That Hideous Strength
That Hideous Strength
C. S. Lewis
The third novel in the science-fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis. This final story is set on Earth, and tells of a terrifying conspiracy against humanity.The story surrounds Mark and Jane Studdock, a newly married couple. Mark is a Sociologist who is enticed to join an organisation called N.I.C.E. which aims to control all human life. His wife, meanwhile, has bizarre prophetic dreams about a decapitated scientist, Alcasan. As Mark is drawn inextricably into the sinister organisation, he discovers the truth of his wife’s dreams when he meets the literal head of Alcasan which is being kept alive by infusions of blood.Jane seeks help concerning her dreams at a community called St Anne’s, where she meets their leader – Dr Ransom (the main character of the previous two titles in the trilogy). The story ends in a final spectacular scene at the N.I.C.E. headquarters where Merlin appears to confront the powers of Hell.
THE COSMIC TRILOGY
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
C. S. Lewis
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups
Contents
The Cosmic Trilogy (#u84396ac3-d225-57ac-b535-f8f086ff85d0)
Title Page (#uae40fa39-c7b4-56ab-8776-330660558bb7)
Dedication (#u81215599-3456-5437-a099-882430fa73b4)
Epigraph (#uec626b35-2eb7-5378-b20d-9dbe4f8e1863)
Preface (#u7a7313b9-5a0f-5e61-8a5f-4a2657d3e191)
1 Sale of College Property (#uee97f8c0-7407-5c19-9c31-a1fe0bdfda87)
2 Dinner with the Sub-Warden (#uacd07b11-7be6-58e6-808a-0c8e9b9e6555)
3 Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill (#ud2a06971-a5f4-5fd3-9680-32f723e290f0)
4 The Liquidation of Anachronisms (#u76612da6-8492-5070-a308-468512e3dfb1)
5 Elasticity (#ub849351e-68ce-5f7e-88f7-ac2ea6f703fc)
6 Fog (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Pendragon (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Moonlight at Belbury (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Saracen’s Head (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Conquered City (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Battle Begun (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Wet and Windy Night (#litres_trial_promo)
13 They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads (#litres_trial_promo)
14 ‘Real Life Is Meeting’ (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Descent of the Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Banquet at Belbury (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Venus at St Anne’s (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
To
J. McNEILL
‘The Shadow of that hyddeous strength Sax myle and more it is of length.’
SIR DAVID LINDSAY: from Ane Dialog (describing the Tower of Babel)
Preface (#ulink_767a6d0f-78c2-5511-89ad-05ccdab67c99)
I have called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who dislikes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why–intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals and planetary angels–I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers, whereas I have never, in any university, come across a college like Bracton. This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man. In the story, the outer rim of that devilry had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. I selected my own profession, not, of course, because I think fellows of colleges more likely to be thus corrupted than anyone else, but because my own is the only profession I know well enough to write about. A very small university is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham–a university with which the only connection I have had was entirely pleasant.
I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow.
Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.
The period of this story is vaguely ‘after the war’. It concludes the Trilogy of which Out of the Silent Planet was the first part, and Perelandra the second, but can be read on its own.
C. S. LEWIS
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Christmas Eve, 1943.
1 (#ulink_30aff43e-f02b-5936-835b-bdc4215fabf0)
Sale of College Property (#ulink_30aff43e-f02b-5936-835b-bdc4215fabf0)
‘Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,’ said Jane Studdock to herself, ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.’ She had not been to church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married, and the words of the service had stuck in her mind.
Through the open door she could see the tiny kitchen of the flat and hear the loud, ungentle tick tick of the clock. She had just left the kitchen and knew how tidy it was. The breakfast things were washed up, the tea towels were hanging above the stove, and the floor was mopped. The beds were made and the rooms ‘done’. She had just returned from the only shopping she need do that day, and it was still a minute before eleven. Except for getting her own lunch and tea, there was nothing that had to be done till six o’clock, even supposing that Mark was really coming home for dinner. But there was a College Meeting today. Almost certainly Mark would ring up about teatime to say that the meeting was taking longer than he had expected and that he would have to dine in College. The hours before her were as empty as the flat. The sun shone and the clock ticked.
‘Mutual society, help, and comfort,’ said Jane bitterly. In reality marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement. For some years before their marriage she had never seen so little of Mark as she had done in the last six months. Even when he was at home he hardly ever talked. He was always either sleepy or intellectually preoccupied. While they had been friends, and later when they were lovers, life itself had seemed too short for all they had to say to each other. But now…why had he married her? Was he still in love? If so, ‘being in love’ must mean totally different things to men and women. Was it the crude truth that all the endless talks which had seemed to her, before they were married, the very medium of love itself, had never been to him more than a preliminary?
‘Here I am, starting to waste another morning, mooning,’ said Jane to herself sharply. ‘I must do some work.’ By work she meant her doctorate thesis on Donne. She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married: that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time yet. Jane was not perhaps a very original thinker and her plan had been to lay great stress on Donne’s ‘triumphant vindication of the body’. She still believed that if she got out all her notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, she could force herself back into her lost enthusiasm for the subject. But before she did so–perhaps in order to put off the moment of beginning –she turned over a newspaper which was lying on the table and glanced at a picture on the back page.
The moment she saw the picture, she remembered her dream. She remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after she had crept out of bed and sat waiting for the first hint of morning, afraid to put on the light for fear Mark should wake up and fuss, yet feeling offended by the sound of his regular breathing. He was an excellent sleeper. Only one thing ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterwards.
She had begun by dreaming simply of a face. It was a foreign-looking face, bearded and rather yellow, with a hooked nose. Its expression was frightening because it was frightened. The mouth sagged open and the eyes stared as she had seen other men’s eyes stare for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually she became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting hunched up in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls–waiting, she thought, for those who had him in their power, to come in and do something horrible to him. At last the door was opened and a rather good-looking man with a pointed grey beard came in. The prisoner seemed to recognise him as an old acquaintance, and they sat down together and began to talk. In all the dreams which Jane had hitherto dreamed, one either understood what the dream-people were saying or else one did not hear it. But in this dream–and that helped to make its extraordinary realism–the conversation was in French and Jane understood bits of it, but by no means all, just as she would have done in real life. The visitor was telling the prisoner something which he apparently intended him to regard as good news. And the prisoner at first looked up with a gleam of hope in his eye and said, ‘Tiens…ah…ça marche’; but then he wavered and changed his mind. The visitor continued in a low, fluent voice to press his point. He was a good-looking man in his rather cold way, but he wore pince-nez and these kept on catching the light so as to make his eyes invisible. This, combined with the almost unnatural perfection of his teeth, somehow gave Jane a disagreeable impression. And this was increased by the growing distress, and finally the terror, of the prisoner. She could not make out what it was that the visitor was proposing to him, but she did discover that the prisoner was under sentence of death. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that frightened him more than that. At this point the dream abandoned all pretence to realism and became ordinary nightmare. The visitor, adjusting his pince-nez and still smiling his cold smile, seized the prisoner’s head between his two hands. He gave it a sharp turn–just as Jane had last summer seen men give a sharp turn to the helmet on a diver’s head. The visitor unscrewed the prisoner’s head and took it away. Then all became confused. The Head was still the centre of the dream but it was quite a different head now–a head with a flowing white beard all covered with earth. It belonged to an old man whom some people were digging up in a kind of churchyard–a sort of ancient British, druidical kind of man, in a long mantle. Jane didn’t mind this much at first because she thought it was a corpse. Then suddenly she noticed that this ancient thing was coming to life. ‘Look out!’ she cried in her dream. ‘He’s alive. Stop! Stop! You’re waking him.’ But they did not stop. The old, buried man sat up and began talking in something that sounded vaguely like Spanish. And this for some reason frightened Jane so badly that she woke up.
That was the dream–no worse, if also no better, than many another nightmare. But it was not the mere memory of a nightmare that made the sitting room of the flat swim before Jane’s eyes and caused her to sit down quickly for fear she should fall. The trouble was elsewhere. There, on the back page of the newspaper, was the Head she had seen in the nightmare: the first head (if there had been two of them)–the head of the Prisoner. With extreme reluctance, she took up the paper. EXECUTION OF ALCASAN was the headline, and beneath it SCIENTIST BLUEBEARD GOES TO GUILLOTINE. She remembered having vaguely followed the case. Alcasan was a distinguished radiologist in a neighbouring country–an Arab by descent, they said–who had cut short an otherwise brilliant career by poisoning his wife. So that was the origin of her dream. She must have looked at this photo in the paper–the man certainly had a very unpleasant face–before going to bed. But no: that couldn’t be it. It was this morning’s paper. But, of course, there must have been some earlier picture which she had seen and forgotten–probably weeks ago when the trial began. It was silly to have let it give her such a turn. And now for Donne. Let’s see, where were we? The ambiguous passage at the end of Love’s Alchymie,
Hope not for minde in women; at their best
Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy possest.
‘Hope not for mind in women.’ Did any man really want mind in women? But that wasn’t the point. ‘I must get back my power of concentrating,’ said Jane; and then, ‘was there a previous picture of Alcasan? Supposing…’
Five minutes later she swept all her books away, went to the mirror, put on her hat, and went out. She was not quite sure where she was going. Anywhere, to be out of that room, that flat, that whole house.
Mark, himself, meanwhile, was walking down to Bracton College, and thinking of a very different matter. He did not notice at all the morning beauty of the little street that led him from the sandy hillside suburb where he and Jane lived down into the central and academic part of Edgestow.
Though I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or sausages or marmalades has yet come to industrialise the country town which is the setting of the University, and the University itself is tiny. Apart from Bracton and from the nineteenth-century women’s college beyond the railway, there are only two colleges: Northumberland which stands below Bracton on the river Wynd, and Duke’s opposite the Abbey. Bracton takes no undergraduates. It was founded in 1300 for the support of ten learned men whose duties were to pray for the soul of Henry de Bracton and to study the laws of England. The number of Fellows has gradually increased to forty, of whom only six (apart from the Bacon Professor) now study Law and of whom none, perhaps, prays for the soul of Bracton. Mark Studdock was himself a Sociologist and had been elected to a fellowship in that subject five years ago. He was beginning to find his feet. If he had felt any doubt on that point (which he did not) it would have been laid to rest when he found himself meeting Curry just outside the Post Office and seen how natural Curry found it that they should walk to College together and discuss the agenda for the meeting. Curry was the Sub-Warden of Bracton.
‘Yes,’ said Curry, ‘it will take the hell of a time. Probably go on after dinner. We shall have all the obstructionists wasting time as hard as they can. But luckily that’s the worst they can do.’
You would never have guessed from the tone of Studdock’s reply what intense pleasure he derived from Curry’s use of the pronoun ‘we’. So very recently he had been an outsider, watching the proceedings of what he then called ‘Curry and his gang’ with awe and with little understanding, and making at College meetings short, nervous speeches which never influenced the course of events. Now he was inside and ‘Curry and his gang’ had become ‘we’ or ‘the Progressive Element in College’. It had all happened quite suddenly and was still sweet in the mouth.
‘You think it’ll go through, then?’ said Studdock.
‘Sure to,’ said Curry. ‘We’ve got the Warden, and the Bursar, and all the chemical and bio-chemical people for a start. I’ve tackled Pelham and Ted and they’re sound. I’ve made Sancho believe that he sees the point and that he’s in favour of it. Bill the Blizzard will probably do something pretty devastating but he’s bound to side with us if it comes to a vote. Besides, I haven’t yet told you. Dick’s going to be there. He came up in time for dinner last night and got busy at once.’
Studdock’s mind darted hither and thither in search of some safe way to conceal the fact that he did not know who Dick was. In the nick of time he remembered a very obscure colleague whose Christian name was Richard.
‘Telford?’ said Studdock in a puzzled voice. He knew very well that Telford could not be the Dick that Curry meant and therefore threw a slightly whimsical and ironical tone into his question.
‘Good Lord! Telford!!’ said Curry with a laugh. ‘No. I mean Lord Feverstone–Dick Devine as he used to be.’
‘I was a little baffled by the idea of Telford,’ said Studdock, joining in the laugh. ‘I’m glad Feverstone is coming. I’ve never met him, you know.’
‘Oh, but you must,’ said Curry. ‘Look here, come and dine in my rooms tonight. I’ve asked him.’
‘I should like to very much,’ said Studdock quite truly. And then, after a pause, ‘By the way, I suppose Feverstone’s own position is quite secure?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Curry.
‘Well, there was some talk, if you remember, as to whether someone who was away quite so much could go on holding a fellowship.’
‘Oh, you mean Glossop and all that ramp. Nothing will come of that. Didn’t you think it absolute blah?’
‘As between ourselves, yes. But I confess if I were put up to explain in public exactly why a man who is nearly always in London should go on being a Fellow of Bracton, I shouldn’t find it altogether easy. The real reasons are the sort that Watson would call imponderables.’
‘I don’t agree. I shouldn’t have the least objection to explaining the real reasons in public. Isn’t it important for a college like this to have influential connections with the outer world? It’s not in the least impossible that Dick will be in the next Cabinet. Even already Dick in London has been a damn sight more use to the College than Glossop and half a dozen others of that sort have been by sitting here all their lives.’
‘Yes. Of course, that’s the real point. It would be a little difficult to put in that form at a College meeting, though!’
‘There’s one thing,’ said Curry in a slightly less intimate tone, ‘that perhaps you ought to know about Dick.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He got you your fellowship.’
Mark was silent. He did not like things which reminded him that he had once been not only outside the Progressive Element but even outside the College. He did not always like Curry either. His pleasure in being with him was not that sort of pleasure.
‘Yes,’ said Curry. ‘Denniston was your chief rival. Between ourselves, a good many people liked his papers better than yours. It was Dick who insisted all through that you were the sort of man we really wanted. He went around to Duke’s and ferreted out all about you. He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of man we need, and be damned to paper qualifications. And I must say he turned out to be right.’
‘Very kind of you,’ said Studdock, with a little mock bow. He was surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. It was an old rule at Bracton, as presumably in most colleges, that one never mentioned in the presence of a man the circumstances of his own election, and Studdock had not realised till now that this also was one of the traditions the Progressive Element was prepared to scrap. It had also never occurred to him that his own election had depended on anything but the excellence of his work in the fellowship examination: still less that it had been so narrow a thing. He was so accustomed to his position by now that this thought gave him the same curious sensation which a man has when he discovers that his father once very nearly married a different woman.
‘Yes,’ continued Curry, pursuing another train of thought. ‘One sees now that Denniston would never have done. Most emphatically not. A brilliant man at that time, of course, but he seems to have gone quite off the rails since then with all his Distributivism and what not. They tell me he’s likely to end up in a monastery.’
‘He’s no fool, all the same,’ said Studdock.
‘I’m glad you’re going to meet Dick,’ said Curry. ‘We haven’t time now, but there’s one thing about him I wanted to discuss with you.’
Studdock looked enquiringly at him.
‘James and I and one or two others,’ said Curry in a somewhat lower voice, ‘have been thinking he ought to be the new Warden. But here we are.’
‘It’s not yet twelve,’ said Studdock. ‘What about popping into the Bristol for a drink?’
Into the Bristol they accordingly went. It would not have been easy to preserve the atmosphere in which the Progressive Element operated without a good many of these little courtesies. This weighed harder on Studdock than on Curry who was unmarried and had a Sub-Warden’s stipend. But the Bristol was a very pleasant place. Studdock brought a double whiskey for his companion and half a pint of beer for himself.
The only time I was a guest at Bracton I persuaded my host to let me into the Wood and leave me there alone for an hour. He apologised for locking me in.
Very few people were allowed into Bragdon Wood. The gate was by Inigo Jones and was the only entry: a high wall enclosed the Wood, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile broad and a mile from east to west. If you came in from the street and went through the College to reach it, the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the Newton quadrangle which is dry and gravelly; florid, but beautiful, Gregorian buildings look down upon it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage, nearly dark at midday unless either the door into Hall should be open on your right or the buttery hatch on your left, giving you a glimpse of indoor daylight falling on panels, and a whiff of the smell of fresh bread. When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the medieval College: in the cloister of the much smaller quadrangle called Republic. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of Newton and the very stone of the buttresses that rise from it gives the impression of being soft and alive. Chapel is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead. You went along this cloister, past slabs and urns and busts that commemorate dead Bractonians, and then down shallow steps into the full daylight of the quadrangle called Lady Alice. The buildings to your left and right were seventeenth-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with dormer windows, mossy and grey-tiled. You were in a sweet, Protestant world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of Bunyan or of Walton’s Lives. There were no buildings straight ahead on the fourth side of Lady Alice: only a row of elms and a wall: and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of wood pigeons. The street was so far off by now that there were no other noises. In the wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with narrow windows on either side. Looking out through these, you discovered that you were crossing a bridge and the dark brown dimpled Wynd was flowing under you. Now you were very near your goal. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought you out on the Fellows’ bowling green, and across that you saw the high wall of the Wood, and through the Inigo Jones gate you caught a glimpse of sunlit green and deep shadows.
I suppose the mere fact of being walled in gave the Wood part of its peculiar quality, for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. As I went forward over the quiet turf I had the sense of being received. The trees were just so wide apart that one saw uninterrupted foliage in the distance but the place where one stood seemed always to be a clearing; surrounded by a world of shadows, one walked in mild sunshine. Except for the sheep whose nibbling kept the grass so short and who sometimes raised their long, foolish faces to stare at me, I was quite alone; and it felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house than like any ordinary solitude out of doors. I remember thinking, ‘This is the sort of place which, as a child, one would have been rather afraid of or else would have liked very much indeed.’ A moment later I thought, ‘But when alone–really alone–everyone is a child: or no one?’ Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
Half a mile is a short walk. Yet it seemed a long time before I came to the centre of the Wood. I knew it was the centre, for there was the thing I had chiefly come to see. It was a well: a well with steps going down to it and the remains of an ancient pavement about it. It was very imperfect now. I did not step on it, but I lay down in the grass and touched it with my fingers. For this was the heart of Bracton or Bragdon Wood: out of this all the legends had come and on this, I suspected, the very existence of the College had originally depended. The archaeologists were agreed that the masonry was very late British-Roman work, done on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. How Bragdon the wood was connected with Bracton the lawyer was a mystery, but I fancy myself that the Bracton family had availed themselves of an accidental similarity in the names to believe, or make believe, that they had something to do with it. Certainly, if all that was told were true, or even half of it, the Wood was older than the Bractons. I suppose no one now would attach much importance to Strabo’s Balachthon though it had led a sixteenth-century Warden of the College to say that ‘We know not by ancientest report of any Britain without Bragdon.’ But the medieval song takes us back to the fourteenth century.
In Bragdon bricht this ende dai
Herde ich Merlin ther he lai
Singende woo and welawai.
It is good enough evidence that the well with the British-Roman pavement was already ‘Merlin’s Well’, though the name is not found till Queen Elizabeth’s reign when good Warden Shovel surrounded the Wood with a wall ‘for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, may games, dancings, mummings, and baking of Morgan’s bread, heretofore used about the fountain called in vanity Merlin’s Well, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufrey of papistry, gentilism, lewdness and dunsicall folly’. Not that the College had by this action renounced its own interest in the place. Old Dr Shovel, who lived to be nearly a hundred, can scarcely have been cold in his grave when one of Cromwell’s Major Generals, conceiving it his business to destroy ‘the groves and the high places’, sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people for this pious work. The scheme came to nothing in the end; but there had been a bicker between the College and the troopers in the heart of Bragdon, and the fabulously learned and saintly Richard Crowe had been killed by a musket-ball on the very steps of the Well. He would be a brave man who would accuse Crowe either of popery or ‘gentilism’; yet the story is that his last words had been, ‘Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?’ And always, through all changes, every Warden of Bracton, on the day of his election, had drunk a ceremonial draught of water from Merlin’s Well in the great cup which, both for its antiquity and beauty, was the greatest of the Bracton treasures.
All of this I thought of, lying beside Merlin’s Well, beside the well which must certainly date from Merlin’s time if there had ever been a real Merlin: lying where Sir Kenelm Digby had lain all one summer night and seen a certain strange appearance: where Collins the poet had lain, and where George the Third had cried: where the brilliant and much-loved Nathaniel Fox had composed the famous poem three weeks before he was killed in France. The air was so still and the billows of foliage so heavy above me, that I fell asleep. I was wakened by my friend hallooing to me from a long way off.
The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the NICE, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would worthily house this remarkable organisation. The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints –‘red tape’ was the word its supporters used–which have hitherto hampered research in this country. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime. The building proposed for it was one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of New York, the staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Senate of Edgestow had lured the new Institute away from Oxford, from Cambridge, from London. It had thought of all these in turn as possible scenes for its labours. At times the Progressive Element in Edgestow had almost despaired. But success was now practically certain. If the NICE could get the necessary land, it would come to Edgestow. And once it came, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move. Curry had even expressed a doubt whether, eventually, Oxford and Cambridge could survive as major universities at all.
Three years ago, if Mark Studdock had come to a College Meeting at which such a question was to be decided, he would have expected to hear the claims of sentiment against progress and beauty against utility openly debated. Today, as he took his seat in the Soler, the long upper room on the south of Lady Alice, he expected no such matter. He knew now that that was not the way things are done.
The Progressive Element managed its business really very well. Most of the Fellows did not know when they came into the Soler that there was any question of selling the Wood. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that item Fifteen was ‘Sale of College land’, but as that appeared at almost every College Meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand, they did see that item One was ‘Questions about Bragdon Wood’. These were not concerned with the proposed sale. Curry, who rose as Sub-Warden to introduce them, had a few letters to read to the College. The first was from a society concerned for the preservation of ancient monuments. I think myself that this society had been ill-advised to make two complaints in one letter. It would have been wiser if they had confined themselves to drawing the College’s attention to the disrepair of the wall round the Wood. When they went on to urge the desirability of building some protection over the Well itself, and even to point out that they had urged this before, the College began to be restive. And when, as a kind of afterthought, they expressed a wish that the College could be a little more accommodating to serious antiquaries who wanted to examine the Well, the College became definitely ill-tempered. I would not like to accuse a man in Curry’s position of misreading a letter; but his reading of this letter was certainly not such as to gloss over any defects in the tone of the original composition. Before he sat down, nearly every one in the room desired strongly to make the outer world understand that Bragdon Wood was the private property of Bracton College and that the outer world had better mind its own business. Then he rose again to read another letter. This was from a society of Spiritualists who wanted leave to investigate the ‘reported phenomena’ in the Wood–a letter ‘connected’, as Curry said, ‘with the next which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now read to you.’ This was from a firm who had heard of the Spiritualists’ proposal and wanted permission to make a film, not exactly of the phenomena, but of the Spiritualists looking for the phenomena. Curry was directed to write short refusals to all three letters.
Then came a new voice from quite a different part of the Soler. Lord Feverstone had risen. He fully agreed with the action which the College had taken about these impertinent letters from various busybodies outside. But was it not, after all, a fact, that the wall of the Wood was in a very unsatisfactory condition? A good many Fellows–Studdock was not one of them–imagined they were watching a revolt on Feverstone’s part against ‘Curry and his gang’ and became intensely interested. Almost at once the Bursar, James Busby, was on his feet. He welcomed Lord Feverstone’s question. In his Bursarial capacity he had recently taken expert advice about the wall of the Wood. ‘Unsatisfactory’ was, he feared, much too mild a word to describe its condition. Nothing but a complete new wall would really meet the situation. With great difficulty the probable cost of this was elicited from him; and when the College heard the figure it gasped. Lord Feverstone inquired icily whether the Bursar was seriously proposing that the College should undertake such an expense. Busby (a very large ex-clergyman with a bushy black beard) replied with some temper that he had proposed nothing: if he were to make a suggestion, it would be that the question could not be treated in isolation from some important financial considerations which it would become his duty to lay before them later in the day. There was a pause at this ominous statement, until gradually, one by one, the ‘outsiders’ and ‘obstructionists’, the men not included in the Progressive Element, began coming into the debate. Most of these found it hard to believe that nothing short of a complete new wall would be any use. The Progressive Element let them talk for nearly ten minutes. Then it looked once again as if Lord Feverstone were actually leading the outsiders. He wanted to know whether it was possible that the Bursar and the Preservation Committee could really find no alternative between building a new wall and allowing Bragdon Wood to degenerate into a common. He pressed for an answer. Some of the outsiders even began to feel that he was being too rude to the Bursar. At last the Bursar answered in a low voice that he had in a purely theoretical way got some facts about possible alternatives. A barbed wire fence–but the rest was drowned in a roar of disapproval, during which old Canon Jewel was heard to say that he would sooner have every tree in the Wood felled to the ground than see it caged in barbed wire. Finally, the matter was postponed for consideration at the next meeting.
The next item was one of those which the majority of the Fellows could not understand. It involved the recapitulation (by Curry) of a long correspondence between the College and the Senate of the University about the proposed incorporation of the NICE in the University of Edgestow. The words ‘committed to’ kept recurring in the debate that followed. ‘We appear,’ said Watson, ‘to have pledged ourselves as a college to the fullest possible support of the new Institute.’ ‘We appear,’ said Feverstone, ‘to have tied ourselves up hand and foot and given the University carte blanche.’ What all this actually amounted to never became clear to any of the outsiders. They remembered fighting hard at a previous meeting against the NICE and all its works, and being defeated; but every effort to find out what their defeat had meant, though answered with great lucidity by Curry, served only to entangle them further in the impenetrable mazes of the university constitution and the still darker mystery of the relations between University and College. The result of the discussion was to leave them under the impression that the honour of the College was not involved in the establishment of the NICE at Edgestow.
During this item the thoughts of more than one Fellow had turned to lunch, and attention had wandered. But when Curry rose at five minutes to one to introduce item Three, there was a sharp revival of interest. It was called, ‘Rectification of an anomaly of the Stipends of Junior Fellows.’ I would not like to say what the most junior Fellows of Bracton were getting at this time, but I believe it hardly covered the expenses of their residence in College, which was compulsory. Studdock who had only recently emerged from this class felt great sympathy with them. He understood the look in their faces. The Rectification, if it went through, would mean to them clothes and holidays and meat for lunch and a chance to buy a half, instead of a fifth, of the books they needed. All their eyes were fixed on the Bursar when he rose to reply to Curry’s proposals. He hoped that no one would imagine he approved the anomaly which had, in 1910, excluded the lowest class of the Fellows from the new clauses in the eighteenth paragraph of Statute 17. He felt sure that every one present would wish it to be rectified; but it was his duty, as Bursar, to point out that this was the second proposal involving very heavy expenditure which had come before them that morning. He could only say of this, as he had said of the previous proposal, that it could not be isolated from the whole problem of the present financial position of the College, which he hoped to lay before them during the course of the afternoon. A great deal more was said, but the Bursar remained unanswered, the matter was postponed, and when, at quarter to two, the Fellows came surging out of the Soler for lunch, hungry and headachy and ravenous for tobacco, every junior had it fixed in his mind that a new wall for the Wood and a rise in his own stipend were strictly exclusive alternatives. ‘That darn Wood has been in our way all morning,’ said one. ‘We’re not out of it yet,’ answered another.
In this frame of mind, the College returned to the Soler after lunch to consider its finances. Busby, the Bursar, was naturally the principal speaker. It is very hot in the Soler on a sunny afternoon; and the smooth flow of the Bursar’s exposition, and even the flashing of his level, white teeth above his beard (he had remarkably fine teeth) had a sort of hypnotic power. Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who became Fellows of colleges. They gathered that the situation was bad, very bad, indeed. Some of the youngest and most inexperienced members ceased to wonder whether they would get a new wall or a rise of stipend and began to wonder instead whether the College would continue to function at all. The times, as the Bursar so truly said, were extraordinarily difficult. Older members had heard of such times very often before from dozens of previous Bursars and were less disturbed. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Bursar of Bracton was in any way misrepresenting the position. It is very seldom that the affairs of a large corporation, indefinitely committed to the advancement of learning, can be described as being, in a quite unambiguous sense, satisfactory. His delivery was excellent. Each sentence was a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their own fault. Some minor retrenchments and reinvestments which he suggested were unanimously approved and the College adjourned for tea in a chastened mood. Studdock rang up Jane and told her he would not be home for dinner.
It was not till six o’clock that all the converging lines of thought and feeling aroused by the earlier business came together upon the question of selling Bragdon Wood. It was not called, ‘the sale of Bragdon Wood’. The Bursar called it the ‘sale of the area coloured pink on the plan which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now pass round the table’. He pointed out quite frankly that this involved the loss of part of the Wood. In fact, the proposed NICE site still left to the College a strip about sixteen feet broad along the far half of the south side but there was no deception for the Fellows had the plan to look at with their own eyes. It was a small scale plan and not perhaps perfectly accurate–only meant to give one a general idea. In answer to questions he admitted that unfortunately –or perhaps fortunately–the Well itself was in the area which the NICE wanted. The rights of the College to access would, of course, be guaranteed; and the Well and its pavement would be preserved by the Institute in a manner to satisfy all the archaeologists in the world. He refrained from offering any advice and merely mentioned the quite astonishing figure which the NICE was offering. After that, the meeting became lively. The advantages of the sale discovered themselves one by one like ripe fruit dropping into the hand. It solved the problem of the wall; it solved the problem of protecting ancient monuments; it solved the financial problem; it looked like solving the problem of the junior Fellows’ stipends. It appeared further that the NICE regarded this as the only possible site in Edgestow; if by any chance Bracton would not sell, the whole scheme miscarried and the Institute would undoubtedly go to Cambridge. It was even drawn out of the Bursar by much questioning that he knew of a Cambridge college very anxious to sell.
The few real ‘Die-hards’ present, to whom Bragdon Wood was almost a basic assumption of life, could hardly bring themselves to realise what was happening. When they found their voices, they struck a discordant note amid the general buzz of cheerful comment. They were manoeuvred into the position of appearing as the party who passionately desired to see Bragdon surrounded with barbed wire. When at last old Jewel, blind and shaky and almost weeping, rose to his feet, his voice was hardly audible. Men turned round to gaze at, and some to admire, the clear-cut, half-childish face and the white hair which had become more conspicuous as the long room grew darker. But only those close to him could hear what he said. At this moment Lord Feverstone sprang to his feet, folded his arms, and looking straight at the old man said in a very loud, clear voice:
‘If Canon Jewel wishes us not to hear his views, I suggest that his end could be better attained by silence.’
Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. For a moment as he stood with his head thrust forward, people thought he was going to reply. Then quite suddenly he spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness, shrunk back, and began laboriously to resume his chair.
The motion was carried.
After leaving the flat that morning Jane also had gone down to Edgestow and bought a hat. She had before now expressed some contempt for the kind of woman who buys hats, as a man buys drinks, for a stimulant and a consolation. It did not occur to her that she was doing so herself on this occasion. She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds–clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety–and because of this preference, she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said, ‘Hullo dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.’
Cecil Dimble, a Fellow of Northumberland, had been Jane’s tutor for her last year as a student and Mrs Dimble (one tended to call her Mother Dimble) had been a kind of unofficial aunt to all the girls of her year. A liking for the female pupils of one’s husband is not, perhaps, so common as might be wished among dons’ wives; but Mrs Dimble appeared to like all Dr Dimble’s pupils of both sexes and the Dimbles’ house, away on the far side of the river, was a kind of noisy salon all the term. She had been particularly fond of Jane with that kind of affection which a humorous, easy natured and childless woman sometimes feels for a girl whom she thinks pretty and rather absurd. For the last year or so Jane had been somewhat losing sight of the Dimbles and felt rather guilty about it. She accepted the invitation to lunch.
They drove over the bridge to the north of Bracton and then south along the bank of the Wynd, past the cottages, then left and eastward at the Norman church and down the straight road with the poplars on one side and the wall of Bragdon Wood on the other, and so finally to the Dimbles’ front door.
‘How lovely it’s looking,’ said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.
‘You’d better take a good look at it then,’ said Dr Dimble.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jane.
‘Haven’t you told her?’ said Dr Dimble to his wife.
‘I haven’t screwed myself up to it yet,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Besides, poor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Jane.
‘Your own College is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.’
‘Oh, Mrs Dimble!’ exclaimed Jane. ‘And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.’
‘There you are!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality–’
‘Mark never talks to me about College business.’
‘Good husbands never do,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘At least, only about the business of other people’s colleges. That’s why Margaret knows all about Bracton and nothing about Northumberland. Is no one coming in to have lunch?’
Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.
‘You’ll have to wait for lunch till I’ve seen Jane’s new hat,’ said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Mrs Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter. When the hat was being put away again Mrs Dimble suddenly said,
‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
‘Wrong?’ said Jane. ‘Why? What should there be?’
‘You’re not looking yourself.’
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Jane aloud. Mentally she added, ‘She’s dying to know whether I’m going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is.’
‘Do you hate being kissed?’ said Mrs Dimble unexpectedly.
‘Do I hate being kissed?’ thought Jane to herself. ‘That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women–’ She had intended to reply, ‘Of course not,’ but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. When she thought of her childhood, Jane usually remembered those occasions on which the voluminous embrace of Nurse or Mother had been unwelcome and resisted as an insult to one’s maturity; now, for the moment, she was back in those forgotten, yet infrequent, times when fear or misery induced a willing surrender and surrender brought comfort. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life; yet, before they went downstairs, she had told Mrs Dimble that she was not going to have a baby, but was a bit depressed from being very much alone, and from a nightmare.
During lunch Dr Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. ‘It’s really wonderful,’ he said, ‘how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background –on the other side of Arthur, so to speak–there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan “set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses”. Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?’
‘How do you mean, Dr Dimble?’ said Jane.
‘Well, wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin–something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But further up country, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the druidical religion.’
‘And what would Arthur himself have been?’ said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words ‘rather like Spanish’.
‘That’s just the point,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There’d be jealousy from his own British family, and the Romanised section–the Launcelots and Lionels–would look down on the Britons. That’d be why Kay is always represented as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that under-tow, that tug back to druidism.’
‘And where would Merlin be?’
‘Yes…He’s the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil; yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail. He’s “the devil’s son”; but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad after all. You remember, “There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.”’
‘It is rather puzzling. I hadn’t thought of it before.’
‘I often wonder,’ said Dr Dimble, ‘whether Merlin doesn’t represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about–something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers.’
‘What a horrid idea,’ said Mrs Dimble, who had noticed that Jane seemed to be preoccupied. ‘Anyway, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all and he’s safely dead and buried under Bragdon Wood as every one of us knows.’
‘Buried but not dead, according to the story,’ corrected Dr Dimble.
‘Ugh!’ said Jane involuntarily, but Dr Dimble was musing aloud.
‘I wonder what they will find if they start digging up that place for the foundations of their NICE,’ he said.
‘First mud and then water,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘That’s why they can’t really build it there.’
‘So you’d think,’ said her husband. ‘And if so, why should they want to come here at all? A little cockney like Jules is not likely to be influenced by any poetic fancy about Merlin’s mantle having fallen on him!’
‘Merlin’s mantle indeed!’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘it’s a rum idea. I daresay some of his set would like to recover the mantle well enough. Whether they’ll be big enough to fill it is another matter! I don’t think they’d like it if the old man himself came back to life along with it.’
‘That child’s going to faint,’ said Mrs Dimble, suddenly jumping up.
‘Hullo! What’s the matter?’ said Dr Dimble, looking with amazement at Jane’s face. ‘Is the room too hot for you?’
‘Oh, it’s too ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘Let’s come into the drawing room,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘Here. Lean on my arm.’
A little later, in the drawing room, seated beside a window that opened onto the lawn, now strewn with bright yellow leaves, Jane attempted to excuse her absurd behaviour by telling the story of her dream. ‘I suppose I’ve given myself away dreadfully,’ she said. ‘You can both start psycho-analysing me now.’
From Dr Dimble’s face, Jane might have indeed conjectured that her dream had shocked him exceedingly. ‘Extraordinary thing… most extraordinary,’ he kept muttering. ‘Two heads. And one of them Alcasan’s. Now is that a false scent…?’
‘Don’t, Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘Do you think I ought to be analysed?’ said Jane.
‘Analysed?’ said Dr Dimble, glancing at her as if he had not quite understood. ‘Oh, I see. You mean going to Brizeacre or someone of that sort?’ Jane realised that her question had recalled him from some quite different train of thought and even –disconcertingly–that the problem of her own health had been shouldered aside. The telling of her dream had raised some other problem, though what this was she could not even imagine.
Dr Dimble looked out of the window. ‘There is my dullest pupil just ringing the bell,’ he said. ‘I must go to the study, and listen to an essay on Swift beginning, “Swift was born.” Must try to keep my mind on it, too, which won’t be easy.’ He rose and stood for a moment with his hand on Jane’s shoulder. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to give any advice. But if you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you.’
‘You don’t believe in Mr Brizeacre?’ said Jane.
‘I can’t explain,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘Not now. It’s all so complicated. Try not to bother about it. But if you do, just let us know first. Good-bye.’
Almost immediately after his departure some other visitors arrived, so that there was no opportunity of further private conversation between Jane and her hostess. She left the Dimbles about half an hour later and walked home, not along the road with the poplars but by the footpath across the common, past the donkeys and the geese, with the towers and spires of Edgestow to her left and the old windmill on the horizon to her right.
2 (#ulink_f24a2a3a-8d86-5ba1-a636-2ce965d7b574)
Dinner with the Sub-Warden (#ulink_f24a2a3a-8d86-5ba1-a636-2ce965d7b574)
‘This is a blow!’ said Curry standing in front of the fireplace in his magnificent rooms which overlooked Newton. They were the best set in College.
‘Something from NO?’ said James Busby. He and Lord Feverstone and Mark were all drinking sherry before dining with Curry. NO, which stood for Non-Olet, was the nickname of Charles Place, the Warden of Bracton. His election to this post, some fifteen years before, had been one of the earliest triumphs of the Progressive Element. By dint of saying that the College needed ‘new blood’ and must be shaken out of its ‘academic grooves’, they had succeeded in bringing in an elderly civil servant who had certainly never been contaminated by academic weaknesses since he left his rather obscure Cambridge college in the previous century, but who had written a monumental report on National Sanitation. The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Diehards, who replied by christening their new Warden Non-Olet. But gradually even Place’s supporters had adopted the name. For Place had not answered their expectations, having turned out to be a dyspeptic with a taste for philately, whose voice was so seldom heard that some of the junior Fellows did not know what it sounded like.
‘Yes, blast him,’ said Curry, ‘wishes to see me on a most important matter as soon as I can conveniently call on him after dinner.’
‘That means,’ said the Bursar, ‘that Jewel and Co. have been getting at him and want to find some way of going back on the whole business.’
‘I don’t give a damn for that,’ said Curry. ‘How can you go back on a Resolution? It isn’t that. But it’s enough to muck up the whole evening.’
‘Only your evening,’ said Feverstone. ‘Don’t forget to leave out that very special brandy of yours before you go.’
‘Jewel! Good God!’ said Busby, burying his left hand in his beard.
‘I was rather sorry for old Jewel,’ said Mark. His motives for saying this were very mixed. To do him justice, it must be said that the quite unexpected and apparently unnecessary brutality of Feverstone’s behaviour to the old man had disgusted him. And then, too, the whole idea of his debt to Feverstone in the matter of his own fellowship had been rankling all day. Who was this man Feverstone? But paradoxically, even while he felt that the time had come for asserting his own independence and showing that his agreement with all the methods of the Progressive Element must not be taken for granted, he also felt that a little independence would raise him to a higher position within that Element itself. If the idea ‘Feverstone will think all the more of you for showing your teeth’ had occurred to him in so many words, he would probably have rejected it as servile; but it didn’t.
‘Sorry for Jewel?’ said Curry wheeling round. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in his prime.’
‘I agree with you,’ said Feverstone to Mark, ‘but then I take the Clausewitz view. Total war is the most humane in the long run. I shut him up instantaneously. Now that he’s got over the shock, he’s quite enjoying himself because I’ve fully confirmed everything he’s been saying about the Younger Generation for the last forty years. What was the alternative? To let him drivel on until he’d worked himself into a coughing fit or a heart attack, and give him in addition the disappointment of finding that he was treated civilly.’
‘That’s a point of view, certainly,’ said Mark.
‘Damn it all,’ continued Feverstone, ‘no man likes to have his stock in trade taken away. What would poor Curry, here, do if the Die-hards one day all refused to do any Die-harding? Othello’s occupation would be gone.’
‘Dinner is served, Sir,’ said Curry’s ‘Shooter’–for that is what they call a College servant at Bracton.
‘That’s all rot, Dick,’ said Curry as they sat down. ‘There’s nothing I should like better than to see the end of all these Die-hards and obstructionists and be able to get on with the job. You don’t suppose I like having to spend all my time merely getting the road clear?’ Mark noticed that his host was a little nettled at Lord Feverstone’s banter. The latter had an extremely virile and infectious laugh. Mark felt he was beginning to like him.
‘The job being…?’ said Feverstone, not exactly glancing, much less winking, at Mark, but making him feel that he was somehow being included in the fun.
‘Well, some of us have got work of our own to do,’ replied Curry, dropping his voice to give it a more serious tone, almost as some people drop their voices to speak of medical or religious matters.
‘I never knew you were that sort of person,’ said Feverstone.
‘That’s the worst of the whole system,’ said Curry. ‘In a place like this you’ve either got to be content to see everything go to pieces–I mean, become stagnant–or else to sacrifice your own career as a scholar to all these infernal college politics. One of these days I shall chuck that side of it and get down to my book. The stuff’s all there, you know, Feverstone. One long vacation clear and I really believe I could put it into shape.’
Mark, who had never seen Curry baited before, was beginning to enjoy himself.
‘I see,’ said Feverstone. ‘In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning.’
‘Exactly!’ said Curry. ‘That’s just–’ and then stopped, uncertain whether he was being taken quite seriously. Feverstone burst into laughter. The Bursar who had up till now been busily engaged in eating, wiped his beard carefully and spoke seriously.
‘All that’s very well in theory,’ he said, ‘but I think Curry’s quite right. Supposing he resigned his office as Sub-Warden and retired into his cave. He might give us a thundering good book on economics–’
‘Economics?’ said Feverstone lifting his eyebrows.
‘I happen to be a military historian, James,’ said Curry. He was often somewhat annoyed at the difficulty which his colleagues seemed to find in remembering what particular branch of learning he had been elected to pursue.
‘I mean military history, of course,’ said Busby. ‘As I say, he might give us a thundering good book on military history. But it would be superseded in twenty years. Whereas the work he is actually doing for the College will benefit it for centuries. This whole business, now, of bringing the NICE to Edgestow. What about a thing like that, Feverstone? I’m not speaking merely of the financial side of it, though as Bursar I naturally rate that pretty high. But think of the new life, the awakening of new vision, the stirring of dormant impulses. What would any book on economics–’
‘Military history,’ said Feverstone gently, but this time Busby did not hear him.
‘What would any book on economics be, compared with a thing like that?’ he continued. ‘I look upon it as the greatest triumph of practical idealism that this century has yet seen.’
The good wine was beginning to do its good office. We have all known the kind of clergyman who tends to forget his clerical collar after the third glass; but Busby’s habit was the reverse. It was after the third glass that he began to remember his collar. As wine and candlelight loosened his tongue, the parson still latent within him after thirty years’ apostasy began to wake into a strange galvanic life.
‘As you chaps know,’ he said, ‘I make no claim to orthodoxy. But if religion is understood in the deepest sense, I have no hesitation in saying that Curry, by bringing the NICE to Edgestow, has done more for it in one year than Jewel has done in his whole life.’
‘Well,’ said Curry modestly, ‘that’s rather the sort of thing one had hoped. I mightn’t put it exactly as you do, James–’
‘No, no,’ said the Bursar, ‘of course not. We all have our different languages; but we all really mean the same thing.’
‘Has anyone discovered,’ asked Feverstone, ‘what, precisely, the NICE is, or what it intends to do?’
Curry looked at him with a slightly startled expression. ‘That comes oddly from you, Dick,’ he said. ‘I thought you were in on it, yourself.’
‘Isn’t it a little naïf,’ said Feverstone, ‘to suppose that being in on a thing involves any distinct knowledge of its official programme?’
‘Oh well, if you mean details,’ said Curry, and then stopped.
‘Surely, Feverstone,’ said Busby, ‘you’re making a great mystery about nothing. I should have thought the objects of the NICE were pretty clear. It’s the first attempt to take applied science seriously from the national point of view. The difference in scale between it and anything we’ve had before amounts to a difference in kind. The buildings alone, the apparatus alone –! Think what it has done already for industry. Think how it is going to mobilise all the talent of the country; and not only scientific talent in the narrower sense. Fifteen departmental directors at fifteen thousand a year each! Its own legal staff! Its own police, I’m told! Its own permanent staff of architects, surveyors, engineers! The thing’s stupendous!’
‘Careers for our sons,’ said Feverstone. ‘I see.’
‘What do you mean by that, Lord Feverstone?’ said Busby putting down his glass.
‘Lord!’ said Feverstone, his eyes laughing, ‘what a brick to drop. I’d quite forgotten you had a family, James.’
‘I agree with James,’ said Curry, who had been waiting somewhat impatiently to speak. ‘The NICE marks the beginning of a new era–the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day and they’ve got a wonderful gadget–I was shown the model last time I was in town–by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice-Board every half hour. Then, that report slides itself into the right position where it’s connected up by little arrows with all the relevant parts of the other reports. A glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole Institute actually taking shape under your own eyes. There’ll be a staff of at least twenty experts at the top of the building working this Notice-Board in a room rather like the Tube control rooms. It’s a marvellous gadget. The different kinds of business all come out in the Board in different coloured lights. It must have cost half a million. They call it a Pragmatometer.’
‘And there,’ said Busby, ‘you see again what the Institute is already doing for the country. Pragmatometry is going to be a big thing. Hundreds of people are going in for it. Why this Analytical Notice-Board will probably be out of date before the building is finished!’
‘Yes, by Jove,’ said Feverstone, ‘and NO himself told me this morning that the sanitation of the Institute was going to be something quite out of the ordinary.’
‘So it is,’ said Busby sturdily. ‘I don’t see why one should think that unimportant.’
‘And what do you think about it, Studdock?’ said Feverstone.
‘I think,’ said Mark, ‘that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.’
‘Damn,’ said Curry, looking at his watch. ‘I’ll have to go and talk to NO now. If you people would like any brandy when you’ve finished your wine, it’s in that cupboard. You’ll find balloon glasses on the shelf above. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You’re not going, James, are you?’
‘Yes,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’m going to bed early. Don’t let me break up the party for you two. I’ve been on my legs nearly all day, you know. A man’s a fool to hold any office in this College. Continual anxiety. Crushing responsibility. And then you get people suggesting that all the little research-beetles who never poke their noses outside their libraries and laboratories are the real workers! I’d like to see Glossop or any of that lot face the sort of day’s work I’ve had today. Curry, my lad, you’d have had an easier life if you’d stuck to economics.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ began Curry, but the Bursar, now risen, was bending over Lord Feverstone and telling him a funny story.
As soon as the two men had got out of the room, Lord Feverstone looked steadily at Mark for some seconds with an enigmatic expression. Then he chuckled. Then the chuckle developed into a laugh. He threw his lean, muscular body well back into his chair and laughed louder and louder. He was very infectious in his laughter and Mark found himself laughing too–quite sincerely and even helplessly, like a child. ‘Pragmatometers–palatial lavatories–practical idealism,’ gasped Feverstone. It was a moment of extraordinary liberation for Mark. All sorts of things about Curry and Busby which he had not previously noticed, or else, noticing, had slurred over in his reverence for the Progressive Element, came back to his mind. He wondered how he could have been so blind to the funny side of them.
‘It really is rather devastating,’ said Feverstone when he had partially recovered, ‘that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel the moment you ask them about the things themselves.’
‘And yet they are, in a sense, the brains of Bracton,’ said Mark.
‘Good Lord no! Glossop and Bill the Blizzard, and even old Jewel, have ten times their intelligence.’
‘I didn’t know you took that view.’
‘I think Glossop, etc., are quite mistaken. I think their idea of culture and knowledge and what not is unrealistic. I don’t think it fits the world we’re living in. It’s a mere fantasy. But it is quite a clear idea and they follow it out consistently. They know what they want. But our two poor friends, though they can be persuaded to take the right train, or even to drive it, haven’t a ghost of a notion where it’s going to, or why. They’ll sweat blood to bring the NICE to Edgestow: that’s why they’re indispensable. But what the point of the NICE is, what the point of anything is–ask them another. Pragmatometry! Fifteen sub-directors!’
‘Well, perhaps I’m in the same boat myself.’
‘Not at all. You saw the point at once. I knew you would. I’ve read everything you’ve written since you were in for your fellowship. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Mark was silent. The giddy sensation of being suddenly whirled up from one plane of secrecy to another, coupled with the growing effect of Curry’s excellent port, prevented him from speaking.
‘I want you to come into the Institute,’ said Feverstone.
‘You mean–to leave Bracton?’
‘That makes no odds. Anyway, I don’t suppose there’s anything you want here. We’d make Curry Warden when NO retires and–’
‘They were talking of making you Warden.’
‘God!’ said Feverstone and stared. Mark realised that from Feverstone’s point of view this was like the suggestion that he should become Headmaster of a small idiots’ school, and thanked his stars that his own remark had not been uttered in a tone that made it obviously serious. Then they both laughed again.
‘You,’ said Feverstone, ‘would be absolutely wasted as Warden. That’s the job for Curry. He’ll do it very well. You want a man who loves business and wire-pulling for their own sake and doesn’t really ask what it’s all about. If he did, he’d start bringing in his own–well, I suppose he’d call them “ideas”. As it is, we’ve only got to tell him that he thinks so-and-so is a man the College wants, and he will think it. And then he’ll never rest till so-and-so gets a fellowship. That’s what we want the College for: a drag net, a recruiting office.’
‘A recruiting office for the NICE, you mean?’
‘Yes, in the first instance. But it’s only part of the general show.’
‘I’m not sure that I know what you mean.’
‘You soon will. The Home Side, and all that, you know! It sounds rather in Busby’s style to say that Humanity is at the cross-roads. But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on–obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t–well, we’re done.’
‘Go on.’
‘There are three main problems. First, the interplanetary problem–’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, that doesn’t really matter. We can’t do anything about that at present. The only man who could help was Weston.’
‘He was killed in a blitz, wasn’t he?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Murdered?’
‘I’m pretty sure of it, and I’ve a shrewd idea who the murderer was.’
‘Good God! Can nothing be done?’
‘There’s no evidence. The murderer is a respectable Cambridge don with weak eyes, a game leg, and a fair beard. He’s dined in this College.’
‘What was Weston murdered for?’
‘For being on our side. The murderer is one of the enemy.’
‘You don’t mean to say he murdered him for that?’
‘Yes,’ said Feverstone, bringing his hand down smartly on the table. ‘That’s just the point. You’ll hear people like Curry or James burbling away about the “war” against reaction. It never enters their heads that it might be a real war with real casualties. They think the violent resistance of the other side ended with the persecution of Galileo and all that. But don’t believe it. It is just seriously beginning. They know now that we have at last got real powers: that the question of what humanity is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years. They’re going to fight every inch. They’ll stop at nothing.’
‘They can’t win,’ said Mark.
‘We’ll hope not,’ said Lord Feverstone. ‘I think they can’t. That is why it is of such immense importance to each of us to choose the right side. If you try to be neutral you become simply a pawn.’
‘Oh, I haven’t any doubt which is my side,’ said Mark. ‘Hang it all–the preservation of the human race–it’s a pretty rock-bottom obligation.’
‘Well, personally,’ said Feverstone, ‘I’m not indulging in any Busbyisms about that. It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too. Both can be explained psycho-analytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting–specially on the winning side.’
‘And what is the first practical step?’
‘Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on one side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.’
‘Go on. This interests me very much.’
‘Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest–which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.’
‘What sort of thing have you in mind?’
‘Quite simple and obvious things, at first–sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no “take-it-or-leave-it” nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…’
‘But this is stupendous, Feverstone.’
‘It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.’
‘That’s my trouble. Don’t think it’s false modesty, but I haven’t yet seen how I can contribute.’
‘No, but we have. You are what we need: a trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write.’
‘You don’t mean you want me to write up all this?’
‘No. We want you to write it down–to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan’t have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We’ll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is–the word “experiment” is unpopular, but not the word “experimental”. You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!’
‘You don’t mean that this–er–journalistic side would be my main job?’
‘It’s nothing to do with journalism. Your readers in the first instance would be Committees of the House of Commons, not the public. But that would only be a side line. As for the job itself–why, it’s impossible to say how it might develop. Talking to a man like you, I don’t stress the financial side. You’d start at something quite modest: say about fifteen hundred a year.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ said Mark, flushing with pure excitement.
‘Of course,’ said Feverstone, ‘I ought to warn you, there is the danger. Not yet, perhaps. But when things really begin to hum, it’s quite on the cards they may try to bump you off, like poor old Weston.’
‘I don’t think I was thinking about that either,’ said Mark.
‘Look here,’ said Feverstone. ‘Let me run you across tomorrow to see John Wither. He told me to bring you for the week-end if you were interested. You’ll meet all the important people there and it’ll give you a chance to make up your mind.’
‘How does Wither come into it? I thought Jules was the head of the NICE.’ Jules was a distinguished novelist and scientific populariser whose name always appeared before the public in connection with the new Institute.
‘Jules! Hell’s bells!’ said Feverstone. ‘You don’t imagine that little mascot has anything to say to what really goes on? He’s all right for selling the Institute to the great British public in the Sunday papers and he draws a whacking salary. He’s no use for work. There’s nothing inside his head except some nineteenth-century socialist stuff, and blah about the rights of man. He’s just about got as far as Darwin!’
‘Oh quite,’ said Mark. ‘I was always rather puzzled at his being in the show at all. Do you know, since you’re so kind, I think I’d better accept your offer and go over to Wither’s for the week-end. What time would you be starting?’
‘About quarter to eleven. They tell me you live out Sandawn way. I could call and pick you up.’
‘Thanks very much. Now tell me about Wither.’
‘John Wither,’ began Feverstone, but suddenly broke off. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘Here comes Curry. Now we shall have to hear everything NO said and how wonderfully the arch-politician has managed him. Don’t run away. I shall need your moral support.’
The last bus had gone long before Mark left College and he walked home up the hill in brilliant moonlight. Something happened to him the moment he had let himself into the flat which was very unusual. He found himself, on the doormat, embracing a frightened, half-sobbing Jane–even a humble Jane–who was saying, ‘Oh Mark, I’ve been so frightened.’
There was a quality in the very muscles of his wife’s body which took him by surprise. A certain indefinable defensiveness had momentarily deserted her. He had known such occasions before, but they were rare. They were already becoming rarer. And they tended, in his experience, to be followed next day by inexplicable quarrels. This puzzled him greatly, but he had never put his bewilderment into words.
It is doubtful whether he could have understood her feelings even if they had been explained to him; and Jane, in any case, could not have explained them. She was in extreme confusion. But the reasons for her unusual behaviour on this particular evening were simple enough. She had got back from the Dimbles at about half-past four, feeling much exhilarated by her walk, and hungry, and quite sure that her experiences on the previous night and at lunch were over and done with. She had had to light up and draw the curtains before she had finished tea, for the days were getting short. While doing so, the thought had come into her mind that her fright at the dream and at the mere mention of a mantle, an old man, an old man buried but not dead, and a language like Spanish, had really been as irrational as a child’s fear of the dark. This had led her to remember moments when she had feared the dark as a child. Perhaps, she allowed herself to remember them too long. At any rate, when she sat down to drink her last cup of tea, the evening had somehow deteriorated. It never recovered. First, she found it rather difficult to keep her mind on her book. Then, when she had acknowledged this difficulty, she found it difficult to fix on any book. Then she realised that she was restless. From being restless, she became nervous. Then followed a long time when she was not frightened, but knew that she would be very frightened indeed if she did not keep herself in hand. Then came a curious reluctance to go into the kitchen to get herself some supper, and a difficulty–indeed, an impossibility–of eating anything when she had got it. And now, there was no disguising the fact that she was frightened. In desperation she rang up the Dimbles. ‘I think I might go and see the person you suggested, after all,’ she said. Mrs Dimble’s voice came back, after a curious little pause, giving her the address. Ironwood was the name–Miss Ironwood, apparently. Jane had assumed it would be a man and was rather repelled. Miss Ironwood lived out at St Anne’s on the Hill. Jane asked if she should make an appointment. ‘No,’ said Mrs Dimble, ‘they’ll be–you needn’t make an appointment.’ Jane kept the conversation going as long as she could. She had rung up not chiefly to get the address but to hear Mother Dimble’s voice. Secretly she had had a wild hope that Mother Dimble would recognise her distress and say at once, ‘I’ll come straight up to you by car.’ Instead, she got the mere information and a hurried ‘Good-night.’ It seemed to Jane that there was something queer about Mrs Dimble’s voice. She felt that by ringing up she had interrupted a conversation about herself–or no–not about herself but about something else more important, with which she was somehow connected. And what had Mrs Dimble meant by, ‘They’ll be–’ ‘They’ll be expecting you?’ Horrible, childish night-nursery visions of They ‘expecting her’ passed before her mind. She saw Miss Ironwood, dressed all in black, sitting with her hands folded on her knees and then someone leading her into Miss Ironwood’s presence and saying, ‘She’s come,’ and leaving her there.
‘Damn the Dimbles!’ said Jane to herself, and then unsaid it, more in fear than in remorse. And now that the life-line had been used and brought no comfort, the terror, as if insulted by her futile attempt to escape it, rushed back on her with no possibility of disguise, and she could never afterwards remember whether the horrible old man and the mantle had actually appeared to her in a dream or whether she had merely sat there, huddled and wild eyed, hoping, hoping, hoping (even praying, though she believed in no one to pray to) that they would not.
And that is why Mark found such an unexpected Jane on the doormat. It was a pity, he thought, that this should have happened on a night when he was so late and so tired and, to tell the truth, not perfectly sober.
‘Do you feel quite all right this morning?’ said Mark.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Jane shortly.
Mark was lying in bed and drinking a cup of tea. Jane was seated at the dressing table, partially dressed, and doing her hair. Mark’s eyes rested on her with indolent, early-morning pleasure. If he guessed very little of the mal-adjustment between them, this was partly due to our race’s incurable habit of ‘projection’. We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them. Jane’s body, soft though firm and slim though rounded, was so exactly to Mark’s mind that it was all but impossible for him not to attribute to her the same sensations which she excited in him.
‘You’re quite sure you’re all right?’ he asked again.
‘Quite,’ said Jane more shortly still.
Jane thought she was annoyed because her hair was not going up to her liking and because Mark was fussing. She also knew, of course, that she was deeply angry with herself for the collapse which had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested–the fluttering, tearful ‘little woman’ of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms. But she thought this anger was only in the back of her mind, and had no suspicion that it was pulsing through every vein and producing at that very moment the clumsiness in her fingers which made her hair seem intractable.
‘Because,’ continued Mark, ‘if you felt the least bit uncomfortable, I could put off going to see this man Wither.’
Jane said nothing.
‘If I did go,’ said Mark, ‘I’d certainly have to be away for the night, perhaps two.’
Jane closed her lips a little more firmly and still said nothing.
‘Supposing I did,’ said Mark, ‘you wouldn’t think of asking Myrtle over to stay?’
‘No thank you,’ said Jane emphatically, and then, ‘I’m quite accustomed to being alone.’
‘I know,’ said Mark in a rather defensive voice. ‘That’s the devil of the way things are in College at present. That’s one of the chief reasons I’m thinking of another job.’
Jane was still silent.
‘Look here, old thing,’ said Mark, suddenly sitting up and throwing his legs out of bed. ‘There’s no good beating about the bush. I don’t feel comfortable about going away while you’re in your present state–’
‘What state?’ said Jane, turning round and facing him for the first time.
‘Well–I mean–just a bit nervy–as anyone may be temporarily.’
‘Because I happened to be having a nightmare when you came home last night–or rather this morning–there’s no need to talk as if I was a neurasthenic.’ This was not in the least what Jane had intended or expected to say.
‘Now there’s no good going on like that…’ began Mark.
‘Like what?’ said Jane icily, and then, before he had time to reply, ‘If you’ve decided that I’m going mad you’d better get Brizeacre to come down and certify me. It would be convenient to do it while you’re away. They could get me packed off while you are at Mr Wither’s without any fuss. I’m going to see about the breakfast now. If you don’t shave and dress pretty quickly, you’ll not be ready when Lord Feverstone calls.’
The upshot of it was that Mark gave himself a very bad cut while shaving (and saw, at once, a picture of himself talking to the all-important Wither with a great blob of cotton-wool on his upper lip) while Jane decided, from a mixture of motives, to cook Mark an unusually elaborate breakfast–of which she would rather die than eat any herself–and did so with the swift efficiency of an angry woman, only to upset it all over the new stove at the last moment. They were still at the table and both pretending to read newspapers when Lord Feverstone arrived. Most unfortunately Mrs Maggs arrived at the same moment. Mrs Maggs was that element in Jane’s economy represented by the phrase ‘I have a woman who comes in twice a week.’ Twenty years earlier Jane’s mother would have addressed such a functionary as ‘Maggs’ and been addressed by her as ‘Mum’. But Jane and her ‘woman who came in’ called one another Mrs Maggs and Mrs Studdock. They were about the same age and to a bachelor’s eye there was no very noticeable difference in the clothes they wore. It was therefore perhaps not inexcusable that when Mark attempted to introduce Feverstone to his wife Feverstone should have shaken Mrs Maggs by the hand; but it did not sweeten the last few minutes before the two men departed.
Jane left the flat under pretence of shopping almost at once. ‘I really couldn’t stand Mrs Maggs today,’ she said to herself. ‘She’s a terrible talker.’ So that was Lord Feverstone–that man with the loud, unnatural laugh and the mouth like a shark, and no manners. Apparently a perfect fool too! What good could it do Mark to go about with a man like that? Jane had distrusted his face. She could always tell–there was something shifty about him. Probably he was making a fool of Mark. Mark was so easily taken in. If only he wasn’t at Bracton! It was a horrible college. What did Mark see in people like Mr Curry and the odious old clergyman with the beard? And meanwhile, what of the day that awaited her, and the night, and the next night, and beyond that–for when men say they may be away for two nights, it means that two nights is the minimum, and they hope to be away for a week. A telegram (never a trunk call) puts it all right, as far as they are concerned.
She must do something. She even thought of following Mark’s advice and getting Myrtle to come and stay. But Myrtle was her sister-in-law, Mark’s twin sister, with much too much of the adoring sister’s attitude to the brilliant brother. She would talk about Mark’s health and his shirts and socks with a continual undercurrent of unexpressed yet unmistakable astonishment at Jane’s good luck in marrying him. No, certainly not Myrtle. Then she thought of going to see Dr Brizeacre as a patient. He was a Bracton man and would therefore probably charge her nothing. But when she came to think of answering, to Brizeacre of all people, the sort of questions which Brizeacre would certainly ask, this turned out to be impossible. She must do something. In the end, somewhat to her own surprise, she found that she had decided to go out to St Anne’s and see Miss Ironwood. She thought herself a fool for doing so.
An observer placed at the right altitude above Edgestow that day might have seen far to the south a moving spot on a main road and later, to the east, much nearer the silver thread of the Wynd, and much more slowly moving, the smoke of a train.
The spot would have been the car which was carrying Mark Studdock towards the Blood Transfusion Office at Belbury, where the nucleus of the NICE had taken up its temporary abode. The very size and style of the car had made a favourable impression on him the moment he saw it. The upholstery was of such quality that one felt it ought to be good to eat. And what fine, male energy (Mark felt sick of women at the moment) revealed itself in the very gestures with which Feverstone settled himself at the wheel and put his elbow on the horn, and clasped his pipe firmly between his teeth! The speed of the car, even in the narrow streets of Edgestow, was impressive, and so were the laconic criticisms of Feverstone on other drivers and pedestrians. Once over the level crossing and beyond Jane’s old college (St Elizabeth’s), he began to show what his car could do. Their speed became so great that even on a rather empty road the inexcusably bad drivers, the manifestly half-witted pedestrians and men with horses, the hen that they actually ran over and the dogs and hens that Feverstone pronounced ‘damned lucky’, seemed to follow one another almost without intermission. Telegraph posts raced by, bridges rushed overhead with a roar, villages streamed backward to join the country already devoured, and Mark, drunk with air and at once fascinated and repelled by the insolence of Feverstone’s driving sat saying, ‘Yes,’ and ‘Quite,’ and ‘It was their fault,’ and stealing side-long glances at his companion. Certainly, he was a change from the fussy importance of Curry and the Bursar! The long, straight nose and the clenched teeth, the hard bony outlines beneath the face, the very way he wore his clothes, all spoke of a big man driving a big car to somewhere where they would find big stuff going on. And he, Mark, was to be in it all. At one or two moments when his heart came into his mouth he wondered whether the quality of Lord Feverstone’s driving quite justified its speed. ‘You need never take a cross-road like that seriously,’ yelled Feverstone as they plunged on after the narrowest of these escapes. ‘Quite,’ bawled Mark. ‘No good making a fetish of them!’ ‘Drive much yourself?’ said Feverstone. ‘Used to a good deal,’ said Mark.
The smoke which our imaginary observer might have seen to the east of Edgestow would have indicated the train in which Jane Studdock was progressing slowly towards the village of St Anne’s. Edgestow itself, for those who had reached it from London, had all the appearance of a terminus; but if you looked about you, you might see presently, in a bay, a little train of two or three coaches and a tank engine–a train that sizzled and exuded steam from beneath the foot-boards and in which most of the passengers seemed to know one another. On some days, instead of the third coach, there might be a horse-box, and on the platform there would be hampers containing dead rabbits or live poultry, and men in brown bowler hats and gaiters, and perhaps a terrier or a sheepdog that seemed to be used to travelling. In this train, which started at half-past one, Jane jerked and rattled along an embankment whence she looked down through some bare branches and some branches freckled with red and yellow leaves into Bragdon Wood itself and thence through the cutting and over the level crossing at Bragdon Camp and along the edge of Brawl Park (the great house was just visible at one point) and so to the first stop at Duke’s Eaton. Here, as at Woolham and Cure Hardy and Fourstones, the train settled back, when it stopped, with a little jerk and something like a sigh. And then there would be a noise of milk cans rolling and coarse boots treading on the platform and after that a pause which seemed to last long, during which the autumn sunlight grew warm on the window pane and smells of wood and field from beyond the tiny station floated in and seemed to claim the railway as part of the land. Passengers got in and out of her carriage at every stop; apple-faced men, and women with elastic-side boots and imitation fruit on their hats, and schoolboys. Jane hardly noticed them: for though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page. And in between the stations things flitted past, so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it: a house backed with a group of haystacks and wide brown fields about it, two aged horses standing head to tail, a little orchard with washing hanging on a line, and a rabbit staring at the train, whose two eyes looked like the dots, and his ears like the uprights, of a double exclamation mark. At quarter-past two she came to St Anne’s, which was the real terminus of the branch, and the end of everything. The air struck her as cold and tonic when she left the station.
Although the train had been chugging and wheezing up-hill for the latter half of her journey, there was still a climb to be done on foot, for St Anne’s is one of those villages perched on a hilltop which are commoner in Ireland than in England, and the station is some way from the village. A winding road between high banks led her up to it. As soon as she had passed the church she turned left, as she had been instructed, at the Saxon Cross. There were no houses on her left–only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the distance. She was on the highest ground in all that region. Presently, she came to a high wall on her right that seemed to run on for a great way: there was a door in it and beside the door an old iron bell-pull. A kind of flatness of spirit was on her. She felt sure she had come on a fool’s errand; nevertheless she rang. When the jangling noise had ceased there followed a silence so long, and in that upland place so chilly, that Jane began to wonder whether the house were inhabited. Then, just as she was debating whether to ring again or to turn away, she heard the noise of someone’s feet approaching briskly on the inside of the wall.
Meanwhile Lord Feverstone’s car had long since arrived at Belbury–a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles. At the sides, it seemed to have sprouted into a widespread outgrowth of newer cement buildings, which housed the Blood Transfusion Office.
3 (#ulink_c95118aa-26a1-54d7-9bf3-efbdeda7f80e)
Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill (#ulink_c95118aa-26a1-54d7-9bf3-efbdeda7f80e)
On his way up the wide staircase Mark caught sight of himself and his companion in a mirror. Feverstone looked, as always, master of his clothes, his face, and of the whole situation. The blob of cotton wool on Mark’s upper lip had been blown awry during the journey so that it looked like one-half of a fiercely up-turned false moustache and revealed a patch of blackened blood beneath it. A moment later he found himself in a bigwindowed room with a blazing fire, being introduced to Mr John Wither, Deputy Director of the NICE.
Wither was a white-haired old man with a courtly manner. His face was clean shaven and very large indeed, with watery blue eyes and something rather vague and chaotic about it. He did not appear to be giving them his whole attention and this impression must, I think, have been due to the eyes, for his actual words and gestures were polite to the point of effusiveness. He said it was a great, a very great pleasure, to welcome Mr Studdock among them. It added to the deep obligations under which Lord Feverstone had already laid him. He hoped they had had an agreeable journey. Mr Wither appeared to be under the impression that they had come by air and, when this was corrected, that they had come from London by train. Then he began enquiring whether Mr Studdock found his quarters perfectly comfortable and had to be reminded that they had only that moment arrived. ‘I suppose,’ thought Mark, ‘the old chap is trying to put me at my ease.’ In fact, Mr Wither’s conversation was having precisely the opposite effect. Mark wished he would offer him a cigarette. His growing conviction that this man really knew nothing about him and even that all the well-knit schemes and promises of Feverstone were at this moment dissolving into some sort of mist, was extremely uncomfortable. At last he took his courage in both hands and endeavoured to bring Mr Wither to the point by saying that he was still not quite clear in what capacity he would be able to assist the Institute.
‘I assure you, Mr Studdock,’ said the Deputy Director with an unusually far away look in his eye, ‘that you needn’t anticipate the slightest–er–the slightest difficulty on that point. There was never any idea of circumscribing your activities and your general influence on policy, much less your relations with your colleagues and what I might call in general the terms of reference under which you would be collaborating with us, without the fullest possible consideration of your own views and, indeed, your own advice. You will find us, Mr Studdock, if I might express myself in that way, a very happy family.’
‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me, Sir,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t mean that at all. I only meant that I felt I should like some sort of idea of what exactly I should be doing if I came to you.’
‘Well now, when you speak of coming to us,’ said the Deputy Director, ‘that raises a point on which I hope there is no misunderstanding. I think we all agreed that no question of residence need be raised–I mean, at this stage. We thought, we all thought, that you should be left entirely free to carry on your work wherever you pleased. If you care to live in London or Cambridge–’
‘Edgestow,’ prompted Lord Feverstone.
‘Ah yes, Edgestow,’ here the Deputy Director turned round and addressed Feverstone. ‘I was just explaining to Mr–er–Studdock, and I feel sure you will fully agree with me, that nothing was further from the mind of the Committee than to dictate in any way, or even to advise, where Mr–where your friend should live. Of course, wherever he lives we should naturally place air transport and road transport at his disposal. I daresay, Lord Feverstone, you have already explained to him that he will find all questions of that sort will adjust themselves without the smallest difficulty.’
‘Really, Sir,’ said Mark, ‘I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I haven’t–I mean I shouldn’t have the smallest objection to living anywhere: I only–’
The Deputy Director interrupted him, if anything so gentle as Wither’s voice can be called an interruption. ‘But I assure you, Mr–er–I assure you, Sir, that there is not the smallest objection to your residing wherever you may find it convenient. There was never, at any stage, the slightest suggestion–’ But here Mark, almost in desperation, ventured to interrupt himself.
‘It is the exact nature of the work,’ he said, ‘and of my qualifications for it that I wanted to get clear.’
‘My dear friend,’ said the Deputy Director, ‘you need not have the slightest uneasiness in that direction. As I said before, you will find us a very happy family, and may feel perfectly satisfied that no questions as to your entire suitability have been agitating anyone’s mind in the least. I should not be offering you a position among us if there were the slightest danger of your not being completely welcome to all, or the least suspicion that your very valuable qualities were not fully appreciated. You are–you are among friends here, Mr Studdock. I should be the last person to advise you to connect yourself with any organisation where you ran the risk of being exposed–er–to disagreeable personal contacts.’
Mark did not ask again in so many words what the NICE wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room–a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.
‘You are very kind,’ he said. ‘The only thing I should like to get just a little clearer is the exact–well, the exact scope of the appointment.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Wither in a voice so low and rich that it was almost a sigh, ‘I am very glad you have raised this issue now in a quite informal way. Obviously neither you nor I would wish to commit ourselves, in this room, in any sense which was at all injurious to the powers of the Committee. I quite understand your motives and–er–respect them. We are not, of course, speaking of an Appointment in the quasi-technical sense of the term; it would be improper for both of us (though, you may well remind me, in different ways) to do so–or at least it might lead to certain inconveniences. But I think I can most definitely assure you that nobody wants to force you into any kind of straight waistcoat or bed of Procrustes. We do not really think, among ourselves, in terms of strictly demarcated functions, of course. I take it that men like you and me are–well, to put it frankly, hardly in the habit of using concepts of that type. Everyone in the Institute feels that his own work is not so much a departmental contribution to an end already defined as a moment or grade in the progressive self-definition of an organic whole.’
And Mark said–God forgive him, for he was young and shy and vain and timid, all in one–‘I do think that is so important. The elasticity of your organisation is one of the things that attracts me.’ After that, he had no further chance of bringing the Director to the point and whenever the slow, gentle voice ceased he found himself answering it in its own style, and apparently helpless to do otherwise despite the torturing recurrence of the question, ‘What are we both talking about?’ At the very end of the interview there came one moment of clarity. Mr Wither supposed that he, Mark, would find it convenient to join the NICE club: even for the next few days he would be freer as a member than as someone’s guest. Mark agreed and then flushed crimson like a small boy on learning that the easiest course was to become a life member at the cost of £200. He had not that amount in the bank. Of course if he had got the new job with its fifteen hundred a year, all would be well. But had he got it? Was there a job at all?
‘How silly,’ he said aloud, ‘I haven’t got my cheque book with me.’
A moment later he found himself on the stairs with Feverstone.
‘Well?’ asked Mark eagerly. Feverstone did not seem to hear him.
‘Well?’ repeated Mark. ‘When shall I know my fate? I mean, have I got the job?’
‘Hullo Guy!’ bawled Feverstone suddenly to a man in the hall beneath. Next moment he had trotted down to the foot of the stairs, grasped his friend warmly by the hand, and disappeared. Mark, following him more slowly, found himself in the hall, silent, alone, and self-conscious, among the groups and pairs of chattering men, who were all crossing it towards the big folding doors on his left.
It seemed to last long, this standing, this wondering what to do, this effort to look natural and not to catch the eyes of strangers. The noise and the agreeable smells which came from the folding doors made it obvious that people were going to lunch. Mark hesitated, uncertain of his own status. In the end, he decided that he couldn’t stand there looking like a fool any longer, and went in.
He had hoped that there would be several small tables at one of which he could have sat alone. But there was only a single long table, already so nearly filled that, after looking in vain for Feverstone, he had to sit down beside a stranger. ‘I suppose one sits where one likes?’ he murmured as he did so; but the stranger apparently did not hear. He was a bustling sort of man who was eating very quickly and talking at the same time to his neighbour on the other side.
‘That’s just it,’ he was saying. ‘As I told him, it makes no difference to me which way they settle it. I’ve no objection to the IJP people taking over the whole thing if that’s what the DD wants but what I dislike is one man being responsible for it when half the work is being done by someone else. As I said to him, you’ve now got three HD’s all tumbling over one another about some job that could really be done by a clerk. It’s becoming ridiculous. Look at what happened this morning.’ Conversation on these lines continued throughout the meal.
Although the food and the drinks were excellent, it was a relief to Mark when people began getting up from table. Following the general movement, he recrossed the hall and came into a large room furnished as a lounge where coffee was being served. Here at last he saw Feverstone. Indeed, it would have been difficult not to notice him for he was the centre of a group and laughing prodigiously. Mark wished to approach him, if only to find out whether he were expected to stay the night and, if so, whether a room had been assigned to him. But the knot of men round Feverstone was of that confidential kind which it is difficult to join. He moved towards one of the many tables and began turning over the glossy pages of an illustrated weekly. Every few seconds he looked up to see if there were any chance of getting a word with Feverstone alone. The fifth time he did so, he found himself looking into the face of one of his own colleagues, a Fellow of Bracton called William Hingest. The Progressive Element called him, though not to his face, Bill the Blizzard.
Hingest had not, as Curry anticipated, been present at the College Meeting and was hardly on speaking terms with Lord Feverstone. Mark realised with a certain awe that here was a man directly in touch with the NICE–one who started, so to speak, at a point beyond Feverstone. Hingest, who was a physical chemist, was one of the two scientists at Bracton who had a reputation outside England. I hope the reader has not been misled into supposing that the Fellows of Bracton were a specially distinguished body. It was certainly not the intention of the Progressive Element to elect mediocrities to fellowships, but their determination to elect ‘sound men’ cruelly limited their field of choice and, as Busby had once said, ‘You can’t have everything.’ Bill the Blizzard had an old-fashioned curly moustache in which white had almost, but not completely, triumphed over yellow, a large beak-like nose, and a bald head.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ said Mark with a hint of formality. He was always a little afraid of Hingest.
‘Huh?’ grunted Bill. ‘Eh? Oh, it’s you, Studdock? Didn’t know they’d secured your services here.’
‘I was sorry not to see you at the College Meeting yesterday,’ said Mark.
This was a lie. The Progressive Element always found Hingest’s presence an embarrassment. As a scientist–and the only really eminent scientist they had–he was their rightful property; but he was that hateful anomaly, the wrong sort of scientist. Glossop, who was a classic, was his chief friend in College. He had the air (the ‘affectation’ Curry called it) of not attaching much importance to his own revolutionary discoveries in chemistry and of valuing himself much more on being a Hingest: the family was of almost mythical antiquity, ‘never contaminated,’ as its nineteenth-century historian had said, ‘by traitor, placeman or baronetcy’. He had given particular offence on the occasion of de Broglie’s visit to Edgestow. The Frenchman had spent his spare time exclusively in Bill the Blizzard’s society, but when an enthusiastic junior Fellow had thrown out a feeler about the rich feast of science which the two savants must have shared, Bill the Blizzard had appeared to search his memory for a moment and then replied that he didn’t think they had got onto that subject. ‘Gassing Almanac de Gotha nonsense, I suppose,’ was Curry’s comment, though not in Hingest’s presence.
‘Eh? What’s that? College Meeting?’ said the Blizzard. ‘What were they talking about?’
‘About the sale of Bragdon Wood.’
‘All nonsense,’ muttered the Blizzard.
‘I hope you would have agreed with the decision we came to.’
‘It made no difference what decision they came to.’
‘Oh!’ said Mark with some surprise.
‘It was all nonsense. The NICE would have had the Wood in any case. They had powers to compel a sale.’
‘What an extraordinary thing! I was given to understand they were going to Cambridge if we didn’t sell.’
Hingest sniffed loudly.
‘Not a word of truth in it. As to its being an extraordinary thing, that depends on what you mean. There’s nothing extraordinary in the Fellows of Bracton talking all afternoon about an unreal issue. And there’s nothing extraordinary in the fact that the NICE should wish, if possible, to hand over to Bracton the odium of turning the heart of England into a cross between an abortive American hotel and a glorified gas works. The only real puzzle is why the NICE should want that bit of land.’
‘I suppose we shall find out as things go on.’
‘You may. I shan’t.’
‘Oh?’ said Mark interrogatively.
‘I’ve had enough of it,’ said Hingest, lowering his voice, ‘I’m leaving tonight. I don’t know what you were doing at Bracton, but if it was any good I’d advise you to go back and stick to it.’
‘Really!’ said Mark. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Doesn’t matter for an old fellow like me,’ said Hingest, ‘but they could play the devil with you. Of course it all depends on what a man likes.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘I haven’t fully made up my mind.’ He had been taught to regard Hingest as a warped reactionary. ‘I don’t even know yet what my job would be if I stayed.’
‘What’s your subject?’
‘Sociology.’
‘Huh,’ said Hingest. ‘In that case I can soon point you out the man you’d be under. A fellow called Steele. Over there by the window, do you see?’
‘Perhaps you could introduce me.’
‘You’re determined to stay then?’
‘Well, I suppose I ought at least to see him.’
‘All right,’ said Hingest. ‘No business of mine.’ Then he added in a louder voice, ‘Steele.’
Steele turned round. He was a tall, unsmiling man with that kind of face which, though long and horse-like, has nevertheless rather thick and pouting lips.
‘This is Studdock,’ said Hingest, ‘the new man for your department.’ Then he turned away.
‘Oh,’ said Steele. Then after a pause, ‘Did he say my department?’
‘That’s what he said,’ replied Mark with an attempt at a smile, ‘but perhaps he’s got it wrong. I’m supposed to be a sociologist–if that throws any light on it.’
‘I’m HD for Sociology all right,’ said Steele, ‘but this is the first I’ve heard about you. Who told you you were to be there?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘the whole thing is rather vague. I’ve just had a talk with the Deputy Director but we didn’t actually go into any details.’
‘How did you manage to see him?’
‘Lord Feverstone introduced me.’
Steele whistled. ‘I say, Cosser,’ he called out to a freckle-faced man who was passing by, ‘listen to this. Feverstone has just unloaded this chap on our department. Taken him straight to the DD without saying a word to me about it. What do you think of that?’
‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Cosser, hardly glancing at Mark but looking very hard at Steele.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mark, a little more loudly and a little more stiffly than he had yet spoken. ‘Don’t be alarmed. I seem to have been put in rather a false position. There must have been some misunderstanding. As a matter of fact I am, at the moment, merely having a look round. I’m not at all certain that I intend to stay in any case.’
Neither of the other two took any notice of this last suggestion.
‘That’s Feverstone all over,’ said Cosser to Steele.
Steele turned to Mark. ‘I shouldn’t advise you to take much notice of what Lord Feverstone says here,’ he remarked. ‘This isn’t his business at all.’
‘All I object to,’ said Mark, wishing that he could prevent his face from turning red, ‘is being put in a false position. I only came over as an experiment. It is a matter of indifference to me whether I take a job in the NICE or not.’
‘You see,’ said Steele to Cosser, ‘there isn’t really any room for a man in our show–specially for someone who doesn’t know the work. Unless they put him on the UL.’
‘That’s right,’ said Cosser.
‘Mr Studdock, I think,’ said a new voice at Mark’s elbow, a treble voice which seemed disproportionate to the huge hill of a man whom he saw when he turned his head. He recognised the speaker at once. His dark, smooth face and black hair were unmistakable, and so was the foreign accent. This was Professor Filostrato, the great physiologist, whom Mark had sat next to at a dinner about two years before. He was fat to that degree which is comic on the stage, but the effect was not funny in real life. Mark was charmed that such a man should have remembered him.
‘I am very glad you have come to join us,’ said Filostrato taking hold of Mark’s arm and gently piloting him away from Steele and Cosser.
‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mark, ‘I’m not sure that I have. I was brought over by Feverstone but he has disappeared, and Steele–I’d have been in his Department I suppose–doesn’t seem to know anything about me.’
‘Bah! Steele!’ said the Professor. ‘That is all a bagatelle. He get too big for his boots. He will be put in his place one of these days. It may be you who will put him. I have read all your work, si si. Do not consider him.’
‘I have a strong objection to being put in a false position–’ began Mark.
‘Listen, my friend,’ interrupted Filostrato, ‘you must put all such ideas out of your head. The first thing to realise is that the NICE is serious. It is nothing less than the existence of the human race that depends on our work: our real work, you comprehend? You will find frictions and impertinences among this canaglia, this rabble. They are no more to be regarded than your dislike of a brother officer when the battle is at its crisis.’
‘As long as I’m given something to do that is worth doing,’ said Mark, ‘I shouldn’t allow anything of that sort to interfere with it.’
‘Yes, yes, that is right. The work is more important than you can yet understand. You will see. These Steeles and Feverstones –they are of no consequence. As long as you have the good will of the Deputy Director, you snap your fingers at them. You need listen to no one but him, you comprehend? Ah–and there is one other. Do not have the Fairy for your enemy. For the rest–you laugh at them.’
‘The Fairy?’
‘Yes. Her they call the Fairy. Oh my God, a terrible Inglesaccia! She is the head of our police, the Institutional Police. Ecco, she come. I will present you. Miss Hardcastle, permit that I present to you Mr Studdock.’
Mark found himself writhing from the stoker’s or carter’s hand-grip of a big woman in a black, short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was rather thickly built than fat and her iron-grey hair was cropped short. Her face was square, stern and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real shape of her mouth was her only concession to fashion and she rolled or chewed a long black cheroot, unlit, between her teeth. As she talked she had a habit of removing this, staring intently at the mixture of lipstick and saliva on its mangled end, and then replacing it more firmly than before. She sat down immediately in a chair close to where Mark was standing, flung her right leg over one of the arms, and fixed him with a gaze of cold intimacy.
Click–clack, distinct in the silence, where Jane stood waiting, came the tread of the person on the other side of the wall. Then the door opened and Jane found herself facing a tall woman of about her own age. This person looked at her with keen, non-committal eyes.
‘Does a Miss Ironwood live here?’ said Jane.
‘Yes,’ said the other girl, neither opening the door any further nor standing aside.
‘I want to see her, please,’ said Jane.
‘Have you an appointment?’ said the tall woman.
‘Well, not exactly,’ said Jane. ‘I was directed here by Dr Dimble who knows Miss Ironwood. He said I shouldn’t need an appointment.’
‘Oh, if you’re from Dr Dimble that is another matter,’ said the woman. ‘Come in. Now wait a moment while I attend to this lock. That’s better. Now we’re all right. There’s not room for two on this path so you must excuse me if I go first.’
The woman led her along a brick path beside a wall on which fruit trees were growing, and then to the left along a mossy path with gooseberry bushes on each side. Then came a little lawn with a see-saw in the middle of it, and beyond that a greenhouse. Here they found themselves in the sort of hamlet that sometimes occurs in the purlieus of a large garden–walking in fact down a little street which had a barn and a stable on one side and, on the other, a second greenhouse, and a potting shed and a pigstye–inhabited, as the grunts and the not wholly agreeable smell informed her. After that were narrow paths across a vegetable garden that seemed to be on a fairly steep hillside, and then, rose bushes, all stiff and prickly in their winter garb. At one place, they were going along a path made of single planks. This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like–like–yes, now she had it: it was like the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? No, not in the least like really. Or like Klingsor’s garden? Or the garden in Alice? Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way? A sentence rose to her memory. ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.’ Where on earth had she read that? And, incidentally, what frightful nonsense she had been thinking for the last minute or so! She shook off all these ideas about gardens and determined to pull herself together. A curious feeling that she was now on hostile, or at least alien, ground warned her to keep all her wits about her. At that moment, they suddenly emerged from between plantations of rhododendron and laurel, and found themselves at a small side door, flanked by a water butt, in the long wall of a large house. Just as they did so a window clapped shut upstairs.
A minute or two later Jane was sitting waiting in a large sparely furnished room with a shut stove to warm it. Most of the floor was bare, and the walls, above the waist-high wainscotting, were of greyish white plaster, so that the whole effect was faintly austere and conventual. The tall woman’s tread died away in the passages and the room became very quiet when it had done so. Occasionally the cawing of rooks could be heard. ‘I’ve let myself in for it now,’ thought Jane. ‘I shall have to tell this woman that dream and she’ll ask all sorts of questions.’ She considered herself, in general, a modern person who could talk without embarrassment of anything, but it began to look quite different as she sat in that room. All sorts of secret reservations in her programme of frankness–things which, she now realised, she had set apart as never to be told –came creeping back into consciousness. It was surprising that very few of them were connected with sex. ‘In dentists’,’ said Jane, ‘they at least leave illustrated papers in the waiting room.’ She got up and opened the one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room. Instantly her eyes lit on the following words: ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the–’
At that moment the door was suddenly opened. Jane turned crimson as she shut the book and looked up. The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that–so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.
‘Is–is Miss Ironwood in?’ said Jane.
‘Are you Mrs Studdock?’ said the girl.
‘Yes,’ said Jane.
‘I will bring you to her at once,’ said the other. ‘We have been expecting you. My name is Camilla–Camilla Denniston.’
Jane followed her. From the narrowness and plainness of the passages, Jane judged that they were still in the back parts of the house, and that, if so, it must be a very large house indeed. They went a long way before Camilla knocked at a door and stood aside for Jane to enter, after saying in a low, clear voice (‘like a servant’, Jane thought), ‘She has come.’ And Jane went in; and there was Miss Ironwood dressed all in black and sitting with her hands folded on her knees, just as Jane had seen her when dreaming–if she were dreaming–last night in the flat.
‘Sit down, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.
The hands which were folded on her knees were very big and bony though they did not suggest coarseness, and even when seated Miss Ironwood was extremely tall. Everything about her was big–the nose, the unsmiling lips, and the grey eyes. She was perhaps nearer sixty than fifty. There was an atmosphere in the room which Jane found uncongenial.
‘What is your name, young lady?’ said Miss Ironwood, taking up a pencil and a notebook.
‘Jane Studdock.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does your husband know you have come to us?’
‘No.’
‘And your age, if you please?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘And now,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘what have you to tell me?’
Jane took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been having bad dreams and–and feeling depressed lately,’ she said.
‘What were the dreams?’ asked Miss Ironwood.
Jane’s narrative–she did not do it very well–took some time. While she was speaking she kept her eyes fixed on Miss Ironwood’s large hands and her black skirt and the pencil and the notebook. And that was why she suddenly stopped. For as she proceeded she saw Miss Ironwood’s hand cease to write and the fingers wrap themselves round the pencil: immensely strong fingers they seemed. And every moment they tightened, till the knuckles grew white and the veins stood out on the backs of the hands and at last, as if under the influence of some stifled emotion, they broke the pencil in two. It was then that Jane stopped in astonishment and looked up at Miss Ironwood’s face. The wide grey eyes were still looking at her with no change of expression.
‘Pray continue, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.
Jane resumed her story. When she had finished Miss Ironwood put a number of questions. After that she became silent for so long that Jane said,
‘Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?’
‘There is nothing wrong with you,’ said Miss Ironwood.
‘You mean it will go away?’
‘I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.’
Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face.
‘Then–can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams–horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.’
‘I can quite understand that.’
‘Is it something that can’t be cured?’
‘The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.’
‘But there must be something wrong. It’s surely not natural to have dreams like that.’
There was a pause. ‘I think,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘I had better tell you the whole truth.’
‘Yes, do,’ said Jane in a strained voice. The other’s words had frightened her.
‘And I will begin by saying this,’ continued Miss Ironwood. ‘You are a more important person than you imagine.’
Jane said nothing, but thought inwardly, ‘She is humouring me. She thinks I am mad.’
‘What was your maiden name?’ asked Miss Ironwood.
‘Tudor,’ said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.
‘The Warwickshire branch of the family?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever read a little book–it is only forty pages long–written by an ancestor of yours about the battle of Worcester?’
‘No. Father had a copy–the only copy, I think he said. But I never read it. It was lost when the house was broken up after his death.’
‘Your father was mistaken in thinking it the only copy. There are at least two others: one is in America, and the other is in this house.’
‘Well?’
‘Your ancestor gave a full and, on the whole, correct account of the battle, which he says he completed on the same day on which it was fought. But he was not at it. He was in York at the time.’
Jane, who had not really been following this, looked at Miss Ironwood.
‘If he was speaking the truth,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘and we believe that he was, he dreamed it. Do you understand?’
‘Dreamed about the battle?’
‘Yes. But dreamed it right. He saw the real battle in his dream.’
‘I don’t see the connection.’
‘Vision–the power of dreaming realities–is sometimes hereditary,’ said Miss Ironwood.
Something seemed to be interfering with Jane’s breathing. She felt a sense of injury–this was just the sort of thing she hated: something out of the past, something irrational and utterly uncalled for, coming up from its den and interfering with her.
‘Can it be proved?’ she asked. ‘I mean, we have only his word for it.’
‘We have your dreams,’ said Miss Ironwood. Her voice, always grave, had become stern. A fantastic thought crossed Jane’s mind. Could this old woman have some idea that one ought not to call even one’s remote ancestors liars?
‘My dreams?’ she said a little sharply.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Ironwood.
‘What do you mean?’
‘My opinion is that you have seen real things in your dreams. You have seen Alcasan as he really sat in the condemned cell, and you have seen a visitor whom he really had.’
‘But–but–oh, this is ridiculous,’ said Jane. ‘That part was a mere coincidence. The rest was just a nightmare. It was all impossible. He screwed off his head, I tell you. And they–dug up the horrible old man. They made him come to life.’
‘There are some confusions there, no doubt. But in my opinion there are realities behind even those episodes.’
‘I am afraid I don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ said Jane coldly.
‘Your upbringing makes it natural that you should not,’ replied Miss Ironwood. ‘Unless, of course, you have discovered for yourself that you have a tendency to dream real things.’
Jane thought of the book on the table which she had apparently remembered before she saw it, and then there was Miss Ironwood’s own appearance–that too she had seen before she saw it. But it must be nonsense.
‘Can you then do nothing for me?’
‘I can tell you the truth,’ said Miss Ironwood. ‘I have tried to do so.’
‘I mean, can you not stop it–cure it?’
‘Vision is not a disease.’
‘But I don’t want it,’ said Jane passionately. ‘I must stop it. I hate this sort of thing.’ Miss Ironwood said nothing.
‘Don’t you even know anyone who could stop it?’ said Jane. ‘Can’t you recommend anyone?’
‘If you go to an ordinary psychotherapist,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘he will proceed on the assumption that the dreams merely reflect your own sub-conscious. He would try to treat you. I do not know what would be the results of treatment based on that assumption. I am afraid they might be very serious. And–it would certainly not remove the dreams.’
‘But what is this all about?’ said Jane. ‘I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?’
‘The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.’
There was a short silence. Jane made a vague movement and said, rather sulkily, ‘Well, if you can do nothing for me, perhaps I’d better be going–’ Then suddenly she added, ‘But how can you know all this? I mean–what realities are you talking about?’
‘I think,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘that you yourself have probably more reason to suspect the truth of your dreams than you have yet told me. If not, you soon will have. In the meantime, I will answer your question. We know your dreams to be partly true because they fit in with information we already possess. It was because he saw their importance that Dr Dimble sent you to us.’
‘Do you mean he sent me here not to be cured but to give information?’ said Jane. The idea fitted in with things she had observed in his manner when she first told him.
‘Exactly.’
‘I wish I had known that a little earlier,’ said Jane coldly, and now definitely getting up to go. ‘I’m afraid it has been a misunderstanding. I had imagined Dr Dimble was trying to help me.’
‘He was. But he was also trying to do something more important at the same time.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful for being considered at all,’ said Jane drily, ‘and how, exactly, was I to be helped by– by all this sort of thing?’ The attempt at icy irony collapsed as she said these last words and red, undisguised anger rushed back into her face. In some ways she was very young.
‘Young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘You do not at all realise the seriousness of this matter. The things you have seen concern something compared with which the happiness, or even the life, of you and me, is of no importance. I must beg you to face the situation. You cannot get rid of your gift. You can try to suppress it, but you will fail, and you will be very badly frightened. On the other hand, you can put it at our disposal. If you do so, you will be much less frightened in the long run and you will be helping to save the human race from a very great disaster. Or thirdly, you may tell someone else about it. If you do that, I warn you that you will almost certainly fall into the hands of other people who are at least as anxious as we to make use of your faculty and who will care no more about your life and happiness than about those of a fly. The people you have seen in your dreams are real people. It is not at all unlikely that they know you have, involuntarily, been spying on them. And, if so, they will not rest till they have got hold of you. I would advise you, even for your own sake, to join our side.’
‘You keep on talking of We and Us. Are you some kind of company?’
‘Yes. You may call it a company.’
Jane had been standing for the last few minutes; and she had almost been believing what she heard. Then suddenly, all her repugnance came over her again–all her wounded vanity, her resentment of the meaningless complication in which she seemed to be caught, and her general dislike of the mysterious and the unfamiliar. At that moment, nothing seemed to matter but to get out of that room and away from the grave, patient voice of Miss Ironwood. ‘She’s made me worse already,’ thought Jane, still regarding herself as a patient. Aloud, she said,
‘I must go home now. I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’
Mark discovered in the end that he was expected to stay, at least for the night, and when he went up to dress for dinner he was feeling more cheerful. This was partly due to a whisky and soda taken with ‘Fairy’ Hardcastle immediately before and partly to the fact that by a glance at the mirror he saw that he could now remove the objectionable piece of cotton wool from his lip. The bedroom with its bright fire and its private bathroom attached had also something to do with it. Thank goodness, he had allowed Jane to talk him into buying that new dress suit! It looked very well, laid out on the bed; and he saw now that the old one really would not have done. But what had reassured him most of all was his conversation with the Fairy.
It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had indeed excited in him all the distaste which a young man feels at the proximity of something rankly, even insolently sexed, and at the same time wholly unattractive. And something in her cold eye had told him that she was well aware of this reaction and found it amusing. She had told him a good many smoking-room stories. Often before now Mark had shuddered at the clumsy efforts of the emancipated female to indulge in this kind of humour, but his shudders had always been consoled by a sense of superiority. This time he had the feeling that he was the butt; this woman was exasperating male prudery for her diversion. Later on, she drifted into police reminiscences. In spite of some initial scepticism, Mark was gradually horrified by her assumption that about thirty per cent of our murder trials ended by the hanging of an innocent man. There were details, too, about the execution shed which had not occurred to him before.
All this was disagreeable. But it was made up for by the deliciously esoteric character of the conversation. Several times that day he had been made to feel himself an outsider; that feeling completely disappeared while Miss Hardcastle was talking to him. He had the sense of getting in. Miss Hardcastle had apparently lived an exciting life. She had been, at different times, a suffragette, a pacifist, and a British Fascist. She had been man-handled by the police and imprisoned. On the other hand, she had met Prime Ministers, Dictators and famous film stars; all her history was secret history. She knew from both ends what a police force could do and what it could not, and there were in her opinion very few things it could not do. ‘Specially now,’ she said. ‘Here in the Institute, we’re backing the crusade against Red Tape.’
Mark gathered that, for the Fairy, the police side of the Institute was the really important side. It existed to relieve the ordinary executive of what might be called all sanitary cases–a category which ranged from vaccination to charges of unnatural vice–from which, as she pointed out, it was only a step to bringing in all cases of blackmail. As regards crime in general, they had already popularised in the press the idea that the Institute should be allowed to experiment pretty largely in the hope of discovering how far humane, remedial treatment could be substituted for the old notion of ‘retributive’ or ‘vindictive’ punishment. That was where a lot of legal Red Tape stood in their way. ‘But there are only two papers we don’t control,’ said the Fairy. ‘And we’ll smash them. You’ve got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says “Sadism” automatically when he hears the word Punishment.’ And then one would have carte blanche. Mark did not immediately follow this. But the Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention? Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen. ‘And that’s where you and I come in, Sonny,’ added the Fairy, tapping Mark’s chest with her forefinger. ‘There’s no distinction in the long run between police work and Sociology. You and I’ve got to work hand in hand.’
This had brought Mark back to his doubts as to whether he were really being given a job and, if so, what it was. The Fairy had warned him that Steele was a dangerous man. ‘There are two people you want to be very cautious about,’ she said. ‘One is Frost and the other is old Wither.’ But she had laughed at his fears in general. ‘You’re in all right, Sonny,’ she said. ‘Only don’t be too particular about what exactly you’ve got to do. You’ll find out as it comes along. Wither doesn’t like people who try to pin him down. There’s no good saying you’ve come here to do this and you won’t do that. The game’s too fast just at present for that sort of thing. You’ve got to make yourself useful. And don’t believe everything you’re told.’
At dinner Mark found himself seated next to Hingest.
‘Well,’ said Hingest, ‘have they finally roped you into it, eh?’
‘I rather believe they have,’ said Mark.
‘Because,’ said Hingest, ‘if you thought the better of it, I’m motoring back tonight and I could give you a lift.’
‘You haven’t yet told me why you are leaving us yourself,’ said Mark.
‘Oh well, it all depends what a man likes. If you enjoy the society of that Italian eunuch and the mad parson and that Hardcastle girl–her grandmother would have boxed her ears if she were alive–of course, there’s nothing more to be said.’
‘I suppose it’s hardly to be judged on purely social grounds–I mean, it’s something more than a club.’
‘Eh? Judged? Never judged anything in my life, to the best of my knowledge, except at a flower show. It’s all a question of taste. I came here because I thought it had something to do with science. Now that I find it’s something more like a political conspiracy, I shall go home. I’m too old for that kind of thing, and if I wanted to join a conspiracy, this one wouldn’t be my choice.’
‘You mean, I suppose, that the element of social planning doesn’t appeal to you? I can quite understand that it doesn’t fit in with your work as it does with sciences like Sociology, but–’
‘There are no sciences like Sociology. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn’t wear corsets and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I’d let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again.’
‘I think I do understand the sentiment that still attaches to the small man, but when you come to study the reality as I have to do–’
‘I should want to pull it to bits and put something else in its place. Of course. That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.’
‘Bill!’ said Fairy Hardcastle suddenly, from the far side of the table, in a voice so loud that even he could not ignore it. Hingest fixed his eyes upon her and his face grew a dark red.
‘Is it true,’ bawled the Fairy, ‘that you’re going off by car immediately after dinner?’
‘Yes, Miss Hardcastle, it is.’
‘I was wondering if you could give me a lift.’
‘I should be happy to do so,’ said Hingest in a voice not intended to deceive, ‘if we are going in the same direction.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I am going to Edgestow.’
‘Will you be passing Brenstock?’
‘No. I leave the by-pass at the crossroads just beyond Lord Holywood’s front gate and go down what they used to call Potter’s Lane.’
‘Oh, damn! No good to me. I may as well wait till the morning.’
After this Mark found himself engaged by his left-hand neighbour and did not see Bill the Blizzard again until he met him in the hall after dinner. He was in his overcoat and just ready to go to his car.
He began talking as he opened the door and thus Mark was drawn into accompanying him across the gravel sweep to where his car was parked.
‘Take my advice, Studdock,’ he said. ‘Or at least think it over. I don’t believe in Sociology myself, but you’ve got quite a decent career before you if you stay at Bracton. You’ll do yourself no good by getting mixed up with the NICE–and, by God, you’ll do nobody else any good either.’
‘I suppose there are two views about everything,’ said Mark.
‘Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one. But it’s no affair of mine. Good night.’
‘Good night, Hingest,’ said Mark. The other started up the car and drove off.
There was a touch of frost in the air. The shoulder of Orion, though Mark did not know even that earnest constellation, flamed at him above the tree-tops. He felt a hesitation about going back into the house. It might mean further talk with interesting and influential people; but it might also mean feeling once more an outsider, hanging about and watching conversations which he could not join. Anyway, he was tired. Strolling along the front of the house he came presently to another and smaller door by which, he judged, one could enter without passing through the hall or the public rooms. He did so, and went upstairs for the night immediately.
Camilla Denniston showed Jane out–not by the little door in the wall at which she had come in but by the main gate which opened on the same road about a hundred yards further on. Yellow light from a westward gap in the grey sky was pouring a short-lived and chilly brightness over the whole landscape. Jane had been ashamed to show either temper or anxiety before Camilla; as a result both had in reality been diminished when she said goodbye. But a settled distaste for what she called ‘all this nonsense’ remained. She was not indeed sure that it was nonsense; but she had already resolved to treat it as if it were. She would not get ‘mixed up in it’, would not be drawn in. One had to live one’s own life. To avoid entanglements and interferences had long been one of her first principles. Even when she had discovered that she was going to marry Mark if he asked her, the thought ‘but I must still keep up my own life’ had arisen at once and had never for more than a few minutes at a stretch been absent from her mind. Some resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, for thus invading her life, remained. She was at least very vividly aware how much a woman gives up in getting married. Mark seemed to her insufficiently aware of this. Though she did not formulate it, this fear of being invaded and entangled was the deepest ground of her determination not to have a child–or not for a long time yet. One had one’s own life to live.
Almost as soon as she got back to the flat the telephone went. ‘Is that you, Jane?’ came a voice. ‘It’s me, Margaret Dimble. Such a dreadful thing’s happened. I’ll tell you when I come. I’m too angry to speak at the moment. Have you a spare bed by any chance? What? Mr Studdock’s away? Not a bit, if you don’t mind. I’ve sent Cecil to sleep in College. You’re sure it won’t be a nuisance? Thanks most awfully. I’ll be round in half an hour.’
4 (#ulink_119cab93-aaed-5f66-b9e8-950b4b075c12)
The Liquidation of Anachronisms (#ulink_119cab93-aaed-5f66-b9e8-950b4b075c12)
Almost before Jane had finished putting clean sheets on Mark’s bed, Mrs Dimble, with a great many parcels, arrived. ‘You’re an angel to have me for the night,’ she said. ‘We’d tried every hotel in Edgestow, I believe. This place is going to become unendurable. The same answer everywhere! All full up with the hangers-on and camp-followers of this detestable NICE. Secretaries here–typists there–commissioners of works–the thing’s outrageous. If Cecil hadn’t had a room in College I really believe he’d have had to sleep in the waiting room at the station. I only hope that man in College has aired the bed.’
‘But what on earth’s happened?’ asked Jane.
‘Turned out, my dear!’
‘But it isn’t possible, Mrs Dimble. I mean, it can’t be legal.’
‘That’s what Cecil said…Just think of it, Jane. The first thing we saw when we poked our heads out of the window this morning was a lorry on the drive with its back wheels in the middle of the rose bed, unloading a small army of what looked like criminals, with picks and spades. Right in our own garden! There was an odious little man in a peaked cap who talked to Cecil with a cigarette in his mouth, at least it wasn’t in his mouth but seccotined onto his upper lip–you know–and guess what he said? He said they’d have no objection to our remaining in possession (of the house, mind you, not the garden) till 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. No objection!’
‘But surely–surely–it must be some mistake.’
‘Of course, Cecil rang up your Bursar. And, of course, your Bursar was out. That took nearly all morning, ringing up again and again, and by that time, the big beech that you used to be so fond of had been cut down, and all the plum trees. If I hadn’t been so angry, I’d have sat down and cried my eyes out. That’s what I felt like. At last Cecil did get onto your Mr Busby, who was perfectly useless. Said there must be some misunderstanding but it was out of his hands now and we’d better get onto the NICE at Belbury. Of course, it turned out to be quite impossible to get them. But by lunch-time we saw that one simply couldn’t stay there for the night, whatever happened.’
‘Why not?’
‘My dear, you’ve no conception what it was like. Great lorries and traction engines roaring past all the time, and a crane on a thing like a railway truck. Why, our own tradesmen couldn’t get through it. The milk didn’t arrive till eleven o’clock. The meat never arrived at all; they rang up in the afternoon to say their people hadn’t been able to reach us by either road. We’d the greatest difficulty in getting into town ourselves. It took us half an hour from our house to the bridge. It was like a nightmare. Flares and noise everywhere and the road practically ruined and a sort of great tin camp already going up on the Common. And the people! Such horrid men. I didn’t know we had workpeople like that in England. Oh, horrible, horrible!’ Mrs Dimble fanned herself with the hat she had just taken off.
‘And what are you going to do?’ asked Jane.
‘Heaven knows!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘For the moment, we have shut up the house and Cecil has been at Rumbold, the solicitor’s, to see if we can at least have it sealed and left alone until we’ve got our things out of it. Rumbold doesn’t seem to know where he is. He keeps on saying the NICE are in a very peculiar position legally. After that, I’m sure I don’t know. As far as I can see, there won’t be any houses in Edgestow. There’s no question of trying to live on the far side of the river any longer, even if they’d let us. What did you say? Oh, indescribable. All the poplars are going down. All those nice little cottages by the church are going down. I found poor Ivy–that’s your Mrs Maggs, you know–in tears. Poor things! They do look dreadful when they cry on top of powder. She’s being turned out too. Poor little woman; she’s had enough troubles in her life without this. I was glad to get away. The men were so horrible. Three big brutes came to the back door asking for hot water and went on so that they frightened Martha out of her wits and Cecil had to go and speak to them. I thought they were going to strike Cecil, really I did. It was most horribly unpleasant. But a sort of special constable sent them away. What? Oh yes, there are dozens of what look like policemen all over the place, and I didn’t like the look of them either. Swinging some kind of truncheon things, like what you’d see in an American film. Do you know Jane, Cecil and I both thought the same thing: we thought, it’s almost as if we’d lost the war. Oh, good girl–tea! That’s just what I wanted.’
‘You must stay here as long as you like, Mrs Dimble,’ said Jane. ‘Mark’ll just have to sleep in College.’
‘Well, really,’ said Mother Dimble, ‘I feel at the moment that no Fellow of Bracton ought to be allowed to sleep anywhere! But I’d make an exception in favour of Mr Studdock. As a matter of fact, I shan’t have to behave like the sword of Siegfried –and, incidentally, a nasty fat stodgy sword I should be! But that side of it is all fixed up. Cecil and I are to go out to the Manor at St Anne’s. We have to be there so much at present, you see.’
‘Oh,’ said Jane, involuntarily prolonging the exclamation as the whole of her own story flowed back on her mind.
‘Why, what a selfish pig I’ve been,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘Here have I been chattering away about my own troubles and quite forgetting that you’ve been out there and are full of things to tell me. Did you see Grace? And did you like her?’
‘Is “Grace” Miss Ironwood?’ asked Jane.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw her. I don’t know if I liked her or not. But I don’t want to talk about all that. I can’t think about anything except this outrageous business of yours. It’s you who are the real martyr, not me.’
‘No, my dear,’ said Mrs Dimble, ‘I’m not a martyr. I’m only an angry old woman with sore feet and a splitting head (but that’s beginning to be better) who’s trying to talk herself into a good temper. After all, Cecil and I haven’t lost our livelihood as poor Ivy Maggs has. It doesn’t really matter leaving the old house. Do you know, the pleasure of living there was in a way a melancholy pleasure. (I wonder, by the bye, do human beings really like being happy?) A little melancholy, yes. All those big upper rooms which we thought we should want because we thought we were going to have lots of children, and then we never had. Perhaps I was getting too fond of mooning about them on long afternoons when Cecil was away. Pitying oneself. I shall be better away from it, I daresay. I might have got like that frightful woman in Ibsen who was always maundering about dolls. It’s really worse for Cecil. He did so love having all his pupils about the place. Jane, that’s the third time you’ve yawned. You’re dropping asleep and I’ve talked your head off. It comes of being married thirty years. Husbands were made to be talked to. It helps them to concentrate their minds on what they’re reading –like the sound of a weir. There!–you’re yawning again.’
Jane found Mother Dimble an embarrassing person to share a room with because she said prayers. It was quite extraordinary, Jane thought, how this put one out. One didn’t know where to look, and it was so difficult to talk naturally again for several minutes after Mrs Dimble had risen from her knees.
‘Are you awake now?’ said Mrs Dimble’s voice, quietly, in the middle of the night.
‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? Was I shouting?’
‘Yes. You were shouting out about someone being hit on the head.’
‘I saw them killing a man–a man in a big car driving along a country road. Then he came to a crossroads and turned off to the right past some trees, and there was someone standing in the middle of the road waving a light to stop him. I couldn’t hear what they said; I was too far away. They must have persuaded him to get out of the car somehow, and there he was talking to one of them. The light fell full on his face. He wasn’t the same old man I saw in my other dream. He hadn’t a beard, only a moustache. And he had a very quick, kind of proud, way. He didn’t like what the man said to him and presently he put up his fists and knocked him down. Another man behind him tried to hit him on the head with something but the old man was too quick and turned round in time. Then it was rather horrible, but rather fine. There were three of them at him and he was fighting them all. I’ve read about that kind of thing in books but I never realised how one would feel about it. Of course, they got him in the end. They beat his head about terribly with the things in their hands. They were quite cool about it and stooped down to examine him and make sure he was really dead. The light from the lantern seemed all funny. It looked as if it made long uprights of light–sort of rods–all round the place. But perhaps I was waking up by then. No thanks, I’m all right. It was horrid, of course, but I’m not really frightened–not the way I would have been before. I’m more sorry for the old man.’
‘You feel you can go to sleep again?’
‘Oh rather! Is your headache better, Mrs Dimble?’
‘Quite gone, thank you. Good night.’
‘Without a doubt,’ thought Mark, ‘this must be the Mad Parson that Bill the Blizzard was talking of.’ The Committee at Belbury did not meet till ten-thirty, and ever since breakfast he had been walking with the Reverend Straik in the garden, despite the raw and misty weather of the morning. At the very moment when the man had first buttonholed him, the threadbare clothes and clumsy boots, the frayed clerical collar, the dark, lean, tragic face, gashed and ill-shaved and seamed, and the bitter sincerity of his manner, had struck a discordant note. It was not a type Mark had expected to meet in the NICE.
‘Do not imagine,’ said Mr Straik, ‘that I indulge in any dreams of carrying out our programme without violence. There will be resistance. They will gnaw their tongues and not repent. We are not to be deterred. We face these disorders with a firmness which will lead traducers to say that we have desired them. Let them say so. In a sense we have. It is no part of our witness to preserve that organisation of ordered sin which is called Society. To that organisation the message which we have to deliver is a message of absolute despair.’
‘Now that is what I meant,’ said Mark, ‘when I said that your point of view and mine must, in the long run, be incompatible. The preservation, which involves the thorough planning, of Society is just precisely the end I have in view. I do not think there is or can be any other end. The problem is quite different for you because you look forward to something else, something better than human society, in some other world.’
‘With every thought and vibration of my heart, with every drop of my blood,’ said Mr Straik, ‘I repudiate that damnable doctrine. That is precisely the subterfuge by which the World, the organisation and body of Death, has sidetracked and emasculated the teaching of Jesus, and turned into priestcraft and mysticism the plain demand of the Lord for righteousness and judgment here and now. The Kingdom of God is to be realised here–in this world. And it will be. At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. In that name I dissociate myself completely from all the organised religion that has yet been seen in the world.’
And at the name of Jesus, Mark, who would have lectured on abortion or perversion to an audience of young women without a qualm, felt himself so embarrassed that he knew his cheeks were slightly reddening; and he became so angry with himself and Mr Straik at this discovery that they then proceeded to redden very much indeed. This was exactly the kind of conversation he could not endure; and never since the well remembered misery of scripture lessons at school had he felt so uncomfortable. He muttered something about his ignorance of theology.
‘Theology!’ said Mr Straik with profound contempt. ‘It’s not theology I’m talking about, young man, but the Lord Jesus. Theology is talk–eyewash–a smoke screen–a game for rich men. It wasn’t in lecture rooms I found the Lord Jesus. It was in the coal pits, and beside the coffin of my daughter. If they think that Theology is a sort of cotton wool which will keep them safe in the great and terrible day, they’ll find their mistake. For, mark my words, this thing is going to happen. The Kingdom is going to arrive: in this world: in this country. The powers of science are an instrument. An irresistible instrument, as all of us in the NICE know. And why are they an irresistible instrument?’
‘Because science is based on observation,’ suggested Mark.
‘They are an irresistible instrument,’ shouted Straik, ‘because they are an instrument in His hand. An instrument of judgment as well as of healing. That is what I couldn’t get any of the Churches to see. They are blinded. Blinded by their filthy rags of humanism, their culture and humanitarianism and liberalism, as well as by their sins, or what they think their sins, though they are really the least sinful thing about them. That is why I have come to stand alone: a poor, weak, unworthy man, but the only prophet left. I knew that He was coming in power. And therefore, where we see power, we see the sign of His coming. And that is why I find myself joining with communists and materialists and anyone else who is really ready to expedite the coming. The feeblest of these people here has the tragic sense of life, the ruthlessness, the total commitment, the readiness to sacrifice all merely human values, which I could not find amid all the nauseating cant of the organised religions.’
‘You mean, do you,’ said Mark, ‘that as far as immediate practice is concerned, there are no limits to your co-operation with the programme?’
‘Sweep away all idea of co-operation!’ said the other. ‘Does clay co-operate with the potter? Did Cyrus cooperate with the Lord? These people will be used. I shall be used too. Instruments. Vehicles. But here comes the point that concerns you, young man. You have no choice whether you will be used or not. There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough. No one goes out of the NICE. Those who try to turn back will perish in the wilderness. But the question is, whether you are content to be one of the instruments which is thrown aside when it has served His turn–one which having executed judgment on others, is reserved for judgment itself–or will you be among those who enter on the inheritance? For it’s all true, you know. It is the Saints who are going to inherit the Earth–here in England, perhaps within the next twelve months–the Saints and no one else. Know you not that we shall judge angels?’ Then, suddenly lowering his voice, Straik added: ‘The real resurrection is even now taking place. The real life everlasting. Here in this world. You will see it.’
‘I say,’ said Mark, ‘it’s nearly twenty past. Oughtn’t we to be going to the Committee?’
Straik turned with him in silence. Partly to avoid further conversation along the same lines, and partly because he really wanted to know the answer, Mark said presently, ‘A rather annoying thing has happened. I’ve lost my wallet. There wasn’t much money in it–only about three pounds. But there were letters and things, and it’s a nuisance. Ought I to tell someone about it?’
‘You could tell the Steward,’ said Straik.
The Committee sat for about two hours and the Deputy Director was in the chair. His method of conducting business was slow and involved and to Mark, with his Bracton experience to guide him, it soon became obvious that the real work of the NICE must go on somewhere else. This, indeed, was what he had expected, and he was too reasonable to suppose that he should find himself, at this early stage, in the Inner Ring or whatever at Belbury corresponded to the Progressive Element at Bracton. But he hoped he would not be kept marking time on phantom committees for too long. This morning the business mainly concerned the details of the work which had already begun at Edgestow. The NICE had apparently won some sort of victory which gave it the right to pull down the little Norman church at the corner. ‘The usual objections were, of course, tabled,’ said Wither. Mark, who was not interested in architecture and who did not know the other side of the Wynd nearly so well as his wife, allowed his attention to wander. It was only at the end of the meeting that Wither opened a much more sensational subject. He believed that most of those present had already heard (‘Why do chairmen always begin that way?’ thought Mark) the very distressing piece of news which it was, nevertheless, his duty now to communicate to them in a semi-official manner. He was referring, of course, to the murder of William Hingest. As far as Mark could discover from the chairman’s tortuous and allusive narrative, Bill the Blizzard had been discovered with his head beaten in by some blunt instrument, lying near his car in Potter’s Lane at about four o’clock that morning. He had been dead for several hours. Mr Wither ventured to suppose that it would be a melancholy pleasure to the committee to know that the NICE police had been on the scene of the crime before five and that neither the local authorities nor Scotland Yard were making any objections to the fullest collaboration. He felt that if the occasion were more appropriate he would have welcomed a motion for some expression of the gratitude they must all feel to Miss Hardcastle and possibly of congratulations to her on the smooth interaction between her own forces and those of the state. This was a most gratifying feature in the sad story and, he suggested, a good omen for the future. Some decently subdued applause went round the table at this. Mr Wither then proceeded to speak at some length about the dead man. They had all much regretted Mr Hingest’s resolution to withdraw from the NICE, while fully appreciating his motives; they had all felt that this official severance would not in the least alter the cordial relations which existed between the deceased and almost all–he thought he could even say all without exception–of his former colleagues in the Institute. The obituary (in Raleigh’s fine phrase) was an instrument which the Deputy Director’s talents well fitted him to play, and he spoke at great length. He concluded by suggesting that they should all stand in silence for one minute as a token of respect for the memory of William Hingest.
And they did–a world-without-end minute in which odd creakings and breathings became audible, and behind the mask of each glazed and tight-lipped face, shy, irrelevant thoughts of this and that came creeping out as birds and mice creep out again in the clearing of a wood when the picnickers have gone, and everyone silently assured himself that he, at least, was not being morbid and not thinking about death.
Then there was a stir and a bustle and the Committee broke up.
The whole process of getting up and doing the ‘morning jobs’ was more cheerful, Jane found, because she had Mrs Dimble with her. Mark often helped; but as he always took the view–and Jane could feel it even if he did not express it in words–that ‘anything would do’ and that Jane made a lot of unnecessary work and that men could keep house with a tithe of the fuss and trouble which women made about it, Mark’s help was one of the commonest causes of quarrels between them. Mrs Dimble, on the other hand, fell in with her ways. It was a bright sunny morning and as they sat down to breakfast in the kitchen Jane was feeling bright herself. During the night her mind had evolved a comfortable theory that the mere fact of having seen Miss Ironwood and ‘had it all out’ would probably stop the dreams altogether. The episode would be closed. And now–there was all the exciting possibility of Mark’s new job to look forward to. She began to see pictures in her mind.
Mrs Dimble was anxious to know what had happened to Jane at St Anne’s and when she was going there again. Jane answered evasively on the first question and Mrs Dimble was too polite to press it. As to the second, Jane thought she wouldn’t ‘bother’ Miss Ironwood again, or wouldn’t ‘bother’ any further about the dreams. She said she had been ‘silly’ but felt sure she’d be all right now. And she glanced at the clock and wondered why Mrs Maggs hadn’t yet turned up.
‘My dear, I’m afraid you’ve lost Ivy Maggs,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Didn’t I tell you they’d taken her house too? I thought you’d understand she wouldn’t be coming to you in future. You see there’s nowhere for her to live in Edgestow.’
‘Bother!’ said Jane, and added, without much interest in the reply, ‘What is she doing, do you know?’
‘She’s gone out to St Anne’s.’
‘Has she got friends there?’
‘She’s gone to the Manor, along with Cecil and me.’
‘Do you mean she’s got a job there?’
‘Well, yes. I suppose it is a job.’
Mrs Dimble left at about eleven. She also, it appeared, was going to St Anne’s, but was first to meet her husband and lunch with him at Northumberland. Jane walked down to the town with her to do a little shopping and they parted at the bottom of Market Street. It was just after this that Jane met Mr Curry.
‘Have you heard the news, Mrs Studdock?’ said Curry. His manner was always important and his tone always vaguely confidential, but this morning they seemed more so than usual.
‘No. What’s wrong?’ said Jane. She thought Mr Curry a pompous fool and Mark a fool for being impressed by him. But as soon as Curry began speaking, her face showed all the wonder and consternation he could have wished. Nor were they, this time, feigned. He told her that Mr Hingest had been murdered, sometime during the night, or in the small hours of that morning. The body had been found lying beside his car, in Potter’s Lane, badly beaten about the head. He had been driving from Belbury to Edgestow. Curry was at the moment hastening back to college to talk to the Warden about it; he had just been at the police station. One saw that the murder had already become Curry’s property. The ‘matter’ was, in some indefinable sense, ‘in his hands’, and he was heavy with responsibility. At another time Jane would have found this amusing. She escaped from him as soon as possible and went into Blackie’s for a cup of coffee. She felt she must sit down.
The death of Hingest in itself meant nothing to her. She had met him only once and she had accepted from Mark the view that he was a disagreeable old man and rather a snob. But the certainty that she herself in her dream had witnessed a real murder shattered at one blow all the consoling pretences with which she had begun the morning. It came over her with sickening clarity that the affair of her dreams, far from being ended, was only beginning. The bright, narrow little life which she had proposed to live was being irremediably broken into. Windows into huge, dark landscapes were opening on every side and she was powerless to shut them. It would drive her mad, she thought, to face it alone. The other alternative was to go back to Miss Ironwood. But that seemed to be only a way of going deeper into all this darkness. This Manor at St Anne’s–this ‘kind of company’ –was ‘mixed up in it’. She didn’t want to get drawn in. It was unfair. It wasn’t as if she had asked much of life. All she wanted was to be left alone. And the thing was so preposterous! The sort of thing which, according to all the authorities she had hitherto accepted, could not really happen.
Cosser–the frecklefaced man with the little wisp of black moustache–approached Mark as he was coming away from the Committee.
‘You and I have a job to do,’ he said. ‘Got to get out a report about Cure Hardy.’
Mark was very relieved to hear of a job. But he was a little on his dignity, not having liked Cosser much when he had met him yesterday, and he answered:
‘Does that mean I am to be in Steele’s department after all?’
‘That’s right,’ said Cosser.
‘The reason I ask,’ said Mark, ‘is that neither he nor you seemed particularly keen on having me. I don’t want to push myself in, you know. I don’t need to stay at the NICE at all if it comes to that.’
‘Well, don’t start talking about it here,’ said Cosser. ‘Come upstairs.’
They were talking in the hall and Mark noticed Wither pacing thoughtfully towards them. ‘Wouldn’t it be as well to speak to him and get the whole thing thrashed out?’ he suggested. But the Deputy Director, after coming within ten feet of them, had turned in another direction. He was humming to himself under his breath and seemed so deep in thought that Mark felt the moment unsuitable for an interview. Cosser, though he said nothing, apparently thought the same and so Mark followed him up to an office on the third floor.
‘It’s about the village of Cure Hardy,’ said Cosser when they were seated. ‘You see, all that land at Bragdon Wood is going to be little better than a swamp once they get to work. Why the hell we wanted to go there I don’t know. Anyway, the latest plan is to divert the Wynd: block up the old channel through Edgestow altogether. Look. Here’s Shillingbridge, ten miles north of the town. It’s to be diverted there and brought down an artificial channel–here, to the east, where the blue line is –and rejoin the old bed down here.’
‘The university will hardly agree to that,’ said Mark. ‘What would Edgestow be without the river?’
‘We’ve got the university by the short hairs,’ said Cosser. ‘You needn’t worry about that. Anyway it’s not our job. The point is that the new Wynd must come right through Cure Hardy. Now look at your contours. Cure Hardy is in this narrow little valley. Eh? Oh, you’ve been there, have you? That makes it all the easier. I don’t know these parts myself. Well, the idea is to dam the valley at the southern end and make a big reservoir. You’ll need a new water supply for Edgestow now that it’s to be the second city in the country.’
‘But what happens to Cure Hardy?’
‘That’s another advantage. We build a new model village (it’s to be called Jules Hardy or Wither Hardy) four miles away. Over here, on the railway.’
‘I say, you know, there’ll be the devil of a stink about this. Cure Hardy is famous. It’s a beauty spot. There are the sixteenth-century almshouses, and a Norman church and all that.’
‘Exactly. That’s where you and I come in. We’ve got to make a report on Cure Hardy. We’ll run out and have a look round tomorrow, but we can write most of the report today. It ought to be pretty easy. If it’s a beauty spot, you can bet it’s insanitary. That’s the first point to stress. Then we’ve got to get out some facts about the population. I think you’ll find it consists almost entirely of the two most undesirable elements–small rentiers and agricultural labourers.’
‘The small rentier is a bad element, I agree,’ said Mark. ‘I suppose the agricultural labourer is more controversial.’
‘The Institute doesn’t approve of him. He’s a very recalcitrant element in a planned community, and he’s always backward. We’re not going in for English agriculture. So you see, all we have to do is to verify a few facts. Otherwise the report writes itself.’
Mark was silent for a moment or two.
‘That’s easy enough,’ he said. ‘But before I get down to it, I’d just like to be a bit clearer about my own position. Oughtn’t I go and see Steele? I don’t fancy settling down to work in this department if he doesn’t want to have me.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said Cosser.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing, Steele can’t prevent you if the DD backs you up, as he seems to be doing for the moment. For another, Steele is rather a dangerous man. If you just go quietly on with the job, he may get used to you in the end; but if you go and see him it might lead to a bust-up. There’s another thing too.’ Cosser paused, picked his nose thoughtfully, and proceeded. ‘Between ourselves, I don’t think things can go on indefinitely in this department in the way they are at present.’
The excellent training which Mark had had at Bracton enabled him to understand this. Cosser was hoping to get Steele out of the department altogether. He thought he saw the whole situation. Steele was dangerous while he lasted, but he might not last.
‘I got the impression yesterday,’ said Mark, ‘that you and Steele hit it off together rather well.’
‘The great thing here,’ said Cosser, ‘is never to quarrel with anyone. I hate quarrels myself. I can get on with anybody– as long as the work gets done.’
‘Of course,’ said Mark. ‘By the way, if we go to Cure Hardy tomorrow I might as well run in to Edgestow and spend the night at home.’
For Mark a good deal hung on the answer to this. He might find out whether he were actually under orders from Cosser. If Cosser said, ‘You can’t do that,’ he would at least know where he stood. If Cosser said that Mark couldn’t be spared, that would be better still. Or Cosser might reply that he’d better consult the DD. That also would have made Mark feel surer of his position. But Cosser merely said ‘Oh,’ leaving Mark in doubt whether no one needed leave of absence or whether Mark was not sufficiently established as a member of the Institute for his absence to be of any consequence. Then they went to work on their report.
It took them the rest of the day, so that Cosser and he came in to dinner late and without dressing. This gave Mark a most agreeable sensation. And he enjoyed the meal too. Although he was among men he had not met before, he seemed to know everyone within the first five minutes and to be joining naturally in the conversation. He was learning how to talk their shop.
‘How nice it is!’ said Mark to himself next morning as the car left the main road at Duke’s Eaton and began descending the bumpy little lane into the long valley where Cure Hardy lay. Mark was not as a rule very sensitive to beauty, but Jane and his love for Jane had already awakened him a little in this respect. Perhaps the winter morning sunlight affected him all the more because he had never been taught to regard it as specially beautiful and it therefore worked on his senses without interference. The earth and sky had the look of things recently washed. The brown fields looked as if they would be good to eat, and those in grass set off the curves of the little hills as close-clipped hair sets off the body of a horse. The sky looked further away than usual, but also clearer, so that the long slender streaks of cloud (dark slate colour against the pale blue) had edges as clear as if they were cut out of cardboard. Every little copse was black and bristling as a hairbrush, and when the car stopped in Cure Hardy itself the silence that followed the turning off of the engine was filled with the noise of rooks that seemed to be calling, ‘Wake! Wake!’
‘Bloody awful noise those birds make,’ said Cosser. ‘Got your map? Now…’ He plunged at once into business.
They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as ‘man’ or ‘woman’. He preferred to write about ‘vocational groups’, ‘elements’, ‘classes’ and ‘populations’: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.
And yet, he could not help rather liking this village. When, at one o’clock, he persuaded Cosser to turn into the Two Bells, he even said so. They had both brought sandwiches with them, but Mark felt he would like a pint of beer. In the Two Bells it was very warm and dark, for the window was small. Two labourers (no doubt recalcitrant and backward) were sitting with earthenware mugs at their elbows, munching very thick sandwiches, and a third was standing up at the counter conducting a conversation with the landlord.
‘No beer for me, thanks,’ said Cosser, ‘and we don’t want to muck about here too long. What were you saying?’
‘I was saying that on a fine morning there is something rather attractive about a place like this, in spite of all its obvious absurdities.’
‘Yes, it is a fine morning. Makes a real difference to one’s health, a bit of sunlight.’
‘I was thinking of the place.’
‘You mean this?’ said Cosser glancing round the room. ‘I should have thought it was just the sort of thing we wanted to get rid of. No sunlight, no ventilation. Haven’t much use for alcohol myself (read the Miller Report) but if people have got to have their stimulants, I’d like to see them administered in a more hygienic way.’
‘I don’t know that the stimulant is quite the whole point,’ said Mark, looking at his beer. The whole scene was reminding him of drinks and talks long ago–of laughter and arguments in undergraduate days. Somehow one had made friends more easily then. He wondered what had become of all that set–of Carey and Wadsden and Denniston, who had so nearly got his own Fellowship.
‘Don’t know, I’m sure,’ said Cosser, in answer to his last remark. ‘Nutrition isn’t my subject. You’d want to ask Stock about that.’
‘What I’m really thinking about,’ said Mark, ‘is not this pub, but the whole village. Of course, you’re quite right: that sort of thing has to go. But it had its pleasant side. We’ll have to be careful that whatever we’re building up in its place will really be able to beat it on all levels–not merely in efficiency.’
‘Oh, architecture and all that,’ said Cosser. ‘Well, that’s hardly my line, you know. That’s more for someone like Wither. Have you nearly finished?’
All at once it came over Mark what a terrible bore this little man was, and in the same moment he felt utterly sick of the NICE. But he reminded himself that one could not expect to be in the interesting set at once; there would be better things later on. Anyway, he had not burnt his boats. Perhaps he would chuck up the whole thing and go back to Bracton in a day or two. But not at once. It would be only sensible to hang on for a bit and see how things shaped.
On their way back Cosser dropped him near Edgestow station, and as he walked home Mark began to think of what he would say to Jane about Belbury. You will quite misunderstand him if you think he was consciously inventing a lie. Almost involuntarily, as the picture of himself entering the flat, and of Jane’s questioning face, arose in his mind, there arose also the imagination of his own voice answering her, hitting off the salient features of Belbury in amusing, confident phrases. This imaginary speech of his own gradually drove out of his mind the real experiences he had undergone. Those real experiences of misgivings and of uneasiness, indeed, quickened his desire to cut a good figure in the eyes of his wife. Almost without noticing it, he had decided not to mention the affair of Cure Hardy; Jane cared for old buildings and all that sort of thing. As a result, when Jane, who was at that moment drawing the curtains, heard the door opening and looked round and saw Mark, she saw a rather breezy and buoyant Mark. Yes, he was almost sure he’d got the job. The salary wasn’t absolutely fixed, but he’d be going into that tomorrow. It was a very funny place: he’d explain all that later. But he had already got onto the real people there. Wither and Miss Hardcastle were the ones that mattered. ‘I must tell you about the Hardcastle woman,’ he said. ‘She’s quite incredible.’
Jane had to decide what she would say to Mark much more quickly than he had decided what he would say to her. And she decided to tell him nothing about the dreams or St Anne’s. Men hated women who had things wrong with them, specially queer, unusual things. Her resolution was easily kept for Mark, full of his own story, asked her no questions. She was not, perhaps, entirely convinced by what he said. There was a vagueness about all the details. Very early in the conversation she said in a sharp, frightened voice (she had no idea how he disliked that voice), ‘Mark, you haven’t given up your fellowship at Bracton?’ He said, No, of course not, and went on. She listened only with half her mind. She knew he often had rather grandiose ideas, and from something in his face she divined that during his absence he had been drinking much more than he usually did. And so, all evening, the male bird displayed his plumage and the female played her part and asked questions and laughed and feigned more interest than she felt. Both were young, and if neither loved very much, each was still anxious to be admired.
That evening the Fellows of Bracton sat in Common Room over their wine and dessert. They had given up dressing for dinner, as an economy during the war, and not yet resumed the practice, so that their sports coats and cardigans struck a somewhat discordant note against the dark Jacobean panels, the candle light, and the silver of many different periods. Feverstone and Curry were sitting together. Until that night for about three hundred years this Common Room had been one of the pleasant quiet places of England. It was in Lady Alice, on the ground floor beneath the soler, and the windows at its eastern end looked out on the river and on Bragdon Wood, across a little terrace where the Fellows were in the habit of taking their dessert on summer evenings. At this hour and season these windows were of course shut and curtained. And from beyond them came such noises as had never been heard in that room before–shouts and curses and the sound of lorries heavily drumming past or harshly changing gear, rattling of chains, drumming of mechanical drills, clanging of iron, whistles, thuddings, and an all pervasive vibration. Saeva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractaeque catenae, as Glossop, sitting on the far side of the fire, had observed to Jewel. For beyond those windows, scarcely thirty yards away on the other side of the Wynd, the conversion of an ancient woodland into an inferno of mud and noise and steel and concrete was already going on apace. Several members even of the Progressive Element–those who had rooms on this side of College –had already been grumbling about it. Curry himself had been a little surprised by the form which his dream had taken now that it was a reality, but he was doing his best to brazen it out, and though his conversation with Feverstone had to be conducted at the top of their voices, he made no allusion to this inconvenience.
‘It’s quite definite, then,’ he bawled, ‘that young Studdock is not coming back?’
‘Oh quite,’ shouted Feverstone. ‘He sent me a message through a high official to tell me to let the College know.’
‘When will he send a formal resignation?’
‘Haven’t an earthly! Like all these youngsters, he’s very casual about these things. As a matter of fact, the longer he delays the better.’
‘You mean it gives us a chance to look about us?’
‘Quite. You see, nothing need come before the College till he writes. One wants to have the whole question of his successor taped before that.’
‘Obviously. That is most important. Once you present an open question to all these people who don’t understand the field and don’t know their own minds, you get anything happening.’
‘Exactly. That’s what we want to avoid. The only way to manage a place like this is to produce your candidate–bring the rabbit out of a hat–two minutes after you’ve announced the vacancy.’
‘We must begin thinking about it at once.’
‘Does his successor have to be a sociologist? I mean is the fellowship tied to the subject?’
‘Oh, not in the least. It’s one of those Paston fellowships. Why? Had you any subject in mind?’
‘It’s a long time since we had anyone in Politics.’
‘Um–yes. There’s still a considerable prejudice against Politics as an academic subject. I say, Feverstone, oughtn’t we to give this new subject a leg up?’
‘What new subject?’
‘Pragmatometry.’
‘Well now, it’s funny you should say that, because the man I was beginning to think of is a Politician who has also been going in a good deal for Pragmatometry. One could call it a fellowship in social Pragmatometry, or something like that.’
‘Who is the man?’
‘Laird–from Leicester, Cambridge.’
It was automatic for Curry to look very thoughtful, though he had never heard of Laird, and to say, ‘Ah, Laird. Just remind me of the details of his academic career.’
‘Well,’ said Feverstone, ‘as you remember, he was in bad health at the time of his finals, and came rather a cropper. The Cambridge examining is so bad nowadays that one hardly counts that. Everyone knew he was one of the most brilliant men of his year. He was President of the Sphinxes and used to edit The Adult. David Laird, you know.’
‘Yes, to be sure. David Laird. But I say, Dick…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m not quite happy about his bad degree. Of course I don’t attach a superstitious value to examination results any more than you do. Still…We have made one or two unfortunate elections lately.’ Almost involuntarily, as he said this, Curry glanced across the room to where Pelham sat–Pelham with his little button-like mouth and his pudding face. Pelham was a sound man; but even Curry found it difficult to remember anything that Pelham had ever done or said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Feverstone, ‘but even our worst elections aren’t quite so dim as those the College makes when we leave it to itself.’
Perhaps because the intolerable noise had frayed his nerves, Curry felt a momentary doubt about the ‘dimness’ of these outsiders. He had dined recently at Northumberland and found Telford dining there the same night. The contrast between the alert and witty Telford whom everyone at Northumberland seemed to know, whom everyone listened to, and the ‘dim’ Telford in Bracton Common Room had perplexed him. Could it be that the silences of all these ‘outsiders’ in his own College, their monosyllabic replies when he condescended and their blank faces when he assumed his confidential manner, had an explanation which had never occurred to him? The fantastic suggestion that he, Curry, might be a bore, passed through his mind so swiftly that a second later he had forgotten it forever. The much less painful suggestion that these traditionalists and research beetles affected to look down on him was retained. But Feverstone was shouting at him again.
‘I’m going to be at Cambridge next week,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m giving a dinner. I’d as soon it wasn’t mentioned here, because, as a matter of fact, the PM may be coming, and one or two big newspaper people and Tony Dew. What? Oh, of course you know Tony. That little dark man from the Bank. Laird is going to be there. He’s some kind of cousin of the PM’s. I was wondering if you could join us. I know David’s very anxious to meet you. He’s heard a lot about you from some chap who used to go to your lectures. I can’t remember the name.’
‘Well, it would be very difficult. It rather depends on when old Bill’s funeral is to be. I should have to be here for that of course. Was there anything about the inquest on the six o’clock news?’
‘I didn’t hear. But of course that raises a second question. Now that Blizzard has gone to blow in a better world, we have two vacancies.’
‘I can’t hear,’ yelled Curry. ‘Is this noise getting worse? Or am I getting deaf?’
‘I say, Sub-Warden,’ shouted Brizeacre from beyond Feverstone, ‘what the devil are your friends outside doing?’
‘Can’t they work without shouting?’ asked someone else.
‘It doesn’t sound like work at all to me,’ said a third.
‘Listen!’ said Glossop suddenly. ‘That’s not work. Listen to the feet. It’s more like a game of rugger.’
‘It’s getting worse every minute,’ said Raynor.
Next moment nearly everyone in the room was on his feet. ‘What was that?’ shouted one. ‘They’re murdering someone,’ said Glossop. ‘There’s only one way of getting a noise like that out of a man’s throat.’ ‘Where are you going?’ asked Curry. ‘I’m going to see what’s happening,’ said Glossop. ‘Curry, go and collect all the shooters in College. Someone ring up the police.’ ‘I shouldn’t go out if I were you,’ said Feverstone who had remained seated and was pouring himself out another glass of wine. ‘It sounds as if the police, or something, was there already.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Listen. There!’
‘I thought that was their infernal drill.’
‘Listen!’
‘My God…you really think it’s a machine gun?’
‘Look out! Look out!’ said a dozen voices at once as a splintering of glass became audible and a shower of stones fell onto the Common Room floor. A moment later several of the Fellows had made a rush for the windows and put up the shutters; and then they were all standing staring at one another, and silent but for the noise of their heavy breathing. Glossop had a cut on the forehead, and on the floor lay the fragments of that famous east window on which Henrietta Maria had once cut her name with a diamond.
5 (#ulink_6aa14d79-1c93-5fd8-a7c5-c4bec94543d0)
Elasticity (#ulink_6aa14d79-1c93-5fd8-a7c5-c4bec94543d0)
Next morning Mark went back to Belbury by train. He had promised his wife to clear up a number of points about his salary and place of residence, and the memory of all these promises made a little cloud of uneasiness in his mind, but on the whole he was in good spirits. This return to Belbury–just sauntering in and hanging up his hat and ordering a drink–was a pleasant contrast to his first arrival. The servant who brought the drink knew him. Filostrato nodded to him. Women would fuss, but this was clearly the real world. After the drink he strolled upstairs to Cosser’s office. He was there for only five minutes, and when he came out, his state of mind had been completely altered.
Steele and Cosser were both there and both looked up with the air of men who have been interrupted by a total stranger. Neither spoke.
‘Ah–good morning,’ said Mark awkwardly.
Steele finished making a pencil note on some large document which was spread out before him.
‘What is it, Mr Studdock?’ he said without looking up.
‘I came to see Cosser,’ said Mark, and then, addressing Cosser, ‘I’ve just been thinking over the last section but one in that report–’
‘What report’s this?’ said Steele to Cosser.
‘Oh, I thought,’ replied Cosser with a little twisty smile at one corner of his mouth, ‘that it would be a good thing to put together a report on Cure Hardy in my spare time, and as there was nothing particular to do yesterday I drew it up. Mr Studdock helped me.’
‘Well, never mind about that now,’ said Steele. ‘You can talk to Mr Cosser about it some other time, Mr Studdock. I’m afraid he’s busy at present.’
‘Look here,’ said Mark, ‘I think we’d better understand one another. Am I to take it that this report was simply a private hobby of Cosser’s? And if so, I should like to have known that before I spent eight hours’ work on it. And whose orders am I under?’
Steele, playing with his pencil, looked at Cosser.
‘I asked you a question about my position, Mr Steele,’ said Mark.
‘I haven’t time for this sort of thing,’ said Steele. ‘If you haven’t any work to do, I have. I know nothing about your position.’
Mark thought, for a moment, of turning to Cosser; but Cosser’s smooth, freckled face and non-committal eyes suddenly filled him with such contempt that he turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the door behind him. He was going to see the Deputy Director.
At the door of Wither’s room he hesitated for a moment because he heard voices from within. But he was too angry to wait. He knocked and entered without noticing whether the knock had been answered.
‘My dear boy,’ said the Deputy Director looking up but not quite fixing his eyes on Mark’s face. ‘I’m delighted to see you.’ As he heard these words Mark noticed that there was a third person in the room. It was a man called Stone whom he had met at dinner the day before yesterday. Stone was standing in front of Wither’s table, rolling and unrolling a piece of blotting paper with his fingers. His mouth was open, his eyes fixed on the Deputy Director.
‘Delighted to see you,’ repeated Wither. ‘All the more so because you–er–interrupted me in what I am afraid I must call a rather painful interview. As I was just saying to poor Mr Stone when you came in, nothing is nearer to my heart than the wish that this great Institute should all work together like one family…the greatest unity of will and purpose, Mr Stone, the fullest mutual confidence…that is what I expect of my colleagues. But then as you may remind me, Mr–ah–Studdock, even in family life, there are occasionally strains and frictions and misunderstandings. And that is why, my dear boy, I am not at the moment quite at leisure–don’t go, Mr Stone. I have a great deal more to say to you.’
‘Perhaps I’d better come back later?’ said Mark.
‘Well, perhaps in all the circumstances…it is your feelings that I am considering, Mr Stone…perhaps…the usual method of seeing me, Mr Studdock, is to apply to my secretary and make an appointment. Not, you will understand, that I have the least wish to insist on any formalities or would be other than pleased to see you whenever you looked in. It is the waste of your time that I am anxious to avoid.’
‘Thank you, Sir,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll go and see your secretary.’
The secretary’s office was next door. When one went in, one found not the secretary himself, but a number of subordinates who were cut off from their visitors behind a sort of counter. Mark made an appointment for ten o’clock tomorrow which was the earliest hour they could offer him. As he came out he ran into Fairy Hardcastle.
‘Hullo, Studdock,’ said the Fairy. ‘Hanging round the DD’s office? That won’t do, you know.’
‘I have decided,’ said Mark, ‘that I must either get my position definitely fixed once and for all or else leave the Institute.’
She looked at him with an ambiguous expression in which amusement seemed to predominate. Then she suddenly slipped her arm through his.
‘Look, Sonny,’ she said, ‘you drop all that, see? It isn’t going to do you any good. You come along and have a talk with me.’
‘There’s really nothing to talk about, Miss Hardcastle,’ said Mark. ‘I’m quite clear in my mind. Either I get a real job here, or I go back to Bracton. That’s simple enough: I don’t even particularly mind which, so long as I know.’
To this, the Fairy made no answer, and the steady pressure of her arm compelled Mark, unless he was prepared to struggle, to go with her along the passage. The intimacy and authority of her grip was ludicrously ambiguous and would have fitted almost equally well the relations of policeman and prisoner, mistress and lover, nurse and child. Mark felt that he would look a fool if they met anyone.
She brought him to her own offices which were on the second floor. The outer office was full of what he had already learned to call Waips, the girls of the Women’s Auxiliary Institutional Police. The men of the force, though very much more numerous, were not so often met with indoors, but Waips were constantly seen flitting to and fro wherever Miss Hardcastle appeared. Far from sharing the masculine characteristics of their chief they were (as Feverstone once said) ‘feminine to the point of imbecility’–small and slight and fluffy and full of giggles. Miss Hardcastle behaved to them as if she were a man, and addressed them in tones of half-breezy, half-ferocious, gallantry. ‘Cocktails, Dolly,’ she bawled as they entered the outer office. When they reached the inner office she made Mark sit down but remained standing herself with her back to the fire and her legs wide apart. The drinks were brought and Dolly retired closing the door behind her. Mark had grumblingly told his grievance on the way.
‘Cut it all out, Studdock,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘And whatever you do, don’t go bothering the DD. I told you before that you needn’t worry about all those little third floor people provided you’ve got him on your side. Which you have at present. But you won’t have if you keep on going to him with complaints.’
‘That might be very good advice, Miss Hardcastle,’ said Mark, ‘if I were committed to staying here at all. But I’m not. And from what I’ve seen I don’t like the place. I’ve very nearly made up my mind to go home. Only I thought I’d just have a talk with him first, to make everything clear.’
‘Making things clear is the one thing the DD can’t stand,’ replied Miss Hardcastle. ‘That’s not how he runs the place. And mind you, he knows what he’s about. It works, Sonny. You’ve no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving…you’re not superstitious, are you? I am. I don’t think it’s lucky to leave the NICE. You needn’t bother your head about all the Steeles and Cossers. That’s part of your apprenticeship. You’re being put through it at the moment, but if you hold on you’ll come out above them. All you’ve got to do is to sit tight. Not one of them is going to be left when we get going.’
‘That’s just the sort of line Cosser took about Steele,’ said Mark, ‘and it didn’t seem to do me much good when it came to the point.’
‘Do you know, Studdock,’ said Miss Hardcastle, ‘I’ve taken a fancy to you. And it’s just as well I have. Because if I hadn’t, I’d be disposed to resent that last remark.’
‘I don’t mean to be offensive,’ said Mark. ‘But–damn it all–look at it from my point of view.’
‘No good, Sonny,’ said Miss Hardcastle shaking her head. ‘You don’t know enough facts yet for your point of view to be worth sixpence. You haven’t yet realised what you’re in on. You’re being offered a chance of something far bigger than a seat in the cabinet. And there are only two alternatives, you know. Either to be in the NICE or to be out of it. And I know better than you which is going to be most fun.’
‘I do understand that,’ said Mark. ‘But anything is better than being nominally in and having nothing to do. Give me a real place in the Sociological Department and I’ll…’
‘Rats! That whole Department is going to be scrapped. It had to be there at the beginning for propaganda purposes. But they’re all going to be weeded out.’
‘But what assurance have I that I’m going to be one of their successors?’
‘You aren’t. They’re not going to have any successors. The real work has nothing to do with all these departments. The kind of sociology we’re interested in will be done by my people–the police.’
‘Then where do I come in?’
‘If you’ll trust me,’ said the Fairy, putting down her empty glass and producing a cheroot, ‘I can put you onto a bit of your real work–what you were really brought here to do–straight away.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Alcasan,’ said Miss Hardcastle between her teeth. She had started one of her interminable dry smokes. Then, glancing at Mark with a hint of contempt, ‘You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?’
‘You mean the radiologist–the man who was guillotined?’ asked Mark who was completely bewildered. The Fairy nodded.
‘He’s to be rehabilitated,’ she said. ‘Gradually. I’ve got all the facts in the dossier. You begin with a quiet little article –not questioning his guilt, not at first, but just hinting that of course he was a member of their Quisling government and there was a prejudice against him. Say you don’t doubt the verdict was just, but it’s disquieting to realise that it would almost certainly have been the same even if he’d been innocent. Then you follow it up in a day or two with an article of quite a different kind. Popular account of the value of his work. You can mug up the facts–enough for that
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C. S. Lewis
The third novel in the science-fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis. This final story is set on Earth, and tells of a terrifying conspiracy against humanity.The story surrounds Mark and Jane Studdock, a newly married couple. Mark is a Sociologist who is enticed to join an organisation called N.I.C.E. which aims to control all human life. His wife, meanwhile, has bizarre prophetic dreams about a decapitated scientist, Alcasan. As Mark is drawn inextricably into the sinister organisation, he discovers the truth of his wife’s dreams when he meets the literal head of Alcasan which is being kept alive by infusions of blood.Jane seeks help concerning her dreams at a community called St Anne’s, where she meets their leader – Dr Ransom (the main character of the previous two titles in the trilogy). The story ends in a final spectacular scene at the N.I.C.E. headquarters where Merlin appears to confront the powers of Hell.
THE COSMIC TRILOGY
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
C. S. Lewis
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups
Contents
The Cosmic Trilogy (#u84396ac3-d225-57ac-b535-f8f086ff85d0)
Title Page (#uae40fa39-c7b4-56ab-8776-330660558bb7)
Dedication (#u81215599-3456-5437-a099-882430fa73b4)
Epigraph (#uec626b35-2eb7-5378-b20d-9dbe4f8e1863)
Preface (#u7a7313b9-5a0f-5e61-8a5f-4a2657d3e191)
1 Sale of College Property (#uee97f8c0-7407-5c19-9c31-a1fe0bdfda87)
2 Dinner with the Sub-Warden (#uacd07b11-7be6-58e6-808a-0c8e9b9e6555)
3 Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill (#ud2a06971-a5f4-5fd3-9680-32f723e290f0)
4 The Liquidation of Anachronisms (#u76612da6-8492-5070-a308-468512e3dfb1)
5 Elasticity (#ub849351e-68ce-5f7e-88f7-ac2ea6f703fc)
6 Fog (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Pendragon (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Moonlight at Belbury (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Saracen’s Head (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Conquered City (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Battle Begun (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Wet and Windy Night (#litres_trial_promo)
13 They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads (#litres_trial_promo)
14 ‘Real Life Is Meeting’ (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Descent of the Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Banquet at Belbury (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Venus at St Anne’s (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
To
J. McNEILL
‘The Shadow of that hyddeous strength Sax myle and more it is of length.’
SIR DAVID LINDSAY: from Ane Dialog (describing the Tower of Babel)
Preface (#ulink_767a6d0f-78c2-5511-89ad-05ccdab67c99)
I have called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who dislikes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why–intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals and planetary angels–I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers, whereas I have never, in any university, come across a college like Bracton. This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man. In the story, the outer rim of that devilry had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. I selected my own profession, not, of course, because I think fellows of colleges more likely to be thus corrupted than anyone else, but because my own is the only profession I know well enough to write about. A very small university is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham–a university with which the only connection I have had was entirely pleasant.
I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow.
Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.
The period of this story is vaguely ‘after the war’. It concludes the Trilogy of which Out of the Silent Planet was the first part, and Perelandra the second, but can be read on its own.
C. S. LEWIS
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Christmas Eve, 1943.
1 (#ulink_30aff43e-f02b-5936-835b-bdc4215fabf0)
Sale of College Property (#ulink_30aff43e-f02b-5936-835b-bdc4215fabf0)
‘Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,’ said Jane Studdock to herself, ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.’ She had not been to church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married, and the words of the service had stuck in her mind.
Through the open door she could see the tiny kitchen of the flat and hear the loud, ungentle tick tick of the clock. She had just left the kitchen and knew how tidy it was. The breakfast things were washed up, the tea towels were hanging above the stove, and the floor was mopped. The beds were made and the rooms ‘done’. She had just returned from the only shopping she need do that day, and it was still a minute before eleven. Except for getting her own lunch and tea, there was nothing that had to be done till six o’clock, even supposing that Mark was really coming home for dinner. But there was a College Meeting today. Almost certainly Mark would ring up about teatime to say that the meeting was taking longer than he had expected and that he would have to dine in College. The hours before her were as empty as the flat. The sun shone and the clock ticked.
‘Mutual society, help, and comfort,’ said Jane bitterly. In reality marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement. For some years before their marriage she had never seen so little of Mark as she had done in the last six months. Even when he was at home he hardly ever talked. He was always either sleepy or intellectually preoccupied. While they had been friends, and later when they were lovers, life itself had seemed too short for all they had to say to each other. But now…why had he married her? Was he still in love? If so, ‘being in love’ must mean totally different things to men and women. Was it the crude truth that all the endless talks which had seemed to her, before they were married, the very medium of love itself, had never been to him more than a preliminary?
‘Here I am, starting to waste another morning, mooning,’ said Jane to herself sharply. ‘I must do some work.’ By work she meant her doctorate thesis on Donne. She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married: that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time yet. Jane was not perhaps a very original thinker and her plan had been to lay great stress on Donne’s ‘triumphant vindication of the body’. She still believed that if she got out all her notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, she could force herself back into her lost enthusiasm for the subject. But before she did so–perhaps in order to put off the moment of beginning –she turned over a newspaper which was lying on the table and glanced at a picture on the back page.
The moment she saw the picture, she remembered her dream. She remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after she had crept out of bed and sat waiting for the first hint of morning, afraid to put on the light for fear Mark should wake up and fuss, yet feeling offended by the sound of his regular breathing. He was an excellent sleeper. Only one thing ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterwards.
She had begun by dreaming simply of a face. It was a foreign-looking face, bearded and rather yellow, with a hooked nose. Its expression was frightening because it was frightened. The mouth sagged open and the eyes stared as she had seen other men’s eyes stare for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually she became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting hunched up in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls–waiting, she thought, for those who had him in their power, to come in and do something horrible to him. At last the door was opened and a rather good-looking man with a pointed grey beard came in. The prisoner seemed to recognise him as an old acquaintance, and they sat down together and began to talk. In all the dreams which Jane had hitherto dreamed, one either understood what the dream-people were saying or else one did not hear it. But in this dream–and that helped to make its extraordinary realism–the conversation was in French and Jane understood bits of it, but by no means all, just as she would have done in real life. The visitor was telling the prisoner something which he apparently intended him to regard as good news. And the prisoner at first looked up with a gleam of hope in his eye and said, ‘Tiens…ah…ça marche’; but then he wavered and changed his mind. The visitor continued in a low, fluent voice to press his point. He was a good-looking man in his rather cold way, but he wore pince-nez and these kept on catching the light so as to make his eyes invisible. This, combined with the almost unnatural perfection of his teeth, somehow gave Jane a disagreeable impression. And this was increased by the growing distress, and finally the terror, of the prisoner. She could not make out what it was that the visitor was proposing to him, but she did discover that the prisoner was under sentence of death. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that frightened him more than that. At this point the dream abandoned all pretence to realism and became ordinary nightmare. The visitor, adjusting his pince-nez and still smiling his cold smile, seized the prisoner’s head between his two hands. He gave it a sharp turn–just as Jane had last summer seen men give a sharp turn to the helmet on a diver’s head. The visitor unscrewed the prisoner’s head and took it away. Then all became confused. The Head was still the centre of the dream but it was quite a different head now–a head with a flowing white beard all covered with earth. It belonged to an old man whom some people were digging up in a kind of churchyard–a sort of ancient British, druidical kind of man, in a long mantle. Jane didn’t mind this much at first because she thought it was a corpse. Then suddenly she noticed that this ancient thing was coming to life. ‘Look out!’ she cried in her dream. ‘He’s alive. Stop! Stop! You’re waking him.’ But they did not stop. The old, buried man sat up and began talking in something that sounded vaguely like Spanish. And this for some reason frightened Jane so badly that she woke up.
That was the dream–no worse, if also no better, than many another nightmare. But it was not the mere memory of a nightmare that made the sitting room of the flat swim before Jane’s eyes and caused her to sit down quickly for fear she should fall. The trouble was elsewhere. There, on the back page of the newspaper, was the Head she had seen in the nightmare: the first head (if there had been two of them)–the head of the Prisoner. With extreme reluctance, she took up the paper. EXECUTION OF ALCASAN was the headline, and beneath it SCIENTIST BLUEBEARD GOES TO GUILLOTINE. She remembered having vaguely followed the case. Alcasan was a distinguished radiologist in a neighbouring country–an Arab by descent, they said–who had cut short an otherwise brilliant career by poisoning his wife. So that was the origin of her dream. She must have looked at this photo in the paper–the man certainly had a very unpleasant face–before going to bed. But no: that couldn’t be it. It was this morning’s paper. But, of course, there must have been some earlier picture which she had seen and forgotten–probably weeks ago when the trial began. It was silly to have let it give her such a turn. And now for Donne. Let’s see, where were we? The ambiguous passage at the end of Love’s Alchymie,
Hope not for minde in women; at their best
Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy possest.
‘Hope not for mind in women.’ Did any man really want mind in women? But that wasn’t the point. ‘I must get back my power of concentrating,’ said Jane; and then, ‘was there a previous picture of Alcasan? Supposing…’
Five minutes later she swept all her books away, went to the mirror, put on her hat, and went out. She was not quite sure where she was going. Anywhere, to be out of that room, that flat, that whole house.
Mark, himself, meanwhile, was walking down to Bracton College, and thinking of a very different matter. He did not notice at all the morning beauty of the little street that led him from the sandy hillside suburb where he and Jane lived down into the central and academic part of Edgestow.
Though I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or sausages or marmalades has yet come to industrialise the country town which is the setting of the University, and the University itself is tiny. Apart from Bracton and from the nineteenth-century women’s college beyond the railway, there are only two colleges: Northumberland which stands below Bracton on the river Wynd, and Duke’s opposite the Abbey. Bracton takes no undergraduates. It was founded in 1300 for the support of ten learned men whose duties were to pray for the soul of Henry de Bracton and to study the laws of England. The number of Fellows has gradually increased to forty, of whom only six (apart from the Bacon Professor) now study Law and of whom none, perhaps, prays for the soul of Bracton. Mark Studdock was himself a Sociologist and had been elected to a fellowship in that subject five years ago. He was beginning to find his feet. If he had felt any doubt on that point (which he did not) it would have been laid to rest when he found himself meeting Curry just outside the Post Office and seen how natural Curry found it that they should walk to College together and discuss the agenda for the meeting. Curry was the Sub-Warden of Bracton.
‘Yes,’ said Curry, ‘it will take the hell of a time. Probably go on after dinner. We shall have all the obstructionists wasting time as hard as they can. But luckily that’s the worst they can do.’
You would never have guessed from the tone of Studdock’s reply what intense pleasure he derived from Curry’s use of the pronoun ‘we’. So very recently he had been an outsider, watching the proceedings of what he then called ‘Curry and his gang’ with awe and with little understanding, and making at College meetings short, nervous speeches which never influenced the course of events. Now he was inside and ‘Curry and his gang’ had become ‘we’ or ‘the Progressive Element in College’. It had all happened quite suddenly and was still sweet in the mouth.
‘You think it’ll go through, then?’ said Studdock.
‘Sure to,’ said Curry. ‘We’ve got the Warden, and the Bursar, and all the chemical and bio-chemical people for a start. I’ve tackled Pelham and Ted and they’re sound. I’ve made Sancho believe that he sees the point and that he’s in favour of it. Bill the Blizzard will probably do something pretty devastating but he’s bound to side with us if it comes to a vote. Besides, I haven’t yet told you. Dick’s going to be there. He came up in time for dinner last night and got busy at once.’
Studdock’s mind darted hither and thither in search of some safe way to conceal the fact that he did not know who Dick was. In the nick of time he remembered a very obscure colleague whose Christian name was Richard.
‘Telford?’ said Studdock in a puzzled voice. He knew very well that Telford could not be the Dick that Curry meant and therefore threw a slightly whimsical and ironical tone into his question.
‘Good Lord! Telford!!’ said Curry with a laugh. ‘No. I mean Lord Feverstone–Dick Devine as he used to be.’
‘I was a little baffled by the idea of Telford,’ said Studdock, joining in the laugh. ‘I’m glad Feverstone is coming. I’ve never met him, you know.’
‘Oh, but you must,’ said Curry. ‘Look here, come and dine in my rooms tonight. I’ve asked him.’
‘I should like to very much,’ said Studdock quite truly. And then, after a pause, ‘By the way, I suppose Feverstone’s own position is quite secure?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Curry.
‘Well, there was some talk, if you remember, as to whether someone who was away quite so much could go on holding a fellowship.’
‘Oh, you mean Glossop and all that ramp. Nothing will come of that. Didn’t you think it absolute blah?’
‘As between ourselves, yes. But I confess if I were put up to explain in public exactly why a man who is nearly always in London should go on being a Fellow of Bracton, I shouldn’t find it altogether easy. The real reasons are the sort that Watson would call imponderables.’
‘I don’t agree. I shouldn’t have the least objection to explaining the real reasons in public. Isn’t it important for a college like this to have influential connections with the outer world? It’s not in the least impossible that Dick will be in the next Cabinet. Even already Dick in London has been a damn sight more use to the College than Glossop and half a dozen others of that sort have been by sitting here all their lives.’
‘Yes. Of course, that’s the real point. It would be a little difficult to put in that form at a College meeting, though!’
‘There’s one thing,’ said Curry in a slightly less intimate tone, ‘that perhaps you ought to know about Dick.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He got you your fellowship.’
Mark was silent. He did not like things which reminded him that he had once been not only outside the Progressive Element but even outside the College. He did not always like Curry either. His pleasure in being with him was not that sort of pleasure.
‘Yes,’ said Curry. ‘Denniston was your chief rival. Between ourselves, a good many people liked his papers better than yours. It was Dick who insisted all through that you were the sort of man we really wanted. He went around to Duke’s and ferreted out all about you. He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of man we need, and be damned to paper qualifications. And I must say he turned out to be right.’
‘Very kind of you,’ said Studdock, with a little mock bow. He was surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. It was an old rule at Bracton, as presumably in most colleges, that one never mentioned in the presence of a man the circumstances of his own election, and Studdock had not realised till now that this also was one of the traditions the Progressive Element was prepared to scrap. It had also never occurred to him that his own election had depended on anything but the excellence of his work in the fellowship examination: still less that it had been so narrow a thing. He was so accustomed to his position by now that this thought gave him the same curious sensation which a man has when he discovers that his father once very nearly married a different woman.
‘Yes,’ continued Curry, pursuing another train of thought. ‘One sees now that Denniston would never have done. Most emphatically not. A brilliant man at that time, of course, but he seems to have gone quite off the rails since then with all his Distributivism and what not. They tell me he’s likely to end up in a monastery.’
‘He’s no fool, all the same,’ said Studdock.
‘I’m glad you’re going to meet Dick,’ said Curry. ‘We haven’t time now, but there’s one thing about him I wanted to discuss with you.’
Studdock looked enquiringly at him.
‘James and I and one or two others,’ said Curry in a somewhat lower voice, ‘have been thinking he ought to be the new Warden. But here we are.’
‘It’s not yet twelve,’ said Studdock. ‘What about popping into the Bristol for a drink?’
Into the Bristol they accordingly went. It would not have been easy to preserve the atmosphere in which the Progressive Element operated without a good many of these little courtesies. This weighed harder on Studdock than on Curry who was unmarried and had a Sub-Warden’s stipend. But the Bristol was a very pleasant place. Studdock brought a double whiskey for his companion and half a pint of beer for himself.
The only time I was a guest at Bracton I persuaded my host to let me into the Wood and leave me there alone for an hour. He apologised for locking me in.
Very few people were allowed into Bragdon Wood. The gate was by Inigo Jones and was the only entry: a high wall enclosed the Wood, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile broad and a mile from east to west. If you came in from the street and went through the College to reach it, the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the Newton quadrangle which is dry and gravelly; florid, but beautiful, Gregorian buildings look down upon it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage, nearly dark at midday unless either the door into Hall should be open on your right or the buttery hatch on your left, giving you a glimpse of indoor daylight falling on panels, and a whiff of the smell of fresh bread. When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the medieval College: in the cloister of the much smaller quadrangle called Republic. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of Newton and the very stone of the buttresses that rise from it gives the impression of being soft and alive. Chapel is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead. You went along this cloister, past slabs and urns and busts that commemorate dead Bractonians, and then down shallow steps into the full daylight of the quadrangle called Lady Alice. The buildings to your left and right were seventeenth-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with dormer windows, mossy and grey-tiled. You were in a sweet, Protestant world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of Bunyan or of Walton’s Lives. There were no buildings straight ahead on the fourth side of Lady Alice: only a row of elms and a wall: and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of wood pigeons. The street was so far off by now that there were no other noises. In the wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with narrow windows on either side. Looking out through these, you discovered that you were crossing a bridge and the dark brown dimpled Wynd was flowing under you. Now you were very near your goal. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought you out on the Fellows’ bowling green, and across that you saw the high wall of the Wood, and through the Inigo Jones gate you caught a glimpse of sunlit green and deep shadows.
I suppose the mere fact of being walled in gave the Wood part of its peculiar quality, for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. As I went forward over the quiet turf I had the sense of being received. The trees were just so wide apart that one saw uninterrupted foliage in the distance but the place where one stood seemed always to be a clearing; surrounded by a world of shadows, one walked in mild sunshine. Except for the sheep whose nibbling kept the grass so short and who sometimes raised their long, foolish faces to stare at me, I was quite alone; and it felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house than like any ordinary solitude out of doors. I remember thinking, ‘This is the sort of place which, as a child, one would have been rather afraid of or else would have liked very much indeed.’ A moment later I thought, ‘But when alone–really alone–everyone is a child: or no one?’ Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
Half a mile is a short walk. Yet it seemed a long time before I came to the centre of the Wood. I knew it was the centre, for there was the thing I had chiefly come to see. It was a well: a well with steps going down to it and the remains of an ancient pavement about it. It was very imperfect now. I did not step on it, but I lay down in the grass and touched it with my fingers. For this was the heart of Bracton or Bragdon Wood: out of this all the legends had come and on this, I suspected, the very existence of the College had originally depended. The archaeologists were agreed that the masonry was very late British-Roman work, done on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. How Bragdon the wood was connected with Bracton the lawyer was a mystery, but I fancy myself that the Bracton family had availed themselves of an accidental similarity in the names to believe, or make believe, that they had something to do with it. Certainly, if all that was told were true, or even half of it, the Wood was older than the Bractons. I suppose no one now would attach much importance to Strabo’s Balachthon though it had led a sixteenth-century Warden of the College to say that ‘We know not by ancientest report of any Britain without Bragdon.’ But the medieval song takes us back to the fourteenth century.
In Bragdon bricht this ende dai
Herde ich Merlin ther he lai
Singende woo and welawai.
It is good enough evidence that the well with the British-Roman pavement was already ‘Merlin’s Well’, though the name is not found till Queen Elizabeth’s reign when good Warden Shovel surrounded the Wood with a wall ‘for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, may games, dancings, mummings, and baking of Morgan’s bread, heretofore used about the fountain called in vanity Merlin’s Well, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufrey of papistry, gentilism, lewdness and dunsicall folly’. Not that the College had by this action renounced its own interest in the place. Old Dr Shovel, who lived to be nearly a hundred, can scarcely have been cold in his grave when one of Cromwell’s Major Generals, conceiving it his business to destroy ‘the groves and the high places’, sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people for this pious work. The scheme came to nothing in the end; but there had been a bicker between the College and the troopers in the heart of Bragdon, and the fabulously learned and saintly Richard Crowe had been killed by a musket-ball on the very steps of the Well. He would be a brave man who would accuse Crowe either of popery or ‘gentilism’; yet the story is that his last words had been, ‘Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?’ And always, through all changes, every Warden of Bracton, on the day of his election, had drunk a ceremonial draught of water from Merlin’s Well in the great cup which, both for its antiquity and beauty, was the greatest of the Bracton treasures.
All of this I thought of, lying beside Merlin’s Well, beside the well which must certainly date from Merlin’s time if there had ever been a real Merlin: lying where Sir Kenelm Digby had lain all one summer night and seen a certain strange appearance: where Collins the poet had lain, and where George the Third had cried: where the brilliant and much-loved Nathaniel Fox had composed the famous poem three weeks before he was killed in France. The air was so still and the billows of foliage so heavy above me, that I fell asleep. I was wakened by my friend hallooing to me from a long way off.
The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the NICE, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would worthily house this remarkable organisation. The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints –‘red tape’ was the word its supporters used–which have hitherto hampered research in this country. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime. The building proposed for it was one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of New York, the staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Senate of Edgestow had lured the new Institute away from Oxford, from Cambridge, from London. It had thought of all these in turn as possible scenes for its labours. At times the Progressive Element in Edgestow had almost despaired. But success was now practically certain. If the NICE could get the necessary land, it would come to Edgestow. And once it came, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move. Curry had even expressed a doubt whether, eventually, Oxford and Cambridge could survive as major universities at all.
Three years ago, if Mark Studdock had come to a College Meeting at which such a question was to be decided, he would have expected to hear the claims of sentiment against progress and beauty against utility openly debated. Today, as he took his seat in the Soler, the long upper room on the south of Lady Alice, he expected no such matter. He knew now that that was not the way things are done.
The Progressive Element managed its business really very well. Most of the Fellows did not know when they came into the Soler that there was any question of selling the Wood. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that item Fifteen was ‘Sale of College land’, but as that appeared at almost every College Meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand, they did see that item One was ‘Questions about Bragdon Wood’. These were not concerned with the proposed sale. Curry, who rose as Sub-Warden to introduce them, had a few letters to read to the College. The first was from a society concerned for the preservation of ancient monuments. I think myself that this society had been ill-advised to make two complaints in one letter. It would have been wiser if they had confined themselves to drawing the College’s attention to the disrepair of the wall round the Wood. When they went on to urge the desirability of building some protection over the Well itself, and even to point out that they had urged this before, the College began to be restive. And when, as a kind of afterthought, they expressed a wish that the College could be a little more accommodating to serious antiquaries who wanted to examine the Well, the College became definitely ill-tempered. I would not like to accuse a man in Curry’s position of misreading a letter; but his reading of this letter was certainly not such as to gloss over any defects in the tone of the original composition. Before he sat down, nearly every one in the room desired strongly to make the outer world understand that Bragdon Wood was the private property of Bracton College and that the outer world had better mind its own business. Then he rose again to read another letter. This was from a society of Spiritualists who wanted leave to investigate the ‘reported phenomena’ in the Wood–a letter ‘connected’, as Curry said, ‘with the next which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now read to you.’ This was from a firm who had heard of the Spiritualists’ proposal and wanted permission to make a film, not exactly of the phenomena, but of the Spiritualists looking for the phenomena. Curry was directed to write short refusals to all three letters.
Then came a new voice from quite a different part of the Soler. Lord Feverstone had risen. He fully agreed with the action which the College had taken about these impertinent letters from various busybodies outside. But was it not, after all, a fact, that the wall of the Wood was in a very unsatisfactory condition? A good many Fellows–Studdock was not one of them–imagined they were watching a revolt on Feverstone’s part against ‘Curry and his gang’ and became intensely interested. Almost at once the Bursar, James Busby, was on his feet. He welcomed Lord Feverstone’s question. In his Bursarial capacity he had recently taken expert advice about the wall of the Wood. ‘Unsatisfactory’ was, he feared, much too mild a word to describe its condition. Nothing but a complete new wall would really meet the situation. With great difficulty the probable cost of this was elicited from him; and when the College heard the figure it gasped. Lord Feverstone inquired icily whether the Bursar was seriously proposing that the College should undertake such an expense. Busby (a very large ex-clergyman with a bushy black beard) replied with some temper that he had proposed nothing: if he were to make a suggestion, it would be that the question could not be treated in isolation from some important financial considerations which it would become his duty to lay before them later in the day. There was a pause at this ominous statement, until gradually, one by one, the ‘outsiders’ and ‘obstructionists’, the men not included in the Progressive Element, began coming into the debate. Most of these found it hard to believe that nothing short of a complete new wall would be any use. The Progressive Element let them talk for nearly ten minutes. Then it looked once again as if Lord Feverstone were actually leading the outsiders. He wanted to know whether it was possible that the Bursar and the Preservation Committee could really find no alternative between building a new wall and allowing Bragdon Wood to degenerate into a common. He pressed for an answer. Some of the outsiders even began to feel that he was being too rude to the Bursar. At last the Bursar answered in a low voice that he had in a purely theoretical way got some facts about possible alternatives. A barbed wire fence–but the rest was drowned in a roar of disapproval, during which old Canon Jewel was heard to say that he would sooner have every tree in the Wood felled to the ground than see it caged in barbed wire. Finally, the matter was postponed for consideration at the next meeting.
The next item was one of those which the majority of the Fellows could not understand. It involved the recapitulation (by Curry) of a long correspondence between the College and the Senate of the University about the proposed incorporation of the NICE in the University of Edgestow. The words ‘committed to’ kept recurring in the debate that followed. ‘We appear,’ said Watson, ‘to have pledged ourselves as a college to the fullest possible support of the new Institute.’ ‘We appear,’ said Feverstone, ‘to have tied ourselves up hand and foot and given the University carte blanche.’ What all this actually amounted to never became clear to any of the outsiders. They remembered fighting hard at a previous meeting against the NICE and all its works, and being defeated; but every effort to find out what their defeat had meant, though answered with great lucidity by Curry, served only to entangle them further in the impenetrable mazes of the university constitution and the still darker mystery of the relations between University and College. The result of the discussion was to leave them under the impression that the honour of the College was not involved in the establishment of the NICE at Edgestow.
During this item the thoughts of more than one Fellow had turned to lunch, and attention had wandered. But when Curry rose at five minutes to one to introduce item Three, there was a sharp revival of interest. It was called, ‘Rectification of an anomaly of the Stipends of Junior Fellows.’ I would not like to say what the most junior Fellows of Bracton were getting at this time, but I believe it hardly covered the expenses of their residence in College, which was compulsory. Studdock who had only recently emerged from this class felt great sympathy with them. He understood the look in their faces. The Rectification, if it went through, would mean to them clothes and holidays and meat for lunch and a chance to buy a half, instead of a fifth, of the books they needed. All their eyes were fixed on the Bursar when he rose to reply to Curry’s proposals. He hoped that no one would imagine he approved the anomaly which had, in 1910, excluded the lowest class of the Fellows from the new clauses in the eighteenth paragraph of Statute 17. He felt sure that every one present would wish it to be rectified; but it was his duty, as Bursar, to point out that this was the second proposal involving very heavy expenditure which had come before them that morning. He could only say of this, as he had said of the previous proposal, that it could not be isolated from the whole problem of the present financial position of the College, which he hoped to lay before them during the course of the afternoon. A great deal more was said, but the Bursar remained unanswered, the matter was postponed, and when, at quarter to two, the Fellows came surging out of the Soler for lunch, hungry and headachy and ravenous for tobacco, every junior had it fixed in his mind that a new wall for the Wood and a rise in his own stipend were strictly exclusive alternatives. ‘That darn Wood has been in our way all morning,’ said one. ‘We’re not out of it yet,’ answered another.
In this frame of mind, the College returned to the Soler after lunch to consider its finances. Busby, the Bursar, was naturally the principal speaker. It is very hot in the Soler on a sunny afternoon; and the smooth flow of the Bursar’s exposition, and even the flashing of his level, white teeth above his beard (he had remarkably fine teeth) had a sort of hypnotic power. Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who became Fellows of colleges. They gathered that the situation was bad, very bad, indeed. Some of the youngest and most inexperienced members ceased to wonder whether they would get a new wall or a rise of stipend and began to wonder instead whether the College would continue to function at all. The times, as the Bursar so truly said, were extraordinarily difficult. Older members had heard of such times very often before from dozens of previous Bursars and were less disturbed. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Bursar of Bracton was in any way misrepresenting the position. It is very seldom that the affairs of a large corporation, indefinitely committed to the advancement of learning, can be described as being, in a quite unambiguous sense, satisfactory. His delivery was excellent. Each sentence was a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their own fault. Some minor retrenchments and reinvestments which he suggested were unanimously approved and the College adjourned for tea in a chastened mood. Studdock rang up Jane and told her he would not be home for dinner.
It was not till six o’clock that all the converging lines of thought and feeling aroused by the earlier business came together upon the question of selling Bragdon Wood. It was not called, ‘the sale of Bragdon Wood’. The Bursar called it the ‘sale of the area coloured pink on the plan which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now pass round the table’. He pointed out quite frankly that this involved the loss of part of the Wood. In fact, the proposed NICE site still left to the College a strip about sixteen feet broad along the far half of the south side but there was no deception for the Fellows had the plan to look at with their own eyes. It was a small scale plan and not perhaps perfectly accurate–only meant to give one a general idea. In answer to questions he admitted that unfortunately –or perhaps fortunately–the Well itself was in the area which the NICE wanted. The rights of the College to access would, of course, be guaranteed; and the Well and its pavement would be preserved by the Institute in a manner to satisfy all the archaeologists in the world. He refrained from offering any advice and merely mentioned the quite astonishing figure which the NICE was offering. After that, the meeting became lively. The advantages of the sale discovered themselves one by one like ripe fruit dropping into the hand. It solved the problem of the wall; it solved the problem of protecting ancient monuments; it solved the financial problem; it looked like solving the problem of the junior Fellows’ stipends. It appeared further that the NICE regarded this as the only possible site in Edgestow; if by any chance Bracton would not sell, the whole scheme miscarried and the Institute would undoubtedly go to Cambridge. It was even drawn out of the Bursar by much questioning that he knew of a Cambridge college very anxious to sell.
The few real ‘Die-hards’ present, to whom Bragdon Wood was almost a basic assumption of life, could hardly bring themselves to realise what was happening. When they found their voices, they struck a discordant note amid the general buzz of cheerful comment. They were manoeuvred into the position of appearing as the party who passionately desired to see Bragdon surrounded with barbed wire. When at last old Jewel, blind and shaky and almost weeping, rose to his feet, his voice was hardly audible. Men turned round to gaze at, and some to admire, the clear-cut, half-childish face and the white hair which had become more conspicuous as the long room grew darker. But only those close to him could hear what he said. At this moment Lord Feverstone sprang to his feet, folded his arms, and looking straight at the old man said in a very loud, clear voice:
‘If Canon Jewel wishes us not to hear his views, I suggest that his end could be better attained by silence.’
Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. For a moment as he stood with his head thrust forward, people thought he was going to reply. Then quite suddenly he spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness, shrunk back, and began laboriously to resume his chair.
The motion was carried.
After leaving the flat that morning Jane also had gone down to Edgestow and bought a hat. She had before now expressed some contempt for the kind of woman who buys hats, as a man buys drinks, for a stimulant and a consolation. It did not occur to her that she was doing so herself on this occasion. She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds–clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety–and because of this preference, she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said, ‘Hullo dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.’
Cecil Dimble, a Fellow of Northumberland, had been Jane’s tutor for her last year as a student and Mrs Dimble (one tended to call her Mother Dimble) had been a kind of unofficial aunt to all the girls of her year. A liking for the female pupils of one’s husband is not, perhaps, so common as might be wished among dons’ wives; but Mrs Dimble appeared to like all Dr Dimble’s pupils of both sexes and the Dimbles’ house, away on the far side of the river, was a kind of noisy salon all the term. She had been particularly fond of Jane with that kind of affection which a humorous, easy natured and childless woman sometimes feels for a girl whom she thinks pretty and rather absurd. For the last year or so Jane had been somewhat losing sight of the Dimbles and felt rather guilty about it. She accepted the invitation to lunch.
They drove over the bridge to the north of Bracton and then south along the bank of the Wynd, past the cottages, then left and eastward at the Norman church and down the straight road with the poplars on one side and the wall of Bragdon Wood on the other, and so finally to the Dimbles’ front door.
‘How lovely it’s looking,’ said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.
‘You’d better take a good look at it then,’ said Dr Dimble.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jane.
‘Haven’t you told her?’ said Dr Dimble to his wife.
‘I haven’t screwed myself up to it yet,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Besides, poor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Jane.
‘Your own College is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.’
‘Oh, Mrs Dimble!’ exclaimed Jane. ‘And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.’
‘There you are!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality–’
‘Mark never talks to me about College business.’
‘Good husbands never do,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘At least, only about the business of other people’s colleges. That’s why Margaret knows all about Bracton and nothing about Northumberland. Is no one coming in to have lunch?’
Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.
‘You’ll have to wait for lunch till I’ve seen Jane’s new hat,’ said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Mrs Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter. When the hat was being put away again Mrs Dimble suddenly said,
‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
‘Wrong?’ said Jane. ‘Why? What should there be?’
‘You’re not looking yourself.’
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Jane aloud. Mentally she added, ‘She’s dying to know whether I’m going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is.’
‘Do you hate being kissed?’ said Mrs Dimble unexpectedly.
‘Do I hate being kissed?’ thought Jane to herself. ‘That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women–’ She had intended to reply, ‘Of course not,’ but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. When she thought of her childhood, Jane usually remembered those occasions on which the voluminous embrace of Nurse or Mother had been unwelcome and resisted as an insult to one’s maturity; now, for the moment, she was back in those forgotten, yet infrequent, times when fear or misery induced a willing surrender and surrender brought comfort. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life; yet, before they went downstairs, she had told Mrs Dimble that she was not going to have a baby, but was a bit depressed from being very much alone, and from a nightmare.
During lunch Dr Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. ‘It’s really wonderful,’ he said, ‘how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background –on the other side of Arthur, so to speak–there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan “set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses”. Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?’
‘How do you mean, Dr Dimble?’ said Jane.
‘Well, wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin–something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But further up country, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the druidical religion.’
‘And what would Arthur himself have been?’ said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words ‘rather like Spanish’.
‘That’s just the point,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There’d be jealousy from his own British family, and the Romanised section–the Launcelots and Lionels–would look down on the Britons. That’d be why Kay is always represented as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that under-tow, that tug back to druidism.’
‘And where would Merlin be?’
‘Yes…He’s the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil; yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail. He’s “the devil’s son”; but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad after all. You remember, “There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.”’
‘It is rather puzzling. I hadn’t thought of it before.’
‘I often wonder,’ said Dr Dimble, ‘whether Merlin doesn’t represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about–something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers.’
‘What a horrid idea,’ said Mrs Dimble, who had noticed that Jane seemed to be preoccupied. ‘Anyway, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all and he’s safely dead and buried under Bragdon Wood as every one of us knows.’
‘Buried but not dead, according to the story,’ corrected Dr Dimble.
‘Ugh!’ said Jane involuntarily, but Dr Dimble was musing aloud.
‘I wonder what they will find if they start digging up that place for the foundations of their NICE,’ he said.
‘First mud and then water,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘That’s why they can’t really build it there.’
‘So you’d think,’ said her husband. ‘And if so, why should they want to come here at all? A little cockney like Jules is not likely to be influenced by any poetic fancy about Merlin’s mantle having fallen on him!’
‘Merlin’s mantle indeed!’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘it’s a rum idea. I daresay some of his set would like to recover the mantle well enough. Whether they’ll be big enough to fill it is another matter! I don’t think they’d like it if the old man himself came back to life along with it.’
‘That child’s going to faint,’ said Mrs Dimble, suddenly jumping up.
‘Hullo! What’s the matter?’ said Dr Dimble, looking with amazement at Jane’s face. ‘Is the room too hot for you?’
‘Oh, it’s too ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘Let’s come into the drawing room,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘Here. Lean on my arm.’
A little later, in the drawing room, seated beside a window that opened onto the lawn, now strewn with bright yellow leaves, Jane attempted to excuse her absurd behaviour by telling the story of her dream. ‘I suppose I’ve given myself away dreadfully,’ she said. ‘You can both start psycho-analysing me now.’
From Dr Dimble’s face, Jane might have indeed conjectured that her dream had shocked him exceedingly. ‘Extraordinary thing… most extraordinary,’ he kept muttering. ‘Two heads. And one of them Alcasan’s. Now is that a false scent…?’
‘Don’t, Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘Do you think I ought to be analysed?’ said Jane.
‘Analysed?’ said Dr Dimble, glancing at her as if he had not quite understood. ‘Oh, I see. You mean going to Brizeacre or someone of that sort?’ Jane realised that her question had recalled him from some quite different train of thought and even –disconcertingly–that the problem of her own health had been shouldered aside. The telling of her dream had raised some other problem, though what this was she could not even imagine.
Dr Dimble looked out of the window. ‘There is my dullest pupil just ringing the bell,’ he said. ‘I must go to the study, and listen to an essay on Swift beginning, “Swift was born.” Must try to keep my mind on it, too, which won’t be easy.’ He rose and stood for a moment with his hand on Jane’s shoulder. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to give any advice. But if you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you.’
‘You don’t believe in Mr Brizeacre?’ said Jane.
‘I can’t explain,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘Not now. It’s all so complicated. Try not to bother about it. But if you do, just let us know first. Good-bye.’
Almost immediately after his departure some other visitors arrived, so that there was no opportunity of further private conversation between Jane and her hostess. She left the Dimbles about half an hour later and walked home, not along the road with the poplars but by the footpath across the common, past the donkeys and the geese, with the towers and spires of Edgestow to her left and the old windmill on the horizon to her right.
2 (#ulink_f24a2a3a-8d86-5ba1-a636-2ce965d7b574)
Dinner with the Sub-Warden (#ulink_f24a2a3a-8d86-5ba1-a636-2ce965d7b574)
‘This is a blow!’ said Curry standing in front of the fireplace in his magnificent rooms which overlooked Newton. They were the best set in College.
‘Something from NO?’ said James Busby. He and Lord Feverstone and Mark were all drinking sherry before dining with Curry. NO, which stood for Non-Olet, was the nickname of Charles Place, the Warden of Bracton. His election to this post, some fifteen years before, had been one of the earliest triumphs of the Progressive Element. By dint of saying that the College needed ‘new blood’ and must be shaken out of its ‘academic grooves’, they had succeeded in bringing in an elderly civil servant who had certainly never been contaminated by academic weaknesses since he left his rather obscure Cambridge college in the previous century, but who had written a monumental report on National Sanitation. The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Diehards, who replied by christening their new Warden Non-Olet. But gradually even Place’s supporters had adopted the name. For Place had not answered their expectations, having turned out to be a dyspeptic with a taste for philately, whose voice was so seldom heard that some of the junior Fellows did not know what it sounded like.
‘Yes, blast him,’ said Curry, ‘wishes to see me on a most important matter as soon as I can conveniently call on him after dinner.’
‘That means,’ said the Bursar, ‘that Jewel and Co. have been getting at him and want to find some way of going back on the whole business.’
‘I don’t give a damn for that,’ said Curry. ‘How can you go back on a Resolution? It isn’t that. But it’s enough to muck up the whole evening.’
‘Only your evening,’ said Feverstone. ‘Don’t forget to leave out that very special brandy of yours before you go.’
‘Jewel! Good God!’ said Busby, burying his left hand in his beard.
‘I was rather sorry for old Jewel,’ said Mark. His motives for saying this were very mixed. To do him justice, it must be said that the quite unexpected and apparently unnecessary brutality of Feverstone’s behaviour to the old man had disgusted him. And then, too, the whole idea of his debt to Feverstone in the matter of his own fellowship had been rankling all day. Who was this man Feverstone? But paradoxically, even while he felt that the time had come for asserting his own independence and showing that his agreement with all the methods of the Progressive Element must not be taken for granted, he also felt that a little independence would raise him to a higher position within that Element itself. If the idea ‘Feverstone will think all the more of you for showing your teeth’ had occurred to him in so many words, he would probably have rejected it as servile; but it didn’t.
‘Sorry for Jewel?’ said Curry wheeling round. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in his prime.’
‘I agree with you,’ said Feverstone to Mark, ‘but then I take the Clausewitz view. Total war is the most humane in the long run. I shut him up instantaneously. Now that he’s got over the shock, he’s quite enjoying himself because I’ve fully confirmed everything he’s been saying about the Younger Generation for the last forty years. What was the alternative? To let him drivel on until he’d worked himself into a coughing fit or a heart attack, and give him in addition the disappointment of finding that he was treated civilly.’
‘That’s a point of view, certainly,’ said Mark.
‘Damn it all,’ continued Feverstone, ‘no man likes to have his stock in trade taken away. What would poor Curry, here, do if the Die-hards one day all refused to do any Die-harding? Othello’s occupation would be gone.’
‘Dinner is served, Sir,’ said Curry’s ‘Shooter’–for that is what they call a College servant at Bracton.
‘That’s all rot, Dick,’ said Curry as they sat down. ‘There’s nothing I should like better than to see the end of all these Die-hards and obstructionists and be able to get on with the job. You don’t suppose I like having to spend all my time merely getting the road clear?’ Mark noticed that his host was a little nettled at Lord Feverstone’s banter. The latter had an extremely virile and infectious laugh. Mark felt he was beginning to like him.
‘The job being…?’ said Feverstone, not exactly glancing, much less winking, at Mark, but making him feel that he was somehow being included in the fun.
‘Well, some of us have got work of our own to do,’ replied Curry, dropping his voice to give it a more serious tone, almost as some people drop their voices to speak of medical or religious matters.
‘I never knew you were that sort of person,’ said Feverstone.
‘That’s the worst of the whole system,’ said Curry. ‘In a place like this you’ve either got to be content to see everything go to pieces–I mean, become stagnant–or else to sacrifice your own career as a scholar to all these infernal college politics. One of these days I shall chuck that side of it and get down to my book. The stuff’s all there, you know, Feverstone. One long vacation clear and I really believe I could put it into shape.’
Mark, who had never seen Curry baited before, was beginning to enjoy himself.
‘I see,’ said Feverstone. ‘In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning.’
‘Exactly!’ said Curry. ‘That’s just–’ and then stopped, uncertain whether he was being taken quite seriously. Feverstone burst into laughter. The Bursar who had up till now been busily engaged in eating, wiped his beard carefully and spoke seriously.
‘All that’s very well in theory,’ he said, ‘but I think Curry’s quite right. Supposing he resigned his office as Sub-Warden and retired into his cave. He might give us a thundering good book on economics–’
‘Economics?’ said Feverstone lifting his eyebrows.
‘I happen to be a military historian, James,’ said Curry. He was often somewhat annoyed at the difficulty which his colleagues seemed to find in remembering what particular branch of learning he had been elected to pursue.
‘I mean military history, of course,’ said Busby. ‘As I say, he might give us a thundering good book on military history. But it would be superseded in twenty years. Whereas the work he is actually doing for the College will benefit it for centuries. This whole business, now, of bringing the NICE to Edgestow. What about a thing like that, Feverstone? I’m not speaking merely of the financial side of it, though as Bursar I naturally rate that pretty high. But think of the new life, the awakening of new vision, the stirring of dormant impulses. What would any book on economics–’
‘Military history,’ said Feverstone gently, but this time Busby did not hear him.
‘What would any book on economics be, compared with a thing like that?’ he continued. ‘I look upon it as the greatest triumph of practical idealism that this century has yet seen.’
The good wine was beginning to do its good office. We have all known the kind of clergyman who tends to forget his clerical collar after the third glass; but Busby’s habit was the reverse. It was after the third glass that he began to remember his collar. As wine and candlelight loosened his tongue, the parson still latent within him after thirty years’ apostasy began to wake into a strange galvanic life.
‘As you chaps know,’ he said, ‘I make no claim to orthodoxy. But if religion is understood in the deepest sense, I have no hesitation in saying that Curry, by bringing the NICE to Edgestow, has done more for it in one year than Jewel has done in his whole life.’
‘Well,’ said Curry modestly, ‘that’s rather the sort of thing one had hoped. I mightn’t put it exactly as you do, James–’
‘No, no,’ said the Bursar, ‘of course not. We all have our different languages; but we all really mean the same thing.’
‘Has anyone discovered,’ asked Feverstone, ‘what, precisely, the NICE is, or what it intends to do?’
Curry looked at him with a slightly startled expression. ‘That comes oddly from you, Dick,’ he said. ‘I thought you were in on it, yourself.’
‘Isn’t it a little naïf,’ said Feverstone, ‘to suppose that being in on a thing involves any distinct knowledge of its official programme?’
‘Oh well, if you mean details,’ said Curry, and then stopped.
‘Surely, Feverstone,’ said Busby, ‘you’re making a great mystery about nothing. I should have thought the objects of the NICE were pretty clear. It’s the first attempt to take applied science seriously from the national point of view. The difference in scale between it and anything we’ve had before amounts to a difference in kind. The buildings alone, the apparatus alone –! Think what it has done already for industry. Think how it is going to mobilise all the talent of the country; and not only scientific talent in the narrower sense. Fifteen departmental directors at fifteen thousand a year each! Its own legal staff! Its own police, I’m told! Its own permanent staff of architects, surveyors, engineers! The thing’s stupendous!’
‘Careers for our sons,’ said Feverstone. ‘I see.’
‘What do you mean by that, Lord Feverstone?’ said Busby putting down his glass.
‘Lord!’ said Feverstone, his eyes laughing, ‘what a brick to drop. I’d quite forgotten you had a family, James.’
‘I agree with James,’ said Curry, who had been waiting somewhat impatiently to speak. ‘The NICE marks the beginning of a new era–the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day and they’ve got a wonderful gadget–I was shown the model last time I was in town–by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice-Board every half hour. Then, that report slides itself into the right position where it’s connected up by little arrows with all the relevant parts of the other reports. A glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole Institute actually taking shape under your own eyes. There’ll be a staff of at least twenty experts at the top of the building working this Notice-Board in a room rather like the Tube control rooms. It’s a marvellous gadget. The different kinds of business all come out in the Board in different coloured lights. It must have cost half a million. They call it a Pragmatometer.’
‘And there,’ said Busby, ‘you see again what the Institute is already doing for the country. Pragmatometry is going to be a big thing. Hundreds of people are going in for it. Why this Analytical Notice-Board will probably be out of date before the building is finished!’
‘Yes, by Jove,’ said Feverstone, ‘and NO himself told me this morning that the sanitation of the Institute was going to be something quite out of the ordinary.’
‘So it is,’ said Busby sturdily. ‘I don’t see why one should think that unimportant.’
‘And what do you think about it, Studdock?’ said Feverstone.
‘I think,’ said Mark, ‘that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.’
‘Damn,’ said Curry, looking at his watch. ‘I’ll have to go and talk to NO now. If you people would like any brandy when you’ve finished your wine, it’s in that cupboard. You’ll find balloon glasses on the shelf above. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You’re not going, James, are you?’
‘Yes,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’m going to bed early. Don’t let me break up the party for you two. I’ve been on my legs nearly all day, you know. A man’s a fool to hold any office in this College. Continual anxiety. Crushing responsibility. And then you get people suggesting that all the little research-beetles who never poke their noses outside their libraries and laboratories are the real workers! I’d like to see Glossop or any of that lot face the sort of day’s work I’ve had today. Curry, my lad, you’d have had an easier life if you’d stuck to economics.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ began Curry, but the Bursar, now risen, was bending over Lord Feverstone and telling him a funny story.
As soon as the two men had got out of the room, Lord Feverstone looked steadily at Mark for some seconds with an enigmatic expression. Then he chuckled. Then the chuckle developed into a laugh. He threw his lean, muscular body well back into his chair and laughed louder and louder. He was very infectious in his laughter and Mark found himself laughing too–quite sincerely and even helplessly, like a child. ‘Pragmatometers–palatial lavatories–practical idealism,’ gasped Feverstone. It was a moment of extraordinary liberation for Mark. All sorts of things about Curry and Busby which he had not previously noticed, or else, noticing, had slurred over in his reverence for the Progressive Element, came back to his mind. He wondered how he could have been so blind to the funny side of them.
‘It really is rather devastating,’ said Feverstone when he had partially recovered, ‘that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel the moment you ask them about the things themselves.’
‘And yet they are, in a sense, the brains of Bracton,’ said Mark.
‘Good Lord no! Glossop and Bill the Blizzard, and even old Jewel, have ten times their intelligence.’
‘I didn’t know you took that view.’
‘I think Glossop, etc., are quite mistaken. I think their idea of culture and knowledge and what not is unrealistic. I don’t think it fits the world we’re living in. It’s a mere fantasy. But it is quite a clear idea and they follow it out consistently. They know what they want. But our two poor friends, though they can be persuaded to take the right train, or even to drive it, haven’t a ghost of a notion where it’s going to, or why. They’ll sweat blood to bring the NICE to Edgestow: that’s why they’re indispensable. But what the point of the NICE is, what the point of anything is–ask them another. Pragmatometry! Fifteen sub-directors!’
‘Well, perhaps I’m in the same boat myself.’
‘Not at all. You saw the point at once. I knew you would. I’ve read everything you’ve written since you were in for your fellowship. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Mark was silent. The giddy sensation of being suddenly whirled up from one plane of secrecy to another, coupled with the growing effect of Curry’s excellent port, prevented him from speaking.
‘I want you to come into the Institute,’ said Feverstone.
‘You mean–to leave Bracton?’
‘That makes no odds. Anyway, I don’t suppose there’s anything you want here. We’d make Curry Warden when NO retires and–’
‘They were talking of making you Warden.’
‘God!’ said Feverstone and stared. Mark realised that from Feverstone’s point of view this was like the suggestion that he should become Headmaster of a small idiots’ school, and thanked his stars that his own remark had not been uttered in a tone that made it obviously serious. Then they both laughed again.
‘You,’ said Feverstone, ‘would be absolutely wasted as Warden. That’s the job for Curry. He’ll do it very well. You want a man who loves business and wire-pulling for their own sake and doesn’t really ask what it’s all about. If he did, he’d start bringing in his own–well, I suppose he’d call them “ideas”. As it is, we’ve only got to tell him that he thinks so-and-so is a man the College wants, and he will think it. And then he’ll never rest till so-and-so gets a fellowship. That’s what we want the College for: a drag net, a recruiting office.’
‘A recruiting office for the NICE, you mean?’
‘Yes, in the first instance. But it’s only part of the general show.’
‘I’m not sure that I know what you mean.’
‘You soon will. The Home Side, and all that, you know! It sounds rather in Busby’s style to say that Humanity is at the cross-roads. But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on–obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t–well, we’re done.’
‘Go on.’
‘There are three main problems. First, the interplanetary problem–’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, that doesn’t really matter. We can’t do anything about that at present. The only man who could help was Weston.’
‘He was killed in a blitz, wasn’t he?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Murdered?’
‘I’m pretty sure of it, and I’ve a shrewd idea who the murderer was.’
‘Good God! Can nothing be done?’
‘There’s no evidence. The murderer is a respectable Cambridge don with weak eyes, a game leg, and a fair beard. He’s dined in this College.’
‘What was Weston murdered for?’
‘For being on our side. The murderer is one of the enemy.’
‘You don’t mean to say he murdered him for that?’
‘Yes,’ said Feverstone, bringing his hand down smartly on the table. ‘That’s just the point. You’ll hear people like Curry or James burbling away about the “war” against reaction. It never enters their heads that it might be a real war with real casualties. They think the violent resistance of the other side ended with the persecution of Galileo and all that. But don’t believe it. It is just seriously beginning. They know now that we have at last got real powers: that the question of what humanity is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years. They’re going to fight every inch. They’ll stop at nothing.’
‘They can’t win,’ said Mark.
‘We’ll hope not,’ said Lord Feverstone. ‘I think they can’t. That is why it is of such immense importance to each of us to choose the right side. If you try to be neutral you become simply a pawn.’
‘Oh, I haven’t any doubt which is my side,’ said Mark. ‘Hang it all–the preservation of the human race–it’s a pretty rock-bottom obligation.’
‘Well, personally,’ said Feverstone, ‘I’m not indulging in any Busbyisms about that. It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too. Both can be explained psycho-analytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting–specially on the winning side.’
‘And what is the first practical step?’
‘Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on one side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.’
‘Go on. This interests me very much.’
‘Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest–which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.’
‘What sort of thing have you in mind?’
‘Quite simple and obvious things, at first–sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no “take-it-or-leave-it” nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…’
‘But this is stupendous, Feverstone.’
‘It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.’
‘That’s my trouble. Don’t think it’s false modesty, but I haven’t yet seen how I can contribute.’
‘No, but we have. You are what we need: a trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write.’
‘You don’t mean you want me to write up all this?’
‘No. We want you to write it down–to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan’t have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We’ll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is–the word “experiment” is unpopular, but not the word “experimental”. You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!’
‘You don’t mean that this–er–journalistic side would be my main job?’
‘It’s nothing to do with journalism. Your readers in the first instance would be Committees of the House of Commons, not the public. But that would only be a side line. As for the job itself–why, it’s impossible to say how it might develop. Talking to a man like you, I don’t stress the financial side. You’d start at something quite modest: say about fifteen hundred a year.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ said Mark, flushing with pure excitement.
‘Of course,’ said Feverstone, ‘I ought to warn you, there is the danger. Not yet, perhaps. But when things really begin to hum, it’s quite on the cards they may try to bump you off, like poor old Weston.’
‘I don’t think I was thinking about that either,’ said Mark.
‘Look here,’ said Feverstone. ‘Let me run you across tomorrow to see John Wither. He told me to bring you for the week-end if you were interested. You’ll meet all the important people there and it’ll give you a chance to make up your mind.’
‘How does Wither come into it? I thought Jules was the head of the NICE.’ Jules was a distinguished novelist and scientific populariser whose name always appeared before the public in connection with the new Institute.
‘Jules! Hell’s bells!’ said Feverstone. ‘You don’t imagine that little mascot has anything to say to what really goes on? He’s all right for selling the Institute to the great British public in the Sunday papers and he draws a whacking salary. He’s no use for work. There’s nothing inside his head except some nineteenth-century socialist stuff, and blah about the rights of man. He’s just about got as far as Darwin!’
‘Oh quite,’ said Mark. ‘I was always rather puzzled at his being in the show at all. Do you know, since you’re so kind, I think I’d better accept your offer and go over to Wither’s for the week-end. What time would you be starting?’
‘About quarter to eleven. They tell me you live out Sandawn way. I could call and pick you up.’
‘Thanks very much. Now tell me about Wither.’
‘John Wither,’ began Feverstone, but suddenly broke off. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘Here comes Curry. Now we shall have to hear everything NO said and how wonderfully the arch-politician has managed him. Don’t run away. I shall need your moral support.’
The last bus had gone long before Mark left College and he walked home up the hill in brilliant moonlight. Something happened to him the moment he had let himself into the flat which was very unusual. He found himself, on the doormat, embracing a frightened, half-sobbing Jane–even a humble Jane–who was saying, ‘Oh Mark, I’ve been so frightened.’
There was a quality in the very muscles of his wife’s body which took him by surprise. A certain indefinable defensiveness had momentarily deserted her. He had known such occasions before, but they were rare. They were already becoming rarer. And they tended, in his experience, to be followed next day by inexplicable quarrels. This puzzled him greatly, but he had never put his bewilderment into words.
It is doubtful whether he could have understood her feelings even if they had been explained to him; and Jane, in any case, could not have explained them. She was in extreme confusion. But the reasons for her unusual behaviour on this particular evening were simple enough. She had got back from the Dimbles at about half-past four, feeling much exhilarated by her walk, and hungry, and quite sure that her experiences on the previous night and at lunch were over and done with. She had had to light up and draw the curtains before she had finished tea, for the days were getting short. While doing so, the thought had come into her mind that her fright at the dream and at the mere mention of a mantle, an old man, an old man buried but not dead, and a language like Spanish, had really been as irrational as a child’s fear of the dark. This had led her to remember moments when she had feared the dark as a child. Perhaps, she allowed herself to remember them too long. At any rate, when she sat down to drink her last cup of tea, the evening had somehow deteriorated. It never recovered. First, she found it rather difficult to keep her mind on her book. Then, when she had acknowledged this difficulty, she found it difficult to fix on any book. Then she realised that she was restless. From being restless, she became nervous. Then followed a long time when she was not frightened, but knew that she would be very frightened indeed if she did not keep herself in hand. Then came a curious reluctance to go into the kitchen to get herself some supper, and a difficulty–indeed, an impossibility–of eating anything when she had got it. And now, there was no disguising the fact that she was frightened. In desperation she rang up the Dimbles. ‘I think I might go and see the person you suggested, after all,’ she said. Mrs Dimble’s voice came back, after a curious little pause, giving her the address. Ironwood was the name–Miss Ironwood, apparently. Jane had assumed it would be a man and was rather repelled. Miss Ironwood lived out at St Anne’s on the Hill. Jane asked if she should make an appointment. ‘No,’ said Mrs Dimble, ‘they’ll be–you needn’t make an appointment.’ Jane kept the conversation going as long as she could. She had rung up not chiefly to get the address but to hear Mother Dimble’s voice. Secretly she had had a wild hope that Mother Dimble would recognise her distress and say at once, ‘I’ll come straight up to you by car.’ Instead, she got the mere information and a hurried ‘Good-night.’ It seemed to Jane that there was something queer about Mrs Dimble’s voice. She felt that by ringing up she had interrupted a conversation about herself–or no–not about herself but about something else more important, with which she was somehow connected. And what had Mrs Dimble meant by, ‘They’ll be–’ ‘They’ll be expecting you?’ Horrible, childish night-nursery visions of They ‘expecting her’ passed before her mind. She saw Miss Ironwood, dressed all in black, sitting with her hands folded on her knees and then someone leading her into Miss Ironwood’s presence and saying, ‘She’s come,’ and leaving her there.
‘Damn the Dimbles!’ said Jane to herself, and then unsaid it, more in fear than in remorse. And now that the life-line had been used and brought no comfort, the terror, as if insulted by her futile attempt to escape it, rushed back on her with no possibility of disguise, and she could never afterwards remember whether the horrible old man and the mantle had actually appeared to her in a dream or whether she had merely sat there, huddled and wild eyed, hoping, hoping, hoping (even praying, though she believed in no one to pray to) that they would not.
And that is why Mark found such an unexpected Jane on the doormat. It was a pity, he thought, that this should have happened on a night when he was so late and so tired and, to tell the truth, not perfectly sober.
‘Do you feel quite all right this morning?’ said Mark.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Jane shortly.
Mark was lying in bed and drinking a cup of tea. Jane was seated at the dressing table, partially dressed, and doing her hair. Mark’s eyes rested on her with indolent, early-morning pleasure. If he guessed very little of the mal-adjustment between them, this was partly due to our race’s incurable habit of ‘projection’. We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them. Jane’s body, soft though firm and slim though rounded, was so exactly to Mark’s mind that it was all but impossible for him not to attribute to her the same sensations which she excited in him.
‘You’re quite sure you’re all right?’ he asked again.
‘Quite,’ said Jane more shortly still.
Jane thought she was annoyed because her hair was not going up to her liking and because Mark was fussing. She also knew, of course, that she was deeply angry with herself for the collapse which had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested–the fluttering, tearful ‘little woman’ of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms. But she thought this anger was only in the back of her mind, and had no suspicion that it was pulsing through every vein and producing at that very moment the clumsiness in her fingers which made her hair seem intractable.
‘Because,’ continued Mark, ‘if you felt the least bit uncomfortable, I could put off going to see this man Wither.’
Jane said nothing.
‘If I did go,’ said Mark, ‘I’d certainly have to be away for the night, perhaps two.’
Jane closed her lips a little more firmly and still said nothing.
‘Supposing I did,’ said Mark, ‘you wouldn’t think of asking Myrtle over to stay?’
‘No thank you,’ said Jane emphatically, and then, ‘I’m quite accustomed to being alone.’
‘I know,’ said Mark in a rather defensive voice. ‘That’s the devil of the way things are in College at present. That’s one of the chief reasons I’m thinking of another job.’
Jane was still silent.
‘Look here, old thing,’ said Mark, suddenly sitting up and throwing his legs out of bed. ‘There’s no good beating about the bush. I don’t feel comfortable about going away while you’re in your present state–’
‘What state?’ said Jane, turning round and facing him for the first time.
‘Well–I mean–just a bit nervy–as anyone may be temporarily.’
‘Because I happened to be having a nightmare when you came home last night–or rather this morning–there’s no need to talk as if I was a neurasthenic.’ This was not in the least what Jane had intended or expected to say.
‘Now there’s no good going on like that…’ began Mark.
‘Like what?’ said Jane icily, and then, before he had time to reply, ‘If you’ve decided that I’m going mad you’d better get Brizeacre to come down and certify me. It would be convenient to do it while you’re away. They could get me packed off while you are at Mr Wither’s without any fuss. I’m going to see about the breakfast now. If you don’t shave and dress pretty quickly, you’ll not be ready when Lord Feverstone calls.’
The upshot of it was that Mark gave himself a very bad cut while shaving (and saw, at once, a picture of himself talking to the all-important Wither with a great blob of cotton-wool on his upper lip) while Jane decided, from a mixture of motives, to cook Mark an unusually elaborate breakfast–of which she would rather die than eat any herself–and did so with the swift efficiency of an angry woman, only to upset it all over the new stove at the last moment. They were still at the table and both pretending to read newspapers when Lord Feverstone arrived. Most unfortunately Mrs Maggs arrived at the same moment. Mrs Maggs was that element in Jane’s economy represented by the phrase ‘I have a woman who comes in twice a week.’ Twenty years earlier Jane’s mother would have addressed such a functionary as ‘Maggs’ and been addressed by her as ‘Mum’. But Jane and her ‘woman who came in’ called one another Mrs Maggs and Mrs Studdock. They were about the same age and to a bachelor’s eye there was no very noticeable difference in the clothes they wore. It was therefore perhaps not inexcusable that when Mark attempted to introduce Feverstone to his wife Feverstone should have shaken Mrs Maggs by the hand; but it did not sweeten the last few minutes before the two men departed.
Jane left the flat under pretence of shopping almost at once. ‘I really couldn’t stand Mrs Maggs today,’ she said to herself. ‘She’s a terrible talker.’ So that was Lord Feverstone–that man with the loud, unnatural laugh and the mouth like a shark, and no manners. Apparently a perfect fool too! What good could it do Mark to go about with a man like that? Jane had distrusted his face. She could always tell–there was something shifty about him. Probably he was making a fool of Mark. Mark was so easily taken in. If only he wasn’t at Bracton! It was a horrible college. What did Mark see in people like Mr Curry and the odious old clergyman with the beard? And meanwhile, what of the day that awaited her, and the night, and the next night, and beyond that–for when men say they may be away for two nights, it means that two nights is the minimum, and they hope to be away for a week. A telegram (never a trunk call) puts it all right, as far as they are concerned.
She must do something. She even thought of following Mark’s advice and getting Myrtle to come and stay. But Myrtle was her sister-in-law, Mark’s twin sister, with much too much of the adoring sister’s attitude to the brilliant brother. She would talk about Mark’s health and his shirts and socks with a continual undercurrent of unexpressed yet unmistakable astonishment at Jane’s good luck in marrying him. No, certainly not Myrtle. Then she thought of going to see Dr Brizeacre as a patient. He was a Bracton man and would therefore probably charge her nothing. But when she came to think of answering, to Brizeacre of all people, the sort of questions which Brizeacre would certainly ask, this turned out to be impossible. She must do something. In the end, somewhat to her own surprise, she found that she had decided to go out to St Anne’s and see Miss Ironwood. She thought herself a fool for doing so.
An observer placed at the right altitude above Edgestow that day might have seen far to the south a moving spot on a main road and later, to the east, much nearer the silver thread of the Wynd, and much more slowly moving, the smoke of a train.
The spot would have been the car which was carrying Mark Studdock towards the Blood Transfusion Office at Belbury, where the nucleus of the NICE had taken up its temporary abode. The very size and style of the car had made a favourable impression on him the moment he saw it. The upholstery was of such quality that one felt it ought to be good to eat. And what fine, male energy (Mark felt sick of women at the moment) revealed itself in the very gestures with which Feverstone settled himself at the wheel and put his elbow on the horn, and clasped his pipe firmly between his teeth! The speed of the car, even in the narrow streets of Edgestow, was impressive, and so were the laconic criticisms of Feverstone on other drivers and pedestrians. Once over the level crossing and beyond Jane’s old college (St Elizabeth’s), he began to show what his car could do. Their speed became so great that even on a rather empty road the inexcusably bad drivers, the manifestly half-witted pedestrians and men with horses, the hen that they actually ran over and the dogs and hens that Feverstone pronounced ‘damned lucky’, seemed to follow one another almost without intermission. Telegraph posts raced by, bridges rushed overhead with a roar, villages streamed backward to join the country already devoured, and Mark, drunk with air and at once fascinated and repelled by the insolence of Feverstone’s driving sat saying, ‘Yes,’ and ‘Quite,’ and ‘It was their fault,’ and stealing side-long glances at his companion. Certainly, he was a change from the fussy importance of Curry and the Bursar! The long, straight nose and the clenched teeth, the hard bony outlines beneath the face, the very way he wore his clothes, all spoke of a big man driving a big car to somewhere where they would find big stuff going on. And he, Mark, was to be in it all. At one or two moments when his heart came into his mouth he wondered whether the quality of Lord Feverstone’s driving quite justified its speed. ‘You need never take a cross-road like that seriously,’ yelled Feverstone as they plunged on after the narrowest of these escapes. ‘Quite,’ bawled Mark. ‘No good making a fetish of them!’ ‘Drive much yourself?’ said Feverstone. ‘Used to a good deal,’ said Mark.
The smoke which our imaginary observer might have seen to the east of Edgestow would have indicated the train in which Jane Studdock was progressing slowly towards the village of St Anne’s. Edgestow itself, for those who had reached it from London, had all the appearance of a terminus; but if you looked about you, you might see presently, in a bay, a little train of two or three coaches and a tank engine–a train that sizzled and exuded steam from beneath the foot-boards and in which most of the passengers seemed to know one another. On some days, instead of the third coach, there might be a horse-box, and on the platform there would be hampers containing dead rabbits or live poultry, and men in brown bowler hats and gaiters, and perhaps a terrier or a sheepdog that seemed to be used to travelling. In this train, which started at half-past one, Jane jerked and rattled along an embankment whence she looked down through some bare branches and some branches freckled with red and yellow leaves into Bragdon Wood itself and thence through the cutting and over the level crossing at Bragdon Camp and along the edge of Brawl Park (the great house was just visible at one point) and so to the first stop at Duke’s Eaton. Here, as at Woolham and Cure Hardy and Fourstones, the train settled back, when it stopped, with a little jerk and something like a sigh. And then there would be a noise of milk cans rolling and coarse boots treading on the platform and after that a pause which seemed to last long, during which the autumn sunlight grew warm on the window pane and smells of wood and field from beyond the tiny station floated in and seemed to claim the railway as part of the land. Passengers got in and out of her carriage at every stop; apple-faced men, and women with elastic-side boots and imitation fruit on their hats, and schoolboys. Jane hardly noticed them: for though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page. And in between the stations things flitted past, so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it: a house backed with a group of haystacks and wide brown fields about it, two aged horses standing head to tail, a little orchard with washing hanging on a line, and a rabbit staring at the train, whose two eyes looked like the dots, and his ears like the uprights, of a double exclamation mark. At quarter-past two she came to St Anne’s, which was the real terminus of the branch, and the end of everything. The air struck her as cold and tonic when she left the station.
Although the train had been chugging and wheezing up-hill for the latter half of her journey, there was still a climb to be done on foot, for St Anne’s is one of those villages perched on a hilltop which are commoner in Ireland than in England, and the station is some way from the village. A winding road between high banks led her up to it. As soon as she had passed the church she turned left, as she had been instructed, at the Saxon Cross. There were no houses on her left–only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the distance. She was on the highest ground in all that region. Presently, she came to a high wall on her right that seemed to run on for a great way: there was a door in it and beside the door an old iron bell-pull. A kind of flatness of spirit was on her. She felt sure she had come on a fool’s errand; nevertheless she rang. When the jangling noise had ceased there followed a silence so long, and in that upland place so chilly, that Jane began to wonder whether the house were inhabited. Then, just as she was debating whether to ring again or to turn away, she heard the noise of someone’s feet approaching briskly on the inside of the wall.
Meanwhile Lord Feverstone’s car had long since arrived at Belbury–a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles. At the sides, it seemed to have sprouted into a widespread outgrowth of newer cement buildings, which housed the Blood Transfusion Office.
3 (#ulink_c95118aa-26a1-54d7-9bf3-efbdeda7f80e)
Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill (#ulink_c95118aa-26a1-54d7-9bf3-efbdeda7f80e)
On his way up the wide staircase Mark caught sight of himself and his companion in a mirror. Feverstone looked, as always, master of his clothes, his face, and of the whole situation. The blob of cotton wool on Mark’s upper lip had been blown awry during the journey so that it looked like one-half of a fiercely up-turned false moustache and revealed a patch of blackened blood beneath it. A moment later he found himself in a bigwindowed room with a blazing fire, being introduced to Mr John Wither, Deputy Director of the NICE.
Wither was a white-haired old man with a courtly manner. His face was clean shaven and very large indeed, with watery blue eyes and something rather vague and chaotic about it. He did not appear to be giving them his whole attention and this impression must, I think, have been due to the eyes, for his actual words and gestures were polite to the point of effusiveness. He said it was a great, a very great pleasure, to welcome Mr Studdock among them. It added to the deep obligations under which Lord Feverstone had already laid him. He hoped they had had an agreeable journey. Mr Wither appeared to be under the impression that they had come by air and, when this was corrected, that they had come from London by train. Then he began enquiring whether Mr Studdock found his quarters perfectly comfortable and had to be reminded that they had only that moment arrived. ‘I suppose,’ thought Mark, ‘the old chap is trying to put me at my ease.’ In fact, Mr Wither’s conversation was having precisely the opposite effect. Mark wished he would offer him a cigarette. His growing conviction that this man really knew nothing about him and even that all the well-knit schemes and promises of Feverstone were at this moment dissolving into some sort of mist, was extremely uncomfortable. At last he took his courage in both hands and endeavoured to bring Mr Wither to the point by saying that he was still not quite clear in what capacity he would be able to assist the Institute.
‘I assure you, Mr Studdock,’ said the Deputy Director with an unusually far away look in his eye, ‘that you needn’t anticipate the slightest–er–the slightest difficulty on that point. There was never any idea of circumscribing your activities and your general influence on policy, much less your relations with your colleagues and what I might call in general the terms of reference under which you would be collaborating with us, without the fullest possible consideration of your own views and, indeed, your own advice. You will find us, Mr Studdock, if I might express myself in that way, a very happy family.’
‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me, Sir,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t mean that at all. I only meant that I felt I should like some sort of idea of what exactly I should be doing if I came to you.’
‘Well now, when you speak of coming to us,’ said the Deputy Director, ‘that raises a point on which I hope there is no misunderstanding. I think we all agreed that no question of residence need be raised–I mean, at this stage. We thought, we all thought, that you should be left entirely free to carry on your work wherever you pleased. If you care to live in London or Cambridge–’
‘Edgestow,’ prompted Lord Feverstone.
‘Ah yes, Edgestow,’ here the Deputy Director turned round and addressed Feverstone. ‘I was just explaining to Mr–er–Studdock, and I feel sure you will fully agree with me, that nothing was further from the mind of the Committee than to dictate in any way, or even to advise, where Mr–where your friend should live. Of course, wherever he lives we should naturally place air transport and road transport at his disposal. I daresay, Lord Feverstone, you have already explained to him that he will find all questions of that sort will adjust themselves without the smallest difficulty.’
‘Really, Sir,’ said Mark, ‘I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I haven’t–I mean I shouldn’t have the smallest objection to living anywhere: I only–’
The Deputy Director interrupted him, if anything so gentle as Wither’s voice can be called an interruption. ‘But I assure you, Mr–er–I assure you, Sir, that there is not the smallest objection to your residing wherever you may find it convenient. There was never, at any stage, the slightest suggestion–’ But here Mark, almost in desperation, ventured to interrupt himself.
‘It is the exact nature of the work,’ he said, ‘and of my qualifications for it that I wanted to get clear.’
‘My dear friend,’ said the Deputy Director, ‘you need not have the slightest uneasiness in that direction. As I said before, you will find us a very happy family, and may feel perfectly satisfied that no questions as to your entire suitability have been agitating anyone’s mind in the least. I should not be offering you a position among us if there were the slightest danger of your not being completely welcome to all, or the least suspicion that your very valuable qualities were not fully appreciated. You are–you are among friends here, Mr Studdock. I should be the last person to advise you to connect yourself with any organisation where you ran the risk of being exposed–er–to disagreeable personal contacts.’
Mark did not ask again in so many words what the NICE wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room–a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.
‘You are very kind,’ he said. ‘The only thing I should like to get just a little clearer is the exact–well, the exact scope of the appointment.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Wither in a voice so low and rich that it was almost a sigh, ‘I am very glad you have raised this issue now in a quite informal way. Obviously neither you nor I would wish to commit ourselves, in this room, in any sense which was at all injurious to the powers of the Committee. I quite understand your motives and–er–respect them. We are not, of course, speaking of an Appointment in the quasi-technical sense of the term; it would be improper for both of us (though, you may well remind me, in different ways) to do so–or at least it might lead to certain inconveniences. But I think I can most definitely assure you that nobody wants to force you into any kind of straight waistcoat or bed of Procrustes. We do not really think, among ourselves, in terms of strictly demarcated functions, of course. I take it that men like you and me are–well, to put it frankly, hardly in the habit of using concepts of that type. Everyone in the Institute feels that his own work is not so much a departmental contribution to an end already defined as a moment or grade in the progressive self-definition of an organic whole.’
And Mark said–God forgive him, for he was young and shy and vain and timid, all in one–‘I do think that is so important. The elasticity of your organisation is one of the things that attracts me.’ After that, he had no further chance of bringing the Director to the point and whenever the slow, gentle voice ceased he found himself answering it in its own style, and apparently helpless to do otherwise despite the torturing recurrence of the question, ‘What are we both talking about?’ At the very end of the interview there came one moment of clarity. Mr Wither supposed that he, Mark, would find it convenient to join the NICE club: even for the next few days he would be freer as a member than as someone’s guest. Mark agreed and then flushed crimson like a small boy on learning that the easiest course was to become a life member at the cost of £200. He had not that amount in the bank. Of course if he had got the new job with its fifteen hundred a year, all would be well. But had he got it? Was there a job at all?
‘How silly,’ he said aloud, ‘I haven’t got my cheque book with me.’
A moment later he found himself on the stairs with Feverstone.
‘Well?’ asked Mark eagerly. Feverstone did not seem to hear him.
‘Well?’ repeated Mark. ‘When shall I know my fate? I mean, have I got the job?’
‘Hullo Guy!’ bawled Feverstone suddenly to a man in the hall beneath. Next moment he had trotted down to the foot of the stairs, grasped his friend warmly by the hand, and disappeared. Mark, following him more slowly, found himself in the hall, silent, alone, and self-conscious, among the groups and pairs of chattering men, who were all crossing it towards the big folding doors on his left.
It seemed to last long, this standing, this wondering what to do, this effort to look natural and not to catch the eyes of strangers. The noise and the agreeable smells which came from the folding doors made it obvious that people were going to lunch. Mark hesitated, uncertain of his own status. In the end, he decided that he couldn’t stand there looking like a fool any longer, and went in.
He had hoped that there would be several small tables at one of which he could have sat alone. But there was only a single long table, already so nearly filled that, after looking in vain for Feverstone, he had to sit down beside a stranger. ‘I suppose one sits where one likes?’ he murmured as he did so; but the stranger apparently did not hear. He was a bustling sort of man who was eating very quickly and talking at the same time to his neighbour on the other side.
‘That’s just it,’ he was saying. ‘As I told him, it makes no difference to me which way they settle it. I’ve no objection to the IJP people taking over the whole thing if that’s what the DD wants but what I dislike is one man being responsible for it when half the work is being done by someone else. As I said to him, you’ve now got three HD’s all tumbling over one another about some job that could really be done by a clerk. It’s becoming ridiculous. Look at what happened this morning.’ Conversation on these lines continued throughout the meal.
Although the food and the drinks were excellent, it was a relief to Mark when people began getting up from table. Following the general movement, he recrossed the hall and came into a large room furnished as a lounge where coffee was being served. Here at last he saw Feverstone. Indeed, it would have been difficult not to notice him for he was the centre of a group and laughing prodigiously. Mark wished to approach him, if only to find out whether he were expected to stay the night and, if so, whether a room had been assigned to him. But the knot of men round Feverstone was of that confidential kind which it is difficult to join. He moved towards one of the many tables and began turning over the glossy pages of an illustrated weekly. Every few seconds he looked up to see if there were any chance of getting a word with Feverstone alone. The fifth time he did so, he found himself looking into the face of one of his own colleagues, a Fellow of Bracton called William Hingest. The Progressive Element called him, though not to his face, Bill the Blizzard.
Hingest had not, as Curry anticipated, been present at the College Meeting and was hardly on speaking terms with Lord Feverstone. Mark realised with a certain awe that here was a man directly in touch with the NICE–one who started, so to speak, at a point beyond Feverstone. Hingest, who was a physical chemist, was one of the two scientists at Bracton who had a reputation outside England. I hope the reader has not been misled into supposing that the Fellows of Bracton were a specially distinguished body. It was certainly not the intention of the Progressive Element to elect mediocrities to fellowships, but their determination to elect ‘sound men’ cruelly limited their field of choice and, as Busby had once said, ‘You can’t have everything.’ Bill the Blizzard had an old-fashioned curly moustache in which white had almost, but not completely, triumphed over yellow, a large beak-like nose, and a bald head.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ said Mark with a hint of formality. He was always a little afraid of Hingest.
‘Huh?’ grunted Bill. ‘Eh? Oh, it’s you, Studdock? Didn’t know they’d secured your services here.’
‘I was sorry not to see you at the College Meeting yesterday,’ said Mark.
This was a lie. The Progressive Element always found Hingest’s presence an embarrassment. As a scientist–and the only really eminent scientist they had–he was their rightful property; but he was that hateful anomaly, the wrong sort of scientist. Glossop, who was a classic, was his chief friend in College. He had the air (the ‘affectation’ Curry called it) of not attaching much importance to his own revolutionary discoveries in chemistry and of valuing himself much more on being a Hingest: the family was of almost mythical antiquity, ‘never contaminated,’ as its nineteenth-century historian had said, ‘by traitor, placeman or baronetcy’. He had given particular offence on the occasion of de Broglie’s visit to Edgestow. The Frenchman had spent his spare time exclusively in Bill the Blizzard’s society, but when an enthusiastic junior Fellow had thrown out a feeler about the rich feast of science which the two savants must have shared, Bill the Blizzard had appeared to search his memory for a moment and then replied that he didn’t think they had got onto that subject. ‘Gassing Almanac de Gotha nonsense, I suppose,’ was Curry’s comment, though not in Hingest’s presence.
‘Eh? What’s that? College Meeting?’ said the Blizzard. ‘What were they talking about?’
‘About the sale of Bragdon Wood.’
‘All nonsense,’ muttered the Blizzard.
‘I hope you would have agreed with the decision we came to.’
‘It made no difference what decision they came to.’
‘Oh!’ said Mark with some surprise.
‘It was all nonsense. The NICE would have had the Wood in any case. They had powers to compel a sale.’
‘What an extraordinary thing! I was given to understand they were going to Cambridge if we didn’t sell.’
Hingest sniffed loudly.
‘Not a word of truth in it. As to its being an extraordinary thing, that depends on what you mean. There’s nothing extraordinary in the Fellows of Bracton talking all afternoon about an unreal issue. And there’s nothing extraordinary in the fact that the NICE should wish, if possible, to hand over to Bracton the odium of turning the heart of England into a cross between an abortive American hotel and a glorified gas works. The only real puzzle is why the NICE should want that bit of land.’
‘I suppose we shall find out as things go on.’
‘You may. I shan’t.’
‘Oh?’ said Mark interrogatively.
‘I’ve had enough of it,’ said Hingest, lowering his voice, ‘I’m leaving tonight. I don’t know what you were doing at Bracton, but if it was any good I’d advise you to go back and stick to it.’
‘Really!’ said Mark. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Doesn’t matter for an old fellow like me,’ said Hingest, ‘but they could play the devil with you. Of course it all depends on what a man likes.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘I haven’t fully made up my mind.’ He had been taught to regard Hingest as a warped reactionary. ‘I don’t even know yet what my job would be if I stayed.’
‘What’s your subject?’
‘Sociology.’
‘Huh,’ said Hingest. ‘In that case I can soon point you out the man you’d be under. A fellow called Steele. Over there by the window, do you see?’
‘Perhaps you could introduce me.’
‘You’re determined to stay then?’
‘Well, I suppose I ought at least to see him.’
‘All right,’ said Hingest. ‘No business of mine.’ Then he added in a louder voice, ‘Steele.’
Steele turned round. He was a tall, unsmiling man with that kind of face which, though long and horse-like, has nevertheless rather thick and pouting lips.
‘This is Studdock,’ said Hingest, ‘the new man for your department.’ Then he turned away.
‘Oh,’ said Steele. Then after a pause, ‘Did he say my department?’
‘That’s what he said,’ replied Mark with an attempt at a smile, ‘but perhaps he’s got it wrong. I’m supposed to be a sociologist–if that throws any light on it.’
‘I’m HD for Sociology all right,’ said Steele, ‘but this is the first I’ve heard about you. Who told you you were to be there?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘the whole thing is rather vague. I’ve just had a talk with the Deputy Director but we didn’t actually go into any details.’
‘How did you manage to see him?’
‘Lord Feverstone introduced me.’
Steele whistled. ‘I say, Cosser,’ he called out to a freckle-faced man who was passing by, ‘listen to this. Feverstone has just unloaded this chap on our department. Taken him straight to the DD without saying a word to me about it. What do you think of that?’
‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Cosser, hardly glancing at Mark but looking very hard at Steele.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mark, a little more loudly and a little more stiffly than he had yet spoken. ‘Don’t be alarmed. I seem to have been put in rather a false position. There must have been some misunderstanding. As a matter of fact I am, at the moment, merely having a look round. I’m not at all certain that I intend to stay in any case.’
Neither of the other two took any notice of this last suggestion.
‘That’s Feverstone all over,’ said Cosser to Steele.
Steele turned to Mark. ‘I shouldn’t advise you to take much notice of what Lord Feverstone says here,’ he remarked. ‘This isn’t his business at all.’
‘All I object to,’ said Mark, wishing that he could prevent his face from turning red, ‘is being put in a false position. I only came over as an experiment. It is a matter of indifference to me whether I take a job in the NICE or not.’
‘You see,’ said Steele to Cosser, ‘there isn’t really any room for a man in our show–specially for someone who doesn’t know the work. Unless they put him on the UL.’
‘That’s right,’ said Cosser.
‘Mr Studdock, I think,’ said a new voice at Mark’s elbow, a treble voice which seemed disproportionate to the huge hill of a man whom he saw when he turned his head. He recognised the speaker at once. His dark, smooth face and black hair were unmistakable, and so was the foreign accent. This was Professor Filostrato, the great physiologist, whom Mark had sat next to at a dinner about two years before. He was fat to that degree which is comic on the stage, but the effect was not funny in real life. Mark was charmed that such a man should have remembered him.
‘I am very glad you have come to join us,’ said Filostrato taking hold of Mark’s arm and gently piloting him away from Steele and Cosser.
‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mark, ‘I’m not sure that I have. I was brought over by Feverstone but he has disappeared, and Steele–I’d have been in his Department I suppose–doesn’t seem to know anything about me.’
‘Bah! Steele!’ said the Professor. ‘That is all a bagatelle. He get too big for his boots. He will be put in his place one of these days. It may be you who will put him. I have read all your work, si si. Do not consider him.’
‘I have a strong objection to being put in a false position–’ began Mark.
‘Listen, my friend,’ interrupted Filostrato, ‘you must put all such ideas out of your head. The first thing to realise is that the NICE is serious. It is nothing less than the existence of the human race that depends on our work: our real work, you comprehend? You will find frictions and impertinences among this canaglia, this rabble. They are no more to be regarded than your dislike of a brother officer when the battle is at its crisis.’
‘As long as I’m given something to do that is worth doing,’ said Mark, ‘I shouldn’t allow anything of that sort to interfere with it.’
‘Yes, yes, that is right. The work is more important than you can yet understand. You will see. These Steeles and Feverstones –they are of no consequence. As long as you have the good will of the Deputy Director, you snap your fingers at them. You need listen to no one but him, you comprehend? Ah–and there is one other. Do not have the Fairy for your enemy. For the rest–you laugh at them.’
‘The Fairy?’
‘Yes. Her they call the Fairy. Oh my God, a terrible Inglesaccia! She is the head of our police, the Institutional Police. Ecco, she come. I will present you. Miss Hardcastle, permit that I present to you Mr Studdock.’
Mark found himself writhing from the stoker’s or carter’s hand-grip of a big woman in a black, short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was rather thickly built than fat and her iron-grey hair was cropped short. Her face was square, stern and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real shape of her mouth was her only concession to fashion and she rolled or chewed a long black cheroot, unlit, between her teeth. As she talked she had a habit of removing this, staring intently at the mixture of lipstick and saliva on its mangled end, and then replacing it more firmly than before. She sat down immediately in a chair close to where Mark was standing, flung her right leg over one of the arms, and fixed him with a gaze of cold intimacy.
Click–clack, distinct in the silence, where Jane stood waiting, came the tread of the person on the other side of the wall. Then the door opened and Jane found herself facing a tall woman of about her own age. This person looked at her with keen, non-committal eyes.
‘Does a Miss Ironwood live here?’ said Jane.
‘Yes,’ said the other girl, neither opening the door any further nor standing aside.
‘I want to see her, please,’ said Jane.
‘Have you an appointment?’ said the tall woman.
‘Well, not exactly,’ said Jane. ‘I was directed here by Dr Dimble who knows Miss Ironwood. He said I shouldn’t need an appointment.’
‘Oh, if you’re from Dr Dimble that is another matter,’ said the woman. ‘Come in. Now wait a moment while I attend to this lock. That’s better. Now we’re all right. There’s not room for two on this path so you must excuse me if I go first.’
The woman led her along a brick path beside a wall on which fruit trees were growing, and then to the left along a mossy path with gooseberry bushes on each side. Then came a little lawn with a see-saw in the middle of it, and beyond that a greenhouse. Here they found themselves in the sort of hamlet that sometimes occurs in the purlieus of a large garden–walking in fact down a little street which had a barn and a stable on one side and, on the other, a second greenhouse, and a potting shed and a pigstye–inhabited, as the grunts and the not wholly agreeable smell informed her. After that were narrow paths across a vegetable garden that seemed to be on a fairly steep hillside, and then, rose bushes, all stiff and prickly in their winter garb. At one place, they were going along a path made of single planks. This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like–like–yes, now she had it: it was like the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? No, not in the least like really. Or like Klingsor’s garden? Or the garden in Alice? Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way? A sentence rose to her memory. ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.’ Where on earth had she read that? And, incidentally, what frightful nonsense she had been thinking for the last minute or so! She shook off all these ideas about gardens and determined to pull herself together. A curious feeling that she was now on hostile, or at least alien, ground warned her to keep all her wits about her. At that moment, they suddenly emerged from between plantations of rhododendron and laurel, and found themselves at a small side door, flanked by a water butt, in the long wall of a large house. Just as they did so a window clapped shut upstairs.
A minute or two later Jane was sitting waiting in a large sparely furnished room with a shut stove to warm it. Most of the floor was bare, and the walls, above the waist-high wainscotting, were of greyish white plaster, so that the whole effect was faintly austere and conventual. The tall woman’s tread died away in the passages and the room became very quiet when it had done so. Occasionally the cawing of rooks could be heard. ‘I’ve let myself in for it now,’ thought Jane. ‘I shall have to tell this woman that dream and she’ll ask all sorts of questions.’ She considered herself, in general, a modern person who could talk without embarrassment of anything, but it began to look quite different as she sat in that room. All sorts of secret reservations in her programme of frankness–things which, she now realised, she had set apart as never to be told –came creeping back into consciousness. It was surprising that very few of them were connected with sex. ‘In dentists’,’ said Jane, ‘they at least leave illustrated papers in the waiting room.’ She got up and opened the one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room. Instantly her eyes lit on the following words: ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the–’
At that moment the door was suddenly opened. Jane turned crimson as she shut the book and looked up. The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that–so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.
‘Is–is Miss Ironwood in?’ said Jane.
‘Are you Mrs Studdock?’ said the girl.
‘Yes,’ said Jane.
‘I will bring you to her at once,’ said the other. ‘We have been expecting you. My name is Camilla–Camilla Denniston.’
Jane followed her. From the narrowness and plainness of the passages, Jane judged that they were still in the back parts of the house, and that, if so, it must be a very large house indeed. They went a long way before Camilla knocked at a door and stood aside for Jane to enter, after saying in a low, clear voice (‘like a servant’, Jane thought), ‘She has come.’ And Jane went in; and there was Miss Ironwood dressed all in black and sitting with her hands folded on her knees, just as Jane had seen her when dreaming–if she were dreaming–last night in the flat.
‘Sit down, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.
The hands which were folded on her knees were very big and bony though they did not suggest coarseness, and even when seated Miss Ironwood was extremely tall. Everything about her was big–the nose, the unsmiling lips, and the grey eyes. She was perhaps nearer sixty than fifty. There was an atmosphere in the room which Jane found uncongenial.
‘What is your name, young lady?’ said Miss Ironwood, taking up a pencil and a notebook.
‘Jane Studdock.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does your husband know you have come to us?’
‘No.’
‘And your age, if you please?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘And now,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘what have you to tell me?’
Jane took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been having bad dreams and–and feeling depressed lately,’ she said.
‘What were the dreams?’ asked Miss Ironwood.
Jane’s narrative–she did not do it very well–took some time. While she was speaking she kept her eyes fixed on Miss Ironwood’s large hands and her black skirt and the pencil and the notebook. And that was why she suddenly stopped. For as she proceeded she saw Miss Ironwood’s hand cease to write and the fingers wrap themselves round the pencil: immensely strong fingers they seemed. And every moment they tightened, till the knuckles grew white and the veins stood out on the backs of the hands and at last, as if under the influence of some stifled emotion, they broke the pencil in two. It was then that Jane stopped in astonishment and looked up at Miss Ironwood’s face. The wide grey eyes were still looking at her with no change of expression.
‘Pray continue, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.
Jane resumed her story. When she had finished Miss Ironwood put a number of questions. After that she became silent for so long that Jane said,
‘Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?’
‘There is nothing wrong with you,’ said Miss Ironwood.
‘You mean it will go away?’
‘I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.’
Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face.
‘Then–can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams–horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.’
‘I can quite understand that.’
‘Is it something that can’t be cured?’
‘The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.’
‘But there must be something wrong. It’s surely not natural to have dreams like that.’
There was a pause. ‘I think,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘I had better tell you the whole truth.’
‘Yes, do,’ said Jane in a strained voice. The other’s words had frightened her.
‘And I will begin by saying this,’ continued Miss Ironwood. ‘You are a more important person than you imagine.’
Jane said nothing, but thought inwardly, ‘She is humouring me. She thinks I am mad.’
‘What was your maiden name?’ asked Miss Ironwood.
‘Tudor,’ said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.
‘The Warwickshire branch of the family?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever read a little book–it is only forty pages long–written by an ancestor of yours about the battle of Worcester?’
‘No. Father had a copy–the only copy, I think he said. But I never read it. It was lost when the house was broken up after his death.’
‘Your father was mistaken in thinking it the only copy. There are at least two others: one is in America, and the other is in this house.’
‘Well?’
‘Your ancestor gave a full and, on the whole, correct account of the battle, which he says he completed on the same day on which it was fought. But he was not at it. He was in York at the time.’
Jane, who had not really been following this, looked at Miss Ironwood.
‘If he was speaking the truth,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘and we believe that he was, he dreamed it. Do you understand?’
‘Dreamed about the battle?’
‘Yes. But dreamed it right. He saw the real battle in his dream.’
‘I don’t see the connection.’
‘Vision–the power of dreaming realities–is sometimes hereditary,’ said Miss Ironwood.
Something seemed to be interfering with Jane’s breathing. She felt a sense of injury–this was just the sort of thing she hated: something out of the past, something irrational and utterly uncalled for, coming up from its den and interfering with her.
‘Can it be proved?’ she asked. ‘I mean, we have only his word for it.’
‘We have your dreams,’ said Miss Ironwood. Her voice, always grave, had become stern. A fantastic thought crossed Jane’s mind. Could this old woman have some idea that one ought not to call even one’s remote ancestors liars?
‘My dreams?’ she said a little sharply.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Ironwood.
‘What do you mean?’
‘My opinion is that you have seen real things in your dreams. You have seen Alcasan as he really sat in the condemned cell, and you have seen a visitor whom he really had.’
‘But–but–oh, this is ridiculous,’ said Jane. ‘That part was a mere coincidence. The rest was just a nightmare. It was all impossible. He screwed off his head, I tell you. And they–dug up the horrible old man. They made him come to life.’
‘There are some confusions there, no doubt. But in my opinion there are realities behind even those episodes.’
‘I am afraid I don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ said Jane coldly.
‘Your upbringing makes it natural that you should not,’ replied Miss Ironwood. ‘Unless, of course, you have discovered for yourself that you have a tendency to dream real things.’
Jane thought of the book on the table which she had apparently remembered before she saw it, and then there was Miss Ironwood’s own appearance–that too she had seen before she saw it. But it must be nonsense.
‘Can you then do nothing for me?’
‘I can tell you the truth,’ said Miss Ironwood. ‘I have tried to do so.’
‘I mean, can you not stop it–cure it?’
‘Vision is not a disease.’
‘But I don’t want it,’ said Jane passionately. ‘I must stop it. I hate this sort of thing.’ Miss Ironwood said nothing.
‘Don’t you even know anyone who could stop it?’ said Jane. ‘Can’t you recommend anyone?’
‘If you go to an ordinary psychotherapist,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘he will proceed on the assumption that the dreams merely reflect your own sub-conscious. He would try to treat you. I do not know what would be the results of treatment based on that assumption. I am afraid they might be very serious. And–it would certainly not remove the dreams.’
‘But what is this all about?’ said Jane. ‘I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?’
‘The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.’
There was a short silence. Jane made a vague movement and said, rather sulkily, ‘Well, if you can do nothing for me, perhaps I’d better be going–’ Then suddenly she added, ‘But how can you know all this? I mean–what realities are you talking about?’
‘I think,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘that you yourself have probably more reason to suspect the truth of your dreams than you have yet told me. If not, you soon will have. In the meantime, I will answer your question. We know your dreams to be partly true because they fit in with information we already possess. It was because he saw their importance that Dr Dimble sent you to us.’
‘Do you mean he sent me here not to be cured but to give information?’ said Jane. The idea fitted in with things she had observed in his manner when she first told him.
‘Exactly.’
‘I wish I had known that a little earlier,’ said Jane coldly, and now definitely getting up to go. ‘I’m afraid it has been a misunderstanding. I had imagined Dr Dimble was trying to help me.’
‘He was. But he was also trying to do something more important at the same time.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful for being considered at all,’ said Jane drily, ‘and how, exactly, was I to be helped by– by all this sort of thing?’ The attempt at icy irony collapsed as she said these last words and red, undisguised anger rushed back into her face. In some ways she was very young.
‘Young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘You do not at all realise the seriousness of this matter. The things you have seen concern something compared with which the happiness, or even the life, of you and me, is of no importance. I must beg you to face the situation. You cannot get rid of your gift. You can try to suppress it, but you will fail, and you will be very badly frightened. On the other hand, you can put it at our disposal. If you do so, you will be much less frightened in the long run and you will be helping to save the human race from a very great disaster. Or thirdly, you may tell someone else about it. If you do that, I warn you that you will almost certainly fall into the hands of other people who are at least as anxious as we to make use of your faculty and who will care no more about your life and happiness than about those of a fly. The people you have seen in your dreams are real people. It is not at all unlikely that they know you have, involuntarily, been spying on them. And, if so, they will not rest till they have got hold of you. I would advise you, even for your own sake, to join our side.’
‘You keep on talking of We and Us. Are you some kind of company?’
‘Yes. You may call it a company.’
Jane had been standing for the last few minutes; and she had almost been believing what she heard. Then suddenly, all her repugnance came over her again–all her wounded vanity, her resentment of the meaningless complication in which she seemed to be caught, and her general dislike of the mysterious and the unfamiliar. At that moment, nothing seemed to matter but to get out of that room and away from the grave, patient voice of Miss Ironwood. ‘She’s made me worse already,’ thought Jane, still regarding herself as a patient. Aloud, she said,
‘I must go home now. I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’
Mark discovered in the end that he was expected to stay, at least for the night, and when he went up to dress for dinner he was feeling more cheerful. This was partly due to a whisky and soda taken with ‘Fairy’ Hardcastle immediately before and partly to the fact that by a glance at the mirror he saw that he could now remove the objectionable piece of cotton wool from his lip. The bedroom with its bright fire and its private bathroom attached had also something to do with it. Thank goodness, he had allowed Jane to talk him into buying that new dress suit! It looked very well, laid out on the bed; and he saw now that the old one really would not have done. But what had reassured him most of all was his conversation with the Fairy.
It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had indeed excited in him all the distaste which a young man feels at the proximity of something rankly, even insolently sexed, and at the same time wholly unattractive. And something in her cold eye had told him that she was well aware of this reaction and found it amusing. She had told him a good many smoking-room stories. Often before now Mark had shuddered at the clumsy efforts of the emancipated female to indulge in this kind of humour, but his shudders had always been consoled by a sense of superiority. This time he had the feeling that he was the butt; this woman was exasperating male prudery for her diversion. Later on, she drifted into police reminiscences. In spite of some initial scepticism, Mark was gradually horrified by her assumption that about thirty per cent of our murder trials ended by the hanging of an innocent man. There were details, too, about the execution shed which had not occurred to him before.
All this was disagreeable. But it was made up for by the deliciously esoteric character of the conversation. Several times that day he had been made to feel himself an outsider; that feeling completely disappeared while Miss Hardcastle was talking to him. He had the sense of getting in. Miss Hardcastle had apparently lived an exciting life. She had been, at different times, a suffragette, a pacifist, and a British Fascist. She had been man-handled by the police and imprisoned. On the other hand, she had met Prime Ministers, Dictators and famous film stars; all her history was secret history. She knew from both ends what a police force could do and what it could not, and there were in her opinion very few things it could not do. ‘Specially now,’ she said. ‘Here in the Institute, we’re backing the crusade against Red Tape.’
Mark gathered that, for the Fairy, the police side of the Institute was the really important side. It existed to relieve the ordinary executive of what might be called all sanitary cases–a category which ranged from vaccination to charges of unnatural vice–from which, as she pointed out, it was only a step to bringing in all cases of blackmail. As regards crime in general, they had already popularised in the press the idea that the Institute should be allowed to experiment pretty largely in the hope of discovering how far humane, remedial treatment could be substituted for the old notion of ‘retributive’ or ‘vindictive’ punishment. That was where a lot of legal Red Tape stood in their way. ‘But there are only two papers we don’t control,’ said the Fairy. ‘And we’ll smash them. You’ve got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says “Sadism” automatically when he hears the word Punishment.’ And then one would have carte blanche. Mark did not immediately follow this. But the Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention? Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen. ‘And that’s where you and I come in, Sonny,’ added the Fairy, tapping Mark’s chest with her forefinger. ‘There’s no distinction in the long run between police work and Sociology. You and I’ve got to work hand in hand.’
This had brought Mark back to his doubts as to whether he were really being given a job and, if so, what it was. The Fairy had warned him that Steele was a dangerous man. ‘There are two people you want to be very cautious about,’ she said. ‘One is Frost and the other is old Wither.’ But she had laughed at his fears in general. ‘You’re in all right, Sonny,’ she said. ‘Only don’t be too particular about what exactly you’ve got to do. You’ll find out as it comes along. Wither doesn’t like people who try to pin him down. There’s no good saying you’ve come here to do this and you won’t do that. The game’s too fast just at present for that sort of thing. You’ve got to make yourself useful. And don’t believe everything you’re told.’
At dinner Mark found himself seated next to Hingest.
‘Well,’ said Hingest, ‘have they finally roped you into it, eh?’
‘I rather believe they have,’ said Mark.
‘Because,’ said Hingest, ‘if you thought the better of it, I’m motoring back tonight and I could give you a lift.’
‘You haven’t yet told me why you are leaving us yourself,’ said Mark.
‘Oh well, it all depends what a man likes. If you enjoy the society of that Italian eunuch and the mad parson and that Hardcastle girl–her grandmother would have boxed her ears if she were alive–of course, there’s nothing more to be said.’
‘I suppose it’s hardly to be judged on purely social grounds–I mean, it’s something more than a club.’
‘Eh? Judged? Never judged anything in my life, to the best of my knowledge, except at a flower show. It’s all a question of taste. I came here because I thought it had something to do with science. Now that I find it’s something more like a political conspiracy, I shall go home. I’m too old for that kind of thing, and if I wanted to join a conspiracy, this one wouldn’t be my choice.’
‘You mean, I suppose, that the element of social planning doesn’t appeal to you? I can quite understand that it doesn’t fit in with your work as it does with sciences like Sociology, but–’
‘There are no sciences like Sociology. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn’t wear corsets and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I’d let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again.’
‘I think I do understand the sentiment that still attaches to the small man, but when you come to study the reality as I have to do–’
‘I should want to pull it to bits and put something else in its place. Of course. That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.’
‘Bill!’ said Fairy Hardcastle suddenly, from the far side of the table, in a voice so loud that even he could not ignore it. Hingest fixed his eyes upon her and his face grew a dark red.
‘Is it true,’ bawled the Fairy, ‘that you’re going off by car immediately after dinner?’
‘Yes, Miss Hardcastle, it is.’
‘I was wondering if you could give me a lift.’
‘I should be happy to do so,’ said Hingest in a voice not intended to deceive, ‘if we are going in the same direction.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I am going to Edgestow.’
‘Will you be passing Brenstock?’
‘No. I leave the by-pass at the crossroads just beyond Lord Holywood’s front gate and go down what they used to call Potter’s Lane.’
‘Oh, damn! No good to me. I may as well wait till the morning.’
After this Mark found himself engaged by his left-hand neighbour and did not see Bill the Blizzard again until he met him in the hall after dinner. He was in his overcoat and just ready to go to his car.
He began talking as he opened the door and thus Mark was drawn into accompanying him across the gravel sweep to where his car was parked.
‘Take my advice, Studdock,’ he said. ‘Or at least think it over. I don’t believe in Sociology myself, but you’ve got quite a decent career before you if you stay at Bracton. You’ll do yourself no good by getting mixed up with the NICE–and, by God, you’ll do nobody else any good either.’
‘I suppose there are two views about everything,’ said Mark.
‘Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one. But it’s no affair of mine. Good night.’
‘Good night, Hingest,’ said Mark. The other started up the car and drove off.
There was a touch of frost in the air. The shoulder of Orion, though Mark did not know even that earnest constellation, flamed at him above the tree-tops. He felt a hesitation about going back into the house. It might mean further talk with interesting and influential people; but it might also mean feeling once more an outsider, hanging about and watching conversations which he could not join. Anyway, he was tired. Strolling along the front of the house he came presently to another and smaller door by which, he judged, one could enter without passing through the hall or the public rooms. He did so, and went upstairs for the night immediately.
Camilla Denniston showed Jane out–not by the little door in the wall at which she had come in but by the main gate which opened on the same road about a hundred yards further on. Yellow light from a westward gap in the grey sky was pouring a short-lived and chilly brightness over the whole landscape. Jane had been ashamed to show either temper or anxiety before Camilla; as a result both had in reality been diminished when she said goodbye. But a settled distaste for what she called ‘all this nonsense’ remained. She was not indeed sure that it was nonsense; but she had already resolved to treat it as if it were. She would not get ‘mixed up in it’, would not be drawn in. One had to live one’s own life. To avoid entanglements and interferences had long been one of her first principles. Even when she had discovered that she was going to marry Mark if he asked her, the thought ‘but I must still keep up my own life’ had arisen at once and had never for more than a few minutes at a stretch been absent from her mind. Some resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, for thus invading her life, remained. She was at least very vividly aware how much a woman gives up in getting married. Mark seemed to her insufficiently aware of this. Though she did not formulate it, this fear of being invaded and entangled was the deepest ground of her determination not to have a child–or not for a long time yet. One had one’s own life to live.
Almost as soon as she got back to the flat the telephone went. ‘Is that you, Jane?’ came a voice. ‘It’s me, Margaret Dimble. Such a dreadful thing’s happened. I’ll tell you when I come. I’m too angry to speak at the moment. Have you a spare bed by any chance? What? Mr Studdock’s away? Not a bit, if you don’t mind. I’ve sent Cecil to sleep in College. You’re sure it won’t be a nuisance? Thanks most awfully. I’ll be round in half an hour.’
4 (#ulink_119cab93-aaed-5f66-b9e8-950b4b075c12)
The Liquidation of Anachronisms (#ulink_119cab93-aaed-5f66-b9e8-950b4b075c12)
Almost before Jane had finished putting clean sheets on Mark’s bed, Mrs Dimble, with a great many parcels, arrived. ‘You’re an angel to have me for the night,’ she said. ‘We’d tried every hotel in Edgestow, I believe. This place is going to become unendurable. The same answer everywhere! All full up with the hangers-on and camp-followers of this detestable NICE. Secretaries here–typists there–commissioners of works–the thing’s outrageous. If Cecil hadn’t had a room in College I really believe he’d have had to sleep in the waiting room at the station. I only hope that man in College has aired the bed.’
‘But what on earth’s happened?’ asked Jane.
‘Turned out, my dear!’
‘But it isn’t possible, Mrs Dimble. I mean, it can’t be legal.’
‘That’s what Cecil said…Just think of it, Jane. The first thing we saw when we poked our heads out of the window this morning was a lorry on the drive with its back wheels in the middle of the rose bed, unloading a small army of what looked like criminals, with picks and spades. Right in our own garden! There was an odious little man in a peaked cap who talked to Cecil with a cigarette in his mouth, at least it wasn’t in his mouth but seccotined onto his upper lip–you know–and guess what he said? He said they’d have no objection to our remaining in possession (of the house, mind you, not the garden) till 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. No objection!’
‘But surely–surely–it must be some mistake.’
‘Of course, Cecil rang up your Bursar. And, of course, your Bursar was out. That took nearly all morning, ringing up again and again, and by that time, the big beech that you used to be so fond of had been cut down, and all the plum trees. If I hadn’t been so angry, I’d have sat down and cried my eyes out. That’s what I felt like. At last Cecil did get onto your Mr Busby, who was perfectly useless. Said there must be some misunderstanding but it was out of his hands now and we’d better get onto the NICE at Belbury. Of course, it turned out to be quite impossible to get them. But by lunch-time we saw that one simply couldn’t stay there for the night, whatever happened.’
‘Why not?’
‘My dear, you’ve no conception what it was like. Great lorries and traction engines roaring past all the time, and a crane on a thing like a railway truck. Why, our own tradesmen couldn’t get through it. The milk didn’t arrive till eleven o’clock. The meat never arrived at all; they rang up in the afternoon to say their people hadn’t been able to reach us by either road. We’d the greatest difficulty in getting into town ourselves. It took us half an hour from our house to the bridge. It was like a nightmare. Flares and noise everywhere and the road practically ruined and a sort of great tin camp already going up on the Common. And the people! Such horrid men. I didn’t know we had workpeople like that in England. Oh, horrible, horrible!’ Mrs Dimble fanned herself with the hat she had just taken off.
‘And what are you going to do?’ asked Jane.
‘Heaven knows!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘For the moment, we have shut up the house and Cecil has been at Rumbold, the solicitor’s, to see if we can at least have it sealed and left alone until we’ve got our things out of it. Rumbold doesn’t seem to know where he is. He keeps on saying the NICE are in a very peculiar position legally. After that, I’m sure I don’t know. As far as I can see, there won’t be any houses in Edgestow. There’s no question of trying to live on the far side of the river any longer, even if they’d let us. What did you say? Oh, indescribable. All the poplars are going down. All those nice little cottages by the church are going down. I found poor Ivy–that’s your Mrs Maggs, you know–in tears. Poor things! They do look dreadful when they cry on top of powder. She’s being turned out too. Poor little woman; she’s had enough troubles in her life without this. I was glad to get away. The men were so horrible. Three big brutes came to the back door asking for hot water and went on so that they frightened Martha out of her wits and Cecil had to go and speak to them. I thought they were going to strike Cecil, really I did. It was most horribly unpleasant. But a sort of special constable sent them away. What? Oh yes, there are dozens of what look like policemen all over the place, and I didn’t like the look of them either. Swinging some kind of truncheon things, like what you’d see in an American film. Do you know Jane, Cecil and I both thought the same thing: we thought, it’s almost as if we’d lost the war. Oh, good girl–tea! That’s just what I wanted.’
‘You must stay here as long as you like, Mrs Dimble,’ said Jane. ‘Mark’ll just have to sleep in College.’
‘Well, really,’ said Mother Dimble, ‘I feel at the moment that no Fellow of Bracton ought to be allowed to sleep anywhere! But I’d make an exception in favour of Mr Studdock. As a matter of fact, I shan’t have to behave like the sword of Siegfried –and, incidentally, a nasty fat stodgy sword I should be! But that side of it is all fixed up. Cecil and I are to go out to the Manor at St Anne’s. We have to be there so much at present, you see.’
‘Oh,’ said Jane, involuntarily prolonging the exclamation as the whole of her own story flowed back on her mind.
‘Why, what a selfish pig I’ve been,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘Here have I been chattering away about my own troubles and quite forgetting that you’ve been out there and are full of things to tell me. Did you see Grace? And did you like her?’
‘Is “Grace” Miss Ironwood?’ asked Jane.
‘Yes.’
‘I saw her. I don’t know if I liked her or not. But I don’t want to talk about all that. I can’t think about anything except this outrageous business of yours. It’s you who are the real martyr, not me.’
‘No, my dear,’ said Mrs Dimble, ‘I’m not a martyr. I’m only an angry old woman with sore feet and a splitting head (but that’s beginning to be better) who’s trying to talk herself into a good temper. After all, Cecil and I haven’t lost our livelihood as poor Ivy Maggs has. It doesn’t really matter leaving the old house. Do you know, the pleasure of living there was in a way a melancholy pleasure. (I wonder, by the bye, do human beings really like being happy?) A little melancholy, yes. All those big upper rooms which we thought we should want because we thought we were going to have lots of children, and then we never had. Perhaps I was getting too fond of mooning about them on long afternoons when Cecil was away. Pitying oneself. I shall be better away from it, I daresay. I might have got like that frightful woman in Ibsen who was always maundering about dolls. It’s really worse for Cecil. He did so love having all his pupils about the place. Jane, that’s the third time you’ve yawned. You’re dropping asleep and I’ve talked your head off. It comes of being married thirty years. Husbands were made to be talked to. It helps them to concentrate their minds on what they’re reading –like the sound of a weir. There!–you’re yawning again.’
Jane found Mother Dimble an embarrassing person to share a room with because she said prayers. It was quite extraordinary, Jane thought, how this put one out. One didn’t know where to look, and it was so difficult to talk naturally again for several minutes after Mrs Dimble had risen from her knees.
‘Are you awake now?’ said Mrs Dimble’s voice, quietly, in the middle of the night.
‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? Was I shouting?’
‘Yes. You were shouting out about someone being hit on the head.’
‘I saw them killing a man–a man in a big car driving along a country road. Then he came to a crossroads and turned off to the right past some trees, and there was someone standing in the middle of the road waving a light to stop him. I couldn’t hear what they said; I was too far away. They must have persuaded him to get out of the car somehow, and there he was talking to one of them. The light fell full on his face. He wasn’t the same old man I saw in my other dream. He hadn’t a beard, only a moustache. And he had a very quick, kind of proud, way. He didn’t like what the man said to him and presently he put up his fists and knocked him down. Another man behind him tried to hit him on the head with something but the old man was too quick and turned round in time. Then it was rather horrible, but rather fine. There were three of them at him and he was fighting them all. I’ve read about that kind of thing in books but I never realised how one would feel about it. Of course, they got him in the end. They beat his head about terribly with the things in their hands. They were quite cool about it and stooped down to examine him and make sure he was really dead. The light from the lantern seemed all funny. It looked as if it made long uprights of light–sort of rods–all round the place. But perhaps I was waking up by then. No thanks, I’m all right. It was horrid, of course, but I’m not really frightened–not the way I would have been before. I’m more sorry for the old man.’
‘You feel you can go to sleep again?’
‘Oh rather! Is your headache better, Mrs Dimble?’
‘Quite gone, thank you. Good night.’
‘Without a doubt,’ thought Mark, ‘this must be the Mad Parson that Bill the Blizzard was talking of.’ The Committee at Belbury did not meet till ten-thirty, and ever since breakfast he had been walking with the Reverend Straik in the garden, despite the raw and misty weather of the morning. At the very moment when the man had first buttonholed him, the threadbare clothes and clumsy boots, the frayed clerical collar, the dark, lean, tragic face, gashed and ill-shaved and seamed, and the bitter sincerity of his manner, had struck a discordant note. It was not a type Mark had expected to meet in the NICE.
‘Do not imagine,’ said Mr Straik, ‘that I indulge in any dreams of carrying out our programme without violence. There will be resistance. They will gnaw their tongues and not repent. We are not to be deterred. We face these disorders with a firmness which will lead traducers to say that we have desired them. Let them say so. In a sense we have. It is no part of our witness to preserve that organisation of ordered sin which is called Society. To that organisation the message which we have to deliver is a message of absolute despair.’
‘Now that is what I meant,’ said Mark, ‘when I said that your point of view and mine must, in the long run, be incompatible. The preservation, which involves the thorough planning, of Society is just precisely the end I have in view. I do not think there is or can be any other end. The problem is quite different for you because you look forward to something else, something better than human society, in some other world.’
‘With every thought and vibration of my heart, with every drop of my blood,’ said Mr Straik, ‘I repudiate that damnable doctrine. That is precisely the subterfuge by which the World, the organisation and body of Death, has sidetracked and emasculated the teaching of Jesus, and turned into priestcraft and mysticism the plain demand of the Lord for righteousness and judgment here and now. The Kingdom of God is to be realised here–in this world. And it will be. At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. In that name I dissociate myself completely from all the organised religion that has yet been seen in the world.’
And at the name of Jesus, Mark, who would have lectured on abortion or perversion to an audience of young women without a qualm, felt himself so embarrassed that he knew his cheeks were slightly reddening; and he became so angry with himself and Mr Straik at this discovery that they then proceeded to redden very much indeed. This was exactly the kind of conversation he could not endure; and never since the well remembered misery of scripture lessons at school had he felt so uncomfortable. He muttered something about his ignorance of theology.
‘Theology!’ said Mr Straik with profound contempt. ‘It’s not theology I’m talking about, young man, but the Lord Jesus. Theology is talk–eyewash–a smoke screen–a game for rich men. It wasn’t in lecture rooms I found the Lord Jesus. It was in the coal pits, and beside the coffin of my daughter. If they think that Theology is a sort of cotton wool which will keep them safe in the great and terrible day, they’ll find their mistake. For, mark my words, this thing is going to happen. The Kingdom is going to arrive: in this world: in this country. The powers of science are an instrument. An irresistible instrument, as all of us in the NICE know. And why are they an irresistible instrument?’
‘Because science is based on observation,’ suggested Mark.
‘They are an irresistible instrument,’ shouted Straik, ‘because they are an instrument in His hand. An instrument of judgment as well as of healing. That is what I couldn’t get any of the Churches to see. They are blinded. Blinded by their filthy rags of humanism, their culture and humanitarianism and liberalism, as well as by their sins, or what they think their sins, though they are really the least sinful thing about them. That is why I have come to stand alone: a poor, weak, unworthy man, but the only prophet left. I knew that He was coming in power. And therefore, where we see power, we see the sign of His coming. And that is why I find myself joining with communists and materialists and anyone else who is really ready to expedite the coming. The feeblest of these people here has the tragic sense of life, the ruthlessness, the total commitment, the readiness to sacrifice all merely human values, which I could not find amid all the nauseating cant of the organised religions.’
‘You mean, do you,’ said Mark, ‘that as far as immediate practice is concerned, there are no limits to your co-operation with the programme?’
‘Sweep away all idea of co-operation!’ said the other. ‘Does clay co-operate with the potter? Did Cyrus cooperate with the Lord? These people will be used. I shall be used too. Instruments. Vehicles. But here comes the point that concerns you, young man. You have no choice whether you will be used or not. There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough. No one goes out of the NICE. Those who try to turn back will perish in the wilderness. But the question is, whether you are content to be one of the instruments which is thrown aside when it has served His turn–one which having executed judgment on others, is reserved for judgment itself–or will you be among those who enter on the inheritance? For it’s all true, you know. It is the Saints who are going to inherit the Earth–here in England, perhaps within the next twelve months–the Saints and no one else. Know you not that we shall judge angels?’ Then, suddenly lowering his voice, Straik added: ‘The real resurrection is even now taking place. The real life everlasting. Here in this world. You will see it.’
‘I say,’ said Mark, ‘it’s nearly twenty past. Oughtn’t we to be going to the Committee?’
Straik turned with him in silence. Partly to avoid further conversation along the same lines, and partly because he really wanted to know the answer, Mark said presently, ‘A rather annoying thing has happened. I’ve lost my wallet. There wasn’t much money in it–only about three pounds. But there were letters and things, and it’s a nuisance. Ought I to tell someone about it?’
‘You could tell the Steward,’ said Straik.
The Committee sat for about two hours and the Deputy Director was in the chair. His method of conducting business was slow and involved and to Mark, with his Bracton experience to guide him, it soon became obvious that the real work of the NICE must go on somewhere else. This, indeed, was what he had expected, and he was too reasonable to suppose that he should find himself, at this early stage, in the Inner Ring or whatever at Belbury corresponded to the Progressive Element at Bracton. But he hoped he would not be kept marking time on phantom committees for too long. This morning the business mainly concerned the details of the work which had already begun at Edgestow. The NICE had apparently won some sort of victory which gave it the right to pull down the little Norman church at the corner. ‘The usual objections were, of course, tabled,’ said Wither. Mark, who was not interested in architecture and who did not know the other side of the Wynd nearly so well as his wife, allowed his attention to wander. It was only at the end of the meeting that Wither opened a much more sensational subject. He believed that most of those present had already heard (‘Why do chairmen always begin that way?’ thought Mark) the very distressing piece of news which it was, nevertheless, his duty now to communicate to them in a semi-official manner. He was referring, of course, to the murder of William Hingest. As far as Mark could discover from the chairman’s tortuous and allusive narrative, Bill the Blizzard had been discovered with his head beaten in by some blunt instrument, lying near his car in Potter’s Lane at about four o’clock that morning. He had been dead for several hours. Mr Wither ventured to suppose that it would be a melancholy pleasure to the committee to know that the NICE police had been on the scene of the crime before five and that neither the local authorities nor Scotland Yard were making any objections to the fullest collaboration. He felt that if the occasion were more appropriate he would have welcomed a motion for some expression of the gratitude they must all feel to Miss Hardcastle and possibly of congratulations to her on the smooth interaction between her own forces and those of the state. This was a most gratifying feature in the sad story and, he suggested, a good omen for the future. Some decently subdued applause went round the table at this. Mr Wither then proceeded to speak at some length about the dead man. They had all much regretted Mr Hingest’s resolution to withdraw from the NICE, while fully appreciating his motives; they had all felt that this official severance would not in the least alter the cordial relations which existed between the deceased and almost all–he thought he could even say all without exception–of his former colleagues in the Institute. The obituary (in Raleigh’s fine phrase) was an instrument which the Deputy Director’s talents well fitted him to play, and he spoke at great length. He concluded by suggesting that they should all stand in silence for one minute as a token of respect for the memory of William Hingest.
And they did–a world-without-end minute in which odd creakings and breathings became audible, and behind the mask of each glazed and tight-lipped face, shy, irrelevant thoughts of this and that came creeping out as birds and mice creep out again in the clearing of a wood when the picnickers have gone, and everyone silently assured himself that he, at least, was not being morbid and not thinking about death.
Then there was a stir and a bustle and the Committee broke up.
The whole process of getting up and doing the ‘morning jobs’ was more cheerful, Jane found, because she had Mrs Dimble with her. Mark often helped; but as he always took the view–and Jane could feel it even if he did not express it in words–that ‘anything would do’ and that Jane made a lot of unnecessary work and that men could keep house with a tithe of the fuss and trouble which women made about it, Mark’s help was one of the commonest causes of quarrels between them. Mrs Dimble, on the other hand, fell in with her ways. It was a bright sunny morning and as they sat down to breakfast in the kitchen Jane was feeling bright herself. During the night her mind had evolved a comfortable theory that the mere fact of having seen Miss Ironwood and ‘had it all out’ would probably stop the dreams altogether. The episode would be closed. And now–there was all the exciting possibility of Mark’s new job to look forward to. She began to see pictures in her mind.
Mrs Dimble was anxious to know what had happened to Jane at St Anne’s and when she was going there again. Jane answered evasively on the first question and Mrs Dimble was too polite to press it. As to the second, Jane thought she wouldn’t ‘bother’ Miss Ironwood again, or wouldn’t ‘bother’ any further about the dreams. She said she had been ‘silly’ but felt sure she’d be all right now. And she glanced at the clock and wondered why Mrs Maggs hadn’t yet turned up.
‘My dear, I’m afraid you’ve lost Ivy Maggs,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Didn’t I tell you they’d taken her house too? I thought you’d understand she wouldn’t be coming to you in future. You see there’s nowhere for her to live in Edgestow.’
‘Bother!’ said Jane, and added, without much interest in the reply, ‘What is she doing, do you know?’
‘She’s gone out to St Anne’s.’
‘Has she got friends there?’
‘She’s gone to the Manor, along with Cecil and me.’
‘Do you mean she’s got a job there?’
‘Well, yes. I suppose it is a job.’
Mrs Dimble left at about eleven. She also, it appeared, was going to St Anne’s, but was first to meet her husband and lunch with him at Northumberland. Jane walked down to the town with her to do a little shopping and they parted at the bottom of Market Street. It was just after this that Jane met Mr Curry.
‘Have you heard the news, Mrs Studdock?’ said Curry. His manner was always important and his tone always vaguely confidential, but this morning they seemed more so than usual.
‘No. What’s wrong?’ said Jane. She thought Mr Curry a pompous fool and Mark a fool for being impressed by him. But as soon as Curry began speaking, her face showed all the wonder and consternation he could have wished. Nor were they, this time, feigned. He told her that Mr Hingest had been murdered, sometime during the night, or in the small hours of that morning. The body had been found lying beside his car, in Potter’s Lane, badly beaten about the head. He had been driving from Belbury to Edgestow. Curry was at the moment hastening back to college to talk to the Warden about it; he had just been at the police station. One saw that the murder had already become Curry’s property. The ‘matter’ was, in some indefinable sense, ‘in his hands’, and he was heavy with responsibility. At another time Jane would have found this amusing. She escaped from him as soon as possible and went into Blackie’s for a cup of coffee. She felt she must sit down.
The death of Hingest in itself meant nothing to her. She had met him only once and she had accepted from Mark the view that he was a disagreeable old man and rather a snob. But the certainty that she herself in her dream had witnessed a real murder shattered at one blow all the consoling pretences with which she had begun the morning. It came over her with sickening clarity that the affair of her dreams, far from being ended, was only beginning. The bright, narrow little life which she had proposed to live was being irremediably broken into. Windows into huge, dark landscapes were opening on every side and she was powerless to shut them. It would drive her mad, she thought, to face it alone. The other alternative was to go back to Miss Ironwood. But that seemed to be only a way of going deeper into all this darkness. This Manor at St Anne’s–this ‘kind of company’ –was ‘mixed up in it’. She didn’t want to get drawn in. It was unfair. It wasn’t as if she had asked much of life. All she wanted was to be left alone. And the thing was so preposterous! The sort of thing which, according to all the authorities she had hitherto accepted, could not really happen.
Cosser–the frecklefaced man with the little wisp of black moustache–approached Mark as he was coming away from the Committee.
‘You and I have a job to do,’ he said. ‘Got to get out a report about Cure Hardy.’
Mark was very relieved to hear of a job. But he was a little on his dignity, not having liked Cosser much when he had met him yesterday, and he answered:
‘Does that mean I am to be in Steele’s department after all?’
‘That’s right,’ said Cosser.
‘The reason I ask,’ said Mark, ‘is that neither he nor you seemed particularly keen on having me. I don’t want to push myself in, you know. I don’t need to stay at the NICE at all if it comes to that.’
‘Well, don’t start talking about it here,’ said Cosser. ‘Come upstairs.’
They were talking in the hall and Mark noticed Wither pacing thoughtfully towards them. ‘Wouldn’t it be as well to speak to him and get the whole thing thrashed out?’ he suggested. But the Deputy Director, after coming within ten feet of them, had turned in another direction. He was humming to himself under his breath and seemed so deep in thought that Mark felt the moment unsuitable for an interview. Cosser, though he said nothing, apparently thought the same and so Mark followed him up to an office on the third floor.
‘It’s about the village of Cure Hardy,’ said Cosser when they were seated. ‘You see, all that land at Bragdon Wood is going to be little better than a swamp once they get to work. Why the hell we wanted to go there I don’t know. Anyway, the latest plan is to divert the Wynd: block up the old channel through Edgestow altogether. Look. Here’s Shillingbridge, ten miles north of the town. It’s to be diverted there and brought down an artificial channel–here, to the east, where the blue line is –and rejoin the old bed down here.’
‘The university will hardly agree to that,’ said Mark. ‘What would Edgestow be without the river?’
‘We’ve got the university by the short hairs,’ said Cosser. ‘You needn’t worry about that. Anyway it’s not our job. The point is that the new Wynd must come right through Cure Hardy. Now look at your contours. Cure Hardy is in this narrow little valley. Eh? Oh, you’ve been there, have you? That makes it all the easier. I don’t know these parts myself. Well, the idea is to dam the valley at the southern end and make a big reservoir. You’ll need a new water supply for Edgestow now that it’s to be the second city in the country.’
‘But what happens to Cure Hardy?’
‘That’s another advantage. We build a new model village (it’s to be called Jules Hardy or Wither Hardy) four miles away. Over here, on the railway.’
‘I say, you know, there’ll be the devil of a stink about this. Cure Hardy is famous. It’s a beauty spot. There are the sixteenth-century almshouses, and a Norman church and all that.’
‘Exactly. That’s where you and I come in. We’ve got to make a report on Cure Hardy. We’ll run out and have a look round tomorrow, but we can write most of the report today. It ought to be pretty easy. If it’s a beauty spot, you can bet it’s insanitary. That’s the first point to stress. Then we’ve got to get out some facts about the population. I think you’ll find it consists almost entirely of the two most undesirable elements–small rentiers and agricultural labourers.’
‘The small rentier is a bad element, I agree,’ said Mark. ‘I suppose the agricultural labourer is more controversial.’
‘The Institute doesn’t approve of him. He’s a very recalcitrant element in a planned community, and he’s always backward. We’re not going in for English agriculture. So you see, all we have to do is to verify a few facts. Otherwise the report writes itself.’
Mark was silent for a moment or two.
‘That’s easy enough,’ he said. ‘But before I get down to it, I’d just like to be a bit clearer about my own position. Oughtn’t I go and see Steele? I don’t fancy settling down to work in this department if he doesn’t want to have me.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said Cosser.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing, Steele can’t prevent you if the DD backs you up, as he seems to be doing for the moment. For another, Steele is rather a dangerous man. If you just go quietly on with the job, he may get used to you in the end; but if you go and see him it might lead to a bust-up. There’s another thing too.’ Cosser paused, picked his nose thoughtfully, and proceeded. ‘Between ourselves, I don’t think things can go on indefinitely in this department in the way they are at present.’
The excellent training which Mark had had at Bracton enabled him to understand this. Cosser was hoping to get Steele out of the department altogether. He thought he saw the whole situation. Steele was dangerous while he lasted, but he might not last.
‘I got the impression yesterday,’ said Mark, ‘that you and Steele hit it off together rather well.’
‘The great thing here,’ said Cosser, ‘is never to quarrel with anyone. I hate quarrels myself. I can get on with anybody– as long as the work gets done.’
‘Of course,’ said Mark. ‘By the way, if we go to Cure Hardy tomorrow I might as well run in to Edgestow and spend the night at home.’
For Mark a good deal hung on the answer to this. He might find out whether he were actually under orders from Cosser. If Cosser said, ‘You can’t do that,’ he would at least know where he stood. If Cosser said that Mark couldn’t be spared, that would be better still. Or Cosser might reply that he’d better consult the DD. That also would have made Mark feel surer of his position. But Cosser merely said ‘Oh,’ leaving Mark in doubt whether no one needed leave of absence or whether Mark was not sufficiently established as a member of the Institute for his absence to be of any consequence. Then they went to work on their report.
It took them the rest of the day, so that Cosser and he came in to dinner late and without dressing. This gave Mark a most agreeable sensation. And he enjoyed the meal too. Although he was among men he had not met before, he seemed to know everyone within the first five minutes and to be joining naturally in the conversation. He was learning how to talk their shop.
‘How nice it is!’ said Mark to himself next morning as the car left the main road at Duke’s Eaton and began descending the bumpy little lane into the long valley where Cure Hardy lay. Mark was not as a rule very sensitive to beauty, but Jane and his love for Jane had already awakened him a little in this respect. Perhaps the winter morning sunlight affected him all the more because he had never been taught to regard it as specially beautiful and it therefore worked on his senses without interference. The earth and sky had the look of things recently washed. The brown fields looked as if they would be good to eat, and those in grass set off the curves of the little hills as close-clipped hair sets off the body of a horse. The sky looked further away than usual, but also clearer, so that the long slender streaks of cloud (dark slate colour against the pale blue) had edges as clear as if they were cut out of cardboard. Every little copse was black and bristling as a hairbrush, and when the car stopped in Cure Hardy itself the silence that followed the turning off of the engine was filled with the noise of rooks that seemed to be calling, ‘Wake! Wake!’
‘Bloody awful noise those birds make,’ said Cosser. ‘Got your map? Now…’ He plunged at once into business.
They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as ‘man’ or ‘woman’. He preferred to write about ‘vocational groups’, ‘elements’, ‘classes’ and ‘populations’: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.
And yet, he could not help rather liking this village. When, at one o’clock, he persuaded Cosser to turn into the Two Bells, he even said so. They had both brought sandwiches with them, but Mark felt he would like a pint of beer. In the Two Bells it was very warm and dark, for the window was small. Two labourers (no doubt recalcitrant and backward) were sitting with earthenware mugs at their elbows, munching very thick sandwiches, and a third was standing up at the counter conducting a conversation with the landlord.
‘No beer for me, thanks,’ said Cosser, ‘and we don’t want to muck about here too long. What were you saying?’
‘I was saying that on a fine morning there is something rather attractive about a place like this, in spite of all its obvious absurdities.’
‘Yes, it is a fine morning. Makes a real difference to one’s health, a bit of sunlight.’
‘I was thinking of the place.’
‘You mean this?’ said Cosser glancing round the room. ‘I should have thought it was just the sort of thing we wanted to get rid of. No sunlight, no ventilation. Haven’t much use for alcohol myself (read the Miller Report) but if people have got to have their stimulants, I’d like to see them administered in a more hygienic way.’
‘I don’t know that the stimulant is quite the whole point,’ said Mark, looking at his beer. The whole scene was reminding him of drinks and talks long ago–of laughter and arguments in undergraduate days. Somehow one had made friends more easily then. He wondered what had become of all that set–of Carey and Wadsden and Denniston, who had so nearly got his own Fellowship.
‘Don’t know, I’m sure,’ said Cosser, in answer to his last remark. ‘Nutrition isn’t my subject. You’d want to ask Stock about that.’
‘What I’m really thinking about,’ said Mark, ‘is not this pub, but the whole village. Of course, you’re quite right: that sort of thing has to go. But it had its pleasant side. We’ll have to be careful that whatever we’re building up in its place will really be able to beat it on all levels–not merely in efficiency.’
‘Oh, architecture and all that,’ said Cosser. ‘Well, that’s hardly my line, you know. That’s more for someone like Wither. Have you nearly finished?’
All at once it came over Mark what a terrible bore this little man was, and in the same moment he felt utterly sick of the NICE. But he reminded himself that one could not expect to be in the interesting set at once; there would be better things later on. Anyway, he had not burnt his boats. Perhaps he would chuck up the whole thing and go back to Bracton in a day or two. But not at once. It would be only sensible to hang on for a bit and see how things shaped.
On their way back Cosser dropped him near Edgestow station, and as he walked home Mark began to think of what he would say to Jane about Belbury. You will quite misunderstand him if you think he was consciously inventing a lie. Almost involuntarily, as the picture of himself entering the flat, and of Jane’s questioning face, arose in his mind, there arose also the imagination of his own voice answering her, hitting off the salient features of Belbury in amusing, confident phrases. This imaginary speech of his own gradually drove out of his mind the real experiences he had undergone. Those real experiences of misgivings and of uneasiness, indeed, quickened his desire to cut a good figure in the eyes of his wife. Almost without noticing it, he had decided not to mention the affair of Cure Hardy; Jane cared for old buildings and all that sort of thing. As a result, when Jane, who was at that moment drawing the curtains, heard the door opening and looked round and saw Mark, she saw a rather breezy and buoyant Mark. Yes, he was almost sure he’d got the job. The salary wasn’t absolutely fixed, but he’d be going into that tomorrow. It was a very funny place: he’d explain all that later. But he had already got onto the real people there. Wither and Miss Hardcastle were the ones that mattered. ‘I must tell you about the Hardcastle woman,’ he said. ‘She’s quite incredible.’
Jane had to decide what she would say to Mark much more quickly than he had decided what he would say to her. And she decided to tell him nothing about the dreams or St Anne’s. Men hated women who had things wrong with them, specially queer, unusual things. Her resolution was easily kept for Mark, full of his own story, asked her no questions. She was not, perhaps, entirely convinced by what he said. There was a vagueness about all the details. Very early in the conversation she said in a sharp, frightened voice (she had no idea how he disliked that voice), ‘Mark, you haven’t given up your fellowship at Bracton?’ He said, No, of course not, and went on. She listened only with half her mind. She knew he often had rather grandiose ideas, and from something in his face she divined that during his absence he had been drinking much more than he usually did. And so, all evening, the male bird displayed his plumage and the female played her part and asked questions and laughed and feigned more interest than she felt. Both were young, and if neither loved very much, each was still anxious to be admired.
That evening the Fellows of Bracton sat in Common Room over their wine and dessert. They had given up dressing for dinner, as an economy during the war, and not yet resumed the practice, so that their sports coats and cardigans struck a somewhat discordant note against the dark Jacobean panels, the candle light, and the silver of many different periods. Feverstone and Curry were sitting together. Until that night for about three hundred years this Common Room had been one of the pleasant quiet places of England. It was in Lady Alice, on the ground floor beneath the soler, and the windows at its eastern end looked out on the river and on Bragdon Wood, across a little terrace where the Fellows were in the habit of taking their dessert on summer evenings. At this hour and season these windows were of course shut and curtained. And from beyond them came such noises as had never been heard in that room before–shouts and curses and the sound of lorries heavily drumming past or harshly changing gear, rattling of chains, drumming of mechanical drills, clanging of iron, whistles, thuddings, and an all pervasive vibration. Saeva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractaeque catenae, as Glossop, sitting on the far side of the fire, had observed to Jewel. For beyond those windows, scarcely thirty yards away on the other side of the Wynd, the conversion of an ancient woodland into an inferno of mud and noise and steel and concrete was already going on apace. Several members even of the Progressive Element–those who had rooms on this side of College –had already been grumbling about it. Curry himself had been a little surprised by the form which his dream had taken now that it was a reality, but he was doing his best to brazen it out, and though his conversation with Feverstone had to be conducted at the top of their voices, he made no allusion to this inconvenience.
‘It’s quite definite, then,’ he bawled, ‘that young Studdock is not coming back?’
‘Oh quite,’ shouted Feverstone. ‘He sent me a message through a high official to tell me to let the College know.’
‘When will he send a formal resignation?’
‘Haven’t an earthly! Like all these youngsters, he’s very casual about these things. As a matter of fact, the longer he delays the better.’
‘You mean it gives us a chance to look about us?’
‘Quite. You see, nothing need come before the College till he writes. One wants to have the whole question of his successor taped before that.’
‘Obviously. That is most important. Once you present an open question to all these people who don’t understand the field and don’t know their own minds, you get anything happening.’
‘Exactly. That’s what we want to avoid. The only way to manage a place like this is to produce your candidate–bring the rabbit out of a hat–two minutes after you’ve announced the vacancy.’
‘We must begin thinking about it at once.’
‘Does his successor have to be a sociologist? I mean is the fellowship tied to the subject?’
‘Oh, not in the least. It’s one of those Paston fellowships. Why? Had you any subject in mind?’
‘It’s a long time since we had anyone in Politics.’
‘Um–yes. There’s still a considerable prejudice against Politics as an academic subject. I say, Feverstone, oughtn’t we to give this new subject a leg up?’
‘What new subject?’
‘Pragmatometry.’
‘Well now, it’s funny you should say that, because the man I was beginning to think of is a Politician who has also been going in a good deal for Pragmatometry. One could call it a fellowship in social Pragmatometry, or something like that.’
‘Who is the man?’
‘Laird–from Leicester, Cambridge.’
It was automatic for Curry to look very thoughtful, though he had never heard of Laird, and to say, ‘Ah, Laird. Just remind me of the details of his academic career.’
‘Well,’ said Feverstone, ‘as you remember, he was in bad health at the time of his finals, and came rather a cropper. The Cambridge examining is so bad nowadays that one hardly counts that. Everyone knew he was one of the most brilliant men of his year. He was President of the Sphinxes and used to edit The Adult. David Laird, you know.’
‘Yes, to be sure. David Laird. But I say, Dick…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m not quite happy about his bad degree. Of course I don’t attach a superstitious value to examination results any more than you do. Still…We have made one or two unfortunate elections lately.’ Almost involuntarily, as he said this, Curry glanced across the room to where Pelham sat–Pelham with his little button-like mouth and his pudding face. Pelham was a sound man; but even Curry found it difficult to remember anything that Pelham had ever done or said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Feverstone, ‘but even our worst elections aren’t quite so dim as those the College makes when we leave it to itself.’
Perhaps because the intolerable noise had frayed his nerves, Curry felt a momentary doubt about the ‘dimness’ of these outsiders. He had dined recently at Northumberland and found Telford dining there the same night. The contrast between the alert and witty Telford whom everyone at Northumberland seemed to know, whom everyone listened to, and the ‘dim’ Telford in Bracton Common Room had perplexed him. Could it be that the silences of all these ‘outsiders’ in his own College, their monosyllabic replies when he condescended and their blank faces when he assumed his confidential manner, had an explanation which had never occurred to him? The fantastic suggestion that he, Curry, might be a bore, passed through his mind so swiftly that a second later he had forgotten it forever. The much less painful suggestion that these traditionalists and research beetles affected to look down on him was retained. But Feverstone was shouting at him again.
‘I’m going to be at Cambridge next week,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m giving a dinner. I’d as soon it wasn’t mentioned here, because, as a matter of fact, the PM may be coming, and one or two big newspaper people and Tony Dew. What? Oh, of course you know Tony. That little dark man from the Bank. Laird is going to be there. He’s some kind of cousin of the PM’s. I was wondering if you could join us. I know David’s very anxious to meet you. He’s heard a lot about you from some chap who used to go to your lectures. I can’t remember the name.’
‘Well, it would be very difficult. It rather depends on when old Bill’s funeral is to be. I should have to be here for that of course. Was there anything about the inquest on the six o’clock news?’
‘I didn’t hear. But of course that raises a second question. Now that Blizzard has gone to blow in a better world, we have two vacancies.’
‘I can’t hear,’ yelled Curry. ‘Is this noise getting worse? Or am I getting deaf?’
‘I say, Sub-Warden,’ shouted Brizeacre from beyond Feverstone, ‘what the devil are your friends outside doing?’
‘Can’t they work without shouting?’ asked someone else.
‘It doesn’t sound like work at all to me,’ said a third.
‘Listen!’ said Glossop suddenly. ‘That’s not work. Listen to the feet. It’s more like a game of rugger.’
‘It’s getting worse every minute,’ said Raynor.
Next moment nearly everyone in the room was on his feet. ‘What was that?’ shouted one. ‘They’re murdering someone,’ said Glossop. ‘There’s only one way of getting a noise like that out of a man’s throat.’ ‘Where are you going?’ asked Curry. ‘I’m going to see what’s happening,’ said Glossop. ‘Curry, go and collect all the shooters in College. Someone ring up the police.’ ‘I shouldn’t go out if I were you,’ said Feverstone who had remained seated and was pouring himself out another glass of wine. ‘It sounds as if the police, or something, was there already.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Listen. There!’
‘I thought that was their infernal drill.’
‘Listen!’
‘My God…you really think it’s a machine gun?’
‘Look out! Look out!’ said a dozen voices at once as a splintering of glass became audible and a shower of stones fell onto the Common Room floor. A moment later several of the Fellows had made a rush for the windows and put up the shutters; and then they were all standing staring at one another, and silent but for the noise of their heavy breathing. Glossop had a cut on the forehead, and on the floor lay the fragments of that famous east window on which Henrietta Maria had once cut her name with a diamond.
5 (#ulink_6aa14d79-1c93-5fd8-a7c5-c4bec94543d0)
Elasticity (#ulink_6aa14d79-1c93-5fd8-a7c5-c4bec94543d0)
Next morning Mark went back to Belbury by train. He had promised his wife to clear up a number of points about his salary and place of residence, and the memory of all these promises made a little cloud of uneasiness in his mind, but on the whole he was in good spirits. This return to Belbury–just sauntering in and hanging up his hat and ordering a drink–was a pleasant contrast to his first arrival. The servant who brought the drink knew him. Filostrato nodded to him. Women would fuss, but this was clearly the real world. After the drink he strolled upstairs to Cosser’s office. He was there for only five minutes, and when he came out, his state of mind had been completely altered.
Steele and Cosser were both there and both looked up with the air of men who have been interrupted by a total stranger. Neither spoke.
‘Ah–good morning,’ said Mark awkwardly.
Steele finished making a pencil note on some large document which was spread out before him.
‘What is it, Mr Studdock?’ he said without looking up.
‘I came to see Cosser,’ said Mark, and then, addressing Cosser, ‘I’ve just been thinking over the last section but one in that report–’
‘What report’s this?’ said Steele to Cosser.
‘Oh, I thought,’ replied Cosser with a little twisty smile at one corner of his mouth, ‘that it would be a good thing to put together a report on Cure Hardy in my spare time, and as there was nothing particular to do yesterday I drew it up. Mr Studdock helped me.’
‘Well, never mind about that now,’ said Steele. ‘You can talk to Mr Cosser about it some other time, Mr Studdock. I’m afraid he’s busy at present.’
‘Look here,’ said Mark, ‘I think we’d better understand one another. Am I to take it that this report was simply a private hobby of Cosser’s? And if so, I should like to have known that before I spent eight hours’ work on it. And whose orders am I under?’
Steele, playing with his pencil, looked at Cosser.
‘I asked you a question about my position, Mr Steele,’ said Mark.
‘I haven’t time for this sort of thing,’ said Steele. ‘If you haven’t any work to do, I have. I know nothing about your position.’
Mark thought, for a moment, of turning to Cosser; but Cosser’s smooth, freckled face and non-committal eyes suddenly filled him with such contempt that he turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the door behind him. He was going to see the Deputy Director.
At the door of Wither’s room he hesitated for a moment because he heard voices from within. But he was too angry to wait. He knocked and entered without noticing whether the knock had been answered.
‘My dear boy,’ said the Deputy Director looking up but not quite fixing his eyes on Mark’s face. ‘I’m delighted to see you.’ As he heard these words Mark noticed that there was a third person in the room. It was a man called Stone whom he had met at dinner the day before yesterday. Stone was standing in front of Wither’s table, rolling and unrolling a piece of blotting paper with his fingers. His mouth was open, his eyes fixed on the Deputy Director.
‘Delighted to see you,’ repeated Wither. ‘All the more so because you–er–interrupted me in what I am afraid I must call a rather painful interview. As I was just saying to poor Mr Stone when you came in, nothing is nearer to my heart than the wish that this great Institute should all work together like one family…the greatest unity of will and purpose, Mr Stone, the fullest mutual confidence…that is what I expect of my colleagues. But then as you may remind me, Mr–ah–Studdock, even in family life, there are occasionally strains and frictions and misunderstandings. And that is why, my dear boy, I am not at the moment quite at leisure–don’t go, Mr Stone. I have a great deal more to say to you.’
‘Perhaps I’d better come back later?’ said Mark.
‘Well, perhaps in all the circumstances…it is your feelings that I am considering, Mr Stone…perhaps…the usual method of seeing me, Mr Studdock, is to apply to my secretary and make an appointment. Not, you will understand, that I have the least wish to insist on any formalities or would be other than pleased to see you whenever you looked in. It is the waste of your time that I am anxious to avoid.’
‘Thank you, Sir,’ said Mark. ‘I’ll go and see your secretary.’
The secretary’s office was next door. When one went in, one found not the secretary himself, but a number of subordinates who were cut off from their visitors behind a sort of counter. Mark made an appointment for ten o’clock tomorrow which was the earliest hour they could offer him. As he came out he ran into Fairy Hardcastle.
‘Hullo, Studdock,’ said the Fairy. ‘Hanging round the DD’s office? That won’t do, you know.’
‘I have decided,’ said Mark, ‘that I must either get my position definitely fixed once and for all or else leave the Institute.’
She looked at him with an ambiguous expression in which amusement seemed to predominate. Then she suddenly slipped her arm through his.
‘Look, Sonny,’ she said, ‘you drop all that, see? It isn’t going to do you any good. You come along and have a talk with me.’
‘There’s really nothing to talk about, Miss Hardcastle,’ said Mark. ‘I’m quite clear in my mind. Either I get a real job here, or I go back to Bracton. That’s simple enough: I don’t even particularly mind which, so long as I know.’
To this, the Fairy made no answer, and the steady pressure of her arm compelled Mark, unless he was prepared to struggle, to go with her along the passage. The intimacy and authority of her grip was ludicrously ambiguous and would have fitted almost equally well the relations of policeman and prisoner, mistress and lover, nurse and child. Mark felt that he would look a fool if they met anyone.
She brought him to her own offices which were on the second floor. The outer office was full of what he had already learned to call Waips, the girls of the Women’s Auxiliary Institutional Police. The men of the force, though very much more numerous, were not so often met with indoors, but Waips were constantly seen flitting to and fro wherever Miss Hardcastle appeared. Far from sharing the masculine characteristics of their chief they were (as Feverstone once said) ‘feminine to the point of imbecility’–small and slight and fluffy and full of giggles. Miss Hardcastle behaved to them as if she were a man, and addressed them in tones of half-breezy, half-ferocious, gallantry. ‘Cocktails, Dolly,’ she bawled as they entered the outer office. When they reached the inner office she made Mark sit down but remained standing herself with her back to the fire and her legs wide apart. The drinks were brought and Dolly retired closing the door behind her. Mark had grumblingly told his grievance on the way.
‘Cut it all out, Studdock,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘And whatever you do, don’t go bothering the DD. I told you before that you needn’t worry about all those little third floor people provided you’ve got him on your side. Which you have at present. But you won’t have if you keep on going to him with complaints.’
‘That might be very good advice, Miss Hardcastle,’ said Mark, ‘if I were committed to staying here at all. But I’m not. And from what I’ve seen I don’t like the place. I’ve very nearly made up my mind to go home. Only I thought I’d just have a talk with him first, to make everything clear.’
‘Making things clear is the one thing the DD can’t stand,’ replied Miss Hardcastle. ‘That’s not how he runs the place. And mind you, he knows what he’s about. It works, Sonny. You’ve no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving…you’re not superstitious, are you? I am. I don’t think it’s lucky to leave the NICE. You needn’t bother your head about all the Steeles and Cossers. That’s part of your apprenticeship. You’re being put through it at the moment, but if you hold on you’ll come out above them. All you’ve got to do is to sit tight. Not one of them is going to be left when we get going.’
‘That’s just the sort of line Cosser took about Steele,’ said Mark, ‘and it didn’t seem to do me much good when it came to the point.’
‘Do you know, Studdock,’ said Miss Hardcastle, ‘I’ve taken a fancy to you. And it’s just as well I have. Because if I hadn’t, I’d be disposed to resent that last remark.’
‘I don’t mean to be offensive,’ said Mark. ‘But–damn it all–look at it from my point of view.’
‘No good, Sonny,’ said Miss Hardcastle shaking her head. ‘You don’t know enough facts yet for your point of view to be worth sixpence. You haven’t yet realised what you’re in on. You’re being offered a chance of something far bigger than a seat in the cabinet. And there are only two alternatives, you know. Either to be in the NICE or to be out of it. And I know better than you which is going to be most fun.’
‘I do understand that,’ said Mark. ‘But anything is better than being nominally in and having nothing to do. Give me a real place in the Sociological Department and I’ll…’
‘Rats! That whole Department is going to be scrapped. It had to be there at the beginning for propaganda purposes. But they’re all going to be weeded out.’
‘But what assurance have I that I’m going to be one of their successors?’
‘You aren’t. They’re not going to have any successors. The real work has nothing to do with all these departments. The kind of sociology we’re interested in will be done by my people–the police.’
‘Then where do I come in?’
‘If you’ll trust me,’ said the Fairy, putting down her empty glass and producing a cheroot, ‘I can put you onto a bit of your real work–what you were really brought here to do–straight away.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Alcasan,’ said Miss Hardcastle between her teeth. She had started one of her interminable dry smokes. Then, glancing at Mark with a hint of contempt, ‘You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?’
‘You mean the radiologist–the man who was guillotined?’ asked Mark who was completely bewildered. The Fairy nodded.
‘He’s to be rehabilitated,’ she said. ‘Gradually. I’ve got all the facts in the dossier. You begin with a quiet little article –not questioning his guilt, not at first, but just hinting that of course he was a member of their Quisling government and there was a prejudice against him. Say you don’t doubt the verdict was just, but it’s disquieting to realise that it would almost certainly have been the same even if he’d been innocent. Then you follow it up in a day or two with an article of quite a different kind. Popular account of the value of his work. You can mug up the facts–enough for that
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Клайв Льюис
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The third novel in the science-fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis. This final story is set on Earth, and tells of a terrifying conspiracy against humanity.The story surrounds Mark and Jane Studdock, a newly married couple. Mark is a Sociologist who is enticed to join an organisation called N.I.C.E. which aims to control all human life. His wife, meanwhile, has bizarre prophetic dreams about a decapitated scientist, Alcasan. As Mark is drawn inextricably into the sinister organisation, he discovers the truth of his wife’s dreams when he meets the literal head of Alcasan which is being kept alive by infusions of blood.Jane seeks help concerning her dreams at a community called St Anne’s, where she meets their leader – Dr Ransom (the main character of the previous two titles in the trilogy). The story ends in a final spectacular scene at the N.I.C.E. headquarters where Merlin appears to confront the powers of Hell.