That Hideous Strength. C. S. Lewis

had just taken off.

      ‘And what are you going to do?’ asked Jane.

      ‘Heaven knows!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘For the moment, we have shut up the house and Cecil has been at Rumbold, the solicitor’s, to see if we can at least have it sealed and left alone until we’ve got our things out of it. Rumbold doesn’t seem to know where he is. He keeps on saying the NICE are in a very peculiar position legally. After that, I’m sure I don’t know. As far as I can see, there won’t be any houses in Edgestow. There’s no question of trying to live on the far side of the river any longer, even if they’d let us. What did you say? Oh, indescribable. All the poplars are going down. All those nice little cottages by the church are going down. I found poor Ivy–that’s your Mrs Maggs, you know–in tears. Poor things! They do look dreadful when they cry on top of powder. She’s being turned out too. Poor little woman; she’s had enough troubles in her life without this. I was glad to get away. The men were so horrible. Three big brutes came to the back door asking for hot water and went on so that they frightened Martha out of her wits and Cecil had to go and speak to them. I thought they were going to strike Cecil, really I did. It was most horribly unpleasant. But a sort of special constable sent them away. What? Oh yes, there are dozens of what look like policemen all over the place, and I didn’t like the look of them either. Swinging some kind of truncheon things, like what you’d see in an American film. Do you know Jane, Cecil and I both thought the same thing: we thought, it’s almost as if we’d lost the war. Oh, good girl–tea! That’s just what I wanted.’

      ‘You must stay here as long as you like, Mrs Dimble,’ said Jane. ‘Mark’ll just have to sleep in College.’

      ‘Well, really,’ said Mother Dimble, ‘I feel at the moment that no Fellow of Bracton ought to be allowed to sleep anywhere! But I’d make an exception in favour of Mr Studdock. As a matter of fact, I shan’t have to behave like the sword of Siegfried –and, incidentally, a nasty fat stodgy sword I should be! But that side of it is all fixed up. Cecil and I are to go out to the Manor at St Anne’s. We have to be there so much at present, you see.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Jane, involuntarily prolonging the exclamation as the whole of her own story flowed back on her mind.

      ‘Why, what a selfish pig I’ve been,’ said Mother Dimble. ‘Here have I been chattering away about my own troubles and quite forgetting that you’ve been out there and are full of things to tell me. Did you see Grace? And did you like her?’

      ‘Is “Grace” Miss Ironwood?’ asked Jane.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I saw her. I don’t know if I liked her or not. But I don’t want to talk about all that. I can’t think about anything except this outrageous business of yours. It’s you who are the real martyr, not me.’

      ‘No, my dear,’ said Mrs Dimble, ‘I’m not a martyr. I’m only an angry old woman with sore feet and a splitting head (but that’s beginning to be better) who’s trying to talk herself into a good temper. After all, Cecil and I haven’t lost our livelihood as poor Ivy Maggs has. It doesn’t really matter leaving the old house. Do you know, the pleasure of living there was in a way a melancholy pleasure. (I wonder, by the bye, do human beings really like being happy?) A little melancholy, yes. All those big upper rooms which we thought we should want because we thought we were going to have lots of children, and then we never had. Perhaps I was getting too fond of mooning about them on long afternoons when Cecil was away. Pitying oneself. I shall be better away from it, I daresay. I might have got like that frightful woman in Ibsen who was always maundering about dolls. It’s really worse for Cecil. He did so love having all his pupils about the place. Jane, that’s the third time you’ve yawned. You’re dropping asleep and I’ve talked your head off. It comes of being married thirty years. Husbands were made to be talked to. It helps them to concentrate their minds on what they’re reading –like the sound of a weir. There!–you’re yawning again.’

      Jane found Mother Dimble an embarrassing person to share a room with because she said prayers. It was quite extraordinary, Jane thought, how this put one out. One didn’t know where to look, and it was so difficult to talk naturally again for several minutes after Mrs Dimble had risen from her knees.

      ‘Are you awake now?’ said Mrs Dimble’s voice, quietly, in the middle of the night.

      ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? Was I shouting?’

      ‘Yes. You were shouting out about someone being hit on the head.’

      ‘I saw them killing a man–a man in a big car driving along a country road. Then he came to a crossroads and turned off to the right past some trees, and there was someone standing in the middle of the road waving a light to stop him. I couldn’t hear what they said; I was too far away. They must have persuaded him to get out of the car somehow, and there he was talking to one of them. The light fell full on his face. He wasn’t the same old man I saw in my other dream. He hadn’t a beard, only a moustache. And he had a very quick, kind of proud, way. He didn’t like what the man said to him and presently he put up his fists and knocked him down. Another man behind him tried to hit him on the head with something but the old man was too quick and turned round in time. Then it was rather horrible, but rather fine. There were three of them at him and he was fighting them all. I’ve read about that kind of thing in books but I never realised how one would feel about it. Of course, they got him in the end. They beat his head about terribly with the things in their hands. They were quite cool about it and stooped down to examine him and make sure he was really dead. The light from the lantern seemed all funny. It looked as if it made long uprights of light–sort of rods–all round the place. But perhaps I was waking up by then. No thanks, I’m all right. It was horrid, of course, but I’m not really frightened–not the way I would have been before. I’m more sorry for the old man.’

      ‘You feel you can go to sleep again?’

      ‘Oh rather! Is your headache better, Mrs Dimble?’

      ‘Quite gone, thank you. Good night.’

      ‘Without a doubt,’ thought Mark, ‘this must be the Mad Parson that Bill the Blizzard was talking of.’ The Committee at Belbury did not meet till ten-thirty, and ever since breakfast he had been walking with the Reverend Straik in the garden, despite the raw and misty weather of the morning. At the very moment when the man had first buttonholed him, the threadbare clothes and clumsy boots, the frayed clerical collar, the dark, lean, tragic face, gashed and ill-shaved and seamed, and the bitter sincerity of his manner, had struck a discordant note. It was not a type Mark had expected to meet in the NICE.

      ‘Do not imagine,’ said Mr Straik, ‘that I indulge in any dreams of carrying out our programme without violence. There will be resistance. They will gnaw their tongues and not repent. We are not to be deterred. We face these disorders with a firmness which will lead traducers to say that we have desired them. Let them say so. In a sense we have. It is no part of our witness to preserve that organisation of ordered sin which is called Society. To that organisation the message which we have to deliver is a message of absolute despair.’

      ‘Now that is what I meant,’ said Mark, ‘when I said that your point of view and mine must, in the long run, be incompatible. The preservation, which involves the thorough planning, of Society is just precisely the end I have in view. I do not think there is or can be any other end. The problem is quite different for you because you look forward to something else, something better than human society, in some other world.’

      ‘With every thought and vibration of my heart, with every drop of my blood,’ said Mr Straik, ‘I repudiate that damnable doctrine. That is precisely the subterfuge by which the World, the organisation and body of Death, has sidetracked and emasculated the teaching of Jesus, and turned into priestcraft and mysticism the plain demand of the Lord for righteousness and judgment here and now. The Kingdom of God is to be realised here–in this world. And it will be. At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow. In that name I dissociate myself completely from all the organised religion that has yet been seen in the world.’

      And