up on Thursday evening from. London, and ask him to make my excuses to you and Pauline and the rest.”

  “Hugh!” Adela exclaimed, “you couldn’t!” Then, dimpling and gurgling, she added: “He’s been very kind to me. I should hate him to feel hurt.”

  “So should I,” Hugh said gravely. “Very well; that’s settled.”

  Unfortunately for this delicate workmanship, the two or three other young creatures who had shared, with Adela, Hugh, and Pauline, the coffee and culture of Wentworth’s house, were also deflected from it on that Thursday by tennis or the play; unfortunately, because the incidents of the Saturday had left him more acutely conscious at once of his need for Adela and of his need for flattery. He did not fully admit either; he rather defended himself mentally against Hugh’s offensiveness that surrendered to his knowledge of his desire. Even so he refused to admit that he was engaged in a battle. He demanded at once security and victory, a habit not common to those great masters whose campaigns he studied. He remembered the past—the few intimate talks with Adela, the lingering hands, the exchanged eyes. Rather like Pompey, he refused to take measures against the threat on the other side the Rubicon; he faintly admitted that there was a Rubicon, but certainly not that there might be a Cæsar. He assumed that the Rome which had, he thought, admired him so much and so long, was still his, and he desired it to make his ownership clear. He was prepared to overlook that Saturday as not being Adela’s fault as soon as the Thursday should bring him Adela’s accustomed propinquity; perhaps, for compensation’s sake and for promise of a veiled conclusion, a little more than propinquity. It was the more shattering for him that her note only reached him by the late post an hour or so before his guests usually arrived.

  She had had, she said, to go to town that day to see about the stuff for her costume; things would be rushed, and she hadn’t liked to make difficulties. She was dreadfully distressed; she might well be, he thought, with a greater flush of anger than he knew. He glanced at another note of excuse almost with indifference. But he was still ruffled when Pauline arrived, and it was with a certain abruptness that he told her he expected no one else but Prescott.

  When, ten minutes later, the telephone bell rang, and he heard Prescott’s voice offering his own regrets and explaining that absolutely unavoidable work kept him at the office: would Mr. Wentworth be so good as to apologize to Adela?—he was not sure if he were glad or sorry. It saved him from Prescott, but it left him tiresomely alone with Pauline. Pauline had a recurrent tendency to lose the finer point of military strategy in an unnecessary discussion of the sufferings of the rank and file; neither of them knew that it was the comfort of his house and his chairs—not to reckon her companionship with men in grief—which incited her. He did not think he wanted to have to talk to Pauline, but he was pleased to think he need not carry Hugh’s message to Adela. He could not, of course, know that Adela was then squeezed into the same telephone box as Hugh. She had objected at first, but Hugh had pleasantly overpersuaded her, and it was true she did want to know exactly what he said—so as to know. And it was attractive to hear him telephone apologies to her when she was close at his side, to listen to the cool formality with which he dispatched ambassadorial messages to phantom ears, so that her actual ears received the chill while her actual eyes sparkled and kindled at his as he stood with the receiver at his ear. He said—as Wentworth only realized when he had put down his own receiver—“and would you be kind enough to make my apologies to Adela?” She mouthed “and the others” at him, but he shook his head ever so little, and when, as he put back the receiver, she said, “But you ought to have sent your message to Pauline at least,” he answered, “Wentworth’ll see to that; I wasn’t going to mix you up.” She said, “But supposing he doesn’t, it’ll look so rude,” expecting him to answer that he didn’t care. Instead of which, as they emerged from the call-box, he said, “Wentworth’ll see to it; he won’t like not to.” She sat down to dinner infinitely more his accomplice than she had been when she had met him first that evening.

  In effect he was right. Wentworth had received a slight shock when the single name reached his ears, but it was only on his way back to the study that he realized that he was being invited to assist Prescott’s approach towards Adela. He must, of course, enlarge the apology, especially since Adela anyhow wasn’t there, as he hadn’t troubled to explain. Prescott could find that out for himself. Since he didn’t know—a throb of new suspicion held him rigid outside his study door. It was incredible, because Prescott wouldn’t have sent the message, or any message, if he and Adela had been together. But they were both away, and that (his startled nerves reported to his brain) meant that they were together. His brain properly reminded him that it meant nothing of the sort. But of that saving intelligence his now vibrating nervous system took no notice whatever. It had never had a chance to disseminate anarchy before, and now it took its chance. Fifty years of security dissolved before one minute of invasion; Cæsar was over
the Rubicon and Pompey was flying from Rome. Wentworth strode back into the study and looked at Pauline much as Pompey might have looked at a peculiarly unattractive senator.

  He said: “Prescott can’t come either. He sends you his apologies,” and with an extreme impatience waited to hear whether she had any comment to make upon this, which might show what and how much, if anything, she knew. She only said, “I’m sorry. Is he working late?”

  It was exactly what Wentworth wanted to know. He went back to his usual seat at the corner of his large table, and put down his cigar. He said, “So he says. It’s unfortunate, isn’t it, just the evening Adela couldn’t come?” He then found himself pausing, and added, “But we can go on talking, can’t we? Though I’m afraid it will be duller for you.”

  He hoped she would deny this at once; on the other hand he didn’t want her to stop. He wanted her to want to stop, but to be compelled to go by some necessary event; so that her longing and disappointment could partly compensate him for Adela’s apparently volitional absence, but without forcing him to talk. He wished her grandmother could be taken worse suddenly. But she made no sign of going, nor did she offer him any vivid tribute. She sat for a minute with her eyes on the floor, then she looked at him and said: “There was something I thought of asking you.”

  “Yes?” Wentworth said. After all, Prescott probably was at his office, and Adela probably—wherever she had to be.

  Pauline had not formally intended to speak. But Lawrence Wentworth was the only person she knew who might be aware of … what these things were and what they demanded. And since they were thus left together, she consented to come so far as to ask. She disdained herself a little, but she went on, her disdain almost audible in her voice: “Did you ever come across”—she found she had to pause to draw equable breath; it was difficult even to hint—“did you ever read of any tale of people meeting themselves?”