That Hideous Strength

by Clive Staples Lewis

  He was already a few paces down the hill when he made this decision, and he turned at once. But instead of going up he found he was still descending. As if he were in shale on a mountain slope, instead of on a metalled road, the ground slipped away backwards where he trod on it. When he arrested his descent he was thirty yards lower. He began again. This time he was flung off his feet, rolled head over heels, stones, earth, grass, and water pouring over him and round him in riotous confusion. It was as when a great wave overtakes you while you are bathing, but this time it was an earth wave. He got to his feet once again; set his face to the hill. Behind him the valley seemed to have turned into Hell. The pit of fog had been ignited and burned with blinding violet flame, water was roaring somewhere, buildings crashing, mobs shouting. The hill in front of him was in ruins-no trace of road, hedge, or field, only a cataract of loose raw earth. It was also far steeper than it had been. His mouth and hair and nostrils were full of earth. The slope was growing steeper as he looked at it. The ridge heaved up and up. Then the whole wave of earth rose, arched, trembled, and with all its weight and noise poured down on him.

  IV

  “Why Logres, sir?” said Camilla.

  Dinner was over at St. Anne’s and they sat at their wine in a circle about the dining-room fire. As Mrs. Dimble had prophesied, the men had cooked it very well: only after their serving was over and the board cleared had they put on their festal garments. Now all sat at their ease and all diversely splendid: Ransom crowned, at the right of the hearth, Grace Ironwood in black and silver opposite him. It was so warm that they had let the fire burn low, and in the candlelight the court dresses seemed to glow of themselves.

  “Tell them, Dimble,” said Ransom. “I will not talk much from now on.”

  “Are you tired, sir?” said Grace. “Is the pain bad?”

  “No, Grace,” he replied, “it isn’t that. But now that it’s so very nearly time for me to go, all this begins to feel like a dream. A happy dream, you understand: all of it, even the pain. I want to taste every drop. I feel as though it would be dissolved if I talked much.”

  “I suppose you got to go, sir?” said Ivy.

  “My dear,” said he, “what else is there to do? I have not grown a day or an hour older since I came back from Perelandra. There is no natural death to look forward to. The wound will only be healed in the world where it was got.”

  “All this has the disadvantage of being clean contrary to the observed laws of Nature,” observed MacPhee. The Director smiled without speaking, as a man who refuses to be drawn.

  “It is not contrary to the laws of Nature,” said a voice from the corner where Grace Ironwood sat, almost invisible in the shadows. “You are quite right. The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.”

  “Shakespeare never breaks the real laws of poetry,” put in Dimble. “But by following them he breaks every now and then the little regularities which critics mistake for the real laws. Then the little critics call it a ‘licence.’ But there’s nothing licentious about it to Shakespeare.”

  “And that,” said Denniston, “is why nothing in Nature is quite regular. There are always exceptions. A good average uniformity, but not complete.”

  “Not many exceptions to the law of death have come my way,” observed MacPhee.

  “And how,” said Grace with much emphasis, “now should you expect to be there on more than one such occasion? Were you a friend of Arthur’s or Barbarossa’s? Did you know Enoch or Elijah?”

  “Do you mean,” said Jane, “that the Director . . . the Pendragon . . . is going where they went?”

  “He will be with Arthur, certainly,” said Dimble.

  “I can’t answer for the rest. There are people who have never died. We do not yet know why. We know a little more than we did about the How. There are many places in the universe-I mean, this same physical universe in which our planet moves-where an organism can last practically for ever. Where Arthur is, we know.”

  “Where?” said Camilla.

  “In the Third Heaven, in Perelandra. In Aphallin, the distant island which the descendants of Tor and Tinidril will not find for a hundred centuries. Perhaps alone?” he hesitated and looked at Ransom, who shook his head.

  “And that is where Logres comes in, is it?” said Camilla. “Because he will be with Arthur?”

  Dimble was silent for a few minutes, arranging and rearranging the fruit-knife and fruit-fork on his plate.

  “It all began,” he said, “when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it-it will do as well as another. And then . . . gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.”

  “What haunting?” asked Camilla.

  “How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney-and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.”

  He paused and took a sip of wine before proceeding.

  “It was long afterwards,” he said, “after the Director had returned from the Third Heaven, that we were told a little more. This haunting turned out to be not only from the other side of the invisible wall. Ransom was summoned to the bedside of an old man then dying in Cumberland. His name would mean nothing to you if I told it. That man was the Pendragon, the successor of Arthur and Uther and Cassibelaun. Then we learned the truth. There has been a secret Logres in the very heart of Britain all these years; an unbroken succession of Pendragons. That old man was the seventy-eighth from Arthur: our Director received from him the office and the blessing; to-morrow we shall know, or to-night, who is to be the eightieth. Some of the Pendragons are well known to history, though not under that name. Others you have never heard of. But in every age they and the little Logres which gathered round them have been the fingers which gave the tiny shove or the almost imperceptible pull, to prod England out of the drunken sleep or to draw her back from the final outrage into which Britain tempted her.”

  “This new history of yours,” said MacPhee, “is a wee bit lacking in documents.”

  “It has plenty,” said Dimble with a smile. “But you do not know the language they’re written in. When the history of these last few months comes to be written in your language, and printed, and taught in schools, there will be no mention in it of you and me, nor of Merlin and the Pendragon and the Planets. And yet in these months Britain rebelled most dangerously against Logres and was defeated only just in time.”

  “Aye,” said MacPhee, “and it could be right good history without mentioning you and me or most of those present. I’d be greatly obliged if anyone would tell me what we have done-always apart from feeding the pigs and raising some very decent vegetables.”

  “You have done what was required of you,” said the Director. “You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that. As one of the modern authors has told us, the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else. But don’t jump to conclusions. You may have plenty of work to do before a month is passed. Britain has lost a battle, but she will rise again.”

  “So that, meanwhile, is England,” said Mother Dimble.

  “Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?”

  “Yes,” said her husband. “Don’t you feel it? The very quality of England. If we’ve got an ass’s head it is by walking in a fairy wood. We’ve heard something better t
han we can do, but can’t quite forget it . . . can’t you see it in everything English-a kind of awkward grace, a humble, humorous incompleteness? How right Sam Weller was when he called Mr. Pickwick an angel in gaiters! Everything here is either better or worse than “

  “Dimble!” said Ransom. Dimble, whose tone had become a little impassioned, stopped and looked towards him. He hesitated and (as Jane thought} almost blushed before he began again.

  “You’re right, sir,” he said with a smile. “I was forgetting what you have warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England-no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.”

  “All this,” said MacPhee, “seems a very roundabout way of saying that there’s good and bad men everywhere.”

  “It’s not a way of saying that at all,” answered Dimble.

  “You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised-same common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China-why, then it will be spring. But meantime, our concern is with Logres. We’ve got Britain down but who knows how long we can hold her down? Edgestow will not recover from what is happening to her to-night. But there will be other Edgestows.”

  “I wanted to ask about Edgestow,” said Mother Dimble. “Aren’t Merlin and the eldils a trifle . . . well wholesale. Did all Edgestow deserve to be wiped out?”

  “Who are you lamenting?” said MacPhee. “The jobbing town council that’d have sold their own wives and daughters to bring the N.I.C.E. to Edgestow?”

  “Well, I don’t know much about them,” said she.

  “But in the university. Even Bracton itself. We all knew it was a horrible College, of course. But did they really mean any great harm with all their fussy little intrigues? Wasn’t it more silly than anything else?”

  “Och aye,” said MacPhee. “They were only playing themselves. Kittens letting on to be tigers. But there was a real tiger about and their play ended by letting her in. They’ve no call to complain if, when the hunter’s after her, he lets them have a bit of a lead in their guts, too. It’ll learn them not to keep bad company.”

  “Well, then, the fellows of other colleges. What about Northumberland and Duke’s?”

  “I know,” said Denniston. “One’s sorry for a man like Churchwood. I knew him well; he was an old dear. All his lectures were devoted to proving the impossibility of ethics, though in private life he’d have walked ten miles rather than leave a penny debt unpaid. But all the same . . . was there a single doctrine practised at Belbury which hadn’t been preached by some lecturer at Edgestow? Oh, of course, they never thought anyone would act on their theories! No one was more astonished than they when what they’d been talking of for years suddenly took on reality. But it was their own child coming back to them: grown up and unrecognisable, but their own.”

  “I’m afraid it’s all true, my dear,” said Dimble.

  “Trahison des clercs. None of us are quite innocent.”

  “That’s nonsense, Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble.

  “You are all forgetting,” said Grace, “that nearly everyone except the very good (who were ripe for fair dismissal) and the very bad, have already left Edgestow. But I agree with Arthur. Those who have forgotten Logres sink into Britain. Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.”

  At that moment she was interrupted. A clawing and whining noise at the door had become audible.

  “Open the door, Arthur,” said Ransom. A moment later the whole party rose to its feet with cries of welcome, for the new arrival was Mr. Bultitude.

  “Oh, I never did,” said Ivy. “The pore thing! And all over snow, too. I’ll just take him down to the kitchen and get him something to eat. Wherever have you been, you bad thing? Eh? Just look at the state you’re in.”

  V

  For the third time in ten minutes the train gave a violent lurch and came to a standstill. This time the shock put all the lights out.

  “This is really getting a bit too bad,” said a voice in the darkness. The four other passengers in the first-class compartment recognised it as belonging to the well-bred, bulky man in the brown suit; the well-informed man who at earlier stages of the journey had told everyone else where they ought to change and why one now reached Sterk without going through Stratford and who it was that really controlled the line.

  “It’s serious for me,” said the same voice. “I ought to be in Edgestow by now.” He got up, opened the window, and stared out into the darkness. Presently one of the other passengers complained of the cold. He shut the window and sat down.

  “We’ve already been here for ten minutes,” he said presently.

  “Excuse me. Twelve,” said another passenger. Still the train did not move. The noise of two men quarrelling in a neighbouring compartment became audible.

  Suddenly a shock flung them all together in the darkness. It was as if the train, going at full speed, had been unskilfully pulled up.

  “What the devil’s that?” said one.

  “Open the doors.”

  “Has there been a collision?”

  “It’s all right,” said the well-informed man in a loud, calm voice. “Putting on another engine. And doing it very badly. It’s all these new engine-drivers they’ve got in lately.”

  “Hullo!” said someone. “We’re moving.” Slow and grunting, the train began to go.

  “It takes its time getting up speed,” said someone.

  “Oh, you’ll find it’ll start making up for lost time in a minute,” said the well-informed man.

  “I wish they’d put the lights on again,” said a woman’s voice.

  “We’re not getting up speed,” said another.

  “We’re losing it. Damn it! Are we stopping again?”

  “No. We’re still moving-oh!! “-once more: violent shock hit them. It was worse than the last one. For nearly a minute everything seemed to be rocking and rattling.

  “This is outrageous!” exclaimed the well-informed man, once more opening the window. This time he was more fortunate. A dark figure waving a lantern was walking past beneath him.

  “Hi! Porter! Guard!” he bellowed.

  “It’s all right, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all right, keep your seats,” shouted the dark figure, marching past and ignoring him.

  “There’s no good letting all that cold air in, sir,” said the passenger next the window.

  “There’s some sort of light ahead,” said the well-informed man.

  “Signal against us?” asked another.

  “No. Not a bit like that. The whole sky’s lit up. Like a fire, or like searchlights.”

  “I don’t care what it’s like,” said the chilly man.

  “If only-oh!”

  Another shock. And then, far away in the darkness, vague disastrous noise. The train began to move again, still slowly, as if it were groping its way.

  “I’ll make a row about this,” said the well-informed man. “It’s a scandal.”

  About half an hour later the lighted platform of Sterk slowly loomed alongside.

  “Station Announcer calling,” said a voice. “Please keep your seats for an important announcement. Slight earthquake shock and floods have rendered the line to Edgestow impassable. No details available. Passengers for Edgestow are advised . . .”

  The well-inf
ormed man, who was Curry, got out. Such a man always knows all the officials on a railway, and in a few minutes he was standing by the fire in the ticket-collector’s office getting a further and private report of the disaster.

  “Well, we don’t exactly know yet, Mr. Curry,” said the man. “There’s been nothing coming through for about an hour. It’s very bad, you know. They’re putting the best face on it they can. There’s never been an earthquake like it in England from what I can hear. And there’s the floods, too. No, sir, I’m afraid you’ll find nothing of Bracton College. All that part of the town went almost at once. It began there, I understand. I don’t know what the casualties’ll be. I’m glad I got my old Dad out last week.”

  Curry always in later years regarded this as one of the turning-points of his life. He had not up till then been a religious man. But the word that now instantly came into his mind was “Providential.” You couldn’t really look at it any other way. He’d been within an ace of taking the earlier train: and if he had . . . why, he’d have been a dead man by now. It made one think. The whole College wiped out! It would have to be rebuilt. There’d be a complete (or almost complete) new set of Fellows, a new Warden. It was Providential again that some responsible person should have been spared to deal with such a tremendous crisis. There couldn’t be an ordinary election, of course. The College Visitor (who was the Lord Chancellor) would probably have to appoint a new Warden and then, in collaboration with him, a nucleus of new Fellows. The more he thought of it, the more fully Curry realised that the whole shaping of the future college rested with the sole survivor. It was almost like being a second founder. Providential-providential. He saw already in imagination the portrait of that second founder in the new-built hall, his statue in the new-built quadrangle, the long, long chapter consecrated to him in the College History. All this time, and without the least hypocrisy, habit and instinct had given his shoulders just such a droop, his eyes such a solemn sternness, his brow such a noble gravity, as a man of good feeling might be expected to exhibit on hearing such news. The ticket-collector was greatly edified.