Shadows of Ecstasy (29 page)

Sir Bernard read it and smiled a little sadly. Philip read it and let it slip by; he was engaged with a recovered Rosamond and his career. Roger did not read it. Sir Bernard asked Philip whether, at a pinch, he would vote for Suydler or Considine. Philip read it, and for almost the first time in his life startled his father into real admiration by saying that he should vote for Ian Caithness. But Sir Bernard's mind illumined the answer with a drier light than Philip's. He wrote of it to the priest: “I congratulate you, my dear Ian, on your proselyte—you can instruct him further when you come up to marry him. There's a notion grown up that since his career'll have to be postponed or reorganized or reborn or something, it would be only reasonable (“reasonable!” I also have my martyrdoms) that I should make financial arrangements for him to be married at once. Rosamond's still recuperating at the cottage in Dorset, she sent me a pretty note of thanks the other day in which she asked whether you didn't know the Archbishop fairly well. You'll guess—as Suydler would say—what she meant. I leave it to you to decide whether you do—well enough, I mean. If he should be shot by a deacon who wanted to wear the vestments of the See at a fancy dress ball I fancy Suydler would be willing to offer you the Archiepiscopal mitre; he's touchingly grateful to someone, and went so far as to ask me if there was anything I wanted. I told him I wanted justice and proportion which is the daughter of justice, knowledge and abstraction which is the daughter of knowledge. This dreadful tendency to personify and (therefore) mythologize I attribute to you and the late Mr. Considine, who was an entire mythology about himself. From Considine to you (excuse me), from you to Philip, from Philip to Rosamond—behold the history of religion! The High Executive disappears under the sea, and leaves its brother of Canterbury to add a touch of richness to my daughter-in-law's wedding. If I had indulged myself in irony as long as Providence, I should be a little tired of it by now, but I suppose he has infinite patience with himself as well as with us. But mightn't he occasionally try a new note?”

Of Roger Sir Bernard said nothing, though he thought of him as he wrote “the High Executive disappears under the sea.” For he was aware that that was all that they knew, and even that they only surmised, and he thought Roger was intensely aware of it too. But he did not know how acutely, and Isabel did not tell him.

Nor had she told him of how much younger and older at once Roger had seemed since his return. She missed in him something of warfare and much of scorn. If he was arrogant still it was a more airy arrogance than of old; if he mocked he mocked more tenderly. But she wondered whether in his heart he—and she also—secretly awaited a return.

Roger himself could not have told her. He shut himself away from the noisy European victories, from the talk and the congratulations. He took up his work again, but as he made notes for a special address on
The Antithetical Couplet from Dryden to Johnson
he was humbly aware that this work was part of a greater work. It would be his fault if he so touched the least detail of the divine art as to leave himself or others less sensitive to its central passion—his fault, his most grievous fault, his sad incompetence. But even sad incompetence might recognize the Power it could hardly name. He would never cease any more to acknowledge it, to search in it and for it, to believe in it, to wait for it. Other people had their ways; this was his. What more——

What indeed had chanced? Had the submarine, plunging away from that house of mingled death and life, carried with it but the dead body of its lord? and had men somewhere far off, seen that body change beneath inexorable corruption and committed it to the waters of the sea or to the African earth? Did it there undergo the final doom of mortality in slow change, or had some fiercer destruction, the shark or the tiger, seized on it? He had dreams sometimes of sharks fighting round the sinking body of Nigel Considine, and sometimes he had other dreams. He saw the body carried to the submarine, he saw it carried off far into the ocean, and then, sometimes in the vessel, sometimes out of it, he saw it change. Sometimes he saw men in a narrow room watching by it, crying out, hurrying to it, adoring it. But more often—though the dream itself was not often—he saw it floating alone in the middle of the sea, far away, far down, and he saw the eyes open and the hands move, and the whole body stir. Life was rushing back into it; power, spirit, imagination, whatever name sad incompetence found for it, was re-animating the willing flesh. He saw it walking in the waters and heard it calling through them. The creatures of the deep, octopus and shark, greed and ferocity, fled before it. Behind it, as it came, there was no more sea; in front of it the waters flowed into it and became the man who moved in them. Back from the shore they swept, out towards that advancing humanity, and all their mysteries were swallowed up in his shining lucidity. This was the vast of experience, currents and tides, streams and whirlpools, restless waves and fathomless depths, absorbed by man. The salt that tinctured it, as the salt of Sir Bernard's amusement tinctured life, was absorbed also. Valuable as that preservative salt was, in the end it was infinitely less than the elements of which it was part, and to prefer it to the renewed body would be to prefer the means to the end, detachment to union. Irony might sustain the swimmer in the sea; it could not master the sea. A greater than Sir Bernard did that now, if indeed now, up the African sand or the English beach, that conqueror returned.

If he returned. If he carried out the experiment of his vision, the purpose of his labours. If, first among his peers, when all believed him lost, he thrust himself from the place of shades back into immortal and transmuted life, if he held death at his disposal, if he knew how the vivid ecstasy of experience dominated all shapes and forms, all accidents of time and place. If he came now, humming those last songs which the greatest of the poets had made from his own vision of Ariel flying free, smiling at the blindness of extreme pain and the paralysis of extreme possession, guardian of myths and expositor of power … if he returned. If now, while the world shouted over the defeat of his allies and subjects, while it drove its terror back into its own unmapped jungles, and subdued its fiercer desires to an alien government of sterile sayings, if now he came once more to threaten and deliver it. If—ah beyond, beyond belief!—but if he returned.…

About the Author

Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a British author and longtime editor at Oxford University Press. He was one of the three most prominent members of the literary group known as the Inklings—the other two being C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Williams wrote poetry, drama, biography, literary criticism, and more, but is best known for his novels, which explored the primal conflict between good and evil. T. S. Eliot, who wrote an introduction to Williams's
All Hallows' Eve
, praised the author's “profound insight into … the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of his novels,” and
Time
magazine called him “one of the most gifted and influential Christian writers England has produced this century.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1931 by Charles Williams

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0667-5

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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