"That Hideous Strength" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lewis Clive Staples)

I

Next morning Mark went back to Belbury by train. He had promised his wife to clear up a number of points about his salary and place of residence, and the memory of all these promises made a little cloud of uneasiness in his mind, but on the whole he was in good spirits. This return to Belbury-just sauntering in and hanging up his hat and ordering a drink-was a pleasant contrast to his first arrival. The servant who brought the drink knew him. Filostrato nodded to him. Women would fuss, but this was clearly the real world. After the drink he strolled upstairs to Cosser’s office. He was there for only five minutes, and when he came out his state of mind had been completely altered.

Steele and Cosser were both there and both looked up with the air of men who have been interrupted by a total stranger. Neither spoke.

“Ah-good morning,” said Mark awkwardly. Steele finished making a pencil note on some large document which was spread out before him.

“What is it, Mr. Studdock?” he said without looking up.

“I came to see Cosser,” said Mark, and then, addressing Cosser, “I’ve just been thinking over the last section but one in that report.”

“What report’s this?” said Steele to Cosser.

“Oh, I thought,” replied Cosser, with a little twisty smile at one corner of his mouth, “that it would be a good thing to put together a report on Cure Hardy in my spare time, and as there was nothing particular to do yesterday I drew it up. Mr. Studdock helped me.”

“Well, never mind about that now,” said Steele.

“You can talk to Mr. Cosser about it some other time, Mr. Studdock. I’m afraid he’s busy at present.”

“Look here,” said Mark, “I think we’d better understand one another. Am I to take it that this report was simply a private hobby of Cosser’s? And if so, I should like to have known that before I spent eight hours’ work on it. And whose orders am I under?”

Steele, playing with his pencil, looked at Cosser.

“I asked you a question about my position, Mr. Steele,” said Mark.

“I haven’t time for this sort of thing,” said Steele. “If you haven’t any work to do, I have. I know nothing about your position.”

Mark thought, for a moment, of turning to Cosser; but Cosser’s smooth, freckled face and non-committal eyes suddenly filled him with such contempt that he turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the door behind him. He was going to see the Deputy Director.

At the door of Wither’s room he hesitated for a moment because he heard voices from within. But he was too angry to wait. He knocked and entered without noticing whether the knock had been answered.

“My dear boy,” said the Deputy Director, looking up but not quite fixing his eyes an Mark’s face, “I am delighted to see you.” As he heard these words Mark noticed that there was a third person in the room. It was a man called Stone whom he had met at dinner the day before yesterday. Stone was standing in front of Wither’s table rolling and unrolling a piece of blotting-paper with his fingers. His mouth was open, his eyes fixed on the Deputy Director.

“Delighted to see you,” repeated Wither. “All the more so because you-er-interrupted me in what I am afraid I must call a rather painful interview. As I was just saying to poor Mr. Stone when you came in, nothing is nearer to my heart than the wish that this great Institute should all work together like one family . . . the greatest unity of will and purpose, Mr. Stone, the freest mutual confidence . . . that is what I expect of my colleagues. But then as you may remind me, Mr.-ah-Studdock, even in family life there are occasionally strains and frictions and misunderstandings. And that is why, my dear boy, I am not at the moment quite at leisure-don’t go, Mr. Stone. I have a great deal more to say to you.”

“Perhaps I’d better come back later?” said Mark.

“Well, perhaps in all the circumstances . . . it is your feelings that I am considering, Mr. Stone . . . perhaps . . . the usual method of seeing me, Mr. Studdock, is to apply to my secretary and make an appointment. Not, you will understand, that I have the least wish to insist on any formalities or would be, other than pleased to see you whenever you looked in. It is the waste of your time that I am anxious to avoid.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Mark. “I’ll go and see your secretary.”

The secretary’s office was next door. When one went in one found not the secretary himself but a number of subordinates who were cut off from their visitors behind a sort of counter, Mark made an appointment for ten o’clock to-morrow which was the earliest hour they could offer him. As he came out he ran into Fairy Hardcastle.

“Hullo, Studdock,” said the Fairy. “Hanging round the D.D.’s office? That won’t do, you know.”

“I have decided,” said Mark, “that I must either get my position definitely fixed once and for all or else leave the Institute.”

She looked at him with an ambiguous expression in which amusement seemed to predominate. Then she suddenly slipped her arm through his.

“Look, sonny,” she said, “you drop all that, see? It isn’t going to do you any good. You come along and have a talk with me.”

“There’s really nothing to talk about, Miss Hardcastle,” said Mark. “I’m quite clear in my mind. Either I get a real job here, or I go back to Bracton. That’s simple enough: I don’t even particularly mind which, so long as I know.”

To this the Fairy made no answer, and the steady pressure of her arm compelled Mark, unless he was prepared to struggle, to go with her along the passage. The intimacy and authority of her grip was ludicrously ambiguous, and would have fitted almost equally well the relations of policeman and prisoner, mistress and lover, nurse and child. Mark felt that he would look a fool if they met anyone.

She brought him to her own offices which were on the second floor. The outer office was full of what he had already learned to call Waips, the girls of the Women’s Auxiliary Institutional Police. The men of the force, though very much more numerous, were not so often met with indoors, but Waips were constantly seen flitting to and fro wherever Miss Hardcastle appeared. Far from sharing the masculine characteristics of their chief they were (as Feverstone once said) “feminine to the point of imbecility “-small and slight and fluffy and full of giggles. Miss Hardcastle behaved to them as if she were a man, and addressed them in tones of half breezy, half ferocious gallantry. “Cocktails, Dolly,” she bawled as they entered the outer office. When they reached the inner office she made Mark sit down but remained standing herself with her back to the fire and her legs wide apart. The drinks were brought and Dolly retired, closing the door behind her. Mark had grumblingly told his grievance on the way.

“Cut it all out, Studdock,” said Miss Hardcastle.

“And whatever you do, don’t go bothering the D.D. I told you before that you needn’t worry about all those little third-floor people provided you’ve got him on your side. Which you have at present. But you won’t have if you keep on going to him with complaints.”

“That might be very good advice, Miss Hardcastle,” said Mark, “if I were committed to staying here at all. But I’m not. And from what I’ve seen I don’t like the place. I’ve very nearly made up my mind to go home. Only I thought I’d just have a talk with him first, to make everything clear.”

“Making things clear is the one thing the D.D. can’t stand,” replied Miss Hardcastle. “That’s not how he runs the place. And mind you, he knows what he’s about. It works, sonny. You’ve no idea yet how well it works. As for leaving . . . you’re not superstitious, are you? I am. I don’t think it’s lucky to leave the N.I.C.E. You needn’t bother your head about all the Steeles and Cossers. That’s part of your apprenticeship. You’re being put through it at the moment, but if you hold on you’ll come out above them. All you’ve got to do is to sit tight. Not one of them is going to be left when we get going.”

“That’s just the sort of line Cosser took about Steele,” said Mark, “and it didn’t seem to do me much good when it came to the point.”

“Do you know, Studdock,” said Miss Hardcastle, “I’ve taken a fancy to you. And it’s just as well I have. Because if I hadn’t, I’d be disposed to resent that last remark.”

“I don’t mean to be offensive,” said Mark. “But-damn it all-look at it from my point of view.”

“No good, sonny,” said Miss Hardcastle, shaking her head. “You don’t know enough facts yet for your point of view to be worth sixpence. You haven’t yet realised what you’re in on. You’re being offered a chance of something far bigger than a seat in the cabinet. And there are only two alternatives, you know. Either to be in the N.I.C.E. or to be out of it. And I know better than you which is going to be most fun.”

“I do understand that,” said Mark. “But anything is better than being nominally in and having nothing to do. Give me a real place in the Sociological Department and I’ll . . .”

“Rats! That whole Department is going to be scrapped. It had to be there at the beginning for propaganda purposes. But they’re all going to be weeded out.”

“But what assurance have I that I’m going to be one of their successors?”

“You aren’t. They’re not going to have any successors. The real work has nothing to do with all these departments. The kind of sociology we’re interested in will be done by my people-the police.”

“Then where do I come in?”

“If you’ll trust me,” said the Fairy, putting down her empty glass and producing a cheroot, “I can put you on to a bit of your real work-what you were really brought here to do-straight away.”

“What’s that?”

“Alcasan,” said Miss Hardcastle between her teeth. She had started one of her interminable dry smokes. Then, glancing at Mark with a hint of contempt, “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“You mean the radiologist-the man who was guillotined?” asked Mark, who was completely bewildered.

The Fairy nodded.

“He’s to be rehabilitated,” she said. “Gradually. I’ve got all the facts in the dossier. You begin with a quiet little article-not questioning his guilt, not at first, but just hinting that of course he was a member of their quisling government, and there was a prejudice against him. Say you don’t doubt the verdict was just, but it’s disquieting to realise that it would almost certainly have been the same even if he’d been innocent. Then you follow it up in a day or two with an article of quite a different kind. Popular account of the value of his work. You can mug up the facts-enough for that kind of article-in an afternoon. Then a letter, rather indignant, to the paper that printed the first article, and going much further. The execution was a miscarriage of justice. By that time”

“What on earth is the point of all this?”

“I’m telling you, Studdock. Alcasan is to be rehabilitated. Made into a martyr. An irreparable loss to the human race.”

“But what for?”

“There you go again! You grumble about being given nothing to do, and as soon as I suggest a bit of real work you expect to have the whole plan of campaign told you before you do it. It doesn’t make sense. That’s not the way to get on here. The great thing is to do what you’re told. If you turn out to be any good you’ll soon understand what’s going on. But you’ve got to begin by doing the work. You don’t seem to realise what we are. We’re an army.”

“Anyway,” said Mark, “I’m not a journalist. I didn’t come here to write newspaper articles. I tried to make that clear to Feverstone at the very beginning.”

“The sooner you drop all that talk about what you came here to do, the better you’ll get on. I’m speaking for your own good, Studdock. You can write. That’s one of the things you’re wanted for.”

“Then I’ve come here under a misunderstanding” , said Mark. The sop to his literary vanity, at that period of his career, by no means compensated for the implication that his sociology was of no importance. “I’ve no notion of spending my life writing newspaper articles,” he said.

“And if I had, I’d want to know a good deal more about the politics of the N.I.C.E. before I went in for that sort of thing.”

“Haven’t you been told that it’s strictly non-political?”

“I’ve been told so many things that I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels,” said Mark. “But I don’t see how one’s going to start a newspaper stunt (which is about what this comes to) without being political. Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot about Alcasan?”

“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done you get each side outbidding the other in support of us-to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”

“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”

“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a freethinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the highbrow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.”

“Well,” said Mark, “this is all very interesting, Miss Hardcastle, but it has nothing to do with me. In the first place, I don’t want to become a journalist at all: and if I did I should like to be an honest journalist.”

“Very well,” said Miss Hardcastle. “All you’ll do is to help to ruin this country, and perhaps the whole human race. Besides dishing your own career.”

The confidential tone in which she had been speaking up till now had disappeared and there was a threatening finality in her voice. The citizen and the honest man which had been awaked in Mark by the conversation, quailed a little: his other and far stronger self, the self that was anxious at all costs not to be placed among the outsiders, leaped up, fully alarmed.

“I don’t mean,” he said, “that I don’t see your point. I was only wondering . . .”

“It’s all one to me, Studdock,” said Miss Hardcastle, seating herself at last at her table. “If you don’t like the job, of course, that’s your affair. Go and settle it with the D.D. He doesn’t like people resigning, but, of course, you can. He’ll have something to say to Feverstone for bringing you here. We’d assumed you understood.”

The mention of Feverstone brought sharply before Mark as a reality the plan, which had up till now been slightly unreal, of going back to Edgestow and satisfying himself with the career of a Fellow of Bracton. On what terms would he go back? Would he still be a member of the inner circle even at Bracton? To find himself no longer in the confidence of the Progressive Element, to be thrust down among the Telfords and Jewels, seemed to him unendurable. And the salary of a mere don looked a poor thing after the dreams he had been dreaming for the last few days. Married life was already turning out more expensive than he had reckoned. Then came a sharp doubt about that two hundred pounds for membership of the N.I.C.E. club. But no-that was absurd. They couldn’t possibly dun him for that.

“Well, obviously,” he said in a vague voice, “the first thing is to see the D.D.”

“Now that you’re leaving,” said the Fairy, “there’s one thing I’ve got to say. I’ve laid all the cards on the table. If it should ever enter your head that it would be fun to repeat any of this conversation in the outer world, take my advice and don’t. It wouldn’t be at all healthy for your future career.”

“Oh, but of course,” began Mark.

“You’d better run along now,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Have a nice talk with the D.D. Be careful not to annoy the old man. He does so hate resignations.”

Mark made an attempt to prolong the interview, but the Fairy did not permit this and in a few seconds he was outside the door.

The rest of that day he passed miserably enough, keeping out of people’s way as much as possible lest his lack of occupation should be noticed. He went out before lunch for one of those short, unsatisfactory walks which a man takes in a strange neighbourhood when he has brought with him neither old clothes nor a walking-stick. After lunch he explored the grounds. But they were not the sort of grounds that anyone could walk in for pleasure. The Edwardian millionaire who had built Belbury had enclosed about twenty acres with a low brick wall surmounted by an iron railing, and laid it all out in what his contractor called Ornamental Pleasure Grounds. There were trees dotted about and winding paths covered so thickly with round white pebbles that you could hardly walk on them. There were immense flower-beds, some oblong, some lozenge-shaped, and some crescents. There were plantations-slabs would be almost a better word-of that kind of laurel which looks as if it were made of cleverly painted and varnished metal. Massive summer seats of bright green stood at regular intervals along the paths. The whole effect was like that of a municipal cemetery. Yet, unattractive as it was, he sought it again after tea, smoking incessantly, though the wind blew the lit part down the side of his cigarette, and his tongue was already burning. This time he wandered round to the back parts of the house where the newer and lower buildings joined it. Here he was surprised by a stable-like smell and a medley of growls, grunts, and whimpers-all the signs, in fact, of a considerable zoo. At first he did not understand, but presently he remembered that an immense programme of vivisection, freed at last from Red Tape and from niggling economy, was one of the plans of the N.I.C.E. He had not been particularly interested and had thought vaguely of rats, rabbits, and an occasional dog. The confused noises from within suggested something very different. As he stood there one great yawn-like howl arose, and then, as if it had set the key, all manner of trumpetings, bayings, screams, laughter even, which shuddered and protested for a moment and then died away into mutterings and whines. Mark had no scruples about vivisection. What the noise meant to him was the greatness and grandiosity of this whole undertaking from which apparently, he was likely to be excluded. There were all sorts of things in there: hundreds of pounds’ worth of living animality, which the Institute could afford to cut up like paper on the mere off chance of some interesting discovery. He must get the job: he must somehow solve the problem of Steele. But the noise was disagreeable and he moved away.