Damaris ignored this; her father on Plato was too silly. People needed a long intellectual training to understand Plato and the Good. He would probably think that the Good was the same thing as God—like a less educated monk of the Dark Ages. Personification (which was one of her side subjects) was a snare to the unadept mind. In a rare mood of benignity, due to her hopes for her paper, she began to talk about the improvement in the maid’s cooking. If time had to be wasted, it had better be wasted on neutral instead of irritating subjects, and she competently wasted it until it was time to get ready for the meeting.
As she stepped into Mrs. Rockbotham’s car, she heard the thunder again—far away. She made conversation out of it.
“There’s the thunder,” she said. “Did it keep you awake last night?”
“It did rather,” Mrs. Rockbotham said, pressing the self-starter. “I kept on expecting to see the lightning, but there wasn’t a single flash.”
“And not a drop of rain,” Damaris agreed. “Curious. It must be summer thunder, if there is such a thing! But I do hate lying awake at night.”
“Naturally—with all your brain-work,” the other said. “Don’t you find it very tiring?”
“O well, of course it gets rather tedious sometimes,” Damaris agreed. “But it’s interesting too—comparing different ways of saying things and noting the resemblances.”
“Like Shakespeare, I suppose?” Mrs. Rockbotham asked, and for a moment took Damaris by surprise.
“Shakespeare?”
“Haven’t they found out where he got all his lines from?” her friend said. “I remember reading an article in Two Camps a few weeks ago which showed that when he wrote, ‘Egypt, you are dying,’ he was borrowing from somebody else who said, ‘England is dying, because sheep are eating men.’ Marlowe or Sir Thomas More.”
“Really?” Damaris asked, with a light laugh. “Of course, Shakespeare’s not my subject. But what did he mean by sheep eating men?”
“It was something to do with agriculture,” Mrs. Rockbotham answered. “He didn’t mean it literally.”
“O of course not,” Damaris agreed. “But the lamb’s become so symbolical, hasn’t it?”
“Hasn’t it?” Mrs. Rockbotham assented, and with such prolonged intellectual conversation they reached The Joinings, as Mr. Berringer’s house was called, with some vague and forgotten reference to the cross-roads near by. The thunder crashed again, as they got out, much nearer this time, and the two ladies hurried into the house.
While Mrs. Rockbotham talked to the uncertain and uneasy housekeeper, Damaris looked at the assembled group. There were not very many members, and she did not much care for the look of any of them. Miss Wilmot was there, of course; most of the rest were different improvisations either upon her rather agitated futility or Mrs. Rockbotham’s masterful efficiency. Among the sixteen or seventeen women were four men—three of whom Damaris recognized, one as a Town Councillor and director of some engineering works, one as the assistant in the central bookshop of the town, the third as the nephew of one of the managing ladies, a Mrs. Jacquelin. Mrs. Jacquelin was almost county, the sister of a local Vicar lately dead; she called herself Mrs. Roche Jacquelin on the strength of a vague connexion with the Vendean family.
“However does this Mr. Berringer interest them all at once?” Damaris thought. “What a curious collection! And I don’t suppose they any of them know anything.” A warm consciousness of her own acquaintance with Abelard and Pythagoras stirred in her mind, as she smiled at the Town Councillor and sat down. He came over to her.
“Well, Miss Tighe,” he said briskly, “so I hear you are to be good enough to talk to us to-night. Very unfortunate, this collapse of Mr. Berringer’s, isn’t it?”
“Very indeed,” Damaris answered. “But I’m afraid I shan’t be very interesting, Mr. Foster. You see I know so little of what Mr. Berringer and you are doing.”
He looked at her a little sharply. “Probably you’re not very interested,” he said. “But we don’t really do anything, except listen. Mr. Berringer is a very remarkable man, and he generally gives us a short address on the world of principles, as one might call it.”
“Principles?” Damaris asked.
“Ideas, energies, realities, whatever you like to call them,” Mr. Foster answered. “The underlying things.”
“Of course,” Damaris said, “I know the Platonic Ideas well enough, but do you mean Mr. Berringer explains Plato?”
“Not so much Plato——” but there Mr. Foster was interrupted by Mrs. Rockbotham, who came up to Damaris.
“Are you ready, Miss Tighe?” she asked. “Yes? Then I will say something first, just to have things in order, and then I will ask you to speak. After that there may be a few questions, or a little discussion, or what not, and then we shall break up. Will you sit here? I think we may as well begin.” She tapped on the table before her, and as the room grew silent proceeded to address it.
“Friends,” she began, “you have all heard that our leader, Mr. Berringer—may I not say our teacher?—has passed into a state of unconsciousness. My husband, who is attending him, tells me that he is inclined to diagnose some sort of brain trouble. But perhaps we, who have profited by our teacher’s lessons, may think that he is engaged upon some experiment in connexion with some of his work. We all remember how often in this very room he has urged us to work and meditate until we became accustomed to what he called ideas, the thought-forms which are moulded by us, although of course they exist in a world of (as he has so often told us) their own. Many of us can no longer walk in the simple paths of childhood’s faith—perhaps I should say alas! But we have found in this new doctrine a great suggestiveness, and each in our own way have done our best to carry it out. It seemed therefore a pity to omit our monthly meeting merely because our leader is in—shall I say?—another state. We can always learn, and therefore I have asked Miss Damaris Tighe, who besides being a dear friend of mine and also known to some of you, is a deep student of philosophy to speak to us to-night on a subject of mutual interest. Miss Tighe’s subject is——” She looked at Damaris, who murmured “The Eidola and the Angeli”—“the idler and the angels—We shall all listen to her with great interest.”
Damaris stood up. Her attention for the moment was centred on the fact that she was Mrs. Rockbotham’s dear friend. She felt that this was a promising situation, even if it involved her wasting an evening among people who would certainly never know an eidolon if they met it. She moved to the table, laid down her handbag, and unfolded her manuscript. As she did so she sniffed slightly; there had seemed to come from somewhere—just for the moment—an extremely unpleasant smell. She sniffed again; no, it was gone. Far away the thunder was still sounding. Mrs. Rockbotham had composed herself to listen; the remainder of the members desisted from their gentle and polite applause.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Damaris began, “as I have already said to Mrs. Rockbotham and to Mr. Foster, I fear I have only a very inadequate substitute to-night for—for what you are used to. But the cobbler, we know”—she was reading now from her manuscript—“must stick to his last, and since you have done me the honour to ask me to address you it may not be without interest for me to offer you a few remarks on a piece of research I have recently been attempting to carry out. Mr. Foster”—she looked up—“in the course of a very interesting conversation which I had with him just now”—she bowed to Mr. Foster, who bowed back—“alluded to your study of a world of principles. Now of course that has always been a very favourite subject of human study—philosophical study, if I may call it that—although no doubt some ages have been more sympathetic to it than others. Ages noted for freedom of thought, such as Athens, have been better equipped for it than less-educated times such as the early medieval. We perhaps in our age, with our increased certainty and science and learning, can appreciate all these views with sympathy if not with agreement. I, for instance”—she smiled brightly at her audience—“no longer say ‘Four angel
s round my bed’, nor am I prepared to call Plato der grosse Pfaffe, the great priest, as was once done.”
She sniffed again; the smell had certainly recurred. In a corner Miss Wilmot moved restlessly, and then sat still. Everything was very quiet; the smell slowly faded. Damaris resumed—
“But it was that phrase which suggested to me the research with which my paper deals. You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels, who were given different names—to be exact” (“and what is research if it is not exact?” she asked Mrs. Rockbotham, who nodded), “in descending order, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, princes, powers, archangels, angels. Now these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world. We may not believe in them as actually existent—either ideas or angels—but here we have what I may call two selected patterns of thought. Let us examine the likenesses between them; though first I should like to say a word on what the path was by which imaginations of the Greek seer became the white-robed beings invoked by the credulous piety of Christian Europe, and familiar to us in many paintings.
“Alexandria——”
As if the word had touched her poignantly Miss Wilmot shrieked and sprang to her feet. “Look, look,” she screamed. “On the floor!”
Damaris stared at the floor, and saw nothing unusual. But she had no long time to look. Miss Wilmot was crouching back in her corner, still shrieking. All the room was in disorder. Mrs. Rockbotham was on her feet and alternately saying fiercely—“Miss Wilmot! Dora! be quiet!” and asking generally “Will someone take her out?”
“The snake!” Dora Wilmot shrieked. “The crowned snake!”
So highly convinced and convincing did the words sound that there was a general stir of something remarkably like terror. Damaris herself was startled. Mr. Foster was standing close to her, and she saw him look searchingly round the room, as she had felt herself doing. Their eyes met, and she said smiling, “Do you see anything like a crowned snake, Mr. Foster?”
“No, Miss Tighe,” Mr. Foster said. “But I can’t perhaps see what she sees. Dora Wilmot may be a fool, but she’s a sincere fool.”
“Can’t you get her away, Mr. Foster?” Mrs. Rockbotham asked. “Perhaps you and I together—shall we try?”
“By all means,” Mr. Foster answered. “By all means let us try.”
The two of them crossed to the corner where Miss Wilmot, now risen from crouching and standing upright and flat against the wall, had with that change of position left off screaming and was now gently moaning. Her eyes were looking past Damaris to where at that end of the room there was an empty space before the French windows.
Mrs. Rockbotham took her friend’s arm. “Dora, what do you mean by it?” she said firmly. “You’d better go home.”
“O Elise,” Dora Wilmot said, without moving her eyes, “can’t you see? look, look, there it goes!” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and again she uttered in a tone of terror and awe: “the snake! the crowned snake!”
Mr. Foster took her other hand. “What is it doing?” he asked in a low voice. “We can’t all see clearly. Tell me, quietly, what is it doing?”
“It is gliding about, slowly,” Miss Wilmot said. “It’s looking round. Look, how it’s moving its head! It’s so huge!”
In the silence that had fallen on the room Damaris heard the colloquy. She was very angry. If these hysterical nincompoops were to be allowed to interrupt her careful analysis of Platonic and medieval learning, she wished she had never taken all that trouble about her paper. “Crowned snake indeed,” she thought. “The shrieking imbecile! Are they never going to get her away?”
“Yes, O yes!” Miss Wilmot moaned. “I daren’t stop. I—no, no, I daren’t stop.”
“Come then,” Mr. Foster said. “This way; the door’s just here by you. But you’re not afraid of it, are you?”
“Yes … no … yes, I am, I am,” Dora moaned again. “It’s too—O let’s get away.”
Mrs. Rockbotham released the arm she held. Mr. Foster, one hand still holding Miss Wilmot’s, felt with his other for the door-handle. Damaris was watching them, as were all the rest—without her indignation—when suddenly everyone sprang into movement. There was a rush for the door; screams, not Miss Wilmot’s, sounded. Damaris herself, startled and galvanized, moved hastily forward, colliding with a heavy mass in flight which turned out to be Mrs. Roche Jacquelin. For from behind her, away towards those open windows, soft but distinct, there had come, or seemed to come, the sound of a gentle and prolonged hiss. Terror caught them all; following Mr. Foster and his charge, they squeezed and thrust themselves through the door. Only Damaris, after that first instinctive movement, restrained herself; only Mrs. Rockbotham, a little conscious of dignity still, allowed herself to be last. After the panic those two went, drawn by it but resisting its infection. The room lay empty and still in the electric light, unless indeed there passed across it then a dim form, which, heavy, long, and coiling, issued slowly through the open window into a silent world where for that moment nothing but the remote thunder was heard.
Chapter Three
THE COMING OF THE BUTTERFLIES
Anthony shook his head reproachfully at Damaris over the coffee cups.
“You know,” he said, “if I were a sub-editor on anything but a distinguished literary paper, I should say you were playing with me—playing fast and loose.”
“Don’t be absurd, Anthony,” Damaris answered.
“I come and I go,” Anthony went on, “and you will and you won’t. And——”
“But I’ve told you what I will,” Damaris said. “I’m not sure whether you and I could make a success of marriage. And anyhow I won’t think about anything of the kind till I’ve got my degree. Of course, if you think more of yourself than of me——”
“Well, naturally I do,” Anthony interrupted. “Who doesn’t? Am I a saint or an Alexandrian gnostic? Don’t let’s ask rhetorical questions, darling.”
“I’m not doing anything of the kind,” Damaris said, coldly. “But you must be willing to wait a little while. I’m not sure of myself.”
“It’s all you are sure of—besides Abelard,” Anthony said. “And with you, that covers everything else.”
“I think you’re rather unkind,” Damaris answered. “We both like each other——”
“Dearest, I don’t like you a bit,” Anthony interrupted again. “I think you’re a very detestable, selfish pig and prig. But I’m often wildly in love with you, and so I see you’re not. But I’m sure your only chance of salvation is to marry me.”
“Really, Anthony!” Damans got up from the table. “Chance of salvation, indeed! And from what, I should like to know?”
“Nobody else,” Anthony went on, “sees you as you are. Nobody else will give you such a difficult and unpleasant time as I do. You’ll never be comfortable, but you may be glorious. You’d better think over it.”
Damaris said nothing. Anthony, it was clear, was in one of his difficult fits; and if it hadn’t been for The Two Camps——. There was a short silence, then he too stood up.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve not been eaten by the lion, and I’ve been mauled by the lioness. I think I will now go and look for the other lioness.”
Damaris half-turned and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Do I maul you?” she asked. “Am I a pig and a prig—just because I like my work?”
Anthony gazed at her solemnly. “You are the Sherbet of Allah, and the gold cup he drinks it out of,” he said slowly. “You are the Night of Repose and the Day of Illumination. You are, incidentally, a night with a good deal of rain and a day with a nasty cold wind. But that may be merely Allah’s little game.”
“I hate being bad friends with you,” Damaris said, with perfect truth, and gave him her hand.
“But I,” said Anthony, as he kissed it, “hate being good friends. Besides, I don??
?t think you could be.”
“What, a bad friend?”
“No, a good one,” Anthony said, almost sadly. “It’s all right, I suppose; it isn’t your fault—or at least it wasn’t. You were made like it by the Invisibles that created you.”
“Why are you always so rude to me, Anthony?” she asked, as wistfully as she thought desirable, but keeping rather on the side of intellectual curiosity than of hurt tenderness.
“I shall be ruder to the other lioness,” he said. “It’s only a way of saying, ‘Hear thou my protestation’—and making quite sure you do.”
“But what do you mean—look for the lioness?” Damaris asked. “You’re not anxious to find it, are you?”
Anthony smiled at her. “Well, you want to work,” he said, “and I could do with a walk. And so, one way and another——” He drew her a little closer to him, but as she moved they both suddenly paused. There struck momentarily into their nostrils—what Damaris recognized and Anthony didn’t—a waft of the horrible stench that had assailed her on the previous night in the house where Mr. Berringer lay insensible. It was gone in a second or two, but to each of them it was obvious that the other had smelt it.
“My God!” Anthony said involuntarily, as Damaris shuddered and threw back her head. “What’s the matter with your drains?”
“Nothing,” Damaris said sharply. “But what—did you smell something!”
“Smell,” Anthony exclaimed. “It was like a corpse walking. Or a beast out of a jungle. What on earth is it?” He sniffed experimentally. “No, it’s gone. It must be your drains.”
“It isn’t our drains,” Damaris said crossly. “I smelt it at that house last night, only not nearly so strongly; but how it got here——! It can’t be the frock—I wasn’t wearing it. How horrible!”
They were standing staring at one another, and she shook herself abruptly, then, recovering her normal remoteness, “I shall go and have a bath,” she said. It occurred to her that the smell might be, in some way, clinging to her hair, but she wasn’t going to admit to Anthony that anything about her could be even remotely undesirable, so she ended—“It makes one feel to need it.”