Shadows of Ecstasy (12 page)

Considine changed in an instant from mockery to seriousness. “Be at ease,” he said. “Mrs. Ingram's perfectly safe—except indeed from the mobs whom alone your wise brains have left to be the degraded servants of ecstasy. The only deaths to-night will be sacrifices of devotion.”

Sir Bernard walked towards the door; a white and bewildered Philip went along with him. Roger lingered a moment.

“I don't know whether I hate or adore you,” he said, “and I don't know whether you're mad or I. But——”

“But either way,” Considine interrupted, “there is more in verse than talk about similes and metres, and you know it. Hark, hark, there is triumph speaking to man.”

The guns sounded again and Roger ran after his friends.

Chapter Six

THE MASS AT LAMBETH

Before Sir Bernard and Philip reached Colindale Square, peace had again filled the night. The raid, if raid it had been, seemed to have been driven off, although the house, when they reached it, was awake and vocal. Caithness was waiting for them in the library, anxious but not perturbed. He knew nothing more than they did, the guns had been sounding, at intervals and at a distance, for something under an hour, then they had ceased. The police had been hastily instructed to spread the news that all was clear, and (in less loud tones) that no damage whatever had been done. Materially this might be true, but not mentally. The agitation which shook London was as much worse than that which the German raids had caused as the fear of negro barbarism was more fundamental than that of the Prussian. London hid and trembled; the jungles were threatening it and the horrors that dwelled in them. It was but for a few minutes—less than an hour—but it had happened. The morning would perhaps increase the fear when it was uttered; for the moment darkness and separation made it private.

Caithness listened with profound attention to the account Sir Bernard gave him. But he showed a distant tendency to discuss it in language which, though hostile, was far too like Considine's to please his friend or reassure Philip. He seemed to find most difficulty in accepting the possibility of Considine's age—which, as Sir Bernard pointed out, was due to the fact that he disapproved of Considine's ideas. “If you thought he was a saint—your kind of saint—you'd think it might be a miracle,” he complained. “You will fall back on the supernatural to explain the unusual. But that doesn't matter: the real problem is whether he's the High Executive.”

“You say he talked as if he was,” Caithness said.

“Yes, but this magniloquent kind of rhetoric can never be trusted,” Sir Bernard said. “He might be merely mad. And if he is there's no sense in talking to the Prime Minister about him. Even if I do he won't be there, of course.”

“The man I'm thinking about,” Caithness said, “is the Zulu. You told me last night he said he was a Christian.”

“In a parenthesis, while we were talking stomach,” Sir Bernard said. “To explain the strength of his digestion, no doubt.”

“And to-night,” Caithness went on, unheeding the last remark, “to-night he was different?”

“My dear Ian, you haven't begun to understand Mr. Considine,” Sir Bernard answered. “Every one was different. Roger went off plunged in a reverie, which is very unlike Roger. And——” he glanced at his son and changed the sentence—“and I was quite incapable of connected thought. And the king—as everybody calls him, so let's—the king was comatose.”

Caithness began walking up and down the room. “I don't like it,” he said. “I don't like the sound of any of it. And especially I don't like a Christian to be under this man's influence or in his power. If he can affect you——”

“What on earth harm——” Sir Bernard began, and was interrupted by the priest.

“He evidently thinks he's got hold of some infernal power,” Caithness went on, “and if—if by the wildest possibility he were mixed up with this African delirium—are we to leave one of the Faith exposed to his control? He's done it harm enough already. God knows what he may be doing to him. He may have hypnotized him into obedience.”

“Literally,” Sir Bernard asked, “or metaphorically?”

“What does it matter which?” Caithness threw back. “D'you suppose one's worse than the other? Are we to have a Christian spiritually martyred here among us?”

“Certainly not,” Sir Bernard said. “St. Iago, and charge, Spain! Where?”

But Caithness took no notice; he stood still and silent for a minute, and Sir Bernard observed, with interest, that he was praying. Caithness, he reflected, had always been a little inclined to call up his own spiritual reserves under such a quite honest pretence of invoking direction, though he was always rather careful to keep the command in his own hands: Sir Bernard couldn't remember that God had ever been known to disagree with Ian, anyhow in ecclesiastical affairs. It was therefore with a sense of gratified accuracy that he heard the priest say, “Well, I'm going up there.”

“What, now?” he asked curiously.

“Certainly,” Caithness answered. “And if this Zulu is still there I shall insist on seeing him.”

“And supposing Mr. Considine refuses?” Sir Bernard asked.

Caithness looked at him abstractedly. “O I don't think he'll refuse,” he said. “He either won't care to or he won't dare to. Will you come and show me the house?”

“Anything for a quiet life,” his friend answered. “Even to conducting a Christian lion to a Zulu victim. What a world! And Rosenberg found it uninteresting. But I dare say he didn't know many Christians. I warn you, Ian,” he went on as they left the room, “that if Considine's there I shall pretend I don't know you, and that I've come back for a cigarette case presented to me by grateful patients. Because if he isn't the High Executive——”

“And if he is?” Caithness asked. “If he
is
?”

“That,” Sir Bernard said, “is my only hope of an excuse for driving you. O no, no taxis, thank you. If I have to help abduct a king, let me do it in my own car, so as to have a right to put up a gold plate: ‘In this car His Majesty the King of the Zulus once fled from the conquest of death.' Why don't you like the conquest of death, Ian?”

“That's all been done,” Caithness said, and Sir Bernard, as they came to the garage, gave a little moan. “Not in Considine's sense it hasn't,” he said. “You're just confused. O well—but I think
you'd
probably like Considine if you could ever get to know him. Get in, and we'll try.”

It was a little after midnight when they ran through Hampstead. Sir Bernard stopped the car at the corner of the road, and the two of them walked up it. There were more windows lit up than was usual, owing to the raid, but Considine's house was in darkness. They went up the steps and Caithness rang. In a few minutes he rang again, and again.

“He's probably directing the raid,” Sir Bernard said. “Or flying up to meet the planes. Levitation, I think they call it; some of your saints used to do it. Similar to the odour of sanctity.”

Caithness said: “We shall have to find a window.”

Sir Bernard sighed happily. “What a night we're having!” he said, following his friend. “No, Ian, not that one: it's too near the road. Somewhere away at the back. One takes off one's coat, I believe, and presses it against the glass before striking a sharp blow in the centre. We ought really to have treacle and brown paper. You wouldn't care to wait while I went and knocked up the nearest grocer for some golden syrup? We could use the rest of the tin as an excuse for calling. I wonder if at his age Considine can eat golden syrup without getting himself all sticky? That'd almost be worth living for.”

But since at the back of the house there was at least one window a little open there was no need to resort to these more uncertain methods. The two gentlemen pushed it up, very quietly, and entered. Sir Bernard, scrambling in, thought to himself, “‘I will encounter darkness as a bride,' I hope she likes me.” Within all was silent. They found their way cautiously along, and emerged at last in the hall, where Sir Bernard assumed direction. Either the house was for the time empty or everyone was asleep. The second alternative was so unlikely that they permitted themselves to assume the first.

They did not, however, relax their caution until they came at last to the room where they had heard the music and seen Nielsen, and left the king in his sleep and Considine in his triumph. Sir Bernard felt that they were not treading so delicately but that one heard them; he seemed to see Considine standing far off, his head a little turned, listening to them, and he wondered if there would be some sudden interference in some unknown manner. But though the suspense endured it did not increase, and in the light of the room they saw Inkamasi still sitting in his chair.

Caithness went quietly across the room towards the Zulu, Sir Bernard paused by the door, listening for footsteps, and watching what went on. The priest kneeled down by the chair, and, after studying the African's face for a few minutes, said in a low voice of energy, “Inkamasi, what are you doing here?”

The Zulu stirred under that intense regard and intense voice and answered, “Inkamasi waits for him who caused sleep.”

Sir Bernard jerked suddenly, for the voice was more like Considine's own than the Zulu's, yet fainter than either, as if from a distance the master of substitution interposed between the priest and the sleeper. Caithness said, “Do you sleep by your own will?”

“I watch by the will of him that rules me,” the other answered monotonously. “Inkamasi is hidden within me. It's I yet not I that sleep.”

“In the name of the Maker of Inkamasi,” Caithness said with superb and deep confidence, “in the Name of the Eternal and Everlasting, in the Name of Immanuel, I bid you awake.”

“I do not know them,” the sleeper answered, “and I keep their sound from Inkamasi lest he hear.”

“By the virtue in created life, by the union of Man with God, by the Mother of God in the world and in the soul, I command you to wake,” Caithness said.

“I do not know them, and I keep their sound from Inkamasi lest he hear,” the sleeper answered.

“In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be silent and go out of him,” Caithness exclaimed, making the sign of the cross over the Zulu. “Inkamasi, Inkamasi, by the faith you hold, by the baptism and the Body of Christ, I bid you wake.”

The sleeper did not answer but he did not move. As if some closed powers hung, poised and equal, over or within him he lay silent. Sir Bernard remembered how, but a little before, he had seen Considine standing in front of the azure profundity of the curtain, which still hung there, as in the depth of space, and it seemed to him as if from the spectral image of that figure and from the kneeling priest two separate currents of command impinged upon the king and in the moment of meeting neutralized their strength. The central heart of the Zulu beat beyond those conflicting and equal intensities, in oblivion of the outer world yet perhaps in liberty. He waited to see what more Caithness could do. But though the priest concentrated his will and intention, though he tried once or twice to speak, the stillness was prolonged. He had silenced the speaker in Inkamasi, but the very effort held him also silent. He strove to impose his determination upon the Zulu, but he could not pass beyond the gate which he had succeeded in reaching; he could not call the other back through it. He knelt praying by the chair and the minutes went by.

Sir Bernard thought, “We can't possibly stop here. We don't know where Considine's gone, we don't know whether he's coming back, and I should hate him to have to worry the exalted imagination with such a detail as what to do with us. He might want us for some new experiment in the conquest of death. I wonder whether——” He peered out through the door; nothing was happening. He turned back into the room. “If Ian and Considine are locked in a spiritual chest-to-chest wrestle,” he thought, “perhaps it's time for a mere intellectualist to have a word. A timid tentative word.”

He went across the room and round the back of the chair. His eyes met the priest, and by the force of old friendship communicated something of his purpose. Caithness, still silent and intent, moved his hands from where they rested on the Zulu's shoulders. Sir Bernard put his hand very gently under an arm, and as gently lifted it forward. It yielded easily to his pressure and when that pressure was removed dropped back again. Fearful of speaking lest some rash word should bring down the balance against him, Sir Bernard went lightly to the front of the chair, and picked up the Zulu's hands. He drew them gently, gently forward and upward, he pulled them towards him till the arms were extended, he pulled with the least little extra firmness, and easily as the hands moved the body moved also. The king rose to his feet, following that physical direction, and Sir Bernard took a step backward towards the door. Inkamasi followed him. Caithness, still caught in spiritual combat, also rose, but he made no movement to assist; he left that visible action to his ally. Sir Bernard, taking another step backward, waited till the Zulu was in movement, then he slipped to one side and, still holding the left hand in his own left, put his right fingers on Inkamasi's back. He pressed gently; as if automatically the Zulu moved on. Slowly they passed to the door, Sir Bernard on one side, Caithness on the other. They went in front of that hanging curtain of blue, and for a moment Sir Bernard could have believed that they were drawing Inkamasi out of its influence and depth, could have wondered whether indeed he were doing well thus to interfere on behalf of one magic against another. “What doest thou here, Gehazi?” he said to himself. “Do I really want to save a jungle-king for Ian's passion? One religion or another, it's all the same—‘She comes, she comes, the sable throne behold Of Night primeval and of Chaos old.' I suspect I'm just getting a little of my own back on Considine. Never mind; it's too late to change now. Round the corner—so.”