That Hideous Strength

‘Merlin’s mantle indeed!’ said Mrs Dimble.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘it’s a rum idea. I daresay some of his set would like to recover the mantle well enough. Whether they’ll be big enough to fill it is another matter! I don’t think they’d like it if the old man himself came back to life along with it.’

‘That child’s going to faint,’ said Mrs Dimble, suddenly jumping up.

‘Hullo! What’s the matter?’ said Dr Dimble, looking with amazement at Jane’s face. ‘Is the room too hot for you?’

‘Oh, it’s too ridiculous,’ said Jane.

‘Let’s come into the drawing room,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘Here. Lean on my arm.’

A little later, in the drawing room, seated beside a window that opened onto the lawn, now strewn with bright yellow leaves, Jane attempted to excuse her absurd behaviour by telling the story of her dream. ‘I suppose I’ve given myself away dreadfully,’ she said. ‘You can both start psycho-analysing me now.’

From Dr Dimble’s face, Jane might have indeed conjectured that her dream had shocked him exceedingly. ‘Extraordinary thing… most extraordinary,’ he kept muttering. ‘Two heads. And one of them Alcasan’s. Now is that a false scent…?’

‘Don’t, Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble.

‘Do you think I ought to be analysed?’ said Jane.

‘Analysed?’ said Dr Dimble, glancing at her as if he had not quite understood. ‘Oh, I see. You mean going to Brizeacre or someone of that sort?’ Jane realised that her question had recalled him from some quite different train of thought and even –disconcertingly–that the problem of her own health had been shouldered aside. The telling of her dream had raised some other problem, though what this was she could not even imagine.

Dr Dimble looked out of the window. ‘There is my dullest pupil just ringing the bell,’ he said. ‘I must go to the study, and listen to an essay on Swift beginning, “Swift was born.” Must try to keep my mind on it, too, which won’t be easy.’ He rose and stood for a moment with his hand on Jane’s shoulder. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to give any advice. But if you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you.’

‘You don’t believe in Mr Brizeacre?’ said Jane.

‘I can’t explain,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘Not now. It’s all so complicated. Try not to bother about it. But if you do, just let us know first. Good-bye.’

Almost immediately after his departure some other visitors arrived, so that there was no opportunity of further private conversation between Jane and her hostess. She left the Dimbles about half an hour later and walked home, not along the road with the poplars but by the footpath across the common, past the donkeys and the geese, with the towers and spires of Edgestow to her left and the old windmill on the horizon to her right.

2 (#ulink_f24a2a3a-8d86-5ba1-a636-2ce965d7b574)

Dinner with the Sub-Warden (#ulink_f24a2a3a-8d86-5ba1-a636-2ce965d7b574)

‘This is a blow!’ said Curry standing in front of the fireplace in his magnificent rooms which overlooked Newton. They were the best set in College.

‘Something from NO?’ said James Busby. He and Lord Feverstone and Mark were all drinking sherry before dining with Curry. NO, which stood for Non-Olet, was the nickname of Charles Place, the Warden of Bracton. His election to this post, some fifteen years before, had been one of the earliest triumphs of the Progressive Element. By dint of saying that the College needed ‘new blood’ and must be shaken out of its ‘academic grooves’, they had succeeded in bringing in an elderly civil servant who had certainly never been contaminated by academic weaknesses since he left his rather obscure Cambridge college in the previous century, but who had written a monumental report on National Sanitation. The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Diehards, who replied by christening their new Warden Non-Olet. But gradually even Place’s supporters had adopted the name. For Place had not answered their expectations, having turned out to be a dyspeptic with a taste for philately, whose voice was so seldom heard that some of the junior Fellows did not know what it sounded like.

‘Yes, blast him,’ said Curry, ‘wishes to see me on a most important matter as soon as I can conveniently call on him after dinner.’

‘That means,’ said the Bursar, ‘that Jewel and Co. have been getting at him and want to find some way of going back on the whole business.’

‘I don’t give a damn for that,’ said Curry. ‘How can you go back on a Resolution? It isn’t that. But it’s enough to muck up the whole evening.’

‘Only your evening,’ said Feverstone. ‘Don’t forget to leave out that very special brandy of yours before you go.’

‘Jewel! Good God!’ said Busby, burying his left hand in his beard.

‘I was rather sorry for old Jewel,’ said Mark. His motives for saying this were very mixed. To do him justice, it must be said that the quite unexpected and apparently unnecessary brutality of Feverstone’s behaviour to the old man had disgusted him. And then, too, the whole idea of his debt to Feverstone in the matter of his own fellowship had been rankling all day. Who was this man Feverstone? But paradoxically, even while he felt that the time had come for asserting his own independence and showing that his agreement with all the methods of the Progressive Element must not be taken for granted, he also felt that a little independence would raise him to a higher position within that Element itself. If the idea ‘Feverstone will think all the more of you for showing your teeth’ had occurred to him in so many words, he would probably have rejected it as servile; but it didn’t.

‘Sorry for Jewel?’ said Curry wheeling round. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in his prime.’

‘I agree with you,’ said Feverstone to Mark, ‘but then I take the Clausewitz view. Total war is the most humane in the long run. I shut him up instantaneously. Now that he’s got over the shock, he’s quite enjoying himself because I’ve fully confirmed everything he’s been saying about the Younger Generation for the last forty years. What was the alternative? To let him drivel on until he’d worked himself into a coughing fit or a heart attack, and give him in addition the disappointment of finding that he was treated civilly.’

‘That’s a point of view, certainly,’ said Mark.

‘Damn it all,’ continued Feverstone, ‘no man likes to have his stock in trade taken away. What would poor Curry, here, do if the Die-hards one day all refused to do any Die-harding? Othello’s occupation would be gone.’

‘Dinner is served, Sir,’ said Curry’s ‘Shooter’–for that is what they call a College servant at Bracton.

‘That’s all rot, Dick,’ said Curry as they sat down. ‘There’s nothing I should like better than to see the end of all these Die-hards and obstructionists and be able to get on with the job. You don’t suppose I like having to spend all my time merely getting the road clear?’ Mark noticed that his host was a little nettled at Lord Feverstone’s banter. The latter had an extremely virile and infectious laugh. Mark felt he was beginning to like him.

‘The job being…?’ said Feverstone, not exactly glancing, much less winking, at Mark, but making him feel that he was somehow being included in the fun.

‘Well, some of us have got work of our own to do,’ replied Curry, dropping his voice to give it a more serious tone, almost as some people drop their voices to speak of medical or religious matters.

‘I never knew you were that sort of person,’ said Feverstone.

‘That’s the worst of the whole system,’ said Curry. ‘In a place like this you’ve either got to be content to see everything go to pieces–I mean, become stagnant–or else to sacrifice your own career as a scholar to all these infernal college politics. One of these days I shall chuck that side of it and get down to my book. The stuff’s all there, you know, Feverstone. One long vacation clear and I really believe I could put it into shape.’

Mark, who had never seen Curry baited before, was beginning to enjoy himself.

‘I see,’ said Feverstone. ‘In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning.’

‘Exactly!’ said Curry. ‘That’s just–’ and then stopped, uncertain whether he was being taken quite seriously. Feverstone burst into laughter. The Bursar who had up till now been busily engaged in eating, wiped his beard carefully and spoke seriously.

‘All that’s very well in theory,’ he said, ‘but I think Curry’s quite right. Supposing he resigned his office as Sub-Warden and retired into his cave. He might give us a thundering good book on economics–’

‘Economics?’ said Feverstone lifting his eyebrows.

‘I happen to be a military historian, James,’ said Curry. He was often somewhat annoyed at the difficulty which his colleagues seemed to find in remembering what particular branch of learning he had been elected to pursue.

‘I mean military history, of course,’ said Busby. ‘As I say, he might give us a thundering good book on military history. But it would be superseded in twenty years. Whereas the work he is actually doing for the College will benefit it for centuries. This whole business, now, of bringing the NICE to Edgestow. What about a thing like that, Feverstone? I’m not speaking merely of the financial side of it, though as Bursar I naturally rate that pretty high. But think of the new life, the awakening of new vision, the stirring of dormant impulses. What would any book on economics–’

‘Military history,’ said Feverstone gently, but this time Busby did not hear him.

‘What would any book on economics be, compared with a thing like that?’ he continued. ‘I look upon it as the greatest triumph of practical idealism that this century has yet seen.’

The good wine was beginning to do its good office. We have all known the kind of clergyman who tends to forget his clerical collar after the third glass; but Busby’s habit was the reverse. It was after the third glass that he began to remember his collar. As wine and candlelight loosened his tongue, the parson still latent within him after thirty years’ apostasy began to wake into a strange galvanic life.

‘As you chaps know,’ he said, ‘I make no claim to orthodoxy. But if religion is understood in the deepest sense, I have no hesitation in saying that Curry, by bringing the NICE to Edgestow, has done more for it in one year than Jewel has done in his whole life.’

‘Well,’ said Curry modestly, ‘that’s rather the sort of thing one had hoped. I mightn’t put it exactly as you do, James–’

‘No, no,’ said the Bursar, ‘of course not. We all have our different languages; but we all really mean the same thing.’

‘Has anyone discovered,’ asked Feverstone, ‘what, precisely, the NICE is, or what it intends to do?’

Curry looked at him with a slightly startled expression. ‘That comes oddly from you, Dick,’ he said. ‘I thought you were in on it, yourself.’