The Complete Works: Fantasy & Sci-Fi Novels, Religious Studies, Poetry & Autobiography. C. S. Lewis
party. The way you talk, anyone would think it was your wife who’d been ill treated.”
“So it might have been. So it may be. It may be any man or woman in England. It was a woman and a citizen. What does it matter whose wife it was?”
“But I tell you I’ll raise hell about it. I’ll break the infernal bitch who did it, if it means breaking the whole N.I.C.E.”
Dimble said nothing. Mark knew that Dimble knew that he was now talking nonsense. Yet Mark could not stop. If he did not bluster, he would not know what to say.
“Sooner than put up with this,” he shouted, “I’ll leave the N.I.C.E.”
“Do you mean that?” asked Dimble with a sharp glance. And to Mark, whose ideas were now all one fluid confusion of wounded vanity and jostling fears and shames, this glance once more appeared accusing and intolerable. In reality it had been a glance of awakened hope: for charity hopes all things. But there was caution in it: and between hope and caution Dimble found himself once more reduced to silence.
“I see you don’t trust me,” said Mark, instinctively summoning to his face the manly and injured expression which had often served him well in headmasters’ studies.
Dimble was a truthful man. “No,” he said after a longish pause. “I don’t quite.”
Mark shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
“Studdock,” said Dimble, “this is not a time for foolery, or compliments. It may be that both of us are within a few minutes of death. You have probably been shadowed into the college. And I, at any rate, don’t propose to die with polite insincerities in my mouth. I don’t trust you. Why should I? You are (at least in some degree) the accomplice of the worst men in the world. Your very coming to me this afternoon may be only a trap.”
“Don’t you know me better than that?” said Mark.
“Stop talking nonsense!” said Dimble. “Stop posturing and acting, if only for a minute. Who are you to talk like that? They have corrupted better men than you or me before now. Straik was a good man once. Filostrato was at least a great genius. Even Alcasan—yes, yes, I know who your Head is—was at least a plain murderer: something better than they have now made of him. Who are you to be exempt?”
Mark gaped. The discovery of how much Dimble knew had suddenly inverted his whole picture of the situation.
“Nevertheless,” continued Dimble, “knowing all this—knowing that you may be only the bait in the trap—I will take a risk. I will risk things compared with which both our lives are a triviality. If you seriously wish to leave the N.I.C.E., I will help you.”
One moment it was like the gates of Paradise opening—then, at once, caution and the incurable wish to temporise rushed back. The chink had closed again.
“I—I’d need to think that over,” he mumbled.
“There is no time,” said Dimble. “And there is really nothing to think about. I am offering you a way back into the human family. But you must come at once.”
“It’s a question affecting my whole future career.”
“Your career!” said Dimble. “It’s a question of damnation or—a last chance. But you must come at once.”
“I don’t think I understand,” said Mark. “You keep on suggesting some kind of danger. What is it? And what powers have you to protect me—or Jane—if I do bolt?”
“You must risk that,” said Dimble. “I can offer you no security. Don’t you understand? There is no security for anyone now. The battle has started. I’m offering you a place on the right side. I don’t know which will win.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Mark, “I had been thinking of leaving. But I must think it over. You put things in rather an odd way.”
“There is no time,” said Dimble.
“Supposing I look you up again to-morrow?”
“Do you know that you’ll be able?”
“Or in an hour? Come, that’s only sensible. Will you be here in an hour’s time?”
“What can an hour do for you? You are only waiting in the hope that your mind will be less clear.”
“But will you be here?”
“If you insist. But no good can come of it.”
“I want to think. I want to think,” said Mark, and left the room without waiting for a reply.
Mark had said he wanted to think: in reality he wanted alcohol and tobacco. He had thoughts in plenty—more than he desired. One thought prompted him to cling to Dimble as a lost child clings to a grown-up. Another whispered to him “Madness. Don’t break with the N.I.C.E. They’ll be after you. How can Dimble save you? You’ll be killed.” A third implored him not, even now, to write off as a total loss his hard-won position in the Inner Ring at Belbury: there must, must be some middle course. A fourth recoiled from the idea of ever seeing Dimble again: the memory of every tone Dimble had used caused horrible discomfort. And he wanted Jane, and he wanted to punish Jane for being a friend of Dimble, and he wanted never to see Wither again, and he wanted to creep back and patch things up with Wither somehow. He wanted to be perfectly safe and yet also very nonchalant and daring—to be admired for manly honesty among the Dimbles and yet also for realism and knowingness at Belbury—to have two more large whiskies and also to think everything out very clearly and collectedly. And it was beginning to rain and his head had begun to ache again. Damn the whole thing! Damn, damn! Why had he such a rotten heredity? Why had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so irrational? Why was his luck so bad?
It was raining quite hard as he reached the College lodge. Some sort of van seemed to be standing in the street outside, and there were three or four uniformed men in capes. He remembered afterwards how the wet oilskin shone in the lamplight. A torch was flashed in his face.
“Excuse me, sir,” said one of the men. “I must ask for your name.”
“Studdock,” said Mark.
“Mark Gainsby Studdock,” said the man, “it is my duty to arrest you for the murder of William Hingest.”
IV
Dr. Dimble drove out to St. Anne’s dissatisfied with himself, haunted with the suspicion that if he had been wiser, or more perfectly in charity with this very miserable young man, he might have done something for him. “Did I give way to my temper? Was I self-righteous? Did I tell him as much as I dared?” he thought. Then came the deeper self-distrust that was habitual with him. “Did you fail to make things clear because you really wanted not to? Just wanted to hurt and humiliate? To enjoy your own self-righteousness? Is there a whole Belbury inside you, too?” The sadness that came over him had no novelty in it. “And thus,” he quoted from Brother Lawrence, “Thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to myself.”
Once clear of the town, he drove slowly—almost sauntering on wheels. The sky was red to westward and the first stars were out. Far down below him in a valley he saw the lights already lit in Cure Hardy. “Thank Heaven it at any rate is far enough from Edgestow to be safe,” he thought. The sudden whiteness of a white owl flying low fluttered across the woody twilight on his left. It gave him a delicious feeling of approaching night. He was very pleasantly tired; he looked forward to an agreeable evening and an early bed.
“Here he is! Here’s Dr. Dimble,” shouted Ivy Maggs as he drove up to the front door of the Manor.
“Don’t put the car away, Dimble,” said Denniston.
“Oh Cecil!” said his wife; and he saw fear in her face. The whole household seemed to have been waiting for him.
A few moments later,