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

“I am not Anthony’s girl, and I won’t crouch down,” Damaris, now utterly furious, cried out. Her stick was out of her reach; she moved one foot back. “If you don’t let me go I’ll kick your face. I mean it.”

“No, no,” the other said, “listen—I tell you you’re not safe. It’s sure to be along here, but if you crawl along the ditch you may get out of its reach somewhere first. It’s too big to get into the ditch. If only it doesn’t tread on us!” He began to shake all over with an increasing fear.

“I’m going to kick you,” Damaris cried, paused a moment, jerking her skirt in an effort to free it, and then, failing, kicked. But it was so small a kick, since she was anxious not to lose her balance, that it came considerably short of the white face in the bracken. The hand that held her pulled violently sideways; she staggered, was jerked again, toppled, and came heavily down on her side, lying half in and half out of the ditch against the bank. She was so bruised and shaken that she couldn’t, for all he r rage, immediately get her breath, and as she lay, the mouth of the hidden man, now not far from her own, went on mouthing its disgusting whispers.

“That’s better,” it said, “a little lower, and you’ll be safer still. You ought to be farther away; I wouldn’t have you with me if you weren’t Anthony’s girl. But now you are here get right down and we’ll pull the bracken over. Have you heard it yet? They say it was roaring at first, but it’s been quite quiet today. It goes round in a circle, you know; at least part of it does—the other part’s looking for me. Only I got out of the circle. We must try and keep out; we’re pretty safe then. Have you felt the earth shake? I’m rather afraid in case that heaves us right up under its paws. Come in, can’t you? I swear I’ll leave you to it if you don’t—only Anthony said he’d promised to help you get your degree and I should like to please Anthony. Come in, blast you! I’m not going to be hunted for you.”

What nightmare this could be Damaris didn’t know. She was struggling and wrestling with the horrible creature, who was grabbing and pulling her farther down into the ditch. As she fought with him she screamed for help. At the sound he stopped pulling at her, and, still holding tight, listened. For a minute there was no sound, then as if in answer there came to them the noise of that remote thunder. At this Quentin, giving gasps of terror, let her go, even tried to push her away, then desisted and himself burrowed still deeper—“I knew it, I knew it,” he babbled softly. “O God! O God! Get away, you bitch! O you’ve told it.” He had almost disappeared and she heard the soft frenzied mutterings coming up to her for a moment before they died away, as the shaking fronds showed where below them he was trying to wriggle and push himself along the ditch. Damaris, with an almost equal violence of movement, scrambled out of it, and up again to her stile, where, stick in hand, she turned.

But there was no sign of his following her, and round the bend of the hedge she could not see him or his trail. Panting and horrified she leant against the stile. All her earlier irritations were swallowed up in her furious anger; she wanted to kill. All the indifferences, the negligences, the inattentions, that she had felt as insults ached almost physically in her. Her acquaintances, her father, Anthony—O to tear, to trample them. O this world of imbeciles! Her eyes caught the papers of her notes which had fallen from her hands and she bent, watchfully, to pick them up, then she went back to the stile and glanced across it. As she did so, she felt her footing uncertain; the earth seemed to rock and subside and rise under her. Could she be going to faint? Shutting her eyes she sat down on the step of the stile, and even that seemed to be swaying gently. For some few moments, the apparent movement went through her, then it gently ceased. Slowly she opened her eyes, slowly stood up, and leaned against the to p bar to recover herself fully. Far off in the sky she saw a winged shape, a bird of sorts—very large it must be, she thought indolently, to be visible, so high as it seemed, and seemed huge even to her. But it flew off or she lost sight of it, and, with a deep breath or two, she pulled and settled her clothing into order, and, crossing the road, took another footpath back to the town, where for the rest of the day she concentrated, even more fiercely than usual, on her work.

Yet her night was disturbed: not merely by the less frequent but still recurring thunder, but by a trouble within. The seclusion in which, more or less successfully, she attempted to live, was so arranged that she was normally ignorant of its conditions. The habitual disposition towards unrighteousness which it involved was at best defended, at worst unnoticed. It was very rarely that her omissions were crystallized in a commission which by that very rarity became noticeable, and as she turned and shifted, and dozed and woke she found herself accused wherever her thoughts fled by the distracted face in the bracken. It looked towards her, and from the mouth she heard the phrases with which she was acquainted: the long wrangles of the early scholastics about universals, a sentence or two from Augustine, a statement from Porphyry…it was Quentin Sabot who uttered them. A couple of lines from one of Abelard’s own hymns especially rang in her ears as such things will.

Est in re veritas Jam non in schemate; until her maddened mind produced (incorrectly) as a translation:

Truth is always in the thing; never in the reasoning.

Quentin’s face went on looking at her and repeating this couplet until she could have cried with weariness and misery.

For she was miserable; also she was afraid. She wasn’t—no, she certainly wasn’t Anthony’s girl, but he was Anthony’s friend. And if her relations with Anthony had any truth at all, then she was committed to at least such an amount of care for Anthony’s wishes as he would have given to hers. For any mightier gift, for any understanding of that state in which she might profoundly and nobly love merely because opportunity for love was offered, she was not asked. She had taken—she knew she had taken—and she had, even by that measure, failed. She produced excuses, reasons, apologies even, and then as she argued there was that distracted face again, and from the distracted mouth came the singing doggerel:

Truth is always in the thing; never in the…

Est in re veritas—but that was all about religion and metaphysics; it was from a hymn for Lauds on Sunday. What had it to do with Quentin Sabot in a ditch? Anthony would be angry with her? Anthony had no right …Anthony couldn’t expect…Anthony oughtn’t to demand….All that was very well, but she realized that it hadn’t much to do with Anthony. He might not demand or expect or claim, but he would undoubtedly be. Est in re veritas—O damn, damn!

She ought to be superior to all that. What was the phrase in the Phaedrus?-“the soul of the philosopher alone has wings.” She ought to be rising above…above helping anyone in a ditch, above speaking in goodwill to the friend of her friend, above trying to bring peace to the face that now pursued her. No, she ought, in fairness to Anthony, to have done something. “I was wrong,” she said, almost irritably, and with a fierce determination not to admit it to Anthony.

She met him therefore when the next morning—Sunday morning of all times—he appeared again, with a destructive fire. As he had been preparing every kind of flag of truce as he came along, under cover of which his diplomacy was to attempt her removal to London, this at first threw him into complete disorder, more especially as he could not for the moment understand what had provoked this fresh battle. She was asking, he at last made out, why he didn’t look after his friend better, and at that he broke through her talk.

“Have you seen him then?” he asked sharply. “Where? when? No, don’t chatter; tell me.”

Damaris told him-in general terms. “It was an extraordinarily unpleasant time,” she said. “I do think, Anthony, you oughtn’t to have let him go off by himself, if that’s the state he’s in.”

Anthony looked at her, and then took a turn through the room. Before his eyes, as he looked, she had seemed to change; the thought of Quentin, cast off, kicked at by her outraged anger, hurt him profoundly, and the sombre eyes with which he surveyed her saw a different and nastier Damaris. Yet he had known it all along—only that she should treat him as she did was part of the joke of things, that she should treat Quentin so seemed somehow so much worse. But of course it wasn’t worse; it was the same Damaris. Those whom he loved were at war. But Love itself wasn’t and couldn’t be at war. He loved her, and she had persecuted his friend. But he loved them both, and therefore there was no taking of sides. Love itself never could take sides. His heart ached in him, but as he came back to her his eyes were smiling, even though his face had been struck by pain.

“O quanta qualia,” he murmured, pausing near her. “Those something sabbaths the blessed ones see. Dearest, you’ll be like the fellow in the New Testament; you’ll meet Abelard one day and he’ll stare at you and say he never knew you. I suppose you know you’ve been a pig.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Damaris said, and in the contention of emotions within her added absurdly, “It was a great shock to me.”

“You’ve got a worse shock than that coming to you,” he answered.

“Why do you always talk as if I didn’t know anything?” she asked, opening another attack on more favourable ground; and added, to distract him still further, “And then you expect me to marry you.”

“I don’t expect anything at all,” he said, “not from anybody. Least of all from you. If you were going to marry me, if you weren’t shut up, I should have knocked your damn silly head off your shoulders. But as it is—no. Only the sooner you leave off expecting the better you’re likely to be. Will you come to London?”

Damaris almost gaped, the question was so sudden, “Will I—will I what?” she exclaimed. “Why on earth should I go to London?”

“Quentin—God’s mercy save him now!—offered you a hole in a ditch…I offer you London,” Anthony said. “The reason is that the princes of heaven are in the world and you’re not used to them. No, stop a minute, and let me tell you. In your own language, you owe me that.”

He paused to choose his words. “Something has driven Quentin into panic and hiding; something has turned your father away from his hobby to inaction and contemplation; something frightened you all at Berringer’s house the other night; something has obsessed Foster and your friend Miss Wilmot till they attacked me yesterday evening; yes, they did—I am not mad, most noble Festa; something is sounding in the world like thunder—”

“Attacked you! What