That Hideous Strength (11 page)

     At four o'clock Mark sat in the Fairy's office re-reading the last two articles he had written-one for the most respectable of our papers, the other for a more popular organ. The first was as follows:

     "While it would be premature to make any final comment on last night's riot at Edgestow, two conclusions seem to emerge from the first accounts with a clarity not likely to be shaken by subsequent developments. In the first place, the whole episode will administer a rude shock to any complacency which may still lurk among us as to the enlightenment of our own civilisation. It must, of course, be admitted that the transformation of a university town into a centre of national research cannot be carried out without some friction and some cases of hardship. But the Englishman has always had his own quiet and humorous way of dealing with frictions and has never showed himself unwilling, when the issue is properly put before him, to make sacrifices much greater than those small alterations of habit and sentiment which progress demands of the people of Edgestow. There is no suggestion that the N.I.C.E. has in any way exceeded its powers or failed in consideration and courtesy; and there is little doubt that the starting-point of the disturbances was some quarrel, probably in a public-house, between one of the N.I.C.E. workmen and some local Sir Oracle, and that this petty fracas was inflamed, if not exploited, by sectional interests or widespread prejudice.

     "It is disquieting to be forced to suspect that the old distrust of planned efficiency and the old jealousy of what is called ' Bureaucracy ' can be so easily revived; but the will of the nation is behind this magnificent ' peace-effort ', as Mr. Jules so happily described the Institute, and any ill-informed opposition which ventures to try conclusions with it will be, we hope gently, but certainly firmly, resisted.

     "The second moral to be drawn from last night's events is a more cheering one. The original proposal to provide the N.I.C.E. with what is misleadingly called its own ' police force ' was viewed with distrust in many quarters. Our readers will remember that while not sharing that distrust, we extended to it a certain sympathy, but also insisted that the complexity of modern society rendered it an anachronism to confine the actual execution of the will of society to a body of men whose real function was the prevention and detection of crime: that the police, in fact, must be relieved sooner or later of that growing body of coercive functions which do not properly fall within their sphere. The so-called ' Police ' of the N.I.C.E.-who should rather be called its ' Sanitary Executive '-is the characteristically English solution. If any doubt as to the value of such a force existed, it has been amply set at rest by the episodes at Edgestow. The happiest relations seem to have been maintained throughout between the officers of the Institute and the National Police. As an eminent police officer observed to one of our representatives this morning, ' But for the N.I.C.E. Police, things would have taken quite a different turn.' If in the light of these events it is found convenient to place the whole Edgestow area under the exclusive control of the Institutional ' police ' for some limited period, we do not believe that the British people will have the slightest objection."

     The second said much the same with shorter words, more exclamation marks, and in a more truculent manner.

     The more often he re-read the articles the better he liked them. It wasn't as if he were taken in by them himself. He was writing with his tongue in his cheek-a phrase that somehow comforted him by making the whole thing appear like a practical joke. And anyway, if he didn't do it, someone else would. And all the while the child inside him whispered how splendid and how triumphantly grown up it was to be writing, with his tongue in his cheek, articles for great newspapers, against time, "with the printer's devil at the door" and all the inner ring of the N.I.C.E. depending on him, and nobody ever again having the least right to consider him a nonentity or cipher.

     Jane stretched out her hand in the darkness but did not feel the table which ought to have been there at her bed's head. She discovered that she was not in bed, but standing. There was darkness all about her and intense cold. Groping, she touched uneven surfaces of stone. The place, whatever it was, did not seem large. She groped along one of the walls and struck her foot against something hard. She stooped down and felt. There was a platform or table of stone, about three feet high. And on it ? Did she dare to explore? But it would be worse not to. Next moment she bit her lip to save herself from screaming, for she had touched a human foot; a naked foot, dead to judge by its coldness. To go on groping seemed the hardest thing she had ever done, but she was impelled to do it. The corpse was clothed in some very coarse stuff which was also uneven, as though it were heavily embroidered. It must be a very large man. On his chest the texture suddenly changed-as if the skin of some hairy animal had been laid over the coarse robe; then she realised that the hair really belonged to a beard. It was only a dream; she could bear it: but it was so dreary, as if she had slipped through a cleft in the present, down into some cold pit of the remote past. If only someone would come quickly and let her out. And immediately she had a picture of someone, someone bearded but also divinely young, someone golden and strong and warm coming with a mighty earth-shaking tread into that black place. At this point she woke.

     She went into Edgestow immediately after breakfast to hunt for someone who would replace Mrs. Maggs. At the top of Market Street something happened which finally determined her to go to St. Anne's that very day. She came to a place where a big car was standing beside the pavement, an N.I.C.E. car. Just as she reached it a man came out of a shop, cut across her path to the car, and got in. He was so close to her that, despite the fog, she saw him very clearly. She would have known him, anywhere: not Mark's face, not her own face in a mirror, was by now more familiar. She saw the pointed beard, the pince-nez, the face which somehow reminded her of a waxworks face. She had no need to think what she would do. Her body, walking quickly past, seemed of itself to have decided that it was heading for the station and thence for St. Anne's. It was something different from fear that drove her. It was a total revulsion from this man on all levels of her being.

     The train was blessedly warm, her compartment empty, the fact of sitting down delightful. The slow journey through the fog almost sent her to sleep. She hardly thought about St. Anne's until she found herself there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

     THE PENDRAGON

     BEFORE she reached the Manor Jane met Mr. Denniston and told him her story as they walked. As they entered the house they met Mrs. Maggs.

     "What? Mrs. Studdock! Fancy!" said Mrs. Maggs.

     "Yes, Ivy," said Denniston, “and bringing great news. We must see Grace at once."

     A few minutes later Jane found herself once more in Grace Ironwood's room. Miss Ironwood and the Dennistons sat facing her, and when Ivy Maggs brought in some tea she did not go away again, but sat down too.

     "You need not mind Ivy, young lady," said Miss Ironwood. "She is one of our company."

     There was a pause.

     "We have your letter of the 10th," continued Miss Ironwood, " describing your dream of the man with the pointed beard sitting making notes in your bedroom. Perhaps I ought to tell you that he wasn't really there: at least, the Director does not think it possible. But he was really studying you. He was getting information about you from some other source which, unfortunately, was not visible to you in the dream."

     "Will you tell us, if you don't mind," said Mr. Denniston, " what you were telling me as we came along?"

     Jane told them about the dream of the corpse (if it was a corpse) in the dark place and how she had met the bearded man that morning in Market Street: and at once she was aware of having created intense interest.

     Miss Ironwood opened a drawer and handed a photograph across to Jane and asked, "Do you recognise that?"

     "Yes," said Jane in a low voice; " that is the man I dreamed of and the man I saw this morning in Edgestow."

     It was a good photograph, and beneath it was the name Augustus Frost.

     "In the second place," continued Miss Ironwood, “are you prepared to see the Director . . . now?"

     "Well-yes, if you like."

     "In that case, Camilla," said Miss Ironwood to Mrs. Denniston, "you had better go and tell him what we have just heard and find out if he is well enough to meet Mrs. Studdock."

     The others rose and left the room.

     "I have very little doubt," said Miss Ironwood, " that the Director will see you."

     Jane said nothing.

     "And at that interview," continued the other, " you will, I presume, be called upon to make a final decision."

     Jane gave a little cough which had no other purpose than to dispel a certain air of unwelcome solemnity.

     "And secondly," said Miss Ironwood, "I must ask you to remember that he is often in great pain."

     "If Mr. Fisher-King is not well enough to see visitors ...," said Jane vaguely.

     "You must excuse me," said Miss Ironwood, "for impressing these points upon you. I am the only doctor in our company, and am responsible -for protecting him as far as I can. If you will now come with me I will show you to the Blue Room."

     She rose and held the door open for Jane. They passed out into the plain, narrow passage and thence up shallow steps into a large entrance hall whence a fine Georgian staircase led to the upper floors. On the first floor they found a little square place with white pillars where Camilla sat waiting for them. There was a door behind her.

     "He will see her," she said to Miss Ironwood, getting up.

     As Miss Ironwood raised her hand to knock on the door, Jane thought to herself, "Be careful. Don't get let in for anything. All these long passages and low voices will make a fool of you if you don't look out." Next moment she found herself going in. It was light-it seemed all windows. And it was warm-a fire blazed on the hearth. And blue was the prevailing colour. She was annoyed, and in a way ashamed, to see that Miss Ironwood was curtseying. "I won't," contended in Jane's mind with "I can't " : for she couldn't.

     "This is the young lady, sir," said Miss Ironwood. Jane looked; and instantly her world was unmade. On a sofa before her, with one foot bandaged as if he had a wound, lay what appeared to be a boy, twenty years old.

     On one of the long window-sills a tame jackdaw was walking up and down. Winter sunlight poured through the glass; apparently one was above the fog here. All the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man.

     Of course he was not a boy-how could she have thought so? The fresh skin on his cheeks and hands had suggested the idea. But no boy could have so full a beard. And no boy could be so strong. It was manifest that the grip of those hands would be inescapable, and imagination suggested that those arms and shoulders could support the whole house. Miss Ironwood at her side struck her as a little old woman, shrivelled and pale-a thing you could have blown away.

     Pain came and went in his face: sudden jabs of sickening pain. But as lightning goes through the darkness and the darkness closes up again and shows no trace, so the tranquillity of his countenance swallowed up each shock of torture. How could she have thought him young? Or old either ? It came over her that this face was of no age at all. She had, or so she had believed, disliked bearded faces except for old men. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood -and the imagined Solomon too. Solomon . . . for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all its linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. Next moment she was once more the ordinary social Jane, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely (at least she hoped that rudeness would be the main impression) at a total stranger. But her world was unmade. Anything might happen now.

     "Thank you, Grace," the man was saying. And the voice also seemed to be like sunlight and gold. "You must forgive me for not getting up, Mrs. Studdock," it said. "My foot is hurt."

     And Jane heard her own voice saying, "Yes, sir," soft and chastened like Miss Ironwood's. She had meant to say, "Good morning, Mr. Fisher-King," in an easy tone. But her world was unmade: anything might happen now.

     "Do you wish me to remain, sir?" said Miss Ironwood.

     "No, Grace," said the Director, "I don't think you need stay. Thank you."

     For a few minutes after Grace Ironwood had left them, Jane hardly took in what the Director was saying. It was not that her attention wandered: on the contrary, her attention was so fixed on him that it defeated itself.

     "I-I beg your pardon," she said, wishing that she did not keep on turning red like a schoolgirl.

     "I was saying," he answered, " that you have already done us the greatest service. We knew that one of the most dangerous attacks ever made upon the human race was coming very soon and in this island. We had an idea that Belbury might be connected with it. But we were not certain. That is why your information is so valuable. But in another way, it presents us with a difficulty. We had hoped you would be able to join us."

     "Can I not, sir?" said Jane.

     "It is difficult," said the Director, " you see, your husband is in Belbury."

     Jane glanced up. It had been on the tip of her tongue to say "Do you mean that Mark is in any danger?"But she had realised that anxiety about Mark did not, in fact, make any part of the emotions she was feeling, and that to reply thus would be hypocrisy. It was a sort of scruple she had not often felt. "What do you mean?" she said.