The Place of the Lion (19 page)

Richardson, now completely watchful, said, “It seems that you're with them entirely now.”

“I'm looking for him,” Foster said, “for him, and”—he began to snarl, “and—and others. There's—ah! ah!—there's a man in my off—off—office,” he barely achieved the word, “that I hate, I hate his face, I'll look after him. The strength'll be on him. Look, look for him, I'll look.”

He turned his eyes about him; his mouth opened and his lips curled back over his teeth. Then he seemed to make an effort towards control, and began to mutter something to himself. “Not much yet, lord god!” Richardson heard. “Slowly, lord, slowly! I'll make sacrifice—the blood of the sacrifice,” and at that a sudden impatient anger caught the young man.

“Fool,” he cried out, “there's only one sacrifice, and the God of gods makes it, not you.”

Foster did not seem to hear, and Richardson almost at once regretted the outburst. Something in it offended him; it was a pit laid for the silver hooves of an immaculate and solitary virtue that was galloping away, away in the cool light of the stars, amid rivers of chastity, to gardens high up among the snows. There—there—it would find its lair and sleep alone among the trees of Eden before man had fallen and … Images, images, he caught his mind back, abolishing them; beyond images, byond any created shape or invented fable lay the union of the end. He was lost in his intensity and woke to awareness again to hear Foster saying,

“… the chosen. The chosen are few. Even the woman … if I knew … knew. The gods know; the gods are here. Here!”

The word went up in a roar up the street. Richardson heard a startled exclamation behind him. He looked round—the worshippers were coming out of Zion, and one of them, an old gentleman with his wife, had jumped violently at the noise. A dismayed voice exclaimed, “Really, really!” A more indignant feminine voice said, “Disgusting! It's enough to deafen anyone.”

But the bleating of an innocent mortality had no effect on the possessed being before them. He glared round him, then he threw up his head, and began to sniff softly and horribly, as if he were seeking to find a trail. The old gentleman stared, then he said to Richardson, in a voice not quite steady, “Ill, is he?”

“O if he's ill,” the old lady said in a tone of pity. “Would he like to come in and sit down for a few minutes? We live close by.”

“Yes, do,” the old gentleman added. “A little rest—when my wife comes over faint—— Well, Martha dear, you
do
sometimes come over faint.”

“There's ways of being bad besides coming over faint,” the old lady, now rather pink, but still sweetly anxious to help, said, “Do come in.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” Richardson said gravely, “but I'm afraid it wouldn't help.” And then, by an irresistible impulse, “I hope you had a happy service?”

They both looked at him with delight. “Now that's very kind,” the old gentleman said. “Thank you, sir, it was a very beautiful service.”

“Beautiful,” the old lady said. She hesitated, fumbling with her umbrella; then, taking sudden courage, she took a step towards Richardson and went on, “You'll excuse me, sir, I know it's old-fashioned, and you quite a stranger, but—are you saved?”

Richardson answered her as seriously as she had spoken, “I believe salvation is for all who will have it,” he said, “and I will have it by the only possible means.”

“Ah, that's good, that's good,” the old gentleman said. “Bless God for it, young man.”

“I know you'll pardon me, sir,” the old lady added, “you being a stranger as I said, and strangers often not liking to talk about it. Though what else there is to talk about …”

“What indeed?” Richardson agreed, and again through the evening there struck upon his ears the noise of galloping hooves, and for a moment the whole earth upon which he stood seemed to be a charging beast upon which he rode, faster than ever his own haste could carry him. But the sound, if it were a sound, struck at the same time on that other creature, half-transfigured, who stood in front of him still. It sprang up, it bellowed out some half-formed word, then it broke off and went leaping down the street; and amazed or meditative the three watched it go.

“Dear me,” the old lady said; and the old gentleman, “He's behaving very strangely, isn't he?”

Richardson nodded. “Very strangely. I'm afraid, but—” he sought a phrase at once mutually comprehensible, comforting, and true—“but he's in the hands of God.”

“Still——” the old gentleman said dubiously. But there was nothing to be done, so they parted and went their way, leaving Richardson standing by the now closed church. The other members of the congregation had come out during the brief conversation and gone. He considered vaguely what to do. And then he remembered Dora Wilmot.

He had spoken of her to Anthony the day before as one of those who desired the power of the Immortals, the virtue of the things that they sought, not for that virtue's sake, not even for the sake of fresh and greater experiences, but merely that their old experience might be more satisfactory to them. Foster wanted to be stronger than those with whom he came in contact; he had made himself a place for the lion and it seemed the lion was taking possession of its habitation; its roar echoing in the wilderness and the dry places of the soul. Dora Wilmot had never dreamed of such brutal government; but once Richardson had caught the expression in her eyes as she handed a cup of coffee to Mrs. Rockbotham, and any quiet little supper with the—probably slandered—children of the Lord Alexander VI would have seemed to him preferable. And if there had entered into her some subtlety from that world, what was happening to her? or, perhaps more important, what was she doing? It occurred to him that he might go and see; almost at the same time it occurred to him, as he still watched the old lady stepping down the street beside her husband, that he might perhaps—not stop her but offer her an alternative course, if it seemed possible or desirable. After all, that old lady had wanted to be kind, even if she reduced indescribable complexities of experience to an epigram. His own solitary life had rather left him without any formed habit of being kind, he reflected: perhaps he was a little too much inclined to concentrate on an end which was (all the authorities assured him) largely dependent on the way. Anthony Durrant had gone charging off to some unknown Damaris. Berringer had been kind to him. Very well, he would go and see if the road of the unicorn led through the house of Dora Wilmot.

When he arrived there he was, after inquiry, shown in to the room where Anthony had fought with the beasts. Miss Wilmot, thin and sedate, was at her writing table. Several little sealed envelopes lay in a pile at one side: she put down her pen as he entered. They looked at one another with doubt masked by courtesy, and exchanged a few trifling remarks. Then Richardson said, “And what do you make of it all, Miss Wilmot?”

She answered softly. “Have you seen Mr. Foster?”

“Yes,” Richardson admitted. “But only just now. That must be my excuse for calling so late.” On the Day of Judgment, if there were another, one would probably say things like that, he thought. But he went on swiftly. “And, to tell you the truth, I don't much like Mr. Foster at the moment.”

“I shouldn't expect you to,” she said. “For you … he … we aren't meaning …” She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once, but under his eyes she made an effort to be collected. Her eyes, nevertheless, went on shooting from side to side, and her restless arms twisted themselves together and again untwisted as she sat.

“You aren't meaning——?”

“We wouldn't … we shouldn't … find it likely … that you …” Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. “O!” she cried, “O! I can't keep up! it keeps dividing! There's too many things to think of!”

He got up and went nearer to her, very watchful. But with an unusual note of pity in his voice he said, “Need you think of them?”

“O yes …” she breathed, “yes-s. There's the wretch-ch of a Rockbotham. I've done hers-s, and Mrs Jacquelin, I've done hers. Such a nice, ni-c-ce one, and I'm s-scribbing this-s to the one that s-spoke, the Damaris creature—but sh-she's strange, so-s I had to s-ese what was bes-st.”

She looked up at him malevolently as he stood over her, and with the end of her tongue moistened her lips. Then her eyes changed again and terror came into them, and in a voice from which the dreadful sibilance had departed she cried out, “My head, my head! There's too much to see, there's so many ways of doing it! I can't think.”

Richardson laid his hand on hers. “There is one thing very certain,” he said with firm clearness, “the way to the Maker of the Gods.”

She looked sly. “Will he help me to show old Mother Rockbotham what her husband might be like?” she said. “Or old Jackie what that nephew of hers is doing?” Her eyes went to the sealed letters. “They didn't think much of me,” she said. “I could sit here and do their work. But I'm getting my turn now. If only I could see them reading their letters.”

Richardson gathered both her hands, as they lay on the writing table into one of his, and almost released them again as he did so. They were clammy-cold and they wriggled horribly in his grasp. But he held them while he leant quickly across and caught up the little pile of letters; then he released them and sprang back. “What devilry have you been up to?” he asked her harshly. “What are these letters you're so proud of?”

“I was afraid at first,” she said, “but he told me—Foster told me—they would help us, strength and subtlety, he said. And … and … O my head! my head!”

She tried to stand up and could not; she writhed in her chair; but her eyes were fixed on him, and their immediate pain changed as his met them into malice and fear. He ripped a letter open and glanced at it, and as he did so she slithered down and began to wriggle towards him across the floor. He had time only for the first few sentences, and a hasty glance at the middle and the end, but they told him all he needed to know. The letter was to Mrs. Rockbotham; it opened with sympathetic phrases of sorrow, then it went on, with a careful and subtle art he had not time then to admire, to bite with stored venom at the heart. The doctor was … he was … for the moment Richardson did not grasp what he was; some evil was suggested, or something that would seem evil to the reader—perversion and cruelty, was it? “Take care of yourself,” one sentence began, and the thing wasn't signed—yes, it was: “From a Sister in Trouble.” He crumpled it in his hand and leapt aside as a hand touched his ankle, then he ran for the door and shouted for the maid. When she showed herself, “Telephone for the doctor,” he called, “your mistress is ill.” Then thrusting the letters in his pocket he went back into the room.

She was where he had left her, but a dreadful change was coming over her. Her body was writhing into curves and knots where she lay, as if cramps convulsed her. Her mouth was open, but she could not scream: her hands were clutching at her twisted throat. In her wide eyes there was now no malice, only an agony, and gradually all her body and head were drawn up backwards from the floor by an invisible force, so that from the hips she remained rigidly upright and her legs lay stretched straight out behind her upon the ground, as if a serpent in human shape raised itself before him. The sight drove him backwards; he turned his face away, and prayed with all his strength to the Maker of the Celestials. From that refuge he looked again, and saw her convulsed and convulsed with spasms of anguish. But now the very colour of her skin was changing; it became blotched and blurred with black and yellow and green; not only that but it seemed distended about her. The face rounded out till it was perfectly smooth, with no hollows or depressions, and from her nostrils and her mouth something was thrusting out. In and out of her neck and hands another skin was forming, over or under her own—he could not distinguish which, but growing through it, here a coating, there an underveiling. Another and an inhuman tongue was flickering out over a human face, and the legs were twisted and thrown from side to side as if something prisoned in them were attempting to escape. For all that lower violence her body did not fall, nor indeed, but for a slight swaying, did it much move. Her arms were interlocked in front of her, the extreme ends of her fingers touched the ground between her thighs. But they too were drawn inwards; the stuff of her dress was rending in places; and wherever it rent and hung aside he could see that other curiously-toned skin shining behind it. A black shadow was on her face; a huge shape was emerging from it, from her, growing larger and larger as the Domination she had invoked freed itself from the will and the mind and the body that had given it a place where it could find the earth for its immaterialization. No longer a woman but a serpent indeed surged before him in the darkening room, bursting and breaking from the woman's shape behind it. It curved and twined itself in the last achievements of liberty; there came through the silence that had accompanied that transmutation a sound as if some slight thing had dropped to the floor, and the Angelic energy was wholly free.

It was free. It glided a little forward, and its head turned lowly from side to side. Richardson stood up and faced it. The subtle eyes gazed at him, without hostility, without friendship, remote and alien. He looked back, wordlessly calling on the Maker and End of all created energies. Images poured through his brain in an unceasing riot; questions such as Anthony had recounted to him propounded themselves; there seemed to be a million things he might do, and he did none of them. He remembered the Will beyond all the makings; then with a tremendous effort he shut out even that troublesome idea of the Will—an invented word, a mortal thought—and, as far as he could, was not before what was. It had mercy on him; he saw the great snake begin to move again, and then he fainted right away.