That Hideous Strength

  Ouroborindra!

  Ouroborindra ba-ba-hee!

  The same thought struck both of them at one moment: ‘It will ask for another.’ And Straik remembered that Wither had that knife. He wrenched himself free from the rhythm with a frightful effort: claws seemed to be tearing his chest from inside. Wither saw what he meant to do. As Straik bolted, Wither was already after him. Straik reached the ante-room, slipped in Filostrato’s blood. Wither slashed repeatedly with his knife. He had not strength to cut through the neck, but he had killed the man. He stood up, pains gnawing at his old man’s heart. Then he saw the Italian’s head lying on the floor. It seemed to him good to pick it up and carry it into the inner room: show it to the original Head. He did so. Then he realised that something was moving in the ante-room. Could it be that they had not shut the outer door? He could not remember. They had come in forcing Filostrato along between them; it was possible…everything had been so abnormal. He put down his burden–carefully, almost courteously, even now–and stepped towards the door between the two rooms. Next moment he drew back. A huge bear, rising to its hind legs as he came in sight of it, had met him in the doorway–its mouth open, its eyes flaming, its fore-paws spread out as if for an embrace. Was this what Straik had become? He knew (though even now he could not attend to it) that he was on the very frontier of a world where such things could happen.

  No one at Belbury that night had been cooler than Feverstone. He was neither an initiate like Wither nor a dupe like Filostrato. He knew about the Macrobes, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he was interested in. He knew that the Belbury scheme might not work, but he knew that if it didn’t he would get out in time. He had a dozen lines of retreat kept open. He had also a perfectly clear conscience and had played no tricks with his mind. He had never slandered another man except to get his job, never cheated except because he wanted money, never really disliked people unless they bored him. He saw at a very early stage that something was going wrong. One had to guess how far wrong. Was this the end of Belbury? If so, he must get back to Edgestow and work up the position he had already prepared for himself as the protector of the University against the NICE. On the other hand, if there were any chance of figuring as the man who had saved Belbury at a moment of crisis, that would be definitely the better line. He would wait as long as it was safe. And he waited a long time. He found a hatch through which hot dishes were passed from the kitchen passage into the dining room. He got through it and watched the scene. His nerves were excellent and he thought he could pull and bolt the shutter in time if any dangerous animal made for the hatch. He stood there during the whole massacre, his eyes bright, something like a smile on his face, smoking endless cigarettes and drumming with his hard fingers on the sill of the hatch. When it was all over he said to himself, ‘Well, I’m damned!’ It had certainly been a most extraordinary show.

  The beasts had all streaked away somewhere. He knew there was a chance of meeting one or two of them in the passages, but he’d have to risk that. Danger–in moderation–acted on him like a tonic. He worked his way to the back of the house and into the garage; it looked as if he must go to Edgestow at once. He could not find his car in the garage–indeed, there were far fewer cars than he had expected. Apparently several other people had had the idea of getting away while the going was good, and his own car had been stolen. He felt no resentment, and set about finding another of the same make. It took him a longish time, and when he had found one he had considerable difficulty in starting her up. The night was cold–going to snow, he thought. He scowled, for the first time that night; he hated snow. It was after two o’clock when he got going.

  Just before he started he had the odd impression that someone had got into the back of the car behind him. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked sharply. He decided to get out and see. But to his surprise his body did not obey this decision; instead it drove the car out of the garage and round to the front and out into the road. The snow was definitely falling by now. He found he could not turn his head and could not stop driving. He was going ridiculously fast, too, in this damned snow. He had no choice. He’d often heard of cars being driven from the back seat, but now it seemed to be really happening. Then to his dismay he found he had left the road. The car, still at a reckless speed, was bumping and leaping along what was called Gypsy Lane or (by the educated) Wayland Street–the old Roman Road from Belbury to Edgestow, all grass and ruts. ‘Here! What the devil am I doing?’ thought Feverstone. ‘Am I tight? I’ll break my neck at this game if I don’t look out!’ But on the car went as if driven by one who regarded this track as an excellent road and the obvious route to Edgestow.

  Frost had left the dining room a few minutes after Wither. He did not know where he was going or what he was about to do. For many years he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last year or so–since he had been initiated–he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. His mind was a mere spectator. He could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The nearest thing to a human passion which still existed in him was a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind. There was no tolerating such an illusion. There were not, and must not be, such things as men. But never, until this evening, had he been quite so vividly aware that the body and its movements were the only reality, that the self which seemed to watch the body leaving the dining room and setting out for the chamber of the Head, was a nonentity. How infuriating that the body should have power thus to project a phantom self!

  Thus the Frost whose existence Frost denied watched his body go into the ante-room, watched it pull up sharply at the sight of a naked and bloodied corpse. The chemical reaction called shock occurred. Frost stopped, turned the body over, and recognised Straik. A moment later his flashing pince-nez and pointed beard looked into the room of the Head itself. He hardly noticed that Wither and Filostrato lay there dead. His attention was fixed by something more serious. The bracket where the Head ought to have been was empty: the metal ring twisted, the rubber tubes tangled and broken. Then he noticed a head on the floor; stooped and examined it. It was Filostrato’s. Of Alcasan’s head he found no trace, unless some mess of broken bones beside Filostrato’s were it.

  Still not asking what he would do or why, Frost went to the garage. The whole place was silent and empty; the snow was thick on the ground by this. He came up with as many petrol tins as he could carry. He piled all the inflammables he could think of together in the Objective Room. Then he locked himself in by locking the outer door of the ante-room. Whatever it was that dictated his actions then compelled him to push the key into the speaking tube which communicated with the passage. When he had pushed it as far in as his fingers could reach, he took a pencil from his pocket and pushed with that. Presently he heard the clink of the key falling on the passage floor outside. That tiresome illusion, his consciousness, was screaming to protest; his body, even had he wished, had no power to attend to those screams. Like the clockwork figure he had chosen to be, his stiff body, now terribly cold, walked back into the Objective Room, poured out the petrol and threw a lighted match into the pile. Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul–nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that. With one supreme effort he flung himself back into his illusion. In that attitude eternity overtook him as sunrise in old t
ales overtakes and turns them into unchangeable stone.

  17

  Venus at St Anne’s

  Daylight came with no visible sunrise as Mark was climbing to the highest ground in his journey. The white road, still virgin of human traffic, showed the footprints of here and there a bird and here and there a rabbit, for the snow-shower was just then coming to its end in a flurry of larger and slower flakes. A big lorry, looking black and warm in that landscape, overtook him. The man put out his head. ‘Going Birmingham way, mate?’ he asked. ‘Roughly,’ said Mark. ‘At least I’m going to St Anne’s.’ ‘Where’s that then?’ said the driver. ‘Up on the hill behind Pennington,’ said Mark. ‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘I could take you to the corner. Save you a bit.’ Mark got in beside him.

  It was mid-morning when the man dropped him at a corner beside a little country hotel. The snow had all lain and there was more in the sky and the day was extremely silent. Mark went into the little hotel and found a kind, elderly landlady. He had a hot bath and a capital breakfast and then went to sleep in a chair before a roaring fire. He did not wake till about four. He reckoned he was only a few miles from St Anne’s, and decided to have tea before he set out. He had tea. At the landlady’s suggestion he had a boiled egg with his tea. Two shelves in the little sitting-room were filled with bound volumes of The Strand. In one of these he found a serial children’s story which he had begun to read as a child but abandoned because his tenth birthday came when he was half way through it and he was ashamed to read it after that. Now, he chased it from volume to volume till he had finished it. It was good. The grown-up stories to which, after his tenth birthday, he had turned instead of it, now seemed to him, except for Sherlock Holmes, to be rubbish. ‘I suppose I must get on soon,’ he said to himself.

  His slight reluctance to do so did not proceed from weariness–he felt, indeed, perfectly rested and better than he had felt for several weeks–but from a sort of shyness. He was going to see Jane: and Denniston: and (probably) the Dimbles as well. In fact, he was going to see Jane in what he now felt to be her proper world. But not his. For he now thought that with all his life-long eagerness to reach an inner circle he had chosen the wrong circle. Jane was where she belonged. He was going to be admitted only out of kindness, because Jane had been fool enough to marry him. He did not resent it, but he felt shy. He saw himself as this new circle must see him–as one more little vulgarian, just like the Steeles and the Cossers, dull, inconspicuous, frightened, calculating, cold. He wondered vaguely why he was like that. How did other people–people like Denniston or Dimble–find it so easy to saunter through the world with all their muscles relaxed and a careless eye roving the horizon, bubbling over with fancy and humour, sensitive to beauty, not continually on their guard and not needing to be? What was the secret of that fine, easy laughter which he could not by any efforts imitate? Everything about them was different. They could not even fling themselves into chairs without suggesting by the very posture of their limbs a certain lordliness, a leo-nine indolence. There was elbow-room in their lives, as there had never been in his. They were Hearts: he was only a Spade. Still, he must be getting on…Of course, Jane was a Heart. He must give her her freedom. It would be quite unjust to think that his love for her had been basely sensual. Love, Plato says, is the son of Want. Mark’s body knew better than his mind had known till recently, and even his sensual desires were the true index of something which he lacked and Jane had to give. When she first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.

  He rang the bell and asked for his bill.

  That same afternoon Mother Dimble and the three girls were upstairs in the big room which occupied nearly the whole top floor of one wing at the Manor, and which the Director called the Wardrobe. If you had glanced in, you would have thought for one moment that they were not in a room at all but in some kind of forest–a tropical forest glowing with bright colours. A second glance and you might have thought they were in one of those delightful upper rooms at a big shop where carpets standing on end and rich stuffs hanging from the roof make a kind of woven forest of their own. In fact, they were standing amidst a collection of robes of state–dozens of robes which hung, each separate, from its little pillar of wood.

  ‘That would do beautifully for you, Ivy,’ said Mother Dimble lifting with one hand the fold of a vividly green mantle over which thin twists and spirals of gold played in a festive pattern. ‘Come, Ivy,’ she continued, ‘don’t you like it? You’re not still fretting about Tom, are you? Hasn’t the Director told you he’ll be here tonight or tomorrow mid-day, at the latest?’

  Ivy looked at her with troubled eyes.

  ‘’Tisn’t that,’ she said. ‘Where’ll the Director himself be?’

  ‘But you can’t want him to stay, Ivy,’ said Camilla, ‘not in continual pain. And his work will be done–if all goes well at Edgestow.’

  ‘He has longed to go back to Perelandra,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘He’s–sort of home-sick. Always, always…I could see it in his eyes.’

  ‘Will that Merlin man come back here?’ asked Ivy.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t think either he or the Director expected him to. And then my dream last night. It looked as if he was on fire…I don’t mean burning, you know, but light–all sorts of lights in the most curious colours shooting out of him and running up and down him. That was the last thing I saw: Merlin standing there like a kind of pillar and all those dreadful things happening all round him. And you could see in his face that he was a man used up to the last drop, if you know what I mean–that he’d fall to pieces the moment the powers let him go.’

  ‘We’re not getting on with choosing our dresses for tonight.’

  ‘What is it made of?’ said Camilla, fingering and then smelling the green mantle. It was a question worth asking. It was not in the least transparent yet all sorts of lights and shades dwelled in its rippling folds and it flowed through Camilla’s hands like a waterfall. Ivy became interested.

  ‘Gor!’ she said. ‘However much a yard would it be?’

  ‘There,’ said Mother Dimble as she draped it skilfully round Ivy. Then she said, ‘Oh!’ in genuine amazement. All three stood back from Ivy staring at her with delight. The commonplace had not exactly gone from her form and face, the robe had taken it up, as a great composer takes up a folk tune and tosses it like a ball through his symphony and makes of it a marvel, yet leaves it still itself. A ‘pert fairy’ or ‘dapper elf’, a small though perfect sprightliness, stood before them: but still recognisably Ivy Maggs.

  ‘Isn’t that like a man!’ exclaimed Mrs Dimble. ‘There’s not a mirror in the room.’

  ‘I don’t believe we were meant to see ourselves,’ said Jane. ‘He said something about being mirrors enough to see another.’

  ‘I would just like to see what I’m like at the back,’ said Ivy.

  ‘Now Camilla,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘There’s no puzzle about you. This is obviously your one.’

  ‘Oh, do you think that one?’ said Camilla.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Jane.

  ‘You’ll look ever so nice in that,’ said Ivy. It was a long slender thing which looked like steel in colour though it was soft as foam to the touch. It wrapped itself close about her loins and flowed out in a glancing train at her heels. ‘Like a mermaid,’ thought Jane; and then, ‘like a Valkyrie.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Mother Dimble, ‘you must wear a coronet with that one.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be rather…?’

  But Mother Dimble was already setting it on her head. That reverence (it need have nothing to do with money value) which nearly all women feel for jewellery hushed three of
them for a moment. There were perhaps no such diamonds in England. The splendour was fabulous, preposterous.

  ‘What are you all staring at?’ asked Camilla who had seen but one flash as the crown was raised in Mrs Dimble’s hands and did not know that she stood ‘like starlight, in the spoils of provinces’.

  ‘Are they real?’ said Ivy.

  ‘Where did they come from, Mother Dimble?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Treasure of Logres, dears, treasures of Logres,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Perhaps from beyond the Moon or before the flood. Now Jane.’

  Jane could see nothing specially appropriate in the robe which the others agreed in putting on her. Blue was, indeed, her colour but she had thought of something a little more austere and dignified. Left to her own judgment, she would have called this a little ‘fussy’. But when she saw the others all clap their hands, she submitted. Indeed, it did not now occur to her to do otherwise and the whole matter was forgotten a moment later in the excitement of choosing a robe for Mother Dimble.

  ‘Something quiet,’ she said. ‘I’m an old woman and I don’t want to be made ridiculous.’

  ‘This wouldn’t do at all,’ said Camilla, walking down the long row of hanging splendours, herself like a meteor as she passed against that background of purple and gold and scarlet and soft snow and elusive opal, of fur, silk, velvet, taffeta and brocade. ‘That’s lovely,’ she said. ‘But not for you. And oh!–look at that. But it wouldn’t do. I don’t see anything…’

  ‘Here! Oh, do come and look! Come here,’ cried Ivy as if she were afraid her discovery would run away unless the others attended to it quickly.

  ‘Oh! Yes, yes indeed,’ said Jane.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Camilla.

  ‘Put it on, Mother Dimble,’ said Ivy. ‘You know you got to.’ It was of that almost tyrannous flame colour which Jane had seen in her vision down in the lodge, but differently cut, with fur about the great copper brooch that clasped the throat, with long sleeves and hangings from them. And there went with it a many-cornered cap. And they had no sooner clasped the robe than all were astonished, none more than Jane, though indeed she had had best reason to foresee the result. For now this provincial wife of a rather obscure scholar, this respectable and barren woman with grey hair and double chin, stood before her, not to be mistaken, as a kind of priestess or sybil, the servant of some pre-historic goddess of fertility–an old tribal matriarch, mother of mothers, grave, formidable and august. A long staff, curiously carved as if a snake twined up it, was apparently part of the costume: they put it in her hand.

  ‘Am I awful?’ said Mother Dimble looking in turn at the three silent faces.

  ‘You look lovely,’ said Ivy.

  ‘It is exactly right,’ said Camilla.

  Jane took up the old lady’s hand and kissed it. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘aweful, in the old sense, is just what you do look.’

  ‘What are the men going to wear?’ asked Camilla suddenly.

  ‘They can’t very well go in fancy dress, can they?’ said Ivy. ‘Not if they’re cooking and bringing things in and out all the time. And I must say, if this is to be the last night and all, I do think we ought to have done the dinner anyway. Let them do as they like about the wine. And what they’ll do with that goose is more than I like to think, because I don’t believe that Mr MacPhee ever roasted a bird in his life, whatever he says.’

  ‘They can’t spoil the oysters anyway,’ said Camilla.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ivy. ‘Nor the plum pudding, not really. Still, I’d like just to go down and take a look.’

  ‘You’d better not,’ said Jane with a laugh. ‘You know what he’s like when he’s in charge in the kitchen.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of him,’ said Ivy, almost, but not quite, putting out her tongue. And in her present dress the gesture was not uncomely.

  ‘You needn’t be in the least worried about the dinner, girls,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘He will do it very well. Always provided he and my husband don’t get into a philosophical argument just when they ought to be dishing up. Let’s go and enjoy ourselves. How very warm it is in here.’

  ‘’s lovely,’ said Ivy.

  At that moment the whole room shook from end to end.

  ‘What on earth’s that?’ said Jane.