The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online

the house, were two men; a car stood by. One of the men was Mr. Tighe, complete with the paraphernalia of active entomology; the other was a stranger who, as Anthony came up, got into his car and drove off. Mr. Tighe exclaimed with pleasure as he recognized Anthony, and shook hands.
    â€œAnd what brings you down this way?” he asked happily.
    â€œO—things!” Anthony answered. He suspected that Mr. Tighe would take this to mean Damaris, but he didn’t mind that. Mr. Tighe and he had, though they never spoke of it, a common experience. Damaris treated her father’s hobby and her lover’s heart with equal firmness, and made her profit out of both of them. “Lionesses don’t keep you from your butterflies?”
    â€œThey seem to think it’s gone farther away. I don’t suppose it would hurt me,” Mr. Tighe said. “And even if it did—when I think of the number of butterflies I’ve caught—I should feel it was only fair. Tit for tat, you know. The brutes—if you can call a butterfly a brute—getting a little of their own back. They deserve to.”
    â€œIn England perhaps,” Anthony allowed, “but do you think altogether?” He liked to talk to Mr. Tighe, and was content for a few minutes to lean on the gate and chat. “Haven’t the animals had it a good deal their own way on the earth?”
    The other shook his head. “Think of the great monsters,” he said. “The mammoth and the plesiosaurus and the sabre-toothed tiger. Think of what butterflies must have been once, what they are now in the jungles. But they will pass with the jungles. Man must conquer, but I should feel a sympathy with the last campaign of the brutes.”
    â€œI see—yes,” Anthony said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. Do you think the animals will die out?”
    â€œPerhaps,” Tighe said. “When we don’t want them for transport—or for food—what will be left to them but the zoos? The birds and the moths, I suppose, will be the last to go. When all the trees are cut down.”
    â€œBut,” objected Anthony, “all the trees won’t be cut down. What about forestry and irrigation and so on?”
    â€œO,” Mr. Tighe said, “there may be tame forests, with artificially induced butterflies. That will be only a larger kind of zoo. The real thing will have passed.”
    â€œAnd even if they do,” Anthony asked, “will man have lost anything very desirable? What after all has a lioness to show us that we cannot know without her? Isn’t all real strength to be found within us?”
    â€œIt may be,” Mr. Tighe answered. “It may be that man will have other enemies and other joys—better perhaps. But the older ones were very lovely.”
    They ceased speaking, and remained leaning on the gate in silence. Anthony’s eyes, passing over the garden, remained fixed where, two nights before, he had thought he saw the form of a lion. It seemed to him now, as he gazed, that a change had taken place. The smooth grass of the lawn was far less green than it had been, and the flowers in the beds by the house walls, on either side of the door, were either dying or already withered. Certainly he had not been in a state to notice much, but there had been left with him a general impression of growth and colour. Neither growth nor colour were now there: all seemed parched. Of course, it was hot, but still.…
    There was a sudden upward sweep of green and orange through the air in front of him: he blinked and moved. As he recovered himself he saw, with startled amazement, that in the centre of the garden, almost directly above the place where he had seen the lion, there floated a butterfly. But—a butterfly! It was a terrific, colossal butterfly, it looked as if it were two feet or more across from wing-tip to wing-tip. It was tinted and coloured with every conceivable