That Hideous Strength

IV

Dr. Dimble drove out to St. Anne’s dissatisfied with himself, haunted with the suspicion that if he had been wiser, or more perfectly in charity with this very miserable young man, he might have done something for him. “Did I give way to my temper? Was I self righteous? Did I tell him as much as I dared?” he thought. Then came the deeper self distrust that was habitual with him. “Did you fail to make things clear because you really wanted not to? Just wanted to hurt and humiliate? To enjoy your own self righteousness? Is there a whole Belbury inside you, too?” The sadness that came over him had no novelty in it. “And thus,” he quoted from Brother Lawrence, “Thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to myself.”

Once clear of the town, he drove slowly-almost sauntering on wheels. The sky was red to westward and the first stars were out. Far down below him in a valley he saw the lights already lit in Cure Hardy. “Thank Heaven it at any rate is far enough from Edgestow to be safe,” he thought. The sudden whiteness of a white owl flying low fluttered across the woody twilight on his left. It gave him a delicious feeling of approaching night. He was very pleasantly tired; he looked forward to an agreeable evening and an early bed.

“Here he is! Here’s Dr. Dimble,” shouted Ivy Maggs as he drove up to the front door of the Manor.

“Don’t put the car away, Dimble,” said Denniston.

“Oh Cecil!” said his wife; and he saw fear in her face. The whole household seemed to have been waiting for him.

A few moments later, blinking in the lighted kitchen, he saw that this was not to be a normal evening. The Director himself was there, seated by the fire, with the jackdaw on his shoulder and Mr. Bultitude at his feet. There were signs that everyone else had had an early supper and Dimble found himself almost at once seated at the end of the table and being rather excitedly urged to eat and drink by his wife and Mrs. Maggs.

“Don’t stop to ask questions, dear,” said Mrs. Dimble.

“Go on eating while they tell you. Make a good meal.”

“You have to go out again,” said Ivy Maggs.

“Yes,” said the Director. “We’re going into action at last. I’m sorry to send you out the moment you come in: but the battle has started.”

“I have already repeatedly urged,” said MacPhee, “the absurdity of sending out an older man like yourself, that’s done a day’s work forbye, when here am I, a great strapping fellow sitting doing nothing.”

“It’s no good, MacPhee,” said the Director, “you can’t go. For one thing you don’t know the language. And for another-it’s a time for frankness-you have never put yourself under the protection of Maleldil.”

“I am perfectly ready,” said MacPhee, “in and for this emergency, to allow the existence of these eldils of yours and of a being called Maleldil whom they regard as their king. And I “

“You can’t go,” said the Director. “I will not send you. It would be like sending a three-year-old child to fight a tank. Put the other map on the table where Dimble can see it while he goes on with his meal. And now, silence. This is the situation, Dimble. What was under Bragdon was a living Merlin. Yes, asleep, if you like to call it sleep. And nothing has yet happened to show that the enemy have found him. Got that? No, don’t talk, go on eating. Last night Jane Studdock had the most important dream she’s had yet. You remember that in an earlier dream she saw (or so I thought) the very place where he lay under Bragdon. But-and this is the important thing-it’s not reached by a shaft and a stair. She dreamed of going through a long tunnel with a very gradual ascent. Ah, you begin to see the point. You’re right. Jane thinks she can recognise the entrance to that tunnel: under a heap of stones at the end of a copse with-what was it, Jane?”

“A white gate, sir. An ordinary five-barred gate with a cross-piece. But the cross-piece was broken off about a foot from the top. I’d know it again.”

“You see, Dimble? There’s a very good chance that this tunnel comes up outside the area held by the N.I.C.E.”

“You mean,” said Dimble, “that we can now get under Bragdon without going into Bragdon.”

“Exactly. But that’s not all.”

Dimble, steadily munching, looked at him.

“Apparently,” said the Director, “we are almost too late. He has waked already.”

Dimble stopped eating.

“Jane found the place empty,” said Ransom.

“You mean the enemy have already found him?”

“No. Not quite as bad as that. The place had not been broken into. He seems to have waked of his own accord.”

“My God!” said Dimble.

“Try to eat, darling,” said his wife.

“But what does it mean?” he asked, covering her hand with his.

“I think it means that the whole thing has been planned and timed long, long ago,” said the Director. “That he went out of Time, into the parachronic state, for the very purpose of returning at this moment.”

“A sort of human time-bomb,” observed MacPhee, “which is why “

“You can’t go, MacPhee,” said the Director.

“Is he out?” asked Dimble.

“He probably is by now,” said the Director. “Tell him what it was like, Jane.”

“It was the same place,” said Jane. “A dark place , all stone, like a cellar. I recognised it at once. And the slab of stone was there, but no one lying on it; and this time it wasn’t quite cold. Then I dreamed about this tunnel . . . gradually sloping up from the souterrain. And there was a man in the tunnel. Of course I couldn’t see him: it was pitch dark. But a great big man. Breathing heavily. At first I thought it was an animal. It got colder as we went up the tunnel. There was air-a little air-from outside. It seemed to end in a pile of loose stones. He was pulling them about just before the dream changed. Then I was outside, in the rain. That was when I saw the white gate.”

“It looks, you see,” said Ransom, “as if they had not yet-or not then-established contact with him. That is our only chance now. To meet this creature before they do.”

“You will all have observed that Bragdon is very nearly water-logged,” put in MacPhee. “Where exactly you’ll find a dry cavity in which a body could be preserved all these centuries is a question worth asking. That is, if any of you are still concerned with evidence.”

“That’s the point,” said the Director. “The chamber must be under the high ground-the gravelly ridge on the south of the wood where it slopes up to the Eaton Road. Near where Storey used to live. That’s where you’ll have to look first for Jane’s white gate. I suspect it opens on the Eaton Road. Or else that other road-look at the map-the yellow one that runs up into the Y of Cure Hardy.”

“We can be there in half an hour,” said Dimble, his hand still on his wife’s hand. To everyone in that room the sickening excitement of the last minutes before battle had come nearer.

“I suppose it must be to-night?” said Mrs. Dimble, rather shamefacedly.

“I am afraid it must, Margaret,” said the Director.

“Every minute counts. We have practically lost the war if the enemy once make contact with him. Their whole plan probably turns on it.”

“Of course. I see. I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Dimble.

“And what is our procedure, sir?” said Dimble, pushing his plate away from him and beginning to fill his pipe.

“The first question is whether he’s out,” said the Director. “It doesn’t seem likely that the entrance to the tunnel has been hidden all these centuries by nothing but a heap of loose stones. And if it has, they wouldn’t be very loose by now. He may take hours getting out.”

“You’ll need at least two strong men with picks-” began MacPhee.

“It’s no good, MacPhee,” said the Director. “I’m not letting you go. If the mouth of the tunnel is still sealed, you must just wait there. But he may have powers we don’t know. If he’s out, you must look for tracks. Thank God it’s a muddy night. You must just hunt him.”

“If Jane is going, sir,” said Camilla, “couldn’t I go too? I’ve had more experience of this sort of thing than “

“Jane has to go because she is the guide,” said Ransom.

“I am afraid you must stay at home. We in this house are all that is left of Logres. You carry its future in your body. As I was saying, Dimble, you must hunt. I do not think he can get far. The country will, of course, be quite unrecognisable to him, even by daylight.”

“And . . . if we do find him, sir?”

“That is why it must be you, Dimble. Only you know the Great Tongue. If there was eldilic power behind the tradition he represented he may understand it. Even if he does not understand it he will, I think, recognise it. That will teach him he is dealing with Masters. There is a chance that he will think you are the Belbury people-his friends. In that case you will bring him here at once.”

“And if not?”

“Then you must show your hand. That is the moment when the danger comes. We do not know what the powers of the old Atlantean circle were: some kind of hypnotism probably covered most of it. Don’t be afraid: but don’t let him try any tricks. Keep your hand on your revolver. You too, Denniston.”

“I’m a good hand with a revolver myself,” said MacPhee. “And why, in the name of all common sense”

“You can’t go, MacPhee,” said the Director. “He’d put you to sleep in ten seconds. The others are heavily protected as you are not. You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil. Then, if he stands, conjure him.”

“What shall I say in the Great Tongue?”

“Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits to-day in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.”

And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room seemed to have become intensely quiet: even the bird, and the bear, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance-or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon, and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.

“Thank you,” said the Director in English; and once again the warm domesticity of the kitchen flowed back upon them. “And if he comes with you, all is well. If he does not-why then, Dimble, you must rely on your Christianity. Do not try any tricks. Say your prayers and keep your will fixed in the will of Maleldil. I don’t know what he will do. But stand firm. You can’t lose your soul, whatever happens; at least, not by any action of his.”

“Yes,” said Dimble. “I understand.”

There was a longish pause. Then the Director spoke again.

“Don’t be cast down, Margaret,” he said. “If they kill Cecil we shall none of us be let live many hours after him. It will be a shorter separation than you could have hoped for in the course of Nature. And now, gentlemen,” he said, “you would like a little time to say your prayers, and to say good-bye to your wives. It is eight now, as near as makes no matter. Suppose you all reassemble here at ten past eight, ready to start?”

“Very good,” answered several voices. Jane found herself left alone in the kitchen with Mrs. Maggs and the animals and MacPhee and the Director.

“You are all right, child?” said Ransom.

“I think so, sir,” said Jane. Her actual state of mind was one she could not analyse. Her expectation was strung up to the height; something that would have been terror but for the joy, and joy but for the terror, possessed her-an all-absorbing tension of excitement and obedience. Everything else in her life seemed small and commonplace compared with this moment.

“Do you place yourself in the obedience,” said the Director, “in obedience to Maleldil?”

“Sir,” said Jane, “I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.”

“It is enough for the present,” said the Director. “This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for to-night, it is enough.”

“This is the craziest business that ever I heard of,” said MacPhee.