The Complete Works: Fantasy & Sci-Fi Novels, Religious Studies, Poetry & Autobiography. C. S. Lewis
say?”
“Well, my French wasn’t quite good enough to follow it. It spoke in a queer way. In starts—like a man who’s out of breath. With no proper expression. And of course it couldn’t turn itself this way or that, the way a—a real person—does.”
“Did you understand any of what was said?”
“Not very much. The fat man seemed to be introducing Mark to it. It said something to him. Then Mark tried to answer. I could follow him all right, his French isn’t much better than mine.”
“What did he say?”
“He said something about ‘doing it in a few days if it was possible.’”
“Was that all?”
“Very nearly. You see Mark couldn’t stand it. I knew he wouldn’t be able to: I remember, idiotically, in the dream, I wanted to tell him. I saw he was going to fall. I think I tried to shout out to the other two, ‘He’s going to fall.’ But, of course, I couldn’t. He was sick too. Then they got him out of the room.”
All three were silent for a few seconds.
“Was that all?” said Miss Ironwood.
“Yes,” said Jane. “That’s all I remember. I think I woke up then.”
The Director took a deep breath. “Well!” he said, glancing at Miss Ironwood, “it becomes plainer and plainer. We must hold a council at once. Is everyone here?”
“No. Dr. Dimble has had to go into Edgestow, into College, to take pupils. He won’t be back till evening.”
“Then we must hold the council this evening. Make all arrangements.” He paused for a moment and then turned to Jane.
“I am afraid this is very bad for you, my dear,” he said; “and worse for him.”
“You mean for Mark, sir?”
“Yes. Don’t think hardly of him. He is suffering. If we are defeated we shall all go down with him. If we win we will rescue him; he cannot be far gone yet.” He paused, smiled, and added, “We are quite used to trouble about husbands here, you know. Poor Ivy’s is in jail.”
“In jail?”
“Oh yes—for ordinary theft. But quite a good fellow. He’ll be all right again.”
Though Jane had felt horror, even to the point of nausea, at the sight (in her dream) of Mark’s real surroundings and associates, it had been horror that carried a certain grandeur and mystery with it. The sudden equation between his predicament and that of a common convict whipped the blood to her cheeks. She said nothing.
“One other thing,” continued the Director. “You will not misunderstand it if I exclude you from our council to-night.”
“Of course not, sir,” said Jane, in fact, misunderstanding it very much.
“You see,” he said, “MacPhee takes the line that if you hear things talked of you will carry ideas of them into your sleep and that will destroy the evidential value of your dreams. And it’s not very easy to refute him. He is our sceptic; a very important office.”
“I quite understand,” said Jane.
“That applies, of course,” said the Director, “only to things we don’t know yet. You mustn’t hear our guesses, you mustn’t be there when we’re puzzling over the evidence. But we have no secrets from you about the earlier history of our family. In fact, MacPhee himself will insist on being the one who tells you all that. He’d be afraid Grace’s account, or mine, wouldn’t be objective enough.”
“I see.”
“I want you to like him if you can. He’s one of my oldest friends. And he’ll be about our best man if we’re going to be defeated. You couldn’t have a better man at your side in a losing battle. What he’ll do if we win, I can’t imagine.”
II
Mark woke next morning to the consciousness that his head ached all over, but specially at the back. He remembered that he had fallen—that was how he had hurt his head—fallen in that other room, with Filostrato and Straik . . . and then, as one of the poets says, he “discovered in his mind an inflammation swollen and deformed, his memory.” Oh, but impossible, not to be accepted for a moment: it had been a nightmare, it must be shoved away, it would vanish away now that he was fully awake. It was an absurdity. Once in delirium he had seen the front part of a horse, by itself, with no body or hind legs, running across a lawn, had felt it ridiculous at the very moment of seeing it, but not the less horrible for that. This was an absurdity of the same sort. A head without any body underneath. A head that could speak when they turned on the air and the artificial saliva with taps in the next room. His own head began to throb so hard that he had to stop thinking.
But he knew it was true. And he could not, as they say, “take it.” He was very ashamed of this, for he wished to be considered one of the tough ones. But the truth is that his toughness was only of the will, not of the nerves, and the virtues he had almost succeeded in banishing from his mind still lived, if only negatively and as weaknesses, in his body. He approved of vivisection, but had never worked in a dissecting room. He recommended that certain classes of people should be gradually eliminated: but he had never been there when a small shopkeeper went to the workhouse or a starved old woman of the governess type came to the very last day and hour and minute in the cold attic. He knew nothing about the last half-cup of cocoa drunk slowly ten days before.
Meantime he must get up. He must do something about Jane. Apparently he would have to bring her to Belbury. His mind had made this decision for him at some moment he did not remember. He must get her, to save his life. All his anxieties about being in the inner ring or getting a job had shrunk into insignificance. It was a question of life or death. They would kill him if he annoyed them; perhaps behead him . . . oh God, if only they would really kill that monstrous little lump of torture, that lump with a face, which they kept there talking on its steel bracket. All the minor fears at Belbury—for he knew now that all except the leaders were always afraid—were only emanations from that central fear. He must get Jane; he wasn’t fighting against that now.
It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling. And his head ached so terribly and he felt so sick. Luckily he now kept a bottle of whisky in his room. A stiff one enabled him to shave and dress.
He was late for breakfast but that made little difference for he could not eat. He drank several cups of black coffee and then went into the writing-room. Here he sat for a long time drawing things on the blotting-paper. This letter to Jane proved almost impossible now that it came to the point. And why did they want Jane? Formless fears stirred in his mind. And Jane of all people! Would they take her to the Head? For almost the first time in his life a gleam of something like disinterested love came into his mind; he wished he had never married her, never dragged her into this whole outfit of horrors which was, apparently, to be his life.
“Hullo, Studdock!” said a voice. “Writing to little wifie, eh?”
“Damn!” said Mark. “You’ve made me drop my pen.”
“Then pick it up, sonny,” said Miss Hardcastle, seating herself on the table. Mark did so, and then sat still, without looking up at her. Not since he had been bullied at school had he known what it was to hate and dread anyone with every nerve of his body as he now hated and dreaded this woman.
“I’ve got bad news for