The Place of the Lion, Charles Williams [top 100 books of all time checklist .txt] 📗

The conversation between Anthony and Dr. Rockbotham in the car on the way to Berringer’s house was of the politest and chattiest kind, interspersed with moments of seriousness. They began by discussing the curious meteorological conditions, agreeing that such frequent repetitions of thunder without lightning or rain were very unusual.

“Some kind of electrical nucleus, I suppose,” the doctor said, “though why the discharge should be audible but not visible, I don’t know.”

“I noticed it when I was down on Thursday,” Anthony remarked, “and again yesterday. It seems to be louder when we get out of town; inside it’s much less.”

“Deadened by the ordinary noises, I expect,” the doctor said. “Very upsetting for some of my patients—the nervous ones, you know. Even quite steady people are affected in the funniest way sometimes. Now my wife, for instance—nobody less nervous than she is, you’ll agree—yet when she came in this morning—there’s an old servant of ours she generally calls on every Sunday morning when it’s fine and she’s not busy—she had an extraordinary tale of a kind of small earthquake.”

“Earthquake!” Anthony exclaimed.

“She declared the ground shifted under her,” the doctor went on. “She was crossing the allotments just round by the railway bridge at the time, and she nearly fell on a lot of cabbages; in fact she did stumble among them—rather hurt her foot, which was how it cropped up. Of course I wouldn’t say there couldn’t have been a slight shock, but I was about the town at the time, and I didn’t notice anything. You didn’t either, I suppose?”

“Nothing at all,” Anthony said.

“No, I thought not,” the doctor said. “The heat too—do you feel it? It’s going to be a very trying summer.”

Anthony, lying back in the car, with a grim look on his face, said, “It is going to be a very trying summer.”

“You don’t like this heat?” the doctor asked. And “I don’t like this heat,” Anthony with perfect truth replied.

“Well, we don’t all of us. I don’t mind it myself,” the doctor said. “It’s the winter I don’t care for. A doctor’s life, you know; all sorts of weather and all sorts of people. Especially the people; I sometimes say I’d as soon be doctor to a zoo.”

“Talking of zoos, did they ever catch the lioness that got loose round here the other day?” Anthony asked.

“Now that was a funny thing,” the other answered. “We heard all sorts of rumours on the Tuesday night, but there’s been no more news. They think it must have gone in the other direction and they’ve been following it that way, I believe. Of course people are a bit shy of coming out of the town by night, but that’s sheer funk. These imprisoned creatures are very timorous, you know. Supposing there ever was a lioness at all. The show itself moved on the next day, and when I saw the Chief Inspector on Friday he was inclined to laugh at the idea.”

“Was he?” Anthony said. “He must be a brave man.”

“As I said to him,” the doctor went on, “I’d rather laugh at the idea than the thing. So would anybody, I expect.”

He paused, but Anthony had no wish to answer. He felt a constriction at his heart as he listened; “the idea” meant to him a spasm of fear, and he was aware that he existed unhappily between two states of knowledge, between the world around him, the pleasant ordinary world in which one laughed at or discussed ideas, and a looming unseen world where ideas—or something, something living and terrible, passed on its own business, overthrowing minds, wrecking lives, and scattering destruction as it went. There already was the house, silent and secret, in which perhaps potentialities beyond all knowledge waited or shaped themselves. Need he get out of the car—as he was doing? open the gate—enter the garden? Couldn’t he get back now, on some excuse or none, before the door opened and they had to go in to where that old man, as he remembered him, lay in his terrible passivity? What new monstrosity, what beast of indescribable might or beauty, was even now perhaps dragging itself down the stairs? What behemoth would come lumbering through the hall?

Actually the only behemoth, and though she was fat she was hardly that, was the housekeeper. She let them in, she conversed with the doctor; she ushered them up the stair to where at the top the male nurse waited. Anthony followed, and, his heart full of Quentin and Damaris, aspired to the knowledge which should give them both security and peace. He remembered the sentences over which he had brooded half the night. “The first circle is of the lion; the second circle is of the serpent; the third circle—” O what, what was the third? what sinister fate centuries ago had so mutilated that volume of angelical lore as to forbid his discovery now? “The wings of an eagle” well, if that was what was needed, then, so far as he could, he would enter into that circle of the eagle which was the-what had the sentence said?—“The knowledge of the Celestials in the place of the Celestials.”

“And God help us all,” he added to himself, as he came into the bedroom.

He stood aside while the doctor, leaning over the bed, made his examination. There had, the nurse’s report told them, been no change; still silent and motionless the adept lay before them. Anthony walked over to the bed while the doctor spoke to the nurse, and looked at the body. The eyes were open but unseeing; he gazed into them, and went on gazing. Here perhaps, could he reach it, the secret lay; he leaned closer, seeking, half-unconsciously, to penetrate it. For a moment he could have fancied that they flicked into life, but not common life; that a dangerous vitality threatened him. Threaten? he leaned nearer again—“the knowledge of the Celestials in the place of the Celestials.” Quentin—Damaris. He could not avoid the challenge that had momently gleamed from those eyes; it had vanished, but he intensely expected its return. He forgot the doctor; he forgot Berringer; he forgot everything but those open unresponsive eyes in which lurked the presage of defeat or victory. What moved, what gleam ed, what shone at him there? What was opening?

“Quite comatose, poor fellow!” a voice close by him gibbered suddenly.

“Er—yes,” said Anthony, and pulled himself upright. He could have sworn that the slightest film passed over the eyes, and reluctantly he turned his own away. But they were dazzled with the strain; he could not see the room very clearly; there seemed to be dark openings everywhere—the top of the jug on the wash stand, the mirror of the dressing-table, the black handle of the grey painted door, all these were holes in things, entrances and exits perhaps, like rabbit holes in a bank from which something might rapidly issue. He heard the dull voice say again: “Shall we go downstairs?” and found himself walking cautiously across the room. As he came near the door he couldn’t resist a backward glance—and the head had turned surely, and the eyes were watching him? No—it was still quiet on the pillow, but over beyond it the dressing-table mirror showed an oval blackness. He looked at it steadily, then he became aware that he was standing by the door right in the doctor’s way; with a murmur of apology he seize d the handle and opened it.

“It makes it so awkward,” Dr. Rockbotham said, passing through, with a little bow of acknowledgement, “when there is no easy way of—”

Anthony followed, shutting the door after him, and as he turned to step along the landing, found that he stood on a landing indeed but no more that of the simple house into which he had so recently come. It was a ledge rather than a landing, and though below him he saw the shadowy