Shadows of Ecstasy

  “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, b
ut 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?”

  “No,” Caithness answered. “I don’t fancy Considine’s all that anxious to part with them.”

  Roger looked at him in surprise. They had come into the room where they had breakfasted, from which doors of an exquisitely clear glass led on to the lawn in front of the house. The priest walked across and looked out. Roger said, rather coldly: “That’s utterly unnecessary. Do you hate him so much?”

  “I don’t hate him,” Caithness said, “except that he’s set himself against God, like Antichrist which is to come.”

  “O don’t be silly,” Roger said crossly. “Antichrist indeed! What on earth has he done to make you think he’d steal a lot of jewels?”

  “What’s he done,” the priest said over his shoulder, “to make you think he wouldn’t? Hasn’t he put many men to death and stolen the minds of others? If he wants the jewels he’ll take them.”

  “But he won’t want them,” Roger exclaimed; “that’s the whole point. I may, or for all I know Mottreux may, but he’s no more likely to want them than you are, to be fair to you,” he added with a half-humorous admission of Caithness’s own integrity.

  The door opened, and Mottreux and Rosenberg came into the room. The old Jew looked at them for a moment and then went across to the other side of the room and sat down. Mottreux paused by the door, seeming not to have expected to find the other two there. His dark and hungry eyes rested on Roger and moving towards him, he said in a low voice, “I hear Nielsen has really died.”

  The sentence itself seemed fatal; in its note of hopelessness it conveyed death. Roger, not finding words to answer, nodded. Mottreux walked slowly over to Rosenberg, to whom he began to talk in a low voice. Caithness, after a minute or so, went over to join them. Roger considered doing the same thing and decided not to. He didn’t want to chat, and he couldn’t see what, besides mere chat, Mottreux and Rosenberg could have to say to each other. Mottreux, he remembered, was supposed to be waiting for the captain, whoever the captain was. His mind went back to the sea, and he thought suddenly of submarines. Perhaps that was what Considine had meant by “moving.” It was all such a mad mixture, purple rhetoric and precise realism, doctrines of transmutation and babble about African witch-doctors and airships and submarines. He wondered what Isabel was doing, and whether perhaps after all he would have been wiser to stop … but he couldn’t, he couldn’t; the thing that for years had torn at his heart and brain had to be satisfied. He and she had alike to choose necessity. But if his necessity could have lain with hers.… And Sir Bernard—what would he have made of this house where servants of impossibilities talked by the hearth, and he himself waited for the next moment of explication? Staring at his toes, Roger thought that that was all he did seem to be doing—waiting. Was he wasting his time? had Considine meant him to be doing something all this while? He ought to have been working, to have imagined intensely the …

  Considine was in the room. To Roger’s preoccupied mind he might have materialized out of the air, but apparently he hadn’t. He said, “There’s no message yet. Mottreux, I’ll dictate the alternative dispositions for the generals, if you will come. These gentlemen will be able to amuse themselves a little.” He came over to Roger and looked into his eyes, then he said, smiling, “You’ve been running after your fancies, Ingram; you’ve not been driving even their faint power through you. Do you think it will happen by itself?”

  “I know,” Roger said. “I was thinking so—‘They heard and were abashed and up they sprang.’”

  “So,” Considine answered. “Turn on to that all your heart; and then turn that on to yourself. Don’t
let yourself grow too tired, but never quite let go. We’ll talk again soon.” He turned.

  “Mottreux?”

  The other joined him and they went across the hall into another room, where a case stood on the table. “There are Rosenberg’s jewels,” Considine said. “We’ll give them to him presently; let’s look at them once.” He took a key from his pocket and opened the case as he spoke, and then poured upon the table a glowing heap of jewels. They shone and sparkled; they gleamed and glinted—some set, many unset; stones of every kind revealing the life of stone, colour revealing the power of colour. Considine stood and looked at them, and if Roger had been there he might have thought that the heap of jewels and the human figure reflected each other, and that intense life leapt and re-leapt between them. The man’s form seemed to hold in itself depths of mysterious tint; so clear and mysterious was the corporeal presence, disciplined and purged and nourished through many decades by supreme passion. The deep smile broke out again as he gazed, exulting in the joy of beauty, absorbing it, and almost visibly transmuting it into his own dominating awareness of it. He stretched out his hand and picked up one or two, and a whole diadem of splendour faded by the unparalleled delicacy of consummated mortality which held it. He laid them down and laughed softly as he did so, humming again to himself, “‘Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’ All this,” he added aloud, “but one blossom under which we live for a moment. Yet they are almost worthy Messias.”

  But Mottreux leant nearer them, and turned an agonized face towards his master.

  “You are giving them back,” he whispered. “You won’t surely?” His hands trembled forward towards the heap. “It’s … it’s life,” he said grasping, and fell on his knees by the table.

  Considine looking down at him laid a hand on his shoulder. “Do you feel them so?” he asked, and felt the answer shudder through the kneeling man’s limbs as he turned his face upwards.