That Hideous Strength

Then came a new voice from quite a different part of the Soler. Lord Feverstone had risen. He fully agreed with the action which the College had taken about these impertinent letters from various busybodies outside. But was it not, after all, a fact, that the wall of the Wood was in a very unsatisfactory condition? A good many Fellows–Studdock was not one of them–imagined they were watching a revolt on Feverstone’s part against ‘Curry and his gang’ and became intensely interested. Almost at once the Bursar, James Busby, was on his feet. He welcomed Lord Feverstone’s question. In his Bursarial capacity he had recently taken expert advice about the wall of the Wood. ‘Unsatisfactory’ was, he feared, much too mild a word to describe its condition. Nothing but a complete new wall would really meet the situation. With great difficulty the probable cost of this was elicited from him; and when the College heard the figure it gasped. Lord Feverstone inquired icily whether the Bursar was seriously proposing that the College should undertake such an expense. Busby (a very large ex-clergyman with a bushy black beard) replied with some temper that he had proposed nothing: if he were to make a suggestion, it would be that the question could not be treated in isolation from some important financial considerations which it would become his duty to lay before them later in the day. There was a pause at this ominous statement, until gradually, one by one, the ‘outsiders’ and ‘obstructionists’, the men not included in the Progressive Element, began coming into the debate. Most of these found it hard to believe that nothing short of a complete new wall would be any use. The Progressive Element let them talk for nearly ten minutes. Then it looked once again as if Lord Feverstone were actually leading the outsiders. He wanted to know whether it was possible that the Bursar and the Preservation Committee could really find no alternative between building a new wall and allowing Bragdon Wood to degenerate into a common. He pressed for an answer. Some of the outsiders even began to feel that he was being too rude to the Bursar. At last the Bursar answered in a low voice that he had in a purely theoretical way got some facts about possible alternatives. A barbed wire fence–but the rest was drowned in a roar of disapproval, during which old Canon Jewel was heard to say that he would sooner have every tree in the Wood felled to the ground than see it caged in barbed wire. Finally, the matter was postponed for consideration at the next meeting.

The next item was one of those which the majority of the Fellows could not understand. It involved the recapitulation (by Curry) of a long correspondence between the College and the Senate of the University about the proposed incorporation of the NICE in the University of Edgestow. The words ‘committed to’ kept recurring in the debate that followed. ‘We appear,’ said Watson, ‘to have pledged ourselves as a college to the fullest possible support of the new Institute.’ ‘We appear,’ said Feverstone, ‘to have tied ourselves up hand and foot and given the University carte blanche.’ What all this actually amounted to never became clear to any of the outsiders. They remembered fighting hard at a previous meeting against the NICE and all its works, and being defeated; but every effort to find out what their defeat had meant, though answered with great lucidity by Curry, served only to entangle them further in the impenetrable mazes of the university constitution and the still darker mystery of the relations between University and College. The result of the discussion was to leave them under the impression that the honour of the College was not involved in the establishment of the NICE at Edgestow.

During this item the thoughts of more than one Fellow had turned to lunch, and attention had wandered. But when Curry rose at five minutes to one to introduce item Three, there was a sharp revival of interest. It was called, ‘Rectification of an anomaly of the Stipends of Junior Fellows.’ I would not like to say what the most junior Fellows of Bracton were getting at this time, but I believe it hardly covered the expenses of their residence in College, which was compulsory. Studdock who had only recently emerged from this class felt great sympathy with them. He understood the look in their faces. The Rectification, if it went through, would mean to them clothes and holidays and meat for lunch and a chance to buy a half, instead of a fifth, of the books they needed. All their eyes were fixed on the Bursar when he rose to reply to Curry’s proposals. He hoped that no one would imagine he approved the anomaly which had, in 1910, excluded the lowest class of the Fellows from the new clauses in the eighteenth paragraph of Statute 17. He felt sure that every one present would wish it to be rectified; but it was his duty, as Bursar, to point out that this was the second proposal involving very heavy expenditure which had come before them that morning. He could only say of this, as he had said of the previous proposal, that it could not be isolated from the whole problem of the present financial position of the College, which he hoped to lay before them during the course of the afternoon. A great deal more was said, but the Bursar remained unanswered, the matter was postponed, and when, at quarter to two, the Fellows came surging out of the Soler for lunch, hungry and headachy and ravenous for tobacco, every junior had it fixed in his mind that a new wall for the Wood and a rise in his own stipend were strictly exclusive alternatives. ‘That darn Wood has been in our way all morning,’ said one. ‘We’re not out of it yet,’ answered another.

In this frame of mind, the College returned to the Soler after lunch to consider its finances. Busby, the Bursar, was naturally the principal speaker. It is very hot in the Soler on a sunny afternoon; and the smooth flow of the Bursar’s exposition, and even the flashing of his level, white teeth above his beard (he had remarkably fine teeth) had a sort of hypnotic power. Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who became Fellows of colleges. They gathered that the situation was bad, very bad, indeed. Some of the youngest and most inexperienced members ceased to wonder whether they would get a new wall or a rise of stipend and began to wonder instead whether the College would continue to function at all. The times, as the Bursar so truly said, were extraordinarily difficult. Older members had heard of such times very often before from dozens of previous Bursars and were less disturbed. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Bursar of Bracton was in any way misrepresenting the position. It is very seldom that the affairs of a large corporation, indefinitely committed to the advancement of learning, can be described as being, in a quite unambiguous sense, satisfactory. His delivery was excellent. Each sentence was a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their own fault. Some minor retrenchments and reinvestments which he suggested were unanimously approved and the College adjourned for tea in a chastened mood. Studdock rang up Jane and told her he would not be home for dinner.

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 coloured 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 archaeologists 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 realise what was happening. When they found their voices, they struck a discordant note amid the general buzz of cheerful comment. They were manoeuvred 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 colours that were really good on serious aesthetic 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 centre: 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 up country, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising 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 Dimble. ‘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 Romanised 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 under-tow, 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 behaviour by telling the story of her dream. ‘I suppose I’ve given myself away dreadfully,’ she said. ‘You can both start psycho-analysing 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 analysed?’ said Jane.

‘Analysed?’ 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 realised 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.