The Place of the Lion (20 page)

When he came to himself he found Dr. Rockbotham in the room, and other people, people who were carrying something out. The doctor, as soon as he discovered that the young man was conscious, came over to him, and was at first discreetly cheerful. But in a few minutes he allowed himself to relax, and said very seriously, “What happened?”

“God knows,” Richardson said, and paused. Then he added, “What was she like?”

Dr. Rockbotham shook his head and—even he—shuddered. “Dreadful,” he said. “I suppose there'll have to be a postmortem—and I hate the idea. I never want to see it again.”

“God help her,” Richardson said sincerely, “wherever, after death, she is. It was a dreadful chance that brought her to it. There are enough of her kind about, but the others get off scot-free.”

But his thoughts were elsewhere. He looked round the room; there was no sign of the Power he had seen. The window was wide open at the bottom, and the garden lay beyond—perhaps it had passed upon its way. The end of everything was surely very near. He got to his feet.

“But you must tell me something,” the doctor said. “I was wondering if I ought to call in the police.”

Richardson looked at him, and mentally refused to speak. The Gods who had come to man he felt he might have to meet, but he simply couldn't explain. He uttered a few words explaining that he had been seized with faintness—which the doctor already knew—and felt he must get home. Somehow he escaped. In the street he remembered the old lady. “Certainly,” he said to himself grimly, “there
are
other ways of feeling bad besides coming over faint.”

Chapter Thirteen

THE BURNING HOUSE

Smetham next morning found itself more than a little agitated. It was, to begin with, on one side cut off from the outer world; the telephones and telegraphs were down. Even the railway line had been interfered with; fortunately on that side it was a very small railway, a mere branch line. But still, at a certain point the lines had simply disappeared, had apparently just crumbled into dust. The point happened to be about five yards long when it was first discovered, and by the time the railway gang got to it, it was rather more than six. There was a good deal of difficulty too about mending it—though the news of this did not reach the town till later; none of the usual appliances were reliable; they seemed to have none of their proper strength. Steel bent; wood snapped; hammers went awry, for their weight lightened even between the upward swing and the blow. It was all most unusual and very disconcerting; and those whose business or pleasure took them to the station where they found that the little train remained the whole day were thoroughly upset.

But there were others who were disturbed too. The collapse of the houses behind the Tighes' home was only part of a disturbance that affected a complete arc of the town. In that arc all dissociated buildings had been affected—by wind, by thunder, by a local earthquake, nobody knew how; sheds and garages were found to be broken down and ruinous. Hoardings were down, poles and posts—everything that was not largely used by man and that had not received into it, as matter will, over a long period, part of his more intimate life. The destruction therefore, consistent with its own laws, was inconsistent to uninstructed eyes. A shed where two small boys found continual pleasure in playing and working was left standing; a very much finer summer-house which no-one had wanted or used was found so broken up that it was not much more that a heap of splinters. Strength, though no-one realized it, was being withdrawn from the works of man, for the earth was more and more passing into the circle round the solitary house, and as it passed the Principle of Strength re-assumed all of itself which had been used in human labours. Anthony Durrant, at breakfast in the Station Hotel, heard of this and that piece of destruction, and saw it in the light of that greater knowledge which he had received since, in the abyss, he had accepted the challenge of the Eagle. This was the first circle, the extreme outward change which the entrance of man's world into that other world was producing. Over the coffee and his first cigarette he asked himself what other change was imminent. When everything was drawn farther, into the second circle—silly words, but they had to be used—when Subtlety which was the Serpent began to draw into itself the subtleties of man? A tremor went through him, but he sat on, constraining himself gravely to contemplate the possible result. For the principle of subtlety was double—instinctive and intellectual, and if man's intellect began to fail, or at least all unprepared and undefended intellect, what dreadful fatuity would take its place! He had a vision of the town full of a crowd of expressionless gaping mindless creatures, physical and mental energy passing out of them. Yet since man was meant to be the balance and pattern of all the Ideas—ah, but he was
meant
to be! Was he? Setting aside any who had deliberately abandoned themselves to their own desires instead of the passion for truth, for reality, such as those with whom he had fought, still there were those who had unconsciously become lost in one pursuit, such as Mr. Tighe, or who had studied reality for their own purposes—such as Damaris had been. She had been saved by a terrible experience, and by the chance of (he found himself bound to admit it as an unimportant fact) his own devotion to her. But of the others?

He left the problem. He had his own business to attend to. Damaris, whatever her faults, had never been a fool—outside one particular folly—and in the long talk that they had had on the previous evening she had grown more and more clear that her business was to go out into the lanes and fields and see if she could find Quentin. His breath came a little quicker; his body shook for a moment, as he considered her making this adventure in a countryside where such Powers were to be experienced. But he overcame this natural fear. If Damaris felt it to be her duty, a necessity of her new life, she had better go. In every way it would be wiser and greater than for her to crouch over her books again while transmutation was proceeding. These cries of the soul produced their own capacities, and though too often the capacity faded as the crisis passed, it was better to make use of it at once than to find reasons for neglecting it. He had himself half-intended to search for his friend—at first alone, and then in company with Damaris, but another place, though not another quest, had presented itself to him. As he thought of Quentin he found his mind recurring continually to the rooms they shared, to the long discussions, the immortal evenings, experienced reality, eternal knowledge. Even from the ordinary point of view, it was at least possible that the distracted Quentin might have tried to get back to the place he knew so well, perhaps by train if his habits still had power on him, perhaps on foot if they had not. It was at least as likely that Quentin would be there as anywhere, taking refuge amid dear familiarities from his intolerable fear. But Anthony felt that this possibility was not the real reason of his own decision. He felt that there rather than elsewhere could he best serve his friend; his nature go out to him, and his will be ready. For there, in so far as place mattered at all, was the place of the Principle that had held them together—something that, he hoped, was stronger than the lion and subtler than the serpent and more lovely than butterflies, something perhaps that held even the Ideas in their places and made a tender mockery even of the Angelicals. There his being would have the best possibility of knowing where that other being was; and in his new-found union with Damaris the possibility was increased. It was for her to prove her own courage and purpose—he could not help her there; except by accepting it. But if her search went among—not the fields alone but those things which moved in the fields, and if he attended, under the protection of the Eagle, in—not their rooms alone but the place that held their rooms, might not some success be granted, and Quentin be brought safely from the chaos that had fallen on him? And even … But the further thought eluded him; some greater possibility flickered in his mind and was gone. Well, that could wait; there was order even in the Divine Hierarchies, and his first business was to catch the earliest possible train to London.

He failed in this because Richardson telephoned just as he was getting up from the breakfast table, and afterwards came immediately round to see him. The tales they each had to recount made no alteration in either of their purposes. Anthony was still clear he had to go to London, and Richardson—smiling a little ironically—proposed to go as usual to his bookshop. They were both in very different ways too far practised in self-discipline and intellectual control not to be content in any crisis, even the most fantastic, to deal as adequately as possible with the next moment. The next moment clearly invited each of them to a definite job, and each of them immediately responded. They shook hands and parted at the door of the hotel, two young men separating pleasantly for the week's work, two princely seekers after holiness dividing to their lonely individual labours. But as they shook hands they were, each of them, intensely aware of sound and movement in the air about them, though one seemed rather to welcome and one to refuse it; and those who passed either of them in the street threw more than one glance at the intent and noble figure that went vigilantly on its way.

Among those who passed Richardson was Mr. Berringer's housekeeper. She had spent the Sunday night in Smetham, rather against the will of the male nurse whom Dr. Rockbotham had engaged. But the doctor himself had given her permission when he had been at
The Joinings
on the Sunday morning, after asking Lorrigan, which was the nurse's name, whether that wouldn't be all right. The question so obviously was one of those which the Latin grammar states are introduced by the word “nonne” that the doctor had hardly waited for the affirmative answer which “nonne” expects. What, as a matter of fact, Lorrigan had said sounded itself more like “nonne” than any English word had a right to do. He rather disapproved of having to get his own breakfast, but later on the sight of the supper which the housekeeper had put ready placated him, and they parted on the best of terms, condoling with each other over the increasing heat. Once or twice indeed, after she had gone, Lorrigan thought he had smelt something burning, and had gone round to investigate. But everything had seemed all right.

It was certainly very hot. Standing at the door of the house for a few minutes before going upstairs to the bed that had been made up for him in Berringer's room, Lorrigan thought to himself that it was partly due to the position of the house. It lay in a much deeper hollow than he had realized, and yet he had known the road well enough for seven or eight years, ever since he had come to Smetham. He had often been along it on his motor-cycle, and he had always thought of it as mounting just past the house in a gentle rise to the slightly higher ridge where the trees were. But to-night as he stood there, looking out, it seemed very different. The hedge looked higher, and much steeper; indeed, all round the house the ground was much higher than he remembered. He looked along the road in the direction of the climbing road, and thought lazily, “It does climb too.” For a wild moment, the house and Mr. Berringer and he all seemed very deep, almost at the bottom of a pit, with ground up about them like walls. There had been less thunder this last day or two, which was fortunate, for it was a creepy house he was in—and he rather wished the housekeeper had not gone. Talk was a useful thing; it kept one steady, he thought, unconsciously repeating Anthony's “It supports the wings in the air” of the previous day. And there were all sorts of little shiverings and quiverings and flickers—once or twice it had been exactly like a little flame at the edge of his eyes. Patients who felt shiverings and quiverings and saw flames and flashes he was more or less used to. He had once been male nurse for three years to an old gentleman who had a recurring belief that he had been responsible for the Great Fire of London, and who had in consequence at those times fits of deep melancholy and remorse at the deaths he had caused, accompanied by a spasmodic terror of being himself cut off by the Fire. Lorrigan's own view had been that this gentleman ought to have been put away, but the family couldn't bring themselves to such extreme measures, so he was relegated to the Dower House and Lorrigan, and books on the higher mathematics in which he was an acknowledged authority. But with all his drawbacks he had been, at his best, a pleasant gentleman, and the house had been away among the South Downs, where everything was much less oppressive. Lorrigan sighed, and went to bed.

In the morning it was, if anything, worse. The sun was blazing down, and nobody came along the road. It had never been a busy road, but it had not, when he had been along it, ever seemed so deserted as it was now. He waited impatiently for Mrs. Portman's return.

She came about half-past eleven full of the rumours that were going about the town. When he heard of the fall of the telephones Lorrigan went off to try their own, and found indeed that he could not get a reply from the Exchange at Smetham. He came back to her rather gloomily, and interrupted her repetition of her story to ask if she could smell burning. “It's getting a very peculiar house, this,” he said. “The old man upstairs—well, I don't mind him; I'm used to them. But all this smell of fire, and things breaking down … And dreams. I don't know when I've dreamt as badly as I did last night. It was a regular nightmare. All animals—you wouldn't believe, Mrs. Portman; I might have been to the Zoo. There was a great lion walking round everywhere.… I couldn't get past him—you know how it is in dreams …”

“Why,” said Mrs. Portman, “would you believe it, that's what my daughter's little girl was talking about this morning. Out in the garden before breakfast she was, and came running in to say that there must be a circus come to Smetham, for she'd just seen a big lion go by the end of the garden. She couldn't talk of anything else all breakfast time till her mother shut her up, her father not being very well. He's a policeman, you know, and he'd been on night duty, and came in all dazed this morning. Couldn't talk of anything but how lovely somethings was.”