[Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, just behind St. Cross Church - the large white stone in the centre marks the grave of Charles Williams]
But
as Arglay bent, he was aware once more of that
effluvia of heat risen round him, and breaking out with the more violence
when suddenly the man, if it were man, cast his arm away, and with
a jerk of movement rose once more to his feet. His eyes, as the head went
back, burned close into Arglay's, who, what with the heat, the eyes, and
his sickness at the horror, shut his own against them, and was at the same
moment thrown from his balance by the rising form, and sent staggering
a step or two away, with upon his face the sensation of a light
hot breath, so light that only in the utter stillness of time could it
be felt, so hot that it might have been the inner fire from which the pillar
of smoke poured outward to the world.
He
recovered his balance; he opened his eyes; both motions brought him into
a new corner of that world. The odd black coat the thing had worn had
disappeared, as if it had been a covering imagined by a habit of mind. The thing itself, a wasted flicker of pallid movement, danced and gyrated
in white flame before him. Arglay saw it still, but only now as a dreamer
may hear, half-asleep and half-awake, the sound of dogs barking or
the crackling of fire in his very room. For he opened his eyes not to such
things, but to the thing that on the threshold of this place, some seconds
earlier or some years, he had felt and been pleased to feel, to the
reality of his hate. It came in a rush within him, a fountain of fire,
and without and about him images of the man he hated swept in a thick
cloud of burning smoke.
The smoke burned his eyes and choked his mouth;
he clutched it, at images within it - at his greedy loves and greedy
hates - at the cloud of the sin of his life, yearning to catch but one
image and renew again the concentration for which he yearned. He could
not. The smoke blinded and stifled him, yet more than stifling or blinding
was the hunger for one true thing to lust or hate. He was starving
in the smoke, and all the hut was full of smoke, for the hut and the
world were smoke, pouring up round him, from him and all like him - a thing
once wholly, and still a little, made visible to his corporeal eyes in
forms which they recognized, but in itself of another nature. He swung and
twisted and crouched. His limbs ached from long wrestling with the smoke,
for as the journey to this place had prolonged itself infinitely, so
now, though he had no thought of measurement, the clutch of his hands and
the growing sickness that invaded him struck through him the sensation
of the passage of years and the knowledge of the passage of moments. The fire sank within him, and the sickness grew, but the change could
not bring him nearer to any end. The end here was not at the end, but
in the beginning. There was no end to this smoke, to this fever and this
chill, to crouching and rising and searching, unless the end was now.
Charles Williams
Et in Sempiternum
Pereant
From: "The London Mercury", 1935
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