The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams (i can read book club .txt) 📕
- Author: Charles Williams
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She put out her hand for his. “But tell me,” she said, “I don’t understand. What ought I to do? How can that thing…that horrible thing…what do you mean? Anthony, tell me. I know I’ve tried to use you….”
“You’ve tried to use something else than me,” Anthony said more gently, but he did not take her hand. “And it’s up to you to stop. Or not.”
“I’ll try to stop if you think I ought to,” Damaris said. “But what did I see?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “if you want me to. Do you want me to?”
She gripped him suddenly. “Why did you come to me?” she exclaimed, and he answered simply, “Because I heard you call.”
“Tell me,” she said, and he begun, going over the tale as it had been known to him. But he spoke now neither with the irritation nor with the amusement which she had felt in him of old; his voice convinced her of what he said, and the authority that was in it directed and encouraged even while it awed and warned her. He neither doubted nor permitted her to doubt; the whole gospel—morals and mythology at once—entered into and possessed her. When he came to speak of Quentin’s flight she trembled a little as she sat and tried to move her hand away. But Anthony, standing above her and looking out towards the darkening eastern sky, did not release it; half a chain and half a caress, his own retained hers by the same compulsion that she heard in his voice, and he exposed her to the knowledge of what she had done. Merciless and merciful, he held her; pitiful and unpitying, he subordinated her to the complete realization of herself and her past.
“So”, he ended at last, “we can’t tell what will happen. But I don’t think”, he added, his voice lightening, “that there is much time left before it does. I shall know presently what I have to do.”
After a long silence she said, “Do you know, Anthony, I think perhaps I ought….” She paused.
“Ought?” he asked.
“Ought to go and look for your friend.”
He considered it gravely. “I had expected to do it myself,” he said, “but I don’t feel that I ought….There’s some other thing…Why will you go?”
“It’s either that or Abelard,” she said, smiling faintly. “My father doesn’t want me.”
“No,” he answered. “I think your father’s almost dead already. I thought so when he let me in just now—before I found you lying on the floor.”
She shuddered again. “O darling, it was dreadful when he pushed me away,” she said, and he answered again, looking down on her, tender and stern at once: “And you—if it comes to pushing away?”
In such conversation, question and answer exchanged between them while Damaris searched her heart, and the dark places where the images of obscene profanations dwelt, they stayed for a long time. They did not hear the noise where, at the back of the house, a crowd surged and pushed and stared and laughed and talked round the fallen houses, and told one another how here a boarding and there a fence had also given way, and how funny it was. Nor did they interrupt above them the trance that was increasing upon her father where he lay stretched on his bed, content now not even to move, and aware only of the vision of living colour that possessed him, as the beauty to which he had offered himself accepted inevitably that surrender, and softly gathered him into itself. In the town the living outposts of the invasion awaited it—Richardson and Foster and Dora Wilmot—each after their kind. Beyond the town change was proceeding; in a great circle round that solitary house there was no living thing but a few men and women, unconscious yet of the doom. Birds and insects and animals had all vanished—all but the sheep; they alone in their field seemed to know nothing of the Angels of that other world. And even among these Principles and Dominations perhaps none but that Virtue which Anthony had encountered in the pit, and which in its earthly image had deigned to be with him that night when he came to dissipate the fear of that other image which was yet itself to the challenge of the pre sumptuous and erring mind—none but the Virtue understood, in its soaring comprehension, the safety in which the sheep still lived, or from what yet deeper distance of spirit was to arise the Innocence which everlastingly formed and maintained them.
Richardson, returning towards his rooms, decided suddenly not to enter them.
The sweep and wonder of his vision were still with him; his body still palpitated with the echo of those charging hooves, though within him his spirit desired a further end. He longed to approach that other end with the speed of the racing herd, but to such an approach the intoxication of the sight was alien; he subdued himself harshly. Visions and auditions had nothing to do with the final surrender, which was—for him—a thing to be achieved wholly in itself, and (it seemed) without reference to any natural or supernatural event. A lonely life had but emphasized, as the exterior life will, the interior method which he pursued. Even his connexion with Berringer had been but a part of a distraction necessary and right to relieve the rigour of his duty, and to keep him in spiritual health, but not part of that duty. Chance, assisted by his personal tastes, had given him a job among books, and as far as possible he read in those books of t he many ways which are always the Way. But not by books or by phrases, not by images or symbols or myths, did he himself follow it. He abstracted himself continually from sense and from thought, attempting always a return to an interior nothingness where that which is itself no thing might communicate its sole essential being.
So separating himself from the memory of the horses, so concentrated on the Nothing of his desires, he walked for some time along the streets until he experienced the easily recognized symptoms of temporary interior exhaustion. Obedient to those symptoms he relaxed and murmured to himself, as was his habit at such conclusions, the phrases from the Dionysius with whom Damaris had been concerned—“He hath not power, nor is he power; He liveth not, nor is He life; neither is He of the things that are or are not, nor is there for Him any word of name or thought, for He is neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth.” As he ended he began again to look round him. He was standing half-way down a street in one of the rather poorer parts of the town—where the lower middle-class were slightly more obviously lower. A tobacconist close by was shutting up for the night; the two recognized each other and nodded.
“Funny business about the telephones,” the tobacconist said.
“I hadn’t heard,” Richardson answered casually but politely. “What was it?”
The tobacconist paused in his task. “All down, so they say,” he explained. “I had occasion to want to speak to my brother in London—my wife thought she’d run up tomorrow by the cheap train—and the Exchange girl told me I couldn’t get through! Couldn’t get a trunk call through on Sunday night! All nonsense it sounded to me, and so I told her, and she as good as told me not to be a fool—the lines were down. They’ve sent out repair gangs, it seems; I had old Mr. Hoskins in—you know him, I expect; the grandfather, I mean; comes in for his quarter-pound every Sunday evening as regularly as the sun…well, I ought to say moon, oughtn’t I? at this time of day, but one gets into a habit of speaking.”
“One does,” Richardson murmured in the pause. “Unless one is careful.”
“So he told me”, the tobacconist resumed, “that the poles have fallen down—all along the roads—all smashed to bits they are, he said, and the wires all fused and broken. Most extraordinary thing I ever heard of. Old Hoskins, he thought it must have been the wind, but then as I said to him: ‘Where’s the wind?’ Now my belief is that it’s got something to do with all that thunder we’ve been having the last few days—this electricity’s a funny thing. Don’t you think that’s more likely now, sir?”
Richardson nodded; then seeing that he was expected to speak, said, “It’s certain, I should think, to have something to do with the thunder.”
“And as for hoardings and fences I hear they’re down in a lot of places. Funny thing altogether.”
“Very funny,” Richardson answered. “Awkward if the houses follow suit.”
The tobacconist gaped at him for a moment. “O I don’t think that’s likely,” he began slowly, but looking up at his own first floor with the beginnings of a fearful anxiety. “I mean houses are rather different to hoardings, aren’t they?”
“Houses that have been lived in, perhaps,” Richardson acknowledged, also looking thoughtfully upwards. “Yes, perhaps. There may be an infiltration of human existence…” He ceased and seemed to await a decision.
“Yes,” the tobacconist said, recovering faith. “Human beings make all the difference, don’t they? A little bit of furniture works wonders in an empty house. Why, when we moved in here, I said to my wife about a room where there was nothing had been put but a chair that had got a leg broken—my fault it was—in the shifting—not a carpet down there wasn’t nothing but that bit of chair, and I said to her: ‘It looks like home already.’ Just the difference between a room and four walls and a floor.”
“Is there any?” Richardson asked. “Yes, of course, I see what you mean.” But his spirit cried out that there was in fact no difference; they were alike shape and form and so far temptations to the soul which so long sought refuge in such exterior patterns from the state in which no such patterns were to be found or desired. He felt the contrast so sharply that he could endure no more talk; he forced himself to say, with as little abruptness as possible, “Ah, well, I daresay we shall hear more about it in the morning,” nodded a goodnight and crossed the road.
As he reached the other side he saw before him a church. It was a small, old, rather ugly Wesleyan church; the doors were open because of the heat,
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