Clive Lewis - That Hideous Strength

“Do you know,” said Ivy in a low voice, “that’s a thing I don’t quite understand. They’re so eerie, these ones that come to visit you. I wouldn’t go near that part of the house if I thought there was anything there, not if you paid me a hundred pounds. But I don’t feel like that about God. But He ought to be worse, if you see what I mean.”

“He was, once,” said the Director. “You are quite right about the Powers. Angels in general are not good company for men in general-even when they are good angels and good men. It’s all in St. Paul. But as for Maleldil himself, all that has changed: it was changed by what happened at Bethlehem.”

“It’s getting ever so near Christmas now,” said Ivy addressing the company in general.

“We shall have Mr. Maggs with us before then,” said Ransom.

“In a day or two, sir,” said Ivy.

“Was that only the wind?” said Grace Ironwood.

“It sounded to me like a horse,” said Mrs. Dimble.

“Here,” said MacPhee jumping up. “Get out of the way, Mr. Bultitude, till I get my gum boots. It’ll be those two horses of Broad’s again, tramping all over my celery trenches. If only you’d let me go to the police in the first instance. Why the man can’t keep them shut up . . .”-he was bundling himself into his mackintosh as he spoke the rest of the speech was inaudible.

“My crutch, please, Camilla,” said Ransom. “Come back, MacPhee. We will go to the door together, you and I. Ladies, stay where you are.”

There was a look on his face which some of those present had not seen before. The four women sat as if they had been turned to stone, with their eyes wide and staring. A moment later Ransom and MacPhee stood alone in the scullery. The back door was so shaking on its hinges with the wind that they did not know whether someone were knocking at it or not.

“Now,” said Ransom, “open it. And stand back behind it yourself.”

For a second MacPhee worked with the bolts. Then, whether he meant to disobey or not (a point which must remain doubtful) the storm flung the door against the wall and he was momentarily pinned behind it. Ransom, standing motionless, leaning forward on his crutch, saw in the light from the scullery, outlined against the blackness, a huge horse, all in a lather of sweat and foam, its yellow teeth laid bare, its nostrils wide and red, its ears flattened against its skull, and its eyes flaming. It had been ridden so close up to the door that its front hoofs rested on the doorstep. It had neither saddle, stirrup nor bridle; but at that very moment a man leapt off its back. He seemed both very tall and very fat, almost a giant. His reddish-grey hair and beard were blown all about his face so that it was hardly visible; and it was only after he had taken a step forward that Ransom noticed his clothes-the ragged, ill-fitting khaki coat, baggy trousers, and boots that had lost the toes.

In a great room at Belbury, where the fire blazed and wine and silver sparkled on side-tables, and a great bed occupied the centre of the floor, the Deputy Director watched in profound silence while four young men with reverential or medical heedfulness carried in a burden on a stretcher. As they removed the blankets and transferred the occupant of the stretcher to the bed, Wither’s mouth opened wider. His interest became so intense that for the moment the chaos of his face appeared ordered and he looked like an ordinary man. What he saw was a naked human body, alive, but apparently unconscious. He ordered the attendants to place hot-water bottles at its feet and raise the head with pillows; when they had done so and withdrawn he drew a chair to the foot of the bed and sat down to study the face of the sleeper. The head was very large, though perhaps it looked larger than it was because of the unkempt grey beard and the long and tangled grey hair. The face was weather-beaten in the extreme and the neck, where visible, already lean and scraggy with age. The eyes were shut and the lips wore a very slight smile. The total effect was ambiguous. Wither gazed at it for a long time and sometimes moved his head to see how it looked from a different angle-almost as if he searched for some trait he could not find and were disappointed. For nearly a quarter of an hour he sat thus: then the door opened and Professor Frost came softly into the room.

He walked to the bedside, bent down and looked closely into the stranger’s face. Then he walked round to the far side of the bed and did the same.

“Is he asleep?” whispered Wither.

“I think not. It is more like some kind of trance. What kind I don’t know.”

“You have no doubts, I trust?”

“Where did they find him?”

“In a dingle about quarter of a mile from the entrance to the souterrain. They had the track of bare feet almost all the way.”

“The souterrain itself was empty?”

“Yes. I had a report on that from Stone shortly after you left me.”

“You will make provision about Stone?”

“Yes. But what do you think? “-he pointed with his eyes to the bed.

“I think it is he,” said Frost. “The place is right. The nudity is hard to account for on any other hypothesis. The skull is the kind I expected.”

“But the face?”

“Yes. There are certain traits which are a little disquieting.”

“I could have sworn,” said Wither, “that I knew the look of a Master-even the look of one who could be made into a Master. You understand me . . . one sees at once that Straik or Studdock might do; that Miss Hardcastle, with all her excellent qualities, would not.”

“Yes. Perhaps we must be prepared for great crudities in . . . him. Who knows what the technique of the Atlantean Circle was really like?”

“Certainly, one must not be-ah-narrow-minded. One can suppose that the Masters of that age were not quite so sharply divided from the common people as we are. All sorts of emotional and even instinctive, elements were perhaps still tolerated in the Great Atlantean which we have had to discard.”

“One not only may suppose it, one must. We should not forget that the whole plan consists in the reunion of different kinds of the art.”

“Exactly. Perhaps one’s association with the Powers-their different time scale and all that-tends to make one forget how enormous the gap in time is by our human standards.”

“What we have here,” said Frost, pointing to the sleeper, “is not, you see, something from the fifth Century. It is the last vestige, surviving into the fifth Century, of something much more remote. Something that comes down from long before the Great Disaster, even from before primitive Druidism; something that takes us back to Numinor, to pre-glacial periods.”

“The whole experiment is perhaps more hazardous than we realised.”

“I have had occasion before,” said Frost, “to express the wish that you would not keep on introducing these emotional pseudo-statements into our scientific discussions.”

“My dear friend,” said Wither, without looking at him,

“I am quite aware that the subject you mention has been discussed between you and the Powers themselves. Quite aware. And I don’t doubt that you are equally well aware of certain discussions they have held with me about aspects of your own methods which are open to criticism. Nothing would be more futile-I might say more dangerous-than any attempt to introduce between ourselves those modes of oblique discipline which we properly apply to our inferiors. It is in your own interest that I venture to touch on this point.”

Instead of replying, Frost signalled to his companion. Both men became silent, their gaze fixed on the bed: for the Sleeper had opened his eyes.

The opening of the eyes flooded the whole face with meaning, but it was a meaning they could not interpret. The Sleeper seemed to be looking at them, but they were not quite sure that he saw them. As the seconds passed Wither’s main impression of the face was its caution. But there was nothing intense or uneasy about it. It was a habitual, unemphatic defensiveness which seemed to have behind it years of hard experience, quietly-perhaps even humorously-endured.