That Hideous Strength (Space Trilogy 3)

"Are you unhappy now?" said the Director.

Suddenly she ceased at last to think how her words might make him think of her, and answered, "No. But," she added after a short pause, " it will be worse now, if I go back."

"Will it?-"

"But is it really necessary?" she began. "I don't think I look on marriage quite as you do---"

"Child," said the Director, " it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it."

"They would never think of finding out first whether Mark and I believed in their ideas of marriage?"

"Well-no," said the Director with a curious smile. "They wouldn't think of doing that."

"And would it make no difference to them what a marriage was actually like . . . whether it was a success ? Whether the woman loved her husband?" Jane had not intended to say this. "But I suppose you will say I oughtn't to have told you that," she added.

"My dear child," said the Director, " you have been telling me that ever since your husband was mentioned."

"Does it make no difference?"

"I suppose," said the Director, " it would depend on how he lost your love."

Jane was silent.

"I don't know," she said at last. "I suppose our marriage was just a mistake."

The Director said nothing.

"What would you-what would the people you are talking of say about a case like that?"

"I will tell you if you really want to know," said the Director.

"Please," said Jane reluctantly.

"They would say," he answered, " that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."

Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger was banished by the fact that the word obedience-but certainly not obedience to Mark- came over her, in that room, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive. . . .

"Stop it!" said the Director sharply. Jane stared at him, open-mouthed: the exotic fragrance faded away.

"You were saying, my dear?" resumed the Director. "I thought love meant equality," she said. "Ah, equality!" said the Director. "Yes; we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another's greed, because we are fallen. Just as we wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know."

"I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal."

"You were mistaken; that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes- that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn't make it. It is medicine, not food."

"But surely in marriage . . .?"

"Worse and worse," said the Director. "Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience- humility-is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt. For the present, I must -send you back. You can come out and see us. In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities."

"When will you be seeing them?"

"They come to me when they please. But we've been talking too solemnly about obedience all this time. I'd like to show you some of its drolleries. You are not---"

He broke off sharply and a new look came into his eyes. At the same moment a new thought came into Jane's mind; an odd one. She was thinking of hugeness. Or rather, she was not thinking of it. She was, in some strange fashion, experiencing it. Something intolerably big, something from Brobdingnag, was pressing on her, was approaching, was almost in the room. She felt herself shrinking, suffocated, emptied of all power and virtue. She darted a glance at the Director which was really a cry for help, and that glance, in some inexplicable way, revealed him as being, like herself, a very small object. The whole room was a tiny place, a mouse's hole, and it seemed to her to be tilted aslant-as though the insupportable mass and splendour of this formless hugeness, in approaching, had knocked it askew. She heard the Director's voice.

"Quick," he said gently, " these are my Masters. You must leave me now. This is no place for us small ones, but I am inured. Go!"

During her homeward journey Jane was so divided that one might say there were three, if not four, Janes in the compartment. The first was a Jane simply receptive of the Director, recalling every word and every look, and delighting in them-a Jane taken utterly off her guard and swept away on the flood-tide of an experience which she could not control. For she was trying to control it; that was the function of the second Jane. This second Jane regarded the first with disgust, as the kind of woman whom she had always particularly despised. To have surrendered without terms at the mere voice and look of this stranger, to have abandoned that prim little grasp on her own destiny, that perpetual reservation . . . the thing was degrading, uncivilised.

The third Jane was a new and unexpected visitant. Risen from some unknown region of grace or heredity, it uttered things which Jane had often heard before but which had never seemed to be connected with real life. If it had told her that her feelings about the Director were wrong, she would not have been very surprised. But it did not. It blamed her for not having similar feelings about Mark. It was Mark who had made the fatal mistake; she must be " nice " to Mark. The Director insisted on it. At the moment when her mind was most filled with another man there arose a resolution to give Mark much more than she had ever given him before, and a feeling that in so doing she would be really giving it to the Director. And this produced such a confusion of sensations that the whole inner debate became indistinct and flowed over into the larger experience of the fourth Jane, who was Jane herself.

This fourth and supreme Jane was simply in the state of joy. The other three had no power upon her, for she was in the sphere of Jove, amid light and music and festal pomp, brimmed with life and radiant in health, jocund and clothed in shining garments. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea-a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation-it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity-that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. Her beauty belonged to the Director. It belonged to him so completely that he could order it to be given to another.

As the train came into Edgestow Station Jane was just deciding that she would not try to get a bus. She would enjoy the walk. And then-what on earth was all this? The platform, usually almost deserted at this hour, was like a London platform on a bank holiday. "Here you are, mate!" cried a voice as she opened the door, and half a dozen men crowded into her carriage so roughly that for a moment she could not get out. She found difficulty in crossing the platform. People seemed to be going in all directions at once-angry, rough, and excited people. "Get back into the train, quick!" shouted someone. "Get out of the station, if you're not travelling," bawled another voice. And from outside, beyond the station, came a great roaring noise like the noise of a football crowd.

Hours later, bruised, frightened, and tired, Jane found herself in a street she did not even know, surrounded by N.I.C.E. policemen and a few of their females, the Waips. A couple of the men-one seemed to meet them everywhere except where the rioting was most violent-had shouted out, "You can't go down there, miss."But as they then turned their backs, Jane had made a bolt for it. They caught her. And that was how she found herself being taken into a lighted room and questioned by a uniformed woman with short grey hair, a square face, and an unlighted cheroot. The woman with the cheroot took no particular interest until Jane had given her name. Then Miss Hardcastle looked her in the face for the first time, and Jane felt quite a new sensation. She was already tired and frightened, but this was different. The face of the other woman affected her as the face of some men-fat men with small, greedy eyes and strange, disquieting smiles-had affected her when she was in her 'teens.