A night (with little sleep) and half another day dragged past before Mark was able to see the Deputy Director again. He went to him in a chastened frame of mind, anxious to get the job on almost any terms.
“I have brought back the Form, Sir,” he said.
“What Form?” asked the Deputy Director. Mark found he was talking to a new and different Wither. The absentmindedness was still there, but the courtliness was gone. The man looked at him as if out of a dream, as if divided from him by an immense distance, but with a sort of dreamy distaste which might turn into active hatred if ever that distance were diminished. He still smiled, but there was something cat-like in the smile; an occasional alteration of the lines about the mouth which even hinted at a snarl. Mark in his hands was as a mouse. At Bracton the Progressive Element, having to face only scholars, had passed for very knowing fellows, but here at Belbury, one felt quite different. Wither said he had understood that Mark had already refused the job. He could not, in any event, renew the offer. He spoke vaguely and alarmingly of strains and frictions, of injudicious behavior, of the danger of making enemies, of the impossibility that the NICE could harbor a person who appeared to have quarreled with all its members in the first week. He spoke even more vaguely and alarmingly of conversations he had had with “your colleagues at Bracton” which entirely confirmed this view. He doubted if Mark were really suited to a learned career, but disclaimed any intention of giving advice. Only after he had hinted and murmured Mark into a sufficient state of dejection did he throw him, like a bone to a dog, the suggestion of an appointment for a probationary period at (roughly—he could not commit the Institute) six hundred a year. And Mark took it. He attempted to get answers even then to some of his questions. From whom was he to take orders? Was he to reside at Belbury?
Wither replied, “I think, Mr. Studdock, we have already mentioned elasticity as the keynote of the Institute. Unless you are prepared to treat membership as—er—a vocation rather than a mere appointment, I could not conscientiously advise you to come to us. There are no watertight compartments. I fear I could not persuade the Committee to invent for your benefit some cut and dried position in which you would discharge artificially limited duties and, apart from those, regard your time as your own. Pray allow me to finish, Mr. Studdock. We are, as I have said before, more like a family, or even, perhaps, like a single personality. There must be no question of ‘taking your orders,’ as you (rather unfortunately) suggest, from some specified official and considering yourself free to adopt an intransigent attitude to your other colleagues. (I must ask you not to interrupt me, please.) That is not the spirit in which I would wish you to approach your duties. You must make yourself useful, Mr. Studdock—generally useful. I do not think the Institute could allow anyone to remain in it who showed a disposition to stand on his rights—who grudged this or that piece of service because it fell outside some function which he had chosen to circumscribe by a rigid definition. On the other hand, it would be quite equally disastrous—I mean for yourself, Mr. Studdock: I am thinking throughout of your own interests—quite equally disastrous if you allowed yourself ever to be distracted from your real work by unauthorized collaboration—or, worse still, interference—with the work of other members. Do not let casual suggestions distract you or dissipate your energies. Concentration, Mr. Studdock, concentration. And the free spirit of give and take. If you avoid both the errors I have mentioned then—ah, I do not think I need despair of correcting on your behalf certain unfortunate impressions which (we must admit) your behavior has already produced. No, Mr. Studdock, I can allow no further discussion. My time is already fully occupied. I cannot be continually harassed by conversations of this sort. You must find your own level, Mr. Studdock. Good morning, Mr. Studdock, good morning. Remember what I have said. I am trying to do all I can for you. Good morning.”
Mark reimbursed himself for the humiliation of this interview by reflecting that if he were not a married man he would not have borne it for a moment. This seemed to him (though he did not put it into words) to throw the burden upon Jane. It also set him free to think of all the things he would have said to Wither if he hadn’t had Jane to bother about—and would still say if ever he got a chance. This kept him in a sort of twilight happiness for several minutes; and when he went to tea he found that the reward for his submission had already begun. The Fairy signed to him to come and sit beside her.
“You haven’t done anything about Alcasan yet?” she asked.
“No,” said Mark, “because I hadn’t really decided to stay, not until this morning. I could come up and look at your materials this afternoon—at least as far as I know, for I haven’t yet really found out what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Elasticity, Sonny, elasticity,” said Miss Hardcastle. “You never will. Your line is to do whatever you’re told and above all not to bother the old man.”
During the next few days several processes, which afterwards came to seem important, were steadily going on.
The fog, which covered Edgestow as well as Belbury, continued and grew denser. At Edgestow one regarded it as “coming up from the river,” but in reality it lay all over the heart of England. It blanketed the whole town so that walls dripped and you could write your name in the dampness on tables and men worked by artificial light at midday. The workings, where Bragdon Wood had been, ceased to offend conservative eyes and became mere clangings, thuddings, hootings, shouts, curses and metallic screams in an invisible world.
Some felt glad that the obscenity should thus be covered for all beyond the Wynd was now an abomination. The grip of the NICE on Edgestow was tightening. The river itself which had once been brownish green and amber and smooth-skinned silver, tugging at the reeds and playing with the red roots, now flowed opaque, thick with mud, sailed on by endless fleets of empty tins, sheets of paper, cigarette ends and fragments of wood, sometimes varied by rainbow patches of oil. Then, the invasion actually crossed it. The Institute had bought the land up to the left or eastern bank. But now Busby was summoned to meet Feverstone and a Professor Frost as the representatives of the NICE, and learned for the first time that the Wynd itself was to be diverted: there was to be no river in Edgestow. This was still strictly confidential, but the Institute had already powers to force it. This being so, a new adjustment of boundaries between it and the College was clearly needed. Busby’s jaw fell when he realized that the Institute wanted to come right up to the College walls. He refused of course. And it was then that he first heard a hint of requisitioning. The College could sell today and the Institute offered a good price: if they did not, compulsion and a merely nominal compensation awaited them. Relations between Feverstone and the Bursar deteriorated during this interview. An extraordinary College Meeting had to be summoned, and Busby had to put the best face he could on things to his colleagues. He was almost physically shocked by the storm of hatred which met him. In vain did he point out that those who were now abusing him had themselves voted for the sale of the wood; but equally in vain did they abuse him. The College was caught in the net of necessity. They sold the little strip on their side of the Wynd which meant so much. It was no more than a terrace between the eastern walls and the water. Twenty-four hours later the NICE boarded over the doomed Wynd and converted the terrace into a dump. All day long workmen were trampling across the planks with heavy loads which they flung down against the very walls of Bracton till the pile had covered the boarded blindness which had once been the Henrietta Maria window and reached almost to the east window of chapel.
In these days many members of the Progressive Element dropped off and joined the opposition. Those who were left were hammered closer together by the unpopularity they had to face. And though the College was thus sharply divided within, yet for the very same reason it also took on a new unity perforce in its relations to the outer world. Bracton as a whole bore the blame for bringing the NICE to Edgestow at all. This was unfair, for many high authorities in the University had thoroughly approved Bracton’s action in doing so, but now that the result was becoming apparent people refused to remember this. Busby, though he had heard the hint of requisitioning in confidence, lost no time in spreading it through Edgestow common rooms—“It would have done no good if we had refused to sell,” he said. But nobody believed that this was why Bracton had sold, and the unpopularity of that College steadily increased. The undergraduates got wind of it, and stopped attending the lectures of Bracton dons. Busby, and even the wholly innocent Warden, were mobbed in the streets.
The Town, which did not usually share the opinions of the University, was also in an unsettled condition. The disturbance in which the Bracton windows had been broken was taken little notice of in the London papers or even in the Edgestow Telegraph. But it was followed by other episodes. There was an indecent assault in one of the mean streets down by the station. There were two “beatings up” in a public house. There were increasing complaints of threatening and disorderly behavior on the part of the NICE workmen. But these complaints never appeared in the papers. Those who had actually seen ugly incidents were surprised to read in the Telegraph, that the new Institute was settling down very comfortably in Edgestow and the most cordial relations developing between it and the natives. Those who had not seen them but only heard of them, finding nothing in the Telegraph, dismissed the stories as rumors or exaggerations. Those who had seen them wrote letters to it, but it did not print their letters.
But if episodes could be doubted, no one could doubt that nearly all the hotels of the town had passed into the hands of the Institute, so that a man could no longer drink with a friend in his accustomed bar; that familiar shops were crowded with strangers who seemed to have plenty of money, and that prices were higher; that there was a queue for every omnibus and a difficulty in getting into every cinema. Quiet houses that had looked out on quiet streets were shaken all day long by heavy and unaccustomed traffic: wherever one went one was jostled by crowds of strangers. To a little midland market town like Edgestow even visitors from the other side of the county had hitherto ranked as aliens: the daylong clamor of Northern, Welsh, and even Irish voices, the shouts, the cat-calls, the songs, the wild faces passing in the fog, were utterly detestable. “There’s going to be trouble here,” was the comment of many a citizen; and in a few days, “You’d think they wanted trouble.” It is not recorded who first said, “We need more police.” And then at last the Edgestow Telegraph took notice. A shy little article—a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand—appeared suggesting that the local police were quite incapable of dealing with the new population.
Of all these things Jane took little notice. She was, during these days, merely “hanging on.” Perhaps Mark would summon her to Belbury. Perhaps he would give up the whole Belbury scheme and come home—his letters were vague and unsatisfactory. Perhaps she would go out to St. Anne’s and see the Dennistons. The dreams continued. But Mr. Denniston had been right: it was better when one had given in to regarding them as “news.” If it had not been, she could hardly have endured her nights. There was one recurrent dream in which nothing exactly happened. She seemed indeed to be lying in her own bed. But there was someone beside the bed—someone who had apparently drawn a chair up to the bedside and then sat down to watch. He had a notebook in which he occasionally made an entry. Otherwise he sat perfectly still and patiently attentive—like a doctor. She knew his face already, and came to know it infinitely well: the pince-nez, the well-chiseled, rather white, features, and the little pointed beard. And presumably—if he could see her—he must by now know hers equally well: it was certainly herself whom he appeared to be studying. Jane did not write about this to the Dennistons the first time it occurred. Even after the second she delayed until it was too late to post the letter that day. She had a sort of hope that the longer she kept silent the more likely they would be to come in and see her again. She wanted comfort but she wanted it, if possible, without going out to St. Anne’s, without meeting this Fisher-King man and getting drawn into his orbit.
Mark meanwhile was working at the rehabilitation of Alcasan. He had never seen a police dossier before and found it difficult to understand. In spite of his efforts to conceal his ignorance, the Fairy soon discovered it. “I’ll put you onto the Captain,” she said. “He’ll show you the ropes.” That was how Mark came to spend most of his working hours with her second in command, Captain O’Hara, a big white-haired man with a handsome face, talking in what English people called a Southern brogue and Irish people “a Dublin accent you could cut with a knife.” He claimed to be of ancient family and had a seat at Castlemortle. Mark did not really understand his explanations of the dossier, the Q Register, the Sliding File system, and what the Captain called “weeding.” But he was ashamed to confess this and so it came about that the whole selection of facts really remained in O’Hara’s hands and Mark found himself working merely as a writer. He did his best to conceal this from O’Hara and to make it appear that they were really working together; this naturally made it impossible for him to repeat his original protests against being treated as a mere journalist. He had, indeed, a taking style (which had helped his academic career much more than he would have liked to acknowledge) and his journalism was a success. His articles and letters about Alcasan appeared in papers where he would never have had the entrée over his own signature: papers read by millions. He could not help feeling a little thrill of pleasurable excitement.
He also confided to Captain O’Hara his minor financial anxieties. When was one paid? And in the meantime, he was short of petty cash. He had lost his wallet on his very first night at Belbury and it had never been recovered. O’Hara roared with laughter. “Sure you can have any money you like by asking the Steward.”
“You mean it’s then deducted from one’s next check?” asked Mark.
“Man,” said the Captain, “once you’re in the Institute, God bless it, you needn’t bother your head about that. Aren’t we going to take over the whole currency question? It’s we that make money.”
“Do you mean?” gasped Mark and then paused and added, “But they’d come down on you for the lot if you left.”
“What do you want to be talking about leaving for at all?” said O’Hara. “No one leaves the Institute. At least, the only one that ever I heard of was old Hingest.”
About this time Hingest’s inquest came to an end with a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. The funeral service was held in the college chapel at Bracton.
It was the third and thickest day of the fog, which was now so dense and white that men’s eyes smarted from looking at it and all distant sounds were annihilated; only the drip from eaves and trees and the shouts of the workmen outside chapel were audible within the College. Inside the chapel the candles burned with straight flames, each flame the center of a globe of greasy luminosity, and cast almost no light on the building as a whole; but for the coughing and shuffling of feet, one would not have known that the stalls were quite full. Curry, black-suited and black-gowned and looming unnaturally large, went to and fro at the western end of the chapel, whispering and peering, anxious lest the fog might delay the arrival of what he called the Remains, and not unpleasingly conscious of the weight wherewith his responsibility for the whole ceremony pressed upon his shoulders. Curry was very great at College funerals. There was no taint of the undertaker about him; he was the restrained, manly friend, stricken by a heavy blow but still mindful that he was (in some undefined sense) the father of the College and that amid all the spoils of mutability he, at any rate, must not give way. Strangers who had been present on such occasions often said to one another as they drove off, “You could see that Sub-Warden chap felt it, though he wasn’t going to show it.” There was no hypocrisy in this. Curry was so used to superintending the lives of his colleagues that it came naturally to him to superintend their deaths; and possibly, if he had possessed an analytic mind, he might have discovered in himself a vague feeling that his influence, his power of smoothing paths and pulling suitable wires, could not really quite cease once the breath was out of the body.
The organ began to play and drowned both the coughing within and the harsher noises without—the monotonously ill-tempered voices, the rattle of iron, and the vibrating shocks with which loads were flung from time to time against the chapel wall. But the fog had, as Curry feared, delayed the coffin, and the organist had been playing for half an hour before there came a stir about the door and the family mourners, the black-clad Hingests of both sexes with their ramrod backs and country faces, began to be ushered into the stalls reserved for them. Then came maces and beadles and censors and the Grand Rector of Edgestow; then, singing, the choir, and finally the coffin—an island of flowers drifting indistinctly through the fog, which seemed to have poured in, thicker, colder and wetter, with the opening of the door. The service began.
Canon Storey took it. His voice was still beautiful, and there was beauty too in his isolation from all that company. He was isolated both by his faith and by his deafness. He felt no qualm about the appropriateness of the words which he read over the corpse of the proud old unbeliever, for he had never suspected his unbelief; and he was wholly unconscious of the strange antiphony between his own voice reading and the other voices from without. Glossop might wince when one of those voices, impossible to ignore in the silence of the chapel, was heard shouting, “Take your bucking great foot out of the light or I’ll let you have the whole lot on top of it”; but Storey, unmoved and unaware, replied, “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.”
“I’ll give you one across your ugly face in a moment, see if I don’t,” said the voice again.
“It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body,” said Storey.
“Disgraceful, disgraceful,” muttered Curry to the Bursar who sat next to him. But some of the junior Fellows saw, as they said, the funny side of it and thought how Feverstone (who had been unable to be present) would enjoy the story.
The pleasantest of the rewards which fell to Mark for his obedience was admission to the library. Shortly after his brief intrusion into it on that miserable morning he had discovered that this room, though nominally public, was in practice reserved for what one had learned, at school, to call “bloods” and, at Bracton, “the Progressive Element.” It was on the library hearthrug and during the hours between ten and midnight that the important and confidential talks took place; and that was why, when Feverstone one evening sidled up to Mark in the lounge and said, “What about a drink in the library?” Mark smiled and agreed and harbored no resentment for the last conversation he had had with Feverstone. If he felt a little contempt of himself for doing so, he repressed and forgot it: that sort of thing was childish and unrealistic.
The circle in the library usually consisted of Feverstone, the Fairy, Filostrato and—more surprising—Straik. It was balm to Mark’s wounds to find that Steele never appeared there. He had apparently got in beyond, or behind, Steele, as they had promised him he would; all was working according to program. The one person whose frequent appearance in the library he did not understand was the silent man with the pince-nez and the pointed beard, Professor Frost. The Deputy Director—or, as Mark now called him, the DD, or the Old Man—was often there, but in a peculiar mode. He had a habit of drifting in and sauntering about the room, creaking and humming as usual. Sometimes he came up to the circle by the fire and listened and looked on with a vaguely parental expression on his face; but he seldom said anything and he never joined the party. He drifted away again, and then, perhaps, would return an hour later and once more potter about the empty parts of the room and once more go away. He had never spoken to Mark since the humiliating interview in his study, and Mark learned from the Fairy that he was still out of favor. “The Old Man will thaw in time,” she said. “But I told you he didn’t like people to talk about leaving.”
The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then—perhaps once in the whole evening—something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the NICE would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles—shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man—that is, Man himself, full grown—has power to judge the world—to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.” It was all very unpleasant.
It was on the day after Hingest’s funeral that Mark first ventured to walk into the library on his own; hitherto he had always been supported by Feverstone or Filostrato. He was a little uncertain of his reception, and yet also afraid that if he did not soon assert his right to the entrée, this modesty might damage him. He knew that in such matters the error in either direction is equally fatal; one has to guess and take the risk.
It was a brilliant success. The circle were all there, and before he had closed the door behind him, all had turned with welcoming faces, and Filostrato had said, “Ecco” and the Fairy, “Here’s the very man.” A glow of sheer pleasure passed over Mark’s whole body. Never had the fire seemed to burn more brightly nor the smell of the drinks to be more attractive. He was actually being waited for. He was wanted.
“How quick can you write two leading articles, Mark?” said Feverstone.
“Can you work all night?” asked Miss Hardcastle.
“I have done,” said Mark. “What’s it all about?”
“You are satisfied,” asked Filostrato, “that it—the disturbance—must go forward at once, yes?”
“That’s the joke of it,” said Feverstone. “She’s done her work too well. She hasn’t read her Ovid. Ad metam properate simul.”
“We cannot delay it if we wished,” said Straik.
“What are we talking about?” said Mark.
“The disturbances at Edgestow,” answered Feverstone.
“Oh . . . I haven’t been following them very much. Are they becoming serious?”
“They’re going to become serious, Sonny,” said the Fairy. “And that’s the point. The real riot was timed for next week. All this little stuff was only meant to prepare the ground. But it’s been going on too well, damn it. The balloon will have to go up tomorrow, or the day after, at latest.”
Mark glanced in bewilderment from her face to Feverstone’s. The latter doubled himself up with laughter and Mark, almost automatically, gave a jocular turn to his own bewilderment.
“I think the penny hasn’t dropped, Fairy,” he said.
“You surely didn’t imagine,” grinned Feverstone, “that the Fairy left the initiative with the natives?”
“You mean she herself is the Disturbance?” said Mark.
“Yes, yes,” said Filostrato, his little eyes glistening above his fat cheeks.
“It’s all fair and square,” said Miss Hardcastle. “You can’t put a few hundred thousand imported workmen—”
“Not the sort you enrolled!” interjected Feverstone.
“Into a sleepy little hole like Edgestow,” Miss Hardcastle continued, “without having trouble. I mean there’d have been trouble anyway. As it turns out, I don’t believe my boys needed to do anything. But, since the trouble was bound to come, there was no harm in seeing it came at the right moment.”
“You mean you’ve engineered the disturbances?” said Mark. To do him justice, his mind was reeling from this new revelation. Nor was he aware of any decision to conceal his state of mind: in the snugness and intimacy of that circle he found his facial muscles and his voice, without any conscious volition, taking on the tone of his colleagues.
“That’s a crude way of putting it,” said Feverstone.
“It makes no difference,” said Filostrato. “This is how things have to be managed.”
“Quite,” said Miss Hardcastle. “It’s always done. Anyone who knows police work will tell you. And as I say, the real thing—the big riot—must take place within the next forty-eight hours.”
“It’s nice to get the tip straight from the horse’s mouth!” said Mark. “I wish I’d got my wife out of the town, though.”
“Where does she live?” said the Fairy.
“Up at Sandown.”
“Ah. It’ll hardly affect her. In the meantime, you and I have got to get busy about the account of the riot.”
“But—what’s it all for?”
“Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.”
“Exactly,” said Filostrato. “It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions. Not that the canaglia would always resist—often they have to be prodded into it—but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades—no one gets powers to act effectively. There is not enough what you call weigh on the boat to steer him.”
“And the stuff must be all ready to appear in the papers the very day after the riot,” said Miss Hardcastle. “That means it must be handed in to the DD by six tomorrow morning, at latest.”
“But how are we to write it tonight if the thing doesn’t even happen till tomorrow at the earliest?”
Everyone burst out laughing.
“You’ll never manage publicity that way, Mark,” said Feverstone. “You surely don’t need to wait for a thing to happen before you tell the story of it!”
“Well, I admit,” said Mark, and his face was full of laughter, “I had a faint prejudice for doing so, not living in Mr. Dunne’s sort of time nor in looking-glass land.”
“No good, Sonny,” said Miss Hardcastle. “We’ve got to get on with it at once. Time for one more drink and you and I’d better go upstairs and begin. We’ll get them to give us devilled bones and coffee at three.”
This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men. A few moments later he was trotting upstairs with the Fairy. They passed Cosser on the way and Mark, talking busily to his companion, saw out of the corner of his eye that Cosser was watching them. To think that he had once been afraid of Cosser!
“Who has the job of waking the DD up at six?” asked Mark.
“Probably not necessary,” said the Fairy. “I suppose the old man must sleep sometime. But I’ve never discovered when he does it.”
At four o’clock Mark sat in the Fairy’s office rereading the last two articles he had written—one for the most respectable of our papers, the other for a more popular organ. This was the only part of the night’s work which had anything in it to flatter literary vanity. The earlier hours had been spent in the sterner labor of concocting the news itself. These two Leaders had been kept for the end, and the ink was still wet. The first was as follows:
While it would be premature to make any final comment on last night’s riot at Edgestow, two conclusions seem to emerge from the first accounts (which we publish elsewhere) with a clarity which is not likely to be shaken by subsequent developments. In the first place, the whole episode will administer a rude shock to any complacency which may still lurk among us as to the enlightenment of our own civilization. It must, of course, be admitted that the transformation of a small university town into a center of national research cannot be carried out without some friction and some cases of hardship to the local inhabitants. But the Englishman has always had his own quiet and humorous way of dealing with frictions and has never showed himself unwilling, when the issue is properly put before him, to make sacrifices much greater than those small alterations of habit and sentiment which progress demands of the people of Edgestow. It is gratifying to note that there is no suggestion in any authoritative quarter that the NICE has in any way exceeded its powers or failed in that consideration and courtesy which was expected of it; and there is little doubt that the actual starting point of the disturbances was some quarrel, probably in a public house, between one of the NICE workmen and some local Sir Oracle. But as the Stagyrite said long ago, disorders which have trivial occasions have deeper causes, and there seems little doubt that this petty fracas must have been inflamed, if not exploited, by sectional interests or widespread prejudice.
It is disquieting to be forced to suspect that the old distrust of planned efficiency and the old jealousy of what is ambiguously called “Bureaucracy” can be so easily (though, we hope, temporarily) revived; though at the same time, this very suspicion, by revealing the gaps and weaknesses in our national level of education, emphasizes one of the very diseases which the National Institute exists to cure. That it will cure it we need have no doubt. The will of the nation is behind this magnificent “peace-effort,” as Mr. Jules so happily described the Institute, and any ill-informed opposition which ventures to try conclusions with it will be, we hope, gently, but certainly firmly, resisted.
The second moral to be drawn from last night’s events is a more cheering one. The original proposal to provide the NICE with what is misleadingly called its own “police force” was viewed with distrust in many quarters. Our readers will remember that while not sharing that distrust, we extended to it a certain sympathy. Even the false fears of those who love liberty should be respected as we respect even the ill-grounded anxieties of a mother. At the same time we insisted that the complexity of modern society rendered it an anachronism to confine the actual execution of the will of society to a body of men whose real function was the prevention and detection of crime: that the police, in fact, must be relieved sooner or later of that growing body of coercive functions which do not properly fall within their sphere. That this problem has been solved by other countries in a manner which proved fatal to liberty and justice, by creating a real imperium in imperio, is a fact which no one is likely to forget. The so-called “Police” of the NICE—who should rather be called its “Sanitary Executive”—is the characteristically English solution. Its relation to the National Police cannot, perhaps, be defined with perfect logical accuracy; but, as a nation, we have never been much enamored of logic. The executive of the NICE has no connection with politics; and if it ever comes into relation with criminal justice, it does so in the gracious role of a rescuer—a rescuer who can remove the criminal from the harsh sphere of punishment into that of remedial treatment. If any doubt as to the value of such a force existed, it has been amply set at rest by the episodes at Edgestow. The happiest relations seem to have been maintained throughout between the officers of the Institute and the National Police, who, but for the assistance of the Institute, would have found themselves faced with an impossible situation. As an eminent police officer observed to one of our representatives this morning, “But for the NICE Police, things would have taken quite a different turn.” If in the light of these events it is found convenient to place the whole Edgestow area under the exclusive control of the Institutional “police” for some limited period, we do not believe that the British people—always realists at heart—will have the slightest objection. A special tribute is due to the female members of the force, who appear to have acted throughout with that mixture of courage and common sense which the last few years have taught us to expect of English women almost as a matter of course. The wild rumors, current in London this morning, of machine-gun fire in the streets and casualties by the hundred, remain to be sifted. Probably, when accurate details are available, it will be found (in the words of a recent Prime Minister) that “when blood flowed, it was generally from the nose.”
The second ran thus:
What is happening at Edgestow?
That is the question which John Citizen wants to have answered. The Institute which has settled at Edgestow is a National Institute. That means it is yours and mine. We are not scientists and we do not pretend to know what the master brains of the Institute are thinking. We do know what each man or woman expects of it. We expect a solution of the unemployment problem, the cancer problem, the housing problem, the problems of currency, of war, of education. We expect from it a brighter, cleaner and fuller life for our children, in which we and they can march ever onward and onward and develop to the full urge of life which God has given each one of us. The NICE is the people’s instrument for bringing about all the things we fought for.
Meanwhile—what is happening at Edgestow?
Do you believe this riot arose simply because Mrs. Snooks or Mr. Buggins found that the landlord had sold their shop or their allotment to the NICE? Mrs. Snooks and Mr. Buggins know better. They know that the Institute means more trade in Edgestow, more public amenities, a larger population, a burst of undreamed-of prosperity. I say these disturbances have been ENGINEERED.
This charge may sound strange, but it is true.
Therefore I ask yet again: What is happening at Edgestow?
There are traitors in the camp. I am not afraid to say so, whoever they may be. They may be so-called religious people. They may be financial interests. They may be the old cobweb-spinning professors and philosophers of Edgestow University itself. They may be Jews. They may be lawyers. I don’t care who they are, but I have one thing to tell them. Take care. The people of England are not going to stand this. We are not going to have the Institute sabotaged.
What is to be done at Edgestow?
I say, put the whole place under the Institutional Police. Some of you may have been to Edgestow for a holiday. If so, you’ll know as well as I do what it is like—a little, sleepy, country town with half a dozen policemen who have had nothing to do for ten years but stop cyclists because their lamps have gone out. It doesn’t make sense to expect these poor old Bobbies to deal with an ENGINEERED RIOT. Last night the NICE police showed that they could. What I say is—Hats off to Miss Hardcastle and her brave boys, yes, and her brave girls too. Give them a free hand and let them get on with the job. Cut out the Red Tape.
I’ve one bit of advice. If you hear anyone back-biting the NICE police, tell him where he gets off. If you hear anyone comparing them to the Gestapo or the Ogpu, tell him you’ve heard that one before. If you hear anyone talking about the liberties of England (by which he means the liberties of the obscurantists, the Mrs. Grundies, the Bishops, and the capitalists), watch that man. He’s the enemy. Tell him from me that the NICE is the boxing glove on the democracy’s fist, and if he doesn’t like it, he’d best get out of the way.
Meanwhile—WATCH EDGESTOW.
It might be supposed that after enjoying these articles in the heat of composition, Mark would awake to reason, and with it to disgust, when reading through the finished product. Unfortunately the process had been almost the reverse. He had become more and more reconciled to the job the longer he worked at it.
The complete reconciliation came when he fair copied both articles. When a man has crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s, and likes the look of his work, he does not wish it to be committed to the wastepaper basket. The more often he reread the articles the better he liked them. And, anyway, the thing was a kind of joke. He had in his mind a picture of himself, old and rich (probably with a peerage, certainly very distinguished) when all this—all the unpleasant side of the NICE—was over, regaling his juniors with wild, unbelievable tales of this present time. (“Ah . . . it was a rum show in those early days. I remember once. . . .”) And then, too, for a man whose writings had hitherto appeared only in learned periodicals or at best in books which only other dons would read, there was an all but irresistible lure in the thought of the daily press—editors waiting for copy—readers all over Europe—something really depending on his words. The idea of the immense dynamo which had been placed for the moment at his disposal, thrilled through his whole being. It was, after all, not so long ago that he had been excited by admission to the Progressive Element at Bracton. But what was the Progressive Element to this? It wasn’t as if he were taken in by the articles himself. He was writing with his tongue in his cheek—a phrase that somehow comforted him by making the whole thing appear like a practical joke. And anyway, if he didn’t do it, someone else would. And all the while the child inside him whispered how splendid and how triumphantly grown up it was to be sitting like this, so full of alcohol and yet not drunk, writing (with his tongue in his cheek) articles for great newspapers, against time, “with the printer’s devil at the door” and all the inner ring of the NICE depending on him, and nobody ever again having the least right to consider him a nonentity or cipher.
Jane stretched out her hand in the darkness but did not feel the table which ought to have been there at her bed’s head. Then with a shock of surprise she discovered that she was not in bed at all, but standing. There was utter darkness all about her and it was intensely cold. Groping, she touched what appeared to be uneven surfaces of stone. The air, also, had some odd quality about it—dead air, imprisoned air, it seemed. Somewhere far away, possibly overhead, there were noises which came to her muffled and shuddering as if through earth. So the worst had happened—a bomb had fallen on the house and she was buried alive. But before she had time to feel the full impact of this idea she remembered that the war was over . . . oh, and all sorts of things had happened since then . . . she had married Mark . . . she had seen Alcasan in his cell . . . she had met Camilla. Then, with great and swift relief she thought, “It is one of my dreams. It is a piece of news. It’ll stop presently. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”
The place, whatever it was, did not seem to be very large. She groped all along one of the rough walls and then, turning at the corner, struck her foot against something hard. She stooped down and felt. There was a sort of raised platform or table of stone, about three feet high. And on it? Did she dare to explore? But it would be worse not to. She began trying the surface of the table with her hand, and next moment bit her lip to save herself from screaming, for she had touched a human foot. It was a naked foot, and dead to judge by its coldness. To go on groping seemed the hardest thing she had ever done but somehow she was impelled to do it. The corpse was clothed in some very coarse stuff which was also uneven, as though it were heavily embroidered, and very voluminous. It must be a very large man, she thought, still groping upwards towards his head. On his chest the texture suddenly changed—as if the skin of some hairy animal had been laid over the coarse robe. So she thought at first; then she realized that the hair really belonged to a beard. She hesitated about feeling the face; she had a fear lest the man should stir or wake or speak if she did so. She therefore became still for a moment. It was only a dream; she could bear it; but it was so dreary and it all seemed to be happening so long ago, as if she had slipped through a cleft in the present, down into some cold, sunless pit of the remote past. She hoped they wouldn’t leave her here long. If only someone would come quickly and let her out. And immediately she had a picture of someone, someone bearded but also (it was odd) divinely young, someone all golden and strong and warm coming with a mighty earth-shaking tread down into that black place. The dream became chaotic at this point. Jane had an impression that she ought to courtesy to this person (who never actually arrived though the impression of him lay bright and heavy on her mind), and felt great consternation on realizing that some dim memories of dancing lessons at school were not sufficient to show her how to do so. At this point she woke.
She went into Edgestow immediately after breakfast to hunt, as she now hunted every day, for someone who would replace Mrs. Maggs. At the top of Market Street something happened which finally determined her to go to St. Anne’s that very day and by the ten-twenty-three train. She came to a place where a big car was standing beside the pavement, an NICE car. Just as she reached it a man came out of a shop, cut across her path to speak to the chauffeur of the car, and then got in. He was so close to her that, despite the fog, she saw him very clearly, in isolation from all other objects: the background was all gray fog and passing feet and the harsh sounds of that unaccustomed traffic which now never ceased in Edgestow. She would have known him, anywhere: not Mark’s face, not her own face in a mirror, was by now more familiar. She saw the pointed beard, the pince-nez, the face which somehow reminded her of a waxworks face. She had no need to think what she would do. Her body, walking quickly past, seemed of itself to have decided that it was heading for the station and thence for St. Anne’s. It was something different from fear (though she was frightened too, almost to the point of nausea) that drove her so unerringly forward. It was a total rejection of, or revulsion from, this man on all levels of her being at once. Dreams sank into insignificance compared with the blinding reality of the man’s presence. She shuddered to think that their hands might have touched as she passed him.
The train was blessedly warm, her compartment empty, the fact of sitting down delightful. The slow journey through the fog almost sent her to sleep. She hardly thought about St. Anne’s until she found herself there: even as she walked up the steep hill she made no plans, rehearsed nothing that she meant to say, but only thought of Camilla and Mrs. Dimble. The childish levels, the undersoil of the mind, had been turned up. She wanted to be with Nice people, away from Nasty people—that nursery distinction seeming at the moment more important than any later categories of Good and Bad or Friend and Enemy.
She was roused from this state by noticing that it was lighter. She looked ahead: surely that bend in the road was more visible than it ought to be in such a fog? Or was it only that a country fog was different from a town one? Certainly what had been gray was becoming white, almost dazzlingly white. A few yards further and luminous blue was showing overhead, and trees cast shadows (she had not seen a shadow for days), and then all of a sudden the enormous spaces of the sky had become visible and the pale golden sun, and looking back, as she took the turn to the Manor, Jane saw that she was standing on the shore of a little green sunlit island looking down on a sea of white fog, furrowed and ridged yet level on the whole, which spread as far as she could see. There were other islands too. That dark one to the west was the wooded hills above Sandown where she had picnicked with the Dennistons; and the far bigger and brighter one to the north was the many caverned hills—mountains one could nearly call them—in which the Wynd had its source. She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out-of-doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon.