That Hideous Strength Page 15

  “Do you mean?” gasped Mark and then paused and added, “But they’d come down on you for the lot if you left?”

  “What do you want to be talking about leaving for at all?” said O’Hara. “No one leaves the Institute. At least the only one that ever I heard of was old Hingest.”

  About this time, Hingest’s inquest came to an end with a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. The funeral service was held in the College chapel at Bracton.

  It was the third and thickest day of the fog, which was now so dense and white that men’s eyes smarted from looking at it and all distant sounds were annihilated; only the drip from eaves and trees and the shouts of the workmen outside the chapel were audible within the College. Inside the chapel the candles burned with straight flames, each flame the centre of a globe of greasy luminosity, and cast almost no light on the building as a whole: but for the coughing and shuffling of feet one would not have known that the stalls were quite full. Curry, black-suited and blackgowned and looming unnaturally large, went to and fro at the western end of the chapel, whispering and peering, anxious lest the fog might delay the arrival of what he called the Remains, and not unpleasingly conscious of the weight wherewith his responsibility for the whole ceremony pressed upon his shoulders. Curry was very great at College funerals. There was no taint of the undertaker about him; he was the restrained, manly friend, stricken by a heavy blow but still mindful that he was (in some undefined sense) the father of the College and that amid all the spoils of mutability he, at any rate, must not give way. Strangers who had been present on such occasions often said to one another as they drove off, “You could see that sub-warden chap felt it, though he wasn’t going to show it.” There was no hypocrisy in this. Curry was so used to superintending the lives of his colleagues that it came naturally to him to superintend their deaths; and possibly, if he had possessed an analytic mind, he might have discovered in himself a vague feeling that his influence, his power of smoothing paths and pulling suitable wires, could not really quite cease once the breath was out of the body.

  The organ began to play and drowned both the coughing within and the harsher noises without-the monotonously ill-tempered voices, the rattle of iron, and the vibrating shocks with which loads were flung from time to time against the chapel wall. But the fog had, as Curry feared, delayed the coffin, and the organist had been playing for half an hour before there came a stir about the door and the family mourners, the black-clad Hingests of both sexes with their ram-rod backs and county faces, began to be ushered into the stalls reserved for them. Then came maces and beadles and censors and the Grand Rector of Edgestow, then, singing, the choir, and finally the coffin-an island of appalling flowers drifting indistinctly through the fog, which seemed to have poured in, thicker, colder, and wetter, with the opening of the door. The service began.

  Canon Storey took it. His voice was still beautiful, and there was beauty, too, in his isolation from all that company. He was isolated both by his faith and by his deafness. He felt no qualm about the appropriateness of the words which he read over the corpse of the proud old unbeliever, for he had never suspected his unbelief; and he was wholly unconscious of the strange antiphony between his own voice reading and the other voices from without. Glossop might wince when one of those voices, impossible to ignore in the silence of the chapel, was heard shouting, “Take your bucking great foot out of the light or I’ll let you have the whole lot on top of it “; but Storey, unmoved and unaware, replied, “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.”

  “I’ll give you one across your ugly face in a moment see if I don’t,” said the voice again.

  “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body,” said Storey.

  “Disgraceful, disgraceful,” muttered Curry to the Bursar who sat next to him. But some of the junior Fellows saw, as they said, the funny side of it and thought how Feverstone, who had been unable to be present, would enjoy the story.

  III

  The pleasantest of the rewards which fell to Mark for his obedience was admission to the library. Shortly after his brief intrusion into it on that miserable morning he had discovered that this room, though nominally public, was in practice reserved for what one had learned, at school, to call “bloods” and, at Bracton, “the Progressive Element.” It was on the library hearthrug and during the hours between ten and midnight that the important and confidential talks took place; and that was why, when Feverstone one evening sidled up to Mark in the lounge. and said, “What about a drink in the library?” Mark smiled and agreed and harboured no resentment for the last conversation he had had with Feverstone. If he felt a little contempt of himself for doing so, he repressed and forgot it: that sort of thing was childish and unrealistic.

  The circle in the library usually consisted of Feverstone, the Fairy, Filostrato, and-more surprising-Straik. It was balm to Mark’s wounds to find that Steele never appeared there. He had apparently got in beyond, or behind, Steele, as they had promised him he would; all was working according to programme. One person whose frequent appearance in the library he did not understand was the silent man with the pince-nez and the pointed beard, Professor Frost. The Deputy Director-or, as Mark now called him, the D.D. or Old Man-was often there, but in a peculiar mode. He had a habit of drifting in and sauntering about the room, creaking and humming as usual. Sometimes he came up to the circle by the fire and listened and looked on with a vaguely parental expression on his face: but he seldom said anything and he never joined the party. He drifted away again, and then, perhaps, would return about an hour later and once more potter about the empty parts of the room and once more go away. He had never spoken to Mark since the humiliating interview in his study, and Mark learned from the Fairy that he was still out of favour. “The Old Man will thaw in time,” she said. “But I told you he didn’t like people to talk about leaving.”

  The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then-perhaps once in the whole evening-something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the N.I.C.E. would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying.

  The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles . . . shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man-that is, Man himself, full grown-has power to judge the world-to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.” It was all very unpleasant.

  It was on the day after Hingest’s funeral that Mark first ventured to walk into the library on his own; hitherto he had always been supported by Feverstone or Filostrato. He was a little uncertain of his reception, and yet also afraid that if he did not soon assert his right to the entree this modesty might damage him. He knew that in such matters the error in either direction is equally fatal; one has to guess and take the risk.

  It was a brilliant success. The circle were all there and before he had closed the door behind him all had turned with welcoming faces and Filostrato had said “Ecco” and the Fairy, “Here’s the very man.” A glow of sheer pleasu
re passed over Mark’s whole body. Never had the fire seemed to burn more brightly nor the smell of the drinks to be more attractive. He was actually being waited for. He was wanted.

  “How quick can you write two leading articles, Mark?” said Feverstone.

  “Can you work all night?” asked Miss Hardcastle.

  “I have done,” said Mark. “What’s it all about?”

  “You are satisfied?” asked Filostrato. “That it-the disturbance-must go forward at once, yes?”

  “That’s the joke of it,” said Feverstone. “She’s done her work too well. She hasn’t read her Ovid. Ad metam properate simul.”

  “We cannot delay it if we wished,” said Straik.

  “What are we talking about?” said Mark.

  “The disturbances at Edgestow,” answered Feverstone.

  “Oh . . . I haven’t been following them very much. Are they becoming serious?”

  “They’re going to become serious, sonny,” said the Fairy. “And that’s the point. The real riot was timed for next week. All this little stuff was only meant to prepare the ground. But it’s been going on too well, damn it. The balloon will have to go up to-morrow, or the day after at latest.”

  Mark glanced in bewilderment from her face to Feverstone’s. The latter doubled himself up with laughter and Mark, almost automatically, gave a jocular turn to his own bewilderment.

  “I think the penny hasn’t dropped, Fairy,” he said.

  “You surely didn’t imagine,” grinned Feverstone, “that the Fairy left the initiative with the natives?”

  “You mean she herself is the Disturbance?” said Mark.

  “Yes, yes,” said Filostrato, his little eyes glistening above his fat cheeks.

  “It’s all fair and square,” said Miss Hardcastle. “You can’t put a few hundred thousand imported workmen-”

  “Not the sort you enrolled!” interjected Feverstone.

  “Into a sleepy little hole like Edgestow,” Miss Hardcastle continued, “without having trouble. I mean there’d have been trouble anyway. As it turns out, I don’t believe my boys needed to do anything. But, since the trouble was bound to come, there was no harm in seeing it came at the right moment.”

  “You mean you’ve engineered the disturbances?” said Mark. To do him justice, his mind was reeling from this new revelation. Nor was he aware of any decision to conceal his state of mind: in the snugness and intimacy of that circle he found his facial muscles and his voice, without any conscious volition, taking on the tone of his colleagues.

  “That’s a crude way of putting it,” said Feverstone.

  “It makes no difference,” said Filostrato. “This is how things have to be managed.”

  “Quite,” said Miss Hardcastle. “It’s always done. Anyone who knows police work will tell you. And as I say, the real thing-the big riot-must take place within the next forty-eight hours.”

  “It’s nice to get the tip straight from the horse’s mouth!” said Mark. “I wish I’d got my wife out of the town, though.”

  “Where does she live?” said the Fairy.

  “Up at Sandown.”

  “Ah. It’ll hardly affect her. In the meantime, you and I have got, to get busy about the account of the riot.”

  “But-what’s it all for?”

  “Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.”

  “Exactly,” said Filostrato. “It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions. Not that the canaglia would always . . . resist-often they have to be prodded into it-but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades-no one gets powers to act effectively. There is not enough what you call weigh on the boat to steer him.”

  “And the stuff must be all ready to appear in the papers the very day after the riot,” said Miss Hardcastle. “That means it must be handed in to the D.D. by six to-morrow morning at latest.”

  “But how are we to write it to-night if the thing doesn’t even happen till to-morrow at the earliest?”

  Everyone burst out laughing.

  “You’ll never manage publicity that way, Mark,” said Feverstone. “You surely don’t need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it!”

  “Well, I admit,” said Mark, and his face also was full of laughter, “I had a faint prejudice for doing so, not living in Mr. Dunne’s sort of time nor in looking-glass land.”

  “No good, sonny,” said Miss Hardcastle. “We’ve got to get on with it at once. Time for one more drink and you and I’d better go upstairs and begin. We’ll get them to give us devilled bones and coffee at two.”

  This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men. A few moments later he was trotting upstairs with the Fairy. They passed Cosser on the way and Mark, talking busily to his companion, saw out of the corner of his eye that Cosser was watching them. To think that he had once been afraid of Cosser!

  “Who has the job of waking the D.D. up at six?” asked Mark.

  “Probably not necessary,” said the Fairy. “I suppose the old man must sleep sometime. But I’ve never discovered when he does it.”

  IV

  At four o’clock Mark sat in the Fairy’s office re-reading the last two articles he had written-one for the most respectable of our papers, the other for a more popular organ. This was the only part of the night’s work which had anything in it to flatter literary vanity. The earlier hours had been spent in the sterner labour of concocting the news itself. These two Leaders had been kept for the end, and the ink was still wet. The first was as follows:

  “While it would be premature to make any final comment on last night’s riot at Edgestow, two conclusions seem to emerge from the first accounts, which we publish elsewhere, with a clarity which is not likely to be shaken by subsequent developments. In the first place, the whole episode will administer a rude shock to any complacency which may still lurk among us as to the enlightenment of our own civilisation. It must, of course, be admitted that the transformation of a small university town into a centre of national research cannot be carried out without some friction and some cases of hardship to the local inhabitants. But the Englishman has always had his own quiet and humorous way of dealing with frictions and has never showed himself unwilling, when the issue is properly put before him, to make sacrifices much greater than those small alterations of habit and sentiment which progress demands of the people of Edgestow. It is gratifying to note that there is no suggestion in any authoritative quarter that the N.I.C.E. has in any way exceeded its powers or failed in that consideration and courtesy which was expected of it; and there is little doubt that the actual starting-point of the disturbances was some quarrel, probably in a public-house, between one of the N.I.C.E. workmen and some local Sir Oracle. But as the Stagyrite said long ago, disorders which have trivial occasions have deeper causes, and there seems little doubt that this petty fracas must have been inflamed, if not exploited, by sectional interests or widespread prejudice.

  “It is disquieting to be forced to suspect that the old distrust of planned efficiency and the old jealousy of what is ambiguously called ‘Bureaucracy ’ can be so easily, though, we hope, temporarily, revived; though at the same time, this very suspicion, by revealing the gaps and weaknesses in our national level of education, emphasises one of the very diseases which the National Institute exists to cure. That it will cure it we need have no doubt
. The will of the nation is behind this magnificent ‘peace-effort,’ as Mr. Jules so happily described the Institute, and any ill-informed opposition which ventures to try conclusions with it will be, we hope gently, but certainly firmly, resisted.

  “The second moral to be drawn from last night’s events is a more cheering one. The original proposal to provide the N.I.C.E. with what is misleadingly called its own ‘police force’ was viewed with distrust in many quarters. Our readers will remember that while not sharing that distrust, we extended to it a certain sympathy. Even the false fears of those who love liberty should be respected as we respect even the ill-grounded anxieties of a mother. At the same time we insisted that the complexity of modern society rendered it an anachronism to confine the actual execution of the will of society to a body of men whose real function was the prevention and detection of crime: that the police, in fact, must be relieved sooner or later of that growing body of coercive functions which do not properly fall within their sphere. That this problem has been solved by other countries in a manner which proved fatal to liberty and justice, by creating a real imperium in imperio, is a fact which no one is likely to forget. The so-called ‘Police’ of the N.I.C.E.-who should rather be called its ‘Sanitary Executive’-is the characteristically English solution. Its relation to the National Police cannot, perhaps, be defined with perfect logical accuracy; but, as a nation, we have never been much enamoured of logic. The executive of the N.I.C.E. has no connection with politics: and if it ever comes into relation with criminal justice, it does so in the gracious role of a rescuer-a rescuer who can remove the criminal from the harsh sphere of punishment into that of remedial treatment. If any doubt as to the value of such a force existed, it has been amply set at rest by the episodes at Edgestow. The happiest relations seem to have been maintained throughout between the officers of the Institute and the National Police, who, but for the assistance of the Institute, would have found themselves faced with an impossible situation. As an eminent police officer observed to one of our representatives this morning, ‘But for the N.I.C.E. Police, things would have taken quite a different turn.’ If in the light of these events it is found convenient to place the whole Edgestow area under the exclusive control of the Institutional ‘police’ for some limited period, we do not believe that the British people-always realists at heart-will have the slightest objection. A special tribute is due to the female members of the force, who appear to have acted throughout with that mixture of courage and common sense which the last few years have taught us to expect of Englishwomen almost as a matter of course. The wild rumours, current in London this morning, of machine-gun fire in the streets and casualties by the hundred, remain to be sifted. Probably, when accurate details are available, it will be found, in the words of a recent Prime Minister, that ‘when blood flowed, it was generally from the nose.’”