Shadows of Ecstasy (24 page)

“I would rather you had slain me,” Inkamasi said, “than held me in such bondage.”

“The cords have not been strained,” Considine answered. “Save for those few days in my own house, and for my knowledge of your ways, you have been always free. But now, not, I grant, by my will you are free indeed. You belong wholly to yourself, and I who am the son of the interior knowledge of rapture salute the rapture of kingship, the incarnation of government and order and immortality.”

“You talk vainly,” the king said, “for my cousin leads my people, and there is no place for me on earth. Will you remove my cousin and set me at the head of the Zulus?”

“I will not prevent your return to them,” the other answered again, “but I think you know that the rifles of his guard await you. And if not, if you are greeted again with the royal salute, and your armies follow you, will you set them for your sake against all the Powers of Africa? For I do not think you believe in the schools or in the exploration of love and wonder and death.”

“I am a Christian,” Inkamasi said. “I believe that love and death are at the feet of Jesus who is called Christ.”

“Believe what you will,” said Considine. “You know what we declare to the initiates of Africa. Will you join us to seek the way by which man descends living into the grave and returns?”

“I will not seek it,” the other replied. “It has been opened once and it is enough. And you—are you sure that man can conquer till he has been wholly defeated? are you sure that he can find plenitude till he has known utter despair? You will not let him despair of himself, but it may be that only in such a complete despair he finds that which cannot despair and is something other than man.”

“There are many reasons for avoiding the work, and all religions have excused man,” the other's voice said. “Despair if you will, and hope that despair may save you. Entreat the gods; I do not refuse you your prayer.”

“There's a submission we're slow to understand,” Inkamasi cried out, “a place where divinity triumphed—I believe in that.”

“Be it so,” the answer came; “but tell me then what you will do.”

There was a long pause before the king said: “I know there is no place for me upon earth.”

“There is place and enough for Inkamasi,” Considine answered. “There is no place in Africa for Inkamasi the king. You best know whether there is a place in Europe. You know whether your friends downstairs and in London receive that royalty as I receive it.”

“They have all courtesy and good will, but they have forgotten the Crown,” Inkamasi said. “They do not mock me but they do not believe.”

“They are sons without a mother,” Considine went on, “for they know neither the Crown nor the Republic. Royalty is a shade and Equality not yet born. What is the difference between these traditions to me so long as either is held and is a passion? But most men are empty of both. And if I must choose I will choose the king and not the State, for the king is flesh and blood and yet undying, and is a symbol of that we seek.”

“Am I left,” Inkamasi asked, “to find my only servants in my enemies?”

“It seems,” Considine answered, “even so, that I and I only am the friend of the king.”

“And what will the king's friend offer the king in his superfluousness?” Inkamasi asked again.

“I have only two things to give,” Considine said; “let the royalty of the king choose which he will take from a believer in him. I will offer a house and servants and money, all that he needs, and he may live contented with his knowledge of his own inheritance. Or I will give the king a royal death.”

“There will be none to hamper you then,” Inkamasi said with a sudden smile.

“There is none to hamper me now,” Considine answered gravely. “For the majesty of the king is in my care and on my side, and if the king choose to live without his majesty, though the choice is his own, he will choose to live in a dream. I am the keeper of the strength of royalty; what is outside me is Europe, and that the king knows.”

“Yet I thought Europe would aid me to aid my people,” Inkamasi meditated aloud—“law and medicine and science.”

“They are good in their place, but the question is whether these things can take the place of greater,” Considine answered. “But the choice is for the king. Only it must be to-day. To-Morrow the submarine returns to Africa, and there are three ways in which the king may go in her. I will have him taker to his people and set among them, that he may try the fates between himself and the man who now rules them, and who inherits royalty if Inkamasi dies. Or I will send him as my friend till peace is signed and he may live a private man wherever he chooses on the face of the earth.”

“And the third way?” Inkamasi asked.

“He shall go clothed with royalty and death,” Considine said. “I will come when night falls to know the king's mind.”

He stood up and went down on one knee, and then moved backwards to the door. There in silence he waited a moment, opened it, and went out.

Inkamasi lay through the afternoon considering all that had been said. The suggestion which had been made to him not only received additional force from the fact that it had been presented as one among several possibilities, but drew its chief strength from the tendencies of his own mind. He knew very well that, of all those by whom he was, or was likely to be surrounded, Considine alone had such intense appreciation of royalty as he himself had. Nor did his own bitter dislike blind him to the fact that his first attempt upon the other had failed, and that to concentrate the rest of his life upon remedying that failure would be not only undignified but treasonable. The king might hate, but his duty was to his own kingship first and always. How to save and serve that must be the first thing in his mind. But for this a life in England among his new circle of friends seemed useless enough. He had a sudden vision of himself growing old, harping upon the tradition which was his, regarded at best as a feeble sentimental survival, at worst as a mere bore. All his profound romanticism rejected the prospect. But to live as Considine proposed would be little better. He would be pitied by himself instead of by others; he would dig his own pit of sentimentality instead of having it dug for him, but the pit would be as deep and fatal.

There was a course Considine had not named, to try and forget that he was the king, to settle down to ordinary work, here or abroad, and submit himself to the idea of the Government, whatever it might be, under which he might find himself: accepting his dispossession simply and sincerely. And this, had there been no alternative, he might have done. But once that alternative had been suggested the colour of the thought of it tinged all his attempts to choose. For though the man Inkamasi might not kill himself—so his creed taught—yet the king had a duty to his kingship. So far as might be, it must never be surrendered; and here was a way by which it might be surrendered in a beauty and greatness equal to its own. Examining himself for the last time, Inkamasi knew that in turning to Europe he had desired Europe for the sake of Africa; that he had studied logic and medicine and law for the sake of the king and his people, and that the king might the better benefit and govern and be one with his people. He did not care for the high abstractions of thought; when he talked of them it was when he took his ease in his private circle and amused himself as other kings had amused themselves with jest or hunt or song. And now, the child of unknown things, he set his face to go up to Jerusalem, that the king's crown might be properly received by the unvestmenting hands of Death. Peace entered in on him and he lay looking out of the window, watching the November twilight gather, and uniting within himself, not in such a twilight but in a more wonderful union of opposites, the day of his own individual being and the mysterious night of his holy and awful office.

Chapter Twelve

THE JEWELS OF MESSIAS

For some time after Considine had left him Roger did nothing. He sat on the verandah and looked out over the grass lawn and the terrace at the sea which lay beyond. And he thought to himself that never in his life had he felt so much, so idiotically, like a baby as he did now. Apart from that recurrent thought he couldn't think. “It's the shock,” he said, half-aloud from time to time, but without convincing himself of anything whatsoever, without indeed particularly wanting to convince himself.

A movement or two of a dead hand, of the hand of a man whom even Considine had now abandoned. It had failed, but it had come very near to succeeding. Roger—product of at least a semi-culture of education and intellect—sat there and felt that culture and education and intellect had all vanished together, all but the very simplest intellect. Even his passion for literature had disappeared; he simply wasn't up to it—he had no more wish or capacity for Milton or Shakespeare than a small child, who might laugh if some of the lines were mouthed at him but would be lost and vacant-eyed if anyone tried to explain them or quoted them seriously. That dead hand moving had abolished the whole edifice of his mind; he sat and stared at the sea. In London things had been different; he had been thrilled and romanticized. In London there was no sea, and no golden-hung rooms with a couch on which a dead man lay. In London these things didn't happen. He had heard and believed, but here belief was abolished; he was confronted with the simple fact. It had to be accepted, and its acceptance was what reduced him to a state of infancy.

The sea—he couldn't look at the shore from where he sat; only at the terrace and the sea beyond—the sea was different. He wondered, vaguely, whether it was Africa, or whether both sea and Africa were names for something else, a full power, an irresistible mass: irresistible if it moved, but then it didn't move. Or hadn't. Hadn't was a better word, because it might. All that mass of waters might gather itself up and surge forward—surge or creep, swiftly or slowly, anyhow irresistible. But he, sitting there, with the memory of that dead hand jerking—as if a sudden wave had flopped forward out of the sea over the green lawn, and then retreated again, and the whole vast mass had swung silent and removed once more. If the mass followed after a while, followed the wave? He would live in it, he would be changed so as to breathe and bear it; he would see what other inhabitants peopled it—there might be one chief thing, a fish of sorts, a swift phosphorescent fish which was called Considine on earth before the sea came. Or if the sea were merely a flat plain for something else to slide over, a huge Africa in the shape he knew from maps sliding over the water—only of course
not
sliding, but marching, millions on millions of black manikins, so small, so very small, but so many, marching forward, yet keeping that mapped shape, and he would be just their size and be marching with them—left, right; left, right. Whether they were alive or dead he couldn't say; the fellow who was marching either opposite him or alongside him—it wasn't clear which—kept quivering and jerking his hand. Hosts of them—Lord of hosts; he had known the Lord of hosts when he was called Considine, and rode on a bat's back; these were the bats. Why was he here among this crowd of bats with negro faces that rose out of that ocean, now throbbing free from the ties which had so long held it? And all the bats were singing—“Fathom five, fathom five; rich and strange.” There they were, all coming on; he himself had called them and they were coming.

He heard, but did not notice, a step beside him. Then a voice he half-recognized said: “Here you are!” It was Caithness's voice, and with the recognition Roger's trance broke. He shifted, looked round, realized that he was cold, stood up, stamped once or twice, and said: “Yes, here I am. But don't,” he added, as his mind came more to itself, “ask me where.”

“It's a strange place,” Caithness said. “He must have many of them, scattered about. Near London, for the airships to land. How's he kept himself hidden all these years?”

“I suppose,” Roger said flippantly, “the exalted imagination suggested it. Shakespeare was a good business man.”

He found a certain relief in talking to the priest, however different their views of Considine, as an ordinary Christian might find it easier to talk to an atheist than to a saint. It wouldn't last, but just for a little it was pleasant and easy.

But Caithness, not having gone so far, was not so desirous of reaction. He said, looking gloomily at the young man: “I don't know what you find in him. Where did he take you?”

Roger looked out to sea again, and half-unconsciously said, “There.” The sea should give up its dead, out of the sea of universal shipwreck the dead sailors of humanity should rise again, their bodies purified by the salt of that ocean, running up to a land which perhaps then they would feel and know for the first time in its full perfection: matter made purely sensitive to matter, and all the secrets of the passion of life revealed. Who could tell what wonders waited then, when emotion was full and strong and sufficient, no longer greedy and grasping, when the senses could take in colour and essence and respond to all the delicate vibrations which now their clumsy dullness missed, when deprivation itself should be an intense means of experiencing both the deprived self and the thing of which it was deprived, when—O when space and time were no more hindrances, when (for all one could tell) the body itself might multiply itself, as certain magicians had been said to do, and truly be here and there at once, or—“Come then,” he prayed, but did not know to whom, “master of life, come quickly.”

“It's cold out here,” he heard Caithness say abruptly, “let's go in. Have you seen Rosenberg?”

Roger, as he half-reluctantly turned to follow, thought of the Jew with a shock. “No,” he said. “I'd forgotten him.”

“I wonder what this man means to do with him,” the priest went on. “Colonel Mottreux has brought the famous jewels.” There was a light sneer in his voice, and Roger knew that the desire and delight of the late Simon Rosenberg was utterly incomprehensible to Caithness. Yet it should not have been so, he thought, for was there after all so much difference between minds that longed to see their own natures made manifest, the one in converted and beautiful souls adorned with virtues, the other in a chosen and beautiful body adorned with jewels? Certainly Caithness thought it was for the good of the souls, but no doubt Rosenberg thought that his wife enjoyed wearing the jewels, and very likely she did. Certainly, also, on Caithness's hypothesis, the souls were likely to enjoy their kind of beauty for a much longer time than Mrs. Rosenberg, even if she hadn't died when she did, could possibly have enjoyed hers. So that Caithness was actually likely to get more satisfaction out of his externalized desire than Rosenberg. But for that you must have a supernatural hypothesis, and the fact that a supernatural hypothesis had quite definite advantages didn't make it true. The fact that man wanted a thing very much never did make it true—or the body that lay within would now perhaps be walking in the house and even coming up to speak to him.… He shuddered involuntarily, no more in servile than in holy fear, and to escape from that hovering awe said: “Have they been given to Rosenberg yet?”