Clive Lewis - That Hideous Strength

“Dissolve the Company, do you mean?” said Dimble.

“Aye, I do,” said MacPhee.

The Director looked up with a smile. “But,” he said, “I have no power to dissolve it.”

“In that case,” said MacPhee, “I must ask what authority you had to bring it together?”

“I never brought it together,” said the Director. Then, after glancing round the company, he added: “There is some strange misunderstanding here! Were you all under the impression I had selected you?”

“Were you?” he repeated, when no one answered.

“Well,” said Dimble, “as regards myself I fully realise that the thing has come about more or less unconsciously-even accidentally. There was no moment at which you asked me to join a definite movement, or anything of that kind. That is why I have always regarded myself as a sort of camp follower. I had assumed that the others were in a more regular position.”

“You know why Camilla and I are here, sir,” said Denniston. “We certainly didn’t intend or foresee how we were going to be employed.”

Grace Ironwood looked up with a set expression on her face, which had grown rather pale. “Do you wish . . . ?” she began.

The Director laid his hand on her arm. “No,” he said, “no. There is no need for all these stories to be told.”

MacPhee’s stern features relaxed into a broad grin. “I see what you’re driving at,” he said. “We’ve all been playing blind-man’s buff, I doubt. But I’ll take leave to observe, Dr. Ransom, that you carry things a wee bit high. I don’t just remember how you came to be called Director: but from that title and from one or two other indications a man would have thought you behaved more like the leader of an organisation than the host at a house-party.”

“I am the Director,” said Ransom, smiling. “Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyeresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me-as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us-sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organisation: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any one of you permission to leave my household.”

For a time there was complete silence in the Blue Room, except for the crackling of the fire.

“If there is nothing more to discuss,” said Grace Ironwood presently, “perhaps we had better leave the Director to rest.”

MacPhee rose and dusted some snuff off the baggy knees of his trousers-thus preparing a wholly novel adventure for the mice when they next came out in obedience to the Director’s whistle.

“I have no notion,” he said, “of leaving this house if anyone wishes me to stay. But as regards the general hypothesis on which the Director appears to be acting and the very peculiar authority he claims, I absolutely reserve my judgement. You know well, Mr. Director, in what sense I have, and in what sense I have not, complete confidence in yourself.”

The Director laughed. “Heaven forbid,” he said, “that I should claim to know what goes on in the two halves of your head, MacPhee, much less how you connect them. But I know-what matters much more-the kind of confidence I have in you. But won’t you sit down? There is much more to be said.”

MacPhee resumed his chair, Grace Ironwood, who had been sitting bolt upright in hers, relaxed, and the Director spoke.

“We have learned to-night,” he said, “if not what the real power behind our enemies is doing, at least the form in which it is embodied at Belbury. We therefore know something about one of the two attacks which are about to be made on our race. But I’m thinking of the other.”

“Yes,” said Camilla earnestly, “the other.”

“Meaning by that?” asked MacPhee.

“Meaning,” said Ransom, “whatever is under Bragdon Wood.”

“You’re still thinking about that?” said the Ulsterman.

“I am thinking of almost nothing else,” said the Director. “We knew already that the enemy wanted the Wood. Some of us guessed why. Now Jane has seen-or rather felt-in a vision what it is they are looking for in Bragdon. It may be the greater danger of the two. But what is certain is that the greatest danger of all is the junction of the enemies’ forces. He is staking everything on that. When the new power from Belbury joins up with the old power under Bragdon Wood, Logres-indeed Man-will be almost surrounded. For us everything turns on preventing that junction. That is the point at which we must be ready both to kill and die. But we cannot strike yet. We cannot get into Bragdon and start excavating for ourselves. There must be a moment when they find him-it. I have no doubt we shall be told in one way or another. Till then we must wait.”

“I don’t believe a word of all that other story,” said MacPhee.

“I thought,” said Miss Ironwood, “we weren’t to use words like believe. I thought we were only to state facts and exhibit implications.”

“If you two quarrel much more,” said the Director, “I think I’ll make you marry one another.”

At the beginning the grand mystery for the Company had been why the enemy wanted Bragdon Wood. The land was unsuitable and could be made fit to bear a building on the scale they proposed only by the costliest preliminary work; and Edgestow itself was not an obviously convenient place. By intense study in collaboration with Dr. Dimble and despite the continued scepticism of MacPhee the Director had at last come to a certain conclusion. Dimble and he and the Dennistons shared between them a knowledge of Arthurian Britain which orthodox scholarship will probably not reach for some centuries. They knew that Edgestow lay in what had been the very heart of ancient Logres, that the village of Cure Hardy preserved the name of Ozana le Coeur Hardi, and that a historical Merlin had once worked in what was now Bragdon Wood.

What exactly he had done there they did not know; but they had all, by various routes, come too far either to consider his art mere legend and imposture, or to equate it exactly with what the Renaissance called Magic. Dimble even maintained that a good critic, by his sensibility alone, could detect the difference between the traces which the two things had left on literature. “What common measure is there,” he would ask, “between ceremonial occultists like Faustus and Prospero and Archimago with their midnight studies, their forbidden books, their attendant fiends or elementals, and a figure like Merlin who seems to produce his results simply by being Merlin?” And Ransom agreed. He thought that Merlin’s art was the last survival of something older and different-something brought to Western Europe after the fall of Numinor and going back to an era in which the general relations of mind and matter on this planet had been other than those we know. It had probably differed from Renaissance Magic profoundly. It had possibly (though this was doubtful) been less guilty: it had certainly been more effective. For Paracelsus and Agrippa and the rest had achieved little or nothing: Bacon himself-no Enemy to magic except on this account-reported that the magicians “attained not to greatness and certainty of works.” The whole Renaissance outburst of forbidden arts had, it seemed, been a method of losing one’s soul on singularly unfavourable terms. But the older Art had been a different proposition.

But if the only possible attraction of Bragdon lay in its association with the last vestiges of Atlantean magic, this told the Company something else. It told them that the N.I.C.E . . . at its core, was not concerned solely with modern or materialistic forms of power. It told the Director, in fact, that there was Eldilic energy and Eldilic knowledge behind it. It was, of course, another question whether its human members knew of the dark powers who were their real organisers. And in the long run this question was not perhaps important. As Ransom himself had said more than once, “Whether they know it or whether they don’t, much the same sort of things are going to happen. It’s not a question of how the Belbury people are going to act-the Dark-Eldils will see to that-but of how they will think about their actions. They’ll go to Bragdon: it remains to be seen whether any of them will know the real reason why they’re going there, or whether they’ll all fudge up some theory of soils, or air, or etheric tensions, to explain it.”