Descent into Hell

Charles Williams

• Publisher: White Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781528711821
• eBook ISBN: 9781528786782
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

"Descent Into Hell" is a novel by Charles Williams, first published in 1937. On Battle Hill, just outside London, a group of townspeople are performing a new play by Peter Stanhope. This hill, however, appears to be positioned at a pivotal place in space and time, as people from the past begin to appear and the townsfolk are transported either to heaven, or to hell. Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945) was a British theologian, novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic. He was also a member of the "The Inklings", a literary discussion group connected to the University of Oxford, England. They were exclusively literary enthusiasts who championed the merit of narrative in fiction and concentrated on writing fantasy. He was given an scholarship to University College London, but was forced to leave in 1904 because he couldn't afford the tuition fees. Other notable works by this author include: "The Greater Trumps" (1932), "War in Heaven" (1930), and "The Place of the Lion" (1931). This volume is highly recommended for lovers of fantasy fiction, and it would make for a fantastic addition to any collection. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

VI.

THE DOCTRINE OF SUBSTITUTED LOVE

Pauline sat back in her chair, and her arms lay along its arms. A rehearsal was taking place in the grounds of the Manor House, and she had ended her part in the first act. She was free to watch the other performers, and to consider the play once more. By now they had all got more or less accustomed to that speaking of verse aloud which our uneducated mouths and ears find so difficult, being less instructed than the more universal Elizabethan must have been. Pauline remembered again, with a queer sense of inferiority, that no Elizabethan audience, gods or groundlings, can have felt any shock of surprise or awkwardness at a play opening with a high rhodomontade of sound. No modern audience would put up with going to the first night of a new play to hear the curtain sweep up on such an absurd and superb invocation as:

"Hung be the heavens with black; yield, day, to night;
Comets, importing change..."

and so on. On the other hand, they accepted plays beginning with the most ordinary prose. Even rhodomontade demands a peculiar capacity, and to lose its bravery perhaps hampers some other bravery of the spirit; to lose even one felicity is to be robbed of more than we have a right to spare. Certainly Stanhope had spared them any overwhelming magniloquence; his verse was subdued almost to conversation, though as she listened and read and studied and spoke it, she became aware that the rhythm of these conversations was a great deal more speedy and vital than any she could ever remember taking part in. All Mrs. Parry's efforts to introduce a stateliness of manner into the Grand Ducal court, and a humorous but slow—O so slow—realism into the village, and an enigmatic meandering meditativeness into the Chorus could not sufficiently delay the celerity of the line. Once or twice Stanhope, having been consulted, had hinted that he would rather have the meaning lost than too firmly explained, and that speed was an element, but after a great deal of enthusiastic agreement they had all gone on as before. She herself had been pleasantly ticked off by Mrs. Parry that very afternoon for hurrying, and as Stanhope hadn't interfered she had done her best to be adequately slow. It was some recompense to sit now and listen to Adela and Mrs. Parry arguing with, or at least explaining to, each other. Adela, true to her principles of massing and blocking, arranged whole groups of words in chunks irrespective of line and meaning, but according to her own views of the emotional quality to be stressed. She had unexpectedly broken one line with a terrific symbolical pause.

"I am," she said to her Woodcutter, and pausing as if she had invoked the Name itself and waited for its Day of Judgment to appear, added in one breath, "only the perception in a flash of love."

Pauline encouraged in herself a twinge of wonder whether there were anything Adela Hunt were less only; then she felt ashamed of having tried to modify the line into her own judgment, especially into a quite unnecessary kind of judgment. She knew little enough of Adela, and the result was that she lost the sound of the woodcutter's answer—"A peremptory phenomenon of love". She thought, a little gloomily, malice could create a fair number of peremptory phenomena for itself, not perhaps of love, but easily enjoyable, like Myrtle Fox's trees. Malice was a much cosier thing than love. She was rather glad they were not doing the last act to-day; that act in which Periel—male or female, no matter!—spirit, but not spiritual—she—began and led the Chorus; and everyone came in, on the most inadequate excuses, the Princess and her lover and the Grand Duke and the farmers and the banditti and the bear; and through the woods went a high medley of wandering beauty and rejoicing love and courtly intelligence and rural laughter and bloody clamour and growling animalism, in mounting complexities of verse, and over all, gathering, opposing, tossing over it, the haunting cry of the all-surrounding and overarching trees.

It troubled her now, as it had not done when she first read it, as it did not the others. She wondered whether it would have troubled her if, since the day of his first call, she had not sometimes heard her grandmother and Peter Stanhope talking in the garden. It was two or three weeks ago, since he had first called, and she could not remember that they had said anything memorable since except a few dicta about poetry—but everything they said was full and simple and unafraid. She herself had rather avoided him; she was not yet altogether prepared in so many words to accept the terror of good. It had occurred to her to imagine those two—the old woman and the poet—watching the last act, themselves its only audience, as if it were presented by the imagined persons themselves, and by no planned actors. But what would happen when the act came to an end she could not think, unless those two went up into the forest and away into the sounds that they had heard, into the medley of which the only unity was the life of the great poetry that made it, and was sufficient unity. Under the influence of one of those garden conversations she had looked up in her old school Shelley the lines that had haunted her, and seen the next line to them. It ran:

That apparition, solo of men, he saw; and it referred, of course, to Zoroaster. But she couldn't, watching the play, refrain from applying it to Stanhope. This apparition, sole of men —so far as she had then discovered—he had seen; and she went back to wonder again if in those three lines Shelley, instead of frightening her, was not nourishing her. Supposing—supposing—that in this last act Peter Stanhope had seen and imagined something more awful even than a vision of himself; supposing he had contemplated the nature of the world in which such visions could be, and that the entwined loveliness of his verse was a mirror of its being. She looked at the hale and hearty young man who was acting the bear, and she wondered whether perhaps her real bear, if she had courage to meet it, would be as friendly as he. If only the woodcutter's son had not learned the language of the leaves while they burned in the fire! There was no doubt about that speech: the very smell and noise of the fire was in it, and the conviction of the alien song that broke out within the red flames. So perhaps the phoenix cried while it burned.

Someone sat down in the next chair. She looked; it was Stanhope. Mrs. Parry and Adela concluded their discussion. Adela seemed to be modifying her chunks of words—sharpening ends and pushing them nearer till they almost met. Presumably Mrs. Parry was relying on later rehearsals to get them quite in touch, and even, if she were fortunate, to tie them together. The rehearsal began again. Stanhope said "You were, of course, quite right."

She turned her head towards him, gravely. "You meant like that then?" she asked.

"Certainly I meant it like that," he said, "more like that, anyhow. Do you suppose I want each line I made to march so many paces to the right, with a meditation between each? But even if I could interfere it'd only get more mixed than ever. Better keep it all of a piece."

"But you don't mind," she asked, "if I'm a little quicker than some of them?"

"I should love to hear it," he answered. "Only I think it is probably our business—yours and mine—to make our feelings agreeable to the company, as it were. This isn't a play; it's a pleasant entertainment. Let's all be pleasantly entertaining together.

"But the poetry?" she said.

He looked at her, laughing. "And even that shall be Mrs. Parry's," he said. "For this kind of thing is not worth the fretfulness of dispute; let's save all that till we are among the doctors, who aren't fretful."

She said suddenly, "Would you read it to me again one day? Is it too absurd to ask you?"

"Of course I'll read it," he said. "Why not? If you'd like it. And now in exchange tell me what's bothering you."

Taken aback, she stared at him, and stammered on her answer. "But—but—" she began.

He looked at the performers. "Miss Hunt is determined to turn me into the solid geometry of the emotions," he said. "But—but—tell me why you always look so about you and what you are looking for."

"Do I?" she asked hesitatingly. He turned a serious gaze on her and her own eyes turned away before it. He said, "There's nothing worth quite so much vigilance or anxiety. Watchfulness, but not anxiety, not fear. You let it in to yourself when you fear it so; and whatever it is, it's less than your life."

"You talk as if life were good," she said.

"It's either good or evil," he answe...

Table of contents

• Charles Williams
• I.
• II.
• III.
• IV.
• V.
• VI.
• VII.
• VIII.
• IX.
• X.
• XI.
• XII.