Now he stood for a moment discussing a large white owl. The two appraised each other, Doole’s eyes with their appearance of false anguish, the owl’s with their false wisdom. The owl had its trousered legs placed neatly together. Unconsciously Doole moved his own into a similar position: at any moment the two might have clicked heels and bowed. “Just a flying puss,” Doole said to himself, considering the owl’s catface of night eyes and furry ears and feathered round cheeks. “Likes mice like puss, too,” he thought with satisfaction, forgetting in the pleasure of this observation his vegetarian principles. It is satisfactory to come across a common coincidence in the flesh—and Doole expanded for a moment as he nodded, “How true I” As if to please him, the owl opened its beak and made, from a distance deep inside the vase of feathers, a thin mewing sound.
Doole smiled and passed on. All seemed very right with the world. Creatures were really so extraordinary. Particularly birds. And he paused again before a delicate blue creature which stood on one long brittle leg with its nut-like head cocked under a complicated hat of coloured feathers. This bird did not look at Doole. It stood and jerked its head backwards and forwards, like an urgent little lady in a spring hat practising the neck movements of an Indonesian dance. Doole took out his watch and checked the time. Nearly half-an-hour before he need think of the office. Delightful! And what a wholly delightful day, not a cloud in the golden blue sky! And so quiet—almost ominously quiet, he thought, imagining for a moment the uneasy peace of metropolitan parks deserted by plague or fear. The panic noon, he thought—well, the panic afternoon, then. Time for sunny ghosts. Extraordinary, too, how powerful the presence of vegetation grows when one is alone with it! Yet put a few people about the place—all that power would recede. Man is a gregarious creature, he repeated to himself, and is frightened to be alone—and how very charming these zinnias are! How bright, like a consortium of national flags, the dahlias!
Indeed these colourful flowers shone very brightly in that September light. Red, yellow, purple and white, the large flower-moons stared like blodges from a paint box, hard as the colours of stained-glass windows. The lateness of the year had dried what green there was about, leaves were shrunken but not yet turned, so that all flowers had a greater prominence, they stood out as they never could in the full green luxuriance of spring and summer. And the earth was dry and the gravel walk dusty. Nothing moved. The flowers stared. The sun bore steadily down. Such vivid, motionless colour gave a sense of magic to the path, it did not seem quite real.
Doole passed slowly along by the netted bird-runs, mildly thankful for the company of their cackling, piping inmates. Sometimes he stopped and read with interest a little white card describing the bird’s astounding Latin name and its place of origin. Uganda, Brazil, New Zealand—and soon these places ceased to mean anything, life’s variety proved too immense, anything might come from anywhere. A thick-trousered bird with a large pink lump on its head croaked at Doole, then swung its head back to bury its whole face in feathers, nibbling furiously with closed eyes. In the adjoining cage everything looked deserted, broken pods and old dried droppings lay scattered, the water bowl was almost dry—and then he spied a grey bird tucked up in a corner, lizard lids half-closed, sleeping or resting or simply tired of it all. Doole felt distress for this bird, it looked so lonely and grieved, he would far rather be croaked at. He passed on, and came to the peacocks: the flaming blue dazzled him and the little heads jerked so busily that he smiled again, and turned contentedly back to the path—when the smile was washed abruptly from his face. He stood frozen with terror in the warm sunshine.
The broad gravel path, walled in on the one side by dahlias, on the other by cages, stretched yellow with sunlight. A moment before it had been quite empty. Now, exactly in the centre and only some thirty feet away, stood a full-maned male lion.
It stared straight at Doole.
Doole stood absolutely still, as still as a man can possibly stand, but in that first short second, like an immensely efficient and complicated machine, his eyes and other senses flashed every detail of the surrounding scene into his consciousness—he knew instantly that on the right there were high wire cages, he estimated whether he could pull himself up by his fingers in the net, he felt the stub ends of his shoes pawing helplessly beneath; he saw the bright dahlia balls on the left, he saw behind them a high green hedge, probably privet, with underbush too thick to penetrate—it was a ten-foot hedge rising high against the sky, could one leap and plunge halfway through, like a clown through a circus hoop? And if so, who would follow? And behind the lion cutting across the path like a wall, a further hedge—it hardly mattered what was behind the lion, though it gave in fact a further sense of impasse. And behind himself? The path stretched back past all those’ cages by which he had strolled at such leisure such a very little time ago—the fractional thought of it started tears of pity in his eyes—and it was far, far to run to the little thatched hut that said Bath Chairs for Hire, he felt that if only he could get among those big old safe chairs with their blankets and pillows he would be safe. But he knew it was too far. Long before he got there those hammer-strong paws would be on him, his clothes torn and his own red meat staining the yellow gravel.
At the same time as his animal reflexes took all this in, some other instinct made him stand still, and as still as a rock, instead of running. Was this, too, an animal sense? Was he, Doole, in his brown suit, like an ostrich that imagines it has fooled its enemy by burying its head in the ground? Or was it rather an educated sense—how many times had he been told that savages and animals can smell fear, one must stand one’s ground and face them? In any case, he did this—he stood his ground and stared straight into the large, deep eyes of the lion, and as he stared there came over him the awful sense: This has happened, this is happening to ME. He had felt it in nightmares, and as a child before going up for a beating—a dreadfully condemned sense, the sense of no way out, never, never and now. It was absolute. The present moment roared loud and intense as all time put together.
The lion, with its alerted head erect, looked very tall. Its mane—and he was so near he could see how coarse and strong the hair straggled—framed its big face hugely. There was something particularly horrible in so much hair making an oval frame. Heavy disgruntled jowls, as big as hams, hung down in folds of muscled flesh buff-grey against the yellow gravel. Its eyes were too big, and shaped in some sharp-cornered way like large convex glasses more than eyes—and from somewhere far back, as far away and deep as the beast’s ancient wisdom, the two black pupils flickered at him from inside their lenses of golden-yellow liquid. The legs beneath had a coarse athletic bandiness: the whole creature was heavy and thick with muscle that thumped and rolled when it moved—as suddenly now it did, padding forward only one silent pace.
Doole’s whole inside was wrenched loose—he felt himself panicked, he wanted to turn and run. But he held on. And a sense of the softness of his flesh overcame him, he felt small and defenceless as a child again.
The lion, large as it was, still had some of the look of a cat—though its heavy disgruntled mouth was downcurved, surly, predatory as any human face with a long upper lip. But the poise of the head had the peculiarly questioning consideration of cat—it smelled inwards with its eyes, there was the furry presence of a brain, or of a mass of instincts that thought slowly but however slowly always came to the same destined decision. Also, there was a cat’s affronted look in its eyes. A long way behind, a knobbed tail swung slow and regular as a clock-pendulum.
Doole prayed: O God, please save me.
And then he thought: if only it could speak, if only like all these animals in books it could speak, then I could tell it how I’m me and how I must go on living, and about my house and my showroom just a few streets away over there, over the hedge, and out of the zoo, and all the thousand things that depend upon me and upon which I depend. I could say how I’m not just meat. I’m a person, a clubmember, a goldfish-feeder, a lover of flow
ers and detective-stories—and I’ll promise to reduce that profit on fire-surrounds, I promise, from forty to thirty percent. I’d have to some day anyway, but I won’t make excuses any more . . .
His mind drummed through the terrible seconds. But above all two separate feelings predominated: one, an athletic, almost youthful alertness—as though he could make his body spring everywhere at once and at superlative speed; the other, an overpowering knowledge of guilt—and with it the canny hope that somehow he could bargain his way out, somehow expiate his wrong and avoid punishment. He had experienced this dual sensation before at moments in business when he had something to hide, and in some way hid the matter more securely by confessing half of his culpability. But such agilities were now magnified enormously, this was life and death, and he would bargain his life away to make sure of it, he would do anything and say anything . . . and much the most urgent of his offerings was the promise never, never to do or think wrong in any way ever again . . .
And the sun bore down yellow and the flowers stared with their mad colours and the lion stood motionless and hard as a top-heavy king—as Doole thought of his cool shaded showroom with all the high-gloss firestone slabs about, the graining and the marble flow, the toffee-streaming arches, and never, never again would he feel dull among them . . . never again . . .
But it was never again, the ever was ever, at any minute now he would be dead and how long would it take him to die, how slowly did they tear?
He suddenly screamed.
“No!” he screamed, “no, I can’t bear it! I can’t bear pain! I can’t bear it. . .” and he covered his face with his hands, so that he never saw the long shudder that ran through the whole length of the lion’s body, from head to slowly swinging tail.
In the evening newspapers there were no more than a few lines about the escape of a lion at the Zoological Gardens. Oddly—but perhaps because no journalist was on the spot and the authorities wished to make little of it—the story was never expanded to its proper dimension. The escape had resulted from a defection in the cage bolting, a chance in a million, and more than a million, for it involved also a momentary blank in a keeper’s mind, and a piece of blown carton wedged in a socket—in fact several freak occasions combining, including such as a lorry backfiring that had reminded the keeper of a certain single gunshot in the whole four years of the Kaiser’s war—the kind of thing that is never properly known and never can be explained, and certainly not in a newspaper. However—the end of it was that the lion had to be shot. It was too precarious a situation for the use of nets or cages. The animal had to go. And there the matter ended.
Doole’s body was never found—for the lion in fact never sprang at him. It did something which was probably, in a final evolution over the years, worse for Doole; certainly worse for his peace of mind, which would have been properly at peace had his body gone, but which was now left forever afterwards to suffer from a shock peculiar to the occasion. If we are not animals, if the human mind is superior to the simple animal body, then it must be true to say that by not being killed, Doole finally suffered a greater ill.
For what happened was this—Doole opened very slowly the fingers that covered his eyes and saw through his tears and the little opening between his fingers, through the same opening through which in church during prayers he had once spied on the people near him, on the priest and the altar itself—he saw the lion slowly turn its head away! He saw it turn its head, in the worn weary way that cats turn from something dull and distasteful, as if the head itself had perceived something too heavy to bear, leaning itself to one side as if a perceptible palable blow had been felt. And then the animal had turned and plodded off up the path and disappeared at the turn of the hedge.
Doole was left standing alone and unwanted. For a second he felt an unbearable sense of isolation. Alone, of all creatures in the world, he was undesirable.
The next moment he was running away as fast as his legs would carry him, for the lion might easily return, and secondly—a very bad second—the alarm must be given for the safety of others.
It was some days before his nerve was partly recovered. But he was never quite the same afterwards. He took to looking at himself for long periods in the mirror. He went to the dentist and had his teeth seen to. He became a regular visitor at a Turkish Bath house, with the vague intention of sweating himself out of himself. And even today, after dusk on summer evenings, his figure may sometimes be seen, in long white running shorts, plodding from shadow to lamplight and again into shadow, among the great tree-hung avenues to the north of Regent’s Park, a man keeping fit—or a man running away from something? From himself?
Under the Garden
GRAHAM GREENE
PART ONE
1
It was only when the doctor said to him, “Of course the fact that you don’t smoke is in your favour,” Wilditch realized what it was he had been trying to convey with such tact. Dr. Cave had lined up along one wall a series of X-ray photographs, the whorls of which reminded the patient of those pictures of the earth’s surface taken from a great height that he had pored over at one period during the war, trying to detect the tiny grey seed of a launching ramp.
Dr. Cave had explained, “I want you clearly to understand my problem.” It was very similar to an intelligence briefing of such “top secret” importance that only one officer could be entrusted with the information. Wilditch felt gratified that the choice had fallen on him, and he tried to express his interest and enthusiasm, leaning forward and examining more closely than ever the photographs of his own interior.
“Beginning at this end,” Dr. Cave said, “let me see April, May, June, three months ago, the scar left by the pneumonia is quite obvious. You can see it here.”
“Yes, sir,” Wilditch said absent-mindedly. Dr. Cave gave him a puzzled look.
“Now if we leave out the intervening photographs for the moment and come straight to yesterday’s, you will observe that this latest one is almost entirely clear, you can only just detect . . .”
“Good,” Wilditch said. The doctor’s finger moved over what might have been tumuli or traces of prehistoric agriculture.
“But not entirely, I’m afraid. If you look now along the whole series you will notice how very slow the progress has been. Really by this stage the photographs should have shown no trace.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilditch said. A sense of guilt had taken the place of gratification.
“If we had looked at the last plate in isolation I would have said there was no cause for alarm.” The doctor tolled the last three words like a bell. Wilditch thought, Is he suggesting tuberculosis?
“It’s only in relation to the others, the slowness . . . it suggests the possibility of an obstruction.”
“Obstruction?”
“The chances are that it’s nothing, nothing at all. Only I wouldn’t be quite happy if I let you go without a deep examination. Not quite happy.” Dr. Cave left the photographs and sat down behind his desk. The long pause seemed to Wilditch like an appeal to his friendship.
“Of course,” he said, “if it would make you happy . . .”
It was then the doctor used those revealing words, “Of course the fact that you don’t smoke is in your favour.”
“Oh.”
“I think we’ll ask Sir Nigel Sampson to make the examination. In case there is something there, we couldn’t have a better surgeon . . . for the operation.”
Wilditch came down from Wimpole Street into Cavendish Square looking for a taxi. It was one of those summer days which he never remembered in childhood: grey and dripping. Taxis drew up outside the tall liver-coloured buildings partitioned by dentists and were immediately caught by the commissionaires for the victims released. Gusts of wind barely warmed by July drove the rain aslant across the blank eastern gaze of Epstein’s virgin and dripped down the body of her fabulous son. “But it hurt,” the child’s voice said behind him. “You make a fuss about nothing,” a mother—or a go
verness—replied.
2
This could not have been said of the examination Wilditch endured a week later, but he made no fuss at all, which perhaps aggravated his case in the eyes of the doctors who took his calm for lack of vitality. For the unprofessional to enter a hospital or to enter the services has very much the same effect; there is a sense of relief and indifference; one is placed quite helplessly on a conveyor-belt with no responsibility any more for anything. Wilditch felt himself protected by an organization, while the English summer dripped outside on the coupes of the parked cars. He had not felt such freedom since the war ended.
The examination was over—a bronchoscopy; and there remained a nightmare memory, which survived through the cloud of the anaesthetic, of a great truncheon forced down his throat into the chest and then slowly withdrawn; he woke next morning bruised and raw so that even the act of excretion was a pain. But that, the nurse told him, would pass in one day or two; now he could dress and go home. He was disappointed at the abruptness with which they were thrusting him off the belt into the world of choice again.
“Was everything satisfactory?” he asked, and saw from the nurse’s expression that he had shown indecent curiosity.
“I couldn’t say, I’m sure,” the nurse said. “Sir Nigel will look in, in his own good time.”
Wilditch was sitting on the end of the bed tying his tie when Sir Nigel Sampson entered. It was the first time Wilditch had been conscious of seeing him: before he I’d been a voice addressing him politely out of sight as the anaesthetic took over. It was the beginning of the weekend and Sir Nigel was dressed for the country in an old tweed jacket. He had tousled white hair and he looked at
Wilditch with a far-away attention as though he were a float bobbing in midstream.
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