Shadows of Ecstasy (20 page)

“Armies?” Considine laughed. “O I know I caused that tale to be spread. But those of my people who are here are entering into their greatest moment, and I give them the sacrifice they desire. Wait; you shall see them.” He picked up the speaking-tube and said something to the driver. The car ran swiftly northward, went round by Regent's Park, into St. John's Wood, and came out at last round Primrose Hill on to Haverstock Hill somewhere below Belsize Park Station. But a few minutes showed that this way was impossible. The road was full of people pressing downward, less thick below the station because of the mob that surged round the entrance, which no vehicle could get through. Beyond and above it the Hill was a noisy tumult of refugees, and beyond in the midnight sky was a red glare, above which again the useless searchlights crossed and wavered. Hysterical shrieks, curses, the noise of many separate scuffles came to them. Near them two wheelbarrows laden with bundles had come into collision, and the owners were fighting wildly in the midst of their scattered goods. Here and there a woman lay in a dead faint; in places the white robes and black cloaks of the Dominicans of the Priory showed as they laboured to create some sort of order. (“No doubt,” Considine murmured to Caithness, “the Anglican clergy are somewhere about too. But of course they haven't the same advantage in dress.”) More and more fugitives were hurrying from the side turnings. Even as the car slowed down, to turn down one of these and escape, two young men scrambled on to the driver's seat. “This car is going to take us,” one said drunkenly; the other hung on to the wheel. Roger glanced at Considine, who, observant but motionless, was lying back in his corner. The driver abandoned the wheel, and with what seemed but a light blow knocked one sprawling into the road; the other let go the wheel to protect himself, was dexterously flung overboard also, and the car backed a little way down the Hill. Considine took up the tube again. “Go round as far as is necessary,” he said. “I must come to the top.”

Eventually, after many pauses and very long detours, the thing was done. They came back from the north on to the Hampstead ridge, and heard beyond them a noise quite different to anything that had passed before. “I will have the car opened,” Considine said to the driver. “Go slowly till you come near Highgate and then bend away to the stopping-place.”

The glare by now had become much stronger, and Roger saw Considine suddenly stand up. Almost at the same moment a great cry in a strange tongue roared out beyond them. A black soldier appeared running and shouting beside the car, and another, and then, rushing towards them, a whole group. He heard the steady beating of drums, and a cry resolving itself into English: “Deathless! Deathless! Glory to the Deathless One!” Considine, raising his right hand, made with it, high in the air, a sudden gesture; the cry beat all round them and ceased and broke out yet more wildly: “Glory to the Master of Love! Glory to the Deathless One!” Negroes ran by the car, rushing up to it, to touch it and fall back exhausted; they leapt and twisted at it.

He felt a sudden lurch and guessed insanely what the obstacle was they had passed over. The cries, now in African, now in English, made an arch of sound: “Death for the Deathless One!” he heard. “Glory to the Lord of Death!” They were passing now between blazing fires each with its own dance of whirling figures, which broke and hurled themselves at the car, or flung themselves prostrate in adoration as it rolled by. Opposite him the figure of Considine seemed to dilate in the red glare; again and again he made the high mysterious gesture with his right hand; every now and then he cried out in a great voice and a strange tongue. Roger tore his eyes away and looked out over the Heath, but beyond the light of the watch-fires it lay in darkness, a darkness which seemed to him to be continually resolving itself into these leaping, shrieking figures. Caithness was leaning back in his corner, his eyes shut, his lips moving in swift murmured prayer.

Roger looked back as the car suddenly stopped and Considine, signing for silence, began to speak. What he said Roger could not tell, but as he ended and the car moved on again, a shout greater than any before went up. He knew instinctively the meaning—it was that whereof the rhythm leapt into the former English: “Death for the Deathless.”

But whatever the cries, Death itself began to accompany them on their passage, for there was heard suddenly a revolver shot, and then another, and as Roger, supposing for a moment that the English had begun an attack, looked round him, he saw one of the running foaming figures by the car stabbing at himself with a bayonet, and saw the madness spreading to others, saw the steel glinting and crimson-streaked faces in the light of the fires. Many of the negroes had torn off their tunics, and some were already naked from head to foot; among whom appeared here and there a yet wilder form in skins of various kinds and high plumes of feathers, leading some eddy of the general dance. Close by him two great negroes caught and held and stabbed at each other with broad knives and more shots sounded around them. Again and again he felt a horrid jerk and lurch of the car, and still through it all Considine stood upright opposite him, and with an exalted but unmoved face considered the revelry he had bidden to be.

At last this journey along a ridge of blazing watch-fires between two seas of darkness came to an end. The crowds of negroes began to thin. Considine threw up both hands, made a downward and outward gesture, cried out once more, and sat down. The last negro halted, flung himself on the earth, the car gathered strength, swept on, and after a while issued at last into the darkness and silence of the open country.

Caithness spoke bitterly, “Are you letting that horde of negroes loose on London?” he asked.

“You heard me,” Considine answered. “You heard me an hour ago. I have let the English feel panic, panic such as they have not felt since the Vikings raided their coasts and burned their towns a thousand years ago. They have been afraid of their feelings, of ecstasy and riot and savage glee; they have frozen love and hated death. And I have shown them these things wild and possibly triumphant; and what fear of a thousand armies will not do, fear of their own passions will. They will ask for peace. As for my Africans, they ask for death and they shall have death. Most of them will kill themselves or one another to-night; those who survive till to-morrow will die before your soldiers. I do not pity them; they are not the adepts; all that they are capable of I have given them. They die for the Undying. How many martyrs would the Churches offer me of such a strain?”

“They die for your schemes,” Caithness said.

“They die for the Master of Death,” Considine answered, “either for me or for another. If I do not achieve, another will. Do you think it is an idle brag to call this year the First of the Second Evolution? It is a truth the story of your Christ darkly foreshadowed. Him that you ignorantly worship declare I unto you. Your martyrs in the past have died, many of them, in such an agony of supreme rapture, and those of many another faith. But I bring you achievement, I bring you the fulfilment of desires, the lordship of love and death.”

There was a little silence; then he went on, slowly and almost to himself: “It is a long work, and many have waited for it. My father longed for it and did not see it, though he knew the beginning and taught it to me. This was the beginning of sex when far away in the ages the world divided itself in its primal dark instinct to destroy death which seemed its doom. And when man came he desired immortality, and deceived himself with begetting children and with religion and with art. All these are not ecstasy, but the shadow of ecstasy. Kingship and dynasties he created and cities and monuments and science, and nothing satisfied that hungry desire. And then he created love, and knew that that which existed between a man and a woman was mysterious and powerful, but what to do with it he has not known. Only a few have known, Caesar and a few others, and they have been struck down. I think perhaps Chaka knew, for he was of the initiates. I taught him what to do and how to govern his energies. But he had an irresistible hunger for cruelty and destruction, and when the time came he was destroyed. For the true adepts care for nothing but to discover the secrets, and to enter into communion with ecstasy; and if they shall govern the world, as they shall, they will do it to make known to all men the things they themselves know. Fast and vigil they keep for this, as my father taught me when I was a boy two centuries ago. In trance and in waking they keep the end before them. I beheld in a trance the making of sex, I went down to where in history and in the individual being—which are one, as all the mystics know: inward or backward, it is the same way—to where those high laboratories lie. And there, in trance or in waking I do not know, I myself carried out the great experiment, and I laid my imagination upon all the powers and influences of sex and love and desire. In the adolescence of my life I did this, and I have thriven upon that strength ever since. For first I bent it to my own life. I set before myself three hundred years from that night, and not two hundred have since gone by. I have gathered from many women all that imagination desired, and I have changed it to strength and cunning and length of days. I have never kissed a woman; all that have lived with me have had what lovers they desired. For a kiss also is but the shadow of ecstasy. Then they taught me in the lodge of the initiated how, though death might be far, yet it was certain, and that at death the ghost of man wanders stripped of all powers that it has gained in a place of shadows, and that there remained yet to be found the secret of how man could go into that place armed with passion and high delight and return to this world when and as he would. He that has mastered love has mastered the world, and he that masters death is lord of that other. Also as the delights of mere bodily love are but shadows beside the rich joys of the transforming imagination, so this itself is nothing compared to the revivifying intoxication of the passage from life to death and from death to life. And I set my purpose on this and laboured to achieve it. But, while I brooded, the feet of Europe came nearer, and the blind intelligence of Europe looked into the clear light of the lodges and said: ‘It is dark, it is dark,' and smelt wickedness. And the religion of Europe came, and the learning of Europe. Then we the adepts knew that, unless we made Africa free, in a little while Europe would trample over us and we should be gone; and we resolved that Europe must be stayed.”

He paused and looked out over the fields and hedges between which they were passing. Then he went on more sharply and swiftly:

“Not that all the Europeans who came to Africa then had closed themselves to wisdom. Some of the white officers sat in our lodges and were initiated and entered into trance, and made themselves strong men; there have always been some who would do this—Mottreux was one; I met him in Uganda, and there was a French General in Morocco, and in the south Simon Rosenberg's great uncle. And there were others. All of us set to work to unite Africa. We knew the lodges already in various parts of the land, and we drew all these into one. And we spoke with the chiefs and kings; little by little we brought them into our purpose. The witch-doctors and sorcerers were ours already, though they were in the outer circle. They gave us a means of ruling the tribes, and little by little through many years we proposed to ourselves to show the people of Africa the doctrines of freedom and sacrifice and ecstasy, and I determined to strike at Europe by panic and strength.”

Roger said abruptly, “Yet you seemed to wish that Mottreux hadn't fired.”

“Why, for myself,” Considine said, “if men without weapons come against me I'll meet them without weapons, heart to heart and strength to strength. But shall I waste years imposing my will on the Governments of Europe—and spend my energies so? It shall be a shorter business. They proclaim guns and they shall have guns. But for the adepts——If I wish Mottreux had not fired it was for his sake, not mine.”

“Your friends may fire at you one day,” the intolerant voice of the priest broke in, “when they want something you can't give them.”

“Pieces of silver, for example,” Considine said, not turning his head.

The night lay about them; they swept on through it. Roger looked out on the unseen countryside, and remembered the words that had brought about his own meeting with the conquistador who sat opposite him. “I will encounter darkness as a bride”—he was rushing towards that darkness now. The dark closed them in, but they were speeding towards the core of the darkness; the words themselves were swallowing them up. All the miracles of the poets had rent and illumined and charged that night, but the mingling light and dark which was in all easily accepted verse lay far behind them now where the wild rapture of the Africans surged above London. It was as if he had passed from them from something which was himself, to something which was even more himself. His very physical body was being carried in towards the energy which created art. Art … the ancient word so often defiled and made stupid stood for a greatness only partially explored. His body felt the energy opposite him—an energy self-restrained, self-shaped. “And hug it in mine arms——” but if the arms could not bear it, if the awful blasting power of that darkness should destroy him as the glory of Zeus destroyed Semele? It was too late now for choice; he was lost and saved at once. Onward and onward, away from the ironic contemplations of the children of the wise world and from the shrieking self-immolating abandonments of the more ignorantsons of rapture; away from young perplexity and young greed; away from Isabel. High-set, as the moon now rising, he saw her, knowing in her daily experiences, her generous heart and her profound womanhood, all that he must compass sea and land to find. This was the separation that had been between man and woman from the beginning; this was fated, and this must be willed. It was the everlasting reconciliation of the everlasting contradiction—to will what was fated, to choose necessity. Perfect for one moment in his heart, he knew the choice taken. He willed necessity. All the poets had done this in their own degree—the very making of their verse was this, their patience and their labour, their silence till the utterance they so long desired rose into being within them. This was the secret of royalty—the solemn anointed figure of government to whom necessary obedience was willed, and so through all orders of hierarchical life, secular or religious, vocational in every kind, trade or profession, ceremonial or actual. Love too was its image, but love and not the beloved was the necessity; to love, and only to the beloved as the sacred means, the honourable toil was given.