“Stand! Stand where you are and tell me your name and business,” said Ransom.
The ragged figure on the threshold tilted its head a little sideways like one who cannot quite hear. At the same moment the wind from the opened door had its way with the house. The inner door, between the scullery and the kitchen, clapped to with a loud bang, isolating the three men from the women, and a large tin basin fell clattering into the sink. The stranger took a pace further into the room.
“Sta,” said Ransom in a loud voice. “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, dic mihi qui sis et quam ob causam veneris.” *
The Stranger raised his hand and flung back the dripping hair from his forehead. The light fell full on his face, from which Ransom had the impression of an immense quietness. Every muscle of this man’s body seemed as relaxed as if he were asleep, and he stood absolutely still. Each drop of rain from the khaki coat struck the tiled floor exactly where the drop before it had fallen.
His eyes rested on Ransom for a second or two with no particular interest. Then he turned his head to his left, to where the door was flung back almost against the wall. MacPhee was concealed behind it.
“Come out,” said the Stranger in Latin. The words were spoken almost in a whisper, but so deep that even in that windshaken room they made a kind of vibration. But what surprised Ransom much more was the fact that MacPhee immediately obeyed. He did not look at Ransom but at the Stranger. Then, unexpectedly, he gave an enormous yawn. The Stranger looked him up and down and then turned to the Director.
“Fellow,” he said in Latin, “tell the Lord of this House that I am come.” As he spoke, the wind from behind him was whipping the coat about his legs and blowing his hair over his forehead; but his great mass stood as if it had been planted like a tree and he seemed in no hurry. And the voice, too, was such as one might imagine to be the voice of a tree, large and slow and patient, drawn up through roots and clay and gravel from the depths of the Earth.
“I am the Master here,” said Ransom, in the same language.
“To be sure!” answered the Stranger. “And yonder whippersnapper [mastigia] is without doubt your Bishop.” He did not exactly smile, but a look of disquieting amusement came into his keen eyes. Suddenly he poked his head forward so as to bring his face much nearer to the Director’s.
“Tell your master that I am come,” he repeated in the same voice as before.
Ransom looked at him without the flicker of an eyelid.
“Do you really wish,” he said at last, “that I call upon my Masters?”
“A daw that lives in a hermit’s cell has learned before now to chatter book-Latin,” said the other. “Let us hear your calling, mannikin” (homuncio).
“I must use another language for it,” said Ransom.
“A daw could have Greek also in its bill.”
“It is not Greek.”
“Let us hear your Hebrew, then.”
“It is not Hebrew.”
“Nay,” answered the other with something like a chuckle, a chuckle deep hidden in his enormous chest and betrayed only by a slight movement of his shoulders, “if you come to the gabble of barbarians, it will go hard but I shall out-chatter you. Here is excellent sport.”
“It may happen to seem to you the speech of barbarians,” said Ransom, “for it is long since it has been heard. Not even in Numinor was it heard in the streets.”
The Stranger gave no start and his face remained as quiet as before, if it did not become quieter. But he spoke with a new interest.
“Your Masters let you play with dangerous toys,” he said. “Tell me, slave, what is Numinor?”
“The true West,” said Ransom.
“Well,” said the other. Then, after a pause, he added, “You have little courtesy to guests in this house. It is a cold wind on my back, and I have been long in bed. You see, I have already crossed the threshold.”
“I value that at a straw,” said Ransom. “Shut the door, MacPhee,” he added in English. But there was no response; and looking round for the first time, he saw that MacPhee had sat down in the one chair which the scullery contained and was fast asleep.
“What is the meaning of this foolery?” said Ransom looking sharply at the Stranger.
“If you are indeed the Master of this house, you have no need to be told. If not, why should I give account of myself to such as you? Do not fear; your horseboy will be none the worse.”
“This shall be seen to shortly,” said Ransom. “In the meantime, I do not fear your entering the house. I have more cause to fear your escaping. Shut the door if you will, for you see my foot is hurt.”
The Stranger without ever taking his eyes off Ransom swept back his left hand behind him, found the door handle, and slammed the door to. MacPhee never stirred. “Now,” he said, “what of these Masters of yours?”
“My Masters are the Oyéresu.”
“Where did you hear that name?” asked the Stranger. “Or, if you are truly of the College, why do they dress you like a slave?”
“Your own garments,” said Ransom, “are not those of a druid.”
“That stroke was well put by,” answered the other. “Since you have knowledge, answer me three questions, if you dare.”
“I will answer them, if I can. But as for daring, we shall see.”
The Stranger mused for a few seconds; then, speaking in a slightly singsong voice, as though he repeated an old lesson, he asked, in two Latin hexameters, the following question:
“Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?”
Ransom replied, “Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty [delicati] in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
“You have answered well,” said the Stranger. “I thought there were but three men in the world that knew this question. But my second may be harder. Where is the ring of Arthur the King? What Lord has such a treasure in his house?”
“The ring of the King,” said Ransom, “is on Arthur’s finger where he sits in the House of Kings in the cup-shaped land of Abhalljin, beyond the seas of Lur in Perelandra. For Arthur did not die; but Our Lord took him, to be in the body till the end of time and the shattering of Sulva, with Enoch and Elias and Moses and Melchisedec the King. Melchisedec is he in whose hall the steep-stoned ring sparkles on the forefinger of the Pendragon.”
“Well answered,” said the Stranger. “In my college it was thought that only two men in the world knew this. But as for my third question, no man knew the answer but myself. Who shall be Pendragon in the time when Saturn descends from his sphere? In what world did he learn war?”
“In the sphere of Venus I learned war,” said Ransom. “In this age Lurga shall descend. I am the Pendragon.”
When he had said this, he took a step backwards for the big man had begun to move and there was a new look in his eyes. Any who had seen them as they stood thus face to face would have thought that it might come to fighting at any moment. But the Stranger had not moved with hostile purpose. Slowly, ponderously, yet not awkwardly, as though a mountain sank like a wave, he sank on one knee; and still his face was almost on a level with the Director’s.
“This throws a quite unexpected burden on our resources,” said Wither to Frost, where they both sat in the outer room with the door ajar. “I must confess I had not anticipated any serious difficulty about language.”
“We must get a Celtic scholar at once,” said Frost. “We are regrettably weak on the philological side. I do not at the moment know who has discovered most about ancient British. Ransom would be the man to advise us if he were available. I suppose nothing has been heard of him by your department?”
“I need hardly point out,” said Wither, “that Dr. Ransom’s philological attainments are by no means the only ground on which we are anxious to find him. If the least trace had been discovered, you may rest assured that you would have long since had the—ah—gratification of seeing him here in person.”
“Of course. He may not be in the Earth at all.”
“I met him once,” said Wither, half-closing his eyes.
“He was a most brilliant man in his way. A man whose penetrations and intuitions might have been of infinite value, if he had not embraced the cause of reaction. It is a saddening reflection . . .”
“Of course,” said Frost, interrupting him. “Straik knows modern Welsh. His mother was a Welsh woman.”
“It would certainly be much more satisfactory,” said Wither, “if we could, so to speak, keep the whole matter in the family. There would be something very disagreeable to me—and I am sure you would feel the same way yourself—about introducing a Celtic expert from outside.”
“The expert would, of course, be provided for as soon as we could dispense with his services,” replied Frost. “It is the waste of time that is the trouble. What progress have you made with Straik?”
“Oh, really excellent,” said the Deputy Director. “Indeed I am almost a little disappointed. I mean, my pupil is advancing so rapidly that it may be necessary to abandon an idea which, I confess, rather attracts me. I had been thinking while you were out of the room that it would be specially fitting and—ah—proper and gratifying if your pupil and mine could be initiated together. We should both, I am sure, have felt. . . . But, of course, if Straik is ready some time before Studdock, I should not feel myself entitled to stand in his way. You will understand, my dear fellow, that I am not trying to make this anything like a test case as to the comparative efficacy of our very different methods.”
“It would be impossible for you to do so,” said Frost, “since I have interviewed Studdock only once, and that one interview has had all the success that could be expected. I mentioned Straik only to find out whether he were already so far committed that he might properly be introduced to our guest.”
“Oh . . . as to being committed,” said Wither, “in some sense . . . ignoring certain fine shades for the moment, while fully recognizing their ultimate importance . . . I should not hesitate . . . we should be perfectly justified.”
“I was thinking,” said Frost, “that there must be someone on duty here. He may wake at any moment. Our pupils—Straik and Studdock—could take it in turns. There is no reason why they should not be useful even before their full initiation. They would, of course, be under orders to ring us up the moment anything happened.”
“You think Mr—ah—Studdock is far enough on?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Frost. “What harm can he do? He can’t get out. And, in the meantime, we only want someone to watch. It would be a useful test.”
MacPhee who had just been refuting both Ransom and Alcasan’s head by a two-edged argument which seemed unanswerable in the dream but which he never afterwards remembered, found himself violently waked by someone shaking his shoulder. He suddenly perceived that he was cold and his left foot was numb. Then he saw Denniston’s face looking into his own. The scullery seemed full of people—Denniston and Dimble and Jane. They appeared extremely bedraggled, torn and muddy and wet.
“Are you all right?” Denniston was saying. “I’ve been trying to wake you for several minutes.”
“All right?” said MacPhee swallowing once or twice and licking his lips. “Aye. I’m all right.” Then he sat upright. “There’s been a—a man here,” he said.
“What sort of a man?” asked Dimble.
“Well,” said MacPhee. “As to that . . . it’s not just so easy. . . . I fell asleep talking to him, to tell you the truth. I can’t just bring to mind what we were saying.”
The others exchanged glances. Though MacPhee was fond of a little hot toddy on winter nights, he was a sober man: they had never seen him like this before. Next moment he jumped to his feet.
“Lord save us!” he exclaimed. “He had the Director here. Quick! We must search the house and the garden. It was some kind of impostor or spy. I know now what’s wrong with me. I’ve been hypnotized. There was a horse too. I mind the horse.”
This last detail had an immediate effect on his hearers. Denniston flung open the kitchen door and the whole party surged in after him. For a second they saw indistinct forms in the deep, red light of a large fire which had not been attended to for some hours; then, as Denniston found the switch and turned on the light, all drew a deep breath. The four women sat fast asleep. The jackdaw slept, perched on the back of an empty chair. Mr. Bultitude, stretched out on his side across the hearth, slept also; his tiny, child-like snore, so disproportionate to his bulk, was audible in the momentary silence. Mrs. Dimble, bunched in what seemed an uncomfortable position, was sleeping with her head on the table, a half-darned sock still clasped on her knees. Dimble looked at her with that incurable pity which men feel for any sleeper, but specially for a wife. Camilla, who had been in the rocking chair, was curled up in an attitude which was full of grace, like that of an animal accustomed to sleep anywhere. Mrs. Maggs slept with her kind, commonplace mouth wide open; and Grace Ironwood, bolt upright as if she were awake, but with her head sagging a little to one side, seemed to submit with austere patience to the humiliation of unconsciousness.
“They’re all right,” said MacPhee from behind. “It’s just the same as he did to me. We’ve no time to wake them. Get on.”
They passed from the kitchen into the flagged passage. To all of them except MacPhee the silence of the house seemed intense after their buffeting in the wind and rain. The lights as they switched them on successively revealed empty rooms and empty passages which wore the abandoned look of indoor midnight—fires dead in the grates, an evening paper on a sofa, a clock that had stopped. But no one had really expected to find much else on the ground floor. “Now for upstairs,” said Dimble.
“The lights are on upstairs,” said Jane as they all came to the foot of the staircase.
“We turned them on ourselves from the passage,” said Dimble.
“I don’t think we did,” said Denniston.
“Excuse me,” said Dimble to MacPhee, “I think perhaps I’d better go first.”
Up to the first landing they were in darkness; on the second and last the light from the first floor fell. At each landing the stair made a right-angled turn, so that till you reached the second you could not see the lobby on the floor above. Jane and Denniston, who were last, saw MacPhee and Dimble stopped dead on the second landing; their faces in profile lit up, the backs of their heads in darkness. The Ulsterman’s mouth was shut like a trap, his expression hostile and afraid. Dimble was openmouthed. Then, forcing her tired limbs to run, Jane got up beside them and saw what they saw.
Looking down on them from the balustrade were two men, one clothed in sweepy garments of red and the other in blue. It was the Director who wore blue, and for one instant a thought that was pure nightmare crossed Jane’s mind. The two robed figures looked to be two of the same sort . . . and what, after all, did she know of this Director who had conjured her into his house and made her dream dreams and taught her the fear of Hell that very night? And there they were, the pair of them, talking their secrets and doing whatever such people would do, when they had emptied the house or laid its inhabitants to sleep. The man who had been dug up out of the earth and the man who had been in outer space . . . and the one had told them that the other was an enemy, and now, the moment they met, here were the two of them, run together like two drops of quicksilver. All this time she had hardly looked at the Stranger. The Director seemed to have laid aside his crutch, and Jane had hardly seen him standing so straight and still before. The light so fell on his beard that it became a kind of halo; and on top of his head also she caught the glint of gold. Suddenly, while she thought of these things, she found that her eyes were looking straight into the eyes of the Stranger. Next moment she had noticed his size. The man was monstrous. And the two men were allies. And the Stranger was speaking and pointing at her as he spoke.
She did not understand the words; but Dimble did, and heard Merlin saying in what seemed to him a rather strange kind of Latin:
“Sir, you have in your house the falsest lady of any at this time alive.”
And Dimble heard the Director answer him in the same language:
“Sir, you are mistaken. She is doubtless like all of us a sinner; but the woman is chaste.”
“Sir,” said Merlin, “know well that she has done in Logres a thing of which no less sorrow shall come than came of the stroke that Balinus struck. For, Sir, it was the purpose of God that she and her lord should between them have begotten a child by whom the enemies should have been put out of Logres for a thousand years.”
“She is but lately married,” said Ransom. “The child may yet be born.”
“Sir,” said Merlin, “be assured that the child will never be born, for the hour of its begetting is passed. Of their own will they are barren: I did not know till now that the usages of Sulva were so common among you. For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again.”
“Enough said,” answered Ransom. “The woman perceives that we are speaking of her.”
“It would be great charity,” said Merlin, “if you gave order that her head should be cut from her shoulders; for it is a weariness to look at her.”
Jane, though she had a smattering of Latin, had not understood their conversation. The accent was unfamiliar, and the old druid used a vocabulary that was far beyond her reading—the Latin of a man to whom Apuleius and Martianus Capella were the primary classics and whose elegances resembled those of the Hisperica Famina. But Dimble had followed it. He thrust Jane behind him and called out, “Ransom! What in Heaven’s name is the meaning of this?”
Merlin spoke again in Latin and Ransom was just turning to answer him, when Dimble interrupted,
“Answer us,” he said. “What has happened? Why are you dressed up like that? What are you doing with that bloodthirsty old man?”
MacPhee, who had followed the Latin even less than Jane, but who had been staring at Merlin as an angry terrier stares at a Newfoundland dog which has invaded its own garden, broke into the conversation: “Dr. Ransom,” he said. “I don’t know who the big man is and I’m no Latinist. But I know well that you’ve kept me under your eyes all this night against my own expressed will, and allowed me to be drugged and hypnotized. It gives me little pleasure, I assure you, to see yourself dressed up like something out of a pantomime and standing there hand in glove with that yogi, or shaman, or priest, or whatever he is. And you can tell him he need not look at me the way he’s doing. I’m not afraid of him. And as for my own life and limb—if you, Dr. Ransom, have changed sides after all that’s come and gone, I don’t know that I’ve much more use for either. But though I may be killed, I’m not going to be made a fool of. We’re waiting for an explanation.”
The Director looked down on them in silence for a few seconds.
“Has it really come to this?” he said. “Does not one of you trust me?”
“I do, Sir,” said Jane suddenly.
“These appeals to the passions and emotions,” said MacPhee, “are nothing to the purpose. I could cry as well as anyone this moment if I gave my mind to it.”
“Well,” said the Director after a pause, “there is some excuse for you all for we have all been mistaken. So has the enemy. This man is Merlinus Ambrosius. They thought that if he came back he would be on their side. I find he is on ours. You, Dimble, ought to realize that this was always a possibility.”
“That is true,” said Dimble. “I suppose it was—well, the look of the thing—you and he standing there together: like that. And his appalling bloodthirstiness.”
“I have been startled by it myself,” said Ransom. “But after all we had no right to expect that his penal code would be that of the nineteenth century. I find it difficult, too, to make him understand that I am not an absolute monarch.”
“Is—is he a Christian?” asked Dimble.
“Yes,” said Ransom. “As for my clothes, I have for once put on the dress of my office to do him honor, and because I was ashamed. He mistook MacPhee and me for scullions or stableboys. In his days, you see, men did not, except for necessity, go about in shapeless sacks of cloth, and drab was not a favorite color.”
At this point Merlin spoke again. Dimble and the Director who alone could follow his speech heard him say, “Who are these people? If they are your slaves, why do they do you no reverence? If they are enemies, why do we not destroy them?”
“They are my friends,” began Ransom in Latin, but MacPhee interrupted,
“Do I understand, Dr. Ransom,” he said, “that you are asking us to accept this person as a member of our organization?”
“I am afraid,” said the Director, “I cannot put it that way. He is a member of the organization. And I must command you all to accept him.”
“And secondly,” continued MacPhee, “I must ask what inquiries have been made into his credentials.”
“I am fully satisfied,” answered the Director. “I am as sure of his good faith as of yours.”
“But the grounds of your confidence?” persisted MacPhee. “Are we not to hear them?”
“It would be hard,” said the Director, “to explain to you my reasons for trusting Merlinus Ambrosius; but no harder than to explain to him why, despite many appearances which might be misunderstood, I trust you.” There was just the ghost of a smile about his mouth as he said this. Then Merlin spoke to him again in Latin and he replied. After that Merlin addressed Dimble.
“The Pendragon tells me,” he said in his unmoved voice, “that you accuse me for a fierce and cruel man. It is a charge I never heard before. A third part of my substance I gave to widows and poor men. I never sought the death of any but felons and heathen Saxons. As for the woman, she may live for me. I am not Master in this house. But would it be such a great matter if her head were struck off? Do not queens and ladies who would disdain her as their tire woman go to the fire for less? Even that gallows bird [cruciarius] beside you—I mean you, fellow, though you speak nothing but your own barbarous tongue; you with the face like sour milk and the voice like a saw in a hard log and the legs like a crane’s—even that cutpurse [sector zonarius], though I would have him to the gatehouse, yet the rope should be used on his back not his throat.”
MacPhee who realized, though without understanding the words, that he was the subject of some unfavorable comment, stood listening with that expression of entirely suspended judgment which is commoner in Northern Ireland and the Scotch lowlands than in England.
“Mr. Director,” he said when Merlin had finished, “I would be very greatly obliged if—”
“Come,” said the Director suddenly, “we have none of us slept tonight. Arthur, will you come and light a fire for our guest in the big room at the North end of this passage? And would someone wake the women? Ask them to bring him up refreshments. A bottle of Burgundy and whatever you have cold. And then, all to bed. We need not stir early in the morning. All is going to be very well.”
“We’re going to have difficulties with that new colleague of ours,” said Dimble. He was alone with his wife in their room at St. Anne’s late on the following day.
“Yes,” he repeated after a pause. “What you’d call a strong colleague.”
“You look very tired, Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble.
“Well, it’s been rather a grueling conference,” said he. “He’s—he’s a tiring man. Oh, I know we’ve all been fools. I mean, we’ve all been imagining that because he came back in the twentieth century he’d be a twentieth-century man. Time is more important than we thought, that’s all.”
“I felt that at lunch, you know,” said his wife. “It was so silly not to have realized that he wouldn’t know about forks. But what surprised me even more (after the first shock) was how—well, how elegant he was without them. I mean you could see it wasn’t a case of having no manners but of having different ones.”
“Oh, the old boy’s a gentleman in his own way—anyone can see that. But . . . well, I don’t know. I suppose it’s all right.”
“What happened at the meeting?”
“Well, you see, everything had to be explained on both sides. We’d the dickens of a job to make him understand that Ransom isn’t the king of this country or trying to become king. And then we had to break it to him that we weren’t the British at all, but the English—what he’d call Saxons. It took him some time to get over that.”
“I see.”
“And then MacPhee had to choose that moment for embarking on an interminable explanation of the relations between Scotland and Ireland and England. All of which, of course, had to be translated. It was all nonsense too. Like a good many people, MacPhee imagines he’s a Celt when, apart from his name, there’s nothing Celtic about him any more than about Mr. Bultitude. By the way Merlinus Ambrosius made a prophecy about Mr. Bultitude.”
“Oh? What was that?”
“He said that before Christmas this bear would do the best deed that any bear had done in Britain except some other bear that none of us had ever heard of. He keeps on saying things like that. They just pop out when we’re talking about something else, and in a rather different voice. As if he couldn’t help it. He doesn’t seem to know any more than the bit he tells you at the moment, if you see what I mean. As if something like a camera shutter opened at the back of his mind and closed again immediately and just one little item came through. It has rather a disagreeable effect.”
“He and MacPhee didn’t quarrel again, I hope.”
“Not exactly. I’m afraid Merlinus Ambrosius wasn’t taking MacPhee very seriously. From the fact that MacPhee is always being obstructive and rather rude and yet never gets sat on, I think Merlinus has concluded that he is the Director’s fool. He seems to have got over his dislike for him. But I don’t think MacPhee is going to like Merlinus.”
“Did you get down to actual business?” asked Mrs. Dimble.
“Well, in a way,” said Dimble, wrinkling his forehead. “We were all at cross-purposes, you see. The business about Ivy’s husband being in prison came up, and Merlinus wanted to know why we hadn’t rescued him. He seemed to imagine us just riding off and taking the County Jail by storm. That’s the sort of thing one was up against all the time.”
“Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble suddenly. “Is he going to be any use?”
“He’s going to be able to do things, if that’s what you mean. In that sense there’s more danger of his being too much use than too little.”
“What sort of things?” asked his wife.
“The universe is so very complicated,” said Dr. Dimble.
“So you have said rather often before, dear,” replied Mrs. Dimble.
“Have I?” he said with a smile. “How often, I wonder? As often as you’ve told the story of the pony and trap at Dawlish?”
“Cecil! I haven’t told it for years.”
“My dear, I heard you telling it to Camilla the night before last.”
“Oh, Camilla. That was quite different. She’d never heard it before.”
“I don’t know that we can be certain even about that . . . the universe being so complicated and all.” For a few minutes there was silence between them.
“But about Merlin?” asked Mrs. Dimble presently.
“Have you ever noticed,” said Dimble, “that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?”
His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.
“I mean this,” said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. “If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like in the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides . . . how does it go? Something about ‘eat every day’ . . . ‘till all is somethinged away.’ It can’t be eaten; that wouldn’t scan. My memory has failed dreadfully these last few years. Do you know the bit, Margery?”
“What you were saying reminded me more of the bit in the Bible about the winnowing fan. Separating the wheat and the chaff. Or like Browning’s line: ‘Life’s business being just the terrible choice.’”
“Exactly! Perhaps the whole time-process means just that and nothing else. But it’s not only in questions of moral choice. Everything is getting more itself and more different from everything else all the time. Evolution means species getting less and less like one another. Minds get more and more spiritual, matter more and more material. Even in literature, poetry and prose draw further and further apart.”
Mrs. Dimble with the ease born of long practice averted the danger, ever present in her house, of a merely literary turn being given to the conversation.
“Yes,” she said. “Spirit and matter, certainly. That explains why people like the Studdocks find it so difficult to be happily married.”
“The Studdocks?” said Dimble, looking at her rather vaguely. The domestic problems of that young couple had occupied his mind a good deal less than they had occupied his wife’s. “Oh, I see. Yes. I daresay that has something to do with it. But about Merlin. What it comes to, as far as I can make out, is this. There were still possibilities for a man of that age which there aren’t for a man of ours. The Earth itself was more like an animal in those days. And mental processes were much more like physical actions. And there were—well, Neutrals, knocking about.”
“Neutrals?”
“I don’t mean, of course, that anything can be a real neutral. A conscious being is either obeying God or disobeying Him. But there might be things neutral in relation to us.”
“You mean eldila—angels?”
“Well, the word angel rather begs the question. Even the Oyéresu aren’t exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are. Technically they are Intelligences. The point is that while it may be true at the end of the world to describe every eldil either as an angel or a devil, and may even be true now, it was much less true in Merlin’s time. There used to be things on this Earth pursuing their own business, so to speak. They weren’t ministering spirits sent to help fallen humanity; but neither were they enemies preying upon us. Even in St. Paul one gets glimpses of a population that won’t exactly fit into our two columns of angels and devils. And if you go back further . . . all the gods, elves, dwarfs, water-people, fate, longaevi. You and I know too much to think they are just illusions.”
“You think there are things like that?”
“I think there were. I think there was room for them then, but the universe has come more to a point. Not all rational things perhaps. Some would be mere wills inherent in matter, hardly conscious. More like animals. Others—but I don’t really know. At any rate, that is the sort of situation in which one got a man like Merlin.”
“It all sounds rather horrible to me.”
“It was rather horrible. I mean even in Merlin’s time (he came at the extreme tail end of it) though you could still use that sort of life in the universe innocently, you couldn’t do it safely. The things weren’t bad in themselves, but they were already bad for us. They sort of withered the man who dealt with them. Not on purpose. They couldn’t help doing it. Merlinus is withered. He’s quite pious and humble and all that, but something has been taken out of him. That quietness of his is just a little deadly, like the quiet of a gutted building. It’s the result of having laid his mind open to something that broadens the environment just a bit too much. Like polygamy. It wasn’t wrong for Abraham, but one can’t help feeling that even he lost something by it.”
“Cecil,” said Mrs. Dimble. “Do you feel quite comfortable about the Director’s using a man like this? I mean, doesn’t it look a little bit like fighting Belbury with its own weapons?”
“No. I had thought of that. Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He’s at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead—a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits—extranatural, antinatural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin, which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia—the brutal surgery from without. No. In a sense Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back to in some different way. Do you know that he is forbidden by the rules of his order to use any edged tool on any growing thing?”
“Good gracious!” said Mrs. Dimble. “There’s six o’clock. I’d promised Ivy to be in the kitchen at quarter to. There’s no need for you to move, Cecil.”
“Do you know,” said Dimble, “I think you are a wonderful woman.”
“Why?”
“How many women who had had their own house for thirty years would be able to fit into this menagerie as you do?”
“That’s nothing,” said Mrs. Dimble. “Ivy had her own house too, you know. And it’s much worse for her. After all, I haven’t got my husband in jail.”
“You jolly soon will have,” said Dimble, “if half the plans of Merlinus Ambrosius are put into action.”
Merlin and the Director were meanwhile talking in the Blue Room. The Director had put aside his robe and circlet and lay on his sofa. The druid sat in a chair facing him, his legs uncrossed, his pale large hands motionless on his knees, looking to modern eyes like an old conventional carving of a king. He was still robed and beneath the robe, as Ransom knew, had surprisingly little clothing, for the warmth of the house was to him excessive and he found trousers uncomfortable. His loud demands for oil after his bath had involved some hurried shopping in the village which had finally produced, by Denniston’s exertions, a tin of Brilliantine. Merlinus had used it freely so that his hair and beard glistened and the sweet sticky smell filled the room. That was why Mr. Bultitude had pawed so insistently at the door that he was finally admitted and now sat as near the magician as he could possibly get, his nostrils twitching. He had never smelled such an interesting man before.
“Sir,” said Merlin in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him. “I give you great thanks. I cannot indeed understand the way you live and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone with no more honor than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres, it is time that we should open counsels to each other.”
He glanced at the Director’s face as he spoke and then, as if startled by what he saw there, leaned sharply forward.
“Does your wound pain you?” he asked.
Ransom shook his head. “No,” he said, “it is not the wound. We have terrible things to talk of.”
The big man stirred uneasily.
“Sir,” said Merlinus in a deeper and softer voice, “I could take all the anguish from your heel as though I were wiping it out with a sponge. Give me but seven days to go in and out and up and down and to and fro, to renew old acquaintance. These fields and I, this wood and I, have much to say to one another.”
As he said this, he was leaning forward so that his face and the bear’s were almost side by side, and it almost looked as if those two might have been engaged in some kind of furry and grunted conversation. The druid’s face had a strangely animal appearance: not sensual nor fierce but full of the patient, unarguing sagacity of a beast. Ransom’s, meanwhile, was full of torment.
“You might find the country much changed,” he said, forcing a smile.
“No,” said Merlin. “I do not reckon to find it much changed.” The distance between the two men was increasing every moment. Merlin was like something that ought not to be indoors. Bathed and anointed though he was, a sense of mold, gravel, wet leaves, weedy water, hung about him.
“Not changed,” he repeated in an almost inaudible voice. And in that deepening inner silence of which his face bore witness, one might have believed that he listened continually to a murmur of evasive sounds: rustling of mice and stoats, thumping progression of frogs, the small shock of falling hazel nuts, creaking of branches, runnels trickling, the very growing of grass. The bear had closed its eyes. The whole room was growing heavy with a sort of floating anæsthesia.
“Through me,” said Merlin, “you can suck up from the Earth oblivion of all pains.”
“Silence,” said the Director sharply. He had been sinking down into the cushions of his sofa with his head drooping a little towards his chest. Now he suddenly sat bolt upright. The magician started and straightened himself likewise. The air of the room was cleared. Even the bear opened its eyes again.
“No,” said the Director. “God’s glory, do you think you were dug out of the earth to give me a plaster for my heel? We have drugs that could cheat the pain as well as your earth magic or better, if it were not my business to bear it to the end. I will hear no more of that. Do you understand?”
“I hear and obey,” said the magician. “But I meant no harm. If not to heal your own wound, yet for the healing of Logres, you will need my commerce with field and water. It must be that I should go in and out, and to and fro, renewing old acquaintance. It will not be changed, you know. Not what you would call changed.”
Again that sweet heaviness, like the smell of hawthorn, seemed to be flowing back over the Blue Room.
“No,” said the Director in a still louder voice, “that cannot be done any longer. The soul has gone out of the wood and water. Oh, I daresay you could awake them; a little. But it would not be enough. A storm, or even a river flood would be of little avail against our present enemy. Your weapon would break in your hands. For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven.”
“Hidden it may be,” said Merlinus. “But not changed. Leave me to work, Lord. I will wake it. I will set a sword in every blade of grass to wound them and the very clods of earth shall be venom to their feet. I will—”
“No,” said the Director. “I forbid you to speak of it. If it were possible, it would be unlawful. Whatever of spirit may still linger in the earth has withdrawn fifteen hundred years further away from us since your time. You shall not speak a word to it. You shall not lift your little finger to call it up. I command you. It is in this age utterly unlawful.” Hitherto, he had been speaking sternly and coldly. Now he leaned forward and said in a different voice, “It never was very lawful, even in your day. Remember, when we first knew that you would be awaked, we thought you would be on the side of the enemy. And because Our Lord does all things for each, one of the purposes of your reawakening was that your own soul should be saved.”
Merlin sank back into his chair like a man unstrung. The bear licked his hand where it hung, pale and relaxed, over the arm of the chair.
“Sir,” said Merlin presently, “if I am not to work for you in that fashion, then you have taken into your house a silly bulk of flesh. For I am no longer much of a man of war. If it comes to point and edge I avail little.”
“Not that way either,” said Ransom, hesitating like a man who is reluctant to come to the point. “No power that is merely earthly,” he continued at last, “will serve against the Hideous Strength.”
“Then let us all to prayers,” said Merlinus. “But there also . . . I was not reckoned of much account . . . they called me a devil’s son, some of them. It was a lie. But I do not know why I have been brought back.”
“Certainly, let us stick to our prayers,” said Ransom. “Now and always. But that was not what I meant. There are celestial powers: created powers, not in this Earth, but in the Heavens.”
Merlinus looked at him in silence.
“You know well what I am speaking of,” said Ransom. “Did not I tell you when we first met that the Oyéresu were my Masters?”
“Of course,” said Merlin. “And that was how I knew you were of the College. Is it not our password all over the Earth?”
“A password?” exclaimed Ransom with a look of surprise. “I did not know that.”
“But . . . but,” said Merlinus, “if you knew not the password, how did you come to say it?”
“I said it because it was true.”
The magician licked his lips which had become very pale.
“True as the plainest things are true,” repeated Ransom. “True as it is true that you sit here with my bear beside you.”
Merlin spread out his hands. “You are my father and mother,” he said. His eyes, steadily fixed on Ransom, were large as those of an awestruck child, but for the rest he looked a smaller man than Ransom had first taken him to be.
“Suffer me to speak,” he said at last, “or slay me if you will, for I am in the hollow of your hand. I had heard of it in my own days—that some had spoken with the gods. Blaise my Master knew a few words of that speech. Yet these were, after all, powers of Earth. For—I need not teach you, you know more than I—it is not the very Oyéresu, the true powers of Heaven, whom the greatest of our craft meet, but only their earthly wraiths, their shadows. Only the earth-Venus, the earth-Mercurius; not Perelandra herself, not Viritrilbia himself. It is only. . . .”
“I am not speaking of the wraiths,” said Ransom. “I have stood before Mars himself in the sphere of Mars and before Venus herself in the sphere of Venus. It is their strength, and the strength of some greater than they, which will destroy our enemies.”
“But, Lord,” said Merlin, “how can this be? Is it not against the Seventh Law?”
“What law is that?” asked Ransom.
“Has not our Fair Lord made it a law for Himself that He will not send down the Powers to mend or mar in this Earth until the end of all things? Or is this the end that is even now coming to pass?”
“It may be the beginning of the end,” said Ransom. “But I know nothing of that. Maleldil may have made it a law not to send down the Powers. But if men by enginry and natural philosophy learn to fly into the Heavens, and come, in the flesh, among the heavenly powers and trouble them, He has not forbidden the Powers to react. For all this is within the natural order. A wicked man did learn so to do. He came flying, by a subtle engine, to where Mars dwells in Heaven and to where Venus dwells, and took me with him as a captive. And there I spoke with the true Oyéresu face to face. You understand me?”
Merlin inclined his head.
“And so the wicked man had brought about, even as Judas brought about, the thing he least intended. For now there was one man in the world—even myself—who was known to the Oyéresu and spoke their tongue, neither by God’s miracle nor by magic from Numinor, but naturally, as when two men meet in a road. Our enemies had taken away from themselves the protection of the Seventh Law. They had broken by natural philosophy the barrier which God of His own power would not break. Even so they sought you as a friend and raised up for themselves a scourge. And that is why Powers of Heaven have come down to this house, and in this chamber where we are now discoursing Malacandra and Perelandra have spoken to me.”
Merlin’s face became a little paler. The bear nosed at his hand, unnoticed.
“I have become a bridge,” said Ransom.
“Sir,” said Merlin, “what will come of this? If they put forth their power, they will unmake all Middle Earth.”
“Their naked power, yes,” said Ransom. “That is why they will work only through a man.”
The magician drew one large hand across his forehead.
“Through a man whose mind is opened to be so invaded,” said Ransom, “one who by his own will once opened it. I take Our Fair Lord to witness that if it were my task, I would not refuse it. But he will not suffer a mind that still has its virginity to be so violated. And through a black magician’s mind their purity neither can nor will operate. One who has dabbled . . . in the days when dabbling had not begun to be evil, or was only just beginning . . . and also a Christian man and a penitent. A tool (I must speak plainly) good enough to be so used and not too good. In all these Western parts of the world there was only one man who had lived in those days and could still be recalled. You—”
He stopped, shocked at what was happening. The huge man had risen from his chair, and stood towering over him. From his horribly opened mouth there came a yell that seemed to Ransom utterly bestial, though it was in fact only the yell of primitive Celtic lamentation. It was horrifying to see that withered and bearded face all blubbered with undisguised tears like a child’s. All the Roman surface in Merlinus had been scraped off. He had become a shameless, archaic monstrosity babbling out entreaties in a mixture of what sounded like Welsh and what sounded like Spanish.
“Silence,” shouted Ransom. “Sit down. You put us both to shame.”
As suddenly as it had begun the frenzy ended. Merlin resumed his chair. To a modern it seemed strange that, having recovered his self-control, he did not show the slightest embarrassment at his temporary loss of it. The whole character of the two-sided society in which this man must have lived became clearer to Ransom than pages of history could have made it.
“Do not think,” said Ransom, “that for me either it is child’s play to meet those who will come down for your empowering.”
“Sir,” faltered Merlin, “you have been in Heaven. I am but a man. I am not the son of one of the Airish Men. That was a lying story. How can I? . . . You are not as I. You have looked upon their faces before.”
“Not on all of them,” said Ransom. “Greater spirits than Malacandra and Perelandra will descend this time. We are in God’s hands. It may unmake us both. There is no promise that either you or I will save our lives or our reason. I do not know how we can dare to look upon their faces; but I know we cannot dare to look upon God’s if we refuse this enterprise.”
Suddenly the magician smote his hand upon his knee.
“Mehercule!” he cried. “Are we not going too fast? If you are the Pendragon, I am the High Council of Logres and I will counsel you. If the Powers must tear me in pieces to break our enemies, God’s will be done. But is it yet come to that? This Saxon king of yours who sits at Windsor, now. Is there no help in him?”
“He has no power in this matter.”
“Then is he not weak enough to be overthrown?”
“I have no wish to overthrow him. He is the king. He was crowned and anointed by the Archbishop. In the order of Logres I may be Pendragon, but in the order of Britain I am the King’s man.”
“Is it then his great men—the counts and legates and bishops—who do the evil and he does not know of it?”
“It is—though they are not exactly the sort of great men you have in mind.”
“And are we not big enough to meet them in plain battle?”
“We are four men, some women, and a bear.”
“I saw the time when Logres was only myself and one man and two boys, and one of those was a churl. Yet we conquered.”
“It could not be done now. They have an engine called the Press whereby the people are deceived. We should die without even being heard of.”
“But what of the true clerks? Is there no help in them? It cannot be that all your priests and bishops are corrupted.”
“The Faith itself is torn in pieces since your day and speaks with a divided voice. Even if it were made whole, the Christians are but a tenth part of the people. There is no help there.”
“Then let us seek help from over sea. Is there no Christian prince in Neustria or Ireland or Benwick who would come in and cleanse Britain if he were called?”
“There is no Christian prince left. These other countries are even as Britain, or else sunk deeper still in the disease.”
“Then we must go higher. We must go to him whose office it is to put down tyrants and give life to dying kingdoms. We must call on the Emperor.”
“There is no Emperor.”
“No Emperor . . .” began Merlin, and then his voice died away. He sat still for some minutes wrestling with a world which he had never envisaged. Presently he said, “A thought comes into my mind and I do not know whether it is good or evil. But because I am the High Council of Logres I will not hide it from you. This is a cold age in which I have awaked. If all this West part of the world is apostate, might it not be lawful, in our great need, to look farther . . . beyond Christendom? Should we not find some even among the heathen who are not wholly corrupt? There were tales in my day of some such: men who knew not the articles of our most holy Faith, but who worshipped God as they could and acknowledged the Law of Nature. Sir, I believe it would be lawful to seek help even there. Beyond Byzantium. It was rumored also that there was knowledge in those lands—an Eastern circle and wisdom that came West from Numinor. I know not where—Babylon, Arabia or Cathay. You said your ships had sailed all round the earth, above and beneath.”
Ransom shook his head. “You do not understand,” he said. “The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.”
“Is it then the end?” asked Merlin.
“And this,” said Ransom, ignoring the question, “is why we have no way left at all save the one I told you. The Hideous Strength holds all this Earth in its fist to squeeze as it wishes. But for their one mistake, there would be no hope left. If of their own evil will they had not broken the frontier and let in the celestial Powers, this would be their moment of victory. Their own strength has betrayed them. They have gone to the gods who would not have come to them, and pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads. Therefore, they will die. For though you search every cranny to escape, now that you see all crannies closed, you will not disobey me.”
And then, very slowly, there crept back into Merlin’s white face, first closing his dismayed mouth and finally gleaming in his eyes, that almost animal expression, earthy and healthy and with a glint of half-humorous cunning.
“Well,” he said, “if the Earths are stopped, the fox faces the hounds. But had I known who you were at our first meeting, I think I would have put the sleep on you as I did on your Fool.”
“I am a very light sleeper since I have traveled in the Heavens,” said Ransom.