Clive Lewis - That Hideous Strength

“How lovely it’s looking!” said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.

“You’d better take a good look at it then,” said Dr. Dimble.

“What do you mean?” asked Jane.

“Haven’t you told her?” said Dr. Dimble to his wife.

“I haven’t screwed myself up to it yet,” said Mrs. Dimble. “Besides, poor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jane.

“Your own college is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.”

“Oh, Mrs. Dimble!” exclaimed Jane. “And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.”

“There you are!” said Mrs. Dimble. “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr. Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality-”

“Mark never talks to me about College business.”

“Good husbands never do,” said Dr. Dimble. “At least only about the business of other people’s colleges. That’s why Margaret knows all about Bracton and nothing about Northumberland. Is no one coming in to have lunch?”

Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.

“You’ll have to wait for your lunch till I’ve seen Jane’s new hat,” said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting: and though Mrs. Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter. When the hat was being put away again Mrs. Dimble suddenly said:

“There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

“Wrong,” said Jane. “Why? What should there be?”

“You’re not looking yourself.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Jane, aloud. Mentally she added: “She’s dying to know whether I’m going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is.”

“Do you hate being kissed?” said Mrs. Dimble unexpectedly.

“Do I hate being kissed? “thought Jane to herself.

“That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women.” She had intended to reply “Of course not,” but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs. Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. When she thought of her childhood Jane usually remembered those occasions on which the voluminous embrace of nurse or mother had been unwelcome and resisted as an insult to one’s maturity: now, for the moment, she was back in those forgotten, yet not infrequent, times when fear or misery induced a willing surrender and surrender brought comfort. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life: yet before they went downstairs she had told Mrs. Dimble that she was not going to have a baby but was a bit depressed from being very much alone and from a nightmare.

During lunch Dr. Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. “It’s really wonderful,” he said, “how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background on the other side of Arthur, so to speak-there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan ‘set all the country in fire with ladies that were enchantresses.’ Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?”

“How do you mean, Dr. Dimble?” said Jane.

“Well, wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin-something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But farther up country, in the out-of the-way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the Druidical religion.”

“And which would Arthur himself have been?” said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words “rather like Spanish.”

“That’s just the point,” said Dr. Dimble. “One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There’d be jealousy from his own British family, and the Romanised section-the Lancelots and Lionels would-look down on the Britons. That’d be why Kay is always represented as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that under-tow, that tug back to Druidism.”

“And where would Merlin be?”

“Yes . . . He’s the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil: yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid: yet he knows all about the Grail. He’s ‘the devil’s son’. but then Layamon goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn’t have been bad after all. You remember: ‘There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.’”

“It is rather puzzling. I hadn’t thought of it before.”

“I often wonder,” said Dr. Dimble, “whether Merlin doesn’t represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about-something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers.”

“What a horrid idea,” said Mrs. Dimble, who had noticed that Jane seemed to be preoccupied. “Anyway, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all, and he’s safely dead and buried under Bragdon Wood as we all know.”

“Buried but not dead, according to the story,” corrected Dr. Dimble.

“Ugh!” said Jane involuntarily, but Dr. Dimble was musing aloud.

“I wonder what they will find if they start digging up that place for the foundations of their N.I.C.E . . .” he said.

“First mud and then water,” said Mrs. Dimble.

“That’s why they can’t really build it there.”

“So you’d think,” said her husband. “And if so, why should they want to come here at all? A little cockney like Jules is not likely to be influenced by any poetic fancy about Merlin’s mantle having fallen on him!”

“Merlin’s mantle indeed!” said Mrs. Dimble.

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “It’s a rum idea. I dare say some of his set would like to recover the mantle well enough. Whether they’ll be big enough to fill it is another matter! I don’t think they’d like it if the old man himself came back to life along with it.”

“That child’s going to faint,” said Mrs. Dimble suddenly jumping up.

“Hullo! What’s the matter?” said Dr. Dimble, looking with amazement at Jane’s face. “Is the room too hot for you?”