That Hideous Strength (20 page)

     "I do not quite understand," said Frost, " why you had no one inside the College to see what staircase Studdock went to."

     "Because. of your damned Emergency Commissioner," said the Fairy. "We're not allowed into colleges now, if you please. I said at the time that Feverstone was the wrong man. He's trying to play on both sides."

     "I am far from denying," said Wither, " though without at all closing my mind to other possible explanations, that some of Lord Feverstone's measures may have been injudicious. It would be inexpressibly painful to me to suppose that--"

     "Need we keep Major Hardcastle?" said Frost.

     "Bless my soul!" said Wither. "How very right of you! I had almost forgotten, my dear lady, how tired you must be, and how very valuable your time is." He got up and held the door open for her.

     "You don't think," said she, " that I ought to let the boys have just a little go at Studdock?"

     And suddenly, as Wither stood with his hand on the door handle, the whole expression faded out of his face. Miss Hardcastle had the feeling that a mere mask of skin and flesh was staring at her. A moment later she was gone.

     "I wonder," said Wither as he came back to his chair, " whether we are attaching too much importance to this Studdock woman."

     "Allow me to remind you of the facts," said Frost. "The authorities had access to the woman's mind for only a very short time. They inspected only one important dream-which revealed, though with some irrelevancies, an essential element in our programme. That warned us that if the woman fell into the hands of any ill-affected persons who knew how to exploit her faculty, she would constitute a grave danger."

     "Oh, to be sure, to be sure. I never intended to deny--"

     "That was the first point," said Frost. "The second is that her mind became opaque to our authorities immediately afterwards. We know only one cause for such occultations. They occur when the mind in question has placed itself, by some voluntary choice, however vague, under the control of some hostile organism. The occultation, therefore, while cutting off our access to the dreams, also tells us that she has come under enemy influence. It also means that to find her would probably mean discovering the enemy's headquarters. Miss Hardcastle is probably right in maintaining that torture would soon induce Studdock to give up his wife's address. But as you pointed out, a round-up at their headquarters, an arrest, and the discovery of her husband here in the condition in which the torture would leave him, would produce psychological conditions in the woman which might destroy her faculty. That is the first objection. The second is, that an attack on enemy headquarters is very risky. They almost certainly have protection of a kind we are not prepared to cope with. And, finally, the man may not know his wife's address. In that case . . ."

     "Oh," said Wither, " there is nothing I should more deeply deplore. Scientific examination (I cannot allow the word Torture in this context) in cases where the patient doesn't know the answer is always a mistake. As men of humanity we should neither of us ... and then, if you go on, the patient naturally does not recover. . . ."

     "There is, in fact, no way of implementing our instructions except by inducing Studdock to bring his wife here himself."

     "Or else," said Wither, a little more dreamily than usual, "if it were possible, by inducing in him a much more radical allegiance to our side than he has yet shown. I am speaking, my dear friend, of a real change of heart."

     "I was saying that he must be induced to send for the woman himself. That can be done in two ways. Either by supplying him with some motive on the instinctive level, such as fear of us or desire for her; or else by conditioning him to identify himself so completely with the Cause that he will understand the real motive for securing her person and act on it."

     "Exactly . . . exactly," said Wither. "Where is Studdock at present?" said Frost. "In one of the cells."

     "Under the impression he has been arrested by the ordinary police?"

     "I presume he would be."

     "And how are you proposing to act?"

     "We had proposed to allow the psychological results of the arrest to mature. I have ventured . . . of course, with every regard for humanity ... to reckon on the value of some slight discomforts- he will not have dined, you understand. They have instructions to empty his pockets. One would not wish the young man to relieve any nervous tension by smoking."

     "Of course. And what next?"

     "Well, I suppose some sort of examination. I am inclined to think that the appearance of examination by the ordinary police should be maintained a little longer. Then at a later stage will come the discovery that he is still in our hands. It would be well to let him realise only gradually that this by no means frees him from the-er-embarrassments arising out of Hingest's death. I take it that some fuller realisation of his inevitable solidarity with the Institute would then follow. . . ."

     "The weakness is that you are relying wholly on fear."

     "Fear," repeated Wither as if he had not heard the word before. "I do not quite follow the connection of thought. I can hardly suppose you are following the opposite suggestion, once made, if I remember, by Miss Hardcastle."

     "What was that?"

     "Why," said Wither, " if I understand her right she thought of taking scientific measures to render the society of his wife more desirable to him. Some of the chemical resources ..."

     "You mean an aphrodisiac?" Wither sighed gently and said nothing. "That is nonsense," said Frost. "It isn't to his wife that a man turns under the influence of aphrodisiacs. But as I was saying, I think it is a mistake to rely wholly on fear. But there are other alternatives. There is desire."

     "I am not sure that I am following you. You have rejected the idea of any medical or chemical approach."

     "I was thinking of stronger desires." Neither at this stage of the conversation nor at any other did the Deputy Director look much at the face of Frost. But either Frost or Wither-it was difficult to say which- had been gradually moving his chair, so that by this time the two sat with their knees almost touching.

     "I had my conversation with Filostrato," said Frost. "I used expressions which must have made my meaning clear if he had any notion of the truth. His assistant, Wilkins, was present. The truth is, neither is really interested. What interests them is the fact that they have succeeded-as they think-in keeping the Head alive and getting it to talk. What it says does not really interest them. As to any question about what is really speaking, they have no curiosity."

     "You are suggesting, if I understand," said Wither, “a movement towards Mr. Studdock along those lines. I need hardly say that I fully realise a certain disappointment which serious minded people must feel with such colleagues as Filostrato."

     "That is the point," said Frost. "One must guard against supposing that the political and economic dominance of England by the N.I.C.E. is more than a subordinate object: it is individuals we are really concerned with. A hard core of individuals really devoted to the cause- that is what we need and are under orders to supply. We have not succeeded so far in bringing many people in- really in."

     "There is still no news from Bragdon Wood?"

     "No."

     "And you believe that Studdock might really be a suitable person?"

     "You must not forget," said Frost, " that his value does not rest solely on his wife's clairvoyance. The couple are eugenically interesting. And I think he can offer no resistance. The hours of fear in the cell, and then an appeal to desires that undercut the fear, will have an almost certain effect on a character of that sort."

     "Of course," said Wither, " nothing is so much to be desired as the greatest possible unity. Any fresh individual brought into that unity would be a source of the most intense satisfaction-to-ah-all concerned. You need not doubt that I would open my arms to receive-to absorb- ; to assimilate this young man."

     They were now sitting so close together that their faces ; almost touched, as if they had been lovers about to kiss. Suddenly there was a crash. Who's Who had fallen off the table, swept on to the floor as, with sudden, swift convulsive movement, the two old men lurched forward towards each other and sat swaying to and fro, locked in an embrace from which each seemed to be struggling to escape. And as they swayed and scrabbled with hand and nail, there arose, shrill and faint at first, a cackling noise that seemed in the end rather an animal than a senile parody of laughter.

     When Mark was bundled out of the police wagon and left at length alone in a little lighted room, he had no idea that he was at Belbury. Nor would he have cared greatly if he had known, for the moment he was arrested he had despaired of his life. He was going to be hanged.

     There came a sudden uprush of grisly details about execution, supplied long since by Miss Hardcastle.

     Because he felt that he was choking, he looked round the cell for any sign of ventilation. There was, in fact, some sort of grating above the door. All else was white floor, white ceiling, white wall, without a chair or table or peg, and one hard white light in the centre of the ceiling.

     Something in the look of the place now suggested to him for the first time the idea that he might be at Belbury and not in an ordinary police station. But the flash of hope aroused by this idea was so brief as to be instantaneous. What difference did it make whether Wither and Miss Hardcastle and the rest decided to get rid of him by handing him over to the ordinary police or by making away with him in private? They were all his enemies, playing upon his hopes and fears to reduce him to servility, certain to kill him if he broke away, and certain to kill him in the long run when he had served the purpose for which they wanted him. It appeared to him astonishing that he could ever have thought otherwise.

     What a fool-a babyish, gullible fool-he had been!

     Why had he come to Belbury in the first instance ? Ought not his first interview with the Deputy Director to have warned him. Feverstone's guffaw, that day he had called him an " incurable romantic ", came back to his mind. Feverstone . . . that was how he had come to believe in Wither: on Feverstone's recommendation. Apparently his folly went farther back. How on earth had he come to trust Feverstone? Jane, or Dimble, would have seen through him at once. He had crook written all over him. He was fit only to deceive puppets like Curry and Busby. But then, at the time when he first met Feverstone, he had not thought Curry and Busby puppets. With astonishment he remembered how he had felt about the Progressive Element at Bracton when he was first admitted to its confidence. Was there no beginning to his folly? Had he been a fool all through from the day of his birth ? Even as a schoolboy, when he had ruined his work and half broken his heart trying to get into the society called Grip, and lost his only real friend in doing so ? Even as a child, fighting Myrtle because she would go and talk secrets with Pamela next door?

     There were no moral considerations at this moment in Mark's mind. He looked back on his life, not with shame but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness. He saw himself as a little boy in short trousers, hidden in the shrubbery beside the paling to overhear Myrtle's conversation with Pamela, and trying to ignore the fact that it was not at all interesting when overheard. He saw himself making believe that he enjoyed those Sunday afternoons with the athletic heroes of Grip, while all the time (as he now saw) he was almost homesick for one of the old walks with Pearson

     -Pearson whom he had taken such pains to leave behind. He saw himself in his teens laboriously reading rubbishy grown-up novels and drinking beer when he really enjoyed John Buchan and stone ginger. The hours that he had spent learning the slang of each new circle, the assumption of interest in things he found dull and of knowledge he did not possess, the sacrifice of nearly every person and thing he actually enjoyed, the miserable attempt to pretend that one could enjoy Grip, or the Progressive Element, or the N.I.C.E. -all this came over him with a kind of heartbreak. When had he ever done what he wanted ? Mixed with the people whom he liked? Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy? The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.

     In his normal condition, explanations that laid on impersonal forces outside himself the responsibility for all this life of dust and broken bottles would have occurred at once to his mind and been at once accepted. None of these occurred to him now. He was aware that it was he himself who had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.

     An unexpected idea came into his head. This-this death of his-would be lucky for Jane. He now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess. Well ... it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled. She was one of those other people-like Pearson, like Denniston, like the Dimbles-who could enjoy things for their own sake. She was not like him. It was well that she should be rid of him. Of course she would get over it. She had tried to do her best, but she didn't really care for him. Nobody ever had, much.

     At that moment came the sound of a key turning in the lock of the cell-door. Instantly physical terror rushed back upon him.

     It was not a policeman who came in. It was a man whose pince-nez, as he glanced towards the light, became opaque windows concealing his eyes. Mark knew him at once and knew that he was at Belbury. It was not this that made him open his own eyes even wider and almost forget his terror in his astonishment. It was the change in the man's appearance-or rather the change in the eyes with which Mark saw him. In one sense everything about Professor Frost was as it had always been-the pointed beard, the extreme whiteness of forehead, and the bright Arctic smile. But Mark could not understand how he had ever managed to overlook something about the man so obvious that any child would have shrunk away from him and any dog would have backed into the corner with raised hackles and bared teeth. Death itself did not seem more frightening than the fact that only six hours ago he would in some measure have trusted this man, and made believe that his society was not disagreeable.