Free The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams

The noise of all the pausing street came to her as the roar of many people; the white cloak held them by a gesture; order and law were there. It moved, it fell aside, the torrent of obedient movement rolled on, and they with it. They flashed past the helmed face, and she found that she had dropped her eyes lest she should see it.
    With the avoidance of that face she seemed to have plunged herself deeper into the dream, as if by avoiding it she had assented to it and had acknowledged its being and power. They were not stopped again, but yet, as the car ran smoothly on, she seemed to see that white-clothed arm again and again, now in the darkness beyond the headlights, now pointing forward just outside the window. The streets were busy with Christmas shoppers, but the car shut them out and her in, and though they were there it was running steadily away from them—as if down a sloping road while they were all on the high level banks on either hand. They never actually did go down that road, but—as in nightmare—they were always on the very point of plunging. Nancy held desperately to her recollection of a car and a policeman and Henry; she was really beginning to pull herself together when suddenly—somewhere on the outskirts of London—the car slowed for a moment outside the gate of a large building. Over the gate was a light, and under the light was a nurse holding a big key. A gate—a light—a nurse; yet one lobe of her brain showed her again a semblance of one of the Tarot cards—ceremonial robes; imperial head-dress, cloak falling like folded wings, proud, austere face lifted towards where in the arch of the gate, so that the light just caught it, was a heraldic carving of some flying creature. Someone, somewhere—perhaps her father behind her—grunted a little, and the grunt seemed to her as if it were wrung from a being in profound pain. And then the car quickened again, and they were flying into the darkness, and away in the roads behind them was that sovereign figure and the sound of a suffering world coming up to it out of the night.
    She would have liked to speak to Henry, but she couldn’t. She and he were in the same car, side by side, only she wasn’t at all clear that there was anyone else in the car at all, or that it was a car, that it was anything but herself mysteriously defined to her own knowledge. She was in a trance; the car, though moving, was still—poised, rushing and motionless at once, at the entrance to a huge, deep, and dark defile, from which on either side the mighty figures rose, themselves at once swift and still, and fled past her and yet were forever there. Indefinable, they defined; they made and held steady the path that was stretched for her. It was a cloud; it was the moon; it was vapor and illusion—or it was the white cloak of the Emperor and the clear cold face of the Empress, as she had seen them when she pored over the Greater Trumps. But the darkness of the low defile awaited her; deeper and deeper, motionless and rushing on, they—she and her companions—were sinking into it. She dared not speak to Henry; he was there, but he was guiding the car. If he were distracted for a moment they might all crash into utter ruin. She let herself take one side-glance at him, a supplication in her heart but never a finger stirring; and, even as she saw his face, she remembered to have seen it elsewhere. There was a painting—somewhere—of a chariot, driven by some semi-Greek figure scourging on two sphinxes who drew that car, and the face in the painting was Henry’s. Henry’s, and yet there was a difference … there was some other likeness; was it (most fantastic of all dreams!) her aunt? The faces, the figures, all rushed together suddenly; something that was neither nurse nor policeman, Empress nor Emperor, Sybil nor Henry, sphinx nor charioteer, grew out of and possessed them all. It was this to which they