Free The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams Page B

feel that she was a little out of touch with philosophy. He had done his best to train his own mind to regard philosophy as something greater and more important than itself. Damans, who adopted that as an axiom of speech, never seemed to follow it as a maxim of intellectual behaviour. If philosophies could get out of hand … he looked unhappily at the Berringer house as they drew near to it.
    But at the gate both he and Quentin exclaimed. The garden was changed. The flowers were withered, the grass was dry and brown; in places the earth showed, hard and cracked. The place looked as if a hot sun had blazed on it for weeks without intermission. Everything living was dead within its borders, and (they noticed) for a little way beyond its borders. The hedges were leafless and brittle; the very air seemed hotter than even the June day could justify. Anthony drew a deep breath.
    â€œMy God, how hot it is!” he said.
    Quentin touched the gate. “It is hot,” he said. “I didn’t notice it so much when we were walking.”
    â€œNo,” Anthony answered. “I don’t, you know, think it was so hot there. This place is beginning”—he had been on the point of saying “to terrify me,” when he remembered Quentin and changed it into “to seem quite funny.” His friend however took no notice even of this; he was far too occupied in maintaining an apparently casual demeanour, of which his pallid cheeks, quick breathing, and nervous movements showed the strain. Anthony turned round and leant against the gate with his back to the house.
    â€œIt looks quiet and ordinary enough,” he said.
    The fields stretched up before them, meadow and cornfield in a gentle slope; along the top of the rising ground lay a series of groups of trees. The road on their left ran straight on for some quarter of a mile, then it swept round towards the right and itself climbed the hill, which it crossed beyond the last fragments of the scattered wood. The house by which they stood was indeed almost directly in the middle of a circular dip in the countryside. In one of the fields a number of sheep were feeding. Anthony’s eyes rested on them.
    â€œThey don’t seem to have been disturbed,” he said.
    â€œWhat do you really think about it all?” Quentin asked suddenly. “It’s all nonsense, isn’t it?”
    Anthony answered thoughtfully. “I should think it was all nonsense if we hadn’t both thought we saw the lion—and if I and Damaris’s father hadn’t both thought we saw the butterflies. But I really can’t see how to get over that.”
    â€œBut is the world slipping?” Quentin exclaimed. “Look at it. Is it?”
    â€œNo, of course not,” Anthony said. “But—I don’t want to be silly, you know—but, if we were to believe what the Foster fellow said, it wouldn’t be that kind of slipping anyhow. It’d be more like something behind coming out into the open. And as I got him, all the more quickly when there are material forms to help it. The lioness was the first chance, and I suppose the butterflies were the next easiest—the next thing at hand.”
    â€œWhat about birds?” Quentin asked.
    â€œI thought of them,” Anthony said, “and—look here, we’d better talk it out, so I’ll tell you—— It’s a minor matter, and I daresay I shouldn’t have noticed them, but as a matter of fact, I haven’t seen or heard any birds round here at all.”
    Quentin took this calmly. “Well, we don’t notice them much, do we?” he said. “And what about the sheep?”
    â€œThe sheep I give you,” Anthony answered. “Either Foster’s mad, or else there must be something to explain that. Perhaps there isn’t an Archetypal Sheep.” His voice was steady, and he smiled, but the mild jest fell very flat.
    â€œAnd what,”