“Well,” said Dimble. “There’s no one here.”
“He was here a moment ago,” said Denniston. “You’re sure you did see someone?” said Dimble.
“I thought I saw someone,” said Denniston. “I’m not positive.”
“If there was anyone he must still be quite close,” said Dimble.
“What about giving him a call?” suggested Denniston. “Hush! Listen!” said Jane. They were all silent for a few moments.
“That’s only the old donkey,” said Dimble presently, “moving about at the top.”
There was another silence.
“He seems to have been pretty extravagant with his matches,” said Denniston, presently, glancing at the trodden earth in the firelight. “One would expect a tramp—”
“On the other hand,” said Dimble, “one would not expect Merlin to have brought a box of matches with him from the fifth century.”
“But what are we to do?” said Jane.
“One hardly likes to think what MacPhee will say if we return with no more success than this. He will at once point out a plan we ought to have followed,” said Denniston with a smile.
“Now that the rain’s over,” said Dimble, “we’d better get back to the car and start looking for your white gate. What are you looking at, Denniston?”
“I’m looking at this mud,” said Denniston who had moved a few paces away from the fire and in the direction of the path by which they had descended into the dingle. He had been stooping and using his torch. Now he suddenly straightened himself. “Look!” he said, “there have been several people here. No, don’t walk on it and mess up all the tracks. Look. Can’t you see, Sir?”
“Aren’t they our own footprints?” said Dimble.
“Some of them are pointing the wrong way. Look at that—and that.”
“Might they be the tramp himself?” said Dimble. “If it was a tramp.”
“He couldn’t have walked up that path without our seeing him,” said Jane.
“Unless he did it before we arrived,” said Denniston.
“But we all saw him,” said Jane.
“Come,” said Dimble. “Let’s follow them up to the top. I don’t suppose we shall be able to follow them far. If not, we must get back to the road and go on looking for the gate.”
As they reached the lip of the hollow, mud changed into grass under foot and the footprints disappeared. They walked twice round the dingle and found nothing; then they set out to return to the road. It had turned into a fine night: Orion dominated the whole sky.
The Deputy Director hardly ever slept. When it became absolutely necessary for him to do so, he took a drug, but the necessity was rare, for the mode of consciousness he experienced at most hours of day or night had long ceased to be exactly like what other men call waking. He had learned to withdraw most of his consciousness from the task of living, to conduct business, even, with only a quarter of his mind. Colors, tastes, smells and tactual sensations no doubt bombarded his physical senses in the normal manner: they did not now reach his ego. The manner and outward attitude to men which he had adopted half a century ago were now an organization which functioned almost independently like a gramophone and to which he could hand over his whole routine of interviews and committees. While the brain and lips carried on this work, and built up day by day for those around him the vague and formidable personality which they knew so well, his inmost self was free to pursue its own life. That detachment of the spirit, not only from the senses, but even from the reason, which has been the goal of some mystics, was now his.
Hence he was still, in a sense, awake—that is, he was certainly not sleeping—an hour after Frost had left him to visit Mark in his cell. Anyone who had looked into the study during that hour would have seen him sitting motionless at his table, with bowed head and folded hands. But his eyes were not shut. The face had no expression; the real man was far away suffering, enjoying, or inflicting whatever such souls do suffer, enjoy or inflict when the cord that binds them to the natural order is stretched out to its utmost but not yet snapped. When the telephone rang at his elbow he took up the receiver without a start.
“Speaking,” he said.
“This is Stone, Sir,” came a voice. “We have found the chamber.”
“Yes.”
“It was empty, Sir.”
“Empty?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Are you sure, my dear Mr. Stone, that you have found the right place? It is possible. . . .”
“Oh yes, Sir. It is a little kind of crypt. Stonework and some Roman brick. And a kind of slab in the middle, like an altar or a bed.”
“And am I to understand there was no one there? No sign of occupation?”
“Well, Sir, it seemed to us to have been recently disturbed.”
“Pray be as explicit as possible, Mr. Stone.”
“Well, Sir, there was an exit—I mean a tunnel, leading out of it to the South. We went up this tunnel at once. It comes out about eight hundred yards away, outside the area of the wood.”
“Comes out? Do you mean there is an arch—a gate—a tunnel mouth?”
“Well, that’s just the point. We got out to the open air all right. But obviously something had been smashed-up there quite recently. It looked as if it had been done by explosives. As if the end of the tunnel had been walled up and had some depth of earth on top of it, and as if someone had recently blasted his way out. There was no end of a mess.”
“Continue, Mr. Stone. What did you do next?”
“I used the order you had given me, Sir, to collect all the police available and have sent off search parties for the man you described.”
“I see. And how did you describe him to them?”
“Just as you did, Sir: an old man with either a very long beard or a beard very roughly trimmed, probably in a mantle, but certainly in some kind of unusual clothes. It occurred to me at the last moment to add that he might have no clothes at all.”
“Why did you add that, Mr. Stone?”
“Well, Sir, I didn’t know how long he’d been there, and it isn’t my business. I’d heard things about clothes preserved in a place like that and all falling to pieces as soon as the air was admitted. I hope you won’t imagine for a moment that I’m trying to find out anything you don’t choose to tell me. But I just thought it would be as well to. . . .”
“You were quite right, Mr. Stone,” said Wither, “in thinking that anything remotely resembling inquisitiveness on your part might have the most disastrous consequences. I mean, for yourself, for, of course, it is your interests I have chiefly had in view in my choice of methods. I assure you that you can rely on my support in the very—er—delicate position you have—no doubt unintentionally—chosen to occupy.”
“Thank you very much, Sir. I am so glad you think I was right in saying he might be naked.”
“Oh, as to that,” said the Director, “there are a great many considerations which cannot be raised at the moment. And what did you instruct your search parties to do on finding any such—er—person?”
“Well, that was another difficulty, Sir. I sent my own assistant, Father Doyle, with one party, because he knows Latin. And I gave Inspector Wrench the ring you gave me and put him in charge of the second. The best I could do for the third party was to see that it contained someone who knew Welsh.”
“You did not think of accompanying a party yourself?”
“No, Sir. You’d told me to ring up without fail the moment we found anything. And I didn’t want to delay the search parties until I’d got you.”
“I see. Well, no doubt your action (speaking quite without prejudice) could be interpreted along those lines. You made it quite clear that this—ah—Personage—when found, was to be treated with the greatest deference and—if you won’t misunderstand me—caution?”
“Oh yes, Sir.”
“Well, Mr. Stone, I am, on the whole, and with certain inevitable reservations, moderately satisfied with your conduct of this affair. I believe that I may be able to present it in a favorable light to those of my colleagues whose good will you have, unfortunately, not been able to retain. If you can bring it to a successful conclusion you would very much strengthen your position. If not . . . it is inexpressibly painful to me that there should be these tensions and mutual recriminations among us. But you quite understand me, my dear boy. If only I could persuade—say Miss Hardcastle and Mr. Studdock—to share my appreciation of your very real qualities, you would need to have no apprehensions about your career or—ah—your security.”
“But what do you want me to do, Sir?”
“My dear young friend, the golden rule is very simple. There are only two errors which would be fatal to one placed in the peculiar situation which certain parts of your previous conduct have unfortunately created for you. On the one hand, anything like a lack of initiative or enterprise would be disastrous. On the other, the slightest approach to unauthorized action—anything which suggested that you were assuming a liberty of decision which, in all the circumstances, is not really yours—might have consequences from which even I could not protect you. But as long as you keep quite clear of these two extremes, there is no reason (speaking unofficially) why you should not be perfectly safe.”
Then, without waiting for Mr. Stone to reply, he hung up the receiver and rang his bell.
“Oughtn’t we to be nearly at the gate we climbed over?” said Dimble.
It was a good deal lighter now that the rain had stopped, but the wind had risen and was roaring about them so that only shouted remarks could be heard. The branches of the hedge beside which they were tramping swayed and dipped and rose again so that they looked as if they were lashing the bright stars.
“It’s a good deal longer than I remembered,” said Denniston.
“But not so muddy,” said Jane.
“You’re right,” said Denniston, suddenly stopping. “It’s all stony. It wasn’t like this at all on the way up. We’re in the wrong field.”
“I think,” said Dimble mildly, “we must be right. We turned half left along this hedge as soon as we came out of the trees, and I’m sure I remember—”
“But did we come out of the copse on the right side?” said Denniston.
“If we once start changing course,” said Dimble, “we shall go round and round in circles all night. Let’s keep straight on. We’re bound to come to the road in the end.”
“Hullo!” said Jane sharply. “What’s this?”
All listened. Because of the wind, the unidentified rhythmic noise which they were straining to hear seemed quite distant at one moment, and then, next moment, with shouts of “Look out!”—“Go away, you great brute!”—“Get back!”—and the like, all were shrinking back into the hedge as the plosh-plosh of a horse cantering on soft ground passed close beside them. A cold gobbet of mud flung up from its hoofs struck Denniston in the face.
“Oh look! Look!” cried Jane. “Stop him. Quick!”
“Stop him?” said Denniston who was trying to clean his face. “What on earth for? The less I see of that great clodhopping quadruped, the better—”
“Oh, shout out to him, Dr. Dimble,” said Jane in an agony of impatience. “Come on. Run! Didn’t you see?”
“See what?” panted Dimble as the whole party, under the influence of Jane’s urgency, began running in the direction of the retreating horse.
“There’s a man on his back,” gasped Jane. She was tired and out of breath and had lost a shoe.
“A man?” said Denniston; and then: “by God, Sir, Jane’s right. Look, look there! Against the sky . . . to your left.”
“We can’t overtake him,” said Dimble.
“Hi! Stop! Come back! Friends—amis—amici,” bawled Denniston.
Dimble was not able to shout for the moment. He was an old man, who had been tired before they set out, and now his heart and lungs were doing things to him of which his doctor had told him the meaning some years ago. He was not frightened, but he could not shout with a great voice (least of all in the Old Solar language) until he had breathed. And while he stood trying to fill his lungs all the others suddenly cried, “Look!” yet again; for high among the stars, looking unnaturally large and many legged, the shape of the horse appeared as it leaped a hedge some twenty yards away, and on its back, with some streaming garment blown far out behind him in the wind, the great figure of a man. It seemed to Jane that he was looking back over his shoulder as though he mocked. Then came a splash and thud as the horse alighted on the far side; and then nothing but wind and starlight again.
“You are in danger,” said Frost when he had finished locking the door of Mark’s cell, “but you are also within reach of a great opportunity.”
“I gather,” said Mark, “I am at the Institute after all and not in a police station.”
“Yes. That makes no difference to the danger. The Institute will soon have official powers of liquidation. It has anticipated them. Hingest and Carstairs have both been liquidated. Such actions are demanded of us.”
“If you are going to kill me,” said Mark, “why all this farce of a murder charge?”
“Before going on,” said Frost, “I must ask you to be strictly objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical relations. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner. Do not let them distract your attention from the facts.”
“I see,” said Mark. He was acting while he said it—trying to sound at once faintly hopeful and slightly sullen, ready to be worked upon. But within, his new insight into Belbury kept him resolved not to believe one word the other said, not to accept (though he might feign acceptance) any offer he made. He felt that he must at all costs hold onto the knowledge that these men were unalterable enemies; for already he felt the old tug towards yielding, towards semicredulity, inside him.
“The murder charge against you and the alterations in your treatment have been part of a planned program with a well-defined end in view,” said Frost. “It is a discipline through which everyone is passed before admission to the Circle.”
Again Mark felt a spasm of retrospective terror. Only a few days ago he would have swallowed any hook with that bait on it; and nothing but the imminence of death could have made the hook so obvious and the bait so insipid as it now was. At least, so comparatively insipid. For even now. . . .
“I don’t quite see the purpose of it,” he said aloud.
“It is, again, to promote objectivity. A circle bound together by subjective feelings of mutual confidence and liking would be useless. Those, as I have said, are chemical phenomena. They could all in principle be produced by injections. You have been made to pass through a number of conflicting feelings about the Deputy Director and others in order that your future association with us may not be based on feelings at all. In so far as there must be social relations between members of the circle it is, perhaps, better that they should be feelings of dislike. There is less risk of their being confused with the real nexus.”
“My future association?” said Studdock, acting a tremulous eagerness. But it was perilously easy for him to act it. The reality might reawake at any moment.
“Yes,” said Frost. “You have been selected as a possible candidate for admission. If you do not gain admission, or if you reject it, it will be necessary to destroy you. I am not, of course, attempting to work on your fears. They only confuse the issue. The process would be quite painless, and your present reactions to it are inevitable physical events.”
Mark considered this thoughtfully.
“It—it seems rather a formidable decision,” said Mark.
“That is merely a proposition about the state of your own body at the moment. If you please, I will go on to give you the necessary information. I must begin by telling you that neither the Deputy Director, nor I, are responsible for shaping the policy of the Institute.”
“The Head?” said Mark.
“No. Filostrato and Wilkins are quite deceived about the Head. They have, indeed, carried out a remarkable experiment by preserving it from decay. But Alcasan’s mind is not the mind we are in contact with when the Head speaks.”
“Do you mean Alcasan is really . . . dead?” asked Mark. His surprise at Frost’s last statement needed no acting.
“In the present state of our knowledge,” said Frost, “there is no answer to that question. Probably it has no meaning. But the cortex and vocal organs in Alcasan’s head are used by a different mind. And now, please, attend very carefully. You have probably not heard of macrobes.”
“Microbes?” said Mark in bewilderment. “But of course—”
“I did not say microbes; I said macrobes. The formation of the word explains itself. Below the level of animal life, we have long known that there are microscopic organisms. Their actual results on human life, in respect of health and disease, have of course made up a large part of history: the secret cause was not known till we invented the microscope.”
“Go on,” said Mark. Ravenous curiosity was moving like a sort of groundswell beneath his conscious determination to stand on guard.
“I have now to inform you that there are similar organisms above the level of animal life. When I say, ‘above,’ I am not speaking biologically. The structure of the macrobe, so far as we know it, is of extreme simplicity. When I say that it is above the animal level, I mean that it is more permanent, disposes of more energy, and has greater intelligence.”
“More intelligent than the highest anthropoids?” said Mark. “It must be pretty nearly human, then.”
“You have misunderstood me. When I say it transcended the animals, I was, of course, including the most efficient animal, Man. The macrobe is more intelligent than Man.”
Frowningly, Mark studied this theory.
“But how is it in that case that we have had no communication with them?”
“It is not certain that we have not. But in primitive times it was spasmodic, and was opposed by numerous prejudices. Moreover, the intellectual development of man had not reached the level at which intercourse with our species could offer any attractions to a macrobe. But though there has been little intercourse, there has been profound influence. Their effect on human history has been far greater than that of the microbes, though, of course, equally unrecognized. In the light of what we now know, all history will have to be rewritten. The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to historians; that, indeed, is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science.”
“I think I’ll sit down, if you don’t mind,” said Mark resuming his seat on the floor. Frost remained, throughout the whole conversation, standing perfectly still with his arms hanging down straight at his sides. But for the periodic upward tilt of his head and flash of his teeth at the end of a sentence, he used no gestures.
“The vocal organs and brain taken from Alcasan,” he continued, “have become the conductors of a regular intercourse between the Macrobes and our own species. I do not say that we have discovered this technique; the discovery was theirs, not ours. The circle to which you may be admitted is the organ of that cooperation between the two species which has already created a new situation for humanity. The change, you will see, is far greater than that which turned the sub-man into the man. It is more comparable to the first appearance of organic life.”
“These organisms, then,” said Mark, “are friendly to humanity?”
“If you reflect for a moment,” said Frost, “you will see that your question has no meaning except on the level of the crudest popular thought. Friendship is a chemical phenomenon; so is hatred. Both of them presuppose organisms of our own type. The first step towards intercourse with the macrobes is the realization that one must go outside the whole world of our subjective emotions. It is only as you begin to do so, that you discover how much of what you mistook for your thought was merely a by-product of your blood and nervous tissues.”
“Oh, of course. I didn’t quite mean, ‘friendly,’ in that sense. I really meant, were their aims compatible with our own?”
“What do you mean by our own aims?”
“Well—I suppose—the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency—the elimination of war and poverty and other forms of waste—a fuller exploitation of Nature—the preservation and extension of our species, in fact.”
“I do not think this pseudoscientific language really modifies the essentially subjective and instinctive basis of the ethics you are describing. I will return to the matter at a later stage. For the moment, I would merely remark that your view of war and your reference to the preservation of the species suggest a profound misconception. They are mere generalizations from affectional feelings.”
“Surely,” said Mark, “one requires a pretty large population for the full exploitation of Nature, if for nothing else? And surely war is disgenic and reduces efficiency? Even if population needs thinning, is not war the worst possible method of thinning it?”
“That idea is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did not operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential; and war destroyed types which were then still useful. But every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.”
“I see,” said Mark. “I had thought rather vaguely—that the intelligent nucleus would be extended by education.”
“That is pure chimera. The great majority of the human race can be educated only in the sense of being given knowledge: they cannot be trained into the total objectivity of mind which is now necessary. They will always remain animals, looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man. Now, the macrobes, and the selected humans who can co-operate with them, have no further use for it.”
“The two last wars, then, were not disasters in your view?”
“On the contrary, they were simply the beginning of the program—the first two of the sixteen major wars which are scheduled to take place in this century. I am aware of the emotional (that is, the chemical) reactions which a statement like this produces in you, and you are wasting your time in trying to conceal them from me. I do not expect you to control them. That is not the path to objectivity. I deliberately raise them in order that you may become accustomed to regard them in a purely scientific light and distinguish them as sharply as possible from the facts.”
Mark sat with his eyes fixed on the floor. He had felt, in fact, very little emotion at Frost’s program for the human race; indeed, he almost discovered at that moment how little he had ever really cared for those remote futures and universal benefits whereon his cooperation with the Institute had at first been theoretically based. Certainly, at the present moment there was no room in his mind for such considerations. He was fully occupied with the conflict between his resolution not to trust these men, never again to be lured by any bait into a real cooperation, and the terrible strength—like a tide sucking at the shingle as it goes out—of an opposite emotion. For here, here surely at last (so his desire whispered to him) was the true inner circle of all, the circle whose center was outside the human race—the ultimate secret, the supreme power, the last initiation. The fact that it was almost completely horrible did not in the least diminish its attraction. Nothing that lacked the tang of horror would have been quite strong enough to satisfy the delirious excitement which now set his temples hammering. It came into his mind that Frost knew all about this excitement, and also about the opposite determination, and reckoned securely on the excitement as something which was certain to carry the day in his victim’s mind.
A rattling and knocking which had been obscurely audible for some time now became so loud that Frost turned to the door. “Go away,” he said, raising his voice. “What is the meaning of this impertinence?” The indistinct noise of someone shouting on the other side of the door was heard, and the knocking went on. Frost’s smile widened as he turned and opened it. Instantly a piece of paper was put into his hand. As he read it, he started violently. Without glancing at Mark, he left the cell. Mark heard the door locked again behind him.
“What friends those two are!” said Ivy Maggs. She was referring to Pinch the cat and Mr. Bultitude the bear. The latter was sitting up with his back against the warm wall by the kitchen fire. His cheeks were so fat and his eyes so small that he looked as if he were smiling. The cat after walking to and fro with erected tail and rubbing herself against his belly had finally curled up and gone to sleep between his legs. The jackdaw, still on the Director’s shoulder, had long since put its head beneath its wing.
Mrs. Dimble, who sat further back in the kitchen, darning as if for dear life, pursed her lips a little as Ivy Maggs spoke. She could not go to bed. She wished they would all keep quiet. Her anxiety had reached that pitch at which almost every event, however small, threatens to become an irritation. But then, if anyone had been watching her expression, they would have seen the little grimace rapidly smoothed out again. Her will had many years of practice behind it.
“When we use the word Friends of those two creatures,” said MacPhee, “I doubt we are being merely anthropomorphic. It is difficult to avoid the illusion that they have personalities in the human sense. But there’s no evidence for it.”
“What’s she go making up to him for, then?” asked Ivy.
“Well,” said MacPhee, “maybe there’d be a desire for warmth—she’s away in out of the draft there. And there’d be a sense of security from being near something familiar. And likely enough some obscure transferred sexual impulses.”
“Really, Mr. MacPhee,” said Ivy with great indignation, “it’s a shame for you to say those things about two dumb animals. I’m sure I never did see Pinch—or Mr. Bultitude either, the poor thing—”
“I said transferred,” interrupted MacPhee drily. “And anyway, they like the mutual friction of their fur as a means of rectifying irritations set up by parasites. Now, you’ll observe—”
“If you mean they have fleas,” said Ivy, “you know as well as anyone that they have no such thing.” She had reason on her side, for it was MacPhee himself who put on overalls once a month and solemnly lathered Mr. Bultitude from rump to snout in the wash-house and poured buckets of tepid water over him, and finally dried him—a day’s work in which he allowed no one to assist him.
“What do you think, Sir?” said Ivy, looking at the Director.
“Me?” said Ransom. “I think MacPhee is introducing into animal life a distinction that doesn’t exist there, and then trying to determine on which side of that distinction the feelings of Pinch and Bultitude fall. You’ve got to become human before the physical cravings are distinguishable from affections—just as you have to become spiritual before affections are distinguishable from charity. What is going on in the cat and the bear isn’t one or other of these two things: it is a single undifferentiated thing in which you can find the germ of what we call friendship and of what we call physical need. But it isn’t either at that level. It is one of Barfield’s ‘ancient unities.’”
“I never denied they liked being together,” said MacPhee.
“Well, that’s what I said,” retorted Mrs. Maggs.
“The question is worth raising, Mr. Director,” said MacPhee, “because I submit that it points to an essential falsity in the whole system of this place.”
Grace Ironwood who had been sitting with her eyes half-closed suddenly opened them wide and fixed them on the Ulsterman, and Mrs. Dimble leaned her head towards Camilla and said in a whisper, “I do wish Mr. MacPhee could be persuaded to go to bed. It’s perfectly unbearable at a time like this.”
“How do you mean, MacPhee?” asked the Director.
“I mean that there is a halfhearted attempt to adopt an attitude towards irrational creatures which cannot be consistently maintained. And I’ll do the justice to say that you’ve never tried. The bear is kept in the house and given apples and golden syrup till it’s near bursting—”
“Well, I like that!” said Mrs. Maggs. “Who is it that’s always giving him apples? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“The bear, as I was observing,” said MacPhee, “is kept in the house and pampered. The pigs are kept in a stye and killed for bacon. I would be interested to know the philosophical rationale of the distinction.”
Ivy Maggs looked in bewilderment from the smiling face of the Director to the unsmiling face of MacPhee.
“I think it’s just silly,” she said. “Who ever heard of trying to make bacon out of a bear?”
MacPhee made a little stamp of impatience and said something which was drowned first by Ransom’s laughter, and then by a great clap of wind which shook the window as if it would blow it in.
“What a dreadful night for them!” said Mrs. Dimble.
“I love it,” said Camilla. “I’d love to be out in it. Out on a high hill. Oh, I do wish you’d let me go with them, Sir.”
“You like it?” said Ivy. “Oh I don’t! Listen to it round the corner of the house. It’d make me feel kind of creepy if I were alone. Or even if you was upstairs, Sir. I always think it’s on nights like this that they—you know—come to you.”
“They don’t take any notice of weather one way or the other, Ivy,” said Ransom.
“Do you know,” said Ivy in a low voice, “that’s a thing I don’t quite understand. They’re so eerie, these ones that come to visit you. I wouldn’t go near that part of the house if I thought there was anything there, not if you paid me a hundred pounds. But I don’t feel like that about God. But He ought to be worse, if you see what I mean.”
“He was, once,” said the Director. “You are quite right about the Powers. Angels in general are not good company for men in general, even when they are good angels and good men. It’s all in St. Paul. But as for Maleldil Himself, all that has changed: it was changed by what happened at Bethlehem.”
“It’s getting ever so near Christmas now,” said Ivy addressing the company in general.
“We shall have Mr. Maggs with us before then,” said Ransom.
“In a day or two, Sir,” said Ivy.
“Was that only the wind?” said Grace Ironwood.
“It sounded to me like a horse,” said Mrs. Dimble.
“Here,” said MacPhee jumping up. “Get out of the way, Mr. Bultitude, till I get my gum boots. It’ll be those two horses of Broad’s again, tramping all over my celery trenches. If only you’d let me go to the police in the first instance. Why the man can’t keep them shut up—” He was bundling himself into his mackintosh as he spoke and the rest of the speech was inaudible.
“My crutch please, Camilla,” said Ransom. “Come back, MacPhee. We will go to the door together, you and I. Ladies, stay where you are.”
There was a look on his face which some of those present had not seen before. The four women sat as if they had been turned to stone, with their eyes wide and staring. A moment later Ransom and MacPhee stood alone in the scullery. The back door was so shaking on its hinges with the wind that they did not know whether someone were knocking at it or not.
“Now,” said Ransom, “open it. And stand back behind it yourself.”
For a second MacPhee worked with the bolts. Then, whether he meant to disobey or not (a point which must remain doubtful), the storm flung the door against the wall and he was momentarily pinned behind it. Ransom, standing motionless, leaning forward on his crutch, saw in the light from the scullery, outlined against the blackness, a huge horse, all in a lather of sweat and foam, its yellow teeth laid bare, its nostrils wide and red, its ears flattened against its skull, and its eyes flaming. It had been ridden so close up to the door that its front hoofs rested on the doorstep. It had neither saddle, stirrup nor bridle; but at that very moment a man leapt off its back. He seemed both very tall and very fat, almost a giant. His reddish-gray hair and beard were blown all about his face so that it was hardly visible; and it was only after he had taken a step forward that Ransom noticed his clothes—the ragged, ill-fitting khaki coat, baggy trousers, and boots that had lost the toes.
In a great room at Belbury, where the fire blazed and wine and silver sparkled on side-tables and a great bed occupied the center of the floor, the Deputy Director watched in profound silence while four young men with reverential or medical heedfulness carried in a burden on a stretcher. As they removed the blankets and transferred the occupant of the stretcher to the bed, Wither’s mouth opened wider. His interest became so intense that for the moment the chaos of his face appeared ordered and he looked like an ordinary man. What he saw was a naked human body, alive, but apparently unconscious. He ordered the attendants to place hot water bottles at its feet and raise the head with pillows: when they had done so and withdrawn, he drew a chair to the foot of the bed and sat down to study the face of the sleeper. The head was very large, though perhaps it looked larger than it was because of the unkempt gray beard and the long and tangled gray hair. The face was weather-beaten in the extreme and the neck, where visible, already lean and scraggy with age. The eyes were shut and the lips wore a very slight smile. The total effect was ambiguous. Wither gazed at it for a long time and sometimes moved his head to see how it looked from a different angle—almost as if he searched for some trait he could not find and were disappointed. For nearly a quarter of an hour he sat thus; then the door opened and Professor Frost came softly into the room.
He walked to the bedside, bent down and looked closely into the stranger’s face. Then he walked round to the far side of the bed and did the same.
“Is he asleep?” whispered Wither.
“I think not. It is more like some kind of a trance. What kind, I don’t know.”
“You have no doubts, I trust?”
“Where did they find him?”
“In a dingle about quarter of a mile from the entrance to the souterrain. They had the track of bare feet almost all the way.”
“The souterrain itself was empty?”
“Yes. I had a report on that from Stone shortly after you left me.”
“You will make provisions about Stone?”
“Yes. But what do you think?”—he pointed with his eyes to the bed.
“I think it is he,” said Frost. “The place is right. The nudity is hard to account for on any other hypothesis. The skull is the kind I expected.”
“But the face.”
“Yes. There are certain traits which are a little disquieting.”
“I could have sworn,” said Wither, “that I knew the look of a Master—even the look of one who could be made into a Master. You understand me . . . one sees at once that Straik or Studdock might do; that Miss Hardcastle, with all her excellent qualities, would not.”
“Yes. Perhaps we must be prepared for great crudities in . . . him. Who knows what the technique of the Atlantean Circle was really like?”
“Certainly, one must not be—ah—narrow-minded. One can suppose that the Masters of that age were not quite so sharply divided from the common people as we are. All sorts of emotional and even instinctive, elements were perhaps still tolerated in the Great Atlantean which we have had to discard.”
“One not only may suppose it, one must. We should not forget that the whole plan consists in the reunion of different kinds of the art.”
“Exactly. Perhaps one’s association with the Powers—their different time scale and all that—tends to make one forget how enormous the gap in time is by our human standards.”
“What we have here,” said Frost pointing to the sleeper, “is not, you see, something from the fifth century. It is the last vestige, surviving into the fifth century, of something much more remote. Something that comes down from long before the Great Disaster, even from before primitive druidism; something that takes us back to Numinor, to pre-glacial periods.”
“The whole experiment is perhaps more hazardous than we realized.”
“I have had occasion before,” said Frost, “to express the wish that you would not keep on introducing these emotional pseudostatements into our scientific discussions.”
“My dear friend,” said Wither without looking at him, “I am quite aware that the subject you mention has been discussed between you and the Powers themselves. Quite aware. And I don’t doubt that you are equally well aware of certain discussions they have held with me about aspects of your own methods which are open to criticism. Nothing would be more futile—I might say more dangerous—than any attempt to introduce between ourselves those modes of oblique discipline which we properly apply to our inferiors. It is in your own interest that I venture to touch on this point.”
Instead of replying, Frost signaled to his companion. Both men became silent, their gaze fixed on the bed: for the Sleeper had opened his eyes.
The opening of the eyes flooded the whole face with meaning, but it was a meaning they could not interpret. The Sleeper seemed to be looking at them, but they were not quite sure that he saw them. As the seconds passed, Wither’s main impression of the face was its caution. But there was nothing intense or uneasy about it. It was a habitual, unemphatic defensiveness which seemed to have behind it years of hard experience, quietly—perhaps even humorously—endured.
Wither rose to his feet, and cleared his throat. “Magister Merline,” he said, “Sapientissime Britonum, secreti secretorum possessor, incredibili quodam gaudio afficimur quod te in domum nostram accipere nobis—ah—contingit. Scito nos etiam haud imperitos esse magnae artis—et—ut ita dicam. . . . ” *
But his voice died away. It was too obvious that the Sleeper was taking no notice of what he said. It was impossible that a learned man of the fifth century should not know Latin. Was there, then, some error in his own pronunciation? But he felt by no means sure that this man could not understand him. The total lack of curiosity, or even interest, in his face, suggested rather that he was not listening.
Frost took a decanter from the table and poured out a glass of red wine. He then returned to the bedside, bowed deeply, and handed it to the stranger. The latter looked at it with an expression that might (or might not) be interpreted as one of cunning; then he suddenly sat up in bed, revealing a huge hairy chest and lean, muscular arms. His eyes turned to the table and he pointed. Frost went back to it and touched a different decanter. The stranger shook his head and pointed again.
“I think,” said Wither, “that our very distinguished guest is trying to indicate the jug. I don’t quite know what was provided. Perhaps—”
“It contains beer,” said Frost.
“Well, it is hardly appropriate—still, perhaps—we know so little of the customs of that age . . .”
While he was still speaking Frost had filled a pewter mug with beer and offered it to their guest. For the first time a gleam of interest came into that cryptic face. The man snatched the mug eagerly, pushed back his disorderly mustache from his lips, and began to drink. Back and back went the gray head; up and up went the bottom of the tankard; the moving muscles of the lean throat made the act of drinking visible. At last the man, having completely inverted the tankard, set it down, wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand, and heaved a long sigh—the first sound he had uttered since his arrival. Then he turned his attention once more to the table.
For about twenty minutes the two old men fed him—Wither with tremulous and courtly deference, Frost with the deft, noiseless movements of a trained servant. All sorts of delicacies had been provided, but the stranger devoted his attention entirely to cold beef, chicken, pickles, bread, cheese and butter. The butter he ate neat, off the end of a knife. He was apparently unacquainted with forks, and took the chicken bones in both hands to gnaw them, placing them under the pillow when he had done. His eating was noisy and animal. When he had eaten, he signaled for a second pint of beer, drank it at two long drafts, wiped his mouth on the sheet and his nose on his hand, and seemed to be composing himself for further slumber.
“Ah—er—domine,” said Wither with deprecating urgency, “nihil magis mihi displiceret quam ut tibi ullo modo—ah—molestior essem. Attamen, venia tua. . . .” *
But the man was taking no notice at all. They could not tell whether his eyes were shut or whether he was still looking at them under half-closed lids; but clearly he was not intending to converse. Frost and Wither exchanged enquiring glances.
“There is no approach to this room, is there?” said Frost, “except through the next one.”
“No,” said Wither.
“Let us go out there and discuss the situation. We can leave the door ajar. We shall be able to hear if he stirs.”
When Mark found himself left suddenly alone by Frost, his first sensation was an unexpected lightness of heart. It was not that he had any release from fears about the future. Rather, in the very midst of those fears, a strange sense of liberation had sprung up. The relief of no longer trying to win these men’s confidence, the shuffling off of miserable hopes, was almost exhilarating. The straight fight, after the long series of diplomatic failures, was tonic. He might lose the straight fight. But at least it was now his side against theirs. And he could talk of “his side” now. Already he was with Jane and with all she symbolized. Indeed, it was he who was in the front line: Jane was almost a non-combatant. . . .
The approval of one’s own conscience is a very heady draft; and specially for those who are not accustomed to it. Within two minutes Mark passed from that first involuntary sense of liberation to a conscious attitude of courage, and thence into unrestrained heroics. The picture of himself as hero and martyr, as Jack the Giant-Killer still coolly playing his hand even in the giant’s kitchen, rose up before him, promising that it could blot out forever those other, and unendurable pictures of himself which had haunted him for the last few hours. It wasn’t everyone, after all, who could have resisted an invitation like Frost’s. An invitation that beckoned you right across the frontiers of human life . . . into something that people had been trying to find since the beginning of the world . . . a touch on that infinitely secret cord which was the real nerve of all history. How it would have attracted him once!
Would have attracted him once. . . . Suddenly, like a thing that leaped to him across infinite distances with the speed of light, desire (salt, black, ravenous, unanswerable desire) took him by the throat. The merest hint will convey to those who have felt it the quality of the emotion which now shook him, like a dog shaking a rat; for others, no description perhaps will avail. Many writers speak of it in terms of lust: a description admirably illuminating from within, totally misleading from without. It has nothing to do with the body. But it is in two respects like lust as lust shows itself to be in the deepest and darkest vault of its labyrinthine house. For like lust, it disenchants the whole universe. Everything else that Mark had ever felt—love, ambition, hunger, lust itself—appeared to have been mere milk and water, toys for children, not worth one throb of the nerves. The infinite attraction of this dark thing sucked all other passions into itself: the rest of the world appeared blenched, etiolated, insipid, a world of white marriages and white masses, dishes without salt, gambling for counters. He could not now think of Jane except in terms of appetite: and appetite here made no appeal. That serpent, faced with the true dragon, became a fangless worm. But it was like lust in another respect also. It is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak a stimulant. And so it was here. These creatures of which Frost had spoken—and he did not doubt now that they were locally present with him in the cell—breathed death on the human race and on all joy. Not despite this but because of this, the terrible gravitation sucked and tugged and fascinated him towards them. Never before had he known the fruitful strength of the movement opposite to Nature which now had him in its grip; the impulse to reverse all reluctances and to draw every circle counterclockwise. The meaning of certain pictures, of Frost’s talk about “objectivity,” of the things done by witches in old times, became clear to him. The image of Wither’s face rose to his memory; and this time he did not merely loathe it. He noted, with shuddering satisfaction, the signs it bore of a shared experience between them. Wither also knew. Wither understood. . . .
At the same moment, it came back to him that he would probably be killed. As soon as he thought of that, he became once more aware of the cell—the little hard white empty place with the glaring light, in which he found himself sitting on the floor. He blinked his eyes. He could not remember that it had been visible for the last few minutes. Where had he been? His mind was clear now at any rate. This idea of something in common between him and Wither was all nonsense. Of course they meant to kill him in the end unless he could rescue himself by his own wits. What had he been thinking and feeling while he forgot that?
Gradually he realized that he had sustained some sort of attack, and that he had put up no resistance at all; and with that realization a quite new kind of dread entered his mind. Though he was theoretically a materialist, he had all his life believed quite inconsistently, and even carelessly, in the freedom of his own will. He had seldom made a moral resolution, and when he had resolved some hours ago to trust the Belbury crew no further, he had taken it for granted that he would be able to do what he resolved. He knew, to be sure, that he might “change his mind”; but till he did so, of course he would carry out his plan. It had never occurred to him that his mind could thus be changed for him, all in an instant of time, changed beyond recognition. If that sort of thing could happen. . . . It was unfair. Here was a man trying (for the first time in his life) to do what was obviously the right thing—the thing that Jane and the Dimbles and Aunt Gilly would have approved of. You might have expected that when a man behaved in that way the universe would back him up. For the relics of such semisavage versions of Theism as Mark had picked up in the course of his life were stronger in him than he knew, and he felt, though he would not have put it into words, that it was “up to” the universe to reward his good resolutions. Yet, the very first moment you tried to be good, the universe let you down. It revealed gaps you had never dreamed of. It invented new laws for the express purpose of letting you down. That was what you got for your pains.
The cynics, then, were right. But at this thought, he stopped sharply. Some flavor that came with it had given him pause. Was this the other mood beginning again? Oh not that, at any price. He clenched his hands. No, no, no. He could not stand this much longer. He wanted Jane; he wanted Mrs. Dimble; he wanted Denniston. He wanted somebody or something. “Oh don’t, don’t let me go back into it,” he said; and then louder, “don’t, don’t.” All that could in any sense be called himself went into that cry; and the dreadful consciousness of having played his last card began to turn slowly into a sort of peace. There was nothing more to be done. Unconsciously he allowed his muscles to relax. His young body was very tired by this time and even the hard floor was grateful to it. The cell also seemed to be somehow emptied and purged, as if it too were tired after the conflicts it had witnessed—emptied like a sky after rain, tired like a child after weeping. A dim consciousness that the night must be nearly ended stole over him, and he fell asleep.