Shadows of Ecstasy

by Charles Williams

  “Yes,” he gasped.

  “Get in the driver’s seat.” They reached the hall; Mottreux looking frantically round rushed him to the front door, paused less than a second to see that the priest was actually scrambling into the car, pushed the door almost shut, lest by chance the other should see him, and sent another mad glance around the hall.

  By so small a chance he was defeated. The old Jew, when he was left alone with the casket, had, by some trick of the mind, gone back to the room where he and his companions had spent most of the day. He was sitting there, lost in his meditations, when Mottreux broke in on him, and in one wild dash caught the case in one hand. But Rosenberg held to the trust which the God of his fathers had imposed on him. He was dragged violently from his chair, but he clung to the sacred treasure; he heard a voice yelling oaths, but though he was shaken to and fro he said nothing. His face, as he lifted it, was full of a scorn deeper than time, the scorn of his God for the spoilers of the holy places. He saw the distorted face of a greedy Gentile above him, and before the bullet searched his brain he spat at it once.

  But by now the revolvers of the other servants of the Deathless One had blown the lock of their prison from the door, and the momentary prisoners had already nearly reached the hall. In a wild confusion and anger they came; Mottreux heard them, and ran to the glass doors on to the drive. These were fastened, and he was again delayed. By the time he had got them open and was outside, Vereker and the Egyptian were out by the car. He was seen; he fired once and ran along the wall of the house. The shot probably saved Caithness’s life, for none of the pursuers were in a state to distinguish between the responsibility of the fugitives for the crime. But Vereker was unarmed, and the Egyptian was distracted by Mottreux’s appearance. He left the priest to his companion, and ran after Mottreux, circling widely out so as to command the corner as he approached it. In the darkness it could only dimly be seen.

  Voices were calling from doors and windows. There were men in the room where the dead Jew lay. Roger, borne along in the general rush, was there also. He wondered afterwards why no-one had shot him down out of hand, and attributed his salvation to the fact that Considine had treated him familiarly. He tried to order his thoughts, but they only repeated themselves: “Considine is dead; is he dead?” Was he dead? or would he, first again in the great experiment, achieve the work he had desired? The question beat at his brain as he ran. He saw the body of the Jew as he came into the room, and paused by it. Without, from the darkness, there came more shots. Roger pulled himself together; he’d better look for Caithness. If Considine were dead, the two of them would be in a very dubious position; he went as far as the glass doors. There he listened; presently, away round the side of the house, he heard another shot. He slipped out and along to the car, whose lights shone steadily as they had done when last he looked at it before he had walked in the verandah and talked. This was the kind of thing that remained; the imagination of man was blown out in a moment but the light of his mechanical invention remained. He cursed deeply, and saw Caithness, who in a restless uncertainty had got out of the car. Roger walked up to him, but for a few seconds neither of them spoke.

  At last Caithness said: “What had we better do?”

  Roger answered: “I should think you’d better get away. Inkamasi’s dead, so I don’t see much point in your staying.”

  Caithness looked round, and tried to see something in the darkness. He failed, and presently asked, “What’s happened to Mottreux?”

  “How the hell do I know?” Roger asked. “Why did you bolt with him?” A sudden thought struck him, and he added: “Did you—by God, did you arrange for him to shoot?”

  “No,” the priest answered, “but I promised to do what I could for him if … if he needed it.”

  “I see,” Roger said, and walked a few steps away. He couldn’t trust himself to speak. That this dreamer, this master of vision should have been destroyed by—by a traitor and a clergyman. He walked back abruptly and said: “I hope you paid him better than Caiaphas did? Even at half-crowns it would only come to three pounds fifteen.”

  Caithness began quietly, “Don’t be unfair, Ingram——” but Roger pursued his own thoughts. “And did you promise him as much for Rosenberg?”

  “Rosenberg!” Caithness cried out, startled. “He can’t have killed Rosenberg?”

  “Can’t he?” Roger said. “What do you think he wanted? Go and look; Rosenberg’s dead and the jewels are gone.”

  The priest stared at him in something like horror. He had believed Mottreux to be sincere, and yet now—words overheard between the traitor and Rosenberg rushed back, the likelihood that so great a personal desire rather than a conversion of thought should have alienated him, his turning away at the last moment, the shot heard in the room close at hand, the old man slain (for he believed Roger at once), the seizure of the jewels by a covetous hand. Roger saw him flinch and said, with a touch of pity out of his own distress, “You didn’t know?”

  “God help me!” Caithness said. “I didn’t know.” He hadn’t known; he hadn’t, if it were blameworthy, been to blame; if he were partly responsible for Considine’s death, it was a noble responsibility, and he would bear it. Out of evil, God brought forth good. He added, “Then there’s the less reason to say.”

  Yet they did not move. Behind the house, between it and the sea, in the darkness, armed men sought one another in hate and fear, abandoning themselves to a passion which their master would have bidden them use for the sole purpose of interior enlargement and further victory. Their strength was turned to greed of treasure or greed of vengeance; the accident which had struck Considine down had released their too little mastered frenzies. The two strangers delayed, reluctant alike to go or stay in the stillness. And, while they delayed, the stillness burst into tumult. There were shots and voices calling, Mottreux’s voice challenging, a chaos of sound, and breaking out of it and over it a high terrific shriek.

  The shriek terrified them as they stood there; it was a death-call. It scattered their disputes and their dogmas, for, whether he who uttered it was slaying or being slain, it was the cry of an intenser death than that of an ordinary man. One of those experimenting spirits had broken into that cry; it swept out to them from the passion of a nature beyond theirs, and its sound pierced them with fear of death, of that greater life, and of the greater death in that life. The lord of the adepts was dead, and enmity was abroad among them as the dead Zulu had prophesied days before. The cry came to Roger as a blast that drove him away. Nigel Considine was dead; the treachery he had despised had taken him; the final dereliction had swallowed him. If he returned—but Roger fled from that return. His nerve broke; he shrank back against the car, and said to Caithness, “Let’s go; let’s go.”

  The priest himself, trembling, turned. “Shall we——” he began, laying his hand on the car.

  “No, for God’s sake,” Roger exclaimed. “Let’s leave it all, if we’re leaving it. If it isn’t for us, let’s get away from it. Come; we’ll get somewhere.”

  Caithness silently assented. “But let’s get our coats at least!” he said. “They’ll be just in there.”

  “I’m not going in there again,” Roger said, “unless Considine himself calls me.”

  “Then I will,” Caithness said. He sprang back into the hall, and in a couple of minutes returned. “We shall want them if we’re walking all night,” he said, and so, in a mingling of terror and despair, and hope and the commonplace, they went down to the gates and out into the darkness beyond. Once the priest said, “Mrs. Ingram’ll be glad to see you back.”

  “Yes,” Roger answered. “Isabel …” and said no more.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SEA-CHANGE

  Some time next morning, after wandering long on foot and finding at last in an unknown town a small garage where they hired a car that took them to Winchester, and coming thence by train to London, they reached again the house in Kensington, from which less than forty-eight h
ours earlier they had been swept away. The streets were still full of wanderers, though it had been known for hours that safety had returned, and the wild intrusion been destroyed. The mob by then had fallen into a waking stupor, not unlike the sleep in which Rosamond still lay; it moved somnambulistically, and the civil authorities, by the use of police and military, by commandeering transport, by supplying food and drink as best they could, managed at last to control and direct it. Laden motor-buses carried the fugitives back towards their houses; taxis, lorries, and all other possible vehicles were put in service for the same purpose. Roger and Caithness made a slow way by the Tubes, now gradually freeing themselves from their invasion, to Colindale Square. They came to it shivering in the bleak noon—as chilled bathers might stumble up a stony beach, while behind them a deserted and disconsolate sea moaned. Sir Bernard came hastily to meet them, deserting for the time being the medley of fugitives who filled his kitchen and overflowed into the other rooms, and for whom conveyances had not yet been found. Roger nodded to him but could not speak; he left explanations to Caithness. In a moment Isabel came also; to her he turned, and with her he shut himself away. Once safe he said to her with no accent in his voice: “He’s dead.”

  “Dead!” she exclaimed. “Roger, my dear!”

  He had perhaps never entirely trusted her before, for all their sweet friendship. But his defences were down, and he lay exposed, terribly sensitive to her looks and words. She neither sympathized nor condoled; in the deep practice of her love her heart was struck equally with his. She suffered his desolation as she had his desire; the trust of his spiritual necessity with which she had charged herself knew this union also. He realized at that moment the vast experience of love which she had undergone, and accepted it. But he only said with a faint smile, implicitly recognizing her vicarious grief, “Yet you didn’t believe in him.”

  She sat down, wide eyes on his, and ignoring the comment, said in a hushed voice of awe, “Tell me. Can he be——?”

  He told her as clearly as he could, what had happened. And at the end she said, “But, Roger, mightn’t he …” She couldn’t finish; her own personal nature fainted before the intensity with which it felt another’s hope.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “If so … It may be, but I daren’t think of it. Isabel, Isabel, to think what killed him!”

  At that moment Caithness was talking swiftly to Sir Bernard downstairs. “So, when I went back for our coats, I saw them,” he said; “they were all ready there, all three packets and I brought them with me.” He pointed at the table on which three thick envelopes lay which he had extracted from his coat-pocket. “He must have meant to take them with him, or else they were directions for the others. They were on a chest in the hall, waiting till we—till he—came back. Don’t you think they ought to go to the Prime Minister?”

  “I hate telling the Prime Minister anything,” Sir Bernard said. “It’s like feeding a gorilla without a body; he can’t digest words. I don’t know which is worse for civilized man, Suydler or Considine.”

  “Considine’s dead,” Caithness said.

  Sir Bernard lifted a packet distastefully. “I wish I were a Christian,” he murmured, “then I should feel I ought to. As it is—I suppose Considine is dead?”

  “Of course he is,” Caithness said impatiently. “Mottreux shot him; I’ve just told you. I’d no notion he wanted the jewels. And even if he weren’t—Considine, I mean—that would only make it more urgent that Suydler should have the papers. They may be of use or they mayn’t. But he ought to have them.”

  “They’ll all be in cipher, I should think,” Sir Bernard said, with a good deal of satisfaction. “Suydler can have a jolly time guessing it. But I don’t like it, in spite of Mr. Considine’s obscene and pernicious gospel. I don’t like giving any gospel to Suydler. Yes, all right, I suppose I must. Portrait of Gallio presenting the manuscript of the Evangelists to the Missing Link. You’ll have to come too; then you can tell him all about the house.”

  When as a consequence the house by the sea was approached, late the same day, with great force and much circumspection, the results were a little disappointing. The body of Inkamasi still lay on its royal couch, but the body of the master of the adepts had disappeared. No living person was there; no car in the drive nor submarine in the bay. But behind the house lay Mottreux, a knife-wound in his throat, and sprawled over him, a bullet in his chest, the body of a negro, whom Caithness recognized as one of those that had followed Considine to the king’s death. Further away lay the Egyptian, also shot. Vereker and the Arab were not to be found.

  But the extent of the catastrophe which the traitor had brought upon the headship of the cause became clear, as the days passed. Considine and three of the closest members of his personal staff had been destroyed, and the great movement was checked. There were no more messages from the High Executive. What tale reached the various headquarters of the African armies the European Governments never knew. But the labouring and anxious generals of their forces began to telegraph the most cheering news. In one or two districts something like panic broke out among the enemy, a great noise of wailing and disorderly firing and then flight. In others the negro forces began to retire, and as they were pressed by the pursuit gave way and were overwhelmed.

  The papers Caithness had seized, which after a great deal of trouble were at least partially decoded—only partially; some of them remained mysteries even to the most ingenious cipher-expert—contained sufficient allusions in detail to make the task of the uncovering of Considine’s bases—houses in Europe and headquarters in Africa—a much easier business than had been feared. An encouraging but slightly vague account appeared in the Press of how a British patriot, who preferred his Imperial citizenship to his Zulu birthright, had shot Considine while being pressed to join him. It was understood that he had deliberately sacrificed himself in order to help England, and a good deal of quiet (and not too quiet) pride was felt that it was an English subject, or at least a Dominion subject, who had acted so. No Senegalese had done as much, nor the native of any district administered by other European countries. Such was the spirit produced by the British occupation. A rather acrimonious correspondence opened between the British Government and the other Powers on the subject of Considine’s own nationality. The French, Italian, Spanish, and Belgian ambassadors presented Notes which pointed out that the late Nigel Considine being a British subject the respective Governments had in equity a claim to be indemnified by his Britannic Majesty’s Government for the expense to which they had been put. His Britannic Majesty replied through the High Executive of Mr. Raymond Suydler’s Foreign Minister (the Earl of Basingstoke) to the effect that—there were nine mutually destructive reasons why the claim should either not be admitted or should be set against still heavier amounts due to his Britannic Majesty for damage suffered. Mr. Suydler made a great speech at an Albert Hall Meeting, and was cheered wildly when he announced that the European Governments had determined to sign no formal terms of peace with an enemy who had no business to be there at all, but to hold a conference in Madeira to decide on the future settlement of Africa, the terms of which would afterwards be submitted to the League of Nations, thus confirming the passionate belief of the Powers in democratic control. Mr. Suydler was also loudly applauded in the course of his witty and brilliant remarks upon the attempts of the madman who had been responsible for all the trouble to turn his megalomaniac nonsense into philosophical nonsense. “Guess: what can you do but guess? We guessed—and we guessed right!” Terrific cheers.

  Sir Bernard read it and smiled a little sadly. Philip read it and let it slip by; he was engaged with a recovered Rosamond and his career. Roger did not read it. Sir Bernard asked Philip whether, at a pinch, he would vote for Suydler or Considine. Philip read it, and for almost the first time in his life startled his father into real admiration by saying that he should vote for Ian Caithness. But Sir Bernard’s mind illumined the answer with a drier light than Philip’s. He
wrote of it to the priest: “I congratulate you, my dear Ian, on your proselyte—you can instruct him further when you come up to marry him. There’s a notion grown up that since his career’ll have to be postponed or reorganized or reborn or something, it would be only reasonable (“reasonable!” I also have my martyrdoms) that I should make financial arrangements for him to be married at once. Rosamond’s still recuperating at the cottage in Dorset, she sent me a pretty note of thanks the other day in which she asked whether you didn’t know the Archbishop fairly well. You’ll guess—as Suydler would say—what she meant. I leave it to you to decide whether you do—well enough, I mean. If he should be shot by a deacon who wanted to wear the vestments of the See at a fancy dress ball I fancy Suydler would be willing to offer you the Archiepiscopal mitre; he’s touchingly grateful to someone, and went so far as to ask me if there was anything I wanted. I told him I wanted justice and proportion which is the daughter of justice, knowledge and abstraction which is the daughter of knowledge. This dreadful tendency to personify and (therefore) mythologize I attribute to you and the late Mr. Considine, who was an entire mythology about himself. From Considine to you (excuse me), from you to Philip, from Philip to Rosamond—behold the history of religion! The High Executive disappears under the sea, and leaves its brother of Canterbury to add a touch of richness to my daughter-in-law’s wedding. If I had indulged myself in irony as long as Providence, I should be a little tired of it by now, but I suppose he has infinite patience with himself as well as with us. But mightn’t he occasionally try a new note?”

  Of Roger Sir Bernard said nothing, though he thought of him as he wrote “the High Executive disappears under the sea.” For he was aware that that was all that they knew, and even that they only surmised, and he thought Roger was intensely aware of it too. But he did not know how acutely, and Isabel did not tell him.