Descent into Hell Page 6

  Pauline, standing up and folding her typescript with a precision that was almost respect, said: “Hardly know. She meets one continually, and she’s at things. She calls. I never met anyone who’d called on her, now I come to think of it. I don’t even know where she lives.”

  “There are all sorts of places to live on this hill,” Mrs. Anstruther said, and Pauline heard in the voice an undertone of ambiguity. For a moment her fear took her; she looked hastily round. There was no sign of her twin. “All sorts of places to live.”

  “Many habitations,” she answered with forced lightness, and went to meet the visitor who appeared from the house.

  Mrs. Sammile was younger than Mrs. Anstruther, and much quicker in movement. She was much more restless. Her feet pattered on the path, her eyes glanced everywhere; she suggested by her whole bearing that time was in a hurry, and there was very little time for—something. Perhaps the contrast of Mrs. Anstruther’s repose heightened this excitement. She was shorter than Pauline, and her eyes looked up at the girl almost anxiously. She said: “I’ve only just looked in. But it was so long since I’d seen you.”

  “We met yesterday, if you remember,” Pauline answered, smiling. “But it was good of you to come.”

  “I don’t, I hope, intrude?” Mrs. Sammile went on, as she shook hands with the old woman. Mrs. Anstruther murmured something vague, and Pauline said it more definitely: “Of course not, Mrs. Sammile, we’re delighted.”

  “Such glorious weather—but trying, isn’t it?” the visitor prattled nervously on, rather like a chicken fluttering round the glass walls of a snake’s cage. “I always think any weather’s trying, heat or cold. And it always seems to be one or other, doesn’t it?”

  “So pleasant,” said Mrs. Anstruther politely. “Like sex, one can’t imagine anything not one or the other. Or, of course, a combination.”

  “If,” Pauline added, valiant but aware of failure, “if we could make our own weather.…”

  Lily Sammile slewed round a little towards her. “If we could!” she said. “I thought yesterday that you were looking a little tired, my dear.”

  “Was I?” Pauline answered. “Perhaps I was,” and added, agonizingly, “It’s the spring, I expect.”

  The other looked at her, turning still a little more away from Mrs. Anstruther, and seeming to become a little quieter as she did so. She said: “I do think the world’s rather trying, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Pauline said with a heartfelt throb of assent, and more earnestly than she knew. “Very trying.” It certainly was hot. She felt that three in the garden were too many, and wondered if her grandmother, in case she was feeling tired, ought to be offered an opportunity of going indoors. If June were so sultry, what would July be? The time was still; no sound came. A lifting palpitation took her; she shuddered. Her grave: who walked on, or was it from, her grave? The thing she had so often seen? into which—she knew now—she feared to be drawn, to be lost or not to be lost, to be always herself as the enfeebled element in something else. Never yet within walls, but the heat crept round her, a preliminary invasion; the heat came over or through walls, and after the heat its centre.

  The violent sensation receded. She came to herself to find herself staring rudely at Mrs. Sammile’s face. It was a face that had been beautiful, rounded and precious with delight, sustained just sufficiently by its bones to avoid, as for instance Adela Hunt’s hardly avoided, the reproach of plumpness; and was still full in places, by the ears and round the jaw; only the cheeks were a little macabre in their withdrawal, and the eyes in their hint of hollows about them. Pauline, stirred by the sad recollection of her other self, thought that Mrs. Sammile looked more like death than her grandmother, more like a living death, than which, on this hill where her own ancestor and so many others had died, what could be more likely?

  Mrs. Sammile was saying softly: “Perhaps she’s asleep; I don’t want to wake her. You look so tired. If I could be any use.…”

  Pauline thought, as she looked back, that she had been unjust to Mrs. Sammile’s eyes. They were not restless, as she had thought. They were soothing; they appealed and comforted at once. She said: “I’ve had bad dreams.”

  Mrs. Sammile said: “I’ve had them too, sometimes,” and Pauline almost felt that even her dream, to call it that, was less trouble than those other undescribed nightmares. But before she could speak the visitor went on: “But there are cures, you know.”

  She had spoken, perhaps, a little more loudly, for Mrs. Anstruther’s voice answered equably: “There is, of course, sleep. Or waking. Is there anything else?”

  Mrs. Sammile looked round and her answer held the earlier suggestion of hostility. She said, defensively: “Pleasanter dreams. On a hill like this, one ought to have a choice. There are so many.”

  Pauline said: “Can you change dreams, Mrs. Sammile?”

  “O, everyone can,” the other answered. She leant towards Pauline and went on: “There are all sorts of ways of changing dreams.” She put a hand on the girl’s. “All tales of the brain. Why not tell yourself a comforting tale?”

  “Because I could never make up a satisfying end,” Pauline said, “and the tale wouldn’t stop—no tale that I could think of. There was always something more that had got to happen and I could never feel—not in my best tale—that I was quite certainly telling it.”

  “You must let me tell you tales instead,” Lily Sammile answered. “Come and see me.”

  “I’d like to, but I don’t think I know where you live, Mrs. Sammile,” Pauline said, and paused on the implied question.

  Mrs. Sammile said: “O, we shall meet. And if we can’t find a tale we’ll do as well. Cross my hand with silver, and I’ll not only tell you a good fortune, I’ll make you one. Like the Bible—wine and milk without money, or for so little it hardly counts.”

  Pauline looked at Mrs. Anstruther. “Mrs. Sammile is offering us all we want without any trouble,” she said. “Shall we take it and be grateful?”

  “Exquisite rhetoric,” her grandmother allusively answered, but faintly, and Pauline went on to the visitor: “And would one always enjoy oneself then?”

  “Why not?” Mrs. Sammile said. “Everything lovely in you for a perpetual companion, so that you’d never be frightened or disappointed or ashamed any more. There are tales that can give you yourself completely and the world could never treat you so badly then that you wouldn’t neglect it. One can get everything by listening or looking in the right way: there are all sorts of turns.”

  Phœbe reappeared by Mrs. Anstruther’s chair. “Miss Fox and Mr. Stanhope, madam,” she said, and retired with a message.

  Pauline said, as she stood up, “It’d be too wonderful,” and then, “Aren’t you rather tired, grandmother? Wouldn’t you rather go upstairs and let me see them indoors?”

  “My dear,” Mrs. Anstruther said, “as long as Peter Stanhope comes to see me, I shall receive him. At least, until Mrs. Sammile gives us the effect of Shakespeare without Shakespeare. Give me your arm.”

  She stood up, and leaning on the girl took a step or two forward, as Myrtle Fox, followed by Stanhope, came into the garden, and hurried across to her.

  “Dear Mrs. Anstruther, how nice to see you again,” Myrtle said. “It seems such a long time, but you know how rushed one is! But I felt I must come to-day. Do you know Mr. Stanhope? We met in the street and came along together.”

  Mrs. Anstruther allowed herself to be embraced and kissed without any further welcome than a smile; then she held out her hand.

  “This is a great honour, Mr. Stanhope,” she said. “I’m very glad to welcome you here.”

  He bowed over her hand. “It’s very kind of you, Mrs. Anstruther.”

  “I’ve owed you a great deal for a long while now,” she said, “and I can do no more than acknowledge it. But I’m grateful that I can do that. Do you know Mrs. Sammile?”

  Stanhope bowed again; Myrtle let out a new gush of greeting and they all sat down.

>   “I really came,” Stanhope said after a little interchange, “to ask Miss Anstruther if she had any preference in names.”

  “Me?” said Pauline. “What sort of names?”

  “As the leader of the Chorus,” Stanhope explained. “I promised Mrs. Parry I’d try and individualize so far—for the sake of the audience—as to give her a name. Myself, I don’t think it’ll much help the audience, but as I promised—I wondered about something French, as it’s to be eighteenth century, La Lointaine or something like that. But Mrs. Parry was afraid that’d make it more difficult. No one would understand (she thought) why leaves—if they are leaves—should be lointaine.…”

  He was interrupted by Myrtle, who, leaning eagerly forward, said: “O, Mr. Stanhope, that reminds me. I was thinking about it myself the other day, and I thought how beautiful and friendly it would be to give all the Chorus tree-names. It would look so attractive on the programmes, Elm, Ash, Oak—the three sweet trees—Hawthorn, Weeping Willow, Beech, Birch, Chestnut. D’you see? That would make it all quite clear. And then Pauline could be the Oak. I mean, the Oak would have to be the leader of the English trees, wouldn’t he—or she?”

  “Do let Mr. Stanhope tell us, Myrtle,” Mrs. Anstruther said; and “You’d turn them into a cosy corner of trees, Myrtle,” Pauline interjected.

  “But that’s what we want,” Myrtle pursued her dream, “we want to realize that Nature can be consoling, like life. And Art—even Mr. Stanhope’s play. I think all art is so consoling, don’t you, Mrs. Sammile?”

  Mrs. Anstruther had opened her mouth to interrupt Myrtle, but now she shut it again, and waited for her guest to reply, who said in a moment, with a slight touch of tartness, “I’m sure Mr. Stanhope won’t agree. He’ll tell you nightmares are significant.”

  “O, but we agreed that wasn’t the right word,” Myrtle exclaimed. “Or was it! Pauline, was it significant or symbolical that we agreed everything was?”

  “I want to know my name,” Pauline said, and Stanhope, smiling, answered, “I was thinking of something like Periel. Quite insignificant.”

  “It sounds rather odd,” said Myrtle. “What about the others?”

  “The others,” Stanhope answered firmly, “will not be named.”

  “O!” Myrtle looked disappointed. “I thought we might have had a song or speech or something with all the names in it. It would sound beautiful. And Art ought to be beautiful, don’t you think? Beautiful words in beautiful voices. I do think elocution is so important.”

  Pauline said, “Grandmother doesn’t care for elocution.”

  “O, Mrs. Anstru——” Myrtle was beginning, when Mrs. Anstruther cut her short.

  “What does one need to say poetry, Mr. Stanhope?” she asked.

  Stanhope laughed. “What but the four virtues, clarity, speed, humility, courage? Don’t you agree?”

  The old lady looked at Mrs. Sammile. “Do you?” she asked.

  Lily Sammile shrugged. “O, if you’re turning poems into labours,” she said. “But we don’t all want to speak poetry, and enjoyment’s a simple thing for the rest of us.”

  “We do all want to speak it,” Stanhope protested. “Or else verse and plays and all art are more of dreams than they need be. They must always be a little so, perhaps.”

  Mrs. Sammile shrugged again. “You make such a business of enjoying yourself,” she said with almost a sneer. “Now if I’ve a nightmare I change it as soon as I can.” She looked at Pauline.

  “I’ve never had nightmares since I Couéd them away,” Myrtle Fox broke in. “I say every night: ‘Sleep is good, and sleep is here. Sleep is good.’ And I never dream. I say the same thing every morning, only I say Life then instead of Sleep. ‘Life is good and Life is here. Life is good.’”

  Stanhope flashed a glance at Pauline. “Terribly good, perhaps,” he suggested.

  “Terribly good, certainly,” Myrtle assented happily.

  Mrs. Sammile stood up. “I must go,” she said. “But I don’t see why you don’t enjoy yourselves.”

  “Because, sooner or later, there isn’t anything to enjoy in oneself,” Stanhope murmured, as she departed.

  Pauline took her to the gate, and said good-bye.

  “Do let’s meet,” Mrs. Sammile said. “I’m always about, and I think I could be useful. You’ve got to get back now, but sometime you needn’t get back.…” She trotted off, and as she went the hard patter of her heels was the only sound that broke, to Pauline’s ears, the heavy silence of the Hill.

  The girl lingered a little before returning. A sense of what Miss Fox called “significance” hung in her mind; she felt, indeterminately, that something had happened, or, perhaps, was beginning to happen. The afternoon had been one of a hundred—the garden, a little talk, visitors, tea—yet all that usualness had been tinged with difference. She wondered if it were merely the play, and her concern with it, that had heightened her senses into what was, no doubt, illusion. Her hands lay on the top bar of the gate, and idly she moved her fingers, separating and closing them one by one for each recollected point. Her promise to her grandmother—death was not to interrupt verse; the memory of her ancestor—death swallowed up in victory—Struther’s Salvation, Anstruther’s salvation; elocution, rhetoric, poetry, Peter Stanhope, Lily Sammile, the slight jar of their half-philosophical dispute; her own silly phrase—“to make your own weather”; tales of the brain, tales to be told, tales that gave you yourself in quiet, tales or the speaking of verse, tales or rhetoric or poetry; “clarity, speed, courage, humility”. Or did they only prevent desirable enjoyment, as Lily Sammile had hinted? One would have to be terribly good to achieve them. And terribly careful about the tales. She looked down the street, and for an instant felt that if she saw It coming—clarity, speed, courage, humility—she might wait. She belonged to the Chorus of a great experiment; a thing not herself.

  The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

  Met his own image walking in the garden.

  If those four great virtues were needed, as Peter Stanhope had proposed, even to say the verse, might Shelley have possessed them before he discovered the verse? If she were wrong in hating them? if they had been offered her as a classification, a hastening, a strengthening? if she had to discover them as Shelley had done, and beyond them.…

  She must go back. She pulled herself from the gate. Mrs. Sammile had just reached the corner. She looked back; she waved. The gesture beckoned. Pauline waved back, reluctantly. Before she told herself tales, it was needful to know what there was in verse. She must hear more.

  She was not offered more. The visitors were on the point of departure, and Mrs. Anstruther was certainly tired. She roused herself to beg Stanhope to come again, if he would, but no more passed, except indeed that as Pauline herself said goodbye, Stanhope delayed a moment behind Miss Fox to add: “The substantive, of course, governs the adjective; not the other way round.”

  “The substantive?” Pauline asked blankly.

  “Good. It contains terror, not terror good. I’m keeping you. Good-bye, Periel,” and he was gone.

  Later in the day, lying unsleeping but contented in her bed, Mrs. Anstruther also reviewed the afternoon. She was glad to have seen Peter Stanhope; she was not particularly glad to have seen Lily Sammile, but she freely acknowledged, in the words of a too often despised poet, that since God suffered her to be, she too was God’s minister, and laboured for some good by Margaret Anstruther not understood. She did not understand clearly what Mrs. Sammile conceived herself to be offering. It sounded so much like Myrtle Fox: “tell yourself tales”.

  She looked out of the window. There would be few more evenings during which she could watch the departure of day, and the promise of rarity gave a greater happiness to the experience. So did the knowledge of familiarity. Rarity was one form of delight and frequency another. A thing could even be beautiful because it did not happen, or rather the not-happening could be beautiful. So long always as joy was not rashly pinned to the happening; so lo
ng as you accepted what joys the universe offered and did not seek to compel the universe to offer you joys of your own definition. She would die soon; she expected, with hope and happiness, the discovery of the joy of death.

  It was partly because Stanhope’s later plays had in them something of this purification and simplicity that she loved them. She knew that, since they were poetry, they must mean more than her individual being knew, but at least they meant that. He discovered it in his style, in words and the manner of the words he used. Whether his personal life could move to the sound of his own lucid exaltation of verse she did not know. It was not her business; perhaps even it was not primarily his. His affair had been the powerful exploration of power after his own manner; all minds that recognized power saluted him. Power was in that strange chorus over which the experts of Battle Hill culture disputed, and it lay beyond them. There was little human approach in it, though it possessed human experience; like the Dirge in Cymbeline or the songs of Ariel in the Tempest it possessed only the pure perfection of fact, rising in rhythms of sound that seemed inhuman because they were free from desire or fear or distress. She herself did not yet dare to repeat the Chorus; it was beyond her courage. Those who had less knowledge or more courage might do so. She dared only to recollect it; to say it would need more courage than was required for death. When she was dead, she might be able to say Stanhope’s poetry properly. Even if there were no other joy, that would be a reason for dying well.

  Here, more than in most places, it should be easy. Here there had, through the centuries, been a compression and culmination of death as if the currents of mortality had been drawn hither from long distances to some whirlpool of invisible depth. The distances might be very long indeed; from all places of predestined sepulchre, scattered through the earth. In those places the movement of human life had closed—of human life or human death, of the death in life which was an element in life, and of those places the Hill on which she lived was one. An energy reposed in it, strong to affect all its people; an energy of separation and an energy of knowledge. If, as she believed, the spirit of a man at death saw truly what he was and had been, so that whether he desired it or not a lucid power of intelligence manifested all himself to him—then that energy of knowledge was especially urgent upon men and women here, though through all the world it must press upon the world. She felt, as if by a communication of a woe not hers, how the neighbourhood of the dead troubled the living; how the living were narrowed by the return of the dead. Therefore in savage regions the houses of sepulchre were forbidden, were taboo, for the wisdom of the barbarians set division between the dead and the living, and the living were preserved. The wisdom of other religions in civilized lands had set sacramental ceremonies about the dying, and dispatched the dead to their doom with prayers and rites which were not meant for the benefit of the dead alone. Rather, they secured the living against ghostly oppression; they made easy the way of the ghosts into their own world and hurried them upon their way. They were sped on with unction and requiem, with intercessions and masses; and the sword of exorcism waved at the portal of their exodus against the return of any whom those salutations of departure did not ease. But where superstition and religion failed, where cemeteries were no longer forbidden and no longer feared; where the convenient processes of cremation encouraged a pretence of swift passage, where easy sentimentality set up a pretence of friendship between the living and the dead—might not that new propinquity turn to a fearful friendship in the end? It was commonly accepted that the dead were anxious to help the living, but what if the dead were only anxious for the living to help them? or what if the infection of their experience communicated itself across the too shallow grave? Men were beginning to know, they were being compelled to know; at last the living world was shaken by the millions of spirits who endured that further permanent revelation. Hysteria of self-knowledge, monotony of self-analysis, introspection spreading like disease, what was all this but the infection communicated over the unpurified borders of death? The spirits of the living world were never meant to be so neighbourly with the spirits of that other. “Grant to them eternal rest, O Lord. And let light eternal shine upon them.” Let them rest in their own places of light; far, far from us be their discipline and their endeavour. The phrases of the prayers of intercession throb with something other than charity for the departed; there is a fear for the living. Grant them, grant them rest; compel them to their rest. Enlighten them, perpetually enlighten them. And let us still enjoy our refuge from their intolerable knowledge.