The Lion and the Unicorn — Key Ideas to Explore

Witnesses and Watchers

The lion and unicorn of the title story are not merely decorative; they function as silent observers whose shame at the Captain’s “scandal” hints at a moral judgment embedded in the narrative structure. Davis uses their fixed vantage to filter events—the maps, the gambling, the woman’s grief—without entering any character’s mind. This technique recurs in the collection: the senator in the second excerpt watches Arkwright’s hands with “mingled fascination and disgust,” and the policemen close in with professional suspicion. The reader, too, is placed in the position of an onlooker, piecing together meaning from gestures and fragments.

The excerpts offer no resolution for the Captain or Arkwright; the stories are left open, their outcomes implied by the newsboy’s cry and the senator’s shiver. Davis trusts the reader to infer the weight of what is seen but not narrated.

Bodies as Evidence

Physical marks carry the stories’ moral and political arguments. Arkwright’s scarred wrists are the centerpiece of the second excerpt: the sergeant misreads them as criminal stigmata, while the senator recoils. The young man explains they were made by “ropes and leather thongs” during his imprisonment in Cuba, and he offers to guide the senator to the island so that he can “come back as one speaking with authority.” The body becomes a document of atrocity, more persuasive than secondhand reports.

Similarly, the Captain’s room—with its maps, pins, and flags—is a material record of his intellectual life, and the woman’s act of taking his photograph is a silent testimony to loss. Davis does not describe her face or her words; the veil and the crying are enough.

War at a Distance

War in these excerpts is never shown directly. It arrives as newsprint (“’orrible disaster”), as aftermath (the Captain never returns), or as testimony (Arkwright’s account of the fusillade and the band playing to drown out cries of “Cuba Libre”). The settings are urban and domestic: a London street, a carriage, a room above a shop. The violence is reported, not staged, and the characters who have experienced it are marked by their bodies and their stories.

This indirect treatment aligns with the catalog subject “Manners and customs – Fiction.” Davis is less interested in battle than in how civilians—the florist, the senator, the young men at the carriage window—encounter the consequences of war. The lion and unicorn, as permanent fixtures, underscore the contrast between the enduring city and the transient soldiers who pass beneath them.

Readers should pay attention to the framing devices and physical details that Davis uses to convey meaning without explicit commentary. The stories reward attention to what is seen and overheard rather than what is stated. Because the excerpts are incomplete, the collection’s full range—including stories like “On the Fever Ship” and “The Vagrant”—may introduce other settings and techniques not represented here.

Reading about the handcuff scars and that grieving woman’s photograph, I was struck by how quietly Davis lets his characters carry their secrets. It made me think of a different kind of concealment—a woman remaking herself whole cloth, which The New Magdalen — Story, Setting & Ideas explores with such gentle irony. Both books hold their woundedness close, waiting for a glance to unlock it.