Shadows of Ecstasy (27 page)

Something lay on his forehead, obstructing him, as if it were a hand; he laboured under it. It pressed on him, or he against it, as if alien limitation controlled him; he stumbled in his walk because it lay over his eyes and blinded him. A great fear of blindness, of losing this most happy life, filled him. He threw up his hands to tear the obstruction away, and they too were caught and prisoned. He tore them loose; he flung back his head; he was convulsed with a spasm of agony, and he was standing in the darkness of a cold night under a wooden roof, and opposite him was the tall watchful figure of Nigel Considine.

There was a long silence; then Considine said, “It may be known and believed, it can't be lived thus. But it can be found and lived. Let us go in.”

In the hall there were a group of some half-dozen; away from them, standing together, were Caithness and Rosenberg. Mottreux was moving about from one place to another. Roger joined his friends. Considine stood still and gathered their eyes and thoughts to himself; when that concentration was sufficient he spoke.

“All's ready,” he said, “and you know your offices. All of us, except Mottreux, leave to-night. He remains here. But there are two things yet to be done. Mr. Rosenberg, I present to you the jewels which your cousin left to you.” Mottreux came forward slowly and gave him the case, which he offered to the Jew who took it silently. Mottreux fell back a pace or two so that he stood behind his master. His face was livid, and he rubbed one hand backward and forward over his forehead. But he stood, horribly eyeing the Jew, while Considine went on: “I invite you to come with me if you choose, and I will see that you reach Jerusalem. There you may wait in peace the coming of your Messias. If you choose to stay here, you shall be taken to London to-night or to-morrow to any place that you name.”

“I will do as you have said,” Rosenberg answered. “The Lord shall reward you, and I will rest in Jerusalem.”

“But for us, lords and princes, my companions,” Considine said, and his tone sank from conversational ease to direction and control, “before we take up again the work that is before us, there remains one ceremony to fulfil. Initiates of love and death, I invite you to a sacrifice of death, by virtue of that hope and determination which shall make you masters of death as you are in your degree masters of love. There is in this house another guest, a child of royalty and an inheritor of one of the great and passionate imaginations of mankind, Inkamasi the Zulu. He is not with us, but we are with him. Shadow though it be of the true ecstasy and fiery life into which we shall enter, it is yet an heritage worthy of honour. To us has been committed the care of these vast and antique dreams; it is ours to see, so far as in us lies, that those who are possessed by them are entertained mightily and dismissed royally. Love and poetry and royalty are adored as the channels whereby the passion and imagination of man's heart become revealed to him, and knowing his own greatness he moves to the final accomplishment, the ending in his own person of all the accidents of place and time. This man is not with us, but in an hour when, superseded in Africa and undesired in Europe, he looks for a throne on which to perish, it must be we who offer him that throne. By no compulsion and no persuasion the King Inkamasi turns to the throne we offer and awaits immolation there. He is driven by the might of his own royalty which demands of him no lesser conclusion; he is received by us as, beyond his purpose, a meet and acceptable sacrifice. Put away from you the desires of your hearts, save the one last desire. I exhort you to come with hands of devotion and a single heart; who knows but this very night the work may be accomplished and there may descend upon one of us that ecstasy which shall drive him into death and in death to resurrection?”

Roger heard and realized what was conveyed by phrase and accent. Appalled by the understanding he took a half-step forward, but Caithness was before him. With a supernatural insolence as high as Considine's own, the priest cried out and confronted his enemy. “You dare not touch him,” he said. “This man is in your care, and his blood is on your head if you hurt him. God shall require it of you; I charge you to let him go——”

Considine had paused to let him speak, but now with a gesture he stopped him, and as the priest panted for words the other's voice set him aside.

“If that time which you and he accept and serve were at your disposal,” he said, “I would not prevent your seeking to turn him from his assent. But it cannot be now. You will not encourage him to seek victory in death; and the king cannot fail from his royalty. What we do we do quickly. It is permitted, if you choose, that you shall be with him at his end; console, direct him as you will. But see that you do not interfere now with his and our choice, or you shall be taken from him. The offering which he makes and which we, with vaster purposes, accept is beyond the humble vision of your creed. He dies for the sake of his kingship; we experience his death for the sake of making it a part of our imaginations. Man shall conquer death, not by submitting to it as you teach, and not by avoiding it in a mere prolongation of life, as certain wise yet erring masters have taught, though this may be a necessary step towards conquest, but by entering into and annulling it.”

“Antichrist,” the priest exclaimed, “is the day of your dominion here?”

“Neither Christ nor Antichrist,” the voice of the other answered him, “but I bring a gospel of redemption, and the ends of the world hear it: whom do men say that I, a son of man, am?”

He flung out a hand towards the group of his servants and disciples; he turned his eyes upon them and they answered, Arab and Egyptian, negro and white: “The end of mirage, the palm in the desert,” “The last of the Imams, the Shadow of Allah,” “The lord of sorcerers and kings,” “The bearer of keys, the interpreter of tongues,” and, as the mingled voices ceased, Considine's own answered them:

“I am all these and yet I am no more than any of you, for all of you shall be as I. That which I have known I have not known of myself. I am the child of the initiates; their servant and the servant of the mighty imagination which is in man. Any of you shall conclude his kingdom before me; purify yourselves, know, exult, and live. I call to you again, lords of the spirit, postulants of infinity, put away all desire but to be fulfilled in yourselves. The sacrifice of kingship is for the single of heart.”

He swept his arms upward and inward in one compelling gesture. “Come, see the death of a man. Come you too,” he added to his guests, “if you so will. But if not, then remain here until we come for you again, to accompany the body of the King Inkamasi to the sepulchre in the ocean which awaits him.”

He went forward and his servants after him. Vereker signed to Caithness to precede him, and Roger accompanied the priest. Mottreux looked after them; then he went swiftly to Rosenberg and laid his hand on the casket.

“Do you really mean to go with these to Jerusalem?” he said.

“I am determined,” the old man answered. “I will make haste to the city of our God.”

Mottreux turned sharply away; he went after the others.

They were going to the room where that morning Roger had seen the attempt at revivification, but the last of the disciples did not quite catch them up. Very softly he went after them; when Vereker had entered the room he paused by the door, and as softly moved a key from within to without. Then he pulled the door nearly but not quite shut after him and waited.

The body of Nielsen had been removed; on the low couch, supported by cushions, the Zulu lay. Considine genuflected as he entered, and moving to one side made a sign to Caithness. The priest ran forward, threw something round his neck, and drew a crucifix from near his heart. He kneeled by the couch; Inkamasi leaned his head towards him and they murmured between themselves. Considine, waiting, looked round, and made a sign to Roger to come to his side. He slipped his arm into the young man's and said: “This is a gift of the universe to you; deal wisely with it. Be strong, exult, and live.”

The two of them were together, a little distance from the head of the couch; opposite them, at a greater distance from the foot, four others had gathered. Mottreux was by the door with a clear space between him and the Zulu. So set, they waited till the speech between the priest and the king died; while the two yet remained in close and silent prayer Considine said in a low voice to the others: “Enlarge in you the imagination by which man lives; this is perhaps the moment of fulfilment. The work shall be accomplished to-night without ritual or ceremony such as we are used to, in your contemplation alone.” He took a step towards Caithness and touched him on the shoulder, saying: “Have you spoken with the king?”

“You're committing wickedness,” the priest exclaimed and ceased, broken either by his own passion or by the concentration of the other's power.

“Back, then,” Considine gently said, and when Caithness had risen and moved a step or two away, he in turn knelt by the couch.

“Majesty,” he said, “are you willing to restore your kingship through us to that of which it is a shadow?”

“Yes,” Inkamasi said, “for though I hold you for my own enemies and for misguided men I think you are the only servants of the kingship that is more than the king.”

“Majesty,” Considine said again, “we are the king's servants and his greatest friends. Farewell.” He touched Inkamasi's hand with his lips and rising signed to Roger to follow him. The young man went forward, knelt, and said, “I'm sorry if this happened through me.”

“Don't be,” Inkamasi said; “it's better to die here than under the feet of a London crowd—if there's any difference. Thank you, and good-bye.”

Roger touched his hand with his lips and went back. The rest, one by one, followed him, ending with Mottreux and Vereker. As Mottreux in turn moved back towards the door Caithness felt a hand press his arm and heard a soft whisper, “Come back and wait by me.” The order reached him in his anguish; with a hope that even now something might interpose, he obeyed and slowly withdrew till he also stood by the door.

Meanwhile, his obeisance done, Vereker had brought to Considine a chalice that had been standing, filled with wine, on a carved table at the side of the room. His master poured into it the contents of a small phial; then he took the chalice in his hands, and turned towards the couch. The silence in the room grew so deep, the absorbed attention of the watchers so intense, that Roger felt as if the terrific moment must break in some new astonishing revelation. Regret and sorrow, bewilderment and antagonism, which had mingled in his heart, were swept away; an awful harmony began to exist. So, in other far-off lives, lesser or greater he could not tell, he had waited for Isabel when they were young and happy, and indeed he had chosen necessity; so he had submitted his obedience to the authority of Milton or Wordsworth, waiting for the august plenitude of their poetry to be manifested within him. Till now he had believed that sense of harmony to be all they—Isabel or
Paradise Lost
—had to offer, but he had begun to learn that to pause there was to be too easily content. The harmony itself was but a prelude to some enrichment of his whole being, which in its turn must be experienced in every detail—made familiar that new powers might arise. He gave himself, freely and wholly, to the moment; he was to live the more completely through the king's death. It was no good being distressed or ashamed; his business was to live by it, as if necessary it would be the business of others to live by his death. He gave himself to the moment, and in the moment to the whole charged imagination of man. It was no lie; the mind of man—not his mind or Inkamasi's but man's—was exalted above all the power of things, “of quality and fabric more divine,” and yet his own was never nearer or more useful to man's than when he was most intensely aware of all things in himself. He gave himself to the moment.

“Drink, Majesty,” Considine said, and gave the chalice into Inkamasi's hands. The king took it, raised it to his lips, and drank. Even as it left his lips, his grip relaxed, his face changed, he sank heavily on to the cushions behind him.

But before the dropped chalice reached the floor, before the sound of its fall could strike their ears, a violent explosion shattered them. Roger, fixed in his surrender, saw Considine jerk his arms up and fall crashing across the litter. Almost before the king's body had sunk lifeless his destroyer lay slain over him. For they saw, as soon as their startled senses acted, that two lives, not one, had been taken. The violence against which Considine had never pretended to be secure, but which had avoided him so long, had struck him at last. The bullet had pierced his skull; the blood streamed over the dead Zulu. And Mottreux dragged Caithness from the room, and shut and locked the door. He held the priest's arm; he rushed him through the house, making for the hall. Caithness ran, and listened to hasty orders: “Go straight to the car in front of the door … get in … I'll come. Can you drive?”

“Yes,” he gasped.

“Get in the driver's seat.” They reached the hall; Mottreux looking frantically round rushed him to the front door, paused less than a second to see that the priest was actually scrambling into the car, pushed the door almost shut, lest by chance the other should see him, and sent another mad glance around the hall.

By so small a chance he was defeated. The old Jew, when he was left alone with the casket, had, by some trick of the mind, gone back to the room where he and his companions had spent most of the day. He was sitting there, lost in his meditations, when Mottreux broke in on him, and in one wild dash caught the case in one hand. But Rosenberg held to the trust which the God of his fathers had imposed on him. He was dragged violently from his chair, but he clung to the sacred treasure; he heard a voice yelling oaths, but though he was shaken to and fro he said nothing. His face, as he lifted it, was full of a scorn deeper than time, the scorn of his God for the spoilers of the holy places. He saw the distorted face of a greedy Gentile above him, and before the bullet searched his brain he spat at it once.