The Place of the Lion (9 page)

Quentin jerked his head. “You think it's stopped, don't you?” he jeered. “You great fool, wait, only wait! I haven't told you, but I've known it a long time. I've heard it when I lay awake at night, the earth chuckling away at its imbecile jokes. It's slobbering over us now. O you're going to find out things soon! Wait till it scratches you. Haven't you felt it scratching you when you thought about that woman, you fool? When you can't sleep for thinking of her? and the earth scratches you again? Ho, and you didn't know what it was. But I know.”

Anthony looked at him long and equably. “You know, Quentin,” he said, “you
do
have the most marvellous notions. When I think that I really know you I get almost proud. The beauty of it is that for all I know you're right, only if you are there's nothing for us to discuss. And though I don't say there is, I insist on behaving as if there was. Because I will not believe in a world where you and I can't talk.” He came a step nearer and added: “Will you? It'll be an awful nuisance for me if you do.”

Quentin had stopped pirouetting and was swinging to and fro on his toes. “Talk!” he said uncertainly. “What's the good of talking when the earth's mad?”

“It supports the wings in the air,” Anthony answered. “Come along and support.”

He tucked his arm into his friend's. “But perhaps for this afternoon——” he began, and paused, arrested by the other's face. Quentin had looked back over his shoulder, and his eyes were growing blind with terror. Sense and intelligence deserted them; Anthony saw and swung round. By the side of the road, almost where the ripple had seemed to pass over, there appeared the creature they had set out to seek. It was larger and mightier than when they had seen it before—and, comparatively close as they now were, they fell back appalled by the mere effluence of strength that issued from it. It was moving like a walled city, like the siege-towers raised against Nineveh or Jerusalem; each terrible paw, as it set it down, sank into the firm ground as if into mud, but was plucked forth without effort; the movement of its mane, whenever it mightily turned its head, sent reverberations of energy through the air, which was shaken into wind by that tossed hair. Anthony's hand rested helplessly on his revolver, but he could not use it—whether this were mortal lion or no, he must take his chance, its being to his exposed being. He had challenged the encounter, and now it was upon him, and all the strength of his body was flowing out of him: he was beginning to tremble and gasp. He no longer had hold of Quentin, nor was indeed aware of him; a faintness was taking him—perhaps this was death, he thought, and then was suddenly recalled to something like consciousness by hearing a shot at his side.

Quentin had snatched the revolver from him and was firing madly at the lion, screaming, “There! there! there!” as he did so, screaming in a weakness that seemed to lay him appallingly open to the advance of that great god—for it looked no less—whenever it should choose to crush him. The noise sounded as futile as the bullets obviously proved, and the futility of the outrage awoke in Anthony a quick protest.

“Don't!” he cried out, “you're giving in. That's not the way to rule; that's not within you.” To keep himself steady, to know somehow within himself what was happening, to find the capacity of his manhood even here—some desire of such an obscure nature stirred in him as he spoke. He felt as if he were riding against some terrific wind; he was balancing upon the instinctive powers of his spirit; he did not fight this awful opposition but poised himself within and above it. He heard vaguely the sound of running feet and knew that Quentin had fled, but he himself could not move. It was impossible now to help others; the overbearing pressure was seizing and stifling his breath; and still as the striving force caught him he refused to fall and strove again to overpass it by rising into the balance of adjusted movement. “If this is in me I reach beyond it,” he cried to himself again, and felt a new-come freedom answer his cry. A memory—of all insane things—awoke in him of the flying he had done in the last year of the war; it seemed as if again he looked down on a wide stretch of land and sea, but no human habitations were there, only forest, and plain, and river, and huge saurians creeping slowly up from the waters, and here and there other giant beasts coming into sight for a moment and then disappearing. Another flying thing went past below him—a hideous shape that was a mockery of the clear air in which he was riding, riding in a machine that, without his control, was now sweeping down towards the ground. He was plunging towards a prehistoric world; a lumbering vastidity went over an open space far in front, and behind it his own world broke again into being through that other. There was a wild minute in which the two were mingled; mammoths and dinotheria wandered among hedges of English fields, and in that confused vision he felt the machine make easy landing, run, and come to a stop. Yet it couldn't have been a machine, for he was no longer in it; he hadn't got out, but he was somehow lying on the ground, drawing deep breaths of mingled terror and gratitude and salvation at last. In a recovered peace he moved, and found that he was actually stretched at the side of the road; he moved again and sat up.

There was no sign of the lion, nor of Quentin. He got to his feet; all the countryside lay still and empty, only high above him a winged something still disported itself in the full blaze of the sun.

Chapter Six

MEDITATION OF MR. ANTHONY DURRANT

When at last, by another road, Anthony returned to Smetham he was very tired. It was not the extra length of the journey that had tired him—he had not at that moment been able to bring himself to go back by Berringer's home—but a shock of wrestling with a great strength. He had taken long to recover his usual equilibrium, and he had been worried over Quentin. But no gazing from the top of the ridge had revealed his friend to him, and there was no sign to show in which direction the fugitive had gone. It was a small comfort to Anthony to remember that he had actually heard the flying feet, for the horrible possibility haunted him that Quentin might … might have been destroyed—shattered or annihilated by the powers which, it seemed, were finding place in the world, or perhaps it would be truer to say (if Foster had been right) into whose dominion the outer world was passing. But the thought of Foster reminded him of another phrase; the man had said something about those who hated and feared it being hunted. Was it possible that such a chase was even now proceeding? that over those sedate hills, and among those quiet cornfields and meadows, a golden majesty was with inexorable speed pursuing Quentin's fearful and lunatic haste? a haste which could find no shelter, nor set any barrier between itself and its fate? The distress of such a thought swelled in Anthony's heart, as, heavily and slowly, he came back to the town. For he, it was evident, could at that time do nothing; he was far too exhausted, and he needed to be alone in order to reatize what had happened, and what his next action should be. Besides, always and everywhere, thrusting between even Quentin's need and any possibility of succour, there was Damaris.

He bathed and rested, and ate and drank, and then feeling better went out to smoke and think in the grounds of the hotel.

It was still early evening; tennis was going on not far off, but presently everyone would be going in to dinner. Anthony found a deck chair in a remote corner, sat down, lit a cigarette, and began to meditate. He arranged his questions in his mind—six of them:

1. Had it happened?

2. Why had it happened?

3. What was likely to happen now?

4. How was it likely to affect Damaris?

5. What was happening to Quentin?

6. What did he himself propose to do about it all?

Over the first question he spent no time. The things that he had seen had been as real to him as anything that he had ever seen. Besides, Tighe had given up collecting butterflies, and Foster had come and talked with him, and Quentin had run away—all because of various aspects of “it.” If “it” hadn't happened, then Quentin had been right and they were all going mad together. The fact that most of Smetham knew nothing about it and wouldn't have believed it was irrelevant. He could act only upon his own experience, and his actions should be, as far as possible, consistent with that experience. “It” then had happened. But why? or, to put it another way, what was happening? Here he had no hypothesis of his own, and only one of anyone else's—Foster's: that between a world of living principles, existing in its own state of being, and this present world, a breach had been made. The lioness from without, the lion from—within? say within, it meant as much as any other mode of description—had approached each other through the channel of a man's consciousness, and had come together by the natural kinship between the material image and the immaterial idea. And after that first impact others had followed; other principles had found their symbols and possessed them, drawing back into themselves as many of those particular symbols as came immediately within the zone influenced. How far those presences could be seen by men he could not guess; he and Quentin had seen the lion, he and Tighe the butterfly. But Foster had told him how one woman, and only one, had cried out that she had seen a snake, which Foster himself had not seen. What then was the distinction? Pondering over this, it occurred to him suddenly that snakes were not as common as butterflies in England, and that only a most unusual chance had loosed a lioness on that country road. Might it not be then that these powers were not visible till they had found their images? not visible at least to ordinary eyes? Why that woman had seen one he did not profess to explain. Nor why, lioness and butterflies being gone, the many sheep he had seen still remained quietly feeding near the house of exodus. He remembered with a shock the strange quiver that had passed across the road that afternoon; was it so certain that he had
not
seen some movement of the snake? If the long undulating body had passed through the earth—if the earth, so to speak, had been charged with that serpentine influence?… All this was beyond him; he could not tell. But, right or wrong, there seemed to him at present no other hypothesis than that of powers loosed into the world; without finally believing it, he accepted it until he should discover more.

And what was likely to happen now? Anthony threw away the end of his cigarette, and sighed. Why did he always ask himself these silly questions? Always intellectualizing, he thought, always trying to find a pattern. Well, and why not? If Foster was right, every man—he himself—was precisely a pattern of these powers. But it wasn't at the moment his own, it was the general pattern he was concerned with. The word supplied a possible answer—the present general pattern of the world was being violently changed into another pattern, perhaps a better one, perhaps not, but anyhow another. And the present pattern looked like being utterly and entirely destroyed, if the world went on passing into that other state. Something had saved him that afternoon, but as he recalled his breathless struggle with overwhelming energy he realized part of the danger that was drawing near. The beauty of butterflies was one thing, but what if these principles drew to their separate selves the elements of which each man was made? Man, it seemed to Anthony, looked like having a thin time. If the animals were swallowed up as Aaron's snake swallowed the snakes of the magicians? Were the other plagues, he wondered, but the permitted domination of some element by its own or another principle? Was that principle—whatever it might be—that knew itself in the frog loosed once in all the palaces of Egypt? and did the life which is in blood enter into and control the waters of the Nile? As perhaps on a later day at Cana ecstasy which is wine entered into lucidity which is water and possessed it? “Damn!” said Anthony, “I'm romancing, and anyhow it doesn't matter; it's got nothing to do with what is happening now. It was the lion that began it here and (if they're right) the snake. Is the lion still beginning it?”

He sat up in some excitement. They had seemed to see the shape of the lion moving slowly—and the queer wave in the road had passed almost in the same path but in the opposite direction. Was this the place of entrance?—were those two the guards of the other world, the dwellers on that supernatural threshold, pacing round in widening circles, until slowly the whole world was encompassed? And, in that case, how long before their circle included Smetham—and Damaris?

He was up against his fourth question, and he made himself lean back to look at it quietly. But his heart was beating quickly, and his hands moved restlessly about his chair. How would it affect Damaris? He tried to see her again as she was in her own nature—he tried to think to which of these august powers she was kin; but he could do not it. “O Damaris darling!” he exclaimed, and felt himself in all a terrible fear for her. If that childish ignorance and concern and childish arrogance and selfishness met these dangers—O then what shelter, what safety, would there be? He wanted to help her, he wanted to stay this new movement till she had understood, and turned to meet it; and if his mind clamoured again with a desire that they should do this together, and together find the right way into or out of this other world—if so far his own self thrust into his otherwise selfless anxiety, it was a momentary accompaniment. But she wouldn't, she would go on thoughtfully playing with the dead pictures of ideas, with names and philosophies, Plato and Pythagoras and Anselm and Abelard, Athens and Alexandria and Paris, not knowing that the living existences to which seers and saints had looked were already in movement to avenge themselves on her. “O you sweet blasphemer!” Anthony moaned, “can't you wake?” Gnostic traditions, medieval rituals, Aeons and Archangels—they were cards she was playing in her own game. But she didn't know, she didn't understand. It wasn't her fault; it was the fault of her time, her culture, her education—the pseudo-knowledge that affected all the learned, the pseudo-scepticism that infected all the unlearned, in an age of pretence, and she was only pretending as everybody else did in this lost and imbecile century. Well, it was up to him to do something.