Shadows of Ecstasy Page 5

  “He scarce had ceased when the superior fiend

  Was moving towards the shore

  “Hid in its vacant interlunar cave

  “And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake.”

  Rosamond said sharply: “Do be quiet, Roger. You know I hate your quoting.”

  “Quoting!” Roger said, “quoting!” and stopped in despair. He looked at Philip as if asking him whether he couldn’t do something.

  Philip didn’t see the look; he was meditating. But the silence affected him at last; he raised his eyes, and was on the point of speaking when Rosamond interrupted, slipping her hand through his arm. “Don’t talk about it any more, darling,” she said; “it’s too horrid. Look, shall I come as far as the Tube with you?”

  He stirred—rather heavily, Roger thought—but as their eyes met he smiled back at her, and only Isabel’s hand prevented her husband from again quoting the High Executive on the exchanged adoration of love. It was therefore with a slight but unusual formality that farewells were spoken, and Philip departed for the station.

  Roger remained propped against the mantelpiece, but he said, viciously, “She ‘wasn’t listening’!”

  Isabel looked at him a little anxiously. “Don’t listen too carefully, darling,” she said. “It’s not just cowardice—to refuse to hear some sounds.”

  He pulled himself upright. “I must go and work,” he said. “I must exquisitely water the wine so that it may be tolerable for weak heads.” By the door he paused. “Do you remember your Yeats?” he asked.

  “What rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  I wonder. Also I wonder where exactly Bethlehem is, and what are the prodigies of the birth.”

  Chapter Four

  THE MAJESTY OF THE KING

  In the Tube Philip read the proclamation of the High Executive over again, and, to the best of his ability, considered it. He was uneasily conscious that Rosamond would have disapproved of this, and he couldn’t help feeling that it was only by an oversight that she hadn’t asked him to please her by leaving it alone. However, she hadn’t, so he was morally free. There stirred vaguely in his mind the subtler question of whether he were free by a strict or by an easy interpretation of morals: did exact justice, did a proper honour, demand that he should follow her choice or insist on his own? But the question never got as far as definition; he was aware of a difficulty turning over in its sleep—slouching towards Bethlehem but not reaching it—and almost deliberately refrained from realizing it. Because he did want to know, more accurately, what this alleged declaration had said about love. Unlike Roger and, fortunately for him, like Rosamond, he had no particular use for the masters of verse. He was therefore ignorant of the cloud of testimony that had been borne to the importance and significance of the passion that was growing in him. He had certainly heard of Dante and Beatrice, of Tristram and Iseult, of Lancelot and Guinevere, but there he stopped. He had hardly heard, he had certainly never brooded over, that strange identification of Beatrice with Theology and of Theology with Beatrice by which one great poet has justified centuries of else doubtful minds. But by that secular dispensation of mercy which has moved in the blood of myriads of lovers, he had felt what he did not know and experienced what he could not formularize. And the words which he now read did not so much startle his innocent devotion by their eccentricity as dimly disturb him with a sense of their justice. He had had no use at all for the African peoples except in so far as they gave him an opportunity to follow his European habits in providing Rosamond with a home and a car and anything else she wanted. The prospect of the great age of intellect being done, also left him unmoved; he hadn’t realized that any special great age of intellect had existed—except for a vague idea that a period of past history known as the Middle Ages was considerably less intelligent than the present, and that there had been a brief time when Athens, and a rather longer time when Rome, was very intellectual. But when all that seemed to him meaningless had been removed, there still remained the fact that never before, never anywhere, had any words, printed or spoken, come nearer to telling him what he really felt about Rosamond than this paragraph which purported to come from the centre of Africa, and from dark-skinned chiefs pouring up against the guns and rifles of England. He knew it was silly, but he knew it said “adoration,” “vision,” “apprehension of victory,” “conquest of death.” He knew it was silly, but he knew also that he had felt through Rosamond, brief and little understood, something which was indeed apprehension of victory and conquest of death.

  When he got home he found his godfather alone, and, rather against his own intention, found himself approaching the subject. Caithness had seen the proclamation and was inclined to be a little scornful of it: which may partly have been due to the unrecognized fact that, while Roger and Philip had both found their interior passions divined and applauded, Caithness had had his referred to merely as “a misguided principle.” He doubted the authenticity, and went on to add: “Rather bombastic, don’t you think? I don’t pretend to know what it means.”

  Philip said, “Roger seemed quite impressed by it.”

  “O Roger!” the priest said good-humouredly. “I called it bombast but I expect he’d call it poetry. I don’t mean that it hasn’t a kind of thrill in it, but thrills aren’t the only thing—certainly they’re not safe things to live by.”

  Philip thought this over, and decided that he agreed with it. Only his sensations about Rosamond were not—no, they were not thrills: and he wasn’t at all clear that they weren’t things to live by. He said, shamelessly involving Roger: “He made fun of me about it—he seemed to think that part of it was meant for me. The paragraph about—O well, some paragraph or other.”

  Caithness looked down at the paper. “This about the exaltation of love, I expect,” he said, with a rather charming smile. “Roger would be all in favour of that; the poets are. But perhaps they’re more used to living on the hilltops than the rest of us.”

  “You don’t think it’s true then?” Philip asked, with a slight and irrational feeling of disappointment. Irrational, because he hadn’t actually expected Caithness to agree with a gospel, if it was a gospel, out of Africa. Sir Bernard had once remarked that Caithness limited himself to the Near East in the matter of gospels, “the near East modified by the much nearer West.”

  But over the direct question Caithness hesitated. “I wouldn’t care to say it wasn’t true,” he said, “but all truth is not expedient. It’s no use making people expect too much.”

  “No,” Philip said, “I suppose it isn’t.” Was he expecting too much? was he, in fact, expecting anything at all? Or could whatever he expected or whatever happened alter the terribly important fact of the shape of Rosamond’s ear? He also looked again at the paper, and words leapt to his eyes. “Believe, imagine, live. Know exaltation and feed on it——”

  “You don’t then,” he said, unwontedly stirred, “really think one ought to believe in it too much?”

  “Why yes, my dear boy,” the priest answered. “Only these things are so often deceptive; they change or they become familiar. One can’t trust one’s own vision too far; that’s where religion comes in.”

  Sir Bernard would no doubt have pointed out, what did not occur to either of the others, that this merely meant that Caithness was substituting his own hobby for Philip’s. But he wasn’t there, and so, vaguely depressed, especially as he couldn’t feel that Rosamond’s ear would ever change, the young man turned the conversation, and shut away the appeal of the High Executive for the time being in whatever corresponded in his mind to Roger Ingram’s bookshelves.

  The African trouble, however, displayed, during the next few days, no possibility of being shut away. The steps which the Powers, on the unanimous testimony of their spokesmen, were harmoniously taking produced no effect against the rebels (as the enemy was habitually called). It became clear that the “hordes” consisted, in fact, of hig
hly disciplined and well-supplied armies. In the north of Africa the territory held by the European forces grew daily smaller; all Egypt, except Cairo, was lost; the French were pressed back to the coast of Tangier; the Spaniards were hustled out of Morocco. The Dominion of South Africa was sending out expeditions, of which no news returned—certainly there had not been much time, but there was no news at all, or none that was published. In England an official censorship was attempted, but failed owing to the speedy growth of a party which demanded “Africa for the Africans.” Normally the massacre of the Christian missionaries would have been fatal to such a demand, but the recalcitrant attitude of the Archbishop hampered the more violent patriots. Rumours got about of the appearance of hostile aeroplanes over the Mediterranean and the coastline of Southern Europe. Negroes in London and other large towns were mobbed in the streets. Roger reported to Isabel that not only negroes but comparatively harmless Indians had disappeared from his classes. It was evident that the Government would be driven to some measure of internment.

  It was so driven, more quickly than had been expected, when the news came of the sinking of a transport crowded with Indian troops which were being rushed to South Africa. That the African armies should be able to operate destructively by sea as well as by land was a shock even to instructed opinion, and, among the uninstructed, crowds began to parade the streets, booing and cheering and chasing any dark-skinned stranger who showed himself. Even one or two Southern Italians had, for a few minutes, an uneasy time. The crowds were of course dissolved by the police, but they came together again like drops of water till the evening’s amusement was done and they reluctantly went home.

  The reaction of all these events on the money market was considerable, and it was not eased by the uncertainty which still existed on the situation of the late Mr. Rosenberg’s affairs. Nothing definite was known, since the Chief Rabbi and Mr. Considine persisted in their silence, as did the two legatees. But an uneasy feeling manifested itself, both in the streets around the brothers’ house and in the wider circles of finance. It could not be said that anything unusual was going on, for nothing at all seemed to be going on. But the stillness was alarming. No-one could believe that the two aged and devoted students of Kabbalistic doctrine were fit persons to control the vast interests of the Rosenberg estate. But no-one could prevent their doing whatever they liked with it. Nehemiah and Ezekiel came out to the synagogue and went home again, and went nowhere else, though well-dressed strangers in cars descended on Hounds-ditch, and were engaged with them over long periods. In Houndsditch itself strange tales of the jewels began to spread, following vivid accounts of them in the papers. The thrill of the jewels and the thrill of the Africans contended; hungry eyes followed the Jews as hostile eyes followed such rare negroes as could still be seen in the East End. A sullen excitement began to work around them, a breathless and vulgar imitation of the exalted imagination which the High Executive had declared to be the true path to desirable knowledge.

  A more natural excitement, though perhaps equally crude from the point of view of the High Executive and that other High Executive represented among others by the Archbishops, affected innumerable suburban homes when the selling began. Gradually but steadily the prices of shares in the Rosenberg concerns began to fall. It was said that someone knew something and was standing from under. A shiver of panic touched finance, allied to that other panic which had already touched the extreme villages of Southern Europe. Nervous voices made inquiries over telephones in England as nervous eyes watched aeroplanes over the Mediterranean. From each background of silence a thin mist of fear crept out and was blown over many minds. Something shook civilization, as it had been shaken a hundred times before, but that something loomed now in half-fancied forms of alien powers, of negroes flying through the air and Jews withdrawing their gold. Day by day the tremors quickened. Neglected expositors of the Apocalypse in Tonbridge or Cheltenham, old ladies, retired military men, and an eccentric clergyman or two, began to say boldly that it was the end of the world. At Birmingham a man ran naked through the streets crying that he saw fire from heaven, and leaping on to the railway lines was killed by an express train before the police could catch him. “Second Adventist goes mad at Birmingham,” said the evening papers. The Churches found that growing crowds attended them. The Government unofficially suggested to the Archbishops that they should discourage people coming to church. The Archbishops issued a Pastoral Letter from which they naturally could not exclude some of their irritation with the Government; and of which therefore the first part, which was addressed to the new converts, tended towards a scornful and minatory tone. This, if anything, made matters worse, the converts naturally arguing that if the Church could afford to use that voice the Church must feel itself very safe indeed; and this feeling was strengthened by the second part which was addressed to the faithful in language that in normal times would have been ordinary enough. “And you, little children, love one another,” it began and continued on the same theme, ending with another quotation, “My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you.” The idea that these incantations contained a magical safety found more and more believers; and Sir Bernard congratulated Caithness on a greater spread of the Faith in ten days than in ten years previously. On a world already thus agitated fell the second communication of the High Executive. This, after the earlier formal invocation of “things willed and fated,” “gods many and one,” went on in something of a high style of distress to lament that the Powers of Europe had not thought well even to answer the earlier message, much less apparently to prepare themselves for any negotiations. They had instead, by all means at their command, increased their armies and strengthened the war. “Some check,” the message went on, “the African armies have administered to this gathering defiance, but the High Executive has felt compelled to advise its august Sovereigns that mere measures of defence will no longer be sufficient. If the Powers of Europe are determined to force war upon Africa, then Africa will be compelled to open war upon Europe. The gospel which is the birthright of the African peoples and which they offer as a message of hope even to the degraded and outworn nations of the white race carries no maxim which they are unwilling to practise. With a profound but unrecognised truth the Christians of Europe have declared that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. This maxim Africa knows, understands, obeys. In the high mysteries of birth and death, not only physical generation or physical destruction, but those spiritual experiences of which these are but types, Africa has learnt the secret duties of man. Her peoples offer themselves in exaltation to the bed of death as to the bed of love. With an ecstasy born of their ecstasy, with a communication to its children of that which they first communicated to it, the High Executive summons them to what is at present the final devotion of conscious being. They and it are alike indifferent to the result, if the armies of Europe destroy them they will but find in death a greater thing than their conquerors know. But the armies of Europe will not destroy them, for the Second Evolution of man has begun. Their leaders and prophets, and the High Executive which is their voice and act, address themselves no longer to the children of intellect and science and learning. They turn to their own peoples. Daughters and Sons of Africa, you are called to the everlasting sacrifice. Victim or priest at that altar, it matters not whether you inflict or endure the pang. Come, for the cycles are accomplished and the knowledge that was of old returns. Come, for this is the hour of death that alternates for ever with the hour of love. Come, for without the knowledge of both the knowledge of one shall fail. Come, ye blessed, inherit the things laid up for you from the foundations of the world.”

  On the evening of the day when this invocation appeared, the crowds in the streets were thicker than ever. The first death was reported in a special edition of the papers; a negro had been literally hunted over Hampstead Heath and afterwards (not quite intentionally, it was thought), killed. Sir Bernard rang up Isabel.

  “Nothing,” h
e said, when she answered, “except that you once said that Hampstead was the negro quarter of London, and I thought I’d like to know whether there was any trouble up there.”

  “Not to say trouble,” Isabel said. “There was a little friction at the gate, and we’ve got a coloured gentleman in the house at present.”

  “Have you indeed?” Sir Bernard exclaimed. “Was it you or Roger who brought him in?”

  “Both of us,” Isabel explained. “We heard a noise in the street and we looked out, and there was a negro—at least, he was a black man; a negro’s something technical, isn’t it?—against our gate, and the most unpleasant lot of whites you ever saw all round him, cursing. Roger went out and talked to them, but that was no good. He said something about behaving like Englishmen, and I suppose they did; at least they began to throw stones and hit out with their sticks. So Roger got him through the gate, and I got them through the front door, and here he is.”

  “You’re not hurt, Isabel?” Sir Bernard said sharply. “What about the crowd?”

  “O they threw things at the house and smashed a window, and presently the police came and they went away,” Isabel answered. “No, thank you, I’m perfectly all right. I’m just going to make coffee. Come and have some.”

  “Where’s your visitor?” Sir Bernard asked.

  “Talking African love songs and tribal poetry with Roger in his room,” Isabel said. “They agree wonderfully on everything but the effect of the adverb. Roger’s evolving a theory that adverbs have no place in great poetry—I don’t understand why.”

  “I should like to hear him,” Sir Bernard said. “Thanks, Isabel; I’ll come up if I may.”

  “Do,” said Isabel, “and I’ll postpone the coffee for half-an-hour. Till then.”