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THE COSMIC TRILOGY
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
C. S. Lewis
THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH
A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups
Contents
The Cosmic Trilogy
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
1 Sale of College Property
2 Dinner with the Sub-Warden
3 Belbury and St Anne’s-on-the-Hill
4 The Liquidation of Anachronisms
5 Elasticity
6 Fog
7 The Pendragon
8 Moonlight at Belbury
9 The Saracen’s Head
10 The Conquered City
11 Battle Begun
12 Wet and Windy Night
13 They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
14 ‘Real Life Is Meeting’
15 The Descent of the Gods
16 Banquet at Belbury
17 Venus at St Anne’s
Copyright
About the Publisher
To
J. McNEILL
‘The Shadow of that hyddeous strength Sax myle and more it is of length.’
SIR DAVID LINDSAY: from Ane Dialog (describing the Tower of Babel)
Preface
I have called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who dislikes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why–intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals and planetary angels–I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me: for many German peasants had actually met cruel stepmothers, whereas I have never, in any university, come across a college like Bracton. This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man. In the story, the outer rim of that devilry had to be shown touching the life of some ordinary and respectable profession. I selected my own profession, not, of course, because I think fellows of colleges more likely to be thus corrupted than anyone else, but because my own is the only profession I know well enough to write about. A very small university is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham–a university with which the only connection I have had was entirely pleasant.
I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can well afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow.
Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.
The period of this story is vaguely ‘after the war’. It concludes the Trilogy of which Out of the Silent Planet was the first part, and Perelandra the second, but can be read on its own.
C. S. LEWIS
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Christmas Eve, 1943.
1
Sale of College Property
‘Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,’ said Jane Studdock to herself, ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.’ She had not been to church since her schooldays until she went there six months ago to be married, and the words of the service had stuck in her mind.
Through the open door she could see the tiny kitchen of the flat and hear the loud, ungentle tick tick of the clock. She had just left the kitchen and knew how tidy it was. The breakfast things were washed up, the tea towels were hanging above the stove, and the floor was mopped. The beds were made and the rooms ‘done’. She had just returned from the only shopping she need do that day, and it was still a minute before eleven. Except for getting her own lunch and tea, there was nothing that had to be done till six o’clock, even supposing that Mark was really coming home for dinner. But there was a College Meeting today. Almost certainly Mark would ring up about teatime to say that the meeting was taking longer than he had expected and that he would have to dine in College. The hours before her were as empty as the flat. The sun shone and the clock ticked.
‘Mutual society, help, and comfort,’ said Jane bitterly. In reality marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement. For some years before their marriage she had never seen so little of Mark as she had done in the last six months. Even when he was at home he hardly ever talked. He was always either sleepy or intellectually preoccupied. While they had been friends, and later when they were lovers, life itself had seemed too short for all they had to say to each other. But now…why had he married her? Was he still in love? If so, ‘being in love’ must mean totally different things to men and women. Was it the crude truth that all the endless talks which had seemed to her, before they were married, the very medium of love itself, had never been to him more than a preliminary?
‘Here I am, starting to waste another morning, mooning,’ said Jane to herself sharply. ‘I must do some work.’ By work she meant her doctorate thesis on Donne. She had always intended to continue her own career as a scholar after she was married: that was one of the reasons why they were to have no children, at any rate for a long time yet. Jane was not perhaps a very original thinker and her plan had been to lay great stress on Donne’s ‘triumphant vindication of the body’. She still believed that if she got out all her notebooks and editions and really sat down to the job, she could force herself back into her lost enthusiasm for the subject. But before she did so–perhaps in order to put off the moment of beginning –she turned over a newspaper which was lying on the table and glanced at a picture on the back page.
The moment she saw the picture, she remembered her dream. She remembered not only the dream but the measureless time after she had crept out of bed and sat waiting for the first hint of morning, afraid to put on the light for fear Mark should wake up and fuss, yet feeling offended by the sound of his regular breathing. He was an excellent sleeper. Only one thing ever seemed able to keep him awake after he had gone to bed, and even that did not keep him awake for long.
The terror of this dream, like the terror of most dreams, evaporates in the telling, but it must be set down for the sake of what came afterwards.
She had begun by dreaming simply of a face. It was a foreign-looking face, bearded and rather yellow, with a hooked nose. Its expression was frightening because it was frightened. The mouth sagged open and the eyes stared as she had seen other men’s eyes stare for a second or two when some sudden shock had occurred. But this face seemed to be meeting a shock that lasted for hours. Then gradually she became aware of more. The face belonged to a man who was sitting hunched up in one corner of a little square room with white-washed walls–waiting, she thought, for those who had him in their power, to come in and do something horrible to him. At last the door was opened and a rather good-looking man with a pointed grey beard came in. The prisoner seemed to recognise him as an old acquaintance, and they sat down together and began to talk. In all the dreams which Jane had hitherto dreamed, one either understood what the dream-people were saying or else one did not hear it. But in this dream–and that helped to make its extraordinary realism–the conversation was in French and Jane understood bits of it, but by no means all, just as she would have done in real life. The visitor was telling the prisoner something which he apparently intended him to regard as good news. And the prisoner at first looked up with a gleam of hope in his eye and said, ‘Tiens…ah…ça marche’; but then he wavered and changed his mind. The visitor continued in a low, fluent voice to press his point. He was a good-looking man in his rather cold way, but he wore pince-nez and these kept on catching the light so as to make his eyes invisible. This, combined with the almost unnatural perfection of his teeth, somehow gave Jane a disagreeable impression. And this was increased by the growing distress, and finally the terror, of the prisoner. She could not make out what it was that the visitor was proposing to him, but she did discover that the prisoner was under sentence of death. Whatever the visitor was offering him was something that frightened him more than that. At this point the dream abandoned all pretence to realism and became ordinary nightmare. The visitor, adjusting his pince-nez and still smiling his cold smile, seized the prisoner’s head between his two hands. He gave it a sharp turn–just as Jane had last summer seen men give a sharp turn to the helmet on a diver’s head. The visitor unscrewed the prisoner’s head and took it away. Then all became confused. The Head was still the centre of the dream but it was quite a different head now–a head with a flowing white beard all covered with earth. It belonged to an old man whom some people were digging up in a kind of churchyard–a sort of ancient British, druidical kind of man, in a long mantle. Jane didn’t mind this much at first because she thought it was a corpse. Then suddenly she noticed that this ancient thing was coming to life. ‘Look out!’ she cried in her dream. ‘He’s alive. Stop! Stop! You’re waking him.’ But they did not stop. The old, buried man sat up and began talking in something that sounded vaguely like Spanish. And this for some reason frightened Jane so badly that she woke up.
That was the dream–no worse, if also no better, than many another nightmare. But it was not the mere memory of a nightmare that made the sitting room of the flat swim before Jane’s eyes and caused her to sit down quickly for fear she should fall. The trouble was elsewhere. There, on the back page of the newspaper, was the Head she had seen in the nightmare: the first head (if there had been two of them)–the head of the Prisoner. With extreme reluctance, she took up the paper. EXECUTION OF ALCASAN was the headline, and beneath it SCIENTIST BLUEBEARD GOES TO GUILLOTINE. She remembered having vaguely followed the case. Alcasan was a distinguished radiologist in a neighbouring country–an Arab by descent, they said–who had cut short an otherwise brilliant career by poisoning his wife. So that was the origin of her dream. She must have looked at this photo in the paper–the man certainly had a very unpleasant face–before going to bed. But no: that couldn’t be it. It was this morning’s paper. But, of course, there must have been some earlier picture which she had seen and forgotten–probably weeks ago when the trial began. It was silly to have let it give her such a turn. And now for Donne. Let’s see, where were we? The ambiguous passage at the end of Love’s Alchymie,
Hope not for minde in women; at their best
Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy possest.
‘Hope not for mind in women.’ Did any man really want mind in women? But that wasn’t the point. ‘I must get back my power of concentrating,’ said Jane; and then, ‘was there a previous picture of Alcasan? Supposing…’
Five minutes later she swept all her books away, went to the mirror, put on her hat, and went out. She was not quite sure where she was going. Anywhere, to be out of that room, that flat, that whole house.
Mark, himself, meanwhile, was walking down to Bracton College, and thinking of a very different matter. He did not notice at all the morning beauty of the little street that led him from the sandy hillside suburb where he and Jane lived down into the central and academic part of Edgestow.
Though I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or sausages or marmalades has yet come to industrialise the country town which is the setting of the University, and the University itself is tiny. Apart from Bracton and from the nineteenth-century women’s college beyond the railway, there are only two colleges: Northumberland which stands below Bracton on the river Wynd, and Duke’s opposite the Abbey. Bracton takes no undergraduates. It was founded in 1300 for the support of ten learned men whose duties were to pray for the soul of Henry de Bracton and to study the laws of England. The number of Fellows has gradually increased to forty, of whom only six (apart from the Bacon Professor) now study Law and of whom none, perhaps, prays for the soul of Bracton. Mark Studdock was himself a Sociologist and had been elected to a fellowship in that subject five years ago. He was beginning to find his feet. If he had felt any doubt on that point (which he did not) it would have been laid to rest when he found himself meeting Curry just outside the Post Office and seen how natural Curry found it that they should walk to College together and discuss the agenda for the meeting. Curry was the Sub-Warden of Bracton.
‘Yes,’ said Curry, ‘it will take the hell of a time. Probably go on after dinner. We shall have all the obstructionists wasting time as hard as they can. But luckily that’s the worst they can do.’
You would never have guessed from the tone of Studdock’s reply what intense pleasure he derived from Curry’s use of the pronoun ‘we’. So very recently he had been an outsider, watching the proceedings of what he then called ‘Curry and his gang’ with awe and with little understanding, and making at College meetings short, nervous speeches which never influenced the course of events. Now he was inside and ‘Curry and his gang’ had become ‘we’ or ‘the Progressive Element in College’. It had all happened quite suddenly and was still sweet in the mouth.
‘You think it’ll go through, then?’ said Studdock.
‘Sure to,’ said Curry. ‘We’ve got the Warden, and the Bursar, and all the chemical and bio-chemical people for a start. I’ve tackled Pelham and Ted and they’re sound. I’ve made Sancho believe that he sees the point and that he’s in favour of it. Bill the Blizzard will probably do something pretty devastating but he’s bound to side with us if it comes to a vote. Besides, I haven’t yet told you. Dick’s going to be there. He came up in time for dinner last night and got busy at once.’
Studdock’s mind darted hither and thither in search of some safe way to conceal the fact that he did not know who Dick was. In the nick of time he remembered a very obscure colleague whose Christian name was Richard.
‘Telford?’ said Studdock in a puzzled voice. He knew very well that Telford could not be the Dick that Curry meant and therefore threw a slightly whimsical and ironical tone into his question.
‘Good Lord! Telford!!’ said Curry with a laugh. ‘No. I mean Lord Feverstone–Dick Devine as he used to be.’
‘I was a little baffled by the idea of Telford,’ said Studdock, joining in the laugh. ‘I’m glad Feverstone is coming. I’ve never met him, you know.’
‘Oh, but you must,’ said Curry. ‘Look here, come and dine in my rooms tonight. I’ve asked him.’
‘I should like to very much,’ said Studdock quite truly. And then, after a pause, ‘By the way, I suppose Feverstone’s own position is quite secure?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Curry.
‘Well, there was some talk, if you remember, as to whether someone who was away quite so much could go on holding a fellowship.’
‘Oh, you mean Glossop and all that ramp. Nothing will come of that. Didn’t you think it absolute blah?’
‘As between ourselves, yes. But I confess if I were put up to explain in public exactly why a man who is nearly always in London should go on being a Fellow of Bracton, I shouldn’t find it altogether easy. The real reasons are the sort that Watson would call imponderables.’
‘I don’t agree. I shouldn’t have the least objection to explaining the real reasons in public. Isn’t it important for a college like this to have influential connections with the outer world? It’s not in the least impossible that Dick will be in the next Cabinet. Even already Dick in London has been a damn sight more use to the College than Glossop and half a dozen others of that sort have been by sitting here all their lives.’
‘Yes. Of course, that’s the real point. It would be a little difficult to put in that form at a College meeting, though!’
‘There’s one thing,’ said Curry in a slightly less intimate tone, ‘that perhaps you ought to know about Dick.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He got you your fellowship.’
Mark was silent. He did not like things which reminded him that he had once been not only outside the Progressive Element but even outside the College. He did not always like Curry either. His pleasure in being with him was not that sort of pleasure.
‘Yes,’ said Curry. ‘Denniston was your chief rival. Between ourselves, a good many people liked his papers better than yours. It was Dick who insisted all through that you were the sort of man we really wanted. He went around to Duke’s and ferreted out all about you. He took the line that the one thing to consider is the type of man we need, and be damned to paper qualifications. And I must say he turned out to be right.’
‘Very kind of you,’ said Studdock, with a little mock bow. He was surprised at the turn the conversation had taken. It was an old rule at Bracton, as presumably in most colleges, that one never mentioned in the presence of a man the circumstances of his own election, and Studdock had not realised till now that this also was one of the traditions the Progressive Element was prepared to scrap. It had also never occurred to him that his own election had depended on anything but the excellence of his work in the fellowship examination: still less that it had been so narrow a thing. He was so accustomed to his position by now that this thought gave him the same curious sensation which a man has when he discovers that his father once very nearly married a different woman.
‘Yes,’ continued Curry, pursuing another train of thought. ‘One sees now that Denniston would never have done. Most emphatically not. A brilliant man at that time, of course, but he seems to have gone quite off the rails since then with all his Distributivism and what not. They tell me he’s likely to end up in a monastery.’
‘He’s no fool, all the same,’ said Studdock.
‘I’m glad you’re going to meet Dick,’ said Curry. ‘We haven’t time now, but there’s one thing about him I wanted to discuss with you.’
Studdock looked enquiringly at him.
‘James and I and one or two others,’ said Curry in a somewhat lower voice, ‘have been thinking he ought to be the new Warden. But here we are.’
‘It’s not yet twelve,’ said Studdock. ‘What about popping into the Bristol for a drink?’
Into the Bristol they accordingly went. It would not have been easy to preserve the atmosphere in which the Progressive Element operated without a good many of these little courtesies. This weighed harder on Studdock than on Curry who was unmarried and had a Sub-Warden’s stipend. But the Bristol was a very pleasant place. Studdock brought a double whiskey for his companion and half a pint of beer for himself.
The only time I was a guest at Bracton I persuaded my host to let me into the Wood and leave me there alone for an hour. He apologised for locking me in.
Very few people were allowed into Bragdon Wood. The gate was by Inigo Jones and was the only entry: a high wall enclosed the Wood, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile broad and a mile from east to west. If you came in from the street and went through the College to reach it, the sense of gradual penetration into a holy of holies was very strong. First you went through the Newton quadrangle which is dry and gravelly; florid, but beautiful, Gregorian buildings look down upon it. Next you must enter a cool tunnel-like passage, nearly dark at midday unless either the door into Hall should be open on your right or the buttery hatch on your left, giving you a glimpse of indoor daylight falling on panels, and a whiff of the smell of fresh bread. When you emerged from this tunnel you would find yourself in the medieval College: in the cloister of the much smaller quadrangle called Republic. The grass here looks very green after the aridity of Newton and the very stone of the buttresses that rise from it gives the impression of being soft and alive. Chapel is not far off: the hoarse, heavy noise of the works of a great and old clock comes to you from somewhere overhead. You went along this cloister, past slabs and urns and busts that commemorate dead Bractonians, and then down shallow steps into the full daylight of the quadrangle called Lady Alice. The buildings to your left and right were seventeenth-century work: humble, almost domestic in character, with dormer windows, mossy and grey-tiled. You were in a sweet, Protestant world. You found yourself, perhaps, thinking of Bunyan or of Walton’s Lives. There were no buildings straight ahead on the fourth side of Lady Alice: only a row of elms and a wall: and here first one became aware of the sound of running water and the cooing of wood pigeons. The street was so far off by now that there were no other noises. In the wall there was a door. It led you into a covered gallery pierced with narrow windows on either side. Looking out through these, you discovered that you were crossing a bridge and the dark brown dimpled Wynd was flowing under you. Now you were very near your goal. A wicket at the far end of the bridge brought you out on the Fellows’ bowling green, and across that you saw the high wall of the Wood, and through the Inigo Jones gate you caught a glimpse of sunlit green and deep shadows.
I suppose the mere fact of being walled in gave the Wood part of its peculiar quality, for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. As I went forward over the quiet turf I had the sense of being received. The trees were just so wide apart that one saw uninterrupted foliage in the distance but the place where one stood seemed always to be a clearing; surrounded by a world of shadows, one walked in mild sunshine. Except for the sheep whose nibbling kept the grass so short and who sometimes raised their long, foolish faces to stare at me, I was quite alone; and it felt more like the loneliness of a very large room in a deserted house than like any ordinary solitude out of doors. I remember thinking, ‘This is the sort of place which, as a child, one would have been rather afraid of or else would have liked very much indeed.’ A moment later I thought, ‘But when alone–really alone–everyone is a child: or no one?’ Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
Half a mile is a short walk. Yet it seemed a long time before I came to the centre of the Wood. I knew it was the centre, for there was the thing I had chiefly come to see. It was a well: a well with steps going down to it and the remains of an ancient pavement about it. It was very imperfect now. I did not step on it, but I lay down in the grass and touched it with my fingers. For this was the heart of Bracton or Bragdon Wood: out of this all the legends had come and on this, I suspected, the very existence of the College had originally depended. The archaeologists were agreed that the masonry was very late British-Roman work, done on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. How Bragdon the wood was connected with Bracton the lawyer was a mystery, but I fancy myself that the Bracton family had availed themselves of an accidental similarity in the names to believe, or make believe, that they had something to do with it. Certainly, if all that was told were true, or even half of it, the Wood was older than the Bractons. I suppose no one now would attach much importance to Strabo’s Balachthon though it had led a sixteenth-century Warden of the College to say that ‘We know not by ancientest report of any Britain without Bragdon.’ But the medieval song takes us back to the fourteenth century.
In Bragdon bricht this ende dai
Herde ich Merlin ther he lai
Singende woo and welawai.
It is good enough evidence that the well with the British-Roman pavement was already ‘Merlin’s Well’, though the name is not found till Queen Elizabeth’s reign when good Warden Shovel surrounded the Wood with a wall ‘for the taking away of all profane and heathenish superstitions and the deterring of the vulgar sort from all wakes, may games, dancings, mummings, and baking of Morgan’s bread, heretofore used about the fountain called in vanity Merlin’s Well, and utterly to be renounced and abominated as a gallimaufrey of papistry, gentilism, lewdness and dunsicall folly’. Not that the College had by this action renounced its own interest in the place. Old Dr Shovel, who lived to be nearly a hundred, can scarcely have been cold in his grave when one of Cromwell’s Major Generals, conceiving it his business to destroy ‘the groves and the high places’, sent a few troopers with power to impress the country people for this pious work. The scheme came to nothing in the end; but there had been a bicker between the College and the troopers in the heart of Bragdon, and the fabulously learned and saintly Richard Crowe had been killed by a musket-ball on the very steps of the Well. He would be a brave man who would accuse Crowe either of popery or ‘gentilism’; yet the story is that his last words had been, ‘Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil’s son was a true King’s man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?’ And always, through all changes, every Warden of Bracton, on the day of his election, had drunk a ceremonial draught of water from Merlin’s Well in the great cup which, both for its antiquity and beauty, was the greatest of the Bracton treasures.
All of this I thought of, lying beside Merlin’s Well, beside the well which must certainly date from Merlin’s time if there had ever been a real Merlin: lying where Sir Kenelm Digby had lain all one summer night and seen a certain strange appearance: where Collins the poet had lain, and where George the Third had cried: where the brilliant and much-loved Nathaniel Fox had composed the famous poem three weeks before he was killed in France. The air was so still and the billows of foliage so heavy above me, that I fell asleep. I was wakened by my friend hallooing to me from a long way off.
The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the NICE, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would worthily house this remarkable organisation. The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints –‘red tape’ was the word its supporters used–which have hitherto hampered research in this country. It was also largely free from the restraints of economy, for, as it was argued, a nation which can spend so many millions a day on a war can surely afford a few millions a month on productive research in peacetime. The building proposed for it was one which would make a quite noticeable addition to the skyline of New York, the staff was to be enormous, and their salaries princely. Persistent pressure and endless diplomacy on the part of the Senate of Edgestow had lured the new Institute away from Oxford, from Cambridge, from London. It had thought of all these in turn as possible scenes for its labours. At times the Progressive Element in Edgestow had almost despaired. But success was now practically certain. If the NICE could get the necessary land, it would come to Edgestow. And once it came, then, as everyone felt, things would at last begin to move. Curry had even expressed a doubt whether, eventually, Oxford and Cambridge could survive as major universities at all.
Three years ago, if Mark Studdock had come to a College Meeting at which such a question was to be decided, he would have expected to hear the claims of sentiment against progress and beauty against utility openly debated. Today, as he took his seat in the Soler, the long upper room on the south of Lady Alice, he expected no such matter. He knew now that that was not the way things are done.
The Progressive Element managed its business really very well. Most of the Fellows did not know when they came into the Soler that there was any question of selling the Wood. They saw, of course, from their agenda paper that item Fifteen was ‘Sale of College land’, but as that appeared at almost every College Meeting, they were not very interested. On the other hand, they did see that item One was ‘Questions about Bragdon Wood’. These were not concerned with the proposed sale. Curry, who rose as Sub-Warden to introduce them, had a few letters to read to the College. The first was from a society concerned for the preservation of ancient monuments. I think myself that this society had been ill-advised to make two complaints in one letter. It would have been wiser if they had confined themselves to drawing the College’s attention to the disrepair of the wall round the Wood. When they went on to urge the desirability of building some protection over the Well itself, and even to point out that they had urged this before, the College began to be restive. And when, as a kind of afterthought, they expressed a wish that the College could be a little more accommodating to serious antiquaries who wanted to examine the Well, the College became definitely ill-tempered. I would not like to accuse a man in Curry’s position of misreading a letter; but his reading of this letter was certainly not such as to gloss over any defects in the tone of the original composition. Before he sat down, nearly every one in the room desired strongly to make the outer world understand that Bragdon Wood was the private property of Bracton College and that the outer world had better mind its own business. Then he rose again to read another letter. This was from a society of Spiritualists who wanted leave to investigate the ‘reported phenomena’ in the Wood–a letter ‘connected’, as Curry said, ‘with the next which, with the Warden’s permission, I will now read to you.’ This was from a firm who had heard of the Spiritualists’ proposal and wanted permission to make a film, not exactly of the phenomena, but of the Spiritualists looking for the phenomena. Curry was directed to write short refusals to all three letters.
2
Dinner with the Sub-Warden
‘This is a blow!’ said Curry standing in front of the fireplace in his magnificent rooms which overlooked Newton. They were the best set in College.
‘Something from NO?’ said James Busby. He and Lord Feverstone and Mark were all drinking sherry before dining with Curry. NO, which stood for Non-Olet, was the nickname of Charles Place, the Warden of Bracton. His election to this post, some fifteen years before, had been one of the earliest triumphs of the Progressive Element. By dint of saying that the College needed ‘new blood’ and must be shaken out of its ‘academic grooves’, they had succeeded in bringing in an elderly civil servant who had certainly never been contaminated by academic weaknesses since he left his rather obscure Cambridge college in the previous century, but who had written a monumental report on National Sanitation. The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Diehards, who replied by christening their new Warden Non-Olet. But gradually even Place’s supporters had adopted the name. For Place had not answered their expectations, having turned out to be a dyspeptic with a taste for philately, whose voice was so seldom heard that some of the junior Fellows did not know what it sounded like.
‘Yes, blast him,’ said Curry, ‘wishes to see me on a most important matter as soon as I can conveniently call on him after dinner.’
‘That means,’ said the Bursar, ‘that Jewel and Co. have been getting at him and want to find some way of going back on the whole business.’
‘I don’t give a damn for that,’ said Curry. ‘How can you go back on a Resolution? It isn’t that. But it’s enough to muck up the whole evening.’
‘Only your evening,’ said Feverstone. ‘Don’t forget to leave out that very special brandy of yours before you go.’
‘Jewel! Good God!’ said Busby, burying his left hand in his beard.
‘I was rather sorry for old Jewel,’ said Mark. His motives for saying this were very mixed. To do him justice, it must be said that the quite unexpected and apparently unnecessary brutality of Feverstone’s behaviour to the old man had disgusted him. And then, too, the whole idea of his debt to Feverstone in the matter of his own fellowship had been rankling all day. Who was this man Feverstone? But paradoxically, even while he felt that the time had come for asserting his own independence and showing that his agreement with all the methods of the Progressive Element must not be taken for granted, he also felt that a little independence would raise him to a higher position within that Element itself. If the idea ‘Feverstone will think all the more of you for showing your teeth’ had occurred to him in so many words, he would probably have rejected it as servile; but it didn’t.
‘Sorry for Jewel?’ said Curry wheeling round. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in his prime.’
‘I agree with you,’ said Feverstone to Mark, ‘but then I take the Clausewitz view. Total war is the most humane in the long run. I shut him up instantaneously. Now that he’s got over the shock, he’s quite enjoying himself because I’ve fully confirmed everything he’s been saying about the Younger Generation for the last forty years. What was the alternative? To let him drivel on until he’d worked himself into a coughing fit or a heart attack, and give him in addition the disappointment of finding that he was treated civilly.’
‘That’s a point of view, certainly,’ said Mark.
‘Damn it all,’ continued Feverstone, ‘no man likes to have his stock in trade taken away. What would poor Curry, here, do if the Die-hards one day all refused to do any Die-harding? Othello’s occupation would be gone.’
‘Dinner is served, Sir,’ said Curry’s ‘Shooter’–for that is what they call a College servant at Bracton.
‘That’s all rot, Dick,’ said Curry as they sat down. ‘There’s nothing I should like better than to see the end of all these Die-hards and obstructionists and be able to get on with the job. You don’t suppose I like having to spend all my time merely getting the road clear?’ Mark noticed that his host was a little nettled at Lord Feverstone’s banter. The latter had an extremely virile and infectious laugh. Mark felt he was beginning to like him.
‘The job being…?’ said Feverstone, not exactly glancing, much less winking, at Mark, but making him feel that he was somehow being included in the fun.
‘Well, some of us have got work of our own to do,’ replied Curry, dropping his voice to give it a more serious tone, almost as some people drop their voices to speak of medical or religious matters.
‘I never knew you were that sort of person,’ said Feverstone.
‘That’s the worst of the whole system,’ said Curry. ‘In a place like this you’ve either got to be content to see everything go to pieces–I mean, become stagnant–or else to sacrifice your own career as a scholar to all these infernal college politics. One of these days I shall chuck that side of it and get down to my book. The stuff’s all there, you know, Feverstone. One long vacation clear and I really believe I could put it into shape.’
Mark, who had never seen Curry baited before, was beginning to enjoy himself.
‘I see,’ said Feverstone. ‘In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning.’
‘Exactly!’ said Curry. ‘That’s just–’ and then stopped, uncertain whether he was being taken quite seriously. Feverstone burst into laughter. The Bursar who had up till now been busily engaged in eating, wiped his beard carefully and spoke seriously.
‘All that’s very well in theory,’ he said, ‘but I think Curry’s quite right. Supposing he resigned his office as Sub-Warden and retired into his cave. He might give us a thundering good book on economics–’
‘Economics?’ said Feverstone lifting his eyebrows.
‘I happen to be a military historian, James,’ said Curry. He was often somewhat annoyed at the difficulty which his colleagues seemed to find in remembering what particular branch of learning he had been elected to pursue.
‘I mean military history, of course,’ said Busby. ‘As I say, he might give us a thundering good book on military history. But it would be superseded in twenty years. Whereas the work he is actually doing for the College will benefit it for centuries. This whole business, now, of bringing the NICE to Edgestow. What about a thing like that, Feverstone? I’m not speaking merely of the financial side of it, though as Bursar I naturally rate that pretty high. But think of the new life, the awakening of new vision, the stirring of dormant impulses. What would any book on economics–’
‘Military history,’ said Feverstone gently, but this time Busby did not hear him.
‘What would any book on economics be, compared with a thing like that?’ he continued. ‘I look upon it as the greatest triumph of practical idealism that this century has yet seen.’
The good wine was beginning to do its good office. We have all known the kind of clergyman who tends to forget his clerical collar after the third glass; but Busby’s habit was the reverse. It was after the third glass that he began to remember his collar. As wine and candlelight loosened his tongue, the parson still latent within him after thirty years’ apostasy began to wake into a strange galvanic life.
‘As you chaps know,’ he said, ‘I make no claim to orthodoxy. But if religion is understood in the deepest sense, I have no hesitation in saying that Curry, by bringing the NICE to Edgestow, has done more for it in one year than Jewel has done in his whole life.’
‘Well,’ said Curry modestly, ‘that’s rather the sort of thing one had hoped. I mightn’t put it exactly as you do, James–’
‘No, no,’ said the Bursar, ‘of course not. We all have our different languages; but we all really mean the same thing.’
‘Has anyone discovered,’ asked Feverstone, ‘what, precisely, the NICE is, or what it intends to do?’
Curry looked at him with a slightly startled expression. ‘That comes oddly from you, Dick,’ he said. ‘I thought you were in on it, yourself.’
‘Isn’t it a little naïf,’ said Feverstone, ‘to suppose that being in on a thing involves any distinct knowledge of its official programme?’
‘Oh well, if you mean details,’ said Curry, and then stopped.
‘Surely, Feverstone,’ said Busby, ‘you’re making a great mystery about nothing. I should have thought the objects of the NICE were pretty clear. It’s the first attempt to take applied science seriously from the national point of view. The difference in scale between it and anything we’ve had before amounts to a difference in kind. The buildings alone, the apparatus alone –! Think what it has done already for industry. Think how it is going to mobilise all the talent of the country; and not only scientific talent in the narrower sense. Fifteen departmental directors at fifteen thousand a year each! Its own legal staff! Its own police, I’m told! Its own permanent staff of architects, surveyors, engineers! The thing’s stupendous!’
‘Careers for our sons,’ said Feverstone. ‘I see.’
‘What do you mean by that, Lord Feverstone?’ said Busby putting down his glass.
‘Lord!’ said Feverstone, his eyes laughing, ‘what a brick to drop. I’d quite forgotten you had a family, James.’
‘I agree with James,’ said Curry, who had been waiting somewhat impatiently to speak. ‘The NICE marks the beginning of a new era–the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day and they’ve got a wonderful gadget–I was shown the model last time I was in town–by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice-Board every half hour. Then, that report slides itself into the right position where it’s connected up by little arrows with all the relevant parts of the other reports. A glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole Institute actually taking shape under your own eyes. There’ll be a staff of at least twenty experts at the top of the building working this Notice-Board in a room rather like the Tube control rooms. It’s a marvellous gadget. The different kinds of business all come out in the Board in different coloured lights. It must have cost half a million. They call it a Pragmatometer.’
‘And there,’ said Busby, ‘you see again what the Institute is already doing for the country. Pragmatometry is going to be a big thing. Hundreds of people are going in for it. Why this Analytical Notice-Board will probably be out of date before the building is finished!’
‘Yes, by Jove,’ said Feverstone, ‘and NO himself told me this morning that the sanitation of the Institute was going to be something quite out of the ordinary.’
‘So it is,’ said Busby sturdily. ‘I don’t see why one should think that unimportant.’
‘And what do you think about it, Studdock?’ said Feverstone.
‘I think,’ said Mark, ‘that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.’
‘Damn,’ said Curry, looking at his watch. ‘I’ll have to go and talk to NO now. If you people would like any brandy when you’ve finished your wine, it’s in that cupboard. You’ll find balloon glasses on the shelf above. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You’re not going, James, are you?’
‘Yes,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’m going to bed early. Don’t let me break up the party for you two. I’ve been on my legs nearly all day, you know. A man’s a fool to hold any office in this College. Continual anxiety. Crushing responsibility. And then you get people suggesting that all the little research-beetles who never poke their noses outside their libraries and laboratories are the real workers! I’d like to see Glossop or any of that lot face the sort of day’s work I’ve had today. Curry, my lad, you’d have had an easier life if you’d stuck to economics.’
‘I’ve told you before,’ began Curry, but the Bursar, now risen, was bending over Lord Feverstone and telling him a funny story.
As soon as the two men had got out of the room, Lord Feverstone looked steadily at Mark for some seconds with an enigmatic expression. Then he chuckled. Then the chuckle developed into a laugh. He threw his lean, muscular body well back into his chair and laughed louder and louder. He was very infectious in his laughter and Mark found himself laughing too–quite sincerely and even helplessly, like a child. ‘Pragmatometers–palatial lavatories–practical idealism,’ gasped Feverstone. It was a moment of extraordinary liberation for Mark. All sorts of things about Curry and Busby which he had not previously noticed, or else, noticing, had slurred over in his reverence for the Progressive Element, came back to his mind. He wondered how he could have been so blind to the funny side of them.
‘It really is rather devastating,’ said Feverstone when he had partially recovered, ‘that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel the moment you ask them about the things themselves.’
‘And yet they are, in a sense, the brains of Bracton,’ said Mark.
‘Good Lord no! Glossop and Bill the Blizzard, and even old Jewel, have ten times their intelligence.’
‘I didn’t know you took that view.’
‘I think Glossop, etc., are quite mistaken. I think their idea of culture and knowledge and what not is unrealistic. I don’t think it fits the world we’re living in. It’s a mere fantasy. But it is quite a clear idea and they follow it out consistently. They know what they want. But our two poor friends, though they can be persuaded to take the right train, or even to drive it, haven’t a ghost of a notion where it’s going to, or why. They’ll sweat blood to bring the NICE to Edgestow: that’s why they’re indispensable. But what the point of the NICE is, what the point of anything is–ask them another. Pragmatometry! Fifteen sub-directors!’
‘Well, perhaps I’m in the same boat myself.’
‘Not at all. You saw the point at once. I knew you would. I’ve read everything you’ve written since you were in for your fellowship. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Mark was silent. The giddy sensation of being suddenly whirled up from one plane of secrecy to another, coupled with the growing effect of Curry’s excellent port, prevented him from speaking.
‘I want you to come into the Institute,’ said Feverstone.
‘You mean–to leave Bracton?’
‘That makes no odds. Anyway, I don’t suppose there’s anything you want here. We’d make Curry Warden when NO retires and–’
‘They were talking of making you Warden.’
‘God!’ said Feverstone and stared. Mark realised that from Feverstone’s point of view this was like the suggestion that he should become Headmaster of a small idiots’ school, and thanked his stars that his own remark had not been uttered in a tone that made it obviously serious. Then they both laughed again.
‘You,’ said Feverstone, ‘would be absolutely wasted as Warden. That’s the job for Curry. He’ll do it very well. You want a man who loves business and wire-pulling for their own sake and doesn’t really ask what it’s all about. If he did, he’d start bringing in his own–well, I suppose he’d call them “ideas”. As it is, we’ve only got to tell him that he thinks so-and-so is a man the College wants, and he will think it. And then he’ll never rest till so-and-so gets a fellowship. That’s what we want the College for: a drag net, a recruiting office.’
‘A recruiting office for the NICE, you mean?’
‘Yes, in the first instance. But it’s only part of the general show.’
‘I’m not sure that I know what you mean.’
‘You soon will. The Home Side, and all that, you know! It sounds rather in Busby’s style to say that Humanity is at the cross-roads. But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on–obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t–well, we’re done.’
‘Go on.’
‘There are three main problems. First, the interplanetary problem–’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, that doesn’t really matter. We can’t do anything about that at present. The only man who could help was Weston.’
‘He was killed in a blitz, wasn’t he?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘Murdered?’
‘I’m pretty sure of it, and I’ve a shrewd idea who the murderer was.’
‘Good God! Can nothing be done?’
‘There’s no evidence. The murderer is a respectable Cambridge don with weak eyes, a game leg, and a fair beard. He’s dined in this College.’
‘What was Weston murdered for?’
‘For being on our side. The murderer is one of the enemy.’
‘You don’t mean to say he murdered him for that?’
‘Yes,’ said Feverstone, bringing his hand down smartly on the table. ‘That’s just the point. You’ll hear people like Curry or James burbling away about the “war” against reaction. It never enters their heads that it might be a real war with real casualties. They think the violent resistance of the other side ended with the persecution of Galileo and all that. But don’t believe it. It is just seriously beginning. They know now that we have at last got real powers: that the question of what humanity is to be is going to be decided in the next sixty years. They’re going to fight every inch. They’ll stop at nothing.’
‘They can’t win,’ said Mark.
‘We’ll hope not,’ said Lord Feverstone. ‘I think they can’t. That is why it is of such immense importance to each of us to choose the right side. If you try to be neutral you become simply a pawn.’
‘Oh, I haven’t any doubt which is my side,’ said Mark. ‘Hang it all–the preservation of the human race–it’s a pretty rock-bottom obligation.’
‘Well, personally,’ said Feverstone, ‘I’m not indulging in any Busbyisms about that. It’s a little fantastic to base one’s actions on a supposed concern for what’s going to happen millions of years hence; and you must remember that the other side would claim to be preserving humanity, too. Both can be explained psycho-analytically if they take that line. The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting–specially on the winning side.’
‘And what is the first practical step?’
‘Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on one side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.’
‘Go on. This interests me very much.’
‘Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest–which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.’
‘What sort of thing have you in mind?’
‘Quite simple and obvious things, at first–sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no “take-it-or-leave-it” nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…’
‘But this is stupendous, Feverstone.’
‘It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man: and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.’
‘That’s my trouble. Don’t think it’s false modesty, but I haven’t yet seen how I can contribute.’
‘No, but we have. You are what we need: a trained sociologist with a radically realistic outlook, not afraid of responsibility. Also, a sociologist who can write.’
‘You don’t mean you want me to write up all this?’
‘No. We want you to write it down–to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan’t have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We’ll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. Odd thing it is–the word “experiment” is unpopular, but not the word “experimental”. You musn’t experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the NICE and it’s all correct!’
‘You don’t mean that this–er–journalistic side would be my main job?’
‘It’s nothing to do with journalism. Your readers in the first instance would be Committees of the House of Commons, not the public. But that would only be a side line. As for the job itself–why, it’s impossible to say how it might develop. Talking to a man like you, I don’t stress the financial side. You’d start at something quite modest: say about fifteen hundred a year.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ said Mark, flushing with pure excitement.
‘Of course,’ said Feverstone, ‘I ought to warn you, there is the danger. Not yet, perhaps. But when things really begin to hum, it’s quite on the cards they may try to bump you off, like poor old Weston.’
‘I don’t think I was thinking about that either,’ said Mark.
‘Look here,’ said Feverstone. ‘Let me run you across tomorrow to see John Wither. He told me to bring you for the week-end if you were interested. You’ll meet all the important people there and it’ll give you a chance to make up your mind.’
‘How does Wither come into it? I thought Jules was the head of the NICE.’ Jules was a distinguished novelist and scientific populariser whose name always appeared before the public in connection with the new Institute.
‘Jules! Hell’s bells!’ said Feverstone. ‘You don’t imagine that little mascot has anything to say to what really goes on? He’s all right for selling the Institute to the great British public in the Sunday papers and he draws a whacking salary. He’s no use for work. There’s nothing inside his head except some nineteenth-century socialist stuff, and blah about the rights of man. He’s just about got as far as Darwin!’
‘Oh quite,’ said Mark. ‘I was always rather puzzled at his being in the show at all. Do you know, since you’re so kind, I think I’d better accept your offer and go over to Wither’s for the week-end. What time would you be starting?’
‘About quarter to eleven. They tell me you live out Sandawn way. I could call and pick you up.’
‘Thanks very much. Now tell me about Wither.’
‘John Wither,’ began Feverstone, but suddenly broke off. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘Here comes Curry. Now we shall have to hear everything NO said and how wonderfully the arch-politician has managed him. Don’t run away. I shall need your moral support.’
The last bus had gone long before Mark left College and he walked home up the hill in brilliant moonlight. Something happened to him the moment he had let himself into the flat which was very unusual. He found himself, on the doormat, embracing a frightened, half-sobbing Jane–even a humble Jane–who was saying, ‘Oh Mark, I’ve been so frightened.’
There was a quality in the very muscles of his wife’s body which took him by surprise. A certain indefinable defensiveness had momentarily deserted her. He had known such occasions before, but they were rare. They were already becoming rarer. And they tended, in his experience, to be followed next day by inexplicable quarrels. This puzzled him greatly, but he had never put his bewilderment into words.
It is doubtful whether he could have understood her feelings even if they had been explained to him; and Jane, in any case, could not have explained them. She was in extreme confusion. But the reasons for her unusual behaviour on this particular evening were simple enough. She had got back from the Dimbles at about half-past four, feeling much exhilarated by her walk, and hungry, and quite sure that her experiences on the previous night and at lunch were over and done with. She had had to light up and draw the curtains before she had finished tea, for the days were getting short. While doing so, the thought had come into her mind that her fright at the dream and at the mere mention of a mantle, an old man, an old man buried but not dead, and a language like Spanish, had really been as irrational as a child’s fear of the dark. This had led her to remember moments when she had feared the dark as a child. Perhaps, she allowed herself to remember them too long. At any rate, when she sat down to drink her last cup of tea, the evening had somehow deteriorated. It never recovered. First, she found it rather difficult to keep her mind on her book. Then, when she had acknowledged this difficulty, she found it difficult to fix on any book. Then she realised that she was restless. From being restless, she became nervous. Then followed a long time when she was not frightened, but knew that she would be very frightened indeed if she did not keep herself in hand. Then came a curious reluctance to go into the kitchen to get herself some supper, and a difficulty–indeed, an impossibility–of eating anything when she had got it. And now, there was no disguising the fact that she was frightened. In desperation she rang up the Dimbles. ‘I think I might go and see the person you suggested, after all,’ she said. Mrs Dimble’s voice came back, after a curious little pause, giving her the address. Ironwood was the name–Miss Ironwood, apparently. Jane had assumed it would be a man and was rather repelled. Miss Ironwood lived out at St Anne’s on the Hill. Jane asked if she should make an appointment. ‘No,’ said Mrs Dimble, ‘they’ll be–you needn’t make an appointment.’ Jane kept the conversation going as long as she could. She had rung up not chiefly to get the address but to hear Mother Dimble’s voice. Secretly she had had a wild hope that Mother Dimble would recognise her distress and say at once, ‘I’ll come straight up to you by car.’ Instead, she got the mere information and a hurried ‘Good-night.’ It seemed to Jane that there was something queer about Mrs Dimble’s voice. She felt that by ringing up she had interrupted a conversation about herself–or no–not about herself but about something else more important, with which she was somehow connected. And what had Mrs Dimble meant by, ‘They’ll be–’ ‘They’ll be expecting you?’ Horrible, childish night-nursery visions of They ‘expecting her’ passed before her mind. She saw Miss Ironwood, dressed all in black, sitting with her hands folded on her knees and then someone leading her into Miss Ironwood’s presence and saying, ‘She’s come,’ and leaving her there.
‘Damn the Dimbles!’ said Jane to herself, and then unsaid it, more in fear than in remorse. And now that the life-line had been used and brought no comfort, the terror, as if insulted by her futile attempt to escape it, rushed back on her with no possibility of disguise, and she could never afterwards remember whether the horrible old man and the mantle had actually appeared to her in a dream or whether she had merely sat there, huddled and wild eyed, hoping, hoping, hoping (even praying, though she believed in no one to pray to) that they would not.
And that is why Mark found such an unexpected Jane on the doormat. It was a pity, he thought, that this should have happened on a night when he was so late and so tired and, to tell the truth, not perfectly sober.
‘Do you feel quite all right this morning?’ said Mark.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Jane shortly.
Mark was lying in bed and drinking a cup of tea. Jane was seated at the dressing table, partially dressed, and doing her hair. Mark’s eyes rested on her with indolent, early-morning pleasure. If he guessed very little of the mal-adjustment between them, this was partly due to our race’s incurable habit of ‘projection’. We think the lamb gentle because its wool is soft to our hands: men call a woman voluptuous when she arouses voluptuous feelings in them. Jane’s body, soft though firm and slim though rounded, was so exactly to Mark’s mind that it was all but impossible for him not to attribute to her the same sensations which she excited in him.
‘You’re quite sure you’re all right?’ he asked again.
‘Quite,’ said Jane more shortly still.
Jane thought she was annoyed because her hair was not going up to her liking and because Mark was fussing. She also knew, of course, that she was deeply angry with herself for the collapse which had betrayed her last night, into being what she most detested–the fluttering, tearful ‘little woman’ of sentimental fiction running for comfort to male arms. But she thought this anger was only in the back of her mind, and had no suspicion that it was pulsing through every vein and producing at that very moment the clumsiness in her fingers which made her hair seem intractable.
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