Shadows of Ecstasy (23 page)

They saluted and rose to their feet, as, taking Roger by the arm, he left the room. They went by corridors and stairs to the left wing of the house stretched backwards towards the sea, corresponding to another wing on the right. Between the two ran a verandah, a wide lawn, and a terrace, from which steps led down to a lower terrace, and so on to the edge of the cliffs. And as they went the young man felt everywhere something of that sense of distance which he had experienced in the hall on the previous night—a distance in which all near things existed in a peculiar natural order. The house might have been one of those mythical buildings which in various legends have been lifted from the earth by music, as Troy rose to Apollo's harping or Pandemonium

like an exhalation with the sound

Of dulcet symphonies
.

There were no pictures, so far as he could see; instead, the walls were covered with soft hangings, of different colours, but each colour richer than ever he had seen it before. Here and there these deep tapestries were worked with shapes, mostly, so far as he could discern, symmetrical designs, though occasionally a human or non-human figure showed—a man or a winged monster or even a small complex city thick with houses and crowds. But Roger could not see them very well and he was not allowed to pause to examine them. Considine walked on, humming to himself, and again Roger recollected with a curious shock that this mature easy form, moving so lightly and gaily beside him, was the High Executive of African ecstasies. Suddenly he recognized the words into which Considine had changed his humming and exclaimed, almost stopping—“But that's Shakespeare!”

“
—shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough
—”

“Yes,” Considine answered. “D'you think Shakespeare didn't know something of it? Yet you must have lectured on the
Tempest
.”

“If you mean that Shakespeare believed in the Second Evolution of Man——” Roger rather desperately began.

“He imagined its nature,” Considine answered. “Think of it—and read Ariel's songs. Not that you'll understand them yet. Nor do I. Perhaps no-one will—properly—until after the conquest of death. He is your greatest poet because none but he has so greatly lived and died and lived in his verse. ‘On the bat's back'—that's the purity of being. He imagined it. But here”—he paused at the door of a room, and his voice became graver—“is the physical experiment.”

He opened it and they went in. It was a large high room, and there moved in it continually a little tender breeze, as of spring, though there were no windows, or, if there were, they were hidden behind the pale yellow hangings which here also hid the walls. They shook, ever so faintly, in the movement of the air, and it seemed to Roger for a few moments as if everywhere great fields of daffodils trembled in that gentle wind. The vague suggestion passed, and left in its stead a thought of a universal sun shedding a golden presence through clear air, and then that again vanished, and he knew they were only wonderfully wrought hangings, and some beautiful light diffused itself over them. In the middle of the room there was a low divan, on which lay a motionless figure. In one corner was a chair on which a man sat, who, as they paused in the entrance, rose and came over to them. Otherwise the room was bare.

Roger looked again at the motionless figure on the divan, gazing at it in a sudden recollection. He knew the face, he had seen it rapt into an ardent intention, offering itself to death and to the High Executive of death. He turned sharply to Considine. “But it's Nielsen,” he said.

Considine nodded, and said to the watcher of the dead, “There's no news?”

“None, sir,” the man said. “He hasn't stirred or breathed.”

“It's seven days,” Considine said absently, and walked across the room to the couch where the dead man lay. Roger followed him, his heart beating more quickly than usual. What—what was expected, here and now?

Considine seemed to feel the unspoken question. He said, still looking at Nielsen: “We're waiting for the result.”

Roger said: “You're waiting for him to live?”

“If it may be,” Considine answered. “He was a strong spirit.” He knelt down by the couch and looked intently into the dead man's eyes. Roger waited, growing more troubled every moment with terrible expectation. This man had intended passionately to succeed in his unpreluded task; he had meant to live. Could so high and strong a purpose break laws which only gods and sons of gods had suspended in the past? Lazarus, the tale ran, had been drawn back from death by supernatural grace, but was it also—was it only—in the power of natural man by natural laws to conquer death? Was the old symbolism of the mysteries true in its reversal? was the supernatural itself but a visionary exhalation of the natural, and could it hold nothing but what the natural held? As he stood gazing a shock went through him, for it seemed to him that a quiver passed over the dead man's face. Considine stiffened where he knelt, and threw out a hand to beckon the third watcher who ran quietly and silently to the other side of the couch. He also knelt, and together the two concentrated themselves on the again unchanging figure. It was motionless in the self-closed stillness of the dead; pallor had touched it, and yet a pallor which—and again the smallest quiver seemed to pass through the dead face. Roger thought to himself, “It's a trance, it's epilepsy, it's——” But Considine was there, and he did not believe—even in that wild rational effort to explain away a thing which hadn't happened and wouldn't and couldn't happen he did not believe—that Considine made mistakes of this kind. The man had meant to die; undoubtedly on that evening in Hampstead he had meant to die. This was no booby show, no conjurer's trick; it was man at the extreme point of his powers sending all those powers to the enlargement of his dominion. The master of the adepts kneeled there, seeking to aid the initiate through the experiment which he himself, called to a different duty, had not yet dared, as the Pope aided St. Francis on a more glorious business than his own. Roger steadied himself; if man could attempt this man could watch the attempt. This was his first test and he would not fail. He would open himself to the knowledge, to the experience of the sight, he would fill himself with it; who could tell but one day he, he himself, might lie on such a couch to await and compel such a … resurrection?

It was—it was happening. The eyelids flickered. Considine's gaze was fixed on them; he was leaning forward as if to catch the first glimpse of the returning consciousness, to meet and hold it lest it should fail. A ripple—of darkness or light seemed to pass down the body; in the infinitesimal vibration of all its hues none could tell whether it were darkness or light that shook it. The eyelids flickered again; Roger caught himself in the midst of a passionate wish that they should open; they might hold madness or horror; they might strike him and blast him with their power or splendour or ungodly terror. Or they might be gay—gay beyond all dreaming: “merrily, merrily shall I live …” No; he couldn't bear such piercing glee—“on a bat's back”—death the bat ridden and flown by a laughing joy. He couldn't bear it; he looked at Considine, and for a brief fraction of a second Considine's eyes flashed at him and away, but in that swift meeting Roger felt command and nourishment and burning expectation, and in its power he set himself again to await revelation.

But for awhile it seemed as if all was done. The body was again rigid and there lay before the straining eyes only the awful barricade of death. Roger thought suddenly how absurd it was—all this abstraction and personification; there was no such thing as death, there were only dead men and dead things. Men tried to make dead men bearable, comprehensible, friendly, by giving to them a general name. Death as an imagined person might be terrifying, but he was, so imagined, human. But Death was nothing of the sort; Death was neither Azrael nor any other immortal shadowy being—it was only dead men and dead things. “Insubstantial Death is amorous”—even the poets pretend; no, not always—“O but to die and go we know not where …” and to come back.

It moved. The hand extended along the couch moved, simultaneously with what seemed a breath. Roger strangled a cry. The hand jerked again, so tiny a jerk that only its force made it perceptible. Something was trying to move that rigid organism, and not quite succeeding. But the signs of its presence spasmodically showed. The nostrils quivered slightly; the lips just parted. The fingers twitched.

Considine said: “Help him then,” and at once the third man leapt into activity, and others who had silently entered the room behind Roger, unnoticed by his fascinated attention, ran softly up. He thought afterwards that some bell must have been rung by the other watcher when first the body had stirred, and that these had gathered in readiness. They were about the dead man; they concerned themselves busily with it; they did this and the other, Roger didn't very well know what, for he was trying not to hope they would be unsuccessful. All the time Considine hardly moved, save to put himself in a more convenient position for the workers; all the time his eyes remained fixed on those closed eyes, and his will waited for the moment when it could unite itself with the restored will of the dead.

After so much toil and vigil they failed. What time was spent there Roger hardly knew. But suddenly he knew a difference in the body about which they stood or moved. It changed to a more dreadful pallor; a greyness crept over it. Beyond the knowledge even of the adept it endured withdrawal; the kingdom so nearly grasped fell away. The neophyte of death was swallowed up in death; beyond all earlier semblance, and before their eyes, he died indeed. Considine signed to the workers to cease; he said to them: “Look,” and they obeyed. He said again: “Look, look as masters. Don't lose a moment; change this into victory within you. Death here shall be life in you; feel it, imagine it, draw it into yourselves; as with all experience, so with this. Live by it; feed on it and live.”

But he himself rose to his feet, and with a sign to Roger to accompany him went out of the room. In silence they went back to the hall, then Considine spoke. “Now you shall rest,” he said. “It's failed this time, but we shall succeed yet, and you'll see it or hear of it. Meanwhile, do what you can to make this sight part of you and make it part of your will to immortality and victory. If you want food it's here. Presently I'll come to you again; we're hardly likely to move to-day. But now I must go to the king.”

He nodded and moved off, and presently Caithness, sitting in talk by the king's bed in an upper room, heard the door open, and looking round saw him in the entrance. The priest stood up abruptly and Inkamasi stirred.

“How is our guest?” Considine asked. “Have you convinced him how wasteful vengeance is, Mr. Caithness? and therefore what folly?”

Caithness said, with almost a sneer, “It's fitting
for you
to talk of folly and waste—you who spend the blood of the martyrs for your own foolishness. Why have you come here?”

“For a better reason than you came to Hampstead not so long ago,” Considine answered. “It wasn't a wise night, that, for because of that the king must choose his future to-day. You should have kept to your pupils, Mr. Caithness, to the morals you understand and the dogmas that you don't. But you must leave us now for I must talk to the king.”

Caithness looked at Inkamasi. “If you want me to stay,” he began but the other shook his head. “Go, if you will,” he said; “it's best that he and I should understand each other. I'll remember better this time.”

Considine held the door for the priest, closed it, and came to the chair by the bed. He paused there and smiled down at Inkamasi. “Have I your permission to sit down, sir?” he asked, and his voice was moved with strength such as the king never remembered in all their strange intercourse.

“Is this another insult?” he asked, restraining anger.

“It isn't anything of an insult,” Considine said, “and you should know it. Haven't I made you what you are, and could I insult the thing I've restored? Therefore I will have an answer—have I your permission to sit?”

The king made a movement with his hand. “I think you've only fooled me,” he answered bitterly, “but you can play with me as you choose—only I know it now. Sit or stand, do what you will, I can only watch you and at bottom defy you.”

Considine sat down and looked with serious and friendly eyes at the man he called his guest. There was a little silence, then with equal gravity and friendliness he began to speak.

“Don't think,” he said, “that in speaking to you by royal titles I do anything out of accord with what I've done in the past. I have always, so far as I could, done according to the gospel which moves in me and my friends, the doctrine of transmutation of energy, of the conscious turning of joy and anguish alike into strength and will, and of that passionate strength and will into the exploration of all the capacities of man. Such men as the priest who was with you just now will tell you to endure or enjoy because this and that is the will of God—at best but a few of them will tell you to use experience as a way of uniting yourself with God. In all the generations of Christendom how many have done that? But I do not turn men to any such remote end; I tell them that they are themselves gods, if they will, and the ecstasy of that knowledge is their victory. Your grandfather in his degree believed in that doctrine though he was an old man when he heard of it and the great triumphs were not for him. But he knew that if Africa was to be held up as a torch to the races that sat in cold and darkness it was necessary that they should be gathered into peace between themselves other than that which the Northern invaders imposed upon them. Therefore we drew those of the chiefs who did not believe, or their sons, into the potential power of the hypnotic sleep; it was so done with the heirs of all the thrones of Africa. It was never the intention of the High Executive—of us who execute the power of the fiery imagination among men—to use that compulsion if those royalties should seem naturally to accept our purpose. But you remember, sir, that your father and you desired Europe rather than Africa, and sooner than attempt to turn your whole nature into a state and process alien to it I proposed to myself only to keep in touch with you and to use you if necessary to keep the Zulus who obey you in peace and alliance with the other African races. I do not conceive that such an action needs defence. My alternative was to destroy you and to let your cousin who now leads your people, holding the sceptre of Chaka and passionately devoted to our cause, be the inheritor of your royalty. But because you in fact were that royalty, because the tradition of royalty is one of the admirable and passionate imaginations of mankind, I was unwilling to do this. If necessary I would bind the king outwardly, but I would neither slay him nor attempt to govern his mind.”