The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams Page 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.”
    â€œAnd in the garden,” Quentin exclaimed. “Why, surely yesterday morning you agreed it must have been a lioness in the garden.”
    â€œAs 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.”
    â€œBut 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.”
    â€œThe lion?” Anthony asked. Certainly it was a curious world.
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œLook 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