That Hideous Strength

V

“It sounds rather like a mythological picture by Titian come to life,” said the Director with a smile, when Jane had described her experience in the lodge.

“Yes, but . . .” said Jane, and then stopped. “I see,” she began again, “it was very like that. Not only the woman and the . . . the dwarfs . . . but the glow. As if the air were on fire. But I always thought I liked Titian. I suppose I wasn’t really taking the pictures seriously enough. Just chattering about ‘the Renaissance’ the way one did.”

“You didn’t like it when it came out into real life?” Jane shook her head.

“Was it real, sir?” she asked presently. “Are there such things?”

“Yes,” said the Director, “it was real enough. Oh . . . there are thousands of things within this square mile that I don’t know about yet. And I dare say that the presence of Merlinus brings out certain things. We are not living exactly in the twentieth century as long as he’s here. We overlap a bit; the focus is blurred. And you yourself . . . you are a seer. You were perhaps bound to meet her. She’s what you’ll get if you won’t have the other.”

“How do you mean, sir?” said Jane.

“You said she was a little like Mother Dimble. So she is. But Mother Dimble with something left out. Mother Dimble is friends with all that world as Merlinus is friends with the woods and rivers. But he isn’t a wood or a river himself. She has not rejected it, but she has baptized it. She is a Christian wife; and you, you know, are not. Neither are you a virgin. You have put yourself where you must meet that Old Woman and you have rejected all that has happened to her since Maleldil came to Earth. So you get her raw-not stronger than Mother Dimble would find her, but untransformed, demoniac. And you don’t like it. Hasn’t that been the history of your life?”

“You mean,” said Jane slowly, “I’ve been repressing something.”

The Director laughed just that loud, assured, bachelor laughter which had often infuriated her on other lips.

“Yes,” he said. “But don’t think I’m talking of Freudian repressions. He knew only half the facts. It isn’t a question of inhibitions-inculcated shame-against natural desire. I’m afraid there’s no niche in the world for people that won’t be either Pagan or Christian. Just imagine a man who was too dainty to eat with his fingers and yet wouldn’t use forks!”

His laughter rather than his words had reddened Jane’s cheeks, and she was staring at him open-mouthed . . . Assuredly the Director was not in the least like Mother Dimble: but an odious realisation that he was, in this matter, on Mother Dimble’s side-that he also, though he did not belong to that hot-coloured, archaic world, stood somehow in good diplomatic relations with it, from which she was excluded-had struck her like a blow. Some old female dream of finding a man who “really understood” was being insulted. She took it for granted, half unconsciously, that the Director was the most virginal of his sex: but she had not realised that this would leave his masculinity still on the other side of the stream from herself and even steeper, more emphatic, than that of common men. Some knowledge of a world beyond nature she had already gained from living in his house, and more from fear of death that night in the dingle. But she had been conceiving this world as “spiritual” in the negative sense-as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away. Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent. How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated-but in ever larger and more disturbing modes-on the highest levels of all?

“Yes,” said the Director, “there is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can by-pass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing-the gold lion, the bearded bull-which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree with your adversary quickly.”

“You mean I shall have to become a Christian?” said Jane.

“It looks like it,” said the Director.

“But-I still don’t see what that had to do with . . . with Mark,” said Jane. This was perhaps not perfectly true. The vision of the universe which she had begun to see in the last few minutes had a curiously stormy quality about it. It was bright, darting, and overpowering. Old Testament imagery of eyes and wheels for the first time in her life took on some possibility of meaning. And mixed with this was the sense that she had been manoeuvred into a false position. It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey formalised one: hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained-glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like. And where Mark stood in all this new world she did not know. Certainly not quite in his old place. Something which she liked to think of as the opposite of Mark had been taken away. Something civilised, or modern, or scholarly, or (of late) spiritual which did not want to possess her, which valued her for the odd collection of qualities she called “herself,” something without hands that gripped and without demands upon her. But if there were no such thing? Playing for time, she asked,

“Who was that Huge Woman?”

“I’m not sure,” said the Director. “But I think I can make a guess. Did you know that all the planets are represented in each?”

“No, sir. I didn’t.”

“Apparently they are. There is no Oyarsa in Heaven who has not got his representative on Earth. And there is no world where you could not meet a little unfallen partner of our own black Archon, a kind of other self. That is why there was an Italian Saturn as well as a heavenly one, and a Cretan Jove as well as an Olympian. It was these earthly wraiths of the high intelligences that men met in old times when they reported that they had seen the gods. It was with those that a man like Merlin was (at times) conversant. Nothing from beyond the Moon ever really descended. What concerns you more, there is a terrestrial as well as a celestial Venus-Perelandra’s wraith as w ell as Perelandra.”

“And you think . . . ?”

“I do: I have long known that this house is deeply under her influence. There is even copper in the soil. Also-the earth-Venus will be specially active here at present. For it is to-night that her heavenly archtype will really descend.”

“I had forgotten,” said Jane.

“You will not forget it once it has happened. All of you had better stay together-in the kitchen, perhaps. Do not come upstairs. To-night I will bring Merlin before my masters, all five of them-Viritrilbia, Perelandra, Malacandra, Glund, and Lurga. He will be opened. Powers will pass into him.”

“What will he do, sir?”

The Director laughed. “The first step is easy. The enemies at Belbury are already looking for experts in archaic western dialects, preferably Celtic. We shall send them an interpreter! Yes, by the splendour of Christ, we will send them one. ‘Upon them He a spirit of frenzy sent to call in haste for their destroyer.’ They have advertised in the papers for one! And after the first step . . . well, you know, it will be easy. In fighting those who serve devils one always has this on one’s side; their masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own masters finish the work for us. They break their tools.”

There was a sudden knock on the door and Grace Ironwood entered.

“Ivy is back, sir,” she said. “I think you’d better see her. No; she’s alone. She never saw her husband. The sentence is over but they haven’t released him. He’s been sent on to Belbury for remedial treatment. Under some new regulation. Apparently it does not require a sentence from a court . . . but she’s not very coherent. She is in great distress.”