That Hideous Strength
Page 34
bee-hive. The bees all went away, over the wall. And to follow bees was the obvious thing to do. I think there was a sense in the bear’s mind –one could hardly call it a picture –of endless green lands beyond the wall, and hives innumerable, and bees the size of sparrows, and waiting there, or else walking, trickling, oozing to meet one, something or someone stickier, sweeter, more golden than honey itself.
Today, this unrest was upon him in an unusual degree. He was missing Ivy Maggs. He did not know that there was any such person and he did not remember her as we know remembering, but there was an unspecified lack in his experience. She and the Director were, in their different ways, the two main factors in his existence. He felt, in his own fashion, the supremacy of the Director. Meetings with him were to the bear what mystical experiences are to men, for the Director had brought back with him from Venus some shadow of man’s lost prerogative to ennoble beasts. In his presence Mr Bultitude trembled on the very borders of personality, thought the unthinkable and did the impossible, was troubled and enraptured with gleams from beyond his own woolly world, and came away tired. But with Ivy he was perfectly at home –as a savage who believes in some remote High God is more at home with the little deities of wood and water. It was Ivy who fed him, chased him out of forbidden places, cuffed him, and talked to him all day long. It was her firm conviction that the creature ‘understood every word she said’. If you took this literally it was untrue; but in another sense it was not so wide of the mark. For much of Ivy’s conversation was the expression not of thought but of feeling and of feelings Mr Bultitude almost shared –feelings of alacrity, snugness, and physical affection. In their own way they understood one another pretty well.
Three times Mr Bultitude turned away from the tree and the wall, but each time he came back. Then, very cautiously and quietly, he began to climb the tree. When he got up into the fork he sat there for a long time. He saw beneath him a steep grassy bank descending to a road. The desire and the inhibition were now both very strong. He sat there for nearly half an hour. Sometimes his mind wandered from the point and once he nearly went to sleep. In the end he got down on the outside of the wall. When he found that the thing had really happened, he became so frightened that he sat still at the bottom of the grassy bank on the very edge of the road. Then he heard a noise.
A motor van came into sight. It was driven by a man in the livery of the NICE and another man in the same livery sat beside him.
‘Hullo…I say!’ said the second man. ‘Pull up, Sid. What about that?’
‘What?’ said the driver.
‘Haven’t you got eyes in your head?’ said the other.
‘Gor,’ said Sid, pulling up. ‘A bloody great bear. I say –it couldn’t be our own bear, could it?’
‘Get on,’ said his mate. ‘She was in her cage all right this morning.’
‘You don’t think she could have done a bunk? There’d be hell to pay for you and me …’
‘She couldn’t have got there if she had done a bunk. Bears don’t go forty miles an hour. That ain’t the point. But hadn’t we better pinch this one?’
‘We haven’t got no orders,’ said Sid.
‘No. And we haven’t failed to get that blasted wolf either, have we?’
‘Wasn’t our fault. The old woman what said she’d sell wouldn’t sell, as you’re there to witness, young Len. We did our best. Told her that experiments at Belbury weren’t what she thought. Told her the brute would have the time of its life and be made no end of a pet. Never told so many lies in one morning in my life. She’d been got at by someone.’
‘Course it wasn’t our fault. But the boss won’t take no notice of that. It’s get on or get out at Belbury.’
‘Get out?’ said Sid. ‘I wish to hell I knew how to.’
Len spat over the side and there was a moment’s silence.
‘Anyway,’ said Sid presently, ‘what’s the good of taking a bear back?’
‘Well, isn’t it better than coming back with nothing?’ said Len. ‘And bears cost money. I know they want another one. And here it is free.’
‘All right,’ said Sid ironically, ‘if you’re so keen on it, just hop out and ask him to step in.’
‘Dope,’ said Len.
‘Not on my bit of dinner, you don’t,’ said Sid.
‘You’re a bucking good mate to have,’ said Len, groping in a greasy parcel. ‘It’s a good thing for you I’m not the sort of chap who’d split on you.’
‘You done it already,’ said the driver. ‘I know all your little games.’
Len had by this time produced a thick sandwich and was dabbing it with some strong smelling liquid from a bottle. When it was thoroughly saturated, he opened the door and went a pace forward, still holding the door in one hand. He was now about six yards from the bear, which had remained perfectly still ever since it saw them. He threw the sandwich to it.
Quarter of an hour later Mr Bultitude lay on his side, unconscious and breathing heavily. They had no difficulty in tying up his mouth and all four paws, but they had great difficulty in lifting him into the van.
‘That’s done something to my ticker,’ said Sid, pressing his hand to his left side.
‘Curse your ticker,’ said Len, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. ‘Come on.’
Sid climbed back into the driving seat, sat still for a few seconds, panting and muttering ‘Christ’ at intervals. Then he started his engine up and they drove away.
For some time now Mark’s waking life was divided between periods by the Sleeper’s bedside and periods in the room with the spotted ceiling. The training in objectivity which took place in the latter cannot be described fully. The reversal of natural inclination which Frost inculcated was not spectacular or dramatic, but the details would be unprintable and had, indeed, a kind of nursery fatuity about them which is best ignored. Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing; but laughter was unhappily out of the question. There indeed lay the horror –to perform petty obscenities which a very silly child might have thought funny all under the unchangingly serious inspection of Frost, with a stop watch and a note book and all the ritual of scientific experiment. Some of the things he had to do were merely meaningless. In one exercise he had to mount the stepladder and touch some one spot on the ceiling, selected by Frost: just touch it with his forefinger and then come down again. But either by association with the other exercises or because it really concealed some significance, this proceeding always appeared to Mark to be the most indecent and even inhuman of all his tasks. And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him –something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.
The other thing that helped to save him was the Man in the Bed. Mark’s discovery that he really could speak English had led to a curious acquaintance with him. It can hardly be said that they conversed. Both spoke but the result was hardly conversation as Mark had hitherto understood the term. The man was so very allusive and used gesture so extensively that Mark’s less sophisticated modes of communication were almost useless. Thus when Mark explained that he had no tobacco, the man had slapped an imaginary tobacco pouch on his knee at least six times and struck an imaginary match about as often, each time jerking his head sideways with a look of such relish as Mark had seldom seen on a human face. Then Mark went on to explain that though ‘they’ were not foreigners, they were extremely dangerous people and that probably the Stranger’s best plan would be to preserve his silence.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Mark. ‘We are both in considerable danger. And –’
‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘Foreigners. Eh?’
‘No, no,’ said Mark. ‘I told you they weren’t. They seem to think you are, though. And that’s why –’
‘That’s right,’ interrupted the man. ‘I know. Foreigners, I call them. I know. They get nothing out of me. You and me’s all right. Ah.’
‘I’ve been trying to think out some sort of plan,’ said Mark.
‘Ah,’ said the man approvingly.
‘And I was wondering,’ began Mark when the man suddenly leaned forwards and said with extraordinary energy, ‘I tell ’ee.’
‘What?’ said Mark.
‘I got a plan.’
‘What is it?’
‘Ah,’ said the man, winking at Mark with infinite knowingness and rubbing his belly.
‘Go on. What is it?’ said Mark.
‘How’d it be,’ said the man, sitting up and applying his left thumb to his right fore-finger as if about to propound the first step in a philosophical argument, ‘how’d it be now if you and I made ourselves a nice bit of toasted cheese?’
‘I meant a plan for escape,’ said Mark.
‘Ah,’ replied the man. ‘My old Dad now. He never had a day’s illness in his life. Eh? How’s that for a bit of all right? Eh?’
‘It’s a remarkable record,’ said Mark.
‘Ah. You may say so,’ replied the other. ‘On the road all his life. Never had a stomach-ache. Eh?’ And here, as if Mark might not know that malady, he went through a long extraordinarily vivid dumb show.
‘Open-air life suited him, I suppose,’ said Mark.
‘And what did he attribute his health to?’ asked the man. He pronounced the word attribute with great relish, laying the accent on the first syllable. ‘I ask everyone, what did he attribute his health to?’
Mark was about to reply when the man indicated by a gesture that the question was purely rhetorical and that he did not wish to be interrupted.
‘He attributed his health,’ continued the speaker with great solemnity, ‘to eating toasted cheese. Keeps the water out of the stomach. That’s what it does. Eh? Makes a lining. Stands to reason. Ah!’
In several later interviews, Mark endeavoured to discover something of the Stranger’s own history, and particularly how he had been brought to Belbury. This was not easy to do, for though the tramp’s conversation was very autobiographical, it was filled almost entirely with accounts of conversations in which he had made stunning repartees whose points remained wholly obscure. Even where it was less intellectual in character, the allusions were too difficult for Mark, who was quite ignorant of the life of the roads though he had once written a very authoritative article on Vagrancy. But by repeated and (as he got to know his man) more cautious, questioning, he couldn’t help getting the idea that the tramp had been made to give up his clothes to a total stranger and then put to sleep. He never got the story in so many words. The tramp insisted on talking as if Mark knew it already, and any pressure for a more accurate account produced only a series of nods, winks and highly confidential gestures. As for the identity or appearance of the person who had taken his clothes, nothing whatever could be made out. The nearest Mark ever got to it, after hours of talk and deep potations, was some such statement as ‘Ah. He was a one!’ or ‘He was a kind of –eh? You know?’ or ‘That was a customer, that was.’ These statements were made with enormous gusto as though the theft of the tramp’s clothes had excited his deepest admiration.
Indeed, throughout the man’s conversation this gusto was the most striking characteristic. He never passed any kind of moral judgment on the various things that had been done to him in the course of his career nor did he even try to explain them. Much that was unjust and still more that was simply unintelligible seemed to be accepted, not only without resentment, but with a certain satisfaction provided only that it was striking. Even about his present situation he showed very much less curiosity than Mark would have thought possible. It did not make sense, but then the man did not expect things to make sense. He deplored the absence of tobacco and regarded the ‘Foreigners’ as very dangerous people; but the main thing, obviously, was to eat and drink as much as possible while the present conditions lasted. And gradually Mark fell into line. The man’s breath, and indeed his body, were malodorous, and his methods of eating were gross. But the sort of continual picnic which the two shared carried Mark back into the realm of childhood which we have all enjoyed before nicety began. Each understood perhaps an eighth part of what the other said, but a kind of intimacy grew between them. Mark never noticed until years later that here, where there was no room for vanity and no more power or security than that of ‘children playing in a giant’s kitchen’, he had unawares become a member of a ‘circle’, as secret and as strongly fenced against outsiders as any that he had dreamed of.
Every now and then their tête-à-tête was interrupted. Frost or Wither or both would come in introducing some stranger who addressed the tramp in an unknown language, failed completely to get any response, and was ushered out again. The tramp’s habit of submission to the unintelligible, mixed with a kind of animal cunning, stood him in good stead during these interviews. Even without Mark’s advice, it would never have occurred to him to undeceive his captors by replying in English. Undeceiving was an activity wholly foreign to his mind. For the rest, his expression of tranquil indifference, varied occasionally by extremely sharp looks but never by the least sign of anxiety or bewilderment, left his interrogators mystified. Wither could never find in his face the evil he was looking for; but neither could he find any of that virtue which would, for him, have been the danger signal. The tramp was a type of man he had never met. The dupe, the terrified victim, the toady, the would-be accomplice, the rival, the honest man with loathing and hatred in his eyes, were all familiar to him. But not this.
And then, one day, there came an interview that was different.
‘It sounds rather like a mythological picture by Titian come to life,’ said the Director with a smile when Jane had described her experience in the lodge.
‘Yes, but …’ said Jane; and then stopped. ‘I see,’ she began again, ‘it was very like that. Not only the woman and the…the dwarfs…but the glow. As if the air were on fire. But I always thought I liked Titian. I suppose I wasn’t really taking the pictures seriously enough. Just chattering about “the Renaissance” the way one did.’
‘You didn’t like it when it came out into real life?’
Jane shook her head.
‘Was it real, Sir?’ she asked presently. ‘Are there such things?’
‘Yes,’ said the Director, ‘it was real enough. Oh, there are thousands of things within this square mile that I don’t know about yet. And I daresay that the presence of Merlinus brings out certain things. We are not living exactly in the twentieth century as long as he’s here. We overlap a bit; the focus is blurred. And you yourself…you are a seer. You were perhaps bound to meet her. She’s what you’ll get if you won’t have the other.’
‘How do you mean, Sir?’ said Jane.
‘You said she was a little like Mother Dimble. So she is. But Mother Dimble with something left out. Mother Dimble is friends with all that world as M
erlinus is friends with the woods and rivers. But he isn’t a wood or a river himself. She has not rejected it, but she has baptised it. She is a Christian wife. And you, you know, are not. Neither are you a virgin. You have put yourself where you must meet that Old Woman and you have rejected all that has happened to her since Maleldil came to Earth. So you get her raw –not stronger than Mother Dimble would find her, but untransformed, demoniac. And you don’t like it. Hasn’t that been the history of your life?’
‘You mean,’ said Jane slowly, ‘I’ve been repressing something?’
The Director laughed; just that loud, assured, bachelor laughter which had often infuriated her on other lips.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But don’t think I’m talking of Freudian repressions. He knew only half the facts. It isn’t a question of inhibitions –inculcated shame –against natural desire. I’m afraid there’s no niche in the world for people that won’t be either Pagan or Christian. Just imagine a man who was too dainty to eat with his fingers and yet wouldn’t use forks!’
His laughter rather than his words had reddened Jane’s cheeks, and she was staring at him open-mouthed. Assuredly, the Director was not in the least like Mother Dimble; but an odious realisation that he was, in this matter, on Mother Dimble’s side – that he also, though he did not belong to that hot-coloured, archaic world, stood somehow in good diplomatic relations with it, from which she was excluded –had struck her like a blow. Some old female dream of finding a man who ‘really understood’ was being insulted. She took it for granted, half-unconsciously, that the Director was the most virginal of his sex; but she had not realised that this would leave his masculinity still on the other side of the stream from herself and even steeper, more emphatic, than that of common men. Some knowledge of a world beyond Nature she had already gained from living in his house, and more from fear of death that night in the dingle. But she had been conceiving this world as ‘spiritual’ in the negative sense –as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away. Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent. How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated –but in ever larger and more disturbing modes –on the highest levels of all?
‘Yes,’ said the Director. ‘There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, he would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing –the gold lion, the bearded bull –which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly.’
‘You mean I shall have to become a Christian?’ said Jane.
‘It looks like it,’ said the Director.
‘But –I still don’t see what that has to do with…with Mark,’ said Jane. This was perhaps not perfectly true. The vision of the universe which she had begun to see in the last few minutes had a curiously stormy quality about it. It was bright, darting and overpowering. Old Testament imagery of eyes and wheels for the first time in her life took on some possibility of meaning. And mixed with this was the sense that she had been manoeuvred into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey formalised one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like. And where Mark stood in all this new world she did not know. Certainly not quite in his old place. Something which she liked to think of as the opposite of