That Hideous Strength

by C. S. Lewis

  is, how remote the horizon.

  7

  The Pendragon

  Before she reached the door in the wall Jane met Mr Denniston and he guided her into the Manor, not by that door but by the main gate which opened on the same road a few hundred yards further on. She told him her story as they walked. In his company she had that curious sensation which most married people know of being with someone whom (for the final but wholly mysterious reason) one could never have married but who is nevertheless more of one’s own world than the person one has married in fact. As they entered the house they met Mrs Maggs.

  ‘What? Mrs Studdock! Fancy!’ said Mrs Maggs.

  ‘Yes, Ivy,’ said Denniston, ‘and bringing great news. Things are beginning to move. We must see Grace at once. And is MacPhee about?’

  ‘He’s out gardening hours ago,’ said Mrs Maggs. ‘And Dr Dimble’s gone in to College. And Camilla’s in the kitchen. Shall I send her along?’

  ‘Yes, do. And if you can prevent Mr Bultitude from butting in–’

  ‘That’s right. I’ll keep him out of mischief all right. You’d like a cup of tea, Mrs Studdock, wouldn’t you? Coming by train and all that.’

  A few minutes later Jane found herself once more in Grace Ironwood’s room. Miss Ironwood and the Dennistons all sat facing her so that she felt as if she were the candidate in a viva voce examination. And when Ivy Maggs brought in the tea she did not go away again but sat down as if she also were one of the examiners.

  ‘Now!’ said Camilla, her eyes and nostrils widened with a sort of fresh mental hunger–it was too concentrated to be called excitement.

  Jane glanced round the room.

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

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

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

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

  ‘Fancy!’ said Ivy Maggs. ‘So we were right about Bragdon Wood!’ said Camilla. ‘It is really Belbury,’ said her husband. ‘But in that case, where does Alcasan come in?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Miss Ironwood in her level voice, and the others became instantly silent. ‘We must not discuss the matter here. Mrs Studdock has not yet joined us.’

  ‘Am I to be told nothing?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood. ‘You must excuse me. It would not be wise at the moment: indeed, we are not at liberty to do so. Will you allow me to ask you two more questions?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Jane, a little sulkily, but only a very little. The presence of Camilla and Camilla’s husband somehow put her on her best behaviour.

  Miss Ironwood had opened a drawer and for a few moments there was silence while she hunted in it. Then she handed a photograph across to Jane and asked,

  ‘Do you recognise that person?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane in a low voice. ‘That is the man I’ve dreamed of and the man I saw this morning in Edgestow.’

  It was a good photograph and beneath it was the name Augustus Frost, with a few other details which Jane did not at the moment take in.

  ‘In the second place,’ continued Miss Ironwood, holding out her hand for Jane to return the photograph, ‘are you prepared to see the Director–now?’

  ‘Well–yes, if you like.’

  ‘In that case, Arthur,’ said Miss Ironwood to Denniston, ‘you had better go and find out if he is well enough to meet Mrs Studdock.’

  Denniston at once rose.

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘I would like a word with Mrs Studdock alone.’ At this the others rose also and preceded Denniston out of the room. A very large cat which Jane had not noticed before jumped up and occupied the chair which Ivy Maggs had just vacated.

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

  Jane said nothing.

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

  Jane gave a little cough which had no other purpose than to dispel a certain air of unwelcome solemnity which seemed to have settled on the room as soon as she and Miss Ironwood were left alone.

  ‘There are also certain things,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘which you ought to know about the Director before you see him. He will appear to you, Mrs Studdock, to be a very young man: younger than yourself. You will please understand that this is not the case. He is nearer fifty than forty. He is a man of very great experience, who has travelled where no other human being ever travelled before and mixed in societies of which you and I have no conception.’

  ‘That is very interesting,’ said Jane, though displaying no interest.

  ‘And thirdly,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘I must ask you to remember that he is often in great pain. Whatever decision you come to, I trust you will not say or do anything that may put an unnecessary strain upon him.’

  ‘If Mr Fisher-King is not well enough to see visitors…’ said Jane vaguely.

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

  She rose and held the door open for Jane. They passed out into the plain, narrow passage and thence up shallow steps into a large entrance hall whence a fine Georgian staircase led to the upper floors. The house, larger than Jane had at first supposed, was warm and very silent, and after so many days spent in fog, the autumn sunlight, falling on soft carpets and on walls, seemed to her bright and golden. On the first floor, but raised above it by six steps, they found a little square place with white pillars where Camilla, quiet and alert, sat waiting for them. There was a door behind her.

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

  ‘Is he in much pain this morning?’

  ‘It is not continuous. It is one of his good days.’

  As Miss Ironwood raised her hand to knock on the door, Jane thought to herself, ‘Be careful. Don’t get let in for anything. All these long passages and low voices will make a fool of you, if you don’t look out. You’ll become another of this man’s female adorers.’ Next moment she found herself going in. It was light–it seemed all windows. And it was warm–a fire blazed on the hearth. And blue was the prevailing colour. Before her eyes had taken it in she was annoyed, and in a way ashamed, to see that Miss Ironwood was courtesying. ‘I won’t,’ contended in Jane’s mind with ‘I can’t’: for it had been true in her dream, she couldn’t.

  ‘This is the young lady, sir,’ said Miss Ironwood.

  Jane looked; and instantly her world was unmade.

  On a sofa before her, with one foot bandaged as if he had a wound, lay what appeared to be a boy, twenty years old.

  On one of the long window sills a tame jackdaw was walking up and down. The light of the fire with its weak reflection, and the light of the sun with its weak reflection, and the light of the sun with its stronger reflection, contended on the ceiling. But all the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man.

  Of course he was not a boy–how could she have thought so? The fresh skin on his forehead and cheeks and, above all, on his hands, had suggested the idea. But no boy could have so full a be
ard. And no boy could be so strong. She had expected to see an invalid. Now it was manifest that the grip of those hands would be inescapable, and imagination suggested that those arms and shoulders could support the whole house. Miss Ironwood at her side struck her as a little old woman, shrivelled and pale –a thing you could have blown away.

  The sofa was placed on a kind of dais divided from the rest of the room by a step. She had an impression of massed hangings of blue–later, she saw that it was only a screen–behind the man, so that the effect was that of a throne room. She would have called it silly if, instead of seeing it, she had been told of it by another. Through the window she saw no trees nor hills nor shapes of other houses: only the level floor of mist, as if this man and she were perched in a blue tower overlooking the world.

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

  ‘Thank you, Grace,’ the man was saying. ‘Is this Mrs Studdock?’

  And the voice also seemed to be like sunlight and gold. Like gold not only as gold is beautiful but as it is heavy: like sunlight not only as it falls gently on English walls in autumn but as it beats down on the jungle or the desert to engender life or destroy it. And now it was addressing her.

  ‘You must forgive me for not getting up, Mrs Studdock,’ it said. ‘My foot is hurt.’

  And Jane heard her own voice saying, ‘Yes Sir,’ soft and chastened like Miss Ironwood’s voice. She had meant to say, ‘Good morning, Mr Fisher-King,’ in an easy tone that would have counteracted the absurdity of her behaviour on first entering the room. But the other was what actually came out of her mouth. Shortly after this she found herself seated before the Director. She was shaken: she was even shaking. She hoped intensely that she was not going to cry, or be unable to speak, or do anything silly. For her world was unmade: anything might happen now. If only the conversation were over!–so that she could get out of that room without disgrace, and go away, not for good, but for a long time.

  ‘Do you wish me to remain, Sir?’ said Miss Ironwood.

  ‘No, Grace,’ said the Director, ‘I don’t think you need stay. Thank you.’

  ‘And now,’ thought Jane, ‘it’s coming–it’s coming–it’s coming now.’ All the most intolerable questions he might ask, all the most extravagant things he might make her do, flashed through her mind in a fatuous medley. For all power of resistance seemed to have been drained away from her and she was left without protection.

  For the first few minutes after Grace Ironwood had left them alone, Jane hardly took in what the Director was saying. It was not that her attention wandered; on the contrary, her attention was so fixed on him that it defeated itself. Every tone, every look (how could they have supposed she would think him young?), every gesture, was printing itself upon her memory; and it was not until she found that he had ceased speaking and was apparently awaiting an answer, that she realised she had taken in so little of what he had been saying.

  ‘I–I beg your pardon,’ she said, wishing that she did not keep on turning red like a schoolgirl.

  ‘I was saying,’ he answered, ‘that you have already done us the greatest possible service. We knew that one of the most dangerous attacks ever made upon the human race was coming very soon and in this island. We had an idea that Belbury might be connected with it. But we were not certain. We certainly did not know that Belbury was so important. That is why your information is so valuable. But in another way, it presents us with a difficulty. I mean a difficulty as far as you are concerned. We had hoped you would be able to join us–to become one of our army.’

  ‘Can I not, Sir?’ said Jane.

  ‘It is difficult,’ said the Director after a pause. ‘You see, your husband is in Belbury.’

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

  ‘Why,’ said the Director, ‘it would be hard for the same person to be the wife of an official in the NICE and also a member of my company.’

  ‘You mean you couldn’t trust me?’

  ‘I mean nothing we need be afraid to speak of. I mean that, in the circumstances, you and I and your husband could not all be trusting one another.’

  Jane bit her lip in anger, not at the Director but at Mark. Why should he and his affairs with the Feverstone man intrude themselves at such a moment as this?

  ‘I must do what I think right, musn’t I?’ she said softly. ‘I mean–if Mark–if my husband–is on the wrong side, I can’t let that make any difference to what I do. Can I?’

  ‘You are thinking about what is right?’ said the Director. Jane started, and flushed. She had not, she realised, been thinking about that.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Director, ‘things might come to such a point that you would be justified in coming here, even wholly against his will, even secretly. It depends on how close the danger is–the danger to us all, and to you personally.’

  ‘I thought the danger was right on top of us now–from the way Mrs Denniston talked.’

  ‘That is just the question,’ said the Director, with a smile. ‘I am not allowed to be too prudent. I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies–breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future.’

  ‘But will it do anyone any harm if I come here?’ asked Jane.

  He did not directly answer this. Presently he spoke again.

  ‘It looks as if you will have to go back; at least for the present. You will, no doubt, be seeing your husband again fairly soon. I think you must make at least one effort to detach him from the NICE.’

  ‘But how can I, Sir?’ said Jane. ‘What have I to say to him. He’d think it all nonsense. He wouldn’t believe all that about an attack on the human race.’ As soon as she had said it she wondered, ‘Did that sound cunning?’ then, more disconcertingly, ‘Was it cunning?’

  ‘No,’ said the Director. ‘And you must not tell him. You must not mention me nor the company at all. We have put our lives in your hands. You must simply ask him to leave Belbury. You must put it on your own wishes. You are his wife.’

  ‘Mark never takes any notice of what I say,’ answered Jane. She and Mark each thought that of the other.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the Director, ‘you have never asked anything as you will be able to ask this. Do you not want to save him as well as yourself?’

  Jane ignored this question. Now that the threat of expulsion from the h
ouse was imminent, she felt a kind of desperation. Heedless of that inner commentator, who had more than once during this conversation shown her her own words and wishes in such a novel light, she began speaking rapidly.

  ‘Don’t send me back,’ she said, ‘I am all alone at home, with terrible dreams. It isn’t as if Mark and I saw much of one another at the best of times. I am so unhappy. He won’t care whether I come here or not. He’d only laugh at it all if he knew. Is it fair that my whole life should be spoiled just because he’s got mixed up with some horrible people? You don’t think a woman is to have no life of her own just because she’s married?’

  ‘Are you unhappy now?’ said the Director. A dozen affirmatives died on Jane’s lips as she looked up in answer to his question. Then suddenly, in a kind of deep calm, like the stillness at the centre of a whirlpool, she saw the truth, and ceased at last to think how her words might make him think of her, and answered, ‘No.’

  ‘But,’ she added after a short pause, ‘It will be worse now, if I go back.’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘I don’t know. No. I suppose not.’ And for a little time Jane was hardly conscious of anything but peace and well-being, the comfort of her own body in the chair where she sat, and a sort of clear beauty in the colours and proportions of the room. But soon she began thinking to herself, ‘This is the end. In a moment he will send for the Ironwood woman to take you away.’ It seemed to her that her fate depended on what she said in the next minute.

  ‘But is it really necessary?’ she began. ‘I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do. It seems to me extraordinary that everything should hang on what Mark says…about something he doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Child,’ said the Director, ‘it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.’

  ‘Someone said they were very old fashioned. But–’

  ‘That was a joke. They are not old fashioned; but they are very, very old.’

  ‘They would never think of finding out first whether Mark and I believed in their ideas of marriage?’

  ‘Well–no,’ said the Director with a curious smile. ‘No. Quite definitely they wouldn’t think of doing that.’

  ‘And would it make no difference to them what a marriage was actually like–whether it was a success? Whether the woman loved her husband?’

  Jane had not exactly intended to say this: much less to say it in the