The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams (i can read book club .txt) 📕

But that evening Anthony, lying in a large chair, contemplated Quentin with almost equal bewilderment.

For he had never known his friend so disturbed, so almost hysterical with—but what it was with Anthony could not understand. The window of their common sitting-room looked out westward over the houses of Shepherd’s Bush, and every now and then Quentin would look at it, with such anxiety and distress that Anthony found himself expecting he knew not what to enter—a butterfly or a lion perhaps, he thought absurdly. A winged lion? Venice—Saint Mark. Perhaps Saint Mark was riding about over London on a winged lion, though why Quentin should be so worried about Saint Mark he couldn’t think. The lion they had seen (if they had) wasn’t winged, or hadn’t seemed to be. Somewhere Anthony vaguely remembered to have seen a picture of people riding on winged lions—some Bible illustration, he thought, Daniel or the Apocalypse. He had forgotten what they were doing, but he had a general vague memory of swords and terrible faces, and a general vague idea that it all had something to do with wasting the earth.

Quentin went back to the window, and, standing by one corner, looked out. Anthony picked up a box of matches, and, opening it by accident upside down, dropped a number on the floor. Quentin leapt round.

“What was that?” he asked sharply.

“Me,” said Anthony. “Sorry; it was pure lazy stupidity.”

“Sorry,” said Quentin in turn. “I seem all on edge tonight.”

“I thought you weren’t very happy,” Anthony said affectionately. “What’s…if there’s anything, I mean, that I can do…”

Quentin came back and dropped into a chair. “I don’t know what’s got me,” he said. “It all began with that lioness. Silly of me to feel it like that. But a lioness is a bit unusual. It was a lioness, wasn’t it?” he asked anxiously.

They had been over this before. And again Anthony, with the best will in the world to say the right thing, found himself hampered by an austere intellectual sincerity. It probably had been, it must have been, a lioness. But it was not the lioness that he had chiefly seen, nor was it a lioness which he had, on the night before, dreamed he had seen stalking over hills and hills and hills, covering continents of unending mountains and great oceans between them, with a stealthy yet dominating stride. In that dream the sky had fallen away before the lion’s thrusting shoulders, the sky that somehow changed into the lion, and yet formed a background to its movement: and the sun had sometimes been rolling round and round it, as if it were a yellow ball, and sometimes had been fixed millions of miles away, but fixed as if it had been left like a lump of meat for the great beast; and Anthony had felt an anxious intense desire to run a few millions of miles in order to pull it down and save it from those jaws. Only however fast he ran he couldn’t catch up with the lion’s much slower movement. He ran much faster than the lion, but he couldn’t get wherever it was so quickly, although of course the lion was farther away. But the farther away it was the bigger it was, according to the new rules of perspective, Anthony remembered himself seriously thinking. It had seemed extremely important to know the rules in that very muddled dream.

It had certainly been a lion-in the dream and in the garden. And he could not pretend—not even for Quentin—that the lioness had mattered nearly so much. So he said, “It was certainly a lioness in the road.”

“And in the garden,” Quentin exclaimed. “Why, surely yesterday morning you agreed it must have been a lioness in the garden.”

“As a great and wise publisher whom I used to know once said,” Anthony remarked, “‘I will believe anything of my past opinions.’ But honestly-in the garden? I don’t suppose it matters one way or the other, and very likely you’re right.”

“But what do you think? Don’t you think it was a lioness?” Quentin cried. And “No,” Anthony said obstinately, “I think it was a lion. I also think”, he added with some haste, “I must have been wrong, because it couldn’t have been. So there we are.”

Quentin shrank back in his chair and Anthony cursed himself for being such a pig-headed precisian. But still, was it any conceivable good pretending—if the intellect had any authority at all? if there were any place for accuracy? In personal relationships it might, for dear love’s sake, sometimes be necessary to lie, so complicated as they often were. But this, so far as Anthony could see, was a mere matter of a line to left or to right upon the wall, and his whole mind revolted at falsehood upon abstract things. It was like an insult to a geometrical pattern. Also he felt that it was up to Quentin—up to him just a little—to deal with this thing. If only he himself knew what his friend feared!

Quentin unintentionally answered his thought. “I’ve always been afraid,” he said bitterly, “at school and at the office and everywhere. And I suppose this damned thing has got me in the same way somehow.”

“The lion?” Anthony asked. Certainly it was a curious world.

“It isn’t—it isn’t just a lion,” Quentin said. “Whoever saw a lion come from nowhere? But we did; I know we did, and you said so. It’s something else—I don’t know what”—he sprang again to his feet—“but it’s something else. And it’s after me.”

“Look here, old thing,” Anthony said, “let’s talk it out. Good God, shall there be anything known to you or me that we can’t talk into comprehension between us? Have a cigarette, and let’s be comfortable. It’s only nine.”

Quentin smiled rather wanly. “O let’s try,” he said. “Can you talk Damaris into comprehension?”

The remark was more direct than either of the two usually allowed himself, without an implicit invitation, but Anthony accepted it. “You’ve often talked me into a better comprehension of Damaris,” he said.

“Theoretically,” Quentin sneered at himself.

“Well, you can hardly tell that, can you?” Anthony argued. “If your intellect elucidated Damaris—O damn!”

The bell of the front door had suddenly sounded and Quentin shied violently, dropping his cigarette. “God curse it,” he cried out.

“All right,” Anthony said, “I’ll go. If it’s anyone we know I won’t let him in, and if it’s anyone we don’t know I’ll keep him out. There! Look after that cigarette!” He disappeared from the room, and it was some time before he returned.

When he did so he was, in spite of his promise, accompanied. A rather short, thickset man, with a firm face and large eyes, was with him.

“I changed my mind, after all,” Anthony said. “Quentin, this is Mr. Foster of Smetham, and he’s come to talk about the lion too. So he was good enough to come up.”

Quentin’s habitual politeness, returning from wherever it hid during his intimacy with his friend, controlled him and said and did the usual things. When they were all sitting down, “And now let’s have it,” Anthony said. “Will you tell Mr. Sabot here what you have told me?”

“I was talking to Miss Tighe this afternoon,” Mr. Foster said; he had a rough deep voice, Quentin thought, “and she told me that you gentlemen had been there two days ago—at Mr. Berringer’s house, I mean—when all this began. So in view of what’s happened since, I thought it would do no harm if we compared notes.”

“When you say what’s happened since,” Anthony asked, “you mean the business at the meeting last night? I understood from Miss Tighe that one of the ladies there thought she saw a snake.”

“I think—and she thinks—she did see a snake,” Mr. Foster answered. “As much as Mr. Tighe saw the butterflies this afternoon. You won’t deny them?”

“Butterflies?” Quentin asked, as Anthony shook his head, and then, with a light movement of it, invited Mr. Foster to explain.

“Mr. Tighe came in while I was at his house this afternoon,” the visitor said, “in a very remarkable state of exaltation. He told us—Miss Tighe and myself—that he had been shown that butterflies were really true. Miss Tighe was inclined to be a little impatient, but I prevailed on her to let him tell us—or rather he insisted on telling us—what he had seen. As far as I could follow, there had been one great butterfly into which the lesser ones had passed. But Mr. Tighe took this to be a justification of his belief in them. He was very highly moved, he quite put us on one side, which is (if I may say so) unusual in so quiet a man as he, and he would do nothing but go to his cabinets and look at the collection of his butterflies. I left him”, Mr. Foster ended abruptly, “on his knees, apparently praying to them.”

Quentin had been entirely distracted by this tale from his own preoccupation. “Praying!” he exclaimed. “But I don’t…Weren’t you with him, Anthony?”

“I was up to a point,” Anthony said. “I was going to tell you later on, whenever it seemed convenient. Mr. Foster is quite right. It can’t possibly have been so, but we saw thousands and thousands of them all flying to one huge fellow in the middle, and then—well, then they weren’t there.”

“So Tighe said,” Mr. Foster remarked. “But why can’t it possibly have happened?”

“Because—because it can’t,” Anthony said. “Thousands of butterflies swallowed up in one, indeed!”

“There was Aaron’s rod,” Mr Foster put in, and for a moment perplexed both his hearers. Anthony, recovering first, said: “What, the one that was turned into a snake and swallowed the other snakes?”

“Exactly,” Mr. Foster answered. “A snake.”

“But you don’t mean that this woman—what was her name?—that this Miss Wilmot saw Aaron’s rod or snake, or what not, do you?” Anthony asked. And yet, Quentin thought, not with such amused scorn as might have been expected; it sounded more like the precise question which the words made it: “do you mean this?”

“I think the magicians of Pharaoh may have seen Miss Wilmot’s snake,” Mr. Foster said, “and all their shapely wisdom have been swallowed by it, as the butterflies of the fields were taken into that butterfly this afternoon.”

“And to what was Mr. Tighe praying then?” Anthony said, his eyes intently fixed on the other.

“To the gods that he knew,” Mr. Foster said, “or to such images of them as he had collected to give himself joy.”

“The gods?” Anthony asked.

“That is why I have come here,” Mr. Foster answered, “to find out what you know