Shadows of Ecstasy (2 page)

“Dotty,” said Roger, “but unusual. The transmutation of energy must have been biting him pretty badly. I suppose all that was a get-back.”

“It sounded awfully thrilling,” Isabel said. “What did he mean?”

“My good child, how should I know?” her husband asked plaintively. “The witch-doctors may. Fancy a witch-doctor entering the kingdom of man before Sir Bernard! Rude of him. Sir Bernard, what did you think of it?”

Sir Bernard turned thoughtful eyes on Roger. “I can't remember,” he said, “where I've seen your Mr. Considine before.”

“Perhaps you haven't,” Roger answered, “in which case you naturally wouldn't remember.”

“O but I have,” Sir Bernard said positively. “I have; just lately. I remember the way he curved his fingers. I can't think where.”

“An unknown path of glorious knowledge,” Isabel murmured. “The Dean of Geography looks quite annoyed.”

“He's thinking of the other things that are being brought to fruition,” Roger said, “all about South America. And of the old man who is dying. D'you think Considine meant any one special? or just as a whole?”

“I don't think it was very nice of him,” Isabel said. “People might take it the wrong way.”

“Well, if you know how to take it the right way …” her husband protested. “I suppose he meant something? O heavens, they're beginning again.”

They were, but also they were approaching the end. The dinner hovered over the point at which empty chairs begin to appear, and people misjudge their moment and tiptoe out at the beginning of a speech, and others reckon the chances of catching their distant friends before they are gone. At this point every dinner contends with destiny, and if it is fortunate concludes in a rapid and ecstatic climax; if it is unfortunate it drags out a lingering death, and enters afterwards a shuddering oblivion. This dinner was fortunate. The National Anthem implored Diety on behalf of royalty, and dismissed many incredulous of both. Sir Bernard accompanied Isabel from the room. Ingram, buttonholed by a colleague or two, was delayed till most of those present had gone, and when he reached the cloak-room counter, he found it, but for himself, deserted. He was waiting a little impatiently for his things when a voice behind him spoke. “And with what passion, Mr. Ingram,” it said, “do you yourself encounter darkness?”

Roger turned and saw Nigel Considine. They had been some distance apart at the dinner, and on the same side of the same table, so that Considine's personality had not been in play except through his rather obscure words. Now, as they stood so near, Roger was surprised to find himself taken aback by the other's face and bearing. He was not as a rule easily impressed by those he met; he had far too good an opinion of himself. But here … He saw a man of apparently about fifty, tall, well-proportioned, clean-shaven, with a good forehead and a good chin. But it was neither forehead nor chin that held Ingram; it was the eyes. He thought of the word “smouldering,” and almost as quickly cursed himself for thinking of it; it was such a hateful word, only it was the most accurate. Something, repressed and controlled but vivid, was living in them; they corresponded, in their flickering intensity, to a voice that vibrated with some similar controlled ardour. The word “darkness” as it was uttered called to him as it did in the lines he had quoted; he felt as if he were looking at the thing itself. He began to speak, stammered on a syllable, and at last said helplessly: “I? darkness?”

“You spoke of it familiarly,” the other said. “You used her language.”

Roger pulled himself together; he answered with a slight hostility. “If you mean my one Shakespearean quotation——”

“Isn't that just darkness making itself known?” Considine asked. “Or do you use apposite quotation merely as a social convenience?”

Roger felt ridiculously helpless, as if a believer accustomed to infidels were suddenly confronted by a fanatic of his own creed. But the implied sneer stung him, and he said sharply, “I don't quote.”

“I believe that—because of your voice,” the other answered. “You must forgive me if I was offensive; could I help wondering if you really made that rapturous cry your own?”

He allowed the attendant to help him on with his coat as he spoke. Roger's own things lay neglected on the counter, and the other attendant waited by them. Roger himself was absurdly conscious of the presence of those two auditors. He had often talked highly in similar circumstances before, not theatrically certainly but with a sardonic consciousness that the subservient listeners probably thought him a little mad, with the slight enjoyment of being too much for them, with an equally slight but equally definite and continuous despair that words which meant so much to him meant so little to others. But Considine was speaking perfectly naturally, only always with that sounding depth of significance in his voice.

“I am glad you liked it,” Roger said foolishly.

Considine said nothing at all to this, and Roger became instantly conscious of the fatuity of the words. “Rapturous cry”… “glad you liked it.” Ass! “No, really,” he said very hastily, “I mean … I did really mean it. I mean I do like poetry. Good God!” he thought to himself, “if my classes could hear me now.”

Hatted and gloved, Considine turned to him. “You are a little afraid of it, I think,” he said. “Or else you have spoken your beliefs very little.”

“Nobody cares about it,” Roger said, “and I mock at myself, God forgive mé, because there's nothing else to do.”

They were moving together out of the cloakroom.

“There's much else to do,” Considine answered, “and I think you believe that; I think you dare encounter darkness.”

He raised his hand in salutation. Isabel was ready waiting with Sir Bernard, but before he joined them Roger stood still watching Considine going towards the door, and when at last he came to them he was still troubled.

“Darling, what's the matter?” Isabel said. “You're looking very gloomy.”

“Mr. Considine's been talking of the fakirs,” Sir Bernard said, “and Roger's wondering if he's one.”

Roger regarded them for a moment and then made an effort to recover himself. “I don't mind telling you,” he answered, “that Mr. Considine has played me entirely off my own stage in my own play, and I didn't think there was a man living who could do that.”

“Elucidate,” Sir Bernard said.

“I shan't elucidate,” Ingram answered. “I don't see why I should be the only fellow to encounter darkness. D'you want a taxi, Sir Bernard?”

Sir Bernard did, and after having parted from the Ingrams and entered it, he lay back and tried once more to remember where he had seen Considine. It was quite recently, and yet he had a vague feeling that it wasn't recently. An idea of yesterday and an idea of many years ago conflicted in his mind—a man with his hand a little lifted, almost as if it contained and controlled power, a hand of energy in rest. Perhaps, he thought, it was the theme of the speeches which had misled him; they had been listening to talk about distant places, and perhaps his mind had transferred that distance to time. It must have been yesterday or he wouldn't remember so clearly. It couldn't have been long ago or Considine, who was obviously younger than his own sixty odd years, would have changed. His gesture mightn't have changed, all the same—well, it didn't matter. As he got out at his Kensington house he reflected that it would come back, of course; sooner or later the pattern of his knowledge would bring that little detail to his mind. The intellect hardly ever failed one eventually, if one fulfilled the conditions it imposed. But it did perhaps rather ignore the immediate necessities of ordinary life; in its own pure life it overlooked the “Now and here” of one's daily wishes. Still, his own was very good to him; with a happy gratitude to it he came into the library, where he found his son reading letters.

“Hullo, Philip!” he said. “Had a good evening? How's Rosamond?”

“Very fit, thanks,” Philip answered. “Did you have a good time?”

Sir Bernard nodded, and sat down leisurely. “Roger told us how he liked poetry,” he said, “and the explorer told us how he liked himself, and Mr. Nigel Considine told us how he disliked the University.”

“Not in so many words?” Philip asked.

“Contrapuntal,” Sir Bernard said. “When you've heard as many speeches as I have, you'll find that's the only interest in them: the intermingling of the theme proposed and the theme actual.”

“I can never make out whether Roger's serious,” Philip said. “He seems to be getting at one the whole time. Rosamond feels it too.”

Sir Bernard thought it very likely. Rosamond Murchison was Isabel's sister and Roger's sister-in-law, but only in law. Rosamond privately felt that Roger was conceited and not quite nice; Roger, less privately, felt that Rosamond was stuck-up and not quite intelligent. When, as at present, she was staying with the Ingrams in Hampstead, it was only by Isabel's embracing sympathy that tolerable relations were maintained. Sir Bernard almost wished that Philip could have got engaged to someone else. He was very fond of his son, and he was afraid that the approaching marriage would make, at the times when he visited them, an atmosphere in which, but for brief intervals, he would find it impossible to breathe. Philip's mind by itself was at present earnest and persevering, if a trifle slow. But Philip's mind surrounded and closed in by Rosamond's promised, so far as he could see, to become merely static. He looked over at his son.

“Roger's serious enough,” he said. “But he still expects to get direct results instead of indirect. He never realizes that the real result of anything is always round the corner.”

“What corner?” Philip asked.

“The universal corner,” Sir Bernard said, “around which we are always on the point of turning—into a street where there are all the numbers except that of the house we're looking for. Good heavens, I'm becoming philosophical. That's the result of University dinners.”

“I don't think I quite follow you,” Philip said.

“It doesn't at all matter,” Sir Bernard answered. “I only meant that I should like you to believe that Roger's quite serious, and a little unhappy.”

“Unhappy!” Philip exclaimed. “Roger!”

“Certainly unhappy,” Sir Bernard said. “He's fanatic enough to believe passionately and not sufficiently fanatical to believe that other people ought to believe. Naturally also, being young, he thinks his own belief is the only real way of salvation, though he'd deny that if you asked him. So he's in a continual unsuccessful emotional conflict, and therefore he's unhappy.”

“But I don't understand,” Philip said. “Roger never goes to church. What does he believe in?”

“Poetry,” Sir Bernard answered, and “O—poetry!” Philip exclaimed; “I thought you meant something religious. I don't see why poetry should make him unhappy.”

“Try living in a world where everyone says to you, quite insincerely, ‘O isn't Miss Murchison
charming
!'” his father said drily. “Or alternatively, ‘I can't think what you see in her.' And then——”

He was interrupted by the entrance of a third person.

“Hullo, Ian,” he broke off; “how's the Archbishop?”

Ian Caithness was the vicar of a Yorkshire parish and Philip's godfather. He was a tall man of about Sir Bernard's age and looked like an ascetic priest, which was more by good luck than by merit, for he practised no extreme austerities. But he took life seriously, and (as often happens) attributed his temperament to his religion. He was therefore not entirely comfortable with other people of different temperaments who did the same thing, and a lifelong friendship with Sir Bernard had probably survived because the other remained delicately poised in a philosophy outside the Church. As a Christian Sir Bernard would have probably irritated his friend intolerably; he soothed him as a—it was difficult to say what; Sir Bernard occasionally alluded to himself as a neo-Christian, “meaning,” he said, “like most neos, one who takes the advantages without the disadvantages. As Neo-Platonist, neo-Thomist, and neolithic too, for all I know.” On the rare occasions when Caithness came to London he always stopped in Kensington; on the still rarer when Sir Bernard went to Yorkshire he always went to church.

“Rather bothered,” Caithness said in answer to his friend's greeting. “The Government papers are making capital out of the massacres of the missions, and demanding expeditions.”

“What massacres?” Philip asked in surprise. “Being down in Dorset for a couple of weeks has cut away the papers.”

“There've been a number of simultaneous native risings in the interior of Africa,” Caithness answered absently, “and so far as we can hear the Christian missionaries have been killed. The Archbishop's very anxious that the Government shan't use that as a reason for military operations.”

“Why ever not?” Philip said staring.

Caithness made an abrupt gesture with his hand. “Because it is their duty, their honour, to die, if necessary,” he said; “it is a condition of their calling. Because the martyrs of the Church must not be avenged by secular arms.”

“A very unusual view for the Church to take,” Sir Bernard murmured. “Normally.… It's a curious business altogether. I was told this afternoon that the Khedive has left Cairo for a British warship. Roger's anthropological idols getting active, I suppose.”

“The pressure on Egypt must be pretty bad, then,” Caithness said. “Well, that isn't our business. We can't, of course, object to any steps the Government think it wise to take in their own interests, so long as they don't use the missions as a reason. The Archbishop has intimated to the Societies who sent them out that no material ought to be given to the papers—photographs or what not.”