Shadows of Ecstasy (11 page)

The music ceased. Considine stood up and came over to his guests. “Did you care for it?” he asked.

No-one found it possible to answer immediately; at last Sir Bernard, with a sudden movement, came to his feet. He looked at Considine, and against the other's majestic form his smaller figure seemed to gather itself together. He looked, and said, in a voice not without a note of victory, “Well, I kept my head.”

“You are proud of that?” Considine asked disdainfully. Sir Bernard shrugged. “It fulfils its function,” he said. “I like to take my music like a gentleman. What was it?”

“It was made by one of my friends,” Considine said. “He had overcome all things except music, but that lured him to spend his power and he died. We feed on what he did that we may do more than he.”

“But——” Roger began, arrested by something in these words, “but do you mean—is it a waste to make music?”

“Mustn't it be?” the other asked. “If you want more than sound it's a waste to spend power making sound, as it's a waste to spend on the beloved what's meant to discover more than the beloved.”

“But this means the death of everything!” Roger exclaimed.

“And if so?” Considine asked. “Yet it isn't so. It's possible to make out of the mere superfluity of power greater things than men now spend all their power on. The dropping flames of that fire are greater than all your pyres of splendour. And when death itself is but passion of ecstasy, we will make music such as you couldn't bear to hear, and we will be the fathers of the children who shall hear it. Listen to the prophecy.”

He turned and nodded to the gentleman in waiting, who had after the music ceased again drawn the curtains, and now went out of the room. Considine left his guests together and returned to a small table near the curtains. The only light in the room came from a tall standard near him, so that Sir Bernard and the others were clustered in the shadows and not clearly to be seen.

Roger glanced at the African, sitting by him almost as if asleep, and then looked back again at Considine. He stood there, an ordinary gentleman in an ordinary dinner-jacket, but the black of the clothes and the tie, the white of the front and the cuffs, gathered into a kind of solemn insignia. Roger saw him, against the immense and universal sapphire of the draperies behind him, a figure in hieratic dress, motionless, expectant, attentive, having power to give or to withhold, as if an Emperor of Byzantium awaited between the East and the West the approach of petitions he only could fulfil. His hands were by his sides, his head was a little thrown back, his eyes were withdrawn as if he meditated, and behind him the vast azure hung as if it were a cloak some attendant had but that moment removed and still held spread out before he folded it. Modern, contemporary—antique, mythical—neither of these were the truth. He stood as something more than either, being both and more than both. It was Man that stood there, man conscious of himself and of his powers, man powerful and victorious, bold and serene, a culmination and a prophecy. Time and space hung behind him, his background and his possession, themselves no more separate but woven in a single vision, the colour of the living background to that living domination. “Death itself but passion of ecstasy”—death itself might well have been lying at those feet in black, shining and pointed gear, as in delicate armour, at the direction of the hands which fell from between the stiff, shining and sacerdotal cuffs. The ritual of a generation was changed into a universal ritual; so for Philip Rosamond had turned her dresses into significance; so always and in all places have the gods when they walked among men changed into their own permanent sacramental habits the accidental raiment of the day.

Phrases of the talk rushed back into Roger's mind—other phrases of the proclamation of the High Executive—“moments of the exalted imagination”: here and now was such a moment, here and now that imagination made itself visible before him and overwhelmed him with its epiphany.

The door opened. Considine turned his head. The gentleman in waiting stood aside and said in a low clear voice: “Colonel Mottreux and Herr Nielsen.” Two men came into the room. The first was a tall, lean, rather hatchet-faced man, not unlike Roger himself, but with fiercer and more hungry eyes, as Roger's might have been had all the real placability which his love of Isabel and his service of poetry gave him been withdrawn. He looked like a soldier but an ambitious soldier who doubts his future; only as he bowed abruptly to Considine he showed a not merely military subordination; his eyes fell and did not for a moment recover. There came after him a different figure—a man German-built, sunburnt and weather-beaten, but still young, or young anyhow he seemed to those who watched, though in the new spiritual air they breathed they were aware that youth and age might have other meanings than usual in terms of time. He bowed much more deeply than Mottreux, and once well in the room he halted while the other went forward.

“My dear Mottreux,” Considine said, not moving, but smiling and holding out his hand. Colonel Mottreux pressed it lightly, almost deferentially; his eyes went to the guests.

“These gentlemen have been dining with me,” Considine said. “I've wished them to remain a little. We'll talk of your other business later, Mottreux. Let Herr Nielsen tell me his purpose first.”

Mottreux stood aside and motioned to Nielsen who came forward and halted two or three steps away.

Considine stretched out his hand, and the other bowed over it, genuflecting a little at the same time as if he were in a royal or sacerdotal presence. But he came erect again and faced his suzerain with an air almost as august as his own. His face was ardent with a profound resolution; to say that “his soul was in his eyes” was no description but a definition. They burned with a purpose and Considine's looked back at them as if he received that purpose and confirmed it.

“Why have you come to me?” he asked, gently, and as if it were a ritual rather than a necessary interrogation.

“I have come to beg for the permission,” the other said.

“The permission is in yourself,” Considine answered. “I only hear it, but that it's right that I should do. Are you a child of the Mysteries?”

“Since you showed them to me,” Nielsen said.

“That was fifty years ago,” Considine answered, and the watchers in the shadow thrilled and trembled as they heard the calm voice, and that which, equally calm, replied, “I've followed them since.”

“Tell me a little,” Considine said, and the other considering, answered, “I have endured love and transmuted it. I have found, when I was young, that the sensual desires of man can be changed into strength of imagination and a physical burden become the bearer of the burden. I have transmuted masculine sex into human life. I am one of the masters of love. And I've done this with all things—whatever I have loved or hated, I have poured the strength of every love and hate into my own life and what is behind my life, and now I need love and hate no more.”

He paused, and Considine said, shooting one swift glance towards his guests: “Is this a greater or lesser thing than hate or love?”

“Sir, it's strength and health beyond describing,” Nielsen said. “But it's now that I long to go farther.”

Considine turned and faced him full, asking “What will you do now?”

“I will go down to death and come again living,” the other said.

Considine's eyes searched him long in silence: then he said slowly, “You may not come again.”

“Then let me die in that moment,” the other cried out. “That's nothing; it doesn't matter; if I fail, I fail. But it's not by dreaming of failure that the master of death shall come. Haven't you told us that this shall be? and it's in my heart now to raise my body from death. I'm not like you; I'm not necessary in this moment to the freeing of men; let me set free the fire that's in us; let me go to break down the barriers of death.”

He flung out his hands and caught Considine's; he poured upon his lord the throbbing triumph of his belief and his desire. Considine's voice, fuller and richer than any of the hearers had known it, answered him: “The will and the right are yours, not mine. I'm here only to purge, not to forbid. There must be those who make the effort and some may never come again, but one at any moment shall. Go, if you will; master corruption and the grave; make mortal imagination more than immortal; die and live.”

Nielsen dropped on a knee, but his face was turned upwards to Considine's who, stooping, laid his hands on the other's shoulders. Behind the two exalted figures the deep blue of the curtains seemed to be troubled as if distance itself were shaken with the cry and the command. The splendour of colour quivered with the neighbourhood of the ecstasy of man imagining the truth of his being, and creating colour by the mere movements of his imagination. The two were alone, alone in a profound depth of azure distance, so greatly did their passion communicate itself to the things that had been made out of like passion. The woven colour and the woven music had been made at some similar depth of devotion, and all that mingled intensity swept through and filled the room, so that the imaginations of Roger and Philip felt and moved in it, and Philip, panting almost with terror, felt the music he had heard and the colour he saw and the figures before him gather and lose themselves in one piercing consciousness of Rosamond, which yet was not Rosamond but that of which Rosamond was a shape and a name; and Roger felt phrases, words, half-lines, pressing on him, and yet not words or lines but that which they defined and conveyed—and before them Considine cried again to the ardent postulant of transmuted energy: “Die then, die, exult and live.”

Only the Zulu king lay back as if asleep in his chair, and in his Sir Bernard, freed from the temptation of music, watched and savoured and keenly enjoyed every moment of the incredibly multitudinous and changing fantasy which was mankind. He wouldn't deny that he was looking at a man two hundred years old telling a man of, say, seventy to die and live again; it might be—it was unusual but it might be. He couldn't imagine himself wanting to die and live, because that (it seemed to him) would be to spoil the whole point of death. The worst of death was that it was the kind of experience it was very difficult to appreciate in the detached mood of the spectator, let alone the connoisseur. But he had done his best in his own case by rehearsing to himself—and occasionally to Philip—all the ironies which the approach of death often releases on a man. “I may babble obscenities or make a pious confession to Caithness,” he had said. “Or I may just lie about and cry for days. One never knows. Try and enjoy it for me, Philip, if I'm past it. I should like to feel that somebody did, and death so often undoes all one's own hypotheses, even the hypothesis that one isn't important.” But he feared that Philip wouldn't find it easy to enjoy.

He thought of this for a moment as he watched Nielsen rising slowly to his feet; he thought of it as he looked at the benediction which Considine's face shed on the new adventurer. They were still speaking to each other but he couldn't hear what was being said; he saw Mottreux come forward, and then he saw the Colonel and Nielsen bowing and going to the door. He drew a deep breath and lay back in his chair, but he was immediately distracted by Philip who said in a low voice, “I can't stand any more of this; I'm going.”

On the other side Roger also moved. “It's true,” he said. “He's right.”

Sir Bernard, a little startled, looked at him. Was Roger becoming a convert to this new gospel? He said, “You believe in him?”

“No,” Roger said, “but I believe he knows what poetry is, and I've never met a man before who did.”

Before Sir Bernard could answer Considine came over to them, and instinctively, in fear or hostility or homage, they all rose. “You see,” he said, “there are those who will try the experiment.”

“Must I really believe,” Sir Bernard said, “that that friend of yours is going to commit suicide with the idea of animating his body all over again?”

“Exactly that,” Considine said.

Sir Bernard sighed a little. “It
is
a religion,” he said. “And I hoped that man was becoming sane. I think I should dislike you, Mr. Considine, if dislike were ever really worth while.”

“And I should have despised you once, Sir Bernard,” Considine answered, “but not now. Before you die you shall know that the world is being made anew.”

He had hardly spoken when they heard without, as if it echoed, applauded, and proclaimed his words, a sound distant indeed but recognizable, though for a moment they doubted. It was the noise of guns firing. Faint and certain it reached them. Philip and Roger jumped, and even Sir Bernard turned his head towards the window. Considine, watching them, smiled. “Can it be the African planes?” he asked ironically. “Has intellect failed to guard its capital?”

A shout or two came up to them from without, the noise of running feet, a whistle, several cars passing at great speed. Sir Bernard looked back at Considine. “Are you bombing London then?” he asked politely.

“I,” Considine laughed at him. “Am I the High Executive? Ask the Jews who believe in Messias, or Mr. Ingram who believes in poetry, or your son who (I think) believes in love, or the king who believes in kingship, ask them what power threatens London to-night. And ask them if they think glory can be defeated by gunpowder.”

“I should think it might, if glory is making use of petrol,” Sir Bernard said. “I'm sorry that in the circumstances perhaps we'd better go. If your friend's blown to bits by a bomb he'll find it a trifle difficult to revivify his body, won't he?”

“The Christian Church for a considerable time believed it could be done,” Considine said. “But I forget that you're not even a Christian.”

Roger broke in. “My God!” he said, harshly, “
are
you bombing London?”