The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams (best desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

Damaris had gone out for a walk, not that she wanted to, but because, as she had rather definitely told her father, it seemed the only way of getting a little peace. In general Damaris associated peace with her study, her books, and her manuscripts rather than with the sky, the hills, and the country roads; and not unjustly, since only a few devout followers of Wordsworth can in fact find more than mere quiet in the country. The absence of noise is not in all cases the same thing as the presence of peace. Wordsworth also found morality there, and no-one is ever likely to find peace without morality of one sort or another. But Damaris had never yet received any kind of impulse from either vernal or autumnal woods to teach her more of moral evil and of good than all her sages. Certainly she had found no particular impulse that way in her sages either, but that was because she was rapidly becoming incapable of recognizing a moral impulse when she saw it, the sages from Pythagoras onwards meaning something quite different from her collocation. Peace to her was not a state to be achieved but a supposed necessary condition of her daily work, and peace therefore, as often happens, evaded her continually. She ingeminated Peace so often and so loudly that she inevitably frightened it still farther away, peace itself being (so far as has yet been found) a loveliness only invocable by a kind of sympathetic magic and auto-hypnotism which it never occurred to her to exercise. In a convulsive patience therefore she walked firmly out of the town, and up the rising ground that lay about it.

For the last day or two the centre of gravity of her world seemed slightly to have shifted. This had begun when she had found the attention of her audience diverted on the Wednesday evening, but it had become more marked with Mr. Foster’s call on Thursday, and had really shocked her with Anthony’s that Saturday morning. Except that it was silly, she would almost have supposed that those two gentlemen had found her father’s odd antics more important than her own conversation. They seemed to be looking past her, at some other fact on their horizon; they were preoccupied, they diffused neglect. Her father too—he had been almost patronizing once or twice, infinitely and unconsciously superior. She was liable to find him anywhere about the house or garden—doing nothing, saying nothing, looking nothing; if she spoke to him, which she often did out of mere irritable good nature, he took a moment to collect himself before he replied. She would have been prepared to make allowances for this if he had been engaged upon his butterflies—having at least an understanding of how hobbies affected people, though this particular hobby seemed to her more silly than many. But he wasn’t; he just sat or stood about. It was all very well for Mr. Foster to be so profoundly interested—Mr. Foster didn’t have to live with him. As for Anthony—

She walked a little faster. Anthony’s call had been at a stupid time to begin with, but its purpose—which really did seem to have been to see her father—made it wholly stupid in itself. What could Anthony at half-past eleven on Saturday morning want with her father? It annoyed her that she had to take a little care in dealing with Anthony—he was so persistently attached and yet at the same time apt to become troublesomely detached. She disliked the slight feeling of anxiety she had about him—of late she found herself occasionally wondering after each visit whether, when he had gone, he had gone for good. And there was at present simply no other convenient way of getting some of her articles into print. They were good articles of their kind—she and Anthony both knew that? only there weren’t very many papers that would care for them. And it did—she half angrily admitted—it did help her, please, encourage, whatever the right word was, to see her name printed at the top of a column. It was a mark and reward of work done and a promise of work and reward to be. It was, in short, an objectivization of Miss Tighe to a point elsewhere at present unobtainable. Probably, though she did not think of this, Abelard, mutatis mutandis, felt a similar satisfaction at his lectures, with perhaps less danger owing to the watch that his confessor would have expected Abelard to keep over his conscience.

However, here she was away from them, and a good thing too. For this business of the relation of the Divine Perfection with creation was giving her, as it had given the schoolmen, a little trouble. Plato’s Absolute Beauty, she quite saw, was all right because that was not necessarily conscious of the world; but the God of Abelard was conscious of the world, and yet that consciousness must not be necessary to Him, for nothing but Himself could be necessary to Him. St. Thomas—only he was later; she didn’t w ant to bring him in, still a short appendix perhaps, bringing the history of the idea up to St. Thomas…just to show that she had read well beyond her subject….St. Thomas would be a good stopping-place, and she might reasonably not pursue it further. Perhaps the whole thing had better be in an appendix—_On the Knowledge of the World_…no, on God’s Idea of the World from Plato to Aquinas. Something was wrong with that title, she thought vaguely, but she could alter it presently. The main thing at the moment was to get clear in her mind the various methods by which God was said to know the world. Joyn the Scot had taught that the account of the Creation in Genesis—“let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind”—referred, not to the making of the earthly animals, but to the formation of the kinds and orders in the Divine Mind before they took on visible and material shapes. Well, now…

She saw on her left a stile, mounted it, sat down, took out her notes on the problem, and set to work on them. Half an hour went by quite pleasantly. At the end of that time she was suddenly startled by hearing a low voice behind her say, “You oughtn’t to be sitting there.”

She twisted round and looked down. From the overgrowth which hid the ditch by the side of the road a head was half-pushed out; two anxious eyes gazed at her. She looked back in mere amazement; the face was that of a young man of her own class; it grew familiar as she stared, and in a minute or two she recognized it. It was a friend of Anthony’s who had once or twice been at her house along with her cousin—a Mr….a Mr. Sabot, of course. But even Damaris’s capacity was shocked into helplessness by seeing Mr. Sabot apparently crawling in a rather deep ditch. She sat with her mouth slightly open, her head twisted over her shoulder, still staring.

“I say you oughtn’t to be there,” Sabot said more urgently. “Why don’t you hide?”

“Hide?” Damaris repeated.

“It hasn’t been here yet,” he whispered loudly. “Get down before it comes. The only thing is to keep out of sight.”

Damaris got down from the stile, and a final exasperation shook her. She took a step nearer and said sharply: “What are you doing, Mr. Sabot?”

He thrust himself a little higher and stared carefully all round; then he answered, still in a loud whisper, “Keeping out of its way.”

“Out of what’s way?” Damaris asked irritably. “Can’t you get up and talk sensibly? Come, Mr. Sabot, tell me what you mean at once.”

But with a quick viciousness he snarled at her. “Don’t be such a bloody fool. Get in somewhere. Not here; there’s not room for two. Run up the road a bit and make yourself a hole.”

Damaris gaped. This last exclamation of unreason overcame her. It seemed that Mr. Sabot must be completely mad; in which case it was extremely unfair of Anthony not to have told her. Why wasn’t Anthony with him? Imagine her being subjected to this sort of thing! She thought of various things to say to Anthony, but they were no good at the moment. He raised himself yet a little higher and caught hold of her skirt.

“I’m trying to help you,” he went on whispering. “Aren’t you Anthony’s girl?”

“Certainly not,” Damaris said. “Let me go, Mr. Sabot. O this is too much!”

“I knew you when you sat down, but I had to look to see if it was coming. It’s been after me, only I dodged it over there and got away. Or perhaps it hasn’t come as far, but it will. It’ll hunt you too. Not Anthony; Anthony’s going to fight it, but you and I can’t do that, we’re not brave enough. I shouldn’t have let you see me, only you’re Anthony’s