That Hideous Strength

II

“I think that’s all we can do for the present,” said Mother Dimble. “We’ll do the flowers this afternoon.” She was speaking to Jane and both were in what was called the Lodge-a little stone house beside the garden door at which Jane had been first admitted to the Manor. Mrs. Dimble and Jane had been preparing it for the Maggs family. For Mr. Maggs’s sentence expired to-day and Ivy had gone off by train on the previous afternoon to spend the night with an aunt in the town where he was imprisoned and to meet him at the prison gates.

When Mrs. Dimble had told her husband how she would be engaged that morning he had said, “Well, it can‘t take you very long just lighting a fire and making a bed.” I share Dr. Dimble’s sex and his limitation. I have no idea what the two women found to do in the Lodge for all the hours they spent there. Even Jane had hardly anticipated it. In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jail-bird husband became something between a game and a ritual.

It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamions-age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth. It was an atmosphere extraordinarily alien to that in which she had grown up. A few weeks ago she would have disliked it. Was there not something absurd about that stiff, twinkling archaic world-the mixture of prudery and sensuality, the stylised ardours of the groom and the conventional bashfulness of the bride, the religious sanction, the permitted salacities of fescennine song, and the suggestion that everyone except the principals might be expected to be rather tipsy? How had the human race ever come to imprison in such a ceremony the most unceremonious thing in the world? But she was no longer sure of her reaction. What she was sure of was the dividing line that included Mother Dimble in that world and left her outside. Mother Dimble, for all her nineteenth-century propriety, or perhaps because of it, struck her this afternoon as being herself an archaic person. At every moment she seemed to join hands with some solemn yet roguish company of busy old women who had been tucking young lovers into beds since the world began with an incongruous mixture of nods and winks and blessings and tears-quite impossible old women in ruffs or wimples who would be making Shakespearean jokes about codpieces and cuckoldry at one moment and kneeling devoutly at altars the next. It was very odd: for of course, as far as their conversation was concerned the difference between them was reversed. Jane, in a literary argument, could have talked about codpieces with great sang-froid, while Mother Dimble was an Edwardian lady who would simply have ignored such a subject out of existence if any modernised booby had been so unfortunate as to raise it in her presence. Perhaps the weather had some bearing on Jane’s curious sensations. The frost had ended and it was one of those days of almost piercingly sweet mildness which sometimes occur in the beginning of winter.

Ivy had discussed her own story with Jane only the day before. Mr. Maggs had stolen some money from the laundry that he worked for. He had done this before he met Ivy and at a time when he had got into bad company. Since he and Ivy had started going out together he had gone “as straight as straight”; but the little crime had been unearthed and come out of the past to catch him, and he had been arrested about six weeks after their marriage. Jane had said very little during the telling of this story. Ivy had not seemed conscious of the purely social stigma attaching to petty theft and a term of imprisonment, so that Jane would have had no opportunity to practise, even if she had wished, that almost technical “kindness” which some people reserve for the sorrows of the poor. On the other hand she was given no chance to be revolutionary or speculative-to suggest that theft was no more criminal than all wealth was criminal. Ivy seemed to take traditional morality for granted. She had been “ever so upset “about it. It seemed to matter a great deal in one way, and not to matter at all in another. It had never occurred to her that it should alter her relations with her husband-as though theft, like ill health, were one of the normal risks one took in getting married.

“I always say, you can’t expect to know everything about a boy till you’re married, not really,” she had said.

“I suppose not,” said Jane.

“Of course it’s the same for them,” added Ivy. “My old dad used often to say he’d never have married mum not if he’d known how she snored. And she said herself, ‘No, dad, that you wouldn’t.’”

“That’s rather different, I suppose,” said Jane.

“Well, what I say is, if it wasn’t that it’d be something else. That’s how I look at it. And it isn’t as if they hadn’t a lot to put up with, too. Because they’ve sort of got to get married if they’re the right sort, poor things, but, whatever we say, Jane, a woman takes a lot of living with. I don’t mean what you’d call a bad woman. I remember one day-it was before you came-Mother Dimble was saying something to the Doctor; and there he was sitting reading something-you know the way he does-with his fingers under some of the pages and a pencil in his hand-not the way you or I’d read-and he just said ‘Yes, dear,’ and we both of us knew he hadn’t been listening. And I said, ‘There you are, Mother Dimble,’ said I, ‘That’s how they treat us once they’re married. They don’t even listen to what we say,’ I said. And do you know what she said? ‘Ivy Maggs,’ said she, ‘Did it ever come into your mind to ask whether anyone could listen to all we say?’ Those were her very words. Of course I wasn’t going to give in to it, not before him, so I said, ‘Yes, they could.’ But it was a fair knock-out. You know often I’ve been talking to my husband for a long time and he’s looked up and asked me what I’ve been saying and, do you know, I haven’t been able to remember myself!”

“Oh, that’s different,” said Jane. “It’s when people drift apart-take up quite different opinions-join different sides . . .”

“You must be ever so anxious about Mr. Studdock “replied Ivy. “I’d never be able to sleep a wink if I were in your shoes. But the Director’ll bring it all right in the end. You see if he don’t.”

Mrs. Dimble went back to the house presently to fetch some little nicety which would put the finishing touch to the bedroom in the Lodge. Jane, feeling a little tired, knelt on the window-seat and put her elbows on the sill and her chin in her hands. The sun was almost hot. The thought of going back to Mark if Mark were ever rescued from Belbury was one which her mind had long accepted; it was not horrifying to her, but flat and insipid. It was not the less so because at this moment she fully forgave him for his conjugal crime of sometimes apparently preferring her person to her conversation and sometimes his own thoughts to both. Why should anyone be particularly interested in what she said? This new humility would even have been pleasant to her if it had been directed to anyone more exciting than Mark. She must, of course, be very different with him when they met again. But it was that “again” which so took the savour out of the good resolution-like going back to a sum one had already got wrong and working it out afresh on the same scrawled page of the exercise book. “If they met again . . .” she felt guilty at her lack of anxiety. Almost at the same moment she found that she was a little anxious. For hitherto she had always somehow assumed that Mark would come back. The possibility of his death now presented itself. She had no direct emotions about herself living afterwards; she just saw the image of Mark dead, that face dead, in the middle of a pillow, that whole body rigid, those hands and arms (for good and ill so different from all other hands and arms) stretched out straight and useless like a doll’s. She felt very cold. Yet the sun was hotter than ever-almost impossibly hot for the time of year. It was very still, too, so still that she could hear the movements of a small bird which was hopping along the path outside the window. This path led to the door in the garden wall by which she had first entered. The bird hopped on to the threshold of that door, and on to someone’s foot. For now Jane saw that someone was sitting on a little seat just inside the door. This person was only a few yards away, and she must have been sitting very quiet for Jane not to have noticed her.

A flame-coloured robe, in which her hands were hidden, covered this person from the feet to where it rose behind her neck in a kind of high ruff-like collar, but in front it was so low or open that it exposed her large breasts. Her skin was darkish and Southern and glowing, almost the colour of honey. Some such dress Jane had seen worn by a Minoan priestess on a vase from old Cnossus. The head, poised motionless on the muscular pillar of her neck, stared straight at Jane. It was a red-cheeked, wet-lipped face, with black eyes-almost the eyes of a cow-and an enigmatic expression. It was not by ordinary standards at all like the face of Mother Dimble; but Jane recognised it at once. It was, to speak like the musicians, the full statement of that theme which had elusively haunted Mother Dimble’s face for the last few hours. It was Mother Dimble’s face with something left out, and the omission shocked Jane. “It is brutal,” she thought, for its energy crushed her; but then she half changed her mind and thought, “It is I who am weak, trumpery.” “It is mocking me,” she thought, but then once more changed her mind and thought, “It is ignoring me. It doesn’t see me”; for though there was an almost ogreish glee in the face, Jane did not seem to be invited to share the joke. She tried to look aside from the face-succeeded-and saw for the first time that there were other creatures present-four or five of them-no, more-a whole crowd of ridiculous little men: fat dwarfs in red caps with tassels on them, chubby, gnome-like little men, quite insufferably familiar, frivolous, and irrepressible. For there was no doubt that they, at any rate, were mocking her. They were pointing at her, nodding, mimicking, standing on their heads, turning somersaults. Jane was not yet frightened; partly because the extreme warmth of the air at this open window made her feel drowsy. It was really quite ridiculous for the time of year. Her main feeling was one of indignation. A suspicion which had crossed her mind once or twice before, now returned to her with irresistible force; the suspicion that the real universe might be simply silly. It was closely mixed up with the memories of that grownup laughter-loud, careless, masculine laughter on the lips of bachelor uncles-which had often infuriated her in childhood, and from which the intense seriousness of her school debating society had offered such a grateful escape.

But a moment later she was very frightened indeed. The giantess rose. They were all coming at her. With a great glow and a noise like fire the flame-robed woman and the malapert dwarfs had all come into the house. They were in the room with her. The strange woman had a torch in her hand. It burned with terrible, blinding brightness, cracking, and sent up a cloud of dense black smoke, and filled the bedroom with a sticky, resinous smell. “If they’re not careful,” thought Jane, “they’ll set the house on fire.” But she had hardly time to think of that for her whole attention was fixed by the outrageous behaviour of the little men. They began making hay of the room. In a few seconds the bed was a mere chaos, the sheets on the floor, the blankets snatched up and used by the dwarfs for tossing the fattest of their company, the pillows hurtling through the air, feathers flying everywhere.

“Look out! Look out, can’t you?” shouted Jane, for the giantess was beginning to touch various parts of the room with her torch. She touched a vase on the mantelpiece. Instantly there rose from it a streak of colour which Jane took for fire. She was just moving to try to put it out when she saw that the same thing had happened to a picture on the wall. And then it happened faster and faster all round her. The very top-knots of the dwarfs were now on fire. But just as the terror of this became unbearable, Jane noticed that what was curling up from everything the torch had touched was not flame after all, but vegetation. Ivy and honeysuckle were growing up the legs of the bed, red roses were sprouting from the caps of the little men, and from every direction huge lilies rose to her knees and waist, shooting out their yellow tongues at her. The smells, the heat, the crowding, and the strangeness made her feel faint. It never occurred to her to think she was dreaming. People mistake dreams for visions: no one ever mistook a vision for a dream . . .

“Jane! Jane!” said the voice of Mrs. Dimble suddenly.

“What on earth is the matter?”

Jane sat up. The room was empty, but the bed had all been pulled to pieces. She had apparently been lying on the floor. She felt cold and very tired.

“What has happened?” repeated Mrs. Dimble.

“I don’t know,” said Jane.

“Are you ill, child?” asked Mother Dimble.

“I must see the Director at once,” said Jane. “It’s all right. Don’t bother. I can get up by myself . . . really. But I’d like to see the Director at once.”