That Hideous Strength

by C. S. Lewis

  ‘If the war was still on I’d have said it was a bomb,’ said Ivy.

  ‘Come and look,’ said Camilla who had regained her composure sooner than any of the others and was now at the window which looked west towards the valley of the Wynd. ‘Oh, look!’ she said again. ‘No. It’s not fire. And it’s not searchlights. And it’s not forked lightning. Ugh!…There’s another shock. And there…Look at that. It’s as bright as day there beyond the Church. What am I talking about, it’s only three o’clock. It’s brighter than day. And the heat!’

  ‘It has begun,’ said Mother Dimble.

  At about the same time that morning when Mark had climbed into the lorry, Feverstone, not much hurt but a good deal shaken, climbed out of the stolen car. That car had ended its course upside down in a deep ditch, and Feverstone, always ready to look on the bright side, reflected as he extricated himself that things might have been worse–it might have been his own car. The snow was deep in the ditch and he was very wet. As he stood up and looked about him he saw that he was not alone. A tall, massive figure in a black cassock was before him, about five yards distant. Its back was towards him and it was already walking steadily away. ‘Hi!’ shouted Feverstone. The other turned and looked at him in silence for a second or two; then it resumed its walk. Feverstone felt at once that this was not the sort of man he would get on with–in fact, he had never liked the look of anyone less. Nor could he, in his broken and soaking pumps, follow the four-mile-an-hour stride of those booted feet. He did not attempt it. The black figure came to a gate, there stopped and made a whinnying noise. He was apparently talking to a horse across the gate. Next moment (Feverstone did not quite see how it happened) the man was over the gate and on the horse’s back and off at a canter across a wide field that rose milk white to the sky-line.

  Feverstone had no idea where he was, but clearly the first thing to do was to reach a road. It took him much longer than he expected. It was not freezing now and deep puddles lay hidden beneath the snow in many places. At the bottom of the first hill he came to such a morass that he was driven to abandon the track of the Roman road and try striking across the fields. The decision was fatal. It kept him for two hours looking for gaps in hedges, and trying to reach things that looked like roads from a distance but turned out to be nothing of the sort when one reached them. He had always hated the country and always hated weather and he was not at any time fond of walking.

  Near twelve o’clock he found a road with no sign-posts that led him an hour later into a main road. Here, thank heavens, there was a fair amount of traffic, both cars and pedestrians, all going one way. The first three cars took no notice of his signals. The fourth stopped. ‘Quick. In you get,’ said the driver. ‘Going to Edgestow?’ asked Feverstone, his hand on the door. ‘Good Lord, no!’ said the other. ‘There’s Edgestow!’ (and he pointed behind him)–‘if you want to go there.’ The man seemed surprised and considerably excited.

  In the end there was nothing for it but walking. Every vehicle was going away from Edgestow, none going towards it. Feverstone was a little surprised. He knew all about the exodus (indeed, it had been part of his plan to clear the city as far as possible) but he had supposed it would be over by now. But all that afternoon as he splashed and slipped through the churned snow the fugitives were still passing him. We have (naturally) hardly any first-hand evidence for what happened in Edgestow that afternoon and evening. But we have plenty of stories as to how so many people came to leave it at the last moment. They filled the papers for weeks and lingered in private talks for months, and in the end became a joke. ‘No, I don’t want to hear how you got out of Edgestow,’ came to be a catch-phrase. But behind all the exaggerations there remains the undoubted truth that a quite astonishing number of citizens left the town just in time. One had had a message from a dying father; another had decided quite suddenly, and he couldn’t just say why, to go and take a little holiday; another went because the pipes in his house had been burst by the frost and he thought he might as well go away till they were put right. Not a few had gone because of some trivial event which seemed to them an omen–a dream, a broken looking-glass, tea-leaves in a cup. Omens of a more ancient kind had also revived during this crisis. One had heard his donkey, another her cat, say ‘as clear as clear’: ‘Go away.’ And hundreds were still leaving for the old reason–because their houses had been taken from them, their livelihood destroyed, and their liberties threatened by the Institutional Police.

  It was at about four o’clock that Feverstone found himself flung on his face. That was the first shock. They continued, increasing in frequency, during the hours that followed–horrible shudderings, and soon heavings, of the earth, and a growing murmur of wide-spread subterranean noise. The temperature began to rise. Snow was disappearing in every direction and at times he was knee deep in water. Haze from the melting snow filled the air. When he reached the brow of the last steep descent into Edgestow he could see nothing of the city: only fog through which extraordinary coruscations of light came up to him. Another shock sent him sprawling. He now decided not to go down: he would turn and follow the traffic–work over to the railway and try to get to London. The picture of a steaming bath at his club, of himself at the fender of the smoking room telling this whole story, rose in his mind. It would be something to have survived both Belbury and Bracton. He had survived a good many things in his day and believed in his luck.

  He was already a few paces down the hill when he made this decision, and he turned at once. But instead of going up he found he was still descending. As if he were in shale on a mountain slope, instead of on a metalled road, the ground slipped away backwards where he trod on it. When he arrested his descent he was thirty yards lower. He began again. This time he was flung off his feet, rolled head over heels, stones, earth, grass and water pouring over him and round him in riotous confusion. It was as when a great wave overtakes you while you are bathing, but this time it was an earth wave. He got to his feet once again; set his face to the hill. Behind, the valley seemed to have turned into Hell. The pit of fog had been ignited and burned with blinding violet flame, water was roaring somewhere, buildings crashing, mobs shouting. The hill in front of him was in ruins–no trace of road, hedge or field, only a cataract of loose raw earth. It was also far steeper than it had been. His mouth and hair and nostrils were full of earth. The slope was growing steeper as he looked at it. The ridge heaved up and up. Then the whole wave of earth rose, arched, trembled, and with all its weight and noise poured down on him.

  ‘Why Logres, Sir?’ said Camilla.

  Dinner was over at St Anne’s and they sat at their wine in a circle about the dining-room fire. As Mrs Dimble had prophesied, the men had cooked it very well; only after their serving was over and the board cleared had they put on their festal garments. Now all sat at their ease and all diversely splendid: Ransom crowned, at the right of the hearth; Grace Ironwood, in black and silver, opposite him. It was so warm that they had let the fire burn low, and in the candlelight the court dresses seemed to glow of themselves.

  ‘Tell them, Dimble,’ said Ransom. ‘I will not talk much from now on.’

  ‘Are you tired, Sir?’ said Grace. ‘Is the pain bad?’

  ‘No, Grace,’ he replied. ‘It isn’t that. But now that it’s so very nearly time for me to go, all this begins to feel like a dream. A happy dream, you understand: all of it, even the pain. I want to taste every drop. I feel as though it would be dissolved if I talked much.’

  ‘I suppose you got to go, Sir?’ said Ivy.

  ‘My dear,’ said he, ‘what else is there to do? I have not grown a day or an hour older since I came back from Perelandra. There is no natural death to look forward to. The wound will only be healed in the world where it was got.’

  ‘All this has the disadvantage of being clean contrary to the observed laws of Nature,’ observed MacPhee. The Director smiled without speaking, as a man who refuses to be drawn.

  ‘It is not contrary to the law
s of Nature,’ said a voice from the corner where Grace Ironwood sat, almost invisible in the shadows. ‘You are quite right. The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.’

  ‘Shakespeare never breaks the real laws of poetry,’ put in Dimble. ‘But by following them he breaks every now and then the little regularities which critics mistake for the real laws. Then the little critics call it a “licence”. But there’s nothing licentious about it to Shakespeare.’

  ‘And that,’ said Denniston, ‘is why nothing in Nature is quite regular. There are always exceptions. A good average uniformity, but not complete.’

  ‘Not many exceptions to the law of death have come my way,’ observed MacPhee.

  ‘And how,’ said Grace with much emphasis, ‘how should you expect to be there on more than one such occasion? Were you a friend of Arthur’s or Barbarossa’s? Did you know Enoch or Elijah?’

  ‘Do you mean,’ said Jane, ‘that the Director…the Pendragon…is going where they went?’

  ‘He will be with Arthur, certainly,’ said Dimble. ‘I can’t answer for the rest. There are people who have never died. We do not yet know why. We know a little more than we did about the How. There are many places in the universe–I mean, this same physical universe in which our planet moves–where an organism can last practically forever. Where Arthur is, we know.’

  ‘Where?’ said Camilla.

  ‘In the Third Heaven, in Perelandra. In Aphallin, the distant island which the descendants of Tor and Tinidril will not find for a hundred centuries. Perhaps alone?’…he hesitated and looked at Ransom who shook his head.

  ‘And that is where Logres comes in, is it?’ said Camilla. ‘Because he will be with Arthur?’

  Dimble was silent for a few minutes arranging and rearranging the fruit-knife and fruit-fork on his plate.

  ‘It all began,’ he said, ‘when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it–it will do as well as another. And then…gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.’

  ‘What haunting?’ asked Camilla.

  ‘How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney–and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.’

  He paused and took a sip of wine before proceeding.

  ‘It was long afterwards,’ he said, ‘after the Director had returned from the Third Heaven, that we were told a little more. This haunting turned out to be not only from the other side of the invisible wall. Ransom was summoned to the bedside of an old man then dying in Cumberland. His name would mean nothing to you if I told it. That man was the Pendragon, the successor of Arthur and Uther and Cassibelaun. Then we learned the truth. There has been a secret Logres in the very heart of Britain all these years; an unbroken succession of Pendragons. That old man was the seventy-eighth from Arthur: our Director received from him the office and the blessings; tomorrow we shall know, or tonight, who is to be the eightieth. Some of the Pendragons are well known to history, though not under that name. Others you have never heard of. But in every age they and the little Logres which gathered round them have been the fingers which gave the tiny shove or the almost imperceptible pull, to prod England out of the drunken sleep or to draw her back from the final outrage into which Britain tempted her.’

  ‘This new history of yours,’ said MacPhee, ‘is a wee bit lacking in documents.’

  ‘It has plenty,’ said Dimble with a smile. ‘But you do not know the language they’re written in. When the history of these last few months comes to be written in your language, and printed, and taught in schools, there will be no mention in it of you and me, nor of Merlin and the Pendragon and the Planets. And yet in these months Britain rebelled most dangerously against Logres and was defeated only just in time.’

  ‘Aye,’ said MacPhee, ‘and it could be right good history without mentioning you and me or most of those present. I’d be greatly obliged if any one would tell me what we have done–always apart from feeding the pigs and raising some very decent vegetables.’

  ‘You have done what was required of you,’ said the Director. ‘You have obeyed and waited. It will often happen like that. As one of the modern authors has told us, the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else. But don’t jump to conclusions. You may have plenty of work to do before a month is passed. Britain has lost a battle, but she will rise again.’

  ‘So that, meanwhile, is England,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘Just this swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain?’

  ‘Yes,’ said her husband. ‘Don’t you feel it? The very quality of England. If we’ve got an ass’s head, it is by walking in a fairy wood. We’ve heard something better than we can do, but can’t quite forget it…can’t you see it in everything English –a kind of awkward grace, a humble, humorous incompleteness? How right Sam Weller was when he called Mr Pickwick an angel in gaiters! Everything here is either better or worse than–’

  ‘Dimble!’ said Ransom. Dimble, whose tone had become a little impassioned, stopped and looked towards him. He hesitated and (as Jane thought) almost blushed before he began again.

  ‘You’re right, Sir,’ he said with a smile. ‘I was forgetting what you have warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England–no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.’

  ‘But this,’ said MacPhee, ‘seems a very round-about way of saying that there’s good and bad men everywhere.’

  ‘It’s not a way of saying that at all,’ answered Dimble. ‘You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised–some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China–why, then it will be spring. But meantime, our concern is with Logres. We’ve got Britain down but who knows how long we can hold her down? Edgestow will not recover from what is happening to her tonight. But there will be other Edgestows.’

  ‘I wanted to ask about Edgestow,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘Aren’t Merlin and the eldila a trifle…well, wholesale. Did all Edgestow deserve to be wiped out?’

  ‘Who are you lamenting?’ said MacPhee. ‘The jobbing town council that’d have sold their own wives and daughters to bring the NICE to Edgestow?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know much about them,’ said she. ‘But in the University. Even Bracton itself. We all knew it was a horrible College, of course. But did they really mean any great harm with all their fussy little intrigues? Wasn’t it more silly than anything else?’

  ‘Och aye,’ said MacPhee. ‘They were only playing themselves. Kittens letting on to be tigers. But there was a real tiger about and their play ended by letting her in. They’ve no call to complain if when the h
unter’s after her he lets them have a bit of a lead in their guts too. It’ll learn them not to keep bad company.’

  ‘Well, then, the Fellows of other colleges. What about Northumberland and Duke’s?’

  ‘I know,’ said Denniston. ‘One’s sorry for a man like Churchwood. I knew him well; he was an old dear. All his lectures were devoted to proving the impossibility of ethics, though in private life he’d walked ten miles rather than leave a penny debt unpaid. But all the same…was there a single doctrine practised at Belbury which hadn’t been preached by some lecturer at Edgestow? Oh, of course, they never thought any one would act on their theories! No one was more astonished than they when what they’d been talking of for years suddenly took on reality. But it was their own child coming back to them: grown up and unrecognisable, but their own.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s all true, my dear,’ said Dimble. ‘Trahison des clercs. None of us is quite innocent.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Cecil,’ said Mrs Dimble.

  ‘You are all forgetting,’ said Grace, ‘that nearly everyone except the very good (who were ripe for fair dismissal) and the very bad, had already left Edgestow. But I agree with Arthur. Those who have forgotten Logres sink into Britain. Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes.’

  At that moment she was interrupted. A clawing and whining noise at the door had become audible.

  ‘Open the door, Arthur,’ said Ransom. A moment later the whole party rose to its feet with cries of welcome, for the new arrival was Mr Bultitude.

  ‘Oh, I never did,’ said Ivy. ‘The pore thing! And all over snow too. I’ll just take him down to the kitchen and get him something to eat. Wherever have you been, you bad thing? Eh? Just look at the state you’re in.’

  For the third time in ten minutes the train gave a violent lurch and came to a standstill. This time the shock put all the lights out.

  ‘This is really getting a bit too bad,’ said a voice in the darkness. The four other passengers in the first-class compartment recognised it as belonging to the well-bred, bulky man in the brown suit; the well-informed man who at earlier stages of the journey had told everyone else where they ought to change and why one now reached Sterk without going through Stratford and who it was that really controlled the line.

  ‘It’s serious for me,’ said the same voice. ‘I ought to be in Edgestow by now.’ He got up, opened the window, and stared out into the darkness. Presently, one of the other passengers complained of the cold. He shut the window and sat down.

  ‘We’ve already been here for ten minutes,’ he said presently.

  ‘Excuse me. Twelve,’ said another passenger.

  Still the train did not move. The noise of two men quarrelling in a neighbouring compartment became audible.

  Then silence followed again.

  Suddenly a shock flung them all together in the darkness. It was as if the train, going at full speed, had been unskilfully pulled up.

  ‘What the devil’s that?’ said one.

  ‘Open the doors.’

  ‘Has there been a collision?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the well-informed man in a loud, calm voice. ‘Putting on another engine. And doing it very badly. It’s all these new engine drivers they’ve got in lately.’

  ‘Hullo!’ said someone. ‘We’re moving.’

  Slow and grunting, the train began to go.

  ‘It takes its time getting up speed,’ said someone.

  ‘Oh, you’ll find it’ll start making up for lost time in a minute,’ said the well-informed man.

  ‘I wish they’d put the lights on again,’ said a woman’s voice.

  ‘We’re not getting up speed,’ said another.

  ‘We’re losing it. Damn it! Are we stopping again?’