“Yes, of course,” said Mark. “We are both in considerable danger. And-“
“Ah,” said the man. “Foreigners. Eh?”
“No, no,” said Mark. “I told you they weren’t. They seem to think you are, though. And that’s why-”
“That’s right,” interrupted the man. “I know. Foreigners, I call them. I know. They get nothing out of me. You and me’s all right. Ah.”
“I’ve been trying to think out some sort of plan “said Mark.
“Ah,” said the man approvingly.
“And I was wondering,” began Mark when the man suddenly leaned forwards and said with extraordinary energy “I tell ’ee.”
“What?” said Mark.
“I got a plan.”
“What is it?”
“Ah,” said the man winking at Mark with infinite knowingness and rubbing his belly.
“Go on. What is it?” said Mark.
“How’d it be,” said the man, sitting up and applying his left thumb to his right forefinger as if about to propound the first step in a philosophical argument, “How’d it be now if you and I made ourselves a nice bit of toasted cheese?”
“I meant a plan for escape,” said Mark.
“Ah,” replied the man. “My old Dad, now. He never had a day’s illness in his life. Eh? How’s that for a bit of all right? Eh?”
“It’s a remarkable record,” said Mark.
“Ah. You may say so,” replied the other. “On the road all his life. Never had a stomach-ache. Eh?” and here, as if Mark might not know that malady, he went through a long and extraordinarily vivid dumb show.
“Open-air life suited him, I suppose,” said Mark.
“And what did he attribute his health to?” asked the man. He pronounced the word attribute with great relish, laying the accent on the first syllable. “I ask everyone, what did he attribute his health to?”
Mark was about to reply when the man indicated by a gesture that the question was purely rhetorical and that he did not wish to be interrupted.
“He attributed his health,” continued the speaker with great solemnity, “to eating toasted cheese. Keeps the water out of the stomach, that’s what it does, eh? Makes a lining. Stands to reason. Ah!”
In several later interviews Mark endeavoured to discover something of the Stranger’s own history and particularly how he had been brought to Belbury. This was not easy to do, for though the tramp’s conversation was very autobiographical, it was filled almost entirely with accounts of conversations in which he had made stunning repartees whose points remained wholly obscure. Even where it was less intellectual in character, the allusions were too difficult for Mark, who was quite ignorant of the life of the roads though he had once written a very authoritative article on Vagrancy. But by repeated and (as he got to know his man) more cautious questioning, he couldn’t help getting the idea that the Tramp had been made to give up his clothes to a total stranger and then put to sleep. He never got the story in so many words. The Tramp insisted on talking as if Mark knew it already, and any pressure for a more accurate account produced only a series of nods, winks, and highly confidential gestures. As for the identity or appearance of the person. who had taken his clothes, nothing whatever could be made out. The nearest Mark ever got to it, after hours of talk and deep potations, was some such statement as “Ah. He was a one!” or “He was a kind of eh? You know?” or “That was a customer, that was.” These statements were made with enormous gusto as though the theft of the tramp’s clothes had excited his deepest admiration.
Indeed, throughout the man’s conversation this gusto was the most striking characteristic. He never passed any kind of moral judgement on the various things that had been done to him in the course of his career, nor did he ever try to explain them. Much that was unjust and still more that was simply unintelligible seemed to be accepted not only without resentment but with a certain satisfaction provided only that it was striking. Even about his present situation he showed very much less curiosity than Mark would have thought possible. It did not make sense, but then the man did not expect things to make sense. He deplored the absence of tobacco and regarded the “Foreigners” as very dangerous people: but the main thing, obviously, was to eat and drink as much as possible while the present conditions lasted. And gradually Mark fell into line. The man’s breath, and indeed his body were malodorous, and his methods of eating were gross. But the sort of continual picnic which the two shared carried Mark back into that realm of childhood which we have all enjoyed before nicety began. Each understood perhaps an eighth part of what the other said, but a kind of intimacy grew between them. Mark never noticed until years later that here, where there was no room for vanity and no more power or security than that of “children playing in a giant’s kitchen,” he had unawares become a member of a “circle,” as secret and as strongly fenced against outsiders as any that he had dreamed of.
Every now and then their tete-a-tete was interrupted. Frost or Wither or both would come in introducing some stranger who addressed the tramp in an unknown language, failed completely to get any response, and was ushered out again. The tramp’s habit of submission to the unintelligible, mixed with a kind of animal cunning, stood him in good stead during these interviews. Even without Mark’s advice, it would never have occurred to him to undeceive his captors by replying in English. Undeceiving was an activity wholly foreign to his mind. For the rest, his expression of tranquil indifference, varied occasionally by extremely sharp looks but never by the least sign of anxiety or bewilderment, left his interrogators mystified. Wither could never find in his face the evil he was looking for: but neither could he find any of that virtue which would, for him, have been the danger signal. The tramp was a type of man he had never met. The dupe, the terrified victim, the toady, the would-be accomplice, the rival, the honest man with loathing and hatred in his eyes, were all familiar to him. But not this.
And then, one day, there came an interview that was different.
V
“It sounds rather like a mythological picture by Titian come to life,” said the Director with a smile, when Jane had described her experience in the lodge.
“Yes, but . . .” said Jane, and then stopped. “I see,” she began again, “it was very like that. Not only the woman and the . . . the dwarfs . . . but the glow. As if the air were on fire. But I always thought I liked Titian. I suppose I wasn’t really taking the pictures seriously enough. Just chattering about ‘the Renaissance’ the way one did.”
“You didn’t like it when it came out into real life?” Jane shook her head.
“Was it real, sir?” she asked presently. “Are there such things?”
“Yes,” said the Director, “it was real enough. Oh . . . there are thousands of things within this square mile that I don’t know about yet. And I dare say that the presence of Merlinus brings out certain things. We are not living exactly in the twentieth century as long as he’s here. We overlap a bit; the focus is blurred. And you yourself . . . you are a seer. You were perhaps bound to meet her. She’s what you’ll get if you won’t have the other.”
“How do you mean, sir?” said Jane.
“You said she was a little like Mother Dimble. So she is. But Mother Dimble with something left out. Mother Dimble is friends with all that world as Merlinus is friends with the woods and rivers. But he isn’t a wood or a river himself. She has not rejected it, but she has baptized it. She is a Christian wife; and you, you know, are not. Neither are you a virgin. You have put yourself where you must meet that Old Woman and you have rejected all that has happened to her since Maleldil came to Earth. So you get her raw-not stronger than Mother Dimble would find her, but untransformed, demoniac. And you don’t like it. Hasn’t that been the history of your life?”
“You mean,” said Jane slowly, “I’ve been repressing something.”
The Director laughed just that loud, assured, bachelor laughter which had often infuriated her on other lips.
; “Yes,” he said. “But don’t think I’m talking of Freudian repressions. He knew only half the facts. It isn’t a question of inhibitions-inculcated shame-against natural desire. I’m afraid there’s no niche in the world for people that won’t be either Pagan or Christian. Just imagine a man who was too dainty to eat with his fingers and yet wouldn’t use forks!”
His laughter rather than his words had reddened Jane’s cheeks, and she was staring at him open-mouthed . . . Assuredly the Director was not in the least like Mother Dimble: but an odious realisation that he was, in this matter, on Mother Dimble’s side-that he also, though he did not belong to that hot-coloured, archaic world, stood somehow in good diplomatic relations with it, from which she was excluded-had struck her like a blow. Some old female dream of finding a man who “really understood” was being insulted. She took it for granted, half unconsciously, that the Director was the most virginal of his sex: but she had not realised that this would leave his masculinity still on the other side of the stream from herself and even steeper, more emphatic, than that of common men. Some knowledge of a world beyond nature she had already gained from living in his house, and more from fear of death that night in the dingle. But she had been conceiving this world as “spiritual” in the negative sense-as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away. Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent. How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated-but in ever larger and more disturbing modes-on the highest levels of all?
“Yes,” said the Director, “there is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can by-pass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing-the gold lion, the bearded bull-which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly.”
“You mean I shall have to become a Christian?” said Jane.
“It looks like it,” said the Director.
“But-I still don’t see what that had to do with . . . with Mark,” said Jane. This was perhaps not perfectly true. The vision of the universe which she had begun to see in the last few minutes had a curiously stormy quality about it. It was bright, darting, and overpowering. Old Testament imagery of eyes and wheels for the first time in her life took on some possibility of meaning. And mixed with this was the sense that she had been manoeuvred into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey formalised one: hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like. And where Mark stood in all this new world she did not know. Certainly not quite in his old place. Something which she liked to think of as the opposite of Mark had been taken away. Something civilised, or modern, or scholarly, or (of late) spiritual which did not want to possess her, which valued her for the odd collection of qualities she called “herself,” something without hands that gripped and without demands upon her. But if there were no such thing? Playing for time, she asked,
“Who was that Huge Woman?”
“I’m not sure,” said the Director. “But I think I can make a guess. Did you know that all the planets are represented in each?”
“No, sir. I didn’t.”
“Apparently they are. There is no Oyarsa in Heaven who has not got his representative on Earth. And there is no world where you could not meet a little unfallen partner of our own black Archon, a kind of other self. That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a heavenly one, and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian. It was these earthly wraiths of the high intelligences that men met in old times when they reported that they had seen the gods. It was with those that a man like Merlin was (at times) conversant. Nothing from beyond the Moon ever really descended. What concerns you more, there is a terrestrial as well as a celestial Venus-Perelandra’s wraith as w ell as Perelandra.”
“And you think . . . ?”
“I do: I have long known that this house is deeply under her influence. There is even copper in the soil. Also-the earth-Venus will be specially active here at present. For it is to-night that her heavenly archtype will really descend.”
“I had forgotten,” said Jane.
“You will not forget it once it has happened. All of you had better stay together-in the kitchen, perhaps. Do not come upstairs. To-night I will bring Merlin before my masters, all five of them-Viritrilbia, Perelandra, Malacandra, Glund, and Lurga. He will be opened. Powers will pass into him.”
“What will he do, sir?”
The Director laughed. “The first step is easy. The enemies at Belbury are already looking for experts in archaic western dialects, preferably Celtic. We shall send them an interpreter! Yes, by the splendour of Christ, we will send them one. ‘Upon them He a spirit of frenzy sent to call in haste for their destroyer.’ They have advertised in the papers for one! And after the first step . . . well, you know, it will be easy. In fighting those who serve devils one always has this on one’s side; their masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own masters finish the work for us. They break their tools.”
There was a sudden knock on the door and Grace Ironwood entered.
“Ivy is back, sir,” she said. “I think you’d better see her. No; she’s alone. She never saw her husband. The sentence is over but they haven’t released him. He’s been sent on to Belbury for remedial treatment. Under some new regulation. Apparently it does not require a sentence from a court . . . but she’s not very coherent. She is in great distress.”
VI
Jane had gone into the garden to think. She accepted what the Director had said, yet it seemed to her nonsensical. His comparison between Mark’s love and God’s (since apparently there was a God) struck her nascent spirituality as indecent and irreverent. “Religion” ought to mean a realm in which her haunting female fear of being treated as a thing, an object of barter and desire and possession, would be set permanently at rest, and what she called her “true self” would soar upwards and expand in some freer and purer world. For still she thought that “Religion” was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive heaven. Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about Religion, nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God. They had no picture in their minds of some mist steaming upward: rather of strong, skilful hands thrust down to make and mend, perhaps even to destroy. Supposing one were a thing after all-a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one’s true self? Supposing all those people who, from the bachelor uncles down to Mark and Mother Dimble, had infuriatingly found her sweet and fresh when she wanted them to find her also interesting and important, had all along been simply right and perceived the sort of thing she was? Supposing Maleldil on this subject agreed with them and not with her? For one moment she had a ridiculous and scorching vision of
a world in which God Himself would never understand, never take her with full seriousness, Then, at one particular corner of the gooseberry patch, the change came.
What awaited her there was serious to the degree of sorrow and beyond. There was no form nor sound. The mould under the bushes, the moss on the path, and the little brick border, were not visibly changed. But they were changed. A boundary had been crossed. She had come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, inexorable, met her with no veil or protection between. In the closeness of that contact she perceived at once that the Director’s words had been entirely misleading. This demand which now pressed upon her was not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It was the origin of all right demands and contained them. In its light you could understand them: but from them you could know nothing of it. There was nothing, and never had been anything, like this. And now there was nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this: only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in space without air. The name me was the name of a being whose existence she had never suspected, a being that did not yet fully exist but which was demanded. It was a person (not the person she had thought) yet also a thing-a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others-a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape it had never dreamed of. And the making went on amidst a kind of splendour or sorrow or both, whereof she could not tell whether it was in the moulding hands or in the kneaded lump.
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