Descent into Hell Read online

  Momentarily distracted, Wentworth said: “Meeting themselves? What, in dreams?”

  “Not dreams,” Pauline said, “meeting themselves … in the street … or anywhere.” She wished now she hadn’t begun, for to speak seemed to invite its presence, as if it were likely to hover outside, if not inside the house; and she would have to go home by herself to-night the whole way.… Or, since she had betrayed its privacy, supposing it followed up her betrayal and came now.…

  “There’s a picture of Rossetti’s,” Wentworth said; “were you thinking of that?”

  “Not a picture,” Pauline said; “I mean, have you ever read of its happening? Shelley says it happened to Zoroaster.”

  “Indeed,” Wentworth said. “I don’t remember that. Of course I’ve heard of it as a superstition. Where have you come across it? Has anyone you know been seeing themselves?”

  His mind was drifting back to Adela; the question rang hard. Pauline felt the obstruction and stayed. She said, “I knew a girl who thought she did. But don’t let me bother you.”

  “You aren’t bothering me,” Wentworth said by force of habit. “On the contrary. I never remember to have come across anything of the sort, though I’ve a notion it was supposed to foretell death. But then almost any unusual incident is supposed to foretell death by the savage—or let’s say the uncivilized—mind. Death, you see, is inevitably the most unusual incident, and so—by correspondence—the lesser is related to the greater. Anthropology is very instructive in that way. The uneducated mind is generally known by its haste to see likeness where no likeness exists. It evaluates its emotions in terms of fortuitous circumstance. It objectifies its concerns through its imagination. Probably your friend was a very self-centred individual.”

  Pauline said coldly, “I don’t know that she was,” while Wentworth wondered if Adela and Prescott had finished the supper they were not, of course, having together. Their absence was a fortuitous circumstance. He evaluated his emotions in its terms, and (like any barbarian chief) objectified his concerns by his imagination. She could find out the difference between Prescott and himself. But he didn’t mind; he didn’t mind. He curvetted on that particular horse for a while, and while curvetting he took no notice of Pauline’s remark until the silence startled his steed into nearly throwing him. Still just remaining seated, he said, “O, she isn’t, isn’t she?” and thought how lank, compared to Adela, Pauline was—lank and blank. She had no capacity. Exactly what capacity she lacked he did not carefully consider, assuming it to be intellectual: the look, not the eyes; the gesture, not the hand. It was Adela’s mental alertness which he knew he would have grudged Prescott, if he could grudge anybody anything. This conversation about people seeing themselves was the dullest he had ever known; he looked covertly at the clock on the mantelpiece; at the same moment Pauline, also covertly, looked at her wrist-watch. She had been a fool to say anything; the only result was to expose her more consciously to that other approach. She had better get home, somehow, before she did anything sillier. She said, “Thank you,” and couldn’t think of anything else. She got up therefore, and said the only thing left.

  “My grandmother’s not been so well to-day. Would you forgive me if I deserted you too? We’re treating you shockingly, aren’t we?”

  Wentworth got up alertly. “Not a bit,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you feel you ought to go.” It occurred to him that, later on, he might walk down toward the station. If he met them together, he would at least be justified. They might have met at Marylebone, of course, even if he did meet them; and if he didn’t, they might be coming by a later train. He might wait for the next. Perhaps it would be wiser not to go—he couldn’t, in his position, hang about for ever and ever. People chattered. But he would decide about that when this superfluous being had been dismissed. He went with her to the door, was genial and bright, said good night, snarled at the time she took getting to the gate, and at last was free to make up his mind.

  He could not do it. He was driven by his hunger as the dead man who had come to that unbuilt house had been driven by his, and for some time he wandered about his rooms as that other shape had gone through the streets, seeking peace and finding none. At last he found himself in his bedroom, looking out of the window, as the dead man had stood there looking over the ruins of history, from the place of his skull. Wentworth stood there now for some seconds, exercising a no more conscious but a still more deliberate choice. He also yielded—to the chaos within rather than the chaos without. The dead man had had reason to suppose that to throw himself down would mean freedom from tyranny, but Wentworth was not so much of a fool as to think that to thrust himself into the way of possible discovery would mean any such freedom. A remnant of intelligence cried to him that this was the road of mania, and self-indulgence leading to mania. Self-preservation itself urged him to remain; lucidity urged him, if not love. He stood and looked and listened, as the dead man had looked and listened. He heard faint hurrying footsteps somewhere on the Hill; the moon was covered by a cloud. The shadow provoked him; in it they might be, now, passing the end of his road. He must act before it was too late. He would not go to spy; he would go for a walk. He went out of the room, down the soft swift stairs of his mind, into the streets of his mind, to find the phantoms of his mind. He desired hell.

  He strode out on his evening walk. He walked down the length of his road; if that led towards the station it could not be helped, nor if at a point it joined the road which Adela would take from the station. He was a man, and he had a right to his walk. He was not a child, neither the child that had lost its toy and cried for it, nor the child that had lost its toy and would not let itself care, nor the child that had lost its toy and tried to recover it by pretending it never did care. It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else. But he was; he was a man, he was going for his walk.

  At the junction of roads, as at a junction of his mind, he stopped and waited—to enjoy the night air. His enjoyment strained intently and viciously to hear the sounds of the night, or such as were not of too remote and piercing a quality to reach him. The wind among the hills was fresh. He heard at a distance a train come in, and the whistle of its departure. One or two travellers went by; one, a woman, hurrying, said something to him as she passed—good night or good morning; it sounded, in his strained joy, like both. He became aware that he was visible in the moon; he moved back into shadow. If he saw them coming he could walk away or walk on without seeming to be in ambush. He was not in ambush; he was out for a walk.

  An hour and more went by. He walked back, and returned. His physical nature, which sometimes by its mere exhaustion postpones our more complete damnation, did not save him. He was not overtired by his vigil, nor in that extreme weariness was the vision of a hopeless honour renewed. He paced and repaced, cannibal of his heart. Midnight passed; the great tower clock struck one. He heard the last train come in. A little up the road, concealed in the shadow, he waited. He heard the light patter of quick feet; he saw, again, a woman go hurrying by. He thought for a moment she was Adela, and then knew she was not. Other feet came, slower and double. The moon was bright; he stood at the edge of his own skull’s platform; desire to hate and desire not to hate struggled in him. In the moonlight, visible, audible, arm in arm, talking and laughing, they came. He saw them pass; his eyes grew blind. Presently he turned and went home. That night when at last he slept he dreamed, more clearly than ever before, of his steady descent of the moon-bright rope.

  Chapter Four

  VISION OF DEATH

  Pauline’s parents had both died a few years before, and she had been put in Battle Hill to live with her grandmother for two reasons. The first was that she had no money. The second was that her uncle refused “to leave his mother to strangers”. Since Pauline’s mother had never liked her husband’s parents, the girl had practically never seen the old lady. But the blood relationship, in her uncle’s mind, connoted intimacy
, and he found an occupation for an orphan and a companion for a widow at one stroke of mercy. Pauline was furious at the decisive kindness which regulated her life, but she had not, at the time when it interfered, found a job, and she had been so involved with the getting to Battle Hill that she discovered herself left there, at last, with her grandmother, a nurse, and a maid. Even so, it was the latent fear in her life that paralysed initiative; she could respond but she could not act. Since they had been on the Hill and the visitations had grown more frequent, she felt that deep paralysis increasing, and she kept her hold on social things almost desperately tight. Her alternative was to stop in altogether, to bury herself in the house, and even so to endure, day by day, the fear that her twin might resolve out of the air somewhere in the hall or the corridor outside her own room. She hated to go out, but she hated still more to stop in, and her intelligence told her that the alternative might save her nothing in the end. Rigid and high-headed she fled, with a subdued fury of pace, from house to gathering, and back from gathering to house, and waited for her grandmother to die.

  Her grandmother, ignoring the possible needs of the young, went on living, keeping her room in the morning, coming down to lunch, and after a light early dinner retiring again to her room. She made no great demands on her granddaughter, towards whom indeed she showed a delicate social courtesy; and Pauline in turn, though in a harsher manner, maintained towards her a steady deference and patience. The girl was in fact so patient with the old lady that she had not yet noticed that she was never given an opportunity to be patient. She endured her own nature and supposed it to be the burden of another’s.

  On an afternoon in early June they were both in the garden at the back of the house; the walls that shut it in made it a part of the girl’s security. Pauline was learning her part, turning the typescript on her knees, and shaping the words with silent lips. The trouble about some of them was that they were so simple as to be almost bathos. Her fibres told her that they were not bathos, until she tried to say them, and then, it was no good denying, they sounded flat. She put the stress here and there; she tried slowness and speed. She invoked her conscious love to vocalize her natural passion, and the lines made the effort ridiculous. She grew hot as she heard herself say them, even though she did not say them aloud. Her unheard melody was less sweet than her memory of Stanhope’s heard, but she did not then think of him reading, only of the lines he had read. They were simple with him; with her they were pretentious and therefore defiled.

  She looked up at Mrs. Anstruther, who was sitting with her eyes closed, and her hands in her lap. Small, thin, wrinkled, she was almost an ideal phenomenon of old age. Some caller, a day or two before, had murmured to Pauline on leaving: “She’s very fragile, isn’t she?” Pauline, gazing, thought that fragile was precisely not the word. Quiet, gentle, but hardly passive and certainly not fragile. Even now, on that still afternoon, the shut eyes left the face with a sense of preoccupation—translucent rock. She was absent, not with the senility of a spirit wandering in feeble memories, but with the attention of a worker engrossed. Perhaps Stanhope looked so when he wrote verse. Pauline felt that she had never seen her grandmother before and did not quite know what to make of her now. A light sound came from the garden beyond. Mrs. Anstruther opened her eyes and met Pauline’s. She smiled. “My dear,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something for the last day or two.” Pauline thought it might be the hot afternoon that gave the voice that effect of distance; it was clear, but small and from afar. The words, the tone, were affectionate with an impersonal love. Pauline thought: “She might be talking to Phœbe”—Phœbe being the maid—and at the same time realized that Mrs. Anstruther did so talk to Phœbe, and to everyone. Her good will diffused itself in all directions. Her granddaughter lay in its way, with all things besides, and it mingled with the warm sun in a general benediction.

  Pauline said: “Yes, grandmother?”

  “If by any chance I should die during the next few weeks,” Mrs. Anstruther said, “you won’t let it interfere with your taking part in the play, will you? It would be so unnecessary.”

  Pauline began to speak, and hesitated. She had been on the point of beginning formally: “O, but——” when she felt, under the lucid gaze, compelled to intelligence. She said slowly: “Well, I suppose I should have.…”

  “Quite unnecessary,” Mrs. Anstruther went on, “and obviously inconvenient, especially if it were in the last few days. Or the last. I hoped you wouldn’t think of it, but it was better to make sure.”

  “It’ll look very odd,” said Pauline, and found herself smiling back. “And what will the rest of them think?”

  “One of them will be disappointed; the rest will be shocked but relieved,” Mrs. Anstruther murmured. “You’ve no proper understudy?”

  “None of us have,” Pauline said. “One of the others in the Chorus would have to take my part … if I were ill, I mean.”

  “Do any of them speak verse better than you?” Mrs. Anstruther asked, with a mild truthfulness of inquiry.

  Pauline considered the Chorus. “No,” she said at last, sincerely. “I don’t think … I’m sure they don’t. Nor Adela,” she added with a slight animosity against the princess. Her grandmother accepted the judgment. “Then it would be better for you to be there,” she said. “So you’ll promise me? It will very nearly be a relief.”

  “I’ll promise certainly,” Pauline said. “But you don’t feel worse, do you, my dear? I thought you’d been stronger lately—since the summer came in.”

  “‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go,’” Mrs. Anstruther quoted. “And a quieter starting-place than our ancestor.”

  “Our ancestor?” Pauline said, surprised. “O, but I remember. He was martyred wasn’t he?”

  Mrs. Anstruther quoted again: “‘Then the said Struther being come to the stake, cried out very loudly: To him that hath shall be given, and one of the friars that went with him struck at him and said: Naughty heretic, and what of him that hath not? and he shouted with a great laughter, pointing at the friar, and calling out: He shall lose all that he hath, and again The Lord hath sent away the rich with empty bellies. Then they stripped him, and when he was in his shirt he looked up and said: The ends of the world be upon me; and so they set him at the stake and put the fire to the wood, and as the fire got hold of him he gave a loud cry and said: I have seen the salvation of my God, and so many times till he died. Which was held for a testimony that the Lord had done great things for him there in the midst of the fire, and under the Lady Elizabeth the place was called Struther’s Salvation for many years.’”

  Mrs. Anstruther stopped. “And perhaps the Lord did,” she said, “though I would not quite take Foxe’s word for it.”

  Pauline shuddered. “It was a terrible thing,” she said. “How he could shout for joy like that!”

  “Salvation,” Mrs. Anstruther said mildly, “is quite often a terrible thing—a frightening good.”

  “A …” said Pauline, and paused. “Mr. Stanhope said something like that,” she ended.

  “Peter Stanhope is a great poet,” her grandmother answered. “But I don’t think many of you can possibly understand his play. You may; I can’t tell.”

  “Mrs. Parry understands it, all but the Chorus,” Pauline said. “And Adela and Myrtle Fox understand even that.”

  Mrs. Anstruther’s look changed. She had been contemplating the fact of Stanhope’s poetry with a gaze of awe; there entered into that awe a delicate and extreme delight. She said: “My dear, I used to know Catherine Parry very well. No one has destroyed more plays by successful production. I sometimes wonder—it’s wrong—whether she has done the same thing with her life. It’s wrong; she is a good creature, and she has behaved very well in all her unrehearsed effects. But I feel she relies too much on elocution and not enough on poetry.”

  Pauline meditated on this. “I don’t think I quite understand,” she said. “How the elocution?”

  “You’re
a little inclined to it yourself, my dear,” Mrs. Anstruther answered. “Your elocution is very just and very effective, but a certain breath of the verse is lacking. No one could have been kinder to me than you have. We’ve done very well together—I as the patient and you as the keeper. That’s what I mean by elocution.”

  She turned on her granddaughter eyes full of delight and affection. Pauline could only sit and stare. Then slowly a blush crept up her face, and she looked hastily away.

  “Ah, don’t be distressed,” the old woman said. “My dear, you’ve been perfect. You’re in trouble over something, and yet you’ve always been kind. I wish I could have helped you.”

  “I’m not in any trouble,” Pauline said with a slight harshness, “except now. Have I been stupid, grandmother?”

  “That,” Mrs. Anstruther said, “was perhaps a little less than intelligent. Why do you refuse to lean?”

  “I don’t,” Pauline said bitterly, “but there’s no——” She was on the point of saying “no help in leaning”; she recovered herself, and changed it to “no need to lean”.

  “O, my dear child,” Mrs. Anstruther murmured gently, “that’s almost like the speech days at my school. Ask Peter Stanhope to tell you how to read verse.”

  Confused between metaphor, implication, and rebuke, and the voice that disseminated sweetness through all, Pauline was about to protest again when Phœbe came out into the garden. She came up to her mistress, and said: “Mrs. Lily Sammile has called, madam, and wants to know if you are well enough to see her.”

  “Certainly,” Mrs. Anstruther said. “Ask Mrs. Sammile to come out here.” And as Phœbe disappeared: “Do you know her, Pauline?”