Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams — Read

Philip jumped on to a bus--any bus--the first he saw. He had been walking for ever so long, and he must sit down. But also he must be moving; he couldn't be shut in. Things were worse than he had ever imagined they could be; indeed he couldn't quite imagine what exactly they now were. The Hampstead flat was in a state of acute distress and turmoil; he had arrived that evening innocently enough, to find half a dozen policemen all arguing with Roger, who was glowering at Rosamond, who was crying hysterically in Isabel's arms, who was keeping, not without difficulty, a grave sympathy with all of them. He had naturally hurried to Rosamond, but not with the best effects; the sight of him had seemed to distract her more than ever. Out of the arguments and exclamations he had at last gathered--and more clearly after the police had at last grimly withdrawn--that Considine had been there, and that Rosamond, after she had realized who it really was, had gone through a short period of conflict with herself on the right thing to do. She said it had been conflict, and that only her duty. whereas Roger, in a few words, implied that she had been delighted at the chance, and that duty--except to herself--was a thing of which she was entirely unconscious and incapable. Anyhow, after a very short period she had rung up the police-station and explained to the authorities there what was happening. Why the police hadn't arrested Considine Philip couldn't understand. Isabel was concerned with her sister, and Roger wasn't very clear in his account. Somebody had gone through the midst of somebody else; somebody had been like Pythian Apollo. But he couldn't bother about all that; he was too anxious about Rosamond. Had he been challenged, he would have had to admit that for a guest to try and have another visitor arrested in the host's drawing-room was not perhaps.though for Roger to call it treachery was absurd. If anything, it was public spirit. He knew nothing--Rosamond had seen to that--of such an orgy as the episode of the chocolates which Isabel so clearly and reluctantly remembered; he knew nothing of a greedy gobbling child, breaking suddenly away from its ordinary snobbish pretences, giving way to the thrust of its secret longings and vainly trying to conceal from others' eyes the force of its desires. She had cheated herself so long, consciously in childhood, with that strange combination of perfect innocence and deliberate sin which makes childhood so blameless and so guilty at one and the same moment; less consciously in youth, as innocence faded and the necessity of imposing some kind of image of herself on the world grew stronger, till now in her first womanhood she had forgotten the cheat, until her outraged flesh rebelled and clamoured from starvation for food. And even now she would not admit it; she would neither fight it nor flee from it nor yield to it nor compromise with it. She could hardly even deny that it was there, for there was no place for it in her mind. She, she of all people, could never be capable of abominably longing to be near the dark prince of Africa; she couldn't thrill to the trumpets of conversion nor glow to the fires of ecstasy. Nor could she hate herself for refusing them. But she could and inevitably did hate the things that resembled them--Considine's person and Roger's verse and Philip, all of Philip, for Philip to her agonized sense was at once a detestable parody of what she wanted and a present reminder of what she longed to forget. And now, like all men and all women who are not masters of life, she swayed to and fro in her intention and even in her desire. At Kensington she had shrunk away from Inkamasi and fled from him; at Hampstead she thought of him and secretly longed for him. Power was in her and she was terrified of it. She had been self-possessed, but all herself was in the possessing and nothing in the possessed; self-controlled, but she had: had only a void to control. And now that nothing and that void were moved with fire and darkness; the shadow of ecstasy lay over her life, and denying the possibility of ecstasy she fled through its shadow as far as its edge, and halted irresolute, and was drawn back by a fascination she loved and hated. She was alive and she hated life; not with a free feeling of judgement but with servile fear. She hated life, and therefore she would hide in Hampstead; she lived, and therefore she would return to Kensington. But neither in Hampstead nor Kensington, in Europe nor Africa, in her vision of her unsubservient self, nor of her monstrous master, was there any place for Philip, much less a Philip aware of the exaltation of love.

But it was not till after, shocked and bewildered by the venom she had flung at him in that dreadful scene, he had at last gone that she began to fear that her relations with Kensington might have been severed. And, not being there, she was determined to get back there. She would run there and then run away, till the strait jacket of time and place imprisoned her as it imprisons in the end all who suffer from a like madness. It is perhaps why the asylum of material creation was created, and we sit in our separate cells, strapped and comparatively harmless, merely foaming a little and twitching our fingers, while the steps and voices of unknown warders come to us from the infinite corridors. But Rosamond was only beginning to hurl herself against the walls of her cell, and the invisible warders had not yet had occasion to take much notice of her. The jacket waited her; when the paroxysm was done she would no doubt come to regard it as becoming wear and in the latest fashion. Whether such a belief is desirable is a question men have not yet been able to decide.