The Place of the Lion (6 page)

Credulous, breathless, he gazed, until after times unreckoned had passed, there seemed to be a stay. Lesser grew the clouds above; smaller the flights that joined them. Now there were but a score and now but twelve or ten—now only three tardy dancers waited above for the flight of their vision; and as again it rose, but one—coming faster than all the rest, reaching its, strange assignation as it were at the last permitted moment, joining its summoning lord as it rose for the last time, and falling with it; and then the great butterfly of the garden floated idly in the empty air, and the whole army of others had altogether vanished from sight, and from knowledge. It also after a short while rose, curvetting, passed upwards towards the roof of the house, settled there for a moment, a glowing splendour upon the red tiles, swept beyond it, and disappeared.

Anthony moved and blinked, took a step or two away, looked round him, blinked again, and turned back to Mr. Tighe. He was about to speak, but, seeing the other man's face, he paused abruptly. The tears were running down it; as his hands released the bars Anthony saw that he was trembling all over; he stumbled and could not get his footing upon the road. Anthony caught and steadied him.

“O glory, glory,” Mr. Tighe said. “O glory everlasting!”

Anthony said nothing; he couldn't begin to think of anything to say. Mr. Tighe, apparently collecting himself, went an unconscious pace or two on, and stopped.

“O that I should see it!” he said again. “O glory be to it!” He wiped away his tears with his knuckles, and looked back at the garden. “O the blessed sight,” he went on. “And I saw it. O what have I done to deserve it?”

“What … what do you think …” Anthony desisted, his companion was so obviously not listening. Mr. Tighe in a little run went back to the gate, and bobbed half across it, making inarticulate murmurs. These gradually ceased, and, pulling himself upright, he remained for a few minutes gazing devoutly at the garden. Then with a deep sigh he turned to face Anthony.

“Well,” he said normally, “I suppose I ought to be getting back. Which way are you going?”

“I think I'll come back with you,” Anthony answered. “I don't feel capable of walking on as I meant to. Besides,” he added diffidently, “I should be very much obliged to you if you could explain this.”

Mr. Tighe picked up his net, which was lying on the road, patted himself here and there, gave a final beatific glance at the garden, put his cap straight, and began to walk on. “Well, as to explaining,” he said doubtfully, “I couldn't tell you anything you don't know.”

“It seems to me someone ought to be able to tell me quite a lot I don't know,” Anthony murmured, but Mr. Tighe only answered, “I always knew they were real, but to think I should see them.”

“See them?” Anthony ventured.

“See the kingdom and the power and the glory,” Mr. Tighe answered. “O what a day this has been!” He looked round at the tall young man pacing by his side. “You know, I did believe it.”

“I am quite sure you did,” Anthony answered gravely. “I wish you'd believe as well, Mr. Tighe, that I only want to understand, if I can, what it seems to you happened over there. Because I can't think that I really saw a lot of butterflies vanishing entirely. But that was what it looked like.”

“Did it now?” Mr. Tighe said. “Well, but the thing is—— You see, it proved they were real, and I always believed that. Damaris doesn't.”

“No,” Anthony agreed, with a doubtful smile, “Damaris probably doesn't—whatever you mean by real. But she will.”

“Will she?” Mr. Tighe replied, with an unexpected scepticism. “Well perhaps … one of these days.”

“If there is any reality,” Anthony said vigorously, “then Damaris shall jolly well know it, if I have anything to do with her. Wouldn't she like to hear me say so, bless her for a self-absorbed little table-maker. But about this reality of yours——”

Mr. Tighe seemed to make an effort or two at phrases, but presently he gave it up. “It's no good,” he said apologetically; “if you didn't see it, it's no good.”

“I saw clouds and clouds of butterflies, or I thought I did, all just disappearing,” Anthony repeated. “And that monstrous one in the middle.”

“Ah, don't call it that,” the older man protested. “That … O that!”

He abandoned speech in a subdued rapture; and in a despair at making anything of anything Anthony followed his example. Something very queer seemed to be going on at that house in the country road. The lion—and the butterflies—and the tale Damaris had, with apparent laughter and real indignation, told him of Miss Wilmot and a crowned snake—and the stench she had known there—and Mr. Berringer's curious collapse.…

“How is this Mr. Berringer?” he asked suddenly.

“That was Dr. Rockbotham you saw with me,” Tighe answered. “He said there was no change. But he didn't give me a very clear idea of what was wrong. He said something about an intermittent suspension of the conscious vital faculties, but it was all very obscure.”

“Well,” Anthony said, as they reached the road leading to the station, “I don't think I'll come back with you. A little silent meditation, I fancy, is what I need.” He looked seriously at his companion. “And you?”

“I am going to look at my butterflies, and recollect everything we saw,” Mr. Tighe answered. “It's the only thing I can do. I was always certain they were true.”

He shook hands and walked quickly away. Anthony stood and watched him. “And what in God's own most holy name,” he asked himself, “does the man mean by that? But he's believed it all along anyhow. O darling, O Damaris my dear, whatever will you do if one day you find out that Abelard was true?”

Half sadly, he shook his head after Mr. Tighe's retreating figure, and then wandered off towards the station.

Chapter Four

THE TWO CAMPS

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 to-night.”

“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 Da—— 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.”