Angels and Insects (42 page)

Sophy Sheekhy saw the terrible face, with its flaring lights, and its smoke and its bone-pits peering as it were through an invisible window into her room. The dead cold weight was heavier on her each moment, pinning her down so that she could move not the smallest muscle, not an eyelid, not her dry throat to swallow. The thick, mumbling tongue asked with difficulty, next to her ear, ‘What do you see?’ and she saw, as though through very thick glass, the old figure in its nightshirt stumble towards its bed, and stretch itself out under the folds of its sheets, and then she saw a kind of haze of spinning threads emanating from it, as though it were some white grub making a cocoon. The shining threads emanated from the mouth and wound about the face, transparent at first, then denser, leaving only a craggy profile, smoothing steadily, and the spinning went on until the whole form was bound into a kind of long bundle of bright woven matter, still, yet glowing and moving and busy and shining.

‘I can’t say what I see.’

‘Everything is—dim. I—cannot—see.’ She felt him grasp at her with disintegrating fingers that tried to pry into her flesh like roots searching for a vantage. She thought she had been afraid in trances before, but that that fear had been nothing compared to this, pity and fear, fear and pity, each making the other harder to bear. He wanted to feed off her life, and was invading the very fibre of her
nerves with his death. The surface of her thought was that she would never again, never again try to come into the presence of the terrible dead, and this time too the depths of the still dark places of her were stirred with terror too, his terror, her terror, the terror of the tearing-out of life from flesh and of the energy of love for whatever remained when that was gone. He was being unmade, undone, and she could not, lying there, hold him together with her arms, or hear his voice any more in her ears, he had no more face, or fingers, only clay-cold, airless, stinking mass, plastering her mouth and nostrils.

The day of the Angel was heavy with approaching storm. Mrs Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy, proceeding along the Front, trod between shining dark wind-ruffled puddles and patches of dull grey. There were gusts of wet, slaty wind in their skirts and they had to hold on to their hats, which threatened to take wing and bowl out to sea. White birds swooped and screamed and cackled, bobbed negligently on slaty waves streaked with sand, or strutted arrogantly in the puddles. Sophy looked at their cold feet in the cold water, clawed and wrinkled, and shuddered. Mrs Papagay sniffed the salt and asked Sophy if she felt ill. ‘You look grey, my love, there is a grey tinge to your skin I do not like, and you have become very subdued.’

Sophy said guardedly that she did not, in fact, feel very well. She said, almost in a whisper, her words carried away by the wind, that she was not sure she was equal to the stress of the séance. Mrs Papagay cried bravely, ‘I will take care of you, I will rescue you the moment I perceive you in any distress.’ Sophy muttered that it was not too easy to rescue anyone from spirits. It was a weight on her mind, she said, gripping the brim of her struggling hat with white knuckles. ‘It may be,’ she said to Mrs Papagay, stopping her and peering into her face, with the movement of the sea behind it, ‘it may be we are not
meant
to spend our time trying to make contact with
them
, Mrs Papagay. It may be against Nature.’ Mrs Papagay replied robustly that it was, as they were taught, a natural aptitude of human beings in most societies to wish to speak with the dead. Look at Saul and the Witch of Endor, said Mrs Papagay, look at Odysseus offering Tiresias beakers of blood, look at the Red Indians, who live peaceably among the spirits of their ancestors. Spiritualists were always being exhorted to look at the Red Indians, whose English-speaking souls were regular guests to many British drawing-rooms,
among antimacassars and stuffed parrots they must have had trouble in understanding. Mrs Papagay was worried that Sophy, usually so placid, should stop in a storm to express doubt. She peered under Sophy’s hat and saw that her eyes were full of standing tears. ‘Dearest Sophy,’ said Mrs Papagay, ‘you must
never
be led into doing anything against your own nature, anything you are not equal to. We can make our living in some other way, we can take in lodgers and do fine sewing. We will talk of this.’

Sophy stared through her tears at the iron water, at the rocking line of the horizon, at the iron sky. White spume, white birds, white fringes of fast cloud, sailing on grey. She said, ‘You are very kind, and I am very grateful, indeed I love you for your kindness, and I do
not
intend to let you down. I feel less afraid, now I have spoken. I am happy to go on.’

The wind squealed past, mocking these sober words of human trust with its whining. The two women took each other’s arms, and leaned into each other, then proceeded united through the gusts and into the town.

Inside the house, there was an atmosphere of ill-temper and constraint which daunted Mrs Papagay immediately she entered. She had not seen Mr Hawke since the ill-fated discussion of marriage in Heaven, and feared that at the very least his ruffled feathers would need smoothing. She saw immediately that it was worse than that. He was seated in a corner, lecturing Mrs Jesse and Mrs Hearnshaw on Swedenborg’s physical apprehension of evil spirits, who persisted in thinking that their smoky darkness and foul odours were clearest air, and their loathsome appearance beautiful, who ‘
clung
to the corresponding part of him of their own place in the Divine Human and emitted sensations of anguish—’. He had brought Mrs Jesse a large, pallid bouquet of hothouse roses, which the maid had arranged in a silver rose-bowl in the
centre of the table. He acknowledged the arrival of Mrs Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy with no more than a cursory nod. Mrs Hearnshaw’s condition made her nauseous. She put a lace handkerchief frequently to her lips, and kept her left hand clasped to her ribs under her bosom, as though holding her emotions, and her unborn child, together in her body. Mrs Jesse herself seemed edgy and tired. Captain Jesse was for once not talking. He was standing in the bay of the window, his white mane rimmed with reflected light from the oil-lamp, staring into the thickening gloom, as though, Mrs Papagay thought, his right place was out there, in the weather.

They sat round the table in an apprehensive silence. Mr Hawke’s face was red anyway, and was further reddened, a shiny apple, an angry cherub, by the reflected firelight. He offered no opening to Mrs Papagay, but said he had solemn matters to impart to them, as they settled their spirits to receive messages from the world of spirits and angels. He had been thinking, he said, about the peculiarly
material
nature of the Swedenborgian witness, and its relation to the spiritualist faith. He had been much struck, when he first read Swedenborg’s accounts of his journeys to Heaven and Hell, by the sage’s claims to have taught the angels in heaven many truths. But why should this not be so? A man who lived in two worlds at once would, by his very doubleness, learn and teach something that no single-world denizen could suspect. The angels
did not know
, until Swedenborg’s visit, what matter was, or that it was distinct from spirit. It was only when a man came, who embraced at once matter and spirit and the difference between them, that an experience was given which taught what the difference is. You might argue that Swedenborg’s visit was in the way of a scientific
experiment
for the angelic hosts, a
positive experience
, as needful for archangels and angels as for chemists, philosophers and mechanics. In fact, in all wisdom, there is no substance but
fact
, nothing so divine as experienee.
This is why the Divine Human is higher than the Angels, because His nature is Human, and corresponds perfectly to the human doubleness, matter and spirit.

There were things moreover, it was needful to know, about the material nature of the Divine Human. It was rightly said that even as the angels in heaven, joined in conjugial love, were both male and female, so was the Divine Human Himself. True it was, as Swedenborg had borne eloquent witness, that at one particular moment and spot in time and space, on one planet of all the inhabited planets, the Divine Human had taken on a particular human form and become an
earthly man
, of the earth earthy, as Saint Paul had written. True it was, that the heavens were male and female, for they proceeded from mankind, which was male and female, ‘in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’ (Genesis 1, 27). But there was a further Doctrine of Swedenborg’s about the Humanity of the Lord which it was essential to know and understand. Whilst He was incarnate here on earth, the Lord had had
both
a human form from His human mother and an eternal human form from the fact of His Divine Self, the Father. And Swedenborg taught that the Lord successively
put off
the Human assumed from the mother, and put on the Human from the Divine in Himself. He had two states on earth, one called the state of humiliation or exinanition, the other the state of glorification or union with the Divine, which is called the Father. He was in the state of humiliation so far as, and when, He was in the Human from the mother; and He was in the state of glorification so far as, and when, He was in the Human from the Father. In the state of humiliation he prayed to the Father as a being distinct from Himself; but in the state of glorification he spoke with the Father as with Himself. His Crucifixion was a necessary shedding of the corrupt humanity He had from the mother, in order to experience glorification and union with the Father.

‘I Corinthians 15, 47 to 52,’ said Mr Hawke.

There was a glum silence amongst the predominantly female members of his audience, who felt themselves individually and generally chastised, found wanting, or rather, not wanting, but too abundantly fleshly. Mrs Hearnshaw clasped her arms tighter around the prison of whalebone that held in the surge of her flesh inside which her own bones caged her growing child, precariously alive. Mrs Papagay fingered the little purse of her flesh under her chin, looking down, not meeting Mr Hawke’s eye. Sophy Sheekhy shivered and shrank further into her clothes. Mrs Jesse stroked Pug’s gentle, ugly, snoring head. Captain Jesse gave a sort of snort and trumpeted inconsequentially, ‘And the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair.’

There was a silence. Mr Hawke said, ‘Excuse me—I fail to see the relevance—’

‘I just like the sound of that saying, Mr Hawke, it cheers me, it suggests a kind of happy union of the earthly and the heavenly, you know, the beauty of women, and the
admiration
of the sons
of God for that, in the oldest days you know, in Paradise, I suppose.’

‘That is a very wrong interpretation, Captain Jesse. Very wrong. The authorities agree that those so-called sons of God are the
fallen angels
who fell into corruption out of their lust for earthly beauty, as certain among the angels are prone to do, as Swedenborg has also revealed. Even Saint Paul, I may tell you, in a most
interesting
text, warns against the excessive angelic desire for female corporeality. He requires women to be covered in the congregation, for a reason, which is that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, so the man ought not, Saint Paul says, to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.