That Hideous Strength

III

MacPhee, who had just been refuting both Ransom and Alcasan’s head by a two-edged argument which seemed unanswerable in the dream but which he never afterwards remembered, found himself violently waked by someone shaking his shoulder. He suddenly perceived that he was cold and his left foot was numb. Then he saw Denniston’s face looking into his own. The scullery seemed full of people-Denniston and Dimble and Jane. They appeared extremely bedraggled, torn and muddy and wet.

“Are you all right?” Denniston was saying. “I’ve been trying to wake you for several minutes.”

“All right?” said MacPhee, swallowing once or twice and licking his lips. “Aye, I’m all right.” Then he sat upright. “There’s been a-a man here,” he said.

“What sort of a man?” asked Dimble.

“Well,” said MacPhee, “as to that . . . it’s not just so easy . . . I fell asleep talking to him, to tell you the truth. I can’t just bring to mind what we were saying.”

The others exchanged glances. Though MacPhee was fond of a little hot toddy on winter nights, he was a sober man: they had never seen him like this before. Next moment he jumped to his feet.

“Lord save us!” he exclaimed. “He had the Director here. Quick! We must search the house and the garden. It was some kind of impostor or spy. I know now what’s wrong with me. I’ve been hypnotised. There was a horse, too. I mind the horse.”

This last detail had an immediate effect on his hearers. Denniston flung open the kitchen door and the whole party surged in after him. For a second they saw indistinct forms in the deep, red light of a large fire which had not been attended to for some hours: then, as Denniston found the switch and turned on the light, all drew a deep breath. The four women sat fast asleep. The jackdaw slept, perched on the back of an empty chair. Mr. Bultitude, stretched out on his side across the hearth, slept also: his tiny, child-like snore, so disproportionate to his bulk, was audible in the momentary silence. Mrs. Dimble, bunched in what seemed a comfortless position, was sleeping with her head on the table, a half darned sock still clasped on her knees. Dimble looked at her with that uncurable pity which men feel for any sleeper, but specially for a wife. Camilla, who had been in the rocking-chair, was curled up in an attitude which was full of grace, like that of an animal accustomed to sleep anywhere. Mrs. Maggs slept with her kind, commonplace mouth wide open; and Grace Ironwood, bolt upright as if she were awake, but with the head sagging a little to one side, seemed to submit with austere patience to the humiliation of unconsciousness.

“They’re all right,” said MacPhee from behind. “It’s just the same as he did to me. We’ve no time to wake them. Get on.”

They passed from the kitchen into the flagged passage. To all of them except MacPhee the silence of the house seemed intense after their buffeting in the wind and rain. The lights as they switched them on successively revealed empty rooms and empty passages which wore the abandoned look of indoor midnight-fires dead in the grates, an evening paper on a sofa, a clock that had stopped. But no one had really expected to find much else on the ground floor.

“Now for upstairs,” said Dimble.

“The lights are on upstairs,” said Jane, as they all came to the foot of the staircase.

“We turned them on ourselves from the passage,” said Dimble.

“I don’t think we did,” said Denniston.

“Excuse me,” said Dimble to MacPhee, “I think perhaps I’d better go first.”

Up to the first landing they were in darkness; on the second and last the light from the first floor fell. At each landing the stair made a right-angled turn, so that till you reached the second you could not see the lobby on the floor above. Jane and Denniston, who were last, saw MacPhee and Dimble stepped dead on the second landing: their faces in profile lit up, the backs of their heads in darkness. The Ulsterman’s mouth was shut like a trap, his expression hostile and afraid. Dimble was open-mouthed. Then, forcing her tired limbs to run, Jane got up beside them and saw what they saw.

Looking down on them from the balustrade were two men, one clothed in sweepy garments of red and the other in blue. It was the Director who wore blue, and for one instant a thought that was pure nightmare crossed Jane’s mind. The two robed figures looked to be two of the same sort . . . and what, after all, did she know of this Director who had conjured her into his house and made her dream dreams and taught her the fear of Hell that very night? And there they were, the pair of them, talking their secrets and doing whatever such people would do, when they had emptied the house or laid its inhabitants to sleep. The man who had been dug up out of the earth and the man who had been in outer space . . . and the one had told them that the other was an enemy, and now, the moment they met, here were the two of them, run together like two drops of quicksilver. All this time she had hardly looked at the Stranger. The Director seemed to have laid aside his crutch, and Jane had hardly seen him standing so straight and still before. The light so fell on his beard that it became a kind of halo; and on top of his head also she caught the glint of gold. Suddenly, while she thought of these things, she found that her eyes were looking straight into the eyes of the Stranger. Next moment she had noticed his size. The man was monstrous. And the two men were allies. And the Stranger was speaking and pointing at her as he spoke.

She did not understand the words: but Dimble did, and heard Merlin saying in what seemed to him a rather strange kind of Latin:

“Sir, you have in your house the falsest lady of any at this time alive.”

And Dimble heard the Director answer in the same language.

“Sir, you are mistaken. She is doubtless like all of us a sinner: but the woman is chaste.”

“Sir,” said Merlin, “know well that she has done in Logres a thing of which no less sorrow shall come than came of the stroke that Balinus struck. For, sir, it was the purpose of God that she and her lord should between them have begotten a child by whom the enemies should have been put out of Logres for a thousand years.

“She is but lately married,” said Ransom. “The child may yet be born.”

“Sir,” said Merlin, “be assured that the child will never be born, for the hour of its begetting is passed. Of their own will they are barren: I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you. For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again.”

“Enough said,” answered Ransom. The woman perceives that we are speaking of her.”

“It would be great charity,” said Merlin, “if you gave order that her head should be cut from her shoulders; for it is a weariness to look at her.”

Jane, though she had a smattering of Latin, had not understood their conversation. The accent was unfamiliar, and the old Druid used a vocabulary that was far beyond her reading-the Latin of a man to whom Apuleius and Martianus Capella were the primary classics and whose elegances resembled those of the Hisperica Famina. But Dimble had followed it. He thrust Jane behind him and called out:

“Ransom! What in heaven’s name is the meaning of this?”

Merlin spoke again in Latin, and Ransom was just turning to answer him when Dimble interrupted:

“Answer us,” he said. “What has happened? Why are you dressed up like that? What are you doing with that bloodthirsty old man?”

MacPhee, who had followed the Latin even less than Jane, but who had been staring at Merlin as an angry terrier stares at a Newfoundland dog which has invaded its own garden, broke into the conversation.

“Dr. Ransom,” he said. “I don’t know who the big man is and I’m no Latinist. But I know well that you’ve kept me under your eye all this night against my own expressed will, and allowed me to be drugged and hypnotised. It gives me little pleasure, I assure you, to see yourself dressed up like something out of a pantomime and standing there hand-in-glove with that yogi, or shaman, or priest, or whatever he is. And you can tell him he need not look at me the way he’s doing. I’m not afraid of him. And as for my own life and limb-if you, Dr. Ransom, have changed sides after all that’s come and gone, I don’t know that I’ve much more use for either. But though I may be killed, I’m not going to be made a fool of. We’re waiting for an explanation.”

The Director looked down on them in silence for a few seconds.

“Has it really come to this?” he said. “Does not one of you trust me?”

“I do, sir,” said Jane suddenly.

“These appeals to the passions and emotions,” said MacPhee, “are nothing to the purpose. I could cry as well as anyone this moment if I gave my mind to it.”

“Well,” said the Director, after a pause, “there is some excuse for you all, for we have all been mistaken. So has the enemy. This man is Merlinus Ambrosius. They thought that if he came back he would be on their side. I find he is on ours. You, Dimble, ought to realise that this was always a possibility.”

“That is true,” said Dimble. “I suppose it was-well the look of the thing-you and he standing there together: like that. And his appalling bloodthirstiness.”

“I have been startled by it myself,” said Ransom. “But after all we had no right to expect that his penal code would be that of the nineteenth century. I find it difficult, too, to make him understand that I am not an absolute monarch.”

“Is-is he a Christian?” asked Dimble.

“Yes,” said Ransom. “As for my clothes, I have for once put on the dress of my office to do him honour, and because I was ashamed. He mistook MacPhee and me for scullions or stable-boys. In his days, you see, men did not, except for necessity, go about in shapeless sacks of cloth, and drab was not a favourite colour.”

At this point Merlin spoke again. Dimble and the Director, who alone could follow his speech, heard him say, “Who are these people? If they are your slaves, why do they do you no reverence? If they are enemies, why do we not destroy them?”

“They are my friends,” began Ransom in Latin, but MacPhee interrupted.

“Do I understand, Dr. Ransom,” he said, “that you are asking us to accept this person as a member of our organisation?”

“I am afraid,” said the Director, “I cannot put it that way. He is a member of the organisation. And I must command you all to accept him.”

“And secondly,” continued MacPhee, “I must ask what enquiries have been made into his credentials.”

“I am fully satisfied,” answered the Director. “I am as sure of his good faith as of yours.”

“But the grounds of your confidence?” persisted MacPhee. “Are we not to hear them?”

“It would be hard,” said the Director, “to explain to you my reasons for trusting Merlinus Ambrosius: but no harder than to explain to him why, despite many appearances which might be misunderstood, I trust you.” There was just the ghost of a smile about his mouth as he said this. Then Merlin spoke to him again in Latin and he replied. After that Merlin addressed Dimble.

“The Pendragon tells me,” he said in his unmoved voice, “that you accuse me for a fierce and cruel man. It is a charge I never heard before. A third part of my substance I gave to widows and poor men. I never sought the death of any but felons and heathen Saxons. As for the woman, she may live for me. I am not master in this house. But would it be such a great matter if her head were struck off? Do not queens and ladies who would disdain her as their tire-woman go to the fire for less? Even that gallows bird (cruciarius) beside you-I mean you, fellow, though you speak nothing but your own barbarous tongue; you with the face like sour milk and the voice like a saw in a hard log and the legs like a crane’s-even that cutpurse (sector zonarius), though I would have him to the gatehouse, yet the rope should be used on his back, not his throat.”

MacPhee who realised, though without understanding the words, that he was the subject of some unfavourable comment, stood listening with that expression of entirely suspended judgement which is commoner in Northern Ireland and the Scotch lowlands than in England.

“Mr. Director “he said, when Merlin had finished, “I would be very greatly obliged if--”

“Come,” said the Director suddenly, “we have none of us slept to-night. Arthur, will you come and light a fire for our guest in the big room at the north end of this passage? And would someone wake the women. Ask them to bring him up refreshments. A bottle of Burgundy and whatever you have cold. And then, all to bed. We need not stir early in the morning. All is going to be very well.”