That Hideous Strength

“There are some confusions there, no doubt. But in my opinion there are realities behind even those episodes.”

“I am afraid I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” said Jane coldly.

“Your upbringing makes it natural that you should not,” replied Miss Ironwood. Unless, of course, you have discovered for yourself that you have a tendency to dream real things.”

Jane thought of the book on the table which she had apparently remembered before she saw it: and then there was Miss Ironwood’s own appearance-that, too, she had seen before she saw it. But it must be nonsense.

“Can you, then, do nothing for me?”

“I can tell you the truth,” said Miss Ironwood. “I have tried to do so.”

“I mean, can you not stop it-cure it?”

“Vision is not a disease.”

“But I don’t want it,” said Jane passionately. “I must stop it. I hate this sort of thing.” Miss Ironwood said nothing.

“Don’t you even know of anyone who could stop it?” said Jane. “Can’t you recommend anyone?”

“If you go to an ordinary psychotherapist,” said Miss Ironwood, “he will proceed on the assumption that the dreams merely reflect your own subconscious. He would try to treat you. I do not know what would be the results of treatment based on that assumption. I am afraid they might be very serious. And-it would certainly not remove the dreams.”

“But what is this all about?” said Jane. “I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?”

“The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.”

There was a short silence. Jane made a vague movement and said, rather sulkily, “Well, if you can do nothing for me, perhaps I’d better be going . . .” Then suddenly she added, “But how can you know all this? I mean . . . what realities are you talking about?”

“I think,” said Miss Ironwood, “that you yourself have probably more reason to suspect the truth of your dreams than you have yet told me. If not, you soon will have. In the meantime I will answer your question. We know your dreams to be partly true because they fit in with information we already possess. It was because he saw their importance that Dr. Dimble sent you to us.”

“Do you mean he sent me here not to be cured but to give information?” said Jane. The idea fitted in with things she had observed in his ma

“Exactly.”

“I wish I had known that a little earlier,” said Jane coldly, and now definitely getting up to go. “I’m afraid it has been a misunderstanding. I had imagined Dr. Dimble was trying to help me.”

“He was. But he was also trying to do something more important at the same time.”

“I suppose I should be grateful for being considered at all,” said Jane dryly. “And how, exactly, was I to be helped by-by all this sort of thing?” The attempt at icy irony collapsed as she said these last words and red, undisguised anger rushed back into her face. In some ways she was very young.

“Young lady,” said Miss Ironwood. “You do not at all realise the seriousness of this matter. The things you have seen concern something compared with which the happiness, or even the life, of you and me is of no importance. I must beg you to face the situation. You ca

“You keep on talking of we and us. Are you some kind of company?”

“Yes. You may call it a company.”

Jane had been standing for the last few minutes: and she had almost been believing what she heard. Then suddenly all her repugnance came over her again-all her wounded vanity, her resentment of. the meaningless complication in which she seemed to be caught, and her general dislike of the mysterious and the unfamiliar. At that moment nothing seemed to matter but to get out of that room and away from the grave, patient voice of Miss Ironwood. “She’s made me worse already,” thought Jane, still regarding herself as a patient. Aloud, she said: “I must go home now. I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

IV

Mark discovered in the end that he was expected to stay, at least for the night, and when he went up to dress for di

It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had indeed excited in him all the distaste which a young man feels at the proximity of something rankly, even insolently, sexed and at the same time wholly unattractive. And something in her cold eye had told him that she was well aware of this reaction and found it amusing. She had told him a good many smoking-room stories. Often before now Mark had shuddered at the clumsy efforts of the emancipated female to indulge in this kind of humour, but his shudders had always been consoled by a sense of superiority. This time he had the feeling that he was the butt; this woman was exasperating male prudery for her diversion. Later on she drifted into police reminiscences. In spite of some initial scepticism, Mark was gradually horrified by her assumption that about thirty per cent of our murder trials ended by the hanging of an i

All this was disagreeable. But it was made up for by the deliciously esoteric character of the conversation. Several times that day he had been made to feel himself an outsider: that feeling completely disappeared while Miss Hardcastle was talking to him. He had the sense of getting in. Miss Hardcastle had apparently lived an exciting life. She had been, at different times, a suffragette, a pacifist, and a British Fascist. She had been manhandled by the police and imprisoned. On the other hand, she had met Prime Ministers, Dictators, and famous film stars; all her history was secret history. She knew from both ends what a police force could do and what it could not, and there were in her opinion very few things it could not do. “Specially now,” she said. “Here in the Institute we’re backing the crusade against Red Tape.”

Mark gathered that, for the Fairy, the police side of the Institute was the really important side. It existed to relieve the ordinary executive of what might be called all sanitary cases-a category which ranged from vaccination to charges of u