That Hideous Strength

by Clive Staples Lewis

  “Dissolve the Company, do you mean?” said Dimble.

  “Aye, I do,” said MacPhee.

  The Director looked up with a smile. “But,” he said, “I have no power to dissolve it.”

  “In that case,” said MacPhee, “I must ask what authority you had to bring it together?”

  “I never brought it together,” said the Director. Then, after glancing round the company, he added: “There is some strange misunderstanding here! Were you all under the impression I had selected you?”

  “Were you?” he repeated, when no one answered.

  “Well,” said Dimble, “as regards myself I fully realise that the thing has come about more or less unconsciously-even accidentally. There was no moment at which you asked me to join a definite movement, or anything of that kind. That is why I have always regarded myself as a sort of camp follower. I had assumed that the others were in a more regular position.”

  “You know why Camilla and I are here, sir,” said Denniston. “We certainly didn’t intend or foresee how we were going to be employed.”

  Grace Ironwood looked up with a set expression on her face, which had grown rather pale. “Do you wish . . . ?” she began.

  The Director laid his hand on her arm. “No,” he said, “no. There is no need for all these stories to be told.”

  MacPhee’s stern features relaxed into a broad grin. “I see what you’re driving at,” he said. “We’ve all been playing blind-man’s buff, I doubt. But I’ll take leave to observe, Dr. Ransom, that you carry things a wee bit high. I don’t just remember how you came to be called Director: but from that title and from one or two other indications a man would have thought you behaved more like the leader of an organisation than the host at a house-party.”

  “I am the Director,” said Ransom, smiling. “Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyeresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me-as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us-sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organisation: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any one of you permission to leave my household.”

  For a time there was complete silence in the Blue Room, except for the crackling of the fire.

  “If there is nothing more to discuss,” said Grace Ironwood presently, “perhaps we had better leave the Director to rest.”

  MacPhee rose and dusted some snuff off the baggy knees of his trousers-thus preparing a wholly novel adventure for the mice when they next came out in obedience to the Director’s whistle.

  “I have no notion,” he said, “of leaving this house if anyone wishes me to stay. But as regards the general hypothesis on which the Director appears to be acting and the very peculiar authority he claims, I absolutely reserve my judgement. You know well, Mr. Director, in what sense I have, and in what sense I have not, complete confidence in yourself.”

  The Director laughed. “Heaven forbid,” he said, “that I should claim to know what goes on in the two halves of your head, MacPhee, much less how you connect them. But I know-what matters much more-the kind of confidence I have in you. But won’t you sit down? There is much more to be said.”

  MacPhee resumed his chair, Grace Ironwood, who had been sitting bolt upright in hers, relaxed, and the Director spoke.

  “We have learned to-night,” he said, “if not what the real power behind our enemies is doing, at least the form in which it is embodied at Belbury. We therefore know something about one of the two attacks which are about to be made on our race. But I’m thinking of the other.”

  “Yes,” said Camilla earnestly, “the other.”

  “Meaning by that?” asked MacPhee.

  “Meaning,” said Ransom, “whatever is under Bragdon Wood.”

  “You’re still thinking about that?” said the Ulsterman.

  “I am thinking of almost nothing else,” said the Director. “We knew already that the enemy wanted the Wood. Some of us guessed why. Now Jane has seen-or rather felt-in a vision what it is they are looking for in Bragdon. It may be the greater danger of the two. But what is certain is that the greatest danger of all is the junction of the enemies’ forces. He is staking everything on that. When the new power from Belbury joins up with the old power under Bragdon Wood, Logres-indeed Man-will be almost surrounded. For us everything turns on preventing that junction. That is the point at which we must be ready both to kill and die. But we cannot strike yet. We cannot get into Bragdon and start excavating for ourselves. There must be a moment when they find him-it. I have no doubt we shall be told in one way or another. Till then we must wait.”

  “I don’t believe a word of all that other story,” said MacPhee.

  “I thought,” said Miss Ironwood, “we weren’t to use words like believe. I thought we were only to state facts and exhibit implications.”

  “If you two quarrel much more,” said the Director, “I think I’ll make you marry one another.”

  V

  At the beginning the grand mystery for the Company had been why the enemy wanted Bragdon Wood. The land was unsuitable and could be made fit to bear a building on the scale they proposed only by the costliest preliminary work; and Edgestow itself was not an obviously convenient place. By intense study in collaboration with Dr. Dimble and despite the continued scepticism of MacPhee the Director had at last come to a certain conclusion. Dimble and he and the Dennistons shared between them a knowledge of Arthurian Britain which orthodox scholarship will probably not reach for some centuries. They knew that Edgestow lay in what had been the very heart of ancient Logres, that the village of Cure Hardy preserved the name of Ozana le Coeur Hardi, and that a historical Merlin had once worked in what was now Bragdon Wood.

  What exactly he had done there they did not know; but they had all, by various routes, come too far either to consider his art mere legend and imposture, or to equate it exactly with what the Renaissance called Magic. Dimble even maintained that a good critic, by his sensibility alone, could detect the difference between the traces which the two things had left on literature. “What common measure is there,” he would ask, “between ceremonial occultists like Faustus and Prospero and Archimago with their midnight studies, their forbidden books, their attendant fiends or elementals, and a figure like Merlin who seems to produce his results simply by being Merlin?” And Ransom agreed. He thought that Merlin’s art was the last survival of something older and different-something brought to Western Europe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had been other than those we know. It had probably differed from Renaissance Magic profoundly. It had possibly (though this was doubtful) been less guilty: it had certainly been more effective. For Paracelsus and Agrippa and the rest had achieved little or nothing: Bacon himself-no Enemy to magic except on this account-reported that the magicians “attained not to greatness and certainty of works.” The whole Renaissance outburst of forbidden arts had, it seemed, been a method of losing one’s soul on singularly unfavourable terms. But the older Art had been a different proposition.

  But if the only possible attraction of Bragdon lay in its association with the last vestiges of Atlantean magic, this told the Company something else. It told them that the N.I.C.E . . . at its core, was not concerned solely with modern or materialistic forms of power. It told the Director, in fact, that there was Eldilic energy and Eldilic knowledge behind it. It was, of course, another question whether its human members knew of the dark powers who were their real organisers. And in the long run this question was not perhaps important. As Ransom himself had said more than once, “Whether they know it or whether they don’t, much the same sort of things are going to happen. It’s not a question of how the Belbury people are going to act-the D
ark-Eldils will see to that-but of how they will think about their actions. They’ll go to Bragdon: it remains to be seen whether any of them will know the real reason why they’re going there, or whether they’ll all fudge up some theory of soils, or air, or etheric tensions, to explain it.”

  Up to a certain point the Director had supposed that the powers for which the enemy hankered were resident in the mere site at Bragdon-for there is an old and widespread belief that locality itself is of importance in such matters. But from Jane’s dream of the cold sleeper he had learned better. It was something much more definite, something located under the soil of Bragdon Wood, something to be discovered by digging. It was, in fact, the body of Merlin. What the eldils had told him about the possibility of such discovery he had received, while they were with him, almost without wonder. It was no wonder to them. In their eyes the normal Tellurian modes of being-engendering and birth and death and decay-which are to us the framework of thought, were no less wonderful than the countless other patterns of being which were continually present to their unsleeping minds. To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is “natural.” From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the wilful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention. That a body should lie uncorrupted for fifteen hundred years, did not seem strange to them; they knew worlds where there was no corruption at all. That its individual life should remain latent in it all that time, was to them no more strange: they had seen innumerable different modes in which soul and matter could be combined and separated, separated without loss of reciprocal influence, combined without true incarnation, fused so utterly as to be a third thing, or periodically brought together in a union as short, and as momentous, as the nuptial embrace. It was not as a marvel in natural philosophy, but as an information in time of war that they brought the Director their tidings. Merlin had not died. His life had been hidden, side-tracked, moved out of our one-dimensioned time, for fifteen centuries. But under certain conditions it would return to his body.

  They had not told him this till recently because they had not known it. One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee, who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldils, was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent. In vain did Ransom endeavour to explain the truth. Doubtless the great beings who now so often came to him had power sufficient to sweep Belbury from the face of England and England from the face of the globe; perhaps to blot the globe itself out of existence. But no power of that kind would be used. Nor had they any direct vision into the minds of men. It was in a different place, and approaching their knowledge from the other side, that they had discovered the state of Merlin: not from inspection of the thing that slept under Bragdon Wood, but from observing a certain unique configuration in that place where those things remain that are taken off time’s mainroad, behind the invisible hedges into the unimaginable fields. Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.

  It was this that kept the Director wakeful, with knitted brow, in the small cold hours of that morning when the others had left him. There was no doubt in his mind now that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin: and if they found him they would re-awake him. The old Druid would inevitably cast in his lot with the new planners-what could prevent his doing so? A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the Dark-Eldils for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the elan vital and flirtations with pan-psychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting-room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed, they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening: but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe of Tellus, would become their slave: and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.

  Ten

  THE CONQUERED CITY

  I

  UP till now, whatever his days had been like, Mark had usually slept well: this night, sleep failed him. He had not written to Jane; he had spent the day keeping out of sight and doing nothing in particular. The wakeful night moved all his fears on to a new level. He was, of course, a materialist in theory: and, also in theory, he was past the age at which one can have night fears. But now, as the wind rattled his window hour after hour, he felt the nursery terrors again: the old exquisite thrill, as of cold fingers delicately travelling down his back. Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not a negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts it is better not to disbelieve in them.

  He was called earlier than usual, and with his tea came a note. The Deputy Director sent his compliments and must ask Mr. Studdock to call on him instantly about a most urgent and distressing matter. Mark dressed and obeyed.

  In Wither’s room he found Wither and Miss Hardcastle. To Mark’s surprise and, momentarily, to his relief Wither showed no recollection of their last meeting. Indeed, his manner was genial, even deferential, though extremely grave.

  “Good morning, good morning, Mr. Studdock,” he said. “It is with the greatest regret that I-er-in short, I would not have kept you from your breakfast unless I had felt that in your own interests you should be placed in full possession o? the facts at the earliest possible moment. You will of course regard all that I am about to say as strictly confidential. The matter is a distressing or at least an embarrassing one. I feel sure that as the conversation proceeds (pray be seated, Mr. Studdock) you will realise in your present situation how very wise we have been in securing from the outset a police force-to give it that rather unfortunate name-of our own.”

  Mark licked his lips and sat down.

  “My reluctance to raise the question,” con
tinued Wither, “would, however, be very much more serious if I did not feel able to assure you-in advance you understand-of the complete confidence which we all feel in you and which I very much hoped” (here for the first time he looked Mark in the eyes)” you were beginning to reciprocate. We regard ourselves here as being so many brothers and-er-sisters: so that whatever passes between us in this room can be regarded as confidential in the fullest possible sense of the word, and I take it we shall all feel entitled to discuss the subject I am about to mention in the most human and informal manner possible.”

  Miss Hardcastle’s voice, suddenly breaking in, had an effect not wholly unlike that of a Pistol shot.

  “You have lost your wallet, Studdock,” she said.

  “My-my wallet?” said Mark.

  “Yes. Wallet. Pocket-book. Thing you keep notes and letters in.”

  “Yes. I have. Have you found it?”

  “Does it contain three pounds ten, counterfoil of postal order for five shillings, letters from a woman signing herself Myrtle, from the Bursar of Bracton, from G. Hernshaw, F. A. Browne, M. Belcher, and a bill for a dress-suit from Simonds and Son, 32A Market Street, Edgestow?”

  “Well, more or less so.”

  “There it is,” said Miss Hardcastle pointing to the table. “No you don’t!” she added as Mark made a step towards it.