That Hideous Strength Read online

  ‘The Warwickshire branch of the family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you ever read a little book–it is only forty pages long–written by an ancestor of yours about the battle of Worcester?’

  ‘No. Father had a copy–the only copy, I think he said. But I never read it. It was lost when the house was broken up after his death.’

  ‘Your father was mistaken in thinking it the only copy. There are at least two others: one is in America, and the other is in this house.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Your ancestor gave a full and, on the whole, correct account of the battle, which he says he completed on the same day on which it was fought. But he was not at it. He was in York at the time.’

  Jane, who had not really been following this, looked at Miss Ironwood.

  ‘If he was speaking the truth,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘and we believe that he was, he dreamed it. Do you understand?’

  ‘Dreamed about the battle?’

  ‘Yes. But dreamed it right. He saw the real battle in his dream.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘Vision–the power of dreaming realities–is sometimes hereditary,’ said Miss Ironwood.

  Something seemed to be interfering with Jane’s breathing. She felt a sense of injury–this was just the sort of thing she hated: something out of the past, something irrational and utterly uncalled for, coming up from its den and interfering with her.

  ‘Can it be proved?’ she asked. ‘I mean, we have only his word for it.’

  ‘We have your dreams,’ said Miss Ironwood. Her voice, always grave, had become stern. A fantastic thought crossed Jane’s mind. Could this old woman have some idea that one ought not to call even one’s remote ancestors liars?

  ‘My dreams?’ she said a little sharply.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Ironwood.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My opinion is that you have seen real things in your dreams. You have seen Alcasan as he really sat in the condemned cell, and you have seen a visitor whom he really had.’

  ‘But–but–oh, this is ridiculous,’ said Jane. ‘That part was a mere coincidence. The rest was just a nightmare. It was all impossible. He screwed off his head, I tell you. And they–dug up the horrible old man. They made him come to life.’

  ‘There are some confusions there, no doubt. But in my opinion there are realities behind even those episodes.’

  ‘I am afraid I don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ said Jane coldly.

  ‘Your upbringing makes it natural that you should not,’ replied Miss Ironwood. ‘Unless, of course, you have discovered for yourself that you have a tendency to dream real things.’

  Jane thought of the book on the table which she had apparently remembered before she saw it, and then there was Miss Ironwood’s own appearance–that too she had seen before she saw it. But it must be nonsense.

  ‘Can you then do nothing for me?’

  ‘I can tell you the truth,’ said Miss Ironwood. ‘I have tried to do so.’

  ‘I mean, can you not stop it–cure it?’

  ‘Vision is not a disease.’

  ‘But I don’t want it,’ said Jane passionately. ‘I must stop it. I hate this sort of thing.’ Miss Ironwood said nothing.

  ‘Don’t you even know anyone who could stop it?’ said Jane. ‘Can’t you recommend anyone?’

  ‘If you go to an ordinary psychotherapist,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘he will proceed on the assumption that the dreams merely reflect your own sub-conscious. He would try to treat you. I do not know what would be the results of treatment based on that assumption. I am afraid they might be very serious. And–it would certainly not remove the dreams.’

  ‘But what is this all about?’ said Jane. ‘I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?’

  ‘The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.’

  There was a short silence. Jane made a vague movement and said, rather sulkily, ‘Well, if you can do nothing for me, perhaps I’d better be going–’ Then suddenly she added, ‘But how can you know all this? I mean–what realities are you talking about?’

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘that you yourself have probably more reason to suspect the truth of your dreams than you have yet told me. If not, you soon will have. In the meantime, I will answer your question. We know your dreams to be partly true because they fit in with information we already possess. It was because he saw their importance that Dr Dimble sent you to us.’

  ‘Do you mean he sent me here not to be cured but to give information?’ said Jane. The idea fitted in with things she had observed in his manner when she first told him.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I wish I had known that a little earlier,’ said Jane coldly, and now definitely getting up to go. ‘I’m afraid it has been a misunderstanding. I had imagined Dr Dimble was trying to help me.’

  ‘He was. But he was also trying to do something more important at the same time.’

  ‘I suppose I should be grateful for being considered at all,’ said Jane drily, ‘and how, exactly, was I to be helped by– by all this sort of thing?’ The attempt at icy irony collapsed as she said these last words and red, undisguised anger rushed back into her face. In some ways she was very young.

  ‘Young lady,’ said Miss Ironwood, ‘You do not at all realise the seriousness of this matter. The things you have seen concern something compared with which the happiness, or even the life, of you and me, is of no importance. I must beg you to face the situation. You cannot get rid of your gift. You can try to suppress it, but you will fail, and you will be very badly frightened. On the other hand, you can put it at our disposal. If you do so, you will be much less frightened in the long run and you will be helping to save the human race from a very great disaster. Or thirdly, you may tell someone else about it. If you do that, I warn you that you will almost certainly fall into the hands of other people who are at least as anxious as we to make use of your faculty and who will care no more about your life and happiness than about those of a fly. The people you have seen in your dreams are real people. It is not at all unlikely that they know you have, involuntarily, been spying on them. And, if so, they will not rest till they have got hold of you. I would advise you, even for your own sake, to join our side.’

  ‘You keep on talking of We and Us. Are you some kind of company?’

  ‘Yes. You may call it a company.’

  Jane had been standing for the last few minutes; and she had almost been believing what she heard. Then suddenly, all her repugnance came over her again–all her wounded vanity, her resentment of the meaningless complication in which she seemed to be caught, and her general dislike of the mysterious and the unfamiliar. At that moment, nothing seemed to matter but to get out of that room and away from the grave, patient voice of Miss Ironwood. ‘She’s made me worse already,’ thought Jane, still regarding herself as a patient. Aloud, she said,

  ‘I must go home now. I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’

  Mark discovered in the end that he was expected to stay, at least for the night, and when he went up to dress for dinner he was feeling more cheerful. This was partly due to a whisky and soda taken with ‘Fairy’ Hardcastle immediately before and partly to the fact that by a glance at the mirror he saw that he could now remove the objectionable piece of cotton wool from his lip. The bedroom with its bright fire and its private bathroom attached had also something to do with it. Thank goodness, he had allowed Jane to talk him into buying that new dress suit! It looked very well, laid out on the bed; and he saw now that the old one really would not have done. But what had reassured him most of all was his conversation with the Fairy.

  It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had indeed excited in him all the distaste which a young man feels at the proximity of something ra
nkly, even insolently sexed, and at the same time wholly unattractive. And something in her cold eye had told him that she was well aware of this reaction and found it amusing. She had told him a good many smoking-room stories. Often before now Mark had shuddered at the clumsy efforts of the emancipated female to indulge in this kind of humour, but his shudders had always been consoled by a sense of superiority. This time he had the feeling that he was the butt; this woman was exasperating male prudery for her diversion. Later on, she drifted into police reminiscences. In spite of some initial scepticism, Mark was gradually horrified by her assumption that about thirty per cent of our murder trials ended by the hanging of an innocent man. There were details, too, about the execution shed which had not occurred to him before.

  All this was disagreeable. But it was made up for by the deliciously esoteric character of the conversation. Several times that day he had been made to feel himself an outsider; that feeling completely disappeared while Miss Hardcastle was talking to him. He had the sense of getting in. Miss Hardcastle had apparently lived an exciting life. She had been, at different times, a suffragette, a pacifist, and a British Fascist. She had been man-handled by the police and imprisoned. On the other hand, she had met Prime Ministers, Dictators and famous film stars; all her history was secret history. She knew from both ends what a police force could do and what it could not, and there were in her opinion very few things it could not do. ‘Specially now,’ she said. ‘Here in the Institute, we’re backing the crusade against Red Tape.’

  Mark gathered that, for the Fairy, the police side of the Institute was the really important side. It existed to relieve the ordinary executive of what might be called all sanitary cases–a category which ranged from vaccination to charges of unnatural vice–from which, as she pointed out, it was only a step to bringing in all cases of blackmail. As regards crime in general, they had already popularised in the press the idea that the Institute should be allowed to experiment pretty largely in the hope of discovering how far humane, remedial treatment could be substituted for the old notion of ‘retributive’ or ‘vindictive’ punishment. That was where a lot of legal Red Tape stood in their way. ‘But there are only two papers we don’t control,’ said the Fairy. ‘And we’ll smash them. You’ve got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says “Sadism” automatically when he hears the word Punishment.’ And then one would have carte blanche. Mark did not immediately follow this. But the Fairy pointed out that what had hampered every English police force up to date was precisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention? Soon anyone who had ever been in the hands of the police at all would come under the control of the NICE; in the end, every citizen. ‘And that’s where you and I come in, Sonny,’ added the Fairy, tapping Mark’s chest with her forefinger. ‘There’s no distinction in the long run between police work and Sociology. You and I’ve got to work hand in hand.’

  This had brought Mark back to his doubts as to whether he were really being given a job and, if so, what it was. The Fairy had warned him that Steele was a dangerous man. ‘There are two people you want to be very cautious about,’ she said. ‘One is Frost and the other is old Wither.’ But she had laughed at his fears in general. ‘You’re in all right, Sonny,’ she said. ‘Only don’t be too particular about what exactly you’ve got to do. You’ll find out as it comes along. Wither doesn’t like people who try to pin him down. There’s no good saying you’ve come here to do this and you won’t do that. The game’s too fast just at present for that sort of thing. You’ve got to make yourself useful. And don’t believe everything you’re told.’

  At dinner Mark found himself seated next to Hingest.

  ‘Well,’ said Hingest, ‘have they finally roped you into it, eh?’

  ‘I rather believe they have,’ said Mark.

  ‘Because,’ said Hingest, ‘if you thought the better of it, I’m motoring back tonight and I could give you a lift.’

  ‘You haven’t yet told me why you are leaving us yourself,’ said Mark.

  ‘Oh well, it all depends what a man likes. If you enjoy the society of that Italian eunuch and the mad parson and that Hardcastle girl–her grandmother would have boxed her ears if she were alive–of course, there’s nothing more to be said.’

  ‘I suppose it’s hardly to be judged on purely social grounds–I mean, it’s something more than a club.’

  ‘Eh? Judged? Never judged anything in my life, to the best of my knowledge, except at a flower show. It’s all a question of taste. I came here because I thought it had something to do with science. Now that I find it’s something more like a political conspiracy, I shall go home. I’m too old for that kind of thing, and if I wanted to join a conspiracy, this one wouldn’t be my choice.’

  ‘You mean, I suppose, that the element of social planning doesn’t appeal to you? I can quite understand that it doesn’t fit in with your work as it does with sciences like Sociology, but–’

  ‘There are no sciences like Sociology. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn’t wear corsets and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I’d let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again.’

  ‘I think I do understand the sentiment that still attaches to the small man, but when you come to study the reality as I have to do–’

  ‘I should want to pull it to bits and put something else in its place. Of course. That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.’

  ‘Bill!’ said Fairy Hardcastle suddenly, from the far side of the table, in a voice so loud that even he could not ignore it. Hingest fixed his eyes upon her and his face grew a dark red.

  ‘Is it true,’ bawled the Fairy, ‘that you’re going off by car immediately after dinner?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Hardcastle, it is.’

  ‘I was wondering if you could give me a lift.’

  ‘I should be happy to do so,’ said Hingest in a voice not intended to deceive, ‘if we are going in the same direction.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I am going to Edgestow.’

  ‘Will you be passing Brenstock?’

  ‘No. I leave the by-pass at the crossroads just beyond Lord Holywood’s front gate and go down what they used to call Potter’s Lane.’

  ‘Oh, damn! No good to me. I may as well wait till the morning.’

  After this Mark found himself engaged by his left-hand neighbour and did not see Bill the Blizzard again until he met him in the hall after dinner. He was in his overcoat and just ready to go to his car.

  He began talking as he opened the door and thus Mark was drawn into accompanying him across the gravel sweep to where his car was parked.

  ‘Take my advice, Studdock,’ he said. ‘Or at least think it over. I don’t believe in Sociology myself, but you’ve got quite a decent career before you if you stay at Bracton. You’ll do yourself no good by getting mixed up with the NICE–and, by God, you’ll do nobody else any good either.’

  ‘I suppose there are two views about everything,’ said Mark.

  ‘Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one. But it’s no affair of mine. Good night.’

  ‘Good night, Hingest,’ said Mark. The other started up the car and drove
off.

  There was a touch of frost in the air. The shoulder of Orion, though Mark did not know even that earnest constellation, flamed at him above the tree-tops. He felt a hesitation about going back into the house. It might mean further talk with interesting and influential people; but it might also mean feeling once more an outsider, hanging about and watching conversations which he could not join. Anyway, he was tired. Strolling along the front of the house he came presently to another and smaller door by which, he judged, one could enter without passing through the hall or the public rooms. He did so, and went upstairs for the night immediately.

  Camilla Denniston showed Jane out–not by the little door in the wall at which she had come in but by the main gate which opened on the same road about a hundred yards further on. Yellow light from a westward gap in the grey sky was pouring a short-lived and chilly brightness over the whole landscape. Jane had been ashamed to show either temper or anxiety before Camilla; as a result both had in reality been diminished when she said goodbye. But a settled distaste for what she called ‘all this nonsense’ remained. She was not indeed sure that it was nonsense; but she had already resolved to treat it as if it were. She would not get ‘mixed up in it’, would not be drawn in. One had to live one’s own life. To avoid entanglements and interferences had long been one of her first principles. Even when she had discovered that she was going to marry Mark if he asked her, the thought ‘but I must still keep up my own life’ had arisen at once and had never for more than a few minutes at a stretch been absent from her mind. Some resentment against love itself, and therefore against Mark, for thus invading her life, remained. She was at least very vividly aware how much a woman gives up in getting married. Mark seemed to her insufficiently aware of this. Though she did not formulate it, this fear of being invaded and entangled was the deepest ground of her determination not to have a child–or not for a long time yet. One had one’s own life to live.

  Almost as soon as she got back to the flat the telephone went. ‘Is that you, Jane?’ came a voice. ‘It’s me, Margaret Dimble. Such a dreadful thing’s happened. I’ll tell you when I come. I’m too angry to speak at the moment. Have you a spare bed by any chance? What? Mr Studdock’s away? Not a bit, if you don’t mind. I’ve sent Cecil to sleep in College. You’re sure it won’t be a nuisance? Thanks most awfully. I’ll be round in half an hour.’

  4

  The Liquidation of Anachronisms

  Almost before Jane had finished putting clean sheets on Mark’s bed, Mrs Dimble, with a great many parcels, arrived. ‘You’re an angel to have me for the night,’ she said. ‘We’d tried every hotel in Edgestow, I believe. This place is going to become unendurable. The same answer everywhere! All full up with the hangers-on and camp-followers of this detestable NICE. Secretaries here–typists there–commissioners of