That Hideous Strength

  ‘I’m telling you how he described them.’

  ‘I mean, what do they look like?’

  ‘I’m not just exactly prepared to answer that question,’ said MacPhee.

  ‘Are they perfectly huge?’ said Jane almost involuntarily. MacPhee blew his nose and continued.

  ‘The point, Mrs Studdock,’ he said, ‘is this: Dr Ransom claims that he has received continual visits from these creatures since he returned to Earth. So much for his first disappearance. Then came the second. He was away for more than a year and that time he said he’d been in the planet Venus–taken there by these eldila.’

  ‘Venus is inhabited by them too?’

  ‘You’ll forgive me observing that this remark shows you have not grasped what I’m telling you. These creatures are not planetary creatures at all. Supposing them to exist, you are to conceive them floating about the depth of space, though they may alight on a planet here and there, like a bird alighting on a tree, you understand. There’s some of them, he says, are more or less permanently attached to particular planets, but they’re not native there. They’re just a clean different kind of thing.’

  There were a few seconds of silence, and then Jane asked, ‘They are, I gather, more or less friendly?’

  ‘That is certainly the Director’s idea about them, with one important exception.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The eldila that have for many centuries concentrated on our own planet. We seem to have had no luck at all in choosing our particular complement of parasites. And that, Mrs Studdock brings me to the point.’

  Jane waited. It was extraordinary how MacPhee’s manner almost neutralised the strangeness of what he was telling her.

  ‘The long and short of it is,’ said he, ‘that this house is dominated either by the creatures I’m talking about, or by a sheer delusion. It is by advices he thinks he has received from eldila that the Director has discovered the conspiracy against the human race; and what’s more, it’s on instructions from eldila that he’s conducting the campaign–if you can call it conducting! It may have occurred to you to wonder, Mrs Studdock, how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears. It is a question I have propounded on more than one occasion. The answer is always the same; we’re waiting for orders.’

  ‘From the eldila? It was they he meant when he spoke of his Masters?’

  ‘I doubt it would be, though he doesn’t use that word in speaking to me.’

  ‘But, Mr MacPhee, I don’t understand. I thought you said the ones on our planet were hostile.’

  ‘That’s a very good question,’ said MacPhee, ‘but it’s not our own ones that the Director claims to be in communication with. It’s his friends from outer space. Our own crew, the terrestrial eldila, are at the back of the whole conspiracy. You are to imagine us, Mrs Studdock, living on a world where the criminal classes of the eldila have established their headquarters. And what’s happening now, if the Director’s views are correct, is that their own respectable kith and kin are visiting this planet to red the place up.’

  ‘You mean that the other eldila out of space actually come here–to this house?’

  ‘That is what the Director thinks.’

  ‘But you must know whether it’s true or not.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘That’s not a question to be answered Aye or No. I’ve seen a good many things in my time that weren’t there or weren’t what they were letting on to be: rainbows and reflections and sunsets, not to mention dreams. And there’s hetero-suggestion too. I will not deny that I have observed a class of phenomena in this house that I have not yet fully accounted for. But they never occurred at a moment when I had a notebook handy or any facilities for verification.’

  ‘Isn’t seeing believing?’

  ‘It may be–for children or beasts,’ said MacPhee.

  ‘But not for sensible people, you mean?’

  ‘My uncle, Dr Duncanson,’ said MacPhee, ‘whose name may be familiar to you–he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland–used to say, “Show it to me in the word of God.” And then he’d slap the big Bible on the table. It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences. And granting his premises, he was quite right. I don’t hold his views, Mrs Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles. If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer.’

  MacPhee regarded his snuff-box meditatively.

  ‘You have seen something, then.’

  ‘Aye. But we must keep an open mind. It might be a hallucination. It might be a conjuring trick…’

  ‘By the Director?’ asked Jane angrily. Mr MacPhee once more had recourse to his snuff-box. ‘Do you really expect me,’ said Jane, ‘to believe that the Director is that sort of man? A charlatan?’

  ‘I wish, Ma’am,’ said MacPhee, ‘you could see your way to consider the matter without constantly using such terms as believe. Obviously, conjuring is one of the hypotheses that any impartial investigator must take into account. The fact that it is a hypothesis specially un-congenial to the emotions of this investigator or that, is neither here nor there. Unless, maybe, it is an extra ground for emphasising the hypothesis in question, just because there is a strong psychological danger of neglecting it.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as loyalty,’ said Jane. MacPhee, who had been carefully shutting up the snuff-box, suddenly looked up with a hundred covenanters in his eyes.

  ‘There is, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘As you get older you will learn that it is a virtue too important to be lavished on individual personalities.’

  At that moment there was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ said MacPhee, and Camilla entered.

  ‘Have you finished with Jane, Mr MacPhee?’ she said. ‘She promised to come out for a breath of air with me before dinner.’

  ‘Och, breath of air your grandmother!’ said MacPhee with a gesture of despair. ‘Very well, ladies, very well. Away out to the garden. I doubt they’re doing something more to the purpose on the enemy’s side. They’ll have all this country under their hands before we move, at this rate.’

  ‘I wish you’d read the poem I’m reading,’ said Camilla. ‘For it says in one line just what I feel about this waiting: Fool, All lies in a passion of patience, my lord’s rule.’

  ‘What’s that from?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Taliessin through Logres.’

  ‘Mr MacPhee probably approves of no poets except Burns.’

  ‘Burns!’ said MacPhee with profound contempt, opening the drawer of his table with great energy and producing a formidable sheaf of papers. ‘If you’re going to the garden, don’t let me delay you, ladies.’

  ‘He’s been telling you?’ said Camilla, as the two girls went together down the passage. Moved by a kind of impulse which was rare to her experience, Jane seized her friend’s hand as she answered, ‘Yes!’ Both were filled with some passion, but what passion they did not know. They came to the front door and as they opened it a sight met their eyes which, though natural, seemed at the moment apocalyptic.

  All day the wind had been rising and they found themselves looking out on a sky swept almost clean. The air was intensely cold, the stars severe and bright. High above the last rags of scurrying clouds hung the Moon in all her wildness–not the voluptuous Moon of a thousand southern love-songs, but the huntress, the untameable virgin, the spear-head of madness. If that cold satellite had just then joined our planet for the first time, it could hardly have looked more like an omen. The wildness crept into Jane’s blood.

  ‘That Mr MacPhee…’ said Jane as they walked steeply uphill to the very summit of the garden.

  ‘I know,’ s
aid Camilla. And then, ‘You believed it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How does Mr MacPhee explain the Director’s age?’

  ‘You mean his looking–or being–so young–if you call it young?’

  ‘Yes. That is what people are like who come back from the stars. Or at least from Perelandra. Paradise is still going on there; make him tell you about it some time. He will never grow a year or a month older again.’

  ‘Will he die?’

  ‘He will be taken away, I believe. Back into Deep Heaven. It has happened to one or two people, perhaps about six, since the world began.’

  ‘Camilla!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What–what is he?’

  ‘He’s a man, my dear. And he is the Pendragon of Logres. This house, all of us here, and Mr Bultitude and Pinch, are all that’s left of the Logres: all the rest has become merely Britain. Go on. Let’s go right to the top. How it’s blowing! They might come to him tonight.’

  That evening Jane washed up under the attentive eye of Baron Corvo, the jackdaw, while the others held council in the Blue Room.

  ‘Well,’ said Ransom as Grace Ironwood concluded reading from her notes. ‘That is the dream, and everything in it seems to be objective.’

  ‘Objective?’ said Dimble. ‘I don’t understand, Sir. You don’t mean they could really have a thing like that?’

  ‘What do you think, MacPhee?’ asked Ransom.

  ‘Oh aye, it’s possible,’ said MacPhee. ‘You see it’s an old experiment with animals’ heads. They do it often in laboratories. You cut off a cat’s head, maybe, and throw the body away. You can keep the head going a bit if you supply it with blood at the right pressure.’

  ‘Fancy!’ said Ivy Maggs.

  ‘Do you mean, keep it alive,’ said Dimble.

  ‘Alive is an ambiguous word. You can keep all the functions. It’s what would be popularly called alive. But a human head–and consciousness –I don’t know what would happen if you tried that.’

  ‘It has been tried,’ said Miss Ironwood. ‘A German tried it before the first war. With the head of a criminal.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ said MacPhee with great interest. ‘And do you know what result he got?’

  ‘It failed. The head simply decayed in the ordinary way.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this, I have,’ said Ivy Maggs rising and abruptly leaving the room.

  ‘Then this filthy abomination,’ said Dr Dimble, ‘is real–not only a dream.’ His face was white and his expression strained. His wife’s face, on the other hand, showed nothing more than that controlled distaste with which a lady of the old school listens to any disgusting detail when its mention becomes unavoidable.

  ‘We have no evidence of that,’ said MacPhee. ‘I’m only stating facts. What the girl has dreamed is possible.’

  ‘And what about this turban business,’ said Denniston, ‘this sort of swelling on top of the head?’

  ‘You see what it might be,’ said the Director.

  ‘I’m not sure that I do, Sir,’ said Dimble.

  ‘Supposing the dream to be veridical,’ said MacPhee. ‘You can guess what it would be. Once they’d got it kept alive, the first thing that would occur to boys like them would be to increase its brain. They’d try all sorts of stimulants. And then, maybe, they’d ease open the skullcap and just–well, just let it boil over as you might say. That’s the idea, I don’t doubt. A cerebral hypertrophy artificially induced to support a superhuman power of ideation.’

  ‘Is it at all probable,’ said the Director, ‘that a hyper-trophy like that would increase thinking power?’

  ‘That seems to me the weak point,’ said Miss Ironwood. ‘I should have thought it was just as likely to produce lunacy–or nothing at all. But it might have the opposite effect.’

  There was a thoughtful silence.

  ‘Then what we are up against,’ said Dimble, ‘is a criminal’s brain swollen to superhuman proportions and experiencing a mode of consciousness which we can’t imagine, but which is presumably a consciousness of agony and hatred.’

  ‘It’s not certain,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘that there would be very much actual pain. Some from the neck, perhaps, at first.’

  ‘What concerns us much more immediately,’ said MacPhee, ‘is to determine what conclusions we can draw from these carryings on with Alcasan’s head and what practical steps should be taken on our part–always and simply as a working hypothesis, assuming the dream to be veridical.’

  ‘It tells us one thing straight away,’ said Denniston.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked MacPhee.

  ‘That the enemy movement is international. To get that head they must have been hand in glove with at least one foreign police force.’

  MacPhee rubbed his hands. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘you have the makings of a logical thinker. But the deduction’s not all that certain. Bribery might account for it without actual consolidation.’

  ‘It tells us something in the long run even more important,’ said the Director. ‘It means that if this technique is really successful, the Belbury people have for all practical purposes discovered a way of making themselves immortal.’ There was a moment’s silence, and then he continued: ‘It is the beginning of what is really a new species–the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves–perhaps its food.’

  ‘The emergence of the Bodiless Men!’ said Dimble.

  ‘Very likely, very likely,’ said MacPhee, extending his snuff-box to the last speaker. It was refused and he took a very deliberate pinch before proceeding. ‘But there’s no good at all applying the forces of rhetoric to make ourselves skeery or daffing our own heads off our shoulders because some other fellows have had the shoulders taken from under their heads. I’ll back the Director’s Head, and yours, Dr Dimble, and my own, against this lad’s whether the brains is boiling out of it or no. Provided we use them. I should be glad to hear what practical measures on our side are suggested.’

  With these words he tapped his knuckles gently on his knee and stared hard at the Director.

  ‘It is,’ said MacPhee, ‘a question I have ventured to propound before.’

  A sudden transformation, like the leaping up of a flame in embers, passed over Grace Ironwood’s face. ‘Can the Director not be trusted to produce his own plan in his own time, Mr MacPhee?’ she said fiercely.

  ‘By the same token, Doctor,’ said he, ‘can the Director’s council not be trusted to hear his plan?’

  ‘What do you mean, MacPhee?’ asked Dimble.

  ‘Mr Director,’ said MacPhee. ‘You’ll excuse me for speaking frankly. Your enemies have provided themselves with this Head. They have taken possession of Edgestow and they’re in a fair way to suspend the laws of England. And still you tell us it is not time to move. If you had taken my advice six months ago we would have had an organisation all over this island by now and maybe a party in the House of Commons. I know well what you’ll say–that those are not the right methods. And maybe no. But if you can neither take our advice nor give us anything to do, what are we all sitting here for? Have you seriously considered sending us away and getting some other colleagues that you can work with?’

  ‘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 Oyéresu 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