Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

A pillar fell. Christina felt herself pushed out of the way. Ethel had grabbed hold of her a moment before she would have been crushed.

“Ethel, come with me, let me save you!” Christina cried.

Ethel tilted her head and studied her with adoration. “You already have,” she whispered. “Remember me, my sister.”

The chapel ceiling rained down, layer by layer of Gabriel’s vibrant paintings flying through the air, and the walls transformed into flames. The flock of followers was divided between those who would not leave Sibbie and those trying to save themselves by following Christina’s directions. The remaining guardian shouted and threatened, pulling his sword, but in the confusion, it was impossible for him to stop those who ran away. The followers who were escaping stampeded. A wall collapsed, smothering two or three of those clinging to Sibbie.

As the others hurried outside at Christina’s direction, she turned back to see Sibbie encircled by smoldering ruins. Christina gestured for her to follow. Now it was Sibbie’s turn to remain planted in place. Their eyes were fixed on each other for a moment, a moment Christina would remember for many years to come.

Sibbie’s mouth formed a word.

Ethel, standing near Sibbie, fell through a hole in the floor as it was incinerated.

A rafter collapsed right in front of Christina, throwing her backward. She scrambled to her feet and rushed out the door. Once outside, she and the others who escaped moved as fast as the snow and debris permitted. The last of the chapel surrendered itself to the flames.

Christina scanned the area until she spotted them.

Browning and a policeman were half carrying Gabriel, whose arms rested around the two other policemen’s shoulders.

Reverend Fallow, terror stricken, his wrists in irons, ran alongside Constable Branagan, who gripped his arm.

Christina hurried, and the escapees followed her. When she paused, they paused; when she turned to look back, they did.

[undated]

[no addressee]

It is as it is meant to be. You, who prayerfully taught us devotion to Dante’s sacred truth, who overmastered us with his power, would have savored what was accomplished. Not by my doing, I regret to add, for I allowed myself to waver and fall to cowardice, a trait belonging to infernal regions rather than the path to magnificence. As I watched the flames and panic spread with equal rapidity, I found myself back inside that theater, back at the pulpit, surrounded by chaos I could not quell, by riots internal and external. I looked backward, I tumbled. It was she who managed what Dante had dreamed up — laying the true and final path for the rest of the world to redeem humanity.

Many think that Dante was an arrogant man. Arrogant, so it is said, to think that he of all people could record the will of God and point the one true way to salvation. Not a pope or a priest but a mere man. Not with dogma but poetry. He was exiled, shunned, and ridiculed by many of the so-called great men of his own time.

Dante’s life, in truth, represents humility. He submitted himself to a divine purpose to correct the course of mankind. There were bards who had held a mirror to our human weaknesses before Dante, but none who have ever succeeded in leaving behind the secrets to expelling them.

There were so many times in my life I hid from errors, from my vices, my mistakes. There were times I was confronted, haunted by them. Through dear Sibbie’s guidance, I saw firsthand how Dante’s words led to a time of purification in ways that the bickering denominations and governments of today fail to do.

Knowledge has never been more available than it is in our nineteenth century; books have become cheaper, and a proliferation of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets can be found in the homes of the humble laborer. Knowledge underlies our miseries: knowledge of our family histories, replete with their own vices and errors; knowledge of other people’s abilities and gifts that we lack and cannot hope to obtain; knowledge of ever-improving medical advancements that would have saved the life of a beloved child or spouse if only it had existed a few years or months or days prior. Knowledge, too, of how the choices we make in professions, in war, in legislation, in commerce affect other people, other nations. We now know we are the cause of more misery than we ever dreamed, and it is a wonder anyone manages to live with that fact.

The religions of the world, organized at a time when most of the workings of the world remained obscure, become increasingly obsolete. As such, death, once reassuring, becomes horrifying, unanswerable. Deprived of what used to be our spiritual ballasts, our moral certainties, our peace, we fear darkness, we fear each other, we fear the foreign and foreigners, we fear the unknown. But here is Dante. His poem reveals death not as something to make us afraid but as the very thing that bestows meaning unto us — it is not a drama of suffering, but a revelation that suffering will save us. Death is the way — the only way remaining in an age of false prophets — we come close to the Lord.

Was Dante more prophet or poet? I have longed to ask you your opinions on this proposition, and to learn more of what you foresee Dante will bring next, and how we might help. Dante foresaw that Beatrice would guide his life when she was a mere child. I cannot help but think of Sibbie’s work as an unfinished portrait, that those to whom she has brought Dante will discover what remains to be painted.

Sometimes when normal life resumes, despair dissolves inside its circular routines; sometimes that despair is quieted and interred underneath the rest, but fortifies and thrives largely unnoticed. Sibbie and Fallow turned despair into the promise of magnificence, and that was difficult to forget for those who made it out of the former Phillip Sanatorium alive the day of Lancashire County’s worst conflagration in thirty-five years, on April 12, 1870, when flames were said to be seen miles away as the fire engines struggled through the snow. When flames were said to reach the heavens.

Gabriel was one survivor.

Back at Tudor House, he slept. Slept without interruption, not so unlike the time Sibbie had spent a few rooms down. He slept, in fact, more soundly and completely than he had in years.

When he woke, he did not display the sense of relief that Christina had anticipated. But no, perhaps she had hoped for it more than anticipated it. She wanted him to say something like: Yesterday, I wished to die, but today I do not . But no. This was Gabriel. Normalcy brought him no comfort. The frequent administration of opium had stopped for long enough that his body did not seem to demand it, and craved it far less frequently — for now. It was impossible to ever say what was caused by the poisons that had been filling his body for years, and what had come from the pure Dantean fervor of his imagination and Sibbie’s. Gabriel understood that he had been on a path to death and that he had been given a reprieve. He understood this, but he was sad after it. Christina could not decide whether Gabriel seemed sadder because of what happened, or sad to be removed from his trance. He never quite expressed regret for those dark, dreamy days under the spell of Sibbie’s power; when he did speak of it, it was as though he spoke of another man whose experiences fascinated him.

He did ask a question related to those events that sent shivers through Christina’s body.

“What do you think it was,” he asked, “that she said at the end?”