I’ll do the justice to say that you’ve never tried. The bear is kept in the house and given apples and golden syrup till it’s near bursting–’
‘Well, I like that!’ said Mrs Maggs. ‘Who is it that’s always giving him apples? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘The bear, as I was observing,’ said MacPhee, ‘is kept in the house and pampered. The pigs are kept in a stye and killed for bacon. I would be interested to know the philosophical rationale of the distinction.’
Ivy Maggs looked in bewilderment from the smiling face of the Director to the unsmiling face of MacPhee.
‘I think it’s just silly,’ she said. ‘Who ever heard of trying to make bacon out of a bear?’
MacPhee made a little stamp of impatience and said something which was drowned first by Ransom’s laughter, and then by a great clap of wind which shook the window as if it would blow it in.
‘What a dreadful night for them!’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘I love it,’ said Camilla. ‘I’d love to be out in it. Out on a high hill. Oh, I do wish you’d let me go with them, Sir.’
‘You like it?’ said Ivy. ‘Oh I don’t! Listen to it round the corner of the house. It’d make me feel kind of creepy if I were alone. Or even if you was upstairs, Sir. I always think it’s on nights like this that they–you know–come to you.’
‘They don’t take any notice of weather one way or the other, Ivy,’ said Ransom.
‘Do you know,’ said Ivy in a low voice, ‘that’s a thing I don’t quite understand. They’re so eerie, these ones that come to visit you. I wouldn’t go near that part of the house if I thought there was anything there, not if you paid me a hundred pounds. But I don’t feel like that about God. But He ought to be worse, if you see what I mean.’
‘He was, once,’ said the Director. ‘You are quite right about the Powers. Angels in general are not good company for men in general, even when they are good angels and good men. It’s all in St Paul. But as for Maleldil Himself, all that has changed: it was changed by what happened at Bethlehem.’
‘It’s getting ever so near Christmas now,’ said Ivy addressing the company in general.
‘We shall have Mr Maggs with us before then,’ said Ransom.
‘In a day or two, Sir,’ said Ivy.
‘Was that only the wind?’ said Grace Ironwood.
‘It sounded to me like a horse,’ said Mrs Dimble.
‘Here,’ said MacPhee jumping up. ‘Get out of the way, Mr Bultitude, till I get my gum boots. It’ll be those two horses of Broad’s again, tramping all over my celery trenches. If only you’d let me go to the police in the first instance. Why the man can’t keep them shut up–’ He was bundling himself into his mackintosh as he spoke and the rest of the speech was inaudible.
‘My crutch please, Camilla,’ said Ransom. ‘Come back, MacPhee. We will go to the door together, you and
I. Ladies, stay where you are.’
There was a look on his face which some of those present had not seen before. The four women sat as if they had been turned to stone, with their eyes wide and staring. A moment later Ransom and MacPhee stood alone in the scullery. The back door was so shaking on its hinges with the wind that they did not know whether someone were knocking at it or not.
‘Now,’ said Ransom, ‘open it. And stand back behind it yourself.’
For a second MacPhee worked with the bolts. Then, whether he meant to disobey or not (a point which must remain doubtful), the storm flung the door against the wall and he was momentarily pinned behind it. Ransom, standing motionless, leaning forward on his crutch, saw in the light from the scullery, outlined against the blackness, a huge horse, all in a lather of sweat and foam, its yellow teeth laid bare, its nostrils wide and red, its ears flattened against its skull, and its eyes flaming. It had been ridden so close up to the door that its front hoofs rested on the doorstep. It had neither saddle, stirrup nor bridle; but at that very moment a man leapt off its back. He seemed both very tall and very fat, almost a giant. His reddish-grey hair and beard were blown all about his face so that it was hardly visible; and it was only after he had taken a step forward that Ransom noticed his clothes–the ragged, ill-fitting khaki coat, baggy trousers, and boots that had lost the toes.
In a great room at Belbury, where the fire blazed and wine and silver sparkled on side-tables and a great bed occupied the centre of the floor, the Deputy Director watched in profound silence while four young men with reverential or medical heedfulness carried in a burden on a stretcher. As they removed the blankets and transferred the occupant of the stretcher to the bed, Wither’s mouth opened wider. His interest became so intense that for the moment the chaos of his face appeared ordered and he looked like an ordinary man. What he saw was a naked human body, alive, but apparently unconscious. He ordered the attendants to place hot water bottles at its feet and raise the head with pillows: when they had done so and withdrawn, he drew a chair to the foot of the bed and sat down to study the face of the sleeper. The head was very large, though perhaps it looked larger than it was because of the unkempt grey beard and the long and tangled grey hair. The face was weather-beaten in the extreme and the neck, where visible, already lean and scraggy with age. The eyes were shut and the lips wore a very slight smile. The total effect was ambiguous. Wither gazed at it for a long time and sometimes moved his head to see how it looked from a different angle–almost as if he searched for some trait he could not find and were disappointed. For nearly a quarter of an hour he sat thus; then the door opened and Professor Frost came softly into the room.
He walked to the bedside, bent down and looked closely into the stranger’s face. Then he walked round to the far side of the bed and did the same.
‘Is he asleep?’ whispered Wither.
‘I think not. It is more like some kind of a trance. What kind, I don’t know.’
‘You have no doubts, I trust?’
‘Where did they find him?’
‘In a dingle about quarter of a mile from the entrance to the souterrain. They had the track of bare feet almost all the way.’
‘The souterrain itself was empty?’
‘Yes. I had a report on that from Stone shortly after you left me.’
‘You will make provisions about Stone?’
‘Yes. But what do you think?’–he pointed with his eyes to the bed.
‘I think it is he,’ said Frost. ‘The place is right. The nudity is hard to account for on any other hypothesis. The skull is the kind I expected.’
‘But the face.’
‘Yes. There are certain traits which are a little disquieting.’
‘I could have sworn,’ said Wither, ‘that I knew the look of a Master–even the look of one who could be made into a Master. You understand me…one sees at once that Straik or Studdock might do; that Miss Hardcastle, with all her excellent qualities, would not.’
‘Yes. Perhaps we must be prepared for great crudities in…him. Who knows what the technique of the Atlantean Circle was really like?’
‘Certainly, one must not be–ah–narrow-minded. One can suppose that the Masters of that age were not quite so sharply divided from the common people as we are. All sorts of emotional and even instinctive, elements were perhaps still tolerated in the Great Atlantean which we have had to discard.’
‘One not only may suppose it, one must. We should not forget that the whole plan consists in the reunion of different kinds of the art.’
‘Exactly. Perhaps one’s association with the Powers–their different time scale and all that–tends to make one forget how enormous the gap in time is by our human standards.’
‘What we have here,’ said Frost pointing to the sleeper, ‘is not, you see, something from the fifth century. It is the last vestige, surviving into the fifth century, of something much more remote. Something that comes down from long before the Great Disaster, even from before primitive druidism; something that takes us back to Numinor, to pre-glacial periods.’
‘The whole experiment is perhaps more hazardous than we realised.’
‘I have had occasion before,’ said Frost, ‘to express the wish that you would not keep on introducing these emotional pseudo-statements into our scientific discussions.’
‘My dear friend,’ said Wither without looking at him, ‘I am quite aware that the subject you mention has been discussed between you and the Powers themselves. Quite aware. And I don’t doubt that you are equally well aware of certain discussions they have held with me about aspects of your own methods which are open to criticism. Nothing would be more futile–I might say more dangerous–than any attempt to introduce between ourselves those modes of oblique discipline which we properly apply to our inferiors. It is in your own interest that I venture to touch on this point.’
Instead of replying, Frost signalled to his companion. Both men became silent, their gaze fixed on the bed: for the Sleeper had opened his eyes.
The opening of the eyes flooded the whole face with meaning, but it was a meaning they could not interpret. The Sleeper seemed to be looking at them, but they were not quite sure that he saw them. As the seconds passed, Wither’s main impression of the face was its caution. But there was nothing intense or uneasy about it. It was a habitual, unemphatic defensiveness which seemed to have behind it years of hard experience, quietly–perhaps even humorously–endured.
Wither rose to his feet, and cleared his throat. ‘Magister Merline,’ he said, ‘Sapientissime Britonum, secreti secretorum possessor, incredibili quodam gaudio afficimur quod te in domum nostram accipere nobis–ah–contingit. Scito nos etiam haud imperitos esse magnae artis–et–ut ita dicam…’ *
But his voice died away. It was too obvious that the Sleeper was taking no notice of what he said. It was impossible that a learned man of the fifth century should not know Latin. Was there, then, some error in his own pronunciation? But he felt by no means sure that this man could not understand him. The total lack of curiosity, or even interest, in his face, suggested rather that he was not listening.
Frost took a decanter from the table and poured out a glass of red wine. He then returned to the bedside, bowed deeply, and handed it to the stranger. The latter looked at it with an expression that might (or might not) be interpreted as one of cunning; then he suddenly sat up in bed, revealing a huge hairy chest and lean, muscular arms. His eyes turned to the table and he pointed. Frost went back to it and touched a different decanter. The stranger shook his head and pointed again.
‘I think,’ said Wither, ‘that our very distinguished guest is trying to indicate the jug. I don’t quite know what was provided. Perhaps–’
‘It contains beer,’ said Frost.
‘Well, it is hardly appropriate–still, perhaps–we know so little of the customs of that age…’
While he was still speaking Frost had filled a pewter mug with beer and offered it to their guest. For the first time a gleam of interest came into that cryptic face. The man snatched the mug eagerly, pushed back his disorderly moustache from his lips, and began to drink. Back and back went the grey head; up and up went the bottom of the tankard; the moving muscles of the lean throat made the act of drinking visible. At last the man, having completely inverted the tankard, set it down, wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand, and heaved a long sigh–the first sound he had uttered since his arrival. Then he turned his attention once more to the table.
For about twenty minutes the two old men fed him–Wither with tremulous and courtly deference, Frost with the deft, noiseless movements of a trained servant. All sorts of delicacies had been provided, but the stranger devoted his attention entirely to cold beef, chicken, pickles, bread, cheese and butter. The butter he ate neat, off the end of a knife. He was apparently unacquainted with forks, and took the chicken bones in both hands to gnaw them, placing them under the pillow when he had done. His eating was noisy and animal. When he had eaten, he signalled for a second pint of beer, drank it at two long draughts, wiped his mouth on the sheet and his nose on his hand, and seemed to be composing himself for further slumber.
‘Ah–er–domine,’ said Wither with deprecating urgency, ‘nihil magis mihi displiceret quam ut tibi ullo modo–ah–molestior essem. Attamen, venia tua…’ *
But the man was taking no notice at all. They could not tell whether his eyes were shut or whether he was still looking at them under half-closed lids; but clearly he was not intending to converse. Frost and Wither exchanged enquiring glances.
‘There is no approach to this room, is there?’ said Frost, ‘except through the next one.’
‘No,’ said Wither.
‘Let us go out there and discuss the situation. We can leave the door ajar. We shall be able to hear if he stirs.’
When Mark found himself left suddenly alone by Frost, his first sensation was an unexpected lightness of heart. It was not that he had any release from fears about the future. Rather, in the very midst of those fears, a strange sense of liberation had sprung up. The relief of no longer trying to win these men’s confidence, the shuffling off of miserable hopes, was almost exhilarating. The straight fight, after the long series of diplomatic failures, was tonic. He might lose the straight fight. But at least it was now his side against theirs. And he could talk of ‘his side’ now. Already he was with Jane and with all she symbolised. Indeed, it was he who was in the front line: Jane was almost a non-combatant…
The approval of one’s own conscience is a very heady draught; and specially for those who are not accustomed to it. Within two minutes Mark passed from that first involuntary sense of liberation to a conscious attitude of courage, and thence into unrestrained heroics. The picture of himself as hero and martyr, as Jack the Giant-Killer still coolly playing his hand even in the giant’s kitchen, rose up before him, promising that it could blot out forever those other, and unendurable pictures of himself which had haunted him for the last few hours. It wasn’t everyone, after all, who could have resisted an invitation like Frost’s. An invitation that beckoned you right across the frontiers of human life…into something that people had been trying to find since the beginning of the world…a touch on that infinitely secret cord which was the real nerve of all history. How it would have attracted him once!
Would have attracted him once…Suddenly, like a thing that leaped to him across infinite distances with the speed of light, desire (salt, black, ravenous, unanswerable desire) took him by the throat. The merest hint will convey to those who have felt it the quality of the emotion which now shook him, like a dog shaking a rat; for others, no description perhaps will avail. Many writers speak of it in terms of lust: a description admirably illuminating from within, totally misleading from without. It has nothing to do with the body. But it is in two respects like lust as lust shows itself to be in the deepest and darkest vault of its labyrinthine house. For like lust, it disenchants the whole universe. Everything else that Mark had ever felt–love, ambition, hunger, lust itself–appeared to have been mere milk and water, toys for children, not worth one throb of the nerves. The infinite attraction of this dark thing sucked all other passions into itself: the rest of the world appeared blenched, etiolated, insipid, a world of white marriages and white masses, dishes without salt, gambling for counters. He could not now think of Jane except in terms of appetite: and appetite here made no appeal. That serpent, faced with the true dragon, became a fangless worm. But it was like lust in another respect also. It is idle to point out to the perverted man the horror of his perversion: while the fierce fit is on, that horror is the very spice of his craving. It is ugliness itself that becomes, in the end, the goal of his lechery; beauty has long since grown too weak a stimulant. And so it was here. These creatures of which Frost had spoken –and he did not doubt now that they were locally present with him in the cell–breathed death on the human race and on all joy. Not despite this but because of this, the terrible gravitation sucked and tugged and fascinated him towards them. Never before had he known the fruitful strength of the
movement opposite to Nature which now had him in its grip; the impulse to reverse all reluctances and to draw every circle anti-clockwise. The meaning of certain pictures, of Frost’s talk about ‘objectivity’, of the things done by witches in old times, became clear to him. The image of Wither’s face rose to his memory; and this time he did not merely loathe it. He noted, with shuddering satisfaction, the signs it bore of a shared experience between them. Wither also knew. Wither understood…
At the same moment, it came back to him that he would probably be killed. As soon as he thought of that, he became once more aware of the cell–the little hard white empty place with the glaring light, in which he found himself sitting on the floor. He blinked his eyes. He could not remember that it had been visible for the last few minutes. Where had he been? His mind was clear now at any rate. This idea of something in common between him and Wither was all nonsense. Of course they meant to kill him in the end unless he could rescue himself by his own wits. What had he been thinking and feeling while he forgot that?
Gradually he realised that he had sustained some sort of attack, and that he had put up no resistance at all; and with that realisation a quite new kind of dread entered his mind. Though he was theoretically a materialist, he had all his life believed quite inconsistently, and even carelessly, in the freedom of his own will. He had seldom made a moral resolution, and when he had resolved some hours ago to trust the Belbury crew no further, he had taken it for granted that he would be able to do what he resolved. He knew, to be sure, that he might ‘change his mind’; but till he did so, of course he would carry out his plan. It had never occurred to him that his mind could thus be changed for him, all in an instant of time, changed beyond recognition. If that sort of thing could happen…It was unfair. Here was a man trying (for the first time in his life) to do what was obviously the right thing–the thing that Jane and the Dimbles and Aunt Gilly would have approved of. You might have expected that when a man behaved in that way the universe would back him up. For the relics of such semi-savage versions of Theism as Mark had picked up in the course of his life were stronger in him than he knew, and he felt, though he would not have put it into words, that it was ‘up to’ the universe to reward his good resolutions. Yet, the very first moment you tried to be good, the universe let you down. It revealed gaps you had never dreamed of. It invented new laws for the express purpose of letting you down. That was what you got for your pains.
The cynics, then, were right. But at this thought, he stopped sharply. Some flavour that came with it had given him pause. Was this the other mood beginning again? Oh not that, at any price. He clenched his hands. No, no, no. He could not stand this much longer. He wanted Jane; he wanted Mrs Dimble; he wanted Denniston. He wanted somebody or something. ‘Oh don’t, don’t let me go back into it,’ he said; and then louder, ‘don’t, don’t.’ All that could in any sense be called himself went into that cry; and the dreadful consciousness of having played his last card began to turn slowly into a sort of peace. There was nothing more to be done. Unconsciously he allowed his muscles to relax. His young body was very tired by this time and even the hard floor was grateful to it. The cell also seemed to be somehow emptied and purged, as if it too were tired after the conflicts it had witnessed–emptied like a sky after rain, tired like a child after weeping. A dim consciousness that the night must be nearly ended stole over him, and he fell asleep.
13
They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads
‘Stand! Stand where you are and tell me your name and business,’ said Ransom.
The ragged figure on the threshold tilted its head a little sideways like one who cannot quite hear. At the same moment the wind from the opened door had its way with the house. The inner door, between the