Shadows of Ecstasy (7 page)

It was so driven, more quickly than had been expected, when the news came of the sinking of a transport crowded with Indian troops which were being rushed to South Africa. That the African armies should be able to operate destructively by sea as well as by land was a shock even to instructed opinion, and, among the uninstructed, crowds began to parade the streets, booing and cheering and chasing any dark-skinned stranger who showed himself. Even one or two Southern Italians had, for a few minutes, an uneasy time. The crowds were of course dissolved by the police, but they came together again like drops of water till the evening's amusement was done and they reluctantly went home.

The reaction of all these events on the money market was considerable, and it was not eased by the uncertainty which still existed on the situation of the late Mr. Rosenberg's affairs. Nothing definite was known, since the Chief Rabbi and Mr. Considine persisted in their silence, as did the two legatees. But an uneasy feeling manifested itself, both in the streets around the brothers' house and in the wider circles of finance. It could not be said that anything unusual was going on, for nothing at all seemed to be going on. But the stillness was alarming. No-one could believe that the two aged and devoted students of Kabbalistic doctrine were fit persons to control the vast interests of the Rosenberg estate. But no-one could prevent their doing whatever they liked with it. Nehemiah and Ezekiel came out to the synagogue and went home again, and went nowhere else, though well-dressed strangers in cars descended on Hounds-ditch, and were engaged with them over long periods. In Houndsditch itself strange tales of the jewels began to spread, following vivid accounts of them in the papers. The thrill of the jewels and the thrill of the Africans contended; hungry eyes followed the Jews as hostile eyes followed such rare negroes as could still be seen in the East End. A sullen excitement began to work around them, a breathless and vulgar imitation of the exalted imagination which the High Executive had declared to be the true path to desirable knowledge.

A more natural excitement, though perhaps equally crude from the point of view of the High Executive and that other High Executive represented among others by the Archbishops, affected innumerable suburban homes when the selling began. Gradually but steadily the prices of shares in the Rosenberg concerns began to fall. It was said that someone knew something and was standing from under. A shiver of panic touched finance, allied to that other panic which had already touched the extreme villages of Southern Europe. Nervous voices made inquiries over telephones in England as nervous eyes watched aeroplanes over the Mediterranean. From each background of silence a thin mist of fear crept out and was blown over many minds. Something shook civilization, as it had been shaken a hundred times before, but that something loomed now in half-fancied forms of alien powers, of negroes flying through the air and Jews withdrawing their gold. Day by day the tremors quickened. Neglected expositors of the Apocalypse in Tonbridge or Cheltenham, old ladies, retired military men, and an eccentric clergyman or two, began to say boldly that it was the end of the world. At Birmingham a man ran naked through the streets crying that he saw fire from heaven, and leaping on to the railway lines was killed by an express train before the police could catch him. “Second Adventist goes mad at Birmingham,” said the evening papers. The Churches found that growing crowds attended them. The Government unofficially suggested to the Archbishops that they should discourage people coming to church. The Archbishops issued a Pastoral Letter from which they naturally could not exclude some of their irritation with the Government; and of which therefore the first part, which was addressed to the new converts, tended towards a scornful and minatory tone. This, if anything, made matters worse, the converts naturally arguing that if the Church could afford to use that voice the Church must feel itself very safe indeed; and this feeling was strengthened by the second part which was addressed to the faithful in language that in normal times would have been ordinary enough. “And you, little children, love one another,” it began and continued on the same theme, ending with another quotation, “My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you.” The idea that these incantations contained a magical safety found more and more believers; and Sir Bernard congratulated Caithness on a greater spread of the Faith in ten days than in ten years previously. On a world already thus agitated fell the second communication of the High Executive. This, after the earlier formal invocation of “things willed and fated,” “gods many and one,” went on in something of a high style of distress to lament that the Powers of Europe had not thought well even to answer the earlier message, much less apparently to prepare themselves for any negotiations. They had instead, by all means at their command, increased their armies and strengthened the war. “Some check,” the message went on, “the African armies have administered to this gathering defiance, but the High Executive has felt compelled to advise its august Sovereigns that mere measures of defence will no longer be sufficient. If the Powers of Europe are determined to force war upon Africa, then Africa will be compelled to open war upon Europe. The gospel which is the birthright of the African peoples and which they offer as a message of hope even to the degraded and outworn nations of the white race carries no maxim which they are unwilling to practise. With a profound but unrecognised truth the Christians of Europe have declared that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. This maxim Africa knows, understands, obeys. In the high mysteries of birth and death, not only physical generation or physical destruction, but those spiritual experiences of which these are but types, Africa has learnt the secret duties of man. Her peoples offer themselves in exaltation to the bed of death as to the bed of love. With an ecstasy born of their ecstasy, with a communication to its children of that which they first communicated to it, the High Executive summons them to what is at present the final devotion of conscious being. They and it are alike indifferent to the result, if the armies of Europe destroy them they will but find in death a greater thing than their conquerors know. But the armies of Europe will not destroy them, for the Second Evolution of man has begun. Their leaders and prophets, and the High Executive which is their voice and act, address themselves no longer to the children of intellect and science and learning. They turn to their own peoples. Daughters and Sons of Africa, you are called to the everlasting sacrifice. Victim or priest at that altar, it matters not whether you inflict or endure the pang. Come, for the cycles are accomplished and the knowledge that was of old returns. Come, for this is the hour of death that alternates for ever with the hour of love. Come, for without the knowledge of both the knowledge of one shall fail. Come, ye blessed, inherit the things laid up for you from the foundations of the world.”

On the evening of the day when this invocation appeared, the crowds in the streets were thicker than ever. The first death was reported in a special edition of the papers; a negro had been literally hunted over Hampstead Heath and afterwards (not quite intentionally, it was thought), killed. Sir Bernard rang up Isabel.

“Nothing,” he said, when she answered, “except that you once said that Hampstead was the negro quarter of London, and I thought I'd like to know whether there was any trouble up there.”

“Not to say
trouble
,” Isabel said. “There was a little friction at the gate, and we've got a coloured gentleman in the house at present.”

“Have you indeed?” Sir Bernard exclaimed. “Was it you or Roger who brought him in?”

“Both of us,” Isabel explained. “We heard a noise in the street and we looked out, and there was a negro—at least, he was a black man; a negro's something technical, isn't it?—against our gate, and the most unpleasant lot of whites you ever saw all round him, cursing. Roger went out and talked to them, but that was no good. He said something about behaving like Englishmen, and I suppose they did; at least they began to throw stones and hit out with their sticks. So Roger got him through the gate, and I got them through the front door, and here he is.”

“You're not hurt, Isabel?” Sir Bernard said sharply. “What about the crowd?”

“O they threw things at the house and smashed a window, and presently the police came and they went away,” Isabel answered. “No, thank you, I'm perfectly all right. I'm just going to make coffee. Come and have some.”

“Where's your visitor?” Sir Bernard asked.

“Talking African love songs and tribal poetry with Roger in his room,” Isabel said. “They agree wonderfully on everything but the effect of the adverb. Roger's evolving a theory that adverbs have no place in great poetry—I don't understand why.”

“I should like to hear him,” Sir Bernard said. “Thanks, Isabel; I'll come up if I may.”

“Do,” said Isabel, “and I'll postpone the coffee for half-an-hour. Till then.”

For once Sir Bernard took a taxi; as a general rule he avoided them, preferring the more actively contemplative life of buses and tubes, and preferring also never to be in anything like a hurry. When he arrived he found Philip and Rosamond, who had been dining out, sitting side by side on the kitchen table, watching Isabel make the coffee.

“Come in here, Sir Bernard, won't you?” she said when she had let him in, “and you shall see the refugee soon. He's in the only room with a fire, and as Rosamond is terrified to death of him we have to linger in the kitchen to keep comfortably warm. ‘October nights are chill,' as someone said. No, don't tell me.”

“Isabel,” her sister protested, “I'm not terrified of him, but I don't think it's quite nice of him to stop here. Why doesn't he go home?”

“With mobs prowling round the garden gate?” Isabel asked. “And Roger still making noises to show the union of accent and quantity? My dear Rosamond, when you're married you won't want Philip's friends to go home until he's thoroughly tired out. Otherwise he'll barge into your room at midnight and go on with the conversation with you. And as you're asleep to begin with, and as you don't know what the conversation was about, and as you don't know whether he wants you to agree or disagree though you'd do either for peace, you'll find it very difficult to be nice him. I have never,” Isabel went on, pouring milk into a saucepan, “really quarrelled with Roger.…”

“Isabel!” Sir Bernard murmured.

“Not really,” Isabel persisted, “except once, and that was when he woke me up by calling out to me very late one night, ‘Isabel, what is there in verse which is the equivalent of the principle of the arch?' I really was angry then, but he only kept murmuring lines of poetry and trying to see if they were like an arch. All that because a friend of his who had been to dinner had gone away at half-past eleven instead of half-past one. Always remember, Rosamond my child, that a man needs you to get away from.”

“You mean needs to get away from me, don't you?” Rosamond asked, looking possessively at Philip.

“No,” Isabel said, “Sir Bernard, the milk's boiling … thank you so much. No, Rosamond, I don't. I mean exactly what I said. A man must have you——”

“I wish you wouldn't keep saying ‘a man,' Isabel,” Philip remonstrated.

“Very well—give me a spoon, Philip—Philip then must have you there in order to be able to get away. If you weren't there he wouldn't be able to get away.”

Rosamond looked uninterested. Philip reflected what a curious thing it was that so many people he knew should want to chatter like this. His father did it, Ingram did it, Isabel did it. Sometimes he understood it, sometimes he didn't. But he never understood it as now, suddenly, he understood Rosamond's arm when she leant forward to pass a plate to her sister; somehow that arm always made him think of the Downs against the sky. There was a line, a curved beauty, a thing that spoke to both mind and heart; a thing that was there for ever. And Rosamond? Rosamond was like them, she was there for ever. It occurred to him that, if she was, then her occasional slowness when he was trying to explain something was there for ever. Well, after all, Rosamond was only human; she couldn't be absolutely perfect. And then as she stretched out her arm again he cried out that she was perfect, she was more than perfect; the movement of her arm was something frightfully important, and now it was gone. He had seen the verge of a great conclusion of mortal things and then it had vanished. Over that white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it. And in a moment all that lay beyond it was the bright kitchen, and Sir Bernard standing up to go into the other room. He jumped to his feet and with a movement almost of terror took the loaded coffee tray from Isabel.

“Quietly,” Isabel said as they came to the door of the nondescript room where the Ingrams habitually, alone or with their intimates, passed their time. “Quietly; let's hear what the rescued captive and his saviour are talking about.”

She opened the door gently, and Ingram's voice came out to them. “O rhythm!” he was saying, “rhythm is the cheap pseudo-metaphysical slang of our day. At least it was; it's dying now. Everyone explained everything by talking about rhythm. It's a curious thing that people who will sneer at a man for doing nothing all his life but making words sound lovely and full of meaning will be quite happy over life so long as they can explain it in words that are almost meaningless. I sometimes think the nearest we can get to meaning is to feel as if there was meaning.”

“Yet at least rhythm's distinctly felt,” said another voice, a rich strange voice; “so far they attempt to discover a knowledge of the whole.”

“O so far!” Ingram said, and jumped off the table on which he was sitting as Isabel pushed the door right open and came into the room. After a table had been found for the tray, introductions took place; at least Ingram began to say, “O Rosamond”—he stopped suddenly; “By God,” he said, “I don't know your name.”