That Hideous Strength Read online

  Mark.

  This was a lie. The Progressive Element always found Hingest’s presence an embarrassment. As a scientist–and the only really eminent scientist they had–he was their rightful property; but he was that hateful anomaly, the wrong sort of scientist. Glossop, who was a classic, was his chief friend in College. He had the air (the ‘affectation’ Curry called it) of not attaching much importance to his own revolutionary discoveries in chemistry and of valuing himself much more on being a Hingest: the family was of almost mythical antiquity, ‘never contaminated,’ as its nineteenth-century historian had said, ‘by traitor, placeman or baronetcy’. He had given particular offence on the occasion of de Broglie’s visit to Edgestow. The Frenchman had spent his spare time exclusively in Bill the Blizzard’s society, but when an enthusiastic junior Fellow had thrown out a feeler about the rich feast of science which the two savants must have shared, Bill the Blizzard had appeared to search his memory for a moment and then replied that he didn’t think they had got onto that subject. ‘Gassing Almanac de Gotha nonsense, I suppose,’ was Curry’s comment, though not in Hingest’s presence.

  ‘Eh? What’s that? College Meeting?’ said the Blizzard. ‘What were they talking about?’

  ‘About the sale of Bragdon Wood.’

  ‘All nonsense,’ muttered the Blizzard.

  ‘I hope you would have agreed with the decision we came to.’

  ‘It made no difference what decision they came to.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Mark with some surprise.

  ‘It was all nonsense. The NICE would have had the Wood in any case. They had powers to compel a sale.’

  ‘What an extraordinary thing! I was given to understand they were going to Cambridge if we didn’t sell.’

  Hingest sniffed loudly.

  ‘Not a word of truth in it. As to its being an extraordinary thing, that depends on what you mean. There’s nothing extraordinary in the Fellows of Bracton talking all afternoon about an unreal issue. And there’s nothing extraordinary in the fact that the NICE should wish, if possible, to hand over to Bracton the odium of turning the heart of England into a cross between an abortive American hotel and a glorified gas works. The only real puzzle is why the NICE should want that bit of land.’

  ‘I suppose we shall find out as things go on.’

  ‘You may. I shan’t.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Mark interrogatively.

  ‘I’ve had enough of it,’ said Hingest, lowering his voice, ‘I’m leaving tonight. I don’t know what you were doing at Bracton, but if it was any good I’d advise you to go back and stick to it.’

  ‘Really!’ said Mark. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter for an old fellow like me,’ said Hingest, ‘but they could play the devil with you. Of course it all depends on what a man likes.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘I haven’t fully made up my mind.’ He had been taught to regard Hingest as a warped reactionary. ‘I don’t even know yet what my job would be if I stayed.’

  ‘What’s your subject?’

  ‘Sociology.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Hingest. ‘In that case I can soon point you out the man you’d be under. A fellow called Steele. Over there by the window, do you see?’

  ‘Perhaps you could introduce me.’

  ‘You’re determined to stay then?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I ought at least to see him.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hingest. ‘No business of mine.’ Then he added in a louder voice, ‘Steele.’

  Steele turned round. He was a tall, unsmiling man with that kind of face which, though long and horse-like, has nevertheless rather thick and pouting lips.

  ‘This is Studdock,’ said Hingest, ‘the new man for your department.’ Then he turned away.

  ‘Oh,’ said Steele. Then after a pause, ‘Did he say my department?’

  ‘That’s what he said,’ replied Mark with an attempt at a smile, ‘but perhaps he’s got it wrong. I’m supposed to be a sociologist–if that throws any light on it.’

  ‘I’m HD for Sociology all right,’ said Steele, ‘but this is the first I’ve heard about you. Who told you you were to be there?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘the whole thing is rather vague. I’ve just had a talk with the Deputy Director but we didn’t actually go into any details.’

  ‘How did you manage to see him?’

  ‘Lord Feverstone introduced me.’

  Steele whistled. ‘I say, Cosser,’ he called out to a freckle-faced man who was passing by, ‘listen to this. Feverstone has just unloaded this chap on our department. Taken him straight to the DD without saying a word to me about it. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Cosser, hardly glancing at Mark but looking very hard at Steele.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mark, a little more loudly and a little more stiffly than he had yet spoken. ‘Don’t be alarmed. I seem to have been put in rather a false position. There must have been some misunderstanding. As a matter of fact I am, at the moment, merely having a look round. I’m not at all certain that I intend to stay in any case.’

  Neither of the other two took any notice of this last suggestion.

  ‘That’s Feverstone all over,’ said Cosser to Steele.

  Steele turned to Mark. ‘I shouldn’t advise you to take much notice of what Lord Feverstone says here,’ he remarked. ‘This isn’t his business at all.’

  ‘All I object to,’ said Mark, wishing that he could prevent his face from turning red, ‘is being put in a false position. I only came over as an experiment. It is a matter of indifference to me whether I take a job in the NICE or not.’

  ‘You see,’ said Steele to Cosser, ‘there isn’t really any room for a man in our show–specially for someone who doesn’t know the work. Unless they put him on the UL.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cosser.

  ‘Mr Studdock, I think,’ said a new voice at Mark’s elbow, a treble voice which seemed disproportionate to the huge hill of a man whom he saw when he turned his head. He recognised the speaker at once. His dark, smooth face and black hair were unmistakable, and so was the foreign accent. This was Professor Filostrato, the great physiologist, whom Mark had sat next to at a dinner about two years before. He was fat to that degree which is comic on the stage, but the effect was not funny in real life. Mark was charmed that such a man should have remembered him.

  ‘I am very glad you have come to join us,’ said Filostrato taking hold of Mark’s arm and gently piloting him away from Steele and Cosser.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mark, ‘I’m not sure that I have. I was brought over by Feverstone but he has disappeared, and Steele–I’d have been in his Department I suppose–doesn’t seem to know anything about me.’

  ‘Bah! Steele!’ said the Professor. ‘That is all a bagatelle. He get too big for his boots. He will be put in his place one of these days. It may be you who will put him. I have read all your work, si si. Do not consider him.’

  ‘I have a strong objection to being put in a false position–’ began Mark.

  ‘Listen, my friend,’ interrupted Filostrato, ‘you must put all such ideas out of your head. The first thing to realise is that the NICE is serious. It is nothing less than the existence of the human race that depends on our work: our real work, you comprehend? You will find frictions and impertinences among this canaglia, this rabble. They are no more to be regarded than your dislike of a brother officer when the battle is at its crisis.’

  ‘As long as I’m given something to do that is worth doing,’ said Mark, ‘I shouldn’t allow anything of that sort to interfere with it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that is right. The work is more important than you can yet understand. You will see. These Steeles and Feverstones –they are of no consequence. As long as you have the good will of the Deputy Director, you snap your fingers at them. You need listen to no one but him, you comprehend? Ah–and there is one other. Do n
ot have the Fairy for your enemy. For the rest–you laugh at them.’

  ‘The Fairy?’

  ‘Yes. Her they call the Fairy. Oh my God, a terrible Inglesaccia! She is the head of our police, the Institutional Police. Ecco, she come. I will present you. Miss Hardcastle, permit that I present to you Mr Studdock.’

  Mark found himself writhing from the stoker’s or carter’s hand-grip of a big woman in a black, short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was rather thickly built than fat and her iron-grey hair was cropped short. Her face was square, stern and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real shape of her mouth was her only concession to fashion and she rolled or chewed a long black cheroot, unlit, between her teeth. As she talked she had a habit of removing this, staring intently at the mixture of lipstick and saliva on its mangled end, and then replacing it more firmly than before. She sat down immediately in a chair close to where Mark was standing, flung her right leg over one of the arms, and fixed him with a gaze of cold intimacy.

  Click–clack, distinct in the silence, where Jane stood waiting, came the tread of the person on the other side of the wall. Then the door opened and Jane found herself facing a tall woman of about her own age. This person looked at her with keen, non-committal eyes.

  ‘Does a Miss Ironwood live here?’ said Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ said the other girl, neither opening the door any further nor standing aside.

  ‘I want to see her, please,’ said Jane.

  ‘Have you an appointment?’ said the tall woman.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ said Jane. ‘I was directed here by Dr Dimble who knows Miss Ironwood. He said I shouldn’t need an appointment.’

  ‘Oh, if you’re from Dr Dimble that is another matter,’ said the woman. ‘Come in. Now wait a moment while I attend to this lock. That’s better. Now we’re all right. There’s not room for two on this path so you must excuse me if I go first.’

  The woman led her along a brick path beside a wall on which fruit trees were growing, and then to the left along a mossy path with gooseberry bushes on each side. Then came a little lawn with a see-saw in the middle of it, and beyond that a greenhouse. Here they found themselves in the sort of hamlet that sometimes occurs in the purlieus of a large garden–walking in fact down a little street which had a barn and a stable on one side and, on the other, a second greenhouse, and a potting shed and a pigstye–inhabited, as the grunts and the not wholly agreeable smell informed her. After that were narrow paths across a vegetable garden that seemed to be on a fairly steep hillside, and then, rose bushes, all stiff and prickly in their winter garb. At one place, they were going along a path made of single planks. This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like–like–yes, now she had it: it was like the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? No, not in the least like really. Or like Klingsor’s garden? Or the garden in Alice? Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way? A sentence rose to her memory. ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.’ Where on earth had she read that? And, incidentally, what frightful nonsense she had been thinking for the last minute or so! She shook off all these ideas about gardens and determined to pull herself together. A curious feeling that she was now on hostile, or at least alien, ground warned her to keep all her wits about her. At that moment, they suddenly emerged from between plantations of rhododendron and laurel, and found themselves at a small side door, flanked by a water butt, in the long wall of a large house. Just as they did so a window clapped shut upstairs.

  A minute or two later Jane was sitting waiting in a large sparely furnished room with a shut stove to warm it. Most of the floor was bare, and the walls, above the waist-high wainscotting, were of greyish white plaster, so that the whole effect was faintly austere and conventual. The tall woman’s tread died away in the passages and the room became very quiet when it had done so. Occasionally the cawing of rooks could be heard. ‘I’ve let myself in for it now,’ thought Jane. ‘I shall have to tell this woman that dream and she’ll ask all sorts of questions.’ She considered herself, in general, a modern person who could talk without embarrassment of anything, but it began to look quite different as she sat in that room. All sorts of secret reservations in her programme of frankness–things which, she now realised, she had set apart as never to be told –came creeping back into consciousness. It was surprising that very few of them were connected with sex. ‘In dentists’,’ said Jane, ‘they at least leave illustrated papers in the waiting room.’ She got up and opened the one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room. Instantly her eyes lit on the following words: ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the–’

  At that moment the door was suddenly opened. Jane turned crimson as she shut the book and looked up. The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that–so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.

  ‘Is–is Miss Ironwood in?’ said Jane.

  ‘Are you Mrs Studdock?’ said the girl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane.

  ‘I will bring you to her at once,’ said the other. ‘We have been expecting you. My name is Camilla–Camilla Denniston.’

  Jane followed her. From the narrowness and plainness of the passages, Jane judged that they were still in the back parts of the house, and that, if so, it must be a very large house indeed. They went a long way before Camilla knocked at a door and stood aside for Jane to enter, after saying in a low, clear voice (‘like a servant’, Jane thought), ‘She has come.’ And Jane went in; and there was Miss Ironwood dressed all in black and sitting with her hands folded on her knees, just as Jane had seen her when dreaming–if she were dreaming–last night in the flat.

  ‘Sit down, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.

  The hands which were folded on her knees were very big and bony though they did not suggest coarseness, and even when seated Miss Ironwood was extremely tall. Everything about her was big–the nose, the unsmiling lips, and the grey eyes. She was perhaps nearer sixty than fifty. There was an atmosphere in the room which Jane found uncongenial.

  ‘What is your name, young lady?’ said Miss Ironwood, taking up a pencil and a notebook.

  ‘Jane Studdock.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does your husband know you have come to us?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And your age, if you please?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘And now,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘what have you to tell me?’

  Jane took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been having bad dreams and–and feeling depressed lately,’ she said.

  ‘What were the dreams?’ asked Miss Ironwood.

  Jane’s narrative–she did not do it very well–took some time. While she was speaking she kept he
r eyes fixed on Miss Ironwood’s large hands and her black skirt and the pencil and the notebook. And that was why she suddenly stopped. For as she proceeded she saw Miss Ironwood’s hand cease to write and the fingers wrap themselves round the pencil: immensely strong fingers they seemed. And every moment they tightened, till the knuckles grew white and the veins stood out on the backs of the hands and at last, as if under the influence of some stifled emotion, they broke the pencil in two. It was then that Jane stopped in astonishment and looked up at Miss Ironwood’s face. The wide grey eyes were still looking at her with no change of expression.

  ‘Pray continue, young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood.

  Jane resumed her story. When she had finished Miss Ironwood put a number of questions. After that she became silent for so long that Jane said,

  ‘Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with you,’ said Miss Ironwood.

  ‘You mean it will go away?’

  ‘I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.’

  Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face.

  ‘Then–can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams–horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.’

  ‘I can quite understand that.’

  ‘Is it something that can’t be cured?’

  ‘The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.’

  ‘But there must be something wrong. It’s surely not natural to have dreams like that.’

  There was a pause. ‘I think,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘I had better tell you the whole truth.’

  ‘Yes, do,’ said Jane in a strained voice. The other’s words had frightened her.

  ‘And I will begin by saying this,’ continued Miss Ironwood. ‘You are a more important person than you imagine.’

  Jane said nothing, but thought inwardly, ‘She is humouring me. She thinks I am mad.’

  ‘What was your maiden name?’ asked Miss Ironwood.

  ‘Tudor,’ said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.