Shadows of Ecstasy (6 page)

“‘To those among the peoples of Europe who know that their lives have origin and nourishment in the great moments of the exalted imagination, the High Executive offers salute and recognition'”—Roger's voice began to linger over the words—“‘to all who owe their devotion to music, to poetry, to painting and sculpture, to the servants of every more than rational energy; greater than those and more numerous, to all who at this present moment exist in the exchanged or unexchanged adoration of love, it calls more especially. There, perhaps more surely and swiftly than in any other state of being outside the transmuting Way, can the labour of exploration be begun; there is the knowledge, the capacity, the herald apprehension of victory. These visionaries are already initiate; they know in themselves the prophecy of the conquest of death. To all such the High Executive appeals, with ardour and conviction. Believe, imagine, live. Know exaltation and feed on it; in the strength of such food man shall enter into his kingdom.

“‘The High Executive permits itself to offer to the Christian Churches its congratulations on the courage and devotion of those their servants who have sustained death by martyrdom. Convinced as it is that the Churches have, almost from the beginning, been misled by an erring principle, it nevertheless honours those martyrs as sublime if misguided instances of that imagination which it is its purpose to make known to mankind and which the rites and dogmas of the Christian religion dimly proclaim. It is assured by its belief in man and by the exalted courage of those martyrs that they would have desired no other end, and it takes full responsibility for having advised its august sovereigns that they could bestow on Christian missionaries no more perfect gift.

“‘The High Executive will be prepared to send representatives at any time to any place fixed by the Powers of Europe or by any of them; or to enter into negotiations in any other way that the Powers may desire. It will assume the fixing of such time and place or the opening of such negotiations to be a guarantee of safe-conduct for its representatives, and it will be prepared to suspend as soon as possible the military, naval, and aerial operations upon which it is engaged.

“‘Given in London, by direction of the High Executive, in the First Year of the Second Evolution of Man.'”

Roger stopped. Almost before his voice had ceased, Rosamond said: “Philip, darling, you haven't eaten anything. Have a cake?” Philip for once took no notice. Roger said: “About a thousand words—a little more. Allowing for recapitulations in its extremely rhetorical style—the High Executive hasn't studied the best models—say, seven-fifty. Either pure waste or the most important seven-fifty words I've ever read.”

“I haven't got the hang of it,” Philip said in bewilderment. “What does it mean?”

“It—what did it say?—it calls to you more especially, Philip,” Roger went on. “It salutes you, because you have the vision of the conquest of death in the exchanged adoration of love. It expects you to do something about it all at once.” His eyes lingered on Isabel, and then became abstracted. He sighed once and got to his feet. “I'll have some more tea,” he said. “The cup that cheers but not inebriates after words that inebriate but do not cheer.”

Isabel, pouring out the tea, said: “Don't they cheer you, dearest?”

“Not one bit,” Roger answered. He leaned gloomily against the mantelpiece, and after a pause said suddenly, “Well, Rosamond, and what do you make of it?”

Rosamond answered coldly. “I wasn't listening, I don't think it's very nice, and really, Roger, I don't see why you need have read it.”

“The High Executive of the African peoples asked me to,” Roger said perversely. “What don't you like about it—giving up intellect or having the vision of the conquest of death?”

“I think you're simply silly, Roger,” Rosamond exclaimed and stood up. “And if it was written by a lot of … a lot of Africans, that makes it more disgusting than ever. I don't think it ought to have been printed.”

Isabel spoke before Roger, sadistically watching Rosamond, could reply. “Do you think it's authentic, Roger?” she asked.

“My dear, how can I guess?” her husband answered, more placably; then he shifted his position, and added: “It's authentic enough in one way; there is something more.”

Isabel smiled at him. “But need we think we didn't know it already?” she asked softly. “It isn't very new, is it?”

He was looking across the room at the high bookcase.

“If they came alive,” he murmured, “if they are alive—all shut up in their cases, all nicely shelved—shelved—shelved. We put them in their places in our minds, don't we? If they got out of their bookcases—not the pretty little frontispieces but the things beyond the frontispieces, not the charming lines of type but the things the type means. Dare you look for them, Isabel?” As he still stared at the bookcase his voice altered into the deeper sound of a subdued chant.

“
He scarce had ceased when the superior fiend

Was moving towards the shore

“
Hid in its vacant interlunar cave

“
And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake
.”

Rosamond said sharply: “Do be quiet, Roger. You know I hate your quoting.”

“Quoting!” Roger said, “quoting!” and stopped in despair. He looked at Philip as if asking him whether he couldn't do something.

Philip didn't see the look; he was meditating. But the silence affected him at last; he raised his eyes, and was on the point of speaking when Rosamond interrupted, slipping her hand through his arm. “Don't talk about it any more, darling,” she said; “it's too horrid. Look, shall I come as far as the Tube with you?”

He stirred—rather heavily, Roger thought—but as their eyes met he smiled back at her, and only Isabel's hand prevented her husband from again quoting the High Executive on the exchanged adoration of love. It was therefore with a slight but unusual formality that farewells were spoken, and Philip departed for the station.

Roger remained propped against the mantelpiece, but he said, viciously, “She ‘wasn't listening'!”

Isabel looked at him a little anxiously. “Don't listen too carefully, darling,” she said. “It's not just cowardice—to refuse to hear some sounds.”

He pulled himself upright. “I must go and work,” he said. “I must exquisitely water the wine so that it may be tolerable for weak heads.” By the door he paused. “Do you remember your Yeats?” he asked.

“
What rough beast, its hour come round at last
,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
?

I wonder. Also I wonder where exactly Bethlehem is, and what are the prodigies of the birth.”

Chapter Four

THE MAJESTY OF THE KING

In the Tube Philip read the proclamation of the High Executive over again, and, to the best of his ability, considered it. He was uneasily conscious that Rosamond would have disapproved of this, and he couldn't help feeling that it was only by an oversight that she hadn't asked him to please her by leaving it alone. However, she hadn't, so he was morally free. There stirred vaguely in his mind the subtler question of whether he were free by a strict or by an easy interpretation of morals: did exact justice, did a proper honour, demand that he should follow her choice or insist on his own? But the question never got as far as definition; he was aware of a difficulty turning over in its sleep—slouching towards Bethlehem but not reaching it—and almost deliberately refrained from realizing it. Because he did want to know, more accurately, what this alleged declaration had said about love. Unlike Roger and, fortunately for him, like Rosamond, he had no particular use for the masters of verse. He was therefore ignorant of the cloud of testimony that had been borne to the importance and significance of the passion that was growing in him. He had certainly heard of Dante and Beatrice, of Tristram and Iseult, of Lancelot and Guinevere, but there he stopped. He had hardly heard, he had certainly never brooded over, that strange identification of Beatrice with Theology and of Theology with Beatrice by which one great poet has justified centuries of else doubtful minds. But by that secular dispensation of mercy which has moved in the blood of myriads of lovers, he had felt what he did not know and experienced what he could not formularize. And the words which he now read did not so much startle his innocent devotion by their eccentricity as dimly disturb him with a sense of their justice. He had had no use at all for the African peoples except in so far as they gave him an opportunity to follow his European habits in providing Rosamond with a home and a car and anything else she wanted. The prospect of the great age of intellect being done, also left him unmoved; he hadn't realized that any special great age of intellect had existed—except for a vague idea that a period of past history known as the Middle Ages was considerably less intelligent than the present, and that there had been a brief time when Athens, and a rather longer time when Rome, was very intellectual. But when all that seemed to him meaningless had been removed, there still remained the fact that never before, never anywhere, had any words, printed or spoken, come nearer to telling him what he really felt about Rosamond than this paragraph which purported to come from the centre of Africa, and from dark-skinned chiefs pouring up against the guns and rifles of England. He knew it was silly, but he knew it said “adoration,” “vision,” “apprehension of victory,” “conquest of death.” He knew it was silly, but he knew also that he had felt through Rosamond, brief and little understood, something which was indeed apprehension of victory and conquest of death.

When he got home he found his godfather alone, and, rather against his own intention, found himself approaching the subject. Caithness had seen the proclamation and was inclined to be a little scornful of it: which may partly have been due to the unrecognized fact that, while Roger and Philip had both found their interior passions divined and applauded, Caithness had had his referred to merely as “a misguided principle.” He doubted the authenticity, and went on to add: “Rather bombastic, don't you think? I don't pretend to know what it means.”

Philip said, “Roger seemed quite impressed by it.”

“O Roger!” the priest said good-humouredly. “I called it bombast but I expect he'd call it poetry. I don't mean that it hasn't a kind of thrill in it, but thrills aren't the only thing—certainly they're not safe things to live by.”

Philip thought this over, and decided that he agreed with it. Only his sensations about Rosamond were not—no, they were not
thrills:
and he wasn't at all clear that they weren't things to live by. He said, shamelessly involving Roger: “He made fun of me about it—he seemed to think that part of it was meant for me. The paragraph about—O well, some paragraph or other.”

Caithness looked down at the paper. “This about the exaltation of love, I expect,” he said, with a rather charming smile. “Roger would be all in favour of that; the poets are. But perhaps they're more used to living on the hilltops than the rest of us.”

“You don't think it's true then?” Philip asked, with a slight and irrational feeling of disappointment. Irrational, because he hadn't actually expected Caithness to agree with a gospel, if it was a gospel, out of Africa. Sir Bernard had once remarked that Caithness limited himself to the Near East in the matter of gospels, “the near East modified by the much nearer West.”

But over the direct question Caithness hesitated. “I wouldn't care to say it wasn't true,” he said, “but all truth is not expedient. It's no use making people expect too much.”

“No,” Philip said, “I suppose it isn't.” Was he expecting too much? was he, in fact, expecting anything at all? Or could whatever he expected or whatever happened alter the terribly important fact of the shape of Rosamond's ear? He also looked again at the paper, and words leapt to his eyes. “Believe, imagine, live. Know exaltation and feed on it——”

“You don't then,” he said, unwontedly stirred, “really think one ought to believe in it too much?”

“Why yes, my dear boy,” the priest answered. “Only these things are so often deceptive; they change or they become familiar. One can't trust one's own vision too far; that's where religion comes in.”

Sir Bernard would no doubt have pointed out, what did not occur to either of the others, that this merely meant that Caithness was substituting his own hobby for Philip's. But he wasn't there, and so, vaguely depressed, especially as he couldn't feel that Rosamond's ear would ever change, the young man turned the conversation, and shut away the appeal of the High Executive for the time being in whatever corresponded in his mind to Roger Ingram's bookshelves.

The African trouble, however, displayed, during the next few days, no possibility of being shut away. The steps which the Powers, on the unanimous testimony of their spokesmen, were harmoniously taking produced no effect against the rebels (as the enemy was habitually called). It became clear that the “hordes” consisted, in fact, of highly disciplined and well-supplied armies. In the north of Africa the territory held by the European forces grew daily smaller; all Egypt, except Cairo, was lost; the French were pressed back to the coast of Tangier; the Spaniards were hustled out of Morocco. The Dominion of South Africa was sending out expeditions, of which no news returned—certainly there had not been much time, but there was no news at all, or none that was published. In England an official censorship was attempted, but failed owing to the speedy growth of a party which demanded “Africa for the Africans.” Normally the massacre of the Christian missionaries would have been fatal to such a demand, but the recalcitrant attitude of the Archbishop hampered the more violent patriots. Rumours got about of the appearance of hostile aeroplanes over the Mediterranean and the coastline of Southern Europe. Negroes in London and other large towns were mobbed in the streets. Roger reported to Isabel that not only negroes but comparatively harmless Indians had disappeared from his classes. It was evident that the Government would be driven to some measure of internment.