That Hideous Strength

IV

“We’re going to have difficulties with that new colleague of ours,” said Dimble. He was alone with his wife in their room at St. Anne’s late on the following day.

“Yes,” he repeated after a pause. “What you’d call a strong colleague.”

“You look very tired, Cecil, said Mrs. Dimble.

“Well, it’s been rather a gruelling conference,” said he.

“He’s-he’s a tiring man. Oh, I know we’ve all been fools. I mean, we’ve all been imagining that because he came back in the twentieth century he’d be a twentieth-century man. Time is more important than we thought, that’s all.”

“I felt that at lunch, you know,” said his wife, “it was so silly not to have realised that he wouldn’t know about forks. But what surprised me even more (after the first shock) was how-well, how elegant he was without them. I mean you could see it wasn’t a case of having no manners but of having different ones.”

“Oh the old boy’s a gentleman in his own way, anyone can see that. But . . . well, I don’t know. I suppose it’s all right.”

“What happened at the meeting?”

“Well, you see, everything had to be explained on both sides. We’d the dickens of a job to make him understand that Ransom isn’t the king of this country or trying to become king. And then we had to break it to him that we weren’t the British at all, but the English-what he’d call Saxons. It took him some time to get over that.”

“I see.”

“And then MacPhee had to choose that moment for embarking on an interminable explanation of the relations between Scotland and Ireland and England. All of which, of course, had to be translated. It was all nonsense, too. Like a good many people MacPhee imagines he’s a Celt when, apart from his name, there’s nothing Celtic about him any more than about Mr. Bultitude. By the way Merlinus Ambrosius made a prophecy about Mr. Bultitude.”

“Oh ! What was that?”

“He said that before Christmas this bear would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except some other bear that none of us had ever heard of. He keeps on saying things like that. They just pop out when we’re talking about something else, and in a rather different voice. As if he couldn’t help it. He doesn’t seem to know any more than the bit he tells you at the moment, if you see what I mean. As if something like a camera shutter opened at the back of his mind and closed again immediately and just one little item came through. It has rather a disagreeable effect.”

“He and MacPhee didn’t quarrel again, I hope.”

“Not exactly. I’m afraid Merlinus Ambrosius wasn’t taking MacPhee very seriously. From the fact that MacPhee is always being obstructive and rather rude and yet never gets sat on, I think Merlinus has concluded that he is the Director’s fool. He seems to have got over his dislike for him. But I don’t think MacPhee is going to like Merlinus.”

“Did you get down to actual business?” asked Mrs. Dimble.

“Well, in a way,” said Dimble, wrinkling his forehead.

“We were all at cross purposes, you see. The business about Ivy’s husband being in prison came up, and Merlinus wanted to know why we hadn’t rescued him. He seemed to imagine us just riding off and taking the County Jail by storm. That’s the sort of thing one was up against all the time.”

“Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble suddenly. “Is he going to be any use?”

“He’s going to be able to do things, if that’s what you mean. In that sense there’s more danger of his being too much use than too little.”

“What sort of things?” asked his wife.

“The universe is so very complicated,” said Dr. Dimble.

“So you have said rather often before, dear,” replied Mrs. Dimble.

“Have I?” he said with a smile. “How often, I wonder? As often as you’ve told the story of the pony and trap at Dawlish?”

“Cecil! I haven’t told it for years.”

“My dear, I heard you telling it to Camilla the night before last.”

“Oh, Camilla! That was quite different. She’d never heard it before.”

“I don’t know that we can be certain even about that . . . the universe being so complicated and all.”

For a few minutes there was silence between them.

“But about Merlin?” asked Mrs. Dimble presently.

“Have you ever noticed,” said Dimble, “that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?”

His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.

“I mean this,” said Dimble, in answer to the question she had not asked. “If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, oz family-anything you like-at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like in the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides . . . how does it go? Something about “eat every day . . . till all is somethinged away.” It can’t be eaten, that wouldn’t scan. My memory has failed dreadfully these last few years. Do you know the bit, Margery?”

“What you were saying reminded me more of the bit in the Bible about the winnowing fan. Separating the wheat and the chaff. Or like Browning’s line: ‘Life’s business being just the terrible choice.’”

“Exactly! Perhaps the whole time-process means just that and nothing else. But it’s not only in questions of moral choice. Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds get more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart.”

Mrs. Dimble with the ease born of long practice averted the danger, ever present in her house, of a merely literary turn being given to the conversation.

“Yes,” she said. “Spirit and matter, certainly. That explains why people like the Studdocks find it so difficult to be happily married.”

“The Studdocks?” said Dimble, looking at her rather vaguely. The domestic problems of that young couple had occupied his mind a good deal less than they had occupied his wife’s. “Oh, I see! Yes. I dare say that has something to do with it. But about Merlin: what it comes to as far as I can make out, is this. There were still possibilities for a man of that age which there aren’t for a man of ours. The earth itself was more like an animal in those days. And mental processes were much more like physical actions. And there were-well, Neutrals, knocking about.”

“Neutrals?”

“I don’t mean, of course, that anything can be a real neutral. A conscious being is either obeying God or disobeying Him. But there might be things neutral in relation to us.”

“You mean eldils-angels?”

“Well, the word angel rather begs the question. Even the Oyeresu aren’t exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically, they are Intelligences. The point is that while it may be true at the end of the world to describe every eldil either as an angel or a devil, and may even be true now, it was much less true in Merlin’s time. There used to be things on this earth pursuing their own business, so to speak. They weren’t ministering spirits sent to help fallen humanity, but neither were they enemies preying upon us. Even in St. Paul one gets glimpses of a population that won’t exactly fit into our two columns of angels and devils. And if you go back further . . . all the gods, elves, dwarfs, water-people, fate, longaevi. You and I know too much to think they are just illusions.”

“You think there are things like that?”

“I think there were. I think there was room for them then, but the universe has come more to a point. Not all rational things perhaps. Some would be mere wills inherent in matter, hardly conscious. More like animals. Others-but I don’t really know. At any rate, that is the sort of situation in which one got a man like Merlin.”

“It all sounds rather horrible to me.”

“It was rather horrible. I mean even in Merlin’s time (he came at the extreme tail end of it), though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn’t do it safely. The things weren’t bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn’t help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He’s quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It’s the result of having laid his mind open to something that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn’t wrong for Abraham, but one can’t help feeling that even he lost something by it.”

“Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble, “do you feel quite comfortable about the Director’s using a man like this? I mean, doesn’t it look a little bit like fighting Belbury with its own weapons?”

“No. I had thought of that. Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He’s at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead-a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking on to it the aid of spirits-extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia-the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense, Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way. Do you know that he is forbidden by the rules of his order ever to use any edged tool on any growing thing?”

“Good gracious!” said Mrs. Dimble, “there’s six o’clock. I’d promised Ivy to be in the kitchen at quarter to. There’s no need for you to move, Cecil.”

“Do you know,” said Dimble, “I think you are a wonderful woman.”

“Why?”

“How many women who had had their own house for thirty years would be able to fit into this menagerie as you do?”

“That’s nothing,” said Mrs. Dimble. “Ivy had her own house too, you know. And it’s much worse for her. After all, I haven’t got my husband in jail.”

“You jolly soon will have,” said Dimble, “if half the plans of Merlinus Ambrosius are put into action.”