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

Richardson, returning towards his rooms, decided suddenly not to enter them.

The sweep and wonder of his vision were still with him; his body still palpitated with the echo of those charging hooves, though within him his spirit desired a further end. He longed to approach that other end with the speed of the racing herd, but to such an approach the intoxication of the sight was alien; he subdued himself harshly. Visions and auditions had nothing to do with the final surrender, which was—for him—a thing to be achieved wholly in itself, and (it seemed) without reference to any natural or supernatural event. A lonely life had but emphasized, as the exterior life will, the interior method which he pursued. Even his connexion with Berringer had been but a part of a distraction necessary and right to relieve the rigour of his duty, and to keep him in spiritual health, but not part of that duty. Chance, assisted by his personal tastes, had given him a job among books, and as far as possible he read in those books of t he many ways which are always the Way. But not by books or by phrases, not by images or symbols or myths, did he himself follow it. He abstracted himself continually from sense and from thought, attempting always a return to an interior nothingness where that which is itself no thing might communicate its sole essential being.

So separating himself from the memory of the horses, so concentrated on the Nothing of his desires, he walked for some time along the streets until he experienced the easily recognized symptoms of temporary interior exhaustion. Obedient to those symptoms he relaxed and murmured to himself, as was his habit at such conclusions, the phrases from the Dionysius with whom Damaris had been concerned—“He hath not power, nor is he power; He liveth not, nor is He life; neither is He of the things that are or are not, nor is there for Him any word of name or thought, for He is neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth.” As he ended he began again to look round him. He was standing half-way down a street in one of the rather poorer parts of the town—where the lower middle-class were slightly more obviously lower. A tobacconist close by was shutting up for the night; the two recognized each other and nodded.

“Funny business about the telephones,” the tobacconist said.

“I hadn’t heard,” Richardson answered casually but politely. “What was it?”

The tobacconist paused in his task. “All down, so they say,” he explained. “I had occasion to want to speak to my brother in London—my wife thought she’d run up tomorrow by the cheap train—and the Exchange girl told me I couldn’t get through! Couldn’t get a trunk call through on Sunday night! All nonsense it sounded to me, and so I told her, and she as good as told me not to be a fool—the lines were down. They’ve sent out repair gangs, it seems; I had old Mr. Hoskins in—you know him, I expect; the grandfather, I mean; comes in for his quarter-pound every Sunday evening as regularly as the sun…well, I ought to say moon, oughtn’t I? at this time of day, but one gets into a habit of speaking.”

“One does,” Richardson murmured in the pause. “Unless one is careful.”

“So he told me”, the tobacconist resumed, “that the poles have fallen down—all along the roads—all smashed to bits they are, he said, and the wires all fused and broken. Most extraordinary thing I ever heard of. Old Hoskins, he thought it must have been the wind, but then as I said to him: ‘Where’s the wind?’ Now my belief is that it’s got something to do with all that thunder we’ve been having the last few days—this electricity’s a funny thing. Don’t you think that’s more likely now, sir?”

Richardson nodded; then seeing that he was expected to speak, said, “It’s certain, I should think, to have something to do with the thunder.”

“And as for hoardings and fences I hear they’re down in a lot of places. Funny thing altogether.”

“Very funny,” Richardson answered. “Awkward if the houses follow suit.”

The tobacconist gaped at him for a moment. “O I don’t think that’s likely,” he began slowly, but looking up at his own first floor with the beginnings of a fearful anxiety. “I mean houses are rather different to hoardings, aren’t they?”

“Houses that have been lived in, perhaps,” Richardson acknowledged, also looking thoughtfully upwards. “Yes, perhaps. There may be an infiltration of human existence…” He ceased and seemed to await a decision.

“Yes,” the tobacconist said, recovering faith. “Human beings make all the difference, don’t they? A little bit of furniture works wonders in an empty house. Why, when we moved in here, I said to my wife about a room where there was nothing had been put but a chair that had got a leg broken—my fault it was—in the shifting—not a carpet down there wasn’t nothing but that bit of chair, and I said to her: ‘It looks like home already.’ Just the difference between a room and four walls and a floor.”

“Is there any?” Richardson asked. “Yes, of course, I see what you mean.” But his spirit cried out that there was in fact no difference; they were alike shape and form and so far temptations to the soul which so long sought refuge in such exterior patterns from the state in which no such patterns were to be found or desired. He felt the contrast so sharply that he could endure no more talk; he forced himself to say, with as little abruptness as possible, “Ah, well, I daresay we shall hear more about it in the morning,” nodded a goodnight and crossed the road.

As he reached the other side he saw before him a church. It was a small, old, rather ugly Wesleyan church; the doors were open because of the heat,