That Hideous Strength

by Clive Staples Lewis

  The bar was at first empty. During the next half hour men dropped in one by one till about four were present. They did not at first talk about the unhappy procession which continued all this time to pass the windows. For some time indeed they did not talk at all. Then a very little man with a face like an old potato observed to no one in particular, “I seen old Rumbold the other night.” No one replied for five minutes and then a very young man in leggings said, “I reckon he’s sorry he ever tried it.” In this way conversation about Rumbold trickled on for some time. It was only when the subject of Rumbold was thoroughly exhausted that the talk, very indirectly and by gradual stages, began to throw some light on the stream of refugees.

  “Still coming out,” said one man.

  “Ah,” said another.

  “Can’t be many left there by now.”

  “Don’t know where they’ll all get in, I’m sure.”

  Little by little the whole thing came out. These were the refugees from Edgestow. Some had been turned out of their houses, some scared by the riots and still more by the restoration of order. Something like a terror appeared to have been established in the town. “They tell me there were two hundred arrests yesterday,” said the landlord. “Ah,” said the young man. “They’re hard cases those N.I.C.E. police, every one of them. They put the wind up my old Dad proper, I tell ’ee.” He ended with a laugh. “’Taint the police so much as the workmen by what I hear,” said another. “They never ought to have brought those Welsh and Irish.” But that was about as far as criticism went. What struck Mark deeply was the almost complete absence of indignation among the speakers, or even of any distinct sympathy with the refugees. Everyone present knew of at least one outrage in Edgestow: but all agreed that these refugees must be greatly exaggerating. “It says in this morning’s paper that things are pretty well settling down,” said the landlord. “That’s right,” agreed the others. “There’ll always be some who get awkward,” said the potato-faced man. “What’s the good of getting awkward?” asked another, “it’s got to go on. You can’t stop it.” “That’s what I say,” said the landlord. Fragments of articles which Mark himself had written drifted to and fro. Apparently he and his kind had done their work well; Miss Hardcastle had rated too high the resistance of the working classes to propaganda.

  When the time came he had no difficulty in getting on to the bus: it was indeed empty, for all the traffic was going in the opposite direction. It put him down at the top of Market Street and he set out at once to walk up to the flat. The whole town wore a new expression. One house out of three was empty. About half the shops had their windows boarded up. As he gained height and came into the region of large villas with gardens he noticed that many of these had been requisitioned and bore white placards with the N.I.C.E. symbol-a muscular male nude grasping a thunderbolt. At every corner, and often in between, lounged or sauntered the N.I.C.E. police, helmeted, swinging their clubs, with revolvers in holsters on their black shiny belts. Their round white faces with open mouths slowly revolving as they chewed gum remained long in his memory. There were also notices everywhere which he did not stop to read: they were headed Emergency Regulations and bore the signature “Feverstone.”

  Would Jane be in? He felt he could not bear it if Jane should not be in. He was fingering his latchkey in his pocket long before he reached the house. The front door was locked. This meant that the Hutchinsons who occupied the ground floor were away. He opened it and went in. It seemed cold and damp on the staircase: cold and damp and dark on the landing. “Ja-ane,” he shouted as he unlocked the door of the flat: but he had already lost hope. As soon as he was inside the door he knew the place was uninhabited. A pile of unopened letters lay on the inside door-mat. There was no sound, not a tick of a clock. Everything was in order: Jane must have left some morning immediately after “doing” all the rooms. The tea-cloths hanging in the kitchen were bone dry: they clearly had not been used for at least twenty-four hours. The bread in the cupboard was stale. There was a jug half full of milk, but the milk had thickened and would not pour. He continued stumping from room to room long after he was quite certain of the truth, staring at the staleness and pathos which pervades deserted homes. But obviously it was no good hanging about here. A splutter of unreasonable anger arose. Why the hell hadn’t Jane told him she was going away? Or had someone taken her away? Perhaps there was a note for him. He took a pile of letters off the mantelpiece, but they were only letters he had put there himself to be answered. Then on the table he noticed an envelope addressed to Mrs. Dimble at her own house over beyond the Wynd. So that damned woman had been here! Those Dimbles had always, he felt, disliked him. They’d probably asked Jane to stay with them. Been interfering somehow, no doubt. He must go down to Northumberland and see Dimble.

  The idea of being annoyed with the Dimbles occurred to Mark almost as an inspiration. To bluster a little as an injured husband in search of his wife would be a pleasant change from the attitudes he had recently been compelled to adopt. On the way down town he stopped to have a drink. As he came to the Bristol and saw the N.I.C.E. placard on it, he had almost said “Oh damn,” and turned away, before he suddenly remembered that he was himself a high official in the N.I.C.E. and by no means a member of that general Public whom the Bristol now excluded. They asked him who he was at the door and became obsequious when he told them. There was a pleasant fire burning. After the gruelling day he had had he felt justified in ordering a large whisky, and after it he had a second. It completed the change in his mental weather which had begun at the moment when he first conceived the idea of having a grievance against the Dimbles. The whole state of Edgestow had something to do with it. There was an element in him to which all these exhibitions of power suggested chiefly how much nicer and how much more appropriate it was, all said and done, to be part of the N.I.C.E. than to be an outsider. Even now . . . had he been taking all this demarche about a murder trial too seriously? Of course that was the way Wither managed things: he liked to have something hanging over everyone It was only a way to keep him at Belbury and to make him send for Jane. And when one came to think of it, why not? She couldn’t go on indefinitely living alone. And the wife of a man who meant to have a career and live at the centre of things would have to learn to be a woman of the world. Anyway, the first thing was to see that fellow Dimble.

  He left the Bristol feeling, as he would have said, a different man. Indeed he was a different man. From now onwards till the moment of final decision should meet him, the different men in him appeared with startling rapidity and each seemed very complete while it lasted. Thus, skidding violently from one side to the other, his youth approached the moment at which he would begin to be a person.

  III

  “Come in,” said Dimble in his rooms at Northumberland. He had just finished with his last pupil for the day and was intending to start out for St. Anne’s in a few minutes. “Oh, it’s you, Studdock,” he added as the door opened. “Come in.” He tried to speak naturally but he was surprised at the visit and shocked by what he saw. Studdock’s face appeared to him to have changed since they last met; it had grown fatter and paler and there was a new vulgarity in the expression.

  “I’ve come to ask about Jane,” said Mark. “Do you know where she is?”

  “I can’t give you her address, I’m afraid,” said Dimble.

  “Do you mean you don’t know it?”

  “I can’t give it,” said Dimble.

  According to Mark’s programme this was the point at which he should have begun to take a strong line. But he did not feel the same now that he was in the room. Dimble had always treated him with scrupulous politeness and Mark had always felt that Dimble disliked him. This had not made him dislike Dimble. It had only made him uneasily talkative in Dimble’s presence and anxious to please. Vindictiveness was by no means one of Mark’s vices. For Mark liked to be liked. A snub sent him away dreaming not of revenge but of brilliant jokes or achievements which would one day conquer t
he good will of the man who had snubbed him. If he were ever cruel it would be downwards, to inferiors and outsiders who solicited his regard, not upwards to those who rejected it. There was a good deal of the spaniel in him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t understand:”

  “If you have any regard for your wife’s safety you will not ask me to tell you where she has gone,” said Dimble.

  “Safety?”

  “Safety,” repeated Dimble with great sternness.

  “Safety from what?”

  “Don’t you know what has happened?”

  “What’s happened?”

  “On the night of the big riot the Institutional Police attempted to arrest her. She escaped, but not before they had tortured her.”

  “Tortured her? What do you mean?”

  “Burned her with cigars.”

  “That’s what I’ve come about,” said Mark. “Jane-I’m afraid she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That didn’t really happen, you know.”

  “The doctor who dressed the burns thinks otherwise.”

  “Great Scot!” said Mark. “So they really did? But, look here . . .”

  Under the quiet stare of Dimble he found it difficult to speak.

  “Why have I not been told about this outrage he shouted.

  “By your colleagues?” asked Dimble drily. “It is an odd question to ask me. You ought to understand the workings of the N.I.C.E better then I do.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why has nothing been done about it? Have you been to the police?”

  “The Institutional Police?”

  “No, the ordinary police.”

  “Do you really not know that there are no ordinary police left in Edgestow?”

  “I suppose there are some magistrates.”

  “There is the Emergency Commissioner, Lord Feverstone. You seem to misunderstand. ‘This is a conquered and occupied city.”

  “Then why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t you get on to me?”

  “You?” said Dimble.

  For one moment, the first for many years, Mark saw himself exactly as a man like Dimble saw him. It almost took his breath away.

  “Look here,” he said. “You don’t . . . it’s too fantastic! You don’t imagine I knew about it! You don’t really believe I send policemen about to man-handle my own wife!” He had begun on the note of indignation, but ended by trying to insinuate a little jocularity. If only Dimble would give even the ghost of a smile: anything to move the conversation on to a different level.

  But Dimble said nothing and his face did not relax. He had not, in fact, been perfectly sure that Mark might not have sunk even to this, but out of charity he did not wish to say so.

  “I know you’ve always disliked me,” said Mark. “But I didn’t know it was quite as bad as that.” And again Dimble was silent, but for a reason Mark could not guess. The truth was that his shaft had gone home. Dimble’s conscience had for years accused him of a lack of charity towards Studdock and he had struggled to amend it: he was struggling now.

  “Well,” said Studdock in a dry voice, after the silence had lasted for several seconds, “there doesn’t seem to be much more to say. I insist on being told where Jane is.”

  “Do you want her to be taken to Belbury?”

  Mark winced. It was as if the other had read the very thought he had had in the Bristol half an hour ago.

  “I don’t see, Dimble,” he said, “why I should be cross-questioned in this way. Where is my wife?”

  “I have no permission to tell you. She is not in my house nor under my care. She is well and happy and safe. If you still have the slightest regard for her happiness you will make no attempt to get into touch with her.”

  “Am I some sort of leper or criminal that I can’t even be trusted to know her address?”

  “Excuse me. You are a member of the N.I.C.E. who have already insulted, tortured, and arrested her. Since her escape she has been left alone only because your colleagues do not know where she is.”

  “And if it really was the N.I.C.E. police, do you suppose I’m not going to have a very full explanation out of them? Damn it, what do you take me for?”

  “I can only hope that you have no power in the N.I.C.E. at all. If you have no power, then you cannot protect her. If you have, then you are identified with its policy. In neither case will I help you to discover where Jane is.”

  “This is fantastic,” said Mark. “Even if I do happen to hold a job in the N.I.C.E. for the moment, you know me.”

  “I do not know you,” said Dimble. “I have no conception of your aims or motives.”

  He seemed to Mark to be looking at him not with anger or contempt but with that degree of loathing which produces in those who feel it a kind of embarrassment-as if he were an obscenity which decent people are forced, for very shame, to pretend that they have not noticed. In this Mark was quite mistaken. In reality his presence was acting on Dimble as a summons to rigid self control. Dimble was simply trying very hard not to hate, not to despise, above all not to enjoy hating and despising, and he had no idea of the fixed severity which this effort gave to his face. The whole of the rest of the conversation went on under this misunderstanding.

  “There has been some ridiculous mistake,” said Mark.

  “I tell you I’ll look into it thoroughly. I’ll make a row. I suppose some newly enrolled policeman got drunk or something. Well, he’ll be broken. I . . .”

  “It was the chief of your police, Miss Hardcastle herself, who did it.”

  “Very well. I’ll break her then. Did you suppose I was going to take it lying down? But there must be some mistake. It can’t . . .”

  “Do you know Miss Hardcastle well?” asked Dimble. Mark was silenced. And he thought (quite wrongly) that Dimble was reading his mind to the bottom and seeing there his certainty that Miss Hardcastle had done this very thing and that he had no more power of calling her to account than of stopping the revolution of the Earth.

  Suddenly the immobility of Dimble’s face changed, and he spoke in a new voice. “Have you the means to bring her to book?” he said. “Are you already as near the centre of Belbury as that? If so, then you have consented to the murder of Hingest, the murder of Compton. If so, it was by your orders that Mary Prescott was raped and battered to death in the sheds behind the station. It is with your approval that criminals-honest criminals whose hands you are unfit to touch-are being taken from the jails to which British judges sent them on the conviction of British juries and packed off to Belbury to undergo for an indefinite period, out of reach of the law, whatever tortures and assaults on personal identity you call Remedial Treatment. It is you who have driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester. It is you who can tell us why Place and Rowley and Cummingham (at eighty years of age) have been arrested, and where they are. And if you are as deeply in it as that, not only will I not deliver Jane into your hands, but I would not deliver my dog.”

  “Really-really,” said Mark. “This is absurd. I know one or two high-handed things have been done. You always get some of the wrong sort in a police force-specially at first. But-I mean to say-what have I ever done that you should make me responsible for every action that any N.I.C.E. official has taken-or is said to have taken in the gutter press?”

  “Gutter press!” thundered Dimble, who seemed to Mark to be even physically larger than he was a few minutes before. “What nonsense is this? Do you suppose I don’t know that you have control of every paper in the country except one? And that one has not appeared this morning. Its printers have gone on strike. The poor dupes say they will not print articles attacking the people’s Institute. Where the lies in all the other papers come from you know better than I.”

  It may seem strange to say that Mark, having long lived in a world without charity, had nevertheless very seldom met real anger. Malice in plenty he had encountered, but it all operated by snubs and sneers
and stabbing in the back. The forehead and eyes and voice of this elderly man had an effect on him which was stifling and unnerving. At Belbury one used the words “whining” and “yapping” to describe any opposition which the actions of Belbury aroused in the outer world. And Mark had never had enough imagination to realise what the “whining” would really be like if you met it face to face.

  “I tell you I knew nothing about it,” he shouted.

  “Damn it, I’m the injured party. The way you talk, anyone would think it was your wife who’d been ill treated.”

  “So it might have been. So it may be. It may be any man or woman in England. It was a woman and a citizen. What does it matter whose wife it was?”

  “But I tell you I’ll raise hell about it. I’ll break the infernal bitch who did it, if it means breaking the whole N.I.C.E.”

  Dimble said nothing. Mark knew that Dimble knew that he was now talking nonsense. Yet Mark could not stop. If he did not bluster, he would not know what to say.

  “Sooner than put up with this,” he shouted, “I’ll leave the N.I.C.E.”

  “Do you mean that?” asked Dimble with a sharp glance. And to Mark, whose ideas were now all one fluid confusion of wounded vanity and jostling fears and shames, this glance once more appeared accusing and intolerable. In reality it had been a glance of awakened hope: for charity hopes all things. But there was caution in it: and between hope and caution Dimble found himself once more reduced to silence.

  “I see you don’t trust me,” said Mark, instinctively summoning to his face the manly and injured expression which had often served him well in headmasters’ studies.

  Dimble was a truthful man. “No,” he said after a longish pause. “I don’t quite.”