That Hideous Strength: (Space Trilogy Book Three) (The Space Trilogy 3) Page 3

  It was not till six o’clock that all the converging lines of thought and feeling aroused by the earlier business came together upon the question of selling Bragdon Wood. It was not called, “the sale of Bragdon Wood.” The Bursar called it the “sale of the area colored pink on the plan which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now pass round the table.” He pointed out quite frankly that this involved the loss of part of the Wood. In fact, the proposed NICE site still left to the College a strip about sixteen feet broad along the far half of the south side but there was no deception for the Fellows had the plan to look at with their own eyes. It was a small scale plan and not perhaps perfectly accurate—only meant to give one a general idea. In answer to questions he admitted that unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—the Well itself was in the area which the NICE wanted. The rights of the College to access would, of course, be guaranteed; and the Well and its pavement would be preserved by the Institute in a manner to satisfy all the archeologists in the world. He refrained from offering any advice and merely mentioned the quite astonishing figure which the NICE was offering. After that, the meeting became lively. The advantages of the sale discovered themselves one by one like ripe fruit dropping into the hand. It solved the problem of the wall; it solved the problem of protecting ancient monuments; it solved the financial problem; it looked like solving the problem of the junior Fellows’ stipends. It appeared further that the NICE regarded this as the only possible site in Edgestow; if by any chance Bracton would not sell, the whole scheme miscarried and the Institute would undoubtedly go to Cambridge. It was even drawn out of the Bursar by much questioning that he knew of a Cambridge college very anxious to sell.

  The few real “Die-hards” present, to whom Bragdon Wood was almost a basic assumption of life, could hardly bring themselves to realize what was happening. When they found their voices, they struck a discordant note amid the general buzz of cheerful comment. They were maneuvered into the position of appearing as the party who passionately desired to see Bragdon surrounded with barbed wire. When at last old Jewel, blind and shaky and almost weeping, rose to his feet, his voice was hardly audible. Men turned round to gaze at, and some to admire, the clear-cut, half-childish face and the white hair which had become more conspicuous as the long room grew darker. But only those close to him could hear what he said. At this moment Lord Feverstone sprang to his feet, folded his arms, and looking straight at the old man said in a very loud, clear voice:

  “If Canon Jewel wishes us not to hear his views, I suggest that his end could be better attained by silence.”

  Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. For a moment as he stood with his head thrust forward, people thought he was going to reply. Then quite suddenly he spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness, shrunk back, and began laboriously to resume his chair.

  The motion was carried.

  After leaving the flat that morning Jane also had gone down to Edgestow and bought a hat. She had before now expressed some contempt for the kind of woman who buys hats, as a man buys drinks, for a stimulant and a consolation. It did not occur to her that she was doing so herself on this occasion. She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colors that were really good on serious esthetic grounds—clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety—and because of this preference, she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs. Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said, “Hullo dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.”

  Cecil Dimble, a Fellow of Northumberland, had been Jane’s tutor for her last year as a student and Mrs. Dimble (one tended to call her Mother Dimble) had been a kind of unofficial aunt to all the girls of her year. A liking for the female pupils of one’s husband is not, perhaps, so common as might be wished among dons’ wives; but Mrs. Dimble appeared to like all Dr. Dimble’s pupils of both sexes and the Dimbles’ house, away on the far side of the river, was a kind of noisy salon all the term. She had been particularly fond of Jane with that kind of affection which a humorous, easy natured and childless woman sometimes feels for a girl whom she thinks pretty and rather absurd. For the last year or so Jane had been somewhat losing sight of the Dimbles and felt rather guilty about it. She accepted the invitation to lunch.

  They drove over the bridge to the north of Bracton and then south along the bank of the Wynd, past the cottages, then left and eastward at the Norman church and down the straight road with the poplars on one side and the wall of Bragdon Wood on the other, and so finally to the Dimbles’ front door.

  “How lovely it’s looking,” said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.

  “You’d better take a good look at it then,” said Dr. Dimble.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jane.

  “Haven’t you told her?” said Dr. Dimble to his wife.

  “I haven’t screwed myself up to it yet,” said Mrs. Dimble. “Besides, poor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jane.

  “Your own College is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Dimble!” exclaimed Jane. “And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.”

  “There you are!” said Mrs. Dimble. “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr. Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality—”

  “Mark never talks to me about College business.”

  “Good husbands never do,” said Dr. Dimble. “At least, only about the business of other people’s colleges. That’s why Margaret knows all about Bracton and nothing about Northumberland. Is no one coming in to have lunch?”

  Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.

  “You’ll have to wait for lunch till I’ve seen Jane’s new hat,” said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Mrs. Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter. When the hat was being put away again Mrs. Dimble suddenly said,

  “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  “Wrong?” said Jane. “Why? What should there be?”

  “You’re not looking yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” said Jane aloud. Mentally she added, “She’s dying to know whether I’m going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is.”

  “Do you hate being kissed?” said Mrs. Dimble unexpectedly.

  “Do I hate being kissed?” thought Jane to herself. “That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women—” She had intended to reply, “Of course not,” but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs. Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. When she thought of her childhood, Jane usually remembered those occasions on which the voluminous embrace of Nurse or Mother had been unwelcome and resisted as an insult to one’s maturity; now, for the moment, she was back in those forgotten, yet infrequent, times when fear or misery induced a willing surrender and surrender brought comfort. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life; yet, before they went downstairs, she had told Mrs. Dimble that she was not going to have a baby, but was a bit depressed from being very much alone, and from a nightmare.

  During lunch Dr. Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. “It’s really wonderful,” he said, “how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the center: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background—on the other side of Arthur, so to speak—there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan ‘set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses.’ Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?”

  “How do you mean, Dr. Dimble?” said Jane.

  “Well, wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin—something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But further upcountry, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British underkings, talking something like Welsh, and practicing a certain amount of the druidical religion.”

  “And what would Arthur himself have been?” said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words “rather like Spanish.”

  “That’s just the point,” said Dr. D
imble. “One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There’d be jealousy from his own British family, and the Romanized section—the Launcelots and Lionels—would look down on the Britons. That’d be why Kay is always represented as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that undertow, that tug back to druidism.”

  “And where would Merlin be?”

  “Yes. . . . He’s the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil; yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail. He’s ‘the devil’s son’; but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad after all. You remember, ‘There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.’ ”

  “It is rather puzzling. I hadn’t thought of it before.”

  “I often wonder,” said Dr. Dimble, “whether Merlin doesn’t represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about—something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers.”

  “What a horrid idea,” said Mrs. Dimble, who had noticed that Jane seemed to be preoccupied. “Anyway, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all and he’s safely dead and buried under Bragdon Wood as every one of us knows.”

  “Buried but not dead, according to the story,” corrected Dr. Dimble.

  “Ugh!” said Jane involuntarily, but Dr. Dimble was musing aloud.

  “I wonder what they will find if they start digging up that place for the foundations of their NICE,” he said.

  “First mud and then water,” said Mrs. Dimble. “That’s why they can’t really build it there.”

  “So you’d think,” said her husband. “And if so, why should they want to come here at all? A little cockney like Jules is not likely to be influenced by any poetic fancy about Merlin’s mantle having fallen on him!”

  “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 behavior by telling the story of her dream. “I suppose I’ve given myself away dreadfully,” she said. “You can both start psychoanalyzing 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 analyzed?” said Jane.

  “Analyzed?” 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 realized 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

  Dinner with the Sub-Warden

  “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.