That Hideous Strength

‘I assure you, Mr Studdock,’ said the Deputy Director with an unusually far away look in his eye, ‘that you needn’t anticipate the slightest–er–the slightest difficulty on that point. There was never any idea of circumscribing your activities and your general influence on policy, much less your relations with your colleagues and what I might call in general the terms of reference under which you would be collaborating with us, without the fullest possible consideration of your own views and, indeed, your own advice. You will find us, Mr Studdock, if I might express myself in that way, a very happy family.’

‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me, Sir,’ said Mark. ‘I didn’t mean that at all. I only meant that I felt I should like some sort of idea of what exactly I should be doing if I came to you.’

‘Well now, when you speak of coming to us,’ said the Deputy Director, ‘that raises a point on which I hope there is no misunderstanding. I think we all agreed that no question of residence need be raised–I mean, at this stage. We thought, we all thought, that you should be left entirely free to carry on your work wherever you pleased. If you care to live in London or Cambridge–’

‘Edgestow,’ prompted Lord Feverstone.

‘Ah yes, Edgestow,’ here the Deputy Director turned round and addressed Feverstone. ‘I was just explaining to Mr–er–Studdock, and I feel sure you will fully agree with me, that nothing was further from the mind of the Committee than to dictate in any way, or even to advise, where Mr–where your friend should live. Of course, wherever he lives we should naturally place air transport and road transport at his disposal. I daresay, Lord Feverstone, you have already explained to him that he will find all questions of that sort will adjust themselves without the smallest difficulty.’

‘Really, Sir,’ said Mark, ‘I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I haven’t–I mean I shouldn’t have the smallest objection to living anywhere: I only–’

The Deputy Director interrupted him, if anything so gentle as Wither’s voice can be called an interruption. ‘But I assure you, Mr–er–I assure you, Sir, that there is not the smallest objection to your residing wherever you may find it convenient. There was never, at any stage, the slightest suggestion–’ But here Mark, almost in desperation, ventured to interrupt himself.

‘It is the exact nature of the work,’ he said, ‘and of my qualifications for it that I wanted to get clear.’

‘My dear friend,’ said the Deputy Director, ‘you need not have the slightest uneasiness in that direction. As I said before, you will find us a very happy family, and may feel perfectly satisfied that no questions as to your entire suitability have been agitating anyone’s mind in the least. I should not be offering you a position among us if there were the slightest danger of your not being completely welcome to all, or the least suspicion that your very valuable qualities were not fully appreciated. You are–you are among friends here, Mr Studdock. I should be the last person to advise you to connect yourself with any organisation where you ran the risk of being exposed–er–to disagreeable personal contacts.’

Mark did not ask again in so many words what the NICE wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room–a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.

‘You are very kind,’ he said. ‘The only thing I should like to get just a little clearer is the exact–well, the exact scope of the appointment.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Wither in a voice so low and rich that it was almost a sigh, ‘I am very glad you have raised this issue now in a quite informal way. Obviously neither you nor I would wish to commit ourselves, in this room, in any sense which was at all injurious to the powers of the Committee. I quite understand your motives and–er–respect them. We are not, of course, speaking of an Appointment in the quasi-technical sense of the term; it would be improper for both of us (though, you may well remind me, in different ways) to do so–or at least it might lead to certain inconveniences. But I think I can most definitely assure you that nobody wants to force you into any kind of straight waistcoat or bed of Procrustes. We do not really think, among ourselves, in terms of strictly demarcated functions, of course. I take it that men like you and me are–well, to put it frankly, hardly in the habit of using concepts of that type. Everyone in the Institute feels that his own work is not so much a departmental contribution to an end already defined as a moment or grade in the progressive self-definition of an organic whole.’

And Mark said–God forgive him, for he was young and shy and vain and timid, all in one–‘I do think that is so important. The elasticity of your organisation is one of the things that attracts me.’ After that, he had no further chance of bringing the Director to the point and whenever the slow, gentle voice ceased he found himself answering it in its own style, and apparently helpless to do otherwise despite the torturing recurrence of the question, ‘What are we both talking about?’ At the very end of the interview there came one moment of clarity. Mr Wither supposed that he, Mark, would find it convenient to join the NICE club: even for the next few days he would be freer as a member than as someone’s guest. Mark agreed and then flushed crimson like a small boy on learning that the easiest course was to become a life member at the cost of £200. He had not that amount in the bank. Of course if he had got the new job with its fifteen hundred a year, all would be well. But had he got it? Was there a job at all?

‘How silly,’ he said aloud, ‘I haven’t got my cheque book with me.’

A moment later he found himself on the stairs with Feverstone.

‘Well?’ asked Mark eagerly. Feverstone did not seem to hear him.

‘Well?’ repeated Mark. ‘When shall I know my fate? I mean, have I got the job?’

‘Hullo Guy!’ bawled Feverstone suddenly to a man in the hall beneath. Next moment he had trotted down to the foot of the stairs, grasped his friend warmly by the hand, and disappeared. Mark, following him more slowly, found himself in the hall, silent, alone, and self-conscious, among the groups and pairs of chattering men, who were all crossing it towards the big folding doors on his left.

It seemed to last long, this standing, this wondering what to do, this effort to look natural and not to catch the eyes of strangers. The noise and the agreeable smells which came from the folding doors made it obvious that people were going to lunch. Mark hesitated, uncertain of his own status. In the end, he decided that he couldn’t stand there looking like a fool any longer, and went in.

He had hoped that there would be several small tables at one of which he could have sat alone. But there was only a single long table, already so nearly filled that, after looking in vain for Feverstone, he had to sit down beside a stranger. ‘I suppose one sits where one likes?’ he murmured as he did so; but the stranger apparently did not hear. He was a bustling sort of man who was eating very quickly and talking at the same time to his neighbour on the other side.

‘That’s just it,’ he was saying. ‘As I told him, it makes no difference to me which way they settle it. I’ve no objection to the IJP people taking over the whole thing if that’s what the DD wants but what I dislike is one man being responsible for it when half the work is being done by someone else. As I said to him, you’ve now got three HD’s all tumbling over one another about some job that could really be done by a clerk. It’s becoming ridiculous. Look at what happened this morning.’ Conversation on these lines continued throughout the meal.

Although the food and the drinks were excellent, it was a relief to Mark when people began getting up from table. Following the general movement, he recrossed the hall and came into a large room furnished as a lounge where coffee was being served. Here at last he saw Feverstone. Indeed, it would have been difficult not to notice him for he was the centre of a group and laughing prodigiously. Mark wished to approach him, if only to find out whether he were expected to stay the night and, if so, whether a room had been assigned to him. But the knot of men round Feverstone was of that confidential kind which it is difficult to join. He moved towards one of the many tables and began turning over the glossy pages of an illustrated weekly. Every few seconds he looked up to see if there were any chance of getting a word with Feverstone alone. The fifth time he did so, he found himself looking into the face of one of his own colleagues, a Fellow of Bracton called William Hingest. The Progressive Element called him, though not to his face, Bill the Blizzard.

Hingest had not, as Curry anticipated, been present at the College Meeting and was hardly on speaking terms with Lord Feverstone. Mark realised with a certain awe that here was a man directly in touch with the NICE–one who started, so to speak, at a point beyond Feverstone. Hingest, who was a physical chemist, was one of the two scientists at Bracton who had a reputation outside England. I hope the reader has not been misled into supposing that the Fellows of Bracton were a specially distinguished body. It was certainly not the intention of the Progressive Element to elect mediocrities to fellowships, but their determination to elect ‘sound men’ cruelly limited their field of choice and, as Busby had once said, ‘You can’t have everything.’ Bill the Blizzard had an old-fashioned curly moustache in which white had almost, but not completely, triumphed over yellow, a large beak-like nose, and a bald head.

‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ said Mark with a hint of formality. He was always a little afraid of Hingest.

‘Huh?’ grunted Bill. ‘Eh? Oh, it’s you, Studdock? Didn’t know they’d secured your services here.’

‘I was sorry not to see you at the College Meeting yesterday,’ said Mark.

This was a lie. The Progressive Element always found Hingest’s presence an embarrassment. As a scientist–and the only really eminent scientist they had–he was their rightful property; but he was that hateful anomaly, the wrong sort of scientist. Glossop, who was a classic, was his chief friend in College. He had the air (the ‘affectation’ Curry called it) of not attaching much importance to his own revolutionary discoveries in chemistry and of valuing himself much more on being a Hingest: the family was of almost mythical antiquity, ‘never contaminated,’ as its nineteenth-century historian had said, ‘by traitor, placeman or baronetcy’. He had given particular offence on the occasion of de Broglie’s visit to Edgestow. The Frenchman had spent his spare time exclusively in Bill the Blizzard’s society, but when an enthusiastic junior Fellow had thrown out a feeler about the rich feast of science which the two savants must have shared, Bill the Blizzard had appeared to search his memory for a moment and then replied that he didn’t think they had got onto that subject. ‘Gassing Almanac de Gotha nonsense, I suppose,’ was Curry’s comment, though not in Hingest’s presence.

‘Eh? What’s that? College Meeting?’ said the Blizzard. ‘What were they talking about?’

‘About the sale of Bragdon Wood.’

‘All nonsense,’ muttered the Blizzard.

‘I hope you would have agreed with the decision we came to.’

‘It made no difference what decision they came to.’

‘Oh!’ said Mark with some surprise.

‘It was all nonsense. The NICE would have had the Wood in any case. They had powers to compel a sale.’

‘What an extraordinary thing! I was given to understand they were going to Cambridge if we didn’t sell.’

Hingest sniffed loudly.

‘Not a word of truth in it. As to its being an extraordinary thing, that depends on what you mean. There’s nothing extraordinary in the Fellows of Bracton talking all afternoon about an unreal issue. And there’s nothing extraordinary in the fact that the NICE should wish, if possible, to hand over to Bracton the odium of turning the heart of England into a cross between an abortive American hotel and a glorified gas works. The only real puzzle is why the NICE should want that bit of land.’

‘I suppose we shall find out as things go on.’

‘You may. I shan’t.’

‘Oh?’ said Mark interrogatively.

‘I’ve had enough of it,’ said Hingest, lowering his voice, ‘I’m leaving tonight. I don’t know what you were doing at Bracton, but if it was any good I’d advise you to go back and stick to it.’

‘Really!’ said Mark. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Doesn’t matter for an old fellow like me,’ said Hingest, ‘but they could play the devil with you. Of course it all depends on what a man likes.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘I haven’t fully made up my mind.’ He had been taught to regard Hingest as a warped reactionary. ‘I don’t even know yet what my job would be if I stayed.’

‘What’s your subject?’

‘Sociology.’

‘Huh,’ said Hingest. ‘In that case I can soon point you out the man you’d be under. A fellow called Steele. Over there by the window, do you see?’

‘Perhaps you could introduce me.’

‘You’re determined to stay then?’

‘Well, I suppose I ought at least to see him.’

‘All right,’ said Hingest. ‘No business of mine.’ Then he added in a louder voice, ‘Steele.’

Steele turned round. He was a tall, unsmiling man with that kind of face which, though long and horse-like, has nevertheless rather thick and pouting lips.

‘This is Studdock,’ said Hingest, ‘the new man for your department.’ Then he turned away.

‘Oh,’ said Steele. Then after a pause, ‘Did he say my department?’

‘That’s what he said,’ replied Mark with an attempt at a smile, ‘but perhaps he’s got it wrong. I’m supposed to be a sociologist–if that throws any light on it.’

‘I’m HD for Sociology all right,’ said Steele, ‘but this is the first I’ve heard about you. Who told you you were to be there?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘the whole thing is rather vague. I’ve just had a talk with the Deputy Director but we didn’t actually go into any details.’

‘How did you manage to see him?’

‘Lord Feverstone introduced me.’

Steele whistled. ‘I say, Cosser,’ he called out to a freckle-faced man who was passing by, ‘listen to this. Feverstone has just unloaded this chap on our department. Taken him straight to the DD without saying a word to me about it. What do you think of that?’

‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Cosser, hardly glancing at Mark but looking very hard at Steele.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mark, a little more loudly and a little more stiffly than he had yet spoken. ‘Don’t be alarmed. I seem to have been put in rather a false position. There must have been some misunderstanding. As a matter of fact I am, at the moment, merely having a look round. I’m not at all certain that I intend to stay in any case.’

Neither of the other two took any notice of this last suggestion.

‘That’s Feverstone all over,’ said Cosser to Steele.

Steele turned to Mark. ‘I shouldn’t advise you to take much notice of what Lord Feverstone says here,’ he remarked. ‘This isn’t his business at all.’

‘All I object to,’ said Mark, wishing that he could prevent his face from turning red, ‘is being put in a false position. I only came over as an experiment. It is a matter of indifference to me whether I take a job in the NICE or not.’

‘You see,’ said Steele to Cosser, ‘there isn’t really any room for a man in our show–specially for someone who doesn’t know the work. Unless they put him on the UL.’

‘That’s right,’ said Cosser.

‘Mr Studdock, I think,’ said a new voice at Mark’s elbow, a treble voice which seemed disproportionate to the huge hill of a man whom he saw when he turned his head. He recognised the speaker at once. His dark, smooth face and black hair were unmistakable, and so was the foreign accent. This was Professor Filostrato, the great physiologist, whom Mark had sat next to at a dinner about two years before. He was fat to that degree which is comic on the stage, but the effect was not funny in real life. Mark was charmed that such a man should have remembered him.

‘I am very glad you have come to join us,’ said Filostrato taking hold of Mark’s arm and gently piloting him away from Steele and Cosser.

‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mark, ‘I’m not sure that I have. I was brought over by Feverstone but he has disappeared, and Steele–I’d have been in his Department I suppose–doesn’t seem to know anything about me.’

‘Bah! Steele!’ said the Professor. ‘That is all a bagatelle. He get too big for his boots. He will be put in his place one of these days. It may be you who will put him. I have read all your work, si si. Do not consider him.’

‘I have a strong objection to being put in a false position–’ began Mark.

‘Listen, my friend,’ interrupted Filostrato, ‘you must put all such ideas out of your head. The first thing to realise is that the NICE is serious. It is nothing less than the existence of the human race that depends on our work: our real work, you comprehend? You will find frictions and impertinences among this canaglia, this rabble. They are no more to be regarded than your dislike of a brother officer when the battle is at its crisis.’

‘As long as I’m given something to do that is worth doing,’ said Mark, ‘I shouldn’t allow anything of that sort to interfere with it.’

‘Yes, yes, that is right. The work is more important than you can yet understand. You will see. These Steeles and Feverstones –they are of no consequence. As long as you have the good will of the Deputy Director, you snap your fingers at them. You need listen to no one but him, you comprehend? Ah–and there is one other. Do not have the Fairy for your enemy. For the rest–you laugh at them.’

‘The Fairy?’

‘Yes. Her they call the Fairy. Oh my God, a terrible Inglesaccia! She is the head of our police, the Institutional Police. Ecco, she come. I will present you. Miss Hardcastle, permit that I present to you Mr Studdock.’

Mark found himself writhing from the stoker’s or carter’s hand-grip of a big woman in a black, short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was rather thickly built than fat and her iron-grey hair was cropped short. Her face was square, stern and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real shape of her mouth was her only concession to fashion and she rolled or chewed a long black cheroot, unlit, between her teeth. As she talked she had a habit of removing this, staring intently at the mixture of lipstick and saliva on its mangled end, and then replacing it more firmly than before. She sat down immediately in a chair close to where Mark was standing, flung her right leg over one of the arms, and fixed him with a gaze of cold intimacy.

Click–clack, distinct in the silence, where Jane stood waiting, came the tread of the person on the other side of the wall. Then the door opened and Jane found herself facing a tall woman of about her own age. This person looked at her with keen, non-committal eyes.

‘Does a Miss Ironwood live here?’ said Jane.

‘Yes,’ said the other girl, neither opening the door any further nor standing aside.

‘I want to see her, please,’ said Jane.

‘Have you an appointment?’ said the tall woman.

‘Well, not exactly,’ said Jane. ‘I was directed here by Dr Dimble who knows Miss Ironwood. He said I shouldn’t need an appointment.’

‘Oh, if you’re from Dr Dimble that is another matter,’ said the woman. ‘Come in. Now wait a moment while I attend to this lock. That’s better. Now we’re all right. There’s not room for two on this path so you must excuse me if I go first.’

The woman led her along a brick path beside a wall on which fruit trees were growing, and then to the left along a mossy path with gooseberry bushes on each side. Then came a little lawn with a see-saw in the middle of it, and beyond that a greenhouse. Here they found themselves in the sort of hamlet that sometimes occurs in the purlieus of a large garden–walking in fact down a little street which had a barn and a stable on one side and, on the other, a second greenhouse, and a potting shed and a pigstye–inhabited, as the grunts and the not wholly agreeable smell informed her. After that were narrow paths across a vegetable garden that seemed to be on a fairly steep hillside, and then, rose bushes, all stiff and prickly in their winter garb. At one place, they were going along a path made of single planks. This reminded Jane of something. It was a very large garden. It was like–like–yes, now she had it: it was like the garden in Peter Rabbit. Or was it like the garden in the Romance of the Rose? No, not in the least like really. Or like Klingsor’s garden? Or the garden in Alice? Or like the garden on the top of some Mesopotamian ziggurat which had probably given rise to the whole legend of Paradise? Or simply like all walled gardens? Freud said we liked gardens because they were symbols of the female body. But that must be a man’s point of view. Presumably gardens meant something different in women’s dreams. Or did they? Did men and women both feel interested in the female body and even, though it sounded ridiculous, in almost the same way? A sentence rose to her memory. ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god.’ Where on earth had she read that? And, incidentally, what frightful nonsense she had been thinking for the last minute or so! She shook off all these ideas about gardens and determined to pull herself together. A curious feeling that she was now on hostile, or at least alien, ground warned her to keep all her wits about her. At that moment, they suddenly emerged from between plantations of rhododendron and laurel, and found themselves at a small side door, flanked by a water butt, in the long wall of a large house. Just as they did so a window clapped shut upstairs.

A minute or two later Jane was sitting waiting in a large sparely furnished room with a shut stove to warm it. Most of the floor was bare, and the walls, above the waist-high wainscotting, were of greyish white plaster, so that the whole effect was faintly austere and conventual. The tall woman’s tread died away in the passages and the room became very quiet when it had done so. Occasionally the cawing of rooks could be heard. ‘I’ve let myself in for it now,’ thought Jane. ‘I shall have to tell this woman that dream and she’ll ask all sorts of questions.’ She considered herself, in general, a modern person who could talk without embarrassment of anything, but it began to look quite different as she sat in that room. All sorts of secret reservations in her programme of frankness–things which, she now realised, she had set apart as never to be told –came creeping back into consciousness. It was surprising that very few of them were connected with sex. ‘In dentists’,’ said Jane, ‘they at least leave illustrated papers in the waiting room.’ She got up and opened the one book that lay on the table in the middle of the room. Instantly her eyes lit on the following words: ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the–’

At that moment the door was suddenly opened. Jane turned crimson as she shut the book and looked up. The same girl who had first let her in had apparently just opened the door and was still standing in the doorway. Jane now conceived for her that almost passionate admiration which women, more often than is supposed, feel for other women whose beauty is not of their own type. It would be nice, Jane thought, to be like that–so straight, so forthright, so valiant, so fit to be mounted on a horse, and so divinely tall.