Shadows of Ecstasy Read online

  For once Sir Bernard took a taxi; as a general rule he avoided them, preferring the more actively contemplative life of buses and tubes, and preferring also never to be in anything like a hurry. When he arrived he found Philip and Rosamond, who had been dining out, sitting side by side on the kitchen table, watching Isabel make the coffee.

  “Come in here, Sir Bernard, won’t you?” she said when she had let him in, “and you shall see the refugee soon. He’s in the only room with a fire, and as Rosamond is terrified to death of him we have to linger in the kitchen to keep comfortably warm. ‘October nights are chill,’ as someone said. No, don’t tell me.”

  “Isabel,” her sister protested, “I’m not terrified of him, but I don’t think it’s quite nice of him to stop here. Why doesn’t he go home?”

  “With mobs prowling round the garden gate?” Isabel asked. “And Roger still making noises to show the union of accent and quantity? My dear Rosamond, when you’re married you won’t want Philip’s friends to go home until he’s thoroughly tired out. Otherwise he’ll barge into your room at midnight and go on with the conversation with you. And as you’re asleep to begin with, and as you don’t know what the conversation was about, and as you don’t know whether he wants you to agree or disagree though you’d do either for peace, you’ll find it very difficult to be nice him. I have never,” Isabel went on, pouring milk into a saucepan, “really quarrelled with Roger.…”

  “Isabel!” Sir Bernard murmured.

  “Not really,” Isabel persisted, “except once, and that was when he woke me up by calling out to me very late one night, ‘Isabel, what is there in verse which is the equivalent of the principle of the arch?’ I really was angry then, but he only kept murmuring lines of poetry and trying to see if they were like an arch. All that because a friend of his who had been to dinner had gone away at half-past eleven instead of half-past one. Always remember, Rosamond my child, that a man needs you to get away from.”

  “You mean needs to get away from me, don’t you?” Rosamond asked, looking possessively at Philip.

  “No,” Isabel said, “Sir Bernard, the milk’s boiling … thank you so much. No, Rosamond, I don’t. I mean exactly what I said. A man must have you——”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying ‘a man,’ Isabel,” Philip remonstrated.

  “Very well—give me a spoon, Philip—Philip then must have you there in order to be able to get away. If you weren’t there he wouldn’t be able to get away.”

  Rosamond looked uninterested. Philip reflected what a curious thing it was that so many people he knew should want to chatter like this. His father did it, Ingram did it, Isabel did it. Sometimes he understood it, sometimes he didn’t. But he never understood it as now, suddenly, he understood Rosamond’s arm when she leant forward to pass a plate to her sister; somehow that arm always made him think of the Downs against the sky. There was a line, a curved beauty, a thing that spoke to both mind and heart; a thing that was there for ever. And Rosamond? Rosamond was like them, she was there for ever. It occurred to him that, if she was, then her occasional slowness when he was trying to explain something was there for ever. Well, after all, Rosamond was only human; she couldn’t be absolutely perfect. And then as she stretched out her arm again he cried out that she was perfect, she was more than perfect; the movement of her arm was something frightfully important, and now it was gone. He had seen the verge of a great conclusion of mortal things and then it had vanished. Over that white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it. And in a moment all that lay beyond it was the bright kitchen, and Sir Bernard standing up to go into the other room. He jumped to his feet and with a movement almost of terror took the loaded coffee tray from Isabel.

  “Quietly,” Isabel said as they came to the door of the nondescript room where the Ingrams habitually, alone or with their intimates, passed their time. “Quietly; let’s hear what the rescued captive and his saviour are talking about.”

  She opened the door gently, and Ingram’s voice came out to them. “O rhythm!” he was saying, “rhythm is the cheap pseudo-metaphysical slang of our day. At least it was; it’s dying now. Everyone explained everything by talking about rhythm. It’s a curious thing that people who will sneer at a man for doing nothing all his life but making words sound lovely and full of meaning will be quite happy over life so long as they can explain it in words that are almost meaningless. I sometimes think the nearest we can get to meaning is to feel as if there was meaning.”

  “Yet at least rhythm’s distinctly felt,” said another voice, a rich strange voice; “so far they attempt to discover a knowledge of the whole.”

  “O so far!” Ingram said, and jumped off the table on which he was sitting as Isabel pushed the door right open and came into the room. After a table had been found for the tray, introductions took place; at least Ingram began to say, “O Rosamond”—he stopped suddenly; “By God,” he said, “I don’t know your name.”

  The stranger, a tall magnificent young creature, darkly bronze, bowed to Rosamond: “My name is Inkamasi,” he said. “At least,” he added, a trifle scornfully, Sir Bernard thought, “that is the simplest form of it.”

  “Quite,” Roger said brightly. “Miss Murchison, Mr. Travers—hallo, Sir Bernard, I didn’t know you were here—Sir Bernard Travers, the Belly-King.”

  It was a name with which his intimates had teased Sir Bernard in the days of his practice. Philip frowned, forgetting that though the black—if you could strictly call him black—was to him an entirely new and not very desirable acquaintance, the occurrences of the last two hours had put him on terms of intimacy with the Ingrams. Rosamond, rather nervously, kept close to his side. Roger sat down again on top of his large knee-hole writing-table, and took the coffee Philip handed him.

  “We were talking——” he began.

  “Yes, darling, we heard you,” Isabel said. “Don’t trouble to repeat it just at once. And I hope that doesn’t sound too rude,” she added to the stranger, “only when Roger’s got more than two people to listen to him he always begins to lecture.”

  “I ought to have gone long ago,” the other said. “But your husband kept me, talking of poetry and song and the principles of being.”

  “But,” Isabel said, “must you go yet? I mean, will it be wise?” She looked at Roger.

  “O quite,” the African said. “The police will have cleared the streets, and I don’t live far away.”

  Roger looked at the clock. “Twenty to ten,” he said, “better wait a little. I didn’t quite get the hang of what you were saying about Homer. I’ll walk round with you presently. Sir Bernard’ll be interested in Homer; he had a line from him on the title-page of his book, opposite the peculiarly loathsome diagram that formed the frontispiece.”

  “I didn’t even know you’d looked so far into it,” Sir Bernard said.

  “I generally give the title-page a fair chance,” Roger said. “One can’t always judge books merely by the cover. It’s a book on the stomach,” he explained to Inkamasi, “with nine full-page photographs and about fifty more illustrations, each more abominable than the others. When it was published Sir Bernard gave copies to all his friends, because he knew they wouldn’t read it and wanted to hear them explaining why. Brave men cut him afterwards.”

  “I should like to see it,” the African voice said. “I did a little medical work before I took up law.”

  “Well, it’s buried under Rabelais, Swift, and Ulysses at the moment,” Ingram grinned at Sir Bernard,” but I’ll get it out for you before you come again. ‘Lend it you I will for half a hundred years.’ But not give it. I retain it to keep me humble.”

  “I think I’ll go now,” Inkamasi said, putting down his cup. “Thank you, Mrs. Ingràm, for being so kind.”

  “O well, if you will,” said Roger. “Coming, Philip?”

  “Yes, rather,” Philip answered, with a momentary private hope that he wouldn’t have to help defend this black
man against even an unpleasant white.

  “Philip,” Rosamond whispered to him, with a soft pounce, “don’t go. I don’t like him.”

  “Must,” he whispered back. “Shan’t be long, dearest.”

  “We’ll all go,” Sir Bernard said. “The streets aren’t too quiet. I’m not at all sure, Mr. Inkamasi, that you wouldn’t be wise to take advantage of the Government’s offer to remove friendly aliens. If you’re living alone——”

  The African dilated where he stood. “I will go alone,” he said. “They will not attack me twice.”

  “No, of course not,” Roger said. “Never attack the same man twice is a well-known rule of mobs. Nonsense, man, no one knows who’s about. I think you ought to stop here; you can, you know. We told you that before.”

  “Do,” Isabel put in.

  Inkamasi seemed to hesitate, then he said rather vaguely, “No, I’m sorry, I must go. There are reasons.…”

  “Are they really vicious, Roger?” Sir Bernard asked.

  “Nasty little things,” Roger answered. “The usual kind. I believe they’d have bolted before if Inkamasi and I had rushed them. He nearly scattered them by himself but there were just enough to feel safe.”

  “I know them,” the African said disdainfully. “There are others like them in my country—they would run from a lion.”

  “As bad as that, are they?” Roger asked gravely. “Good heavens, many’s the time I’ve chased a lion or two down Haverstock Hill by just shouting at them. Like you were doing when we came out. By the way, what were you shouting?”

  The African drew himself up and his magnificent form seemed to expand before the young man’s eyes. He cried out: “They asked me my name and I told them. I am Inkamasi of the Zulus, I am the chief of the sons of Chaka, I am the master of the impis, I am Inkamasi the chieftain and the king.”

  There was a dead silence; and then suddenly Roger, almost as if some challenge in the other’s voice had stirred him to motion and speech, answered in the voice he had for verse. He threw up his right arm; he cried out, “Bayate!”; he held the Zulu rigid by the unexpected salute. And then someone else moved, and Roger dropped his arm and grinned and said: “Rider Haggard. But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “It is true,” the king said. “It is the royal salute that you give, though I’ve only heard it once or twice in my life before. But I thought in England you’d forgotten royalty.”

  “Well, in a kind of way we have,” Roger said. “And then again in a kind of way we haven’t. And anyhow I didn’t know you really kept it in Africa.”

  “There are those among you who would like us to forget,” the Zulu answered. “But it isn’t easy to forget Chaka. Have you forgotten Cæsar?”

  He seemed to expect no answer; he turned again to Isabel, but this time with a greater air. “Good-night, Mrs. Ingram,” he said. “Your husband will be back soon. They shan’t come far. Good-night, Miss Murchison. Sir Bernard, will you tell me one thing I have always meant to look up about the stomach?”

  Isabel came back from the front door to Rosamond with a bewildered air. “Tell me,” she said, “are those three taking care of him or is he taking care of them?”

  “I think it’s perfectly horrible,” Rosamond said. “How could you let him come into the house, Isabel?—everything smells of him. The king, indeed! It’s almost profane.”

  Isabel raised her eyebrows. “What, calling himself a king?” she asked.

  “It was the way he talked, looking like a god,” Rosamond said, almost hysterically. “I hate him to look like that.”

  Isabel looked at the coffee cups. “Shall I clear them away?” she said, “or shall I leave them for Muriel? Roger won’t call her Muriel, he says it makes him feel unclean. So awkward, because he always has to go and find her if he happens to want anything. He can’t just call out ‘Hi!’ Don’t worry, Rosamond, I don’t suppose you’ll see him again.”

  “I hate him,” Rosamond repeated. “Why didn’t he stop in Africa?” She walked to the window. “Isabel, they won’t come here, will they?”

  Isabel looked at the fire, herself a little shaken. In spite of her mockery of her sister she knew quite well what Rosamond had meant by calling Inkamasi “profane.” It was a wild protest against the sudden intrusion of a new energy, the making violently real of a thing that had become less than a word. For a few moments royalty—a dark alien royalty—had appeared in the room, imposed upon all of them by the mere intensity of the Zulu chieftain’s own strength and conviction. By virtue of that wide reading which both she and her husband loved, she had felt a shadow of it at times; in the superb lines of Marlowe or Shakespeare, in the rolling titles heard on ceremonial occasions at Church or in local celebrations: “The King’s Most Excellent Majesty,” “His Majesty the King-Emperor,” “The Government of His Britannic Majesty.” But on Rosamond unprepared by such imaginative experience the sudden consciousness of this energy and richness—believing so greatly in itself and operating so near her—had come with a shock of dismay. Besides, when all had been said, they were all on edge with the African news, and to have an African in your own rooms overwhelming you with himself——No, she didn’t like it, Rosamond was right.

  The single bliss and sole felicity,

  The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

  The divine lines came riding back into her memory. “It isn’t,” Roger had said once at one of his “popular” lectures, “what poetry says, it is what poetry is.” These lines described kingship, but that wasn’t their strength. They invoked kingship, they grew by their very sound into something of the same enormous royalty which the Zulu had for a moment worn; they were the safe possession in themselves of that sense of single bliss and sole felicity which they affected to describe. In them it was apart from her, to be enjoyed and endured only as she chose, it was hers. But if it went abroad, moving in the world not at her decision or the decision of those like her, but in its own right and power, the energy which was royalty and poetry dominating and using her by means of hands and voices and eyes.…

  Rosamond came back from the window to the fire, and Isabel remembered that she hadn’t replied to her sister’s question. She said: “No, they won’t come here.”

  Rosamond answered: “You won’t see him again?”

  “Who—the king?” Isabel asked. “I don’t suppose so.”

  “I don’t think you ought to,” Rosamond said. “It’s not very patriotic, is it? Why ever did you let Roger bring him in?”

  Isabel stiffened a little. “My dear little girl,” she answered, “I don’t ‘let’ Roger. If there’s any letting done,” she went on, relaxing, “he does it. But I don’t think he quite knows it.”

  Rosamond’s face suggested that Philip would be “let” or not, fairly often. Isabel added: “Would you rather we’d ‘let’ the crowd get at him?”

  “Yes,” her sister answered. “You don’t know how I hate him. He’s … abominable.”

  “Don’t be silly, Rosamond,” Isabel said. “You let things upset you so, though you do seem such a sedate little creature. I don’t suppose you’ll see him again, and if you do what difference does it make?”

  Rosamond moved uneasily. “Why isn’t Philip stronger?” she said. “He needn’t have gone to-night.”

  Isabel broke into a laugh. “You want Philip to be the world’s strong man led by a woman’s hair,” she said. “You can’t have it, darling. Philip’s no caveman.”

  “I don’t want a caveman,” Rosamond cried out. “I hate him anyhow. He looks like Roger does when he quotes that beastly poetry. It isn’t decent. It’s like those horrible people on the Heath.”

  “What on earth do you mean? What horrible people?” Isabel asked, really bewildered.

  “Disgusting beasts,” Rosamond went on. “You know what I mean—all those brutes lying about at night. They make everything so … so loathsome. Why can’t people be nice and behave properly?”

  “And not quote poetry or be kings of the Z
ulus,” Isabel murmured. “You do hate a good many things, don’t you? You’re not going to marry Philip, I hope, because you hate him rather less than the other young men you know? I don’t think he’d be entirely satisfied with that.”

  “Philip!” Rosamond uttered, in a tone so unlike her usual deceitfully soft voice that Isabel looked at her in alarm. There had been in that one word scorn and hate and fear, almost as if Philip rather than the Zulu stood for everything that Rosamond most detested, as if she were aware now for the first time that the world was not simply Rosamond Murchison’s oyster, that indeed it was a great deal more like an octopus, the tentacles of which she had seen waving at a distance in the night. The king—Philip—poetry—people on the Heath—African proclamations—certainly there was a huge something whose form lay hidden in the darkness and the distance without; something Rosamond had always avoided, unless occasionally.… Isabel remembered how her small sister, who had always carried herself as if she pretended to disdain chocolates, had once secretly and greedily devoured a whole boxful. It had been an unpleasant episode, made worse by an ignored but definite attempt on Rosamond’s part to make Isabel herself the culprit; only appalling physical results had made innocence certain. Rosamond perhaps hated an octopus that lay not merely without. Isabel, bending her brows at the fire, and trying to be lucid and loving at once, was not altogether sorry when Rosamond said suddenly: “I’m tired: I’m going to bed. Say good-night to Philip for me,” and vanished.

  Roger, meanwhile, was walking with the others towards the house where Inkamasi lived, at one end of the line of four, with Philip at the other, and Sir Bernard and the Zulu discussing stomachs in between. It occurred to Ingram with a slight feeling of shame, as he heard the older man explaining and assenting, that although in the past Sir Bernard had always been able and willing to discuss literature, he himself had never been either able or willing to discuss stomachs. He had liked and admired the specialist, but he had assumed as a matter of course that his own specialization was a more public, even a more important, thing. To justify himself he allowed the suggestion to arise that Sir Bernard had been perhaps a little too easy-going, too disinclined to press his own interests. After all, it was in a different way a note of his son’s character also. Philip was a nice creature, but he never imposed himself; he was graver and more solemn than his father but equally swept on the current of conversation. That Sir Bernard had now for many years been able unnoticed to direct any conversation to any end he wished, but that all ends seemed to him equally interesting, naturally did not occur to the younger specialist. Ingram was himself so devoted to his own subject and neglectful of others that he inevitably assumed a similar devotion and neglect in his friends, and explained their behaviour on this hypothesis. As he glanced sidelong at the disputants therefore he saw in Sir Bernard an example of a man a little ill-treated by society, and made up his mind to read the famous book at the first opportunity. Nor could he refrain, as his eye caught the Zulu’s face in the light of a lamp, from reflecting upon how differently this stranger had dominated their emotions. The sudden crisis had tricked him into what was almost an absurdity. But in fact, he reflected, the sudden crisis was not separate from Inkamasi; it was Inkamasi. It was a human force that had overthrown him. His emotions, caught unguarded by his self-attentive mind, had moved him, and his emotions themselves had been moved by a stronger emotion issuing from the stranger. Rhythm had followed rhythm. “God damn and blast rhythm!” he thought angrily, “I will not use their malodorous slang.” But the word had started his associations; half a dozen lines leapt into his mind flushed with war and royalty, from “My nightingale, We have beat them to their beds,” down to “stunned of heaven or stricken pale Before the face of the King.” Perhaps there was something in rhythm after all; perhaps Milton meant something profounder than was usually thought by saying that the great poet should himself be a poem; perhaps——