The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams (i can read book club .txt) 📕

had a recurring belief that he had been responsible for the Great Fire of London, and who had in consequence at those times fits of deep melancholy and remorse at the deaths he had caused, accompanied by a spasmodic terror of being himself cut off by the Fire. Lorrigan’s own view had been that this gentleman ought to have be en put away, but the family couldn’t bring themselves to such extreme measures, so he was relegated to the Dower House and Lorrigan, and books on the higher mathematics in which he was an acknowledged authority. But with all his drawbacks he had been, at his best, a pleasant gentleman, and the house had been away among the South Downs, where everything was much less oppressive. Lorrigan sighed, and went to bed.

In the morning it was, if anything, worse. The sun was blazing down, and nobody came along the road. It had never been a busy road, but it had not, when he had been along it, ever seemed so deserted as it was now. He waited impatiently for Mrs. Portman’s return.

She came about half-past eleven full of the rumours that were going about the town. When he heard of the fall of the telephones Lorrigan went off to try their own, and found indeed that he could not get a reply from the Exchange at Smetham. He came back to her rather gloomily, and interrupted her repetition of her story to ask if she could smell burning. “It’s getting a very peculiar house, this,” he said. “The old man upstairs—well, I don’t mind him; I’m used to them. But all this smell of fire, and things breaking down…And dreams. I don’t know when I’ve dreamt as badly as I did last night. It was a regular nightmare. All animals—you wouldn’t believe, Mrs. Portman; I might have been to the Zoo. There was a great lion walking round everywhere…I couldn’t get past him—you know how it is in dreams…”

“Why,” said Mrs. Portman, “would you believe it, that’s what my daughter’s little girl was talking about this morning. Out in the garden before breakfast she was, and came running in to say that there must be a circus come to Smetham, for she’d just seen a big lion go by the end of the garden. She couldn’t talk of anything else all breakfast time till her mother shut her up, her father not being very well. He’s a policeman, you know, and he’d been on night duty, and came in all dazed this morning. Couldn’t talk of anything but how lovely something was.”

“There’s not much that’s all that lovely,” Mr. Lorrigan said pessimistically.

“O I don’t know,” Mrs. Portman answered. “I like a bit of colour round myself, but I’m not in it with Jack. He ought to’ve been a painter instead of a policeman, the things he sees in trees and sunsets. I tell him he wouldn’t notice a murder right before his eyes if there was a sunset there too.”

“Sunsets have their place,” said Lorrigan. “Not that I’ve ever seen much in a sunset myself. My Bessie did an essay on sunsets the other day at school, and the things that child put in! I’ve not seen all those colours in a sunset—not for forty years. And anyhow I don’t hold with teaching children to do too much sky gazing; there’s other things that’s more important.”

“That’s so,” Mrs. Portman said, “and if I was going to buy a picture it’d be one of those that have got more to them than just a lot of different colours. I like a picture to have a story in it, something that you can enjoy. I’ve got one upstairs that belonged to my mother—_The Last Days of King Charles the First_, and I’m sure it used to make me cry to look at it, all so natural with the little children and everything. I tell you, Mr. Lorrigan, I like a picture that makes me feel something.”

“I don’t care for pictures much, anyhow,” Lorrigan answered. “Though, of course, a good lifelike bit of work…One of the best I ever saw was the sign of an inn out the other side of the town—that was a lion too: the Red Lion, and anything more natural I never saw. I wonder if I got thinking of it last night.”

“I expect so,” Mrs. Portman said. “Lor’, isn’t it close, Mr. Lorrigan? I could do with a cup of tea after that walk. Will you have a cup too?”

“Well, I don’t mind,” Mr. Lorrigan agreed. “I’ll just have another look at Mr. Berringer while you get your hat off, and then take a turn in the garden till it’s ready.”

“Do,” Mrs. Portman said, and went off to her room. In a few minutes she was downstairs again, and went across to light the gas and put on the kettle for her tea. It would have needed Anthony’s purged eyes to see then what neither she in the kitchen not Lorrigan in the garden could see—the multiplicity of intellectual flame that was leaping and twining all over the house. Some new passion was spreading out through earthly things, another Energy pressed onwards to the moment in which, concerned upon its own business, it should yet take the opportunity of whatever opening into matter might be afforded to it. Mrs. Portman picked up a box of matches, and as the invisible fire arched itself round and over her paused in amused remembrance of her granddaughter’s chatter about the lion. Then she opened it, took out a match, struck it—

In the garden Lorrigan was strolling from the gate back towards the house. A wave of heat struck him, a terrific burst of fire blinded him. He reeled back, shouting incoherently, with his hands to his eyes. When he could open them again, after that violent shock, he saw before him the whole house blazing to heaven. This was no fire spreading from room to room, though his first thought was that the curtains had caught. But from the road to which he had fled, looking dazedly back, he saw not flames breaking out from doors or windows, but now a pillar, now a nest of fire. It soared, it sank, it spread outwards and curved back inwards; the heat and light of the burning struck and hurt him, and he went stumbling farther along the road to escape it. “What’s happened?” he thought stupidly. “What’s she done? Christ, the whole place is alight!” The roar of the fire beat in his ears; he covered them with his hands and blinked out over the fields. And then h e remembered his charge.

He faced round, feeling that he ought to do something. But it was evident, even to his ruining intelligence, that nothing could be done. No one could live in that destructive ferocity of flame; both his patient and Mrs. Portman must already have perished. He had better get hold of somebody; the fire brigade, the police—and the telephones were down. Lorrigan felt like crying, his helplessness was obvious and extreme. It wasn’t more than ten minutes since he had been talking to Mrs. Portman in that kitchen about pictures and lions and zoos, and now she and her master were burnt to death, and the house was falling in? “O God…” he exclaimed, “don’t let her come out,” for he had had a moment’s dreadful fear of some burning creature rushing out of that fiery splendour. “O God, kill her, kill her,” he thought unintentionally, “and then put it out.” But God went on concerning Himself with his Deity and that seemed to imply the continuation of the fire.

It was some time later that Lorrigan came racing into the town, and a shorter time later still that the fire brigade, and Dr. Rockbotham, and a number of other people were assembled round the house. So fierce was the heat that they were all kept at a good distance, and the efforts that were made to approach the house closely all failed. The hoses were turned on; streams of water were dashed against the fire. By this time it had been burning for the best part of an hour, and if anything it seemed more violent than before. “You shouldn’t have left him, Lorrigan,” Dr. Rockbotham exclaimed, quite unjustly, in the excitement of the moment.

“No,” said Lorrigan, also excited. “I suppose I ought to have sat by him and been burnt up too. I suppose you pay me for that, don’t you? I suppose…”

The doctor looked at him sharply. “Now steady, steady,” he said. “Of course, you couldn’t tell. I didn’t intend to blame you. I only meant that…” He stopped, aware that he had as a fact meant to blame the nurse, and then resumed, “There, I apologize if I hurt you.”

But Lorrigan’s usual equanimity had vanished. “Coming to me and telling me I ought to have stopped there!” he said. “What d’you mean, hey? What d’you mean?” He caught the doctor’s arm, and shook it fiercely.

“Leave go at once,” Rockbotham exclaimed, shaken out of his usual benignity. “How dare you touch me? Leave go!”

In the general surging of the crowd in the road a new little vortex formed around the two of them.

“Now then, Jack,” a voice said, “don’t you be silly.”

“Ah,” said another voice, “it’s all very fine, blaming a man for not letting himself be burnt! There’s too many treat us that way!”

The doctor looked round. It was a mixed crowd, and part of it wasn’t very nice. Loafers and bullies from Smetham had been attracted by the blaze. Lorrigan still held his arm; another man drove an elbow, as if accidentally, into his side. “Take care,” the doctor exclaimed.

Immediately a sudden fierceness awoke in them. They jolted, thrust, hit at him. His hat was knocked off, and his glasses. He called out. Others in the crowd heard him, looked round, saw what was happening, and came pushing in on one side or the other. In less than five minutes after Rockbotham’s first remark nothing less than a free fight was going on. It was not, perhaps, a serious fight, but it shook the doctor very greatly. People were grunting and snarling at each other all round him; they were behaving, he thought disgustedly, like animals. A couple of constables intervened, and the row quietened down. But though the crowd turned its attention again to the fire the panting and grunting remained, as if indeed some animal rather than human nature was then dominating its members. And over everything went up the roar of the fire.

An hour, two hours, went by. Still the hoses were directed towards the blaze; still the torrents of water fell on it. But when three hours were past, and more—when the afternoon was almost done—when the crowd had changed and multiplied and lessened and multiplied again—still the house burned. A t least, presumably it was the house. The Captain of the Fire. Brigade talked with the Police-Inspector, who suggested that there might be a store of chemicals somewhere in the cellars. Hadn’t Mr. Berringer bee n a scientific man?

“I suppose it must be something like that,” the Captain said. “But it seems very odd.”

“It’s odd how the flames hide the house,” the Inspector answered. “Generally you can see the walls except for a minute or two here and there. But here you can’t see anything but the fire. And that looks more like a great nest than anything.”

“With a bird in it, I suppose,” the Captain answered, looking irritably at the blaze, and then at his watch. “Why, it’s been going on for five hours and it’s as bad as ever.”

“Ah, well, I daresay you’ll get it under soon,” the Inspector said encouragingly, and moved off.

But when the night fell, that violent