‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘If you have any regard for your wife’s safety you will not ask me to tell you where she has gone,’ said Dimble.
‘Safety?’
‘Safety,’ repeated Dimble with great sternness.
‘Safety from what?’
‘Don’t you know what has happened?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘On the night of the big riot the Institutional Police attempted to arrest her. She escaped, but not before they had tortured her.’
‘Tortured her? What do you mean?’
‘Burned her with cigars.’
‘That’s what I’ve come about,’ said Mark. ‘Jane–I’m afraid she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That didn’t really happen, you know.’
‘The doctor who dressed the burns thinks otherwise.’
‘Great Scot!’ said Mark. ‘So they really did? But, look here…’
Under the quiet stare of Dimble he found it difficult to speak.
‘Why have I not been told of this outrage?’ he shouted.
‘By your colleagues?’ asked Dimble drily. ‘It is an odd question to ask me. You ought to understand the workings of the NICE better than I do.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why has nothing been done about it? Have you been to the police?’
‘The Institutional Police?’
‘No, the ordinary police.’
‘Do you really not know that there are no ordinary police left in Edgestow?’
‘I suppose there are some magistrates.’
‘There is the Emergency Commissioner, Lord Feverstone. You seem to misunderstand. This is a conquered and occupied city.’
‘Then why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t you get on to me?’
‘You?’ said Dimble.
For one moment, the first for many years, Mark saw himself exactly as a man like Dimble saw him. It almost took his breath away.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘You don’t…it’s too fantastic! You don’t imagine I knew about it. You don’t really believe I send policemen about to man-handle my own wife!’ He had begun on the note of indignation, but ended by trying to insinuate a little jocularity. If only Dimble would give even the ghost of a smile: anything to move the conversation onto a different level.
But Dimble said nothing and his face did not relax. He had not, in fact, been perfectly sure that Mark might not have sunk even to this, but out of charity he did not wish to say so.
‘I know you’ve always disliked me,’ said Mark. ‘But I didn’t know it was quite as bad as that.’ And again Dimble was silent, but for a reason Mark could not guess. The truth was that his shaft had gone home. Dimble’s conscience had for years accused him of a lack of charity towards Studdock and he had struggled to amend it: he was struggling now.
‘Well,’ said Studdock in a dry voice, after the silence had lasted for several seconds, ‘there doesn’t seem to be much more to say. I insist on being told where Jane is.’
‘Do you want her to be taken to Belbury?’
Mark winced. It was as if the other had read the very thought he had had in the Bristol half an hour ago.
‘I don’t see, Dimble,’ he said, ‘why I should be cross-questioned in this way. Where is my wife?’
‘I have no permission to tell you. She is not in my house nor under my protection. She is well and happy and safe. If you still have the slightest regard for her happiness you will make no attempt to get into touch with her.’
‘Am I sort of leper or criminal that I can’t even be trusted to know her address?’
‘Excuse me. You are a member of the NICE who have already insulted, tortured and arrested her. Since her escape she has been left alone only because your colleagues do not know where she is.’
‘And if it really was the NICE police, do you suppose I’m not going to have a very full explanation out of them? Damn it, what do you take me for?’
‘I can only hope that you have no power in the NICE at all. If you have no power, then you cannot protect her. If you have, then you are identified with its policy. In neither case will I help you to discover where Jane is.’
‘This is fantastic,’ said Mark. ‘Even if I do happen to hold a job in the NICE for the moment, you know me.’
‘I do not know you,’ said Dimble. ‘I have no conception of your aims or motives.’
He seemed to Mark to be looking at him, not with anger or contempt, but with that degree of loathing which produces in those who feel it a kind of embarrassment–as if he were an obscenity which decent people are forced, for very shame, to pretend that they have not noticed. In this Mark was quite mistaken. In reality his presence was acting on Dimble as a summons to rigid self-control. Dimble was simply trying very hard not to hate, not to despise, above all not to enjoy hating and despising, and he had no idea of the fixed severity which this effort gave to his face. The whole of the rest of the conversation went on under this misunderstanding.
‘There has been some ridiculous mistake,’ said Mark. ‘I tell you I’ll look into it thoroughly. I’ll make a row. I suppose some newly enrolled policeman got drunk or something. Well, he’ll be broken. I–’
‘It was the chief of your police, Miss Hardcastle herself, who did it.’
‘Very well. I’ll break her then. Did you suppose I was going to take it lying down? But there must be some mistake. It can’t…’
‘Do you know Miss Hardcastle well?’ asked Dimble. Mark was silenced. And he thought (quite wrongly) that Dimble was reading his mind to the bottom and seeing there his certainty that Miss Hardcastle had done this very thing and that he had no more power of calling her to account than of stopping the revolution of the Earth.
Suddenly the immobility of Dimble’s face changed, and he spoke in a new voice. ‘Have you the means to bring her to book?’ he said. ‘Are you already as near the centre of Belbury as that? If so, then you have consented to the murder of Hingest, the murder of Compton. If so, it was by your orders that Mary Prescott was raped and battered to death in the sheds behind the station. It is with your approval that criminals–honest criminals whose hands you are unfit to touch–are being taken from the jails to which British judges sent them on the conviction of British juries and packed off to Belbury to undergo for an indefinite period, out of reach of the law, whatever tortures and assaults on personal identity you call Remedial Treatment. It is you who have driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester. It is you who can tell us why Place and Rowley and Cunningham (at eighty years of age) have been arrested, and where they are. And if you are as deeply in it as that, not only will I not deliver Jane into your hands, but I would not deliver my dog.’
‘Really–really,’ said Mark. ‘This is absurd. I know one or two high-handed things have been done. You always get some of the wrong sort in a police force–specially at first. But–I mean to say–what have I ever done that you should make me responsible for every action that any NICE official has taken–or is said to have taken in the gutter press?’
‘Gutter press!’ thundered Dimble, who seemed to Mark to be even physically larger than he was a few minutes before. ‘What nonsense is this? Do you suppose I don’t know that you have control of every paper in the country except one? And that one has not appeared this morning. Its printers have gone on strike. The poor dupes say they will not print articles attacking the people’s Institute. Where the lies in all other papers come from you know better than I.’
It may seem strange to say that Mark, having long lived in a world without charity, had nevertheless very seldom met real anger. Malice in plenty he had encountered, but it all operated by snubs and sneers and stabbing in the back. The forehead and eyes and voice of this elderly man had an effect on him which was stifling and unnerving. At Belbury one used the words ‘whining’ and ‘yapping’ to describe any opposition which the actions of Belbury aroused in the o
uter world. And Mark had never had enough imagination to realise what the ‘whining’ would really be like if you met it face to face.
‘I tell you I knew nothing about it,’ he shouted. ‘Damn it, I’m the injured party. The way you talk, anyone would think it was your wife who’d been ill-treated.’
‘So it might have been. So it may be. It may be any man or woman in England. It was a woman and a citizen. What does it matter whose wife it was?’
‘But I tell you I’ll raise hell about it. I’ll break the infernal bitch who did it, if it means breaking the whole NICE.’
Dimble said nothing. Mark knew that Dimble knew that he was talking nonsense. Yet Mark could not stop. If he did not bluster, he would not know what to say.
‘Sooner than put up with this,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll leave the NICE.’
‘Do you mean that?’ asked Dimble with a sharp glance. And to Mark, whose ideas were now all one fluid confusion of wounded vanity and jostling fears and shames, this glance once more appeared accusing and intolerable. In reality, it had been a glance of awakened hope: for charity hopes all things. But there was caution in it; and between hope and caution Dimble found himself once more reduced to silence.
‘I see you don’t trust me,’ said Mark, instinctively summoning to his face the manly and injured expression which had often served him well in headmasters’ studies.
Dimble was a truthful man. ‘No,’ he said after a longish pause. ‘I don’t quite.’
Mark shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
‘Studdock,’ said Dimble. ‘This is not a time for foolery, or compliments. It may be that both of us are within a few minutes of death. You have probably been shadowed into the college. And I, at any rate, don’t propose to die with polite insincerities in my mouth. I don’t trust you. Why should I? You are (at least in some degree) the accomplice of the worst men in the world. Your very coming to me this afternoon may be only a trap.’
‘Don’t you know me better than that?’ said Mark.
‘Stop talking nonsense!’ said Dimble. ‘Stop posturing and acting, if only for a minute. Who are you to talk like that? They have corrupted better men than you or me before now. Straik was a good man once. Filostrato was at least a great genius. Even Alcasan–yes, yes, I know who your Head is–was at least a plain murderer: something better than they have now made of him. Who are you to be exempt?’
Mark gasped. The discovery of how much Dimble knew had suddenly inverted his whole picture of the situation. No logic was left in him.
‘Nevertheless,’ continued Dimble, ‘knowing all this–knowing that you may be only the bait in the trap, I will take a risk. I will risk things compared with which both our lives are a triviality. If you seriously wish to leave the NICE, I will help you.’
One moment it was like the gates of Paradise opening–then, at once, caution and the incurable wish to tempo-rise rushed back. The chink had closed again.
‘I–I’d need to think that over,’ he mumbled.
‘There is no time,’ said Dimble. ‘And there is really nothing to think about. I am offering you a way back into the human family. But you must come at once.’
‘It’s a question affecting my whole future career.’
‘Your career!’ said Dimble. ‘It’s a question of damnation or–a last chance. But you must come at once.’
‘I don’t think I understand,’ said Mark. ‘You keep on suggesting some kind of danger. What is it? And what powers have you to protect me–or Jane–if I do bolt?’
‘You must risk that,’ said Dimble. ‘I can offer you no security. Don’t you understand? There is no security for anyone now. The battle has started. I’m offering you a place on the right side. I don’t know which will win.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mark, ‘I had been thinking of leaving. But I must think it over. You put things in rather an odd way.’
‘There is no time,’ said Dimble.
‘Supposing I look you up again tomorrow?’
‘Do you know that you’ll be able?’
‘Or in an hour? Come, that’s only sensible. Will you be here in an hour’s time?’
‘What can an hour do for you? You are only waiting in the hope that your mind will be less clear.’
‘But will you be here?’
‘If you insist. But no good can come of it.’
‘I want to think. I want to think,’ said Mark, and left the room without waiting for a reply.
Mark had said he wanted to think: in reality he wanted alcohol and tobacco. He had thoughts in plenty–more than he desired. One thought prompted him to cling to Dimble as a lost child clings to a grown-up. Another whispered to him, ‘Madness. Don’t break with the NICE. They’ll be after you. How can Dimble save you! You’ll be killed.’ A third implored him not, even now, to write off as a total loss his hard won position in the Inner Ring at Belbury: there must, must be some middle course. A fourth recoiled from the idea of ever seeing Dimble again: the memory of every tone Dimble had used caused horrible discomfort. And he wanted Jane, and he wanted to punish Jane for being a friend of Dimble’s, and he wanted never to see Wither again, and he wanted to creep back and patch things up with Wither somehow. He wanted to be perfectly safe and yet also very nonchalant and daring –to be admired for manly honesty among the Dimbles and yet also for realism and knowingness at Belbury–to have two more large whiskies and also to think everything out very clearly and collectedly. And it was beginning to rain and his head had begun to ache again. Damn the whole thing. Damn, damn! Why had he such a rotten heredity? Why had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so irrational? Why was his luck so bad?
He began walking rapidly.
It was raining quite hard as he reached the College lodge. Some sort of van seemed to be standing in the street outside, and there were three or four uniformed men in capes. He remembered afterwards how the wet oilskin shone in the lamplight. A torch was flashed in his face.
‘Excuse me, Sir,’ said one of the men. ‘I must ask for your name.’
‘Studdock,’ said Mark.
‘Mark Gainsby Studdock,’ said the man, ‘it is my duty to arrest you for the murder of William Hingest.’
Dr Dimble drove out to St Anne’s dissatisfied with himself, haunted with the suspicion that if he had been wiser, or more perfectly in charity with this very miserable young man, he might have done something for him. ‘Did I give way to my temper? Was I self-righteous? Did I tell him as much as I dared?’ he thought. Then came the deeper self-distrust that was habitual with him. ‘Did you fail to make things clear because you really wanted not to? Just wanted to hurt and humiliate? To enjoy your own self-righteousness? Is there a whole Belbury inside you too?’ The sadness that came over him had novelty in it. ‘And thus,’ he quoted from Brother Lawrence, ‘thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to myself.’
Once clear of the town, he drove slowly–almost sauntering on wheels. The sky was red to westward and the first stars were out. Far down below him in a valley he saw the lights already lit in Cure Hardy. ‘Thank Heaven it at any rate is far enough from Edgestow to be safe,’ he thought. The sudden whiteness of a white owl flying low fluttered across the woody twilight on his left. It gave him a delicious feeling of approaching night. He was very pleasantly tired; he looked forward to an agreeable evening and an early bed.
‘Here he is! Here’s Dr Dimble,’ shouted Ivy Maggs as he drove up to the front door of the Manor.
‘Don’t put the car away, Dimble,’ said Denniston.
‘Oh, Cecil!’ said his wife; and he saw fear in her face. The whole household seemed to have been waiting for him.
A few moments later, blinking in the lighted kitchen, he saw that this was not to be a normal evening. The Director himself was there, seated by the fire, with the jackdaw on his shoulder and Mr Bultitude at his feet. There were signs that everyone else had had an early supper and Dimble found himself almost at once seated at the end of the
table and being rather excitedly urged to eat and drink by his wife and Mrs Maggs.
‘Don’t stop to ask questions, dear,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Go on eating while they tell you. Make a good meal.’
‘You have to go out again,’ said Ivy Maggs.
‘Yes,’ said the Director. ‘We’re going into action at last. I’m sorry to send you out the moment you come in; but the battle has started.’
‘I have already repeatedly urged,’ said MacPhee, ‘the absurdity of sending out an older man like yourself, that’s done a day’s work forbye, when here am I, a great strapping fellow sitting doing nothing.’
‘It’s no good, MacPhee,’ said the Director, ‘you can’t go. For one thing you don’t know the language. And for another–it’s time for frankness–you have never put yourself under the protection of Maleldil.’
‘I am perfectly ready,’ said MacPhee, ‘in and for this emergency, to allow the existence of these eldila of yours and of a being called Maleldil whom they regard as their king. And I–’
‘You can’t go,’ said the Director. ‘I will not send you. It would be like sending a three-year-old child to fight a tank. Put the other map on the table where Dimble can see it while he goes on with his meal. And now, silence. This is the situation, Dimble. What was under Bragdon was a living Merlin. Yes, asleep, if you like to call it sleep. And nothing has yet happened to show that the enemy have found him. Got that? No, don’t talk, go on eating. Last night Jane Studdock had the most important dream she’s had yet. You remember that in an earlier dream she saw (or so I thought) the very place where he lay under Bragdon. But–and this is the important thing–it’s not reached by a shaft and a stair. She dreamed of going through a long tunnel with a very gradual ascent. Ah, you begin to see the point. You’re right. Jane thinks she can recognise the entrance to that tunnel: under a heap of stones at the end of a copse with–what was it, Jane?’
‘A white gate, Sir. An ordinary five-barred gate with a cross-piece. But the cross-piece was broken off about a foot from the top. I’d know it again.’
‘You see, Dimble? There’s a very good chance that this tunnel comes up outside the area held by the NICE.’
‘You mean,’ said Dimble, ‘that we can now get under Bragdon without going into Bragdon.’
‘Exactly. But that’s not all.’
Dimble, steadily munching, looked at him.