Descent into Hell Read online

  He lay quiet; beyond heart and lungs he had come, in the depth of the Hill, to the bottom of the body. He saw before him, in the disappearing moonlight, a place of cisterns and broad tanks, on the watery surface of which the moon still shone and from which a faint mist still arose. Between them, covering acres of ground, an enormous shape lay, something like a man’s; it lay on its face, its shoulders and buttocks rose in mounds, and the head beyond; he could not see the legs lower than the thighs, for that was where he himself lay, and they could not be seen, for they were his own. He and the Adam sprang from one source; high over him he felt his heart beat and his lungs draw breath. His machinery operated, far away. He had decided that. He lay and waited for the complete creation that was his own.

  The Adam slept; the mist rose from the ground. The son of Adam waited. He felt, coming over that vast form, that Hill of the dead and of the living, but to him only the mass of matter from which his perfect satisfaction was to approach, a road, a road up which a shape, no longer vast, was now coming; a shape he distrusted before he discerned it. It was coming slowly, over the mass of the Adam, a man, a poor ragged sick man. The dead man, walking in his own quiet world, knew nothing of the eyes to which his death-day walk was shown, nor of the anger with which he was seen. Wentworth saw him, and grew demented; was he to miss and be mocked again? what shape was this, and there? He sprang forward and up, to drive it away, to curse it lest it interpolated its horrid need between himself and his perfection. He would not have it: no canvassers, no hawkers, no tramps. He shouted angrily, making gestures; it offended him; it belonged to the City, and he would not have a City—no City, no circulars, no beggars. No; no; no. No people but his, no loves but his.

  It still came on, slowly, ploddingly, wearily, but it came; on down the road that was the Adam in the bottom of Eden, determinedly plodding as on the evening when it had trudged towards its death, inexorably advancing as the glory of truth that broke out of the very air itself upon the agonized Florentine in the Paradise of Eden: “ben sem, ben sem, Beatrice”; the other, the thing seen, the thing known in every fibre to be not the self, woman or beggar, the thing in the streets of the City. No, no; no canvassers, no beggars, no lovers; and away, away from the City into the wood and the mist, by the path that runs between past and present, between present and present, that slides through each moment of all experience, twisting and twining, plunging from the City and earth and Eve and all otherness, into the green mist that rises among the trees; by the path up which she was coming, the she of his longing, the she that was he, and all he in the she—patter-patter, the she that went hurrying about the Hill and the world, of whom it was said that they whom she overtook were found drained and strangled in the morning, and a single hair tight about the neck, so faint, so sure, so deathly, the clinging and twisting path of the strangling hair. She whose origin is with man’s, kindred to him as he to his beasts, alien from him as he from his beasts; to whom a name was given in a myth, Lilith for a name and Eden for a myth, and she a stirring more certain than name or myth, who in one of her shapes went hurrying about the refuge of that Hill of skulls, and pattered and chattered on the Hill, hurrying, hurrying, for fear of time growing together, and squeezing her out, out of the interstices, of time where she lived, locust in the rock; time growing together into one, and squeezing her out, squeezing her down, out of the pressure of the universal present, down into depth, down into the opposite of that end, down into the ever and ever of the void.

  He was running down the path, the path that coiled round the edge of Eden, and the mist swooped to meet him. He had got right away from the road which was the shape of the Adam outstretched in the sleep precedent to the creation of fact, the separation of Eve, the making of things other than the self. He ran away into the comforting mist, partly because he liked it better, partly because there was nowhere else. He ran from sight; he found sensation. Arms met and embraced, a mouth kissed him, a sigh of content was loosed to him and from him. He was held, consoled, nourished, satisfied. Adela; he; sleep.

  The door swung after him. He was standing on Battle Hill, not far from his house, but higher, towards the cemetery, towards the height. There, waiting for him, was a girl. She exactly resembled Adela. She came towards him softly, reached her hand to him, smiled at him, put up her mouth to him. It was night on the Hill. They turned together and went down it; after the single footsteps the double sounded again, his own and the magical creature’s drawn from his own recesses: she in him, he in him. He was complacent; they went home.

  Chapter Six

  THE DOCTRINE OF SUBSTITUTED LOVE

  Pauline sat back in her chair, and her arms lay along its arms. A rehearsal was taking place in the ground of the Manor House, and she had ended her part in the first act. She was free to watch the other performers, and to consider the play once more. By now they had all got more or less accustomed to that speaking of verse aloud which our uneducated mouths and ears find so difficult, being less instructed than the more universal Elizabethan must have been. Pauline remembered again, with a queer sense of inferiority, that no Elizabethan audience, gods or groundlings, can have felt any shock of surprise or awkwardness at a play opening with a high rhodomontade of sound. No modern audience would put up with going to the first night of a new play to hear the curtain sweep up on such an absurd and superb invocation as:

  Hung be the heavens with black; yield, day, to night;

  Comets, importing change …

  and so on. On the other hand, they accepted plays beginning with the most ordinary prose. Even rhodomontade demands a peculiar capacity, and to lose its bravery perhaps hampers some other bravery of the spirit; to lose even one felicity is to be robbed of more than we have a right to spare. Certainly Stanhope had spared them any over-whelming magniloquence; his verse was subdued almost to conversation, though as she listened and read and studied and spoke it, she became aware that the rhythm of these conversations was a great deal more speedy and vital than any she could ever remember taking part in. All Mrs. Parry’s efforts to introduce a stateliness of manner into the Grand Ducal court, and a humorous but slow—O so slow—realism into the village, and an enigmatic meandering meditativeness into the Chorus could not sufficiently delay the celerity of the lines. Once or twice Stanhope, having been consulted, had hinted that he would rather have the meaning lost than too firmly explained, and that speed was an element, but after a great deal of enthusiastic agreement they had all gone on as before. She herself had been pleasantly ticked off by Mrs. Parry that very afternoon for hurrying, and as Stanhope hadn’t interfered she had done her best to be adequately slow. It was some recompense to sit now and listen to Adela and Mrs. Parry arguing with, or at least explaining to, each other. Adela, true to her principles of massing and blocking, arranged whole groups of words in chunks, irrespective of line and meaning, but according to her own views of the emotional quality to be stressed. She had just unexpectedly broken one line with a terrific symbolical pause.

  “I am,” she said to her Woodcutter, and pausing as if she had invoked the Name itself and waited for its Day of Judgment to appear, added in one breath, “only the perception in a flash of love.”

  Pauline encouraged in herself a twinge of wonder whether there were anything Adela Hunt were less only; then she felt ashamed of having tried to modify the line into her own judgment, especially into a quite unnecessary kind of judgment. She knew little enough of Adela, and the result was that she lost the sound of the woodcutter’s answer—“A peremptory phenomenon of love”. She thought, a little gloomily, that malice could create a fair number of peremptory phenomena for itself, not perhaps of love, but easily enjoyable, like Myrtle Fox’s trees. Malice was a much cosier thing than love. She was rather glad they were not doing the last act to-day; that act in which Periel—male or female, no matter!—spirit, only not spiritual—she—began and led the Chorus; and where everyone came in, on the most inadequate excuses, the Princess and her lover and the Grand Duke and the far
mers and the banditti and the bear; and through the woods went a high medley of wandering beauty and rejoicing love and courtly intelligence and rural laughter and bloody clamour and growling animalism, in mounting complexities of verse, and over all, gathering, opposing, tossing over it, the naughting cry of the all-surrounding and overarching trees.

  It troubled her now, as it had not done when she first read it, as it did not the others. She wondered whether it would have troubled her if, since the day of his first call, she had not sometimes heard her grandmother and Peter Stanhope talking in the garden. It was two or three weeks ago, since he had first called, and she could not remember that they had said anything memorable since except a few dicta about poetry—but everything they said was full and simple and unafraid. She herself had rather avoided him; she was not yet altogether prepared in so many words to accept the terror of good. It had occurred to her to imagine those two—the old woman and the poet—watching the last act, themselves its only audience, as if it were presented by the imagined persons themselves, and by no planned actors. But what would happen when the act came to an end she could not think, unless those two went up into the forest and away into the sounds that they had heard, into the medley of which the only unity was the life of the great poetry that made it, and was sufficient unity. Under the influence of one of those garden conversations she had looked up in her old school Shelley the lines that had haunted her, and seen the next line to them. It ran:

  That apparition, solo of men, he saw;

  and it referred, of course, to Zoroaster. But she couldn’t, watching the play, refrain from applying it to Stanhope. This apparition, sole of men—so far as she had then discovered—he had seen; and she went back to wonder again if in those three lines Shelley, instead of frightening her, was not nourishing her. Supposing—supposing—that in this last act Peter Stanhope had seen and imagined something more awful even than a vision of himself; supposing he had contemplated the nature of the world in which such visions could be, and that the entwined loveliness of his verse was a mirror of its being. She looked at the hale and hearty young man who was acting the bear, and she wondered whether perhaps her real bear, if she had courage to meet it, would be as friendly as he. If only the woodcutter’s son had not learned the language of the leaves while they burned in the fire! There was no doubt about that speech: the very smell and noise of the fire was in it, and the conviction of the alien song that broke out within the red flames. So perhaps the phœnix cried while it burned.

  Someone sat down in the next chair. She looked; it was Stanhope. Mrs. Parry and Adela concluded their discussion. Adela seemed to be modifying her chunks of words—sharpening ends and pushing them nearer till they almost met. Presumably Mrs. Parry was relying on later rehearsals to get them quite in touch, and even, if she were fortunate, to tie them together. The rehearsal began again. Stanhope said: “You were, of course, quite right.”

  She turned her head towards him, gravely. “You meant it like that then?” she asked.

  “Certainly I meant it like that,” he said, “more like that, anyhow. Do you suppose I want each line I made to march so many paces to the right, with a meditation between each? But even if I could interfere it’d only get more mixed than ever. Better keep it all of a piece.”

  “But you don’t mind,” she asked, “if I’m a little quicker than some of them?”

  “I should love to hear it,” he answered. “Only I think it’s probably our business—yours and mine—to make our own feelings agreeable to the company, as it were. This isn’t a play; it’s a pleasant entertainment. Let’s all be pleasantly entertaining together.”

  “But the poetry?” she said.

  He looked at her, laughing. “And even that shall be Mrs. Parry’s,” he said. “For this kind of thing is not worth the fretfulness of dispute; let’s save all that till we are among the doctors, who aren’t fretful.”

  She said suddenly, “Would you read it to me again one day? is it too absurd to ask you?”

  “Of course I’ll read it,” he said. “Why not? If you’d like it. And now in exchange tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Taken aback, she stared at him, and stammered on her answer. “But—but——” she began.

  He looked at the performers. “Miss Hunt is determined to turn me into the solid geometry of the emotions,” he said. “But—but—tell me why you always look so about you and what you are looking for.”

  “Do I?” she asked hesitatingly. He turned a serious gaze on her and her own eyes turned away before it. He said, “There’s nothing worth quite so much vigilance or anxiety. Watchfulness, but not anxiety, not fear. You let it in to yourself when you fear it so; and whatever it is, it’s less than your life.”

  “You talk as if life were good,” she said.

  “It’s either good or evil,” he answered, “and you can’t decide that by counting incidents on your fingers. The decision is of another kind. But don’t let’s be abstract. Will you tell me what it is bothers you?”

  She said, “It sounds too silly.”

  Stanhope paused, and in the silence there came to them Mrs. Parry’s voice carefully enunciating a grand ducal speech to Hugh Prescott. The measured syllables fell in globed detachment at their feet, and Stanhope waved a hand outwards.

  “Well,” he said, “if you think it sounds sillier than that. God is good; if I hadn’t been here they might have done the Tempest. Consider—‘Yea—all which—it inher-it—shall dissolve. And—like this—insub-stantial pag-eant fa-ded.’ O certainly God is good. So what about telling me?”

  “I have a trick,” she said steadily, “of meeting an exact likeness of myself in the street.” And as if she hated herself for saying it, she turned sharply on him. “There!” she exclaimed. “Now you know. You know exactly. And what will you say?”

  Her eyes burned at him; he received their fury undisturbed, saying, “You mean exactly that?” and she nodded. “Well,” he went on mildly, “it’s not unknown. Goethe met himself once—on the road to Weimar, I think. But he didn’t make it a habit. How long has this been happening?”

  “All my life,” she answered. “At intervals—long intervals, I know. Months and years sometimes, only it’s quicker now. O, it’s insane—no one could believe it, and yet it’s there.”

  “It’s your absolute likeness?” he asked.

  “It’s me,” she repeated. “It comes from a long way off, and it comes up towards me, and I’m terrified—terrified—one day it’ll come on and meet me. It hasn’t so far; it’s turned away or disappeared. But it won’t always; it’ll come right up to me—and then I shall go mad or die.”

  “Why?” he asked quickly, and she answered at once, “Because I’m afraid. Dreadfully afraid.”

  “But,” he said, “that I don’t quite understand. You have friends; haven’t you asked one of them to carry your fear?”

  “Carry my fear!” she said, sitting rigid in her chair, so that her arms, which had lain so lightly, pressed now into the basket-work and her long firm hands gripped it as if they strangled her own heart. “How can anyone else carry my fear? Can anyone else see it and have to meet it?”

  Still, in that public place, leaning back easily as if they talked of casual things, he said, “You’re mixing up two things. Think a moment, and you’ll see. The meeting it—that’s one thing, and we can leave it till you’re rid of the other. It’s the fear we’re talking about. Has no one ever relieved you of that? Haven’t you ever asked them to?”

  She said: “You haven’t understood, of course.… I was a fool.… Let’s forget it. Isn’t Mrs. Parry efficient?”

  “Extremely,” he answered. “And God redeem her. But nicely. Will you tell me whether you’ve any notion of what I’m talking about? And if not, will you let me do it for you?”

  She attended reluctantly, as if to attend were an unhappy duty she owed him, as she had owed others to others and tried to fulfil them. She said politely, “Do it for me?”

  “
It can be done, you know,” he went on. “It’s surprisingly simple. And if there’s no one else you care to ask, why not use me? I’m here at your disposal, and we could so easily settle it that way. Then you needn’t fear it, at least, and then again for the meeting—that might be a very different business if you weren’t distressed.”

  “But how can I not be afraid?” she asked. “It’s hellish nonsense to talk like that. I suppose that’s rude, but——”

  “It’s no more nonsense than your own story,” he said. “That isn’t; very well, this isn’t. We all know what fear and trouble are. Very well—when you leave here you’ll think of yourself that I’ve taken this particular trouble over instead of you. You’d do as much for me if I needed it, or for any one. And I will give myself to it. I’ll think of what comes to you, and imagine it, and know it, and be afraid of it. And then, you see, you won’t.”

  She looked at him as if she were beginning to understand that at any rate he thought he was talking about a reality, and as she did so something of her feeling for him returned. It was, after all, Peter Stanhope who was talking to her like this. Peter Stanhope was a great poet. Were great poets liars? No. But they might be mistaken. Yes; so might she. She said, very doubtfully: “But I don’t understand. It isn’t your—you haven’t seen it. How can you——”

  He indicated the rehearsal before them. “Come,” he said, “if you like that, will you tell me that I must see in order to know? That’s not pride, and if it were it wouldn’t matter. Listen—when you go from here, when you’re alone, when you think you’ll be afraid, let me put myself in your place, and be afraid instead of you.” He sat up and leaned towards her. “It’s so easy,” he went on, “easy for both of us. It needs only the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to yourself that since I am there to be troubled instead of you, therefore you needn’t be troubled? And what can be easier than for me to carry a little while a burden that isn’t mine?”