That Hideous Strength (26 page)

     A flame-coloured robe, in which her hands were hidden, covered this person from the feet to where it rose behind , her neck in a kind of high ruff-like collar, but in front it was so low or open that it exposed her large breasts. Her skin was darkish and Southern and glowing, almost the colour of honey. Some such dress Jane had seen worn by a Minoan priestess on a vase from Cnossus. The head, poised motionless on the muscular pillar of her neck, stared straight at Jane. It was a red-cheeked, wet-lipped face, with black eyes-almost the eyes of a cow-and an enigmatic expression. It was not by ordinary standards at all like the face of Mother Dimble; but Jane recognised it. It was Mother Dimble's face with something left out, and the omission shocked Jane. "It is brutal," she thought, for its energy crushed her; but then she half changed her mind and thought, "It is I who am weak, trumpery."

     "It is mocking me," she thought, but then once more changed her mind and thought, "It is ignoring me. It doesn't see me." She tried to look aside from the face-succeeded-and saw for the first time that there were other creatures present-a whole crowd of ridiculous little men: fat dwarfs in red caps with tassels on them, gnome-like little men, insufferably familiar, frivolous, and irrepressible. There was no doubt that they, at any rate, were mocking her; nodding, mimicking, standing on their heads, turning somersaults. Jane was not yet frightened; partly because the warmth of the air made her feel drowsy. Her main feeling was indignation. A suspicion which had crossed her mind before now returned with irresistible force; the suspicion that the real universe might be simply silly. It was closely mixed up with the memories of that grown-up laughter-loud, careless, masculine laughter on the lips of bachelor uncles-which had often infuriated her in childhood.

     The giantess rose. They were all coming at her. With a great glow and a noise like fire the flame-robed woman and the dwarfs were in the room with her. The strange woman had a torch in her hand. It burned with terrible, blinding brightness, crackling, and sent up a cloud of dense black smoke, and a sticky, resinous smell. "If they're not careful," thought Jane, " they'll set the house on fire." The outrageous little men began making hay of the room. In a few seconds the bed was a mere chaos, the sheets on the floor, the pillows hurtling through the air, feathers flying everywhere. "Look out! Look out, can't you?" shouted Jane, for the giantess was beginning to touch various parts of the room with her torch. She touched a vase on the mantelpiece. Instantly there rose from it a streak of colour which Jane took for fire. She was just moving to try to put it out when she saw that the same thing had happened to a picture on the wall. It happened faster and faster all round her. The very top-knots of the dwarfs were now on fire. But just as the terror of this became unbearable, Jane noticed that what was curling up from everything the torch had touched was not flame after all, but vegetation. Ivy and honeysuckle were growing up the legs of the bed, red roses were sprouting from the caps of the little men, and from every direction huge lilies rose to her knees and waist, shooting out their yellow tongues at her.

     "Jane! Jane!" said the voice of Mrs. Dimble suddenly. "What on earth is the matter?"

     Jane sat up. The room was empty, but the bed had all been pulled to pieces.

     "Are you ill, child?" asked Mother Dimble.

     "I must see the Director at once," said Jane. "It's all right. Don't bother. I can get up by myself . . . really."

     Mr. Bultitude's mind was as furry and as unhuman as his body. He did not remember the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, nor his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, nor the stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, he did not recognise either a giver or a recipient. His loves might, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the beast's sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for states below reason and states above it have a superficial resemblance. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.

     Today an unusual thing had happened to him-he had got into the garden without being muzzled. He was always muzzled out of doors, not because there was any fear of his becoming dangerous but because of his partiality for fruit and for the sweeter kinds of vegetables. But today the precaution had been forgotten and the bear had passed a very agreeable morning investigating the turnips. Now -in the early afternoon-he had approached the garden wall. There was a chestnut tree within the wall which the bear could easily climb, and from its branches he could drop down on the far side. He was standing looking up at this tree. Mrs. Maggs would have described his state of mind by saying, "He knows perfectly well he's not allowed out of the garden." That was not how it appeared to Mr. Bultitude. He had no morals: but the Director had given him certain inhibitions. A mysterious reluctance arose, a clouding of the emotional weather, when the wall was too close; but mixed with this there was an opposite impulse to get beyond that wall. If the pressure behind this impulse could be translated into human terms at all, it would appear more like a mythology than a thought. One met bees in the garden. The bees all went away, over the wall. And to follow bees was the obvious thing to do. There was a sense in the bear's mind-one could hardly call it a picture-of green lands beyond the wall, and hives, and bees the size of sparrows, and there, walking, trickling, oozing to meet one, something or someone stickier, sweeter, than honey itself.

     Three times Mr. Bultitude turned away from the tree and the wall, but each time he came back. Then, very cautiously and quietly, he began to climb the tree. When he got up into the fork he sat there for a long time. He sat there for nearly half an hour. Sometimes his mind wandered from the point and once he nearly went to sleep. In the end he got down on the outside of the wall. When he found that the thing had really happened he became so frightened that he sat still at the bottom of the grassy bank on the very edge of the road.

     A motor van came into sight. It was driven by a man in the livery of the N.I.C.E., and another man in the same livery sat beside him.

     "Hullo ... I say!" said the second man. "Pull up, Sid. What about that?"

     "What?" said the driver.

     "Haven't you got eyes in your head?" said the other.

     "Gor," said Sid, pulling up. "A bloody great bear. I say-it. couldn't be our own bear, could it?"

     "Get on," said his mate. "She was in her cage all right this morning."

     "You don't think she could have done a bunk? There'd be hell to pay for you and me. . . ."

     "She couldn't have got here if she had done a bunk. Bears don't go forty miles an hour. But hadn't we better pinch this one?"

     "We haven't got no orders," said Sid. "No. And we haven't failed to get that blasted wolf either, have we?"

     "Wasn't our fault."

     "Course it wasn't our fault. But the boss won't take no notice of that. It's get on or get out at Belbury."

     "Get out?" said Sid. "I wish to hell I knew how to."

     Len spat over the side and there was a moment's silence. "Anyway," said Sid presently, " what's the good of taking a bear back?"

     "Well, isn't it better than coming back with nothing?" said Len. "I know they want another one. And here it is free."

     "All right," said Sid ironically, " if you're so keen on it, just hop out and ask him to step in."

     "Dope," said Len.

     "Not on my bit of dinner, you don't," said Sid. "You're a bucking good mate to have," said Len, groping in a greasy parcel. "It's a good thing for you I'm not the sort of chap who'd split on you."

     "You done it already," said the driver. "I know all your little games."

     Len produced a sandwich and dabbed it with some strong-smelling liquid from a bottle. When it was saturated, he opened the door and went a pace forward, about six yards from the bear. He threw the sandwich to it.

     Quarter of an hour later Mr. Bultitude lay on his side, unconscious and breathing heavily. They had no difficulty in tying up his mouth and all four paws, but they had great difficulty in lifting him into the van.

     Mark's waking life was now divided between periods by the Sleeper's bedside and periods in the room with the spotted ceiling. The training in objectivity which took place in the latter cannot be described; the details would be unprintable and had, indeed, a "kind of nursery fatuity about them which is best ignored. There indeed lay the horror-to perform petty obscenities which a silly child might have thought funny under the unchangingly serious inspection of Frost, with a stop watch and a note-book and all the ritual of experiment. And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it became a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant.

     The other thing that helped to save him was the Man in the Bed. Mark's discovery that he really could speak English had led to a curious acquaintance with him. It can hardly be said that they conversed. The man was so very allusive and used gesture so extensively that Mark's less sophisticated modes of communication were almost useless. Thus when Mark explained that he had no tobacco, the man had slapped an imaginary tobacco pouch on his knees at least six times and struck an imaginary match about as often, each time jerking his head sideways with a look of such relish as Mark had seldom seen on a human face. Then Mark went on to explain that though " they " were not foreigners, they were extremely dangerous people and that probably the Stranger's best plan would be to preserve his silence.

     "Ah," said the Stranger, jerking his head again, " don't get nothing out of me. I tell 'ee. Don't get nothing out of me. Eh? I tell 'ee. You and me knows. Ah?" and his look embraced Mark in such an apparently gleeful conspiracy that it warmed the heart.

     Believing this matter to be now sufficiently clear. Mark began, "But, as regards the future--"

     "Ah," said the man. "Foreigners. Eh?"

     "No, no," said Mark. "I told you they weren't. They seem to think you are, though. And that's why-

     "That's right," interrupted the man. ' Foreigners, I call them. I know."

     "I've been trying to think out some sort of plan," said Mark.

     "Ah," said the man approvingly, "I got a plan."

     "What is it?"

     "Ah," said the man, winking at Mark with infinite knowingness and rubbing his belly.

     "Go on. What is it?" said Mark.

     "How'd it be," said the man. "How'd it be if you and I made ourselves a nice bit of toasted cheese?"

     "I mean a plan for escape," said Mark. I know.

     "Ah," replied the man. "My old Dad, now. He never had a day's illness in his life."

     "It's a remarkable record," said Mark. "Ah. You may say so," replied the other. "On the road all his life. Never had a stomach-ache. And what did he attribute his health to?" He pronounced the word attribute with great relish, laying the accent on the first syllable.

     Mark was about to reply when the man indicated by a gesture that the question was purely rhetorical.

     "He attributed his health, continued the speaker, "to eating toasted cheese. Keeps the water out of the stomach, that's what it does. Makes a lining."

     In several interviews Mark endeavoured to discover something of the Stranger's own history and particularly how he had been brought to Belbury. This was not easy, for though the tramp's conversation was very autobiographical, it was filled almost entirely with accounts of conversations in which he had made stunning repartees whose points remained wholly obscure. But by repeated and cautious questioning, he couldn't help getting the idea that the tramp had been made to give up his clothes to a total stranger and then put to sleep. He never got the story in so many words. As for the identity or appearance of the person who had taken his clothes, nothing whatever could be made out. The nearest Mark ever got to it, after hours of talk and deep potations, was some such statement as "Ah. He was a one!" or "He was a kind of-eh? You know?" or "That was a customer, that was."

     Throughout the man's conversation, gusto was the most striking characteristic. He never passed any kind of moral judgement on the various things that had been done to him in the course of his career, nor did he ever try to explain them. Much that was unjust and more that was simply unintelligible seemed to be accepted not only without resentment but with a certain satisfaction provided only that it was striking. Even about his present situation he showed very much less curiosity than Mark would have thought possible. It did not make sense, but then the man did not expect things to make sense. He deplored the absence of tobacco and regarded the "Foreigners " as very dangerous people: but the main thing, obviously, was to eat and drink as much as possible while the present conditions lasted.

     Every now and then their tête-à-tête was interrupted. Frost or Wither or both would come in introducing some stranger who addressed the tramp in an unknown language, failed completely to get any response, and was ushered out again. The tramp's habit of submission to the unintelligible, mixed with a kind of animal cunning, stood him in good stead during these interviews. It would never have occurred to him to undeceive his captors by replying in English. Undeceiving was an activity wholly foreign to his mind. For the rest, his expression of tranquil indifference, varied occasionally by extremely sharp looks but never by the least sign of anxiety or bewilderment, left his interrogators mystified.