Shadows of Ecstasy E-Book

Charles Williams

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A humanistic adept has discovered that by focusing his energies inward he can extend his life almost indefinitely. He undertakes an experiment using African lore to die and resurrect his own body thereby assuring his immortality. His followers begin a revolutionary movement to destroy European civilization.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Chapter One - Encountering Darkness

Chapter Two - Suicide While of Unsound Mind

Chapter Three - The Proclamation of the High Executive

Chapter Four - The Majesty of the King

Chapter Five - The Neophyte of Death

Chapter Six - The Mass at Lambeth

Chapter Seven - The Opening of Schism

Chapter Eight - Passing Through the Midst of Them

Chapter Nine - The Riot and the Raid

Chapter Ten - London After the Raid

Chapter Eleven - The House by the Sea

Chapter Twelve - The Jewels of Messias

Chapter Thirteen - The Meeting of the Adepts

Chapter Fourteen - Sea-Change

Charles Williams

Shadows of Ecstasy

First digital edition 2018 by Anna Ruggieri

Chapter One - Encountering Darkness

Roger Ingram’s peroration broke over the silent dininghall: “He and such as he are one with the great conquerors, the great scientists, the great poets; they have all of them cried of the unknown: ‘I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms’.”

He sat down amid applause, directed not to himbut to the subject of his speech. It was at a dinner given by the Geographical Faculty of the University of London to a distinguished explorer just back from South America. The explorer’s health had been proposed by the Dean of the Faculty, and the Professor of Tropical Geography had been intended to second it. Unfortunately the Professor had gone down with influenza that very day, and Roger had been hastily made to take his place. The other geographical professors, though vocationally more suitable, were both learned and low-voiced, as also were their public addresses. The Dean had refused to subject his distinguished guests, including the explorer, to their instructive whispers. Roger might not be a geographer, but he could make a better speech, and he belonged to the University if to a different faculty, being Professor of Applied Literature. This was a new Chair, endowed beneficently by a rich Canadian who desired at once to benefit the Mother Country and to recall her from the by-ways of pure art to thehighroad of art as related to action. Roger had been invited from a post in a Northern University to fill the Chair, largely on the strength of his last book, which was called “Persuasive Serpents: studies in English Criticism”, and had been read with admiration by twenty-seven persons and with complete misunderstanding by four hundred and eighty-two. Its theme, briefly, was that most English critics had at all times been wholly and entirely wrong in their methods and aims, and that criticism was an almostundiscovered art, being a final austere harmony produced by the purification of literature from everything alien, which must still exist in the subjects of most prose and poetry. However, the salary of the Chair of Applied Literature had decided him to give an example of it in his own person, and he had accepted.

He lent an ear, when the toast had been drunk, to his wife’s “Beautiful, Roger: he loved it”, and to Sir Bernard Travers’ murmured “Hug?”

“I know,” he said; “you wouldn’t hug it. You’d ask it to alight but good dinner and send it away all pale and comfortable. I was good, wasn’t I, Isabel? A little purple, butpleasing purple. Pleasing purple for pleased people — that’s me after dinner.” He composed himself to listen.

The explorer, returning thanks, was not indisposed to accept literally the compliments which had been offered him. He touched on ordinary lives, on the conditions of ordinary lives, on the ordinary office clerk, and on the difference between such a man and himself. He painted a pictureof South America in black and scarlet; Roger remarked to his wife in a whisper that crude scarlet was the worst colour to put beside rich purple. He enlarged on the heroism of his companions with an under-lying suggestion that it was largely maintained byhis own. He made a joke at the expense of Roger’s quotation, saying that he would never apply “for a divorce or even a judicial separation from the bride Mr. Ingram has found me.” Roger gnashed his teeth and smiled back politely, muttering “He isn’t worthMacaulay and I gave him Shakespeare.” He would, in short, have been a bore, had he not been himself.