by C. S. Lewis
A night (with little sleep) and half another day dragged past before Mark was able to see the Deputy Director again. He went to him in a chastened frame of mind, anxious to get the job on almost any terms.
‘I have brought back the Form, Sir,’ he said.
‘What Form?’ asked the Deputy Director. Mark found he was talking to a new and different Wither. The absent-mindedness was still there, but the courtliness was gone. The man looked at him as if out of a dream, as if divided from him by an immense distance, but with a sort of dreamy distaste which might turn into active hatred if ever that distance were diminished. He still smiled, but there was something cat-like in the smile; an occasional alteration of the lines about the mouth which even hinted at a snarl. Mark in his hands was as a mouse. At Bracton the Progressive Element, having to face only scholars, had passed for very knowing fellows, but here at Belbury, one felt quite different. Wither said he had understood that Mark had already refused the job. He could not, in any event, renew the offer. He spoke vaguely and alarmingly of strains and frictions, of injudicious behaviour, of the danger of making enemies, of the impossibility that the NICE could harbour a person who appeared to have quarrelled with all its members in the first week. He spoke even more vaguely and alarmingly of conversations he had had with ‘your colleagues at Bracton’ which entirely confirmed this view. He doubted if Mark were really suited to a learned career, but disclaimed any intention of giving advice. Only after he had hinted and murmured Mark into a sufficient state of dejection did he throw him, like a bone to a dog, the suggestion of an appointment for a probationary period at (roughly –he could not commit the Institute) six hundred a year. And Mark took it. He attempted to get answers even then to some of his questions. From whom was he to take orders? Was he to reside at Belbury?
Wither replied, ‘I think, Mr Studdock, we have already mentioned elasticity as the keynote of the Institute. Unless you are prepared to treat membership as–er–a vocation rather than a mere appointment, I could not conscientiously advise you to come to us. There are no water-tight compartments. I fear I could not persuade the Committee to invent for your benefit some cut and dried position in which you would discharge artificially limited duties and, apart from those, regard your time as your own. Pray allow me to finish, Mr Studdock. We are, as I have said before, more like a family, or even, perhaps, like a single personality. There must be no question of “taking your orders”, as you (rather unfortunately) suggest, from some specified official and considering yourself free to adopt an intransigent attitude to your other colleagues. (I must ask you not to interrupt me, please.) That is not the spirit in which I would wish you to approach your duties. You must make yourself useful, Mr Studdock–generally useful. I do not think the Institute could allow anyone to remain in it who showed a disposition to stand on his rights–who grudged this or that piece of service because it fell outside some function which he had chosen to circumscribe by a rigid definition. On the other hand, it would be quite equally disastrous–I mean for yourself, Mr Studdock: I am thinking throughout of your own interests–quite equally disastrous if you allowed yourself ever to be distracted from your real work by unauthorised collaboration–or, worse still, interference–with the work of other members. Do not let casual suggestions distract you or dissipate your energies. Concentration, Mr Studdock, concentration. And the free spirit of give and take. If you avoid both the errors I have mentioned then–ah, I do not think I need despair of correcting on your behalf certain unfortunate impressions which (we must admit) your behaviour has already produced. No, Mr Studdock, I can allow no further discussion. My time is already fully occupied. I cannot be continually harassed by conversations of this sort. You must find your own level, Mr Studdock. Good morning, Mr Studdock, good morning. Remember what I have said. I am trying to do all I can for you. Good morning.’
Mark reimbursed himself for the humiliation of this interview by reflecting that if he were not a married man he would not have borne it for a moment. This seemed to him (though he did not put it into words) to throw the burden upon Jane. It also set him free to think of all the things he would have said to Wither if he hadn’t had Jane to bother about–and would still say if ever he got a chance. This kept him in a sort of twilight happiness for several minutes; and when he went to tea he found that the reward for his submission had already begun. The Fairy signed to him to come and sit beside her.
‘You haven’t done anything about Alcasan yet?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Mark, ‘because I hadn’t really decided to stay, not until this morning. I could come up and look at your materials this afternoon–at least as far as I know, for I haven’t yet really found out what I’m supposed to be doing.’
‘Elasticity, Sonny, elasticity,’ said Miss Hardcastle. ‘You never will. Your line is to do whatever you’re told and above all not to bother the old man.’
During the next few days several processes, which afterwards came to seem important, were steadily going on.
The fog, which covered Edgestow as well as Belbury, continued and grew denser. At Edgestow one regarded it as ‘coming up from the river’, but in reality it lay all over the heart of England. It blanketed the whole town so that walls dripped and you could write your name in the dampness on tables and men worked by artificial light at midday. The workings, where Bragdon Wood had been, ceased to offend conservative eyes and became mere clangings, thuddings, hootings, shouts, curses and metallic screams in an invisible world.
Some felt glad that the obscenity should thus be covered for all beyond the Wynd was now an abomination. The grip of the NICE on Edgestow was tightening. The river itself which had once been brownish green and amber and smooth-skinned silver, tugging at the reeds and playing with the red roots, now flowed opaque, thick with mud, sailed on by endless fleets of empty tins, sheets of paper, cigarette ends and fragments of wood, sometimes varied by rainbow patches of oil. Then, the invasion actually crossed it. The Institute had bought the land up to the left or eastern bank. But now Busby was summoned to meet Feverstone and a Professor Frost as the representatives of the NICE, and learned for the first time that the Wynd itself was to be diverted: there was to be no river in Edgestow. This was still strictly confidential, but the Institute had already powers to force it. This being so, a new adjustment of boundaries between it and the College was clearly needed. Busby’s jaw fell when he realised that the Institute wanted to come right up to the College walls. He refused of course. And it was then that he first heard a hint of requisitioning. The College could sell today and the Institute offered a good price: if they did not, compulsion and a merely nominal compensation awaited them. Relations between Feverstone and the Bursar deteriorated during this interview. An extraordinary College Meeting had to be summoned, and Busby had to put the best face he could on things to his colleagues. He was almost physically shocked by the storm of hatred which met him. In vain did he point out that those who were now abusing him had themselves voted for the sale of the wood; but equally in vain did they abuse him. The College was caught in the net of necessity. They sold the little strip on their side of the Wynd which meant so much. It was no more than a terrace between the eastern walls and the water. Twenty-four hours later the NICE boarded over the doomed Wynd and converted the terrace into a dump. All day long workmen were trampling across the planks with heavy loads which they flung down against the very walls of Bracton till the pile had covered the boarded blindness which had once been the Henrietta Maria window and reached almost to the east window of chapel.
In these days many members of the Progressive Element dropped off and joined the opposition. Those who were left were hammered closer together by the unpopularity they had to face. And though the College was thus sharply divided within, yet for the very same reason it also took on a new unity perforce in its relations to the outer world. Bracton as a whole bore the blame for bringing the NICE to Edgestow at all. This was unfair, for many high authorities in the University had thoroughly
approved Bracton’s action in doing so, but now that the result was becoming apparent people refused to remember this. Busby, though he had heard the hint of requisitioning in confidence, lost no time in spreading it through Edgestow common rooms–‘It would have done no good if we had refused to sell,’ he said. But nobody believed that this was why Bracton had sold, and the unpopularity of that College steadily increased. The undergraduates got wind of it, and stopped attending the lectures of Bracton dons. Busby, and even the wholly innocent Warden, were mobbed in the streets.
The Town, which did not usually share the opinions of the University, was also in an unsettled condition. The disturbance in which the Bracton windows had been broken was taken little notice of in the London papers or even in the Edgestow Telegraph. But it was followed by other episodes. There was an indecent assault in one of the mean streets down by the station. There were two ‘beatings up’ in a public house. There were increasing complaints of threatening and disorderly behaviour on the part of the NICE workmen. But these complaints never appeared in the papers. Those who had actually seen ugly incidents were surprised to read in the Telegraph, that the new Institute was settling down very comfortably in Edgestow and the most cordial relations developing between it and the natives. Those who had not seen them but only heard of them, finding nothing in the Telegraph, dismissed the stories as rumours or exaggerations. Those who had seen them wrote letters to it, but it did not print their letters.
But if episodes could be doubted, no one could doubt that nearly all the hotels of the town had passed into the hands of the Institute, so that a man could no longer drink with a friend in his accustomed bar; that familiar shops were crowded with strangers who seemed to have plenty of money, and that prices were higher; that there was a queue for every omnibus and a difficulty in getting into every cinema. Quiet houses that had looked out on quiet streets were shaken all day long by heavy and unaccustomed traffic: wherever one went one was jostled by crowds of strangers. To a little midland market town like Edgestow even visitors from the other side of the county had hitherto ranked as aliens: the day-long clamour of Northern, Welsh, and even Irish voices, the shouts, the cat-calls, the songs, the wild faces passing in the fog, were utterly detestable. ‘There’s going to be trouble here,’ was the comment of many a citizen; and in a few days, ‘You’d think they wanted trouble.’ It is not recorded who first said, ‘We need more police.’ And then at last the Edgestow Telegraph took notice. A shy little article–a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand–appeared suggesting that the local police were quite incapable of dealing with the new population.
Of all these things Jane took little notice. She was, during these days, merely ‘hanging on’. Perhaps Mark would summon her to Belbury. Perhaps he would give up the whole Belbury scheme and come home–his letters were vague and unsatisfactory. Perhaps she would go out to St Anne’s and see the Dennistons. The dreams continued. But Mr Denniston had been right: it was better when one had given in to regarding them as ‘news’. If it had not been, she could hardly have endured her nights. There was one recurrent dream in which nothing exactly happened. She seemed indeed to be lying in her own bed. But there was someone beside the bed–someone who had apparently drawn a chair up to the bedside and then sat down to watch. He had a notebook in which he occasionally made an entry. Otherwise he sat perfectly still and patiently attentive–like a doctor. She knew his face already, and came to know it infinitely well: the pince-nez, the well-chiselled, rather white, features, and the little pointed beard. And presumably–if he could see her–he must by now know hers equally well: it was certainly herself whom he appeared to be studying. Jane did not write about this to the Dennistons the first time it occurred. Even after the second she delayed until it was too late to post the letter that day. She had a sort of hope that the longer she kept silent the more likely they would be to come in and see her again. She wanted comfort but she wanted it, if possible, without going out to St Anne’s, without meeting this Fisher-King man and getting drawn into his orbit.
Mark meanwhile was working at the rehabilitation of Alcasan. He had never seen a police dossier before and found it difficult to understand. In spite of his efforts to conceal his ignorance, the Fairy soon discovered it. ‘I’ll put you onto the Captain,’ she said. ‘He’ll show you the ropes.’ That was how Mark came to spend most of his working hours with her second in command, Captain O’Hara, a big white-haired man with a handsome face, talking in what English people called a Southern brogue and Irish people ‘a Dublin accent you could cut with a knife’. He claimed to be of ancient family and had a seat at Castlemortle. Mark did not really understand his explanations of the dossier, the Q Register, the Sliding File system, and what the Captain called ‘weeding’. But he was ashamed to confess this and so it came about that the whole selection of facts really remained in O’Hara’s hands and Mark found himself working merely as a writer. He did his best to conceal this from O’Hara and to make it appear that they were really working together; this naturally made it impossible for him to repeat his original protests against being treated as a mere journalist. He had, indeed, a taking style (which had helped his academic career much more than he would have liked to acknowledge) and his journalism was a success. His articles and letters about Alcasan appeared in papers where he would never have had the entrée over his own signature: papers read by millions. He could not help feeling a little thrill of pleasurable excitement.
He also confided to Captain O’Hara his minor financial anxieties. When was one paid? And in the meantime, he was short of petty cash. He had lost his wallet on his very first night at Belbury and it had never been recovered. O’Hara roared with laughter. ‘Sure you can have any money you like by asking the Steward.’
‘You mean it’s then deducted from one’s next cheque?’ asked Mark.
‘Man,’ said the Captain, ‘once you’re in the Institute, God bless it, you needn’t bother your head about that. Aren’t we going to take over the whole currency question? It’s we that make money.’
‘Do you mean?’ gasped Mark and then paused and added, ‘But they’d come down on you for the lot if you left.’
‘What do you want to be talking about leaving for at all?’ said O’Hara. ‘No one leaves the Institute. At least, the only one that ever I heard of was old Hingest.’
About this time Hingest’s inquest came to an end with a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. The funeral service was held in the college chapel at Bracton.
It was the third and thickest day of the fog, which was now so dense and white that men’s eyes smarted from looking at it and all distant sounds were annihilated; only the drip from eaves and trees and the shouts of the workmen outside chapel were audible within the College. Inside the chapel the candles burned with straight flames, each flame the centre of a globe of greasy luminosity, and cast almost no light on the building as a whole; but for the coughing and shuffling of feet, one would not have known that the stalls were quite full. Curry, black-suited and black-gowned and looming unnaturally large, went to and fro at the western end of the chapel, whispering and peering, anxious lest the fog might delay the arrival of what he called the Remains, and not unpleasingly conscious of the weight wherewith his responsibility for the whole ceremony pressed upon his shoulders. Curry was very great at College funerals. There was no taint of the undertaker about him; he was the restrained, manly friend, stricken by a heavy blow but still mindful that he was (in some undefined sense) the father of the College and that amid all the spoils of mutability he, at any rate, must not give way. Strangers who had been present on such occasions often said to one another as they drove off, ‘You could see that Sub-Warden chap felt it, though he wasn’t going to show it.’ There was no hypocrisy in this. Curry was so used to superintending the lives of his colleagues that it came naturally to him to superintend their deaths; and possibly, if he had possessed an analytic mind, he might have discovered in himself a vague feeling that his influence, his power
of smoothing paths and pulling suitable wires, could not really quite cease once the breath was out of the body.
The organ began to play and drowned both the coughing within and the harsher noises without–the monotonously ill-tempered voices, the rattle of iron, and the vibrating shocks with which loads were flung from time to time against the chapel wall. But the fog had, as Curry feared, delayed the coffin, and the organist had been playing for half an hour before there came a stir about the door and the family mourners, the black-clad Hingests of both sexes with their ram-rod backs and country faces, began to be ushered into the stalls reserved for them. Then came maces and beadles and censors and the Grand Rector of Edgestow; then, singing, the choir, and finally the coffin–an island of flowers drifting indistinctly through the fog, which seemed to have poured in, thicker, colder and wetter, with the opening of the door. The service began.
Canon Storey took it. His voice was still beautiful, and there was beauty too in his isolation from all that company. He was isolated both by his faith and by his deafness. He felt no qualm about the appropriateness of the words which he read over the corpse of the proud old unbeliever, for he had never suspected his unbelief; and he was wholly unconscious of the strange antiphony between his own voice reading and the other voices from without. Glossop might wince when one of those voices, impossible to ignore in the silence of the chapel, was heard shouting, ‘Take your bucking great foot out of the light or I’ll let you have the whole lot on top of it’; but Storey, unmoved and unaware, replied, ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.’
‘I’ll give you one across your ugly face in a moment, see if I don’t,’ said the voice again.
‘It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body,’ said Storey.
‘Disgraceful, disgraceful,’ muttered Curry to the Bursar who sat next to him. But some of the junior Fellows saw, as they said, the funny side of it and thought how Feverstone (who had been unable to be present) would enjoy the story.
The pleasantest of the rewards which fell to Mark for his obedience was admission to the library. Shortly after his brief intrusion into it on that miserable morning he had discovered that this room, though nominally public, was in practice reserved for what one had learned, at school, to call ‘bloods’ and, at Bracton, ‘the Progressive Element’. It was on the library hearthrug and during the hours between ten and midnight that the important and confidential talks took place; and that was why, when Feverstone one evening sidled up to Mark in the lounge and said, ‘What about a drink in the library?’ Mark smiled and agreed and harboured no resentment for the last conversation he had had with Feverstone. If he felt a little contempt of himself for doing so, he repressed and forgot it: that sort of thing was childish and unrealistic.
The circle in the library usually consisted of Feverstone, the Fairy, Filostrato and–more surprising–Straik. It was balm to Mark’s wounds to find that Steele never appeared there. He had apparently got in beyond, or behind, Steele, as they had promised him he would; all was working according to programme. The one person whose frequent appearance in the library he did not understand was the silent man with the pince-nez and the pointed beard, Professor Frost. The Deputy Director–or, as Mark now called him, the DD, or the Old Man–was often there, but in a peculiar mode. He had a habit of drifting in and sauntering about the room, creaking and humming as usual. Sometimes he came up to the circle by the fire and listened and looked on with a vaguely parental expression on his face; but he seldom said anything and he never joined the party. He drifted away again, and then, perhaps, would return an hour later and once more potter about the empty parts of the room and once more go away. He had never spoken to Mark since the humiliating interview in his study, and Mark learned from the Fairy that he was still out of favour. ‘The Old Man will thaw in time,’ she said. ‘But I told you he didn’t like people to talk about leaving.’
The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then–perhaps once in the whole evening–something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the NICE would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. ‘Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,’ he said, ‘but a prophecy. All the miracles–shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man–that is, Man himself, full grown–has power to judge the world–to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.’ It was all very unpleasant.
It was on the day after Hingest’s funeral that Mark first ventured to walk into the library on his own; hitherto he had always been supported by Feverstone or Filostrato. He was a little uncertain of his reception, and yet also afraid that if he did not soon assert his right to the entrée, this modesty might damage him. He knew that in such matters the error in either direction is equally fatal; one has to guess and take the risk.
It was a brilliant success. The circle were all there, and before he had closed the door behind him, all had turned with welcoming faces, and Filostrato had said, ‘Ecco’ and the Fairy, ‘Here’s the very man.’ A glow of sheer pleasure passed over Mark’s whole body. Never had the fire seemed to burn more brightly nor the smell of the drinks to be more attractive. He was actually being waited for. He was wanted.
‘How quick can you write two leading articles, Mark?’ said Feverstone.
‘Can you work all night?’ asked Miss Hardcastle.
‘I have done,’ said Mark. ‘What’s it all about?’
‘You are satisfied,’ asked Filostrato, ‘that it–the disturbance–must go forward at once, yes?’
‘That’s the joke of it,’ said Feverstone. ‘She’s done her work too
