That Hideous Strength

by C. S. Lewis

  ‘I do, Sir,’ said Jane suddenly.

  ‘These appeals to the passions and emotions,’ said MacPhee, ‘are nothing to the purpose. I could cry as well as anyone this moment if I gave my mind to it.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Director after a pause, ‘there is some excuse for you all for we have all been mistaken. So has the enemy. This man is Merlinus Ambrosius. They thought that if he came back he would be on their side. I find he is on ours. You, Dimble, ought to realise that this was always a possibility.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Dimble. ‘I suppose it was–well, the look of the thing–you and he standing there together: like that. And his appalling bloodthirstiness.’

  ‘I have been startled by it myself,’ said Ransom. ‘But after all we had no right to expect that his penal code would be that of the nineteenth century. I find it difficult, too, to make him understand that I am not an absolute monarch.’

  ‘Is–is he a Christian?’ asked Dimble.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ransom. ‘As for my clothes, I have for once put on the dress of my office to do him honour, and because I was ashamed. He mistook MacPhee and me for scullions or stable-boys. In his days, you see, men did not, except for necessity, go about in shapeless sacks of cloth, and drab was not a favourite colour.’

  At this point Merlin spoke again. Dimble and the Director who alone could follow his speech heard him say, ‘Who are these people? If they are your slaves, why do they do you no reverence? If they are enemies, why do we not destroy them?’

  ‘They are my friends,’ began Ransom in Latin, but MacPhee interrupted,

  ‘Do I understand, Dr Ransom,’ he said, ‘that you are asking us to accept this person as a member of our organisation?’

  ‘I am afraid,’ said the Director, ‘I cannot put it that way. He is a member of the organisation. And I must command you all to accept him.’

  ‘And secondly,’ continued MacPhee, ‘I must ask what enquiries have been made into his credentials.’

  ‘I am fully satisfied,’ answered the Director. ‘I am as sure of his good faith as of yours.’

  ‘But the grounds of your confidence?’ persisted MacPhee. ‘Are we not to hear them?’

  ‘It would be hard,’ said the Director, ‘to explain to you my reasons for trusting Merlinus Ambrosius; but no harder than to explain to him why, despite many appearances which might be misunderstood, I trust you.’ There was just the ghost of a smile about his mouth as he said this. Then Merlin spoke to him again in Latin and he replied. After that Merlin addressed Dimble.

  ‘The Pendragon tells me,’ he said in his unmoved voice, ‘that you accuse me for a fierce and cruel man. It is a charge I never heard before. A third part of my substance I gave to widows and poor men. I never sought the death of any but felons and heathen Saxons. As for the woman, she may live for me. I am not Master in this house. But would it be such a great matter if her head were struck off? Do not queens and ladies who would disdain her as their tire-woman go to the fire for less? Even that gallows bird [cruciarius] beside you–I mean you, fellow, though you speak nothing but your own barbarous tongue; you with the face like sour milk and the voice like a saw in a hard log and the legs like a crane’s–even that cutpurse [sector zonarius], though I would have him to the gatehouse, yet the rope should be used on his back not his throat.’

  MacPhee who realised, though without understanding the words, that he was the subject of some unfavourable comment, stood listening with that expression of entirely suspended judgment which is commoner in Northern Ireland and the Scotch lowlands than in England.

  ‘Mr Director,’ he said when Merlin had finished, ‘I would be very greatly obliged if–’

  ‘Come,’ said the Director suddenly, ‘we have none of us slept tonight. Arthur, will you come and light a fire for our guest in the big room at the North end of this passage? And would someone wake the women? Ask them to bring him up refreshments. A bottle of Burgundy and whatever you have cold. And then, all to bed. We need not stir early in the morning. All is going to be very well.’

  ‘We’re going to have difficulties with that new colleague of ours,’ said Dimble. He was alone with his wife in their room at St Anne’s late on the following day.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated after a pause. ‘What you’d call a strong colleague.’

  ‘You look very tired, Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble.

  ‘Well, it’s been rather a gruelling conference,’ said he. ‘He’s–he’s a tiring man. Oh, I know we’ve all been fools. I mean, we’ve all been imagining that because he came back in the twentieth century he’d be a twentieth century man. Time is more important than we thought, that’s all.’

  ‘I felt that at lunch, you know,’ said his wife. ‘It was so silly not to have realised that he wouldn’t know about forks. But what surprised me even more (after the first shock) was how–well, how elegant he was without them. I mean you could see it wasn’t a case of having no manners but of having different ones.’

  ‘Oh, the old boy’s a gentleman in his own way–anyone can see that. But…well, I don’t know. I suppose it’s all right.’

  ‘What happened at the meeting?’

  ‘Well, you see, everything had to be explained on both sides. We’d the dickens of a job to make him understand that Ransom isn’t the king of this country or trying to become king. And then we had to break it to him that we weren’t the British at all, but the English–what he’d call Saxons. It took him some time to get over that.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And then MacPhee had to choose that moment for embarking on an interminable explanation of the relations between Scotland and Ireland and England. All of which, of course, had to be translated. It was all nonsense too. Like a good many people, MacPhee imagines he’s a Celt when, apart from his name, there’s nothing Celtic about him any more than about Mr Bultitude. By the way Merlinus Ambrosius made a prophecy about Mr Bultitude.’

  ‘Oh? What was that?’

  ‘He said that before Christmas this bear would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except some other bear that none of us had ever heard of. He keeps on saying things like that. They just pop out when we’re talking about something else, and in a rather different voice. As if he couldn’t help it. He doesn’t seem to know any more than the bit he tells you at the moment, if you see what I mean. As if something like a camera shutter opened at the back of his mind and closed again immediately and just one little item came through. It has rather a disagreeable effect.’

  ‘He and MacPhee didn’t quarrel again, I hope.’

  ‘Not exactly. I’m afraid Merlinus Ambrosius wasn’t taking MacPhee very seriously. From the fact that MacPhee is always being obstructive and rather rude and yet never gets sat on, I think Merlinus has concluded that he is the Director’s fool. He seems to have got over his dislike for him. But I don’t think MacPhee is going to like Merlinus.’

  ‘Did you get down to actual business?’ asked Mrs Dimble.

  ‘Well, in a way,’ said Dimble, wrinkling his forehead. ‘We were all at cross-purposes, you see. The business about Ivy’s husband being in prison came up, and Merlinus wanted to know why we hadn’t rescued him. He seemed to imagine us just riding off and taking the County Jail by storm. That’s the sort of thing one was up against all the time.’

  ‘Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble suddenly. ‘Is he going to be any use?’

  ‘He’s going to be able to do things, if that’s what you mean. In that sense there’s more danger of his being too much use than too little.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ asked his wife.

  ‘The universe is so very complicated,’ said Dr Dimble.

  ‘So you have said rather often before, dear,’ replied Mrs Dimble.

  ‘Have I?’ he said with a smile. ‘How often, I wonder? As often as you’ve told the story of the pony and trap at Dawlish?’

  ‘Cecil! I haven’t told it for years.’

  ‘My dear, I heard you telling it to Camilla the ni
ght before last.’

  ‘Oh, Camilla. That was quite different. She’d never heard it before.’

  ‘I don’t know that we can be certain even about that…the universe being so complicated and all.’ For a few minutes there was silence between them.

  ‘But about Merlin?’ asked Mrs Dimble presently.

  ‘Have you ever noticed,’ said Dimble, ‘that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?’

  His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.

  ‘I mean this,’ said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. ‘If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family–anything you like–at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like in the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides…how does it go? Something about “eat every day”…“till all is somethinged away”. It can’t be eaten; that wouldn’t scan. My memory has failed dreadfully these last few years. Do you know the bit, Margery?’

  ‘What you were saying reminded me more of the bit in the Bible about the winnowing fan. Separating the wheat and the chaff. Or like Browning’s line: “Life’s business being just the terrible choice.”’

  ‘Exactly! Perhaps the whole time-process means just that and nothing else. But it’s not only in questions of moral choice. Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds get more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart.’

  Mrs Dimble with the ease born of long practice averted the danger, ever present in her house, of a merely literary turn being given to the conversation.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Spirit and matter, certainly. That explains why people like the Studdocks find it so difficult to be happily married.’

  ‘The Studdocks?’ said Dimble, looking at her rather vaguely. The domestic problems of that young couple had occupied his mind a good deal less than they had occupied his wife’s. ‘Oh, I see. Yes. I daresay that has something to do with it. But about Merlin. What it comes to, as far as I can make out, is this. There were still possibilities for a man of that age which there aren’t for a man of ours. The Earth itself was more like an animal in those days. And mental processes were much more like physical actions. And there were–well, Neutrals, knocking about.’

  ‘Neutrals?’

  ‘I don’t mean, of course, that anything can be a real neutral. A conscious being is either obeying God or disobeying Him. But there might be things neutral in relation to us.’

  ‘You mean eldila–angels?’

  ‘Well, the word angel rather begs the question. Even the Oyéresu aren’t exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically they are Intelligences. The point is that while it may be true at the end of the world to describe every eldil either as an angel or a devil, and may even be true now, it was much less true in Merlin’s time. There used to be things on this Earth pursuing their own business, so to speak. They weren’t ministering spirits sent to help fallen humanity; but neither were they enemies preying upon us. Even in St Paul one gets glimpses of a population that won’t exactly fit into our two columns of angels and devils. And if you go back further…all the gods, elves, dwarfs, water-people, fate, longaevi. You and I know too much to think they are just illusions.’

  ‘You think there are things like that?’

  ‘I think there were. I think there was room for them then, but the universe has come more to a point. Not all rational things perhaps. Some would be mere wills inherent in matter, hardly conscious. More like animals. Others–but I don’t really know. At any rate, that is the sort of situation in which one got a man like Merlin.’

  ‘It all sounds rather horrible to me.’

  ‘It was rather horrible. I mean even in Merlin’s time (he came at the extreme tail end of it) though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn’t do it safely. The things weren’t bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn’t help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He’s quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It’s the result of having laid his mind open to something that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn’t wrong for Abraham, but one can’t help feeling that even he lost something by it.’

  ‘Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Do you feel quite comfortable about the Director’s using a man like this? I mean, doesn’t it look a little bit like fighting Belbury with its own weapons?’

  ‘No. I had thought of that. Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He’s at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead–a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits–extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia–the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way. Do you know that he is forbidden by the rules of his order to use any edged tool on any growing thing?’

  ‘Good gracious!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘There’s six o’clock. I’d promised Ivy to be in the kitchen at quarter to. There’s no need for you to move, Cecil.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Dimble, ‘I think you are a wonderful woman.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How many women who had had their own house for thirty years would be able to fit into this menagerie as you do?’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Ivy had her own house too, you know. And it’s much worse for her. After all, I haven’t got my husband in jail.’

  ‘You jolly soon will have,’ said Dimble, ‘if half the plans of Merlinus Ambrosius are put into action.’

  Merlin and the Director were meanwhile talking in the Blue Room. The Director had put aside his robe and circlet and lay on his sofa. The druid sat in a chair facing him, his legs uncrossed, his pale large hands motionless on his knees, looking to modern eyes like an old conventional carving of a king. He was still robed and beneath the robe, as Ransom knew, had surprisingly little clothing, for the warmth of the house was to him excessive and he found trousers uncomfortable. His loud demands for oil after his bath had involved some hurried shopping in the village which had finally produced, by Denniston’s exertions, a tin of Brilliantine. Merlinus had used it freely so that his hair and beard glistened and the sweet sticky smell filled the room. That was why Mr Bultitude had pawed so insistently at the door that he was finally admitted and now sat as near the magician as he could possibly get, his nostrils twitching. He had never smelled such an interesting man before.

  ‘Sir,’ said Merlin in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him. ‘I give you great thanks. I cannot indeed understa
nd the way you live and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres, it is time that we should open counsels to each other.’

  He glanced at the Director’s face as he spoke and then, as if startled by what he saw there, leaned sharply forward.

  ‘Does your wound pain you?’ he asked.

  Ransom shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is not the wound. We have terrible things to talk of.’

  The big man stirred uneasily.

  ‘Sir,’ said Merlinus in a deeper and softer voice, ‘I could take all the anguish from your heel as though I were wiping it out with a sponge. Give me but seven days to go in and out and up and down and to and fro, to renew old acquaintance. These fields and I, this wood and I, have much to say to one another.’

  As he said this, he was leaning forward so that his face and the bear’s were almost side by side, and it almost looked as if those two might have been engaged in some kind of furry and grunted conversation. The druid’s face had a strangely animal appearance: not sensual nor fierce but full of the patient, unarguing sagacity of a beast. Ransom’s, meanwhile, was full of torment.

  ‘You might find the country much changed,’ he said, forcing a smile.

  ‘No,’ said Merlin. ‘I do not reckon to find it much changed.’ The distance between the two men was increasing every moment. Merlin was like something that ought not to be indoors. Bathed and anointed though he was, a sense of mould, gravel, wet leaves, weedy water, hung about him.

  ‘Not changed,’ he repeated in an almost inaudible voice. And in that deepening inner silence of which his face bore witness, one might have believed that he listened continually to a murmur of evasive sounds: rustling of mice and stoats, thumping progression of frogs, the small shock of falling hazel nuts, creaking of branches, runnels trickling, the very growing of grass. The bear had closed its eyes. The whole room was growing heavy with a sort of floating anæsthesia.

  ‘Through me,’ said Merlin, ‘you can suck up from the Earth oblivion of all pains.’

  ‘Silence,’ said the Director sharply. He had been sinking down into the cushions of his sofa with his head drooping a little towards his chest. Now he suddenly sat bolt upright. The magician started and straightened himself likewise. The air of the room was cleared. Even the bear opened its eyes again.

  ‘No,’ said the Director. ‘God’s glory, do you think you were dug out of the earth to give me a plaster for my heel? We have drugs that could cheat the pain as well as your earth-magic or better, if it were not my business to bear it to the end. I will hear no more of that. Do you understand?’