That Hideous Strength Page 5

  “Oh quite,” said Mark. “I was always rather puzzled at his being in the show at all. Do you know, since you’re so kind, I think I’d better accept your offer and go over to Withers for the week-end. What time would you be starting?”

  “About quarter to eleven. They tell me you live out Sandown way. I could call and pick you up.”

  “Thanks very much. Now tell me about Wither.”

  “John Wither,” began Feverstone, but suddenly broke off. “Damn!” he said. “Here comes Curry. Now we shall have to hear everything N.O. said and how wonderfully the arch-politician has managed him. Don’t run away. I shall need your moral support.”

  II

  The last bus had gone long before Mark left College, and he walked home up the hill in brilliant moonlight. Something happened to him the moment he had let himself into the flat which was very unusual. He found himself, on the door-mat, embracing a frightened, half sobbing Jane-even a humble Jane, who was saying, “Oh, Mark, I’ve been so frightened.”

  There was a quality in the very muscles of his wife’s body which took him by surprise. A certain indefinable defensiveness had momentarily deserted her. He had known such occasions before, but they were rare. They were already becoming rarer. And they tended, in his experience, to be followed next day by inexplicable quarrels. This puzzled him greatly, but he had never put his bewilderment into words.

  It is doubtful whether he could have understood her feelings even if they had been explained to him; and Jane, in any case, could not have explained them. She was in extreme confusion. But the reasons for her unusual behaviour on this particular evening were simple enough.

  She had got back from the Dimbles at about half past four, feeling much exhilarated by her walk and hungry, and quite sure that her experiences on the previous night and at lunch were over and done with. She had had to light up and draw the curtains before she had finished tea, for the days were getting short. While doing so the thought had come into her mind that her fright at the dream and at the mere mention of a mantle, an old man, an old man buried but not dead, and a language like Spanish, had really been as irrational as a child’s fear of the dark. This had led her to remember moments when she had feared the dark as a child. Perhaps she allowed herself to remember them too long. At any rate, when she sat down to drink her last cup of tea, the evening had somehow deteriorated. It never recovered. First she found it rather difficult to keep her mind on her book. Then, when she had acknowledged this difficulty, she found it difficult to fix on any book. Then she realised that she was restless. From being restless she became nervous. Then followed a long time when she was not frightened, but knew that she would be very frightened indeed if she did not keep herself in hand. Then came a curious reluctance to go into the kitchen to get herself some supper, and a difficulty-indeed an impossibility-of eating anything when she had got it. And now there was no disguising the fact that she was frightened. In desperation she rang up the Dimbles. “I think I might go and see the person you suggested, after all,” she said. Mrs. Dimble’s voice came back, after a curious little pause, giving her the address. Ironwood was the name, Miss Ironwood, apparently. Jane had assumed it would be a man and was rather repelled. Miss Ironwood lived out at St. Anne’s on the Hill. Jane asked if she should make an appointment. “No,” said Mrs. Dimble, “they’ll be-you needn’t make an appointment.” Jane kept the conversation going as long as she could. She had rung up not chiefly to get the address but to hear Mother Dimble’s voice. Secretly she had had a wild hope that Mother Dimble would recognise her distress and say at once, “I’ll come straight up to you by car.” Instead, she got the mere information and a hurried “Good night.” It seemed to Jane that there was something queer about Mrs. Dimble’s voice. She felt that by ringing up she had interrupted a conversation about herself: or no-not about herself but about something else more important, with which she was somehow connected. And what had Mrs. Dimble meant by “They’ll be.” “They’ll be expecting you?” Horrible childish night-nursery visions of They “expecting her” passed before her mind. She saw Miss Ironwood, dressed all in black, sitting with her hands folded on her knees and then someone leading her into Miss Ironwood’s presence and saying “She’s come” and leaving her there.

  “Damn the Dimbles!” said Jane to herself, and then unsaid it, more in fear than in remorse. And now that the life-line had been used and brought no comfort, the terror, as if insulted by her futile attempt to escape it, rushed back on her with no possibility of disguise, and she could never afterwards remember whether the horrible old man and the mantle had actually appeared to her in a dream or whether she had merely sat there, huddled and wild-eyed, hoping, hoping, hoping (even praying, though she believed in no one to pray to) that they would not.

  And that is why Mark found such an unexpected Jane on the door-mat. It was a pity, he thought, that this should have happened on a night when he was so late and so tired and, to tell the truth, not perfectly sober.

  III

  “Do you feel quite all right this morning?” said Mark.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Jane shortly.

  Mark was lying in bed and drinking a cup of tea. Jane was seated at the dressing-table, partially dressed, and doing her hair. Mark’s eyes rested on her with indolent, early morning pleasure. If he guessed very little of the maladjustment between them this was partly due to our race’s incurable habit of “projection.” We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them. Jane’s body, soft though firm and slim though rounded was so exactly to Mark’s mind that it was all but impossible for him not to attribute to her the same sensations which she excited in him.

  “You’re quite sure you’re all right?” he asked again.

  “Quite,” said Jane, more shortly still.

  Jane thought she was annoyed because her hair was not going up to her liking and because Mark was fussing. She also knew, of course, that she was deeply angry with herself for the collapse which had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested-the fluttering, tearful “little woman” of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms. But she thought this anger was only in the back of her mind, and had no suspicion that it was pulsing through every vein and producing at that very moment the clumsiness in her fingers which made her hair seem intractable.

  “Because,” continued Mark, “if you felt the least bit uncomfortable, I could put off going to see this man Wither.”

  Jane said nothing.

  “If I did go,” said Mark, “I’d certainly have to be away for the night; perhaps two.”

  Jane closed her lips a little more firmly and still said nothing.

  “Supposing I did,” said Mark, “you wouldn’t think of asking Myrtle over to stay?”

  “No thank you,” said Jane emphatically; and then, “I’m quite accustomed to being alone.”

  “I know,” said Mark in a rather defensive voice. “That’s the devil of the way things are in College at present. That’s one of the chief reasons I’m thinking of another job.”

  Jane was still silent.

  “Look here, old thing,” said Mark, suddenly sitting up and throwing his legs out of bed. “There’s no good beating about the bush. I don’t feel comfortable about going away while you’re in your present state.”

  “What state?” said Jane, turning round and facing him for the first time.

  “Well-I mean-just a bit nervy-as anyone may be temporarily.”

  “Because I happened to be having a nightmare when you came home last night-or rather this morning-there’s no need to talk as if I was a neurasthenic.” This was not in the least what Jane had intended or expected to say.

  “Now there’s no good going on like that . . .” began Mark.

  “Like what?” said Jane loudly, and then, before he had time to reply, “If you’ve decided that I’m going mad you’d better get Brizeacre to come down and certify me. It would
be convenient to do it while you’re away. They could get me packed off while you are at Mr. Wither’s without any fuss. I’m going to see about the breakfast now. If you don’t shave and dress pretty quickly, you’ll not be ready when Lord Feverstone calls.”

  The upshot of it was that Mark gave himself a very bad cut while shaving (and saw, at once, a picture of himself talking to the all-important Wither with a great blob of cotton wool on his upper lip), while Jane decided, from a mixture of motives, to cook Mark an unusually elaborate breakfast-of which she would rather die than eat any herself and did so with the swift efficiency of an angry woman, only to upset it all over the new stove at the last moment. They were still at the table and both pretending to read newspapers when Lord Feverstone arrived. Most unfortunately Mrs. Maggs arrived at the same moment. Mrs. Maggs was that element in Jane’s economy represented by the phrase “I have a woman who comes in twice a week.” Twenty years earlier Jane’s mother would have addressed such a functionary as “Maggs” and been addressed by her as “Mum.” But Jane and her “woman who came in” called one another Mrs. Maggs and Mrs. Studdock. They were about the same age and to a bachelor’s eye there was no very noticeable difference in the clothes they wore. It was therefore perhaps not inexcusable that when Mark attempted to introduce Feverstone to his wife Feverstone should have shaken Mrs. Maggs by the hand: but it did not sweeten the last few minutes before the two men departed.

  Jane left the flat under pretence of shopping almost at once. “I really couldn’t stand Mrs. Maggs to-day,” she said to herself. “She’s a terrible talker.” So that was Lord Feverstone-that man with the loud, unnatural laugh and the mouth like a shark, and no manners. Apparently a perfect fool, too! What good could it do Mark to go about with a man like that? Jane had distrusted his face. She could always tell-there was something shifty about him. Probably he was making a fool of Mark. Mark was so easily taken in. If only he wasn’t at Bracton! It was a horrible college. What did Mark see in people like Mr. Curry and the odious old clergyman with the beard? And meanwhile, what of the day that awaited her, and the night, and the next night, and beyond that-for when men say they may be away for two nights it means that two nights is the minimum and they hope to be away for a week. A telegram (never a trunk call) puts it all right as far as they are concerned.

  She must do something. She even thought of following Mark’s advice and getting Myrtle to come and stay. But Myrtle was her sister-in-law, Mark’s twin sister, with much too much of the adoring sister’s attitude to the brilliant brother. She would talk about Mark’s health and his shirts and socks with a continual undercurrent of unexpressed yet unmistakable astonishment at Jane’s good luck in marrying him. No, certainly not Myrtle. Then she thought of going to see Dr. Brizeacre as a patient. He was a Bracton man and would therefore probably charge her nothing. But when she came to think of answering, to Brizeacre of all people the sort of questions which Brizeacre would certainly ask, this turned out to be impossible. She must do something. In the end, somewhat to her own surprise, she found that she had decided to go out to St. Anne s and see Miss Ironwood. She thought herself a fool for doing so.

  IV

  An observer placed at the right altitude above Edgestow that day might have seen far to the south a moving spot on a main road, and later, to the east, much nearer the silver thread of the Wynd, and much more slowly moving, the smoke of a train.

  The spot would have been the car which was carrying Mark Studdock towards the Blood Transfusion Office at Belbury, where the nucleus of the N.I.C.E. had taken up its temporary abode. The very size and style of the car had made a favourable impression on him the moment he saw it. The upholstery was of such quality that one felt it ought to be good to eat. And what fine, male energy (Mark felt sick of women at the moment) revealed itself in the very gestures with which Feverstone settled himself at the wheel and put his elbow on the horn, and clasped his pipe firmly between his teeth! The speed of the car, even in the narrow streets of Edgestow, was impressive, and so were the laconic criticisms of Feverstone on other drivers and pedestrians. Once over the level crossing and beyond Jane’s old college (St. Elizabeth’s) he began to show what his car could do. Their speed became so great that even on a rather empty road the inexcusably bad drivers, the manifestly half witted pedestrians and men with horses, the hen that they actually ran over and the dogs and hens that Feverstone pronounced “damned lucky,” seemed to follow one another almost without intermission. Telegraph posts raced by, bridges rushed overhead with a roar, villages streamed backward to join the country already devoured, and Mark, drunk with air and at once fascinated and repelled by the insolence of Feverstone’s driving, sat saying “Yes” and “Quite” and “It was their fault,” and stealing sidelong glances at his companion. Certainly, he was a change from the fussy importance of Curry and the Bursar! The long, straight nose and the clenched teeth, the hard bony outlines beneath the face, the very way he wore his clothes, all spoke of a big man driving a big car to somewhere where they would find big stuff going on. And he, Mark, was to be in it all. At one or two moments when his heart came into his mouth he wondered whether the quality of Lord Feverstone’s driving quite justified its speed.

  “You need never take a cross-road like that seriously “yelled Feverstone, as they plunged on after the narrowest of these escapes.

  “Quite,” bawled Mark. “No good making a fetish of them!”

  “Drive much yourself?” said Feverstone.

  “Used to a good deal,” said Mark.

  The smoke which our imaginary observer might have seen to the east of Edgestow would have indicated the train in which Jane Studdock was progressing slowly towards the village of St. Anne’s. Edgestow itself, for those who had reached it from London, had all the appearances of a terminus: but if you looked about you, you might see presently, in a bay, a little train of two or three coaches and a tank engine-a train that sizzled and exuded steam from beneath the footboards and in which most of the passengers seemed to know one another. On some days, instead of the third coach, there might be a horse-box, and on the platform there would be hampers containing dead rabbits or live poultry, and men in brown bowler hats and gaiters, and perhaps a terrier or a sheep-dog that seemed to be used to travelling. In this train, which started at half past one, Jane jerked and rattled along an embankment whence she looked down through some bare branches and some branches freckled with red and yellow leaves into Bragdon Wood itself and thence through the cutting and over the level-crossing at Bragdon Camp and along the edge of Brawl Park (the great house was just visible at one point) and so to the first stop at Duke’s Eaton. Here as at Woolham and Cure Hardy and Fourstones, the train settled back, when it stopped, with a little jerk and something like a sigh. And then there would be a noise of milk cans rolling and coarse boots treading on the platform and after that a pause which seemed to last long, during which the autumn sunlight grew warm on the window-pane and smells of wood and field from beyond the tiny station floated in and seemed to claim the railway as part of the land. Passengers got in and out of her carriage at every stop; apple-faced men, and women with elastic-side boots and imitation fruit on their hats, and schoolboys. Jane hardly noticed them; for though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page. And in between the stations things flitted past, so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it: a house backed with a group of haystacks and wide brown fields about it, two aged horses standing head to tail, a little orchard with washing hanging on a line, and a rabbit staring at the train, whose two eyes looked like the dots, and his ears like the uprights, of a double exclamation mark. At quarter-past two she came to St. Anne’s, which was the real terminus of the branch, and the end of everything. The air struck her as cold and tonic when she left the station.

  Although the train had
been chugging and wheezing up-hill for the latter half of her journey there was still a climb to be done on foot, for St. Anne’s is one of those villages perched on a hilltop which are commoner in Ireland than in England, and the station is some way from the village. A winding road between high banks led her up to it. As soon as she had passed the church she turned left, as she had been instructed, at the Saxon Cross. There were no houses on her left-only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the distance. She was on the highest ground in all that region. Presently she came to a high wall on her right that seemed to run on for a great way. There was a door in it and beside the door an old iron bell-pull. A kind of flatness of spirit was on her. She felt sure she had come on a fool’s errand: nevertheless she rang. When the jangling noise had ceased there followed a silence so long, and in that upland place so chilly, that Jane began to wonder whether the house were inhabited. Then, just as she was debating whether to ring again or to turn away, she heard the noise of someone’s feet approaching briskly on the inside of the wall.

  Meanwhile Lord Feverstone’s car had long since arrived at Belbury-a florid Edwardian mansion which had been built for a millionaire who admired Versailles. At the sides it seemed to have sprouted into a widespread outgrowth of newer and lower buildings in cement, which housed the Blood Transfusion Office.

  Three

  BELBURY AND ST. ANNE’S-ON-THE-HILL

  I

  On his way up the wide staircase Mark caught sight of himself and his companion in a mirror. Feverstone looked as always master of his clothes, his face, and of the whole situation. The blob of cotton wool on Mark’s upper lip had been blown awry during the journey, so that it looked like one half of a fiercely upturned false moustache and revealed a patch of blackened blood beneath it. A moment later he found himself in a big-windowed room with a blazing fire, being introduced to Mr. John Wither, Deputy Director of the N.I.C.E.