Читать книгу That Hideous Strength - C. S. Lewis - Страница 13

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The last bus had gone long before Mark left College, and he walked home up the hill in brilliant moonlight. Something happened to him the moment he had let himself into the flat which was very unusual. He found himself, on the door-mat, embracing a frightened, half-sobbing Jane—even a humble Jane, who was saying, “Oh, Mark, I’ve been so frightened.”

There was a quality in the very muscles of his wife’s body which took him by surprise. A certain indefinable defensiveness had momentarily deserted her. He had known such occasions before, but they were rare. They were already becoming rarer. And they tended, in his experience, to be followed next day by inexplicable quarrels. This puzzled him greatly, but he had never put his bewilderment into words.

It is doubtful whether he could have understood her feelings even if they had been explained to him; and Jane, in any case, could not have explained them. She was in extreme confusion. But the reasons for her unusual behaviour on this particular evening were simple enough. 50 She had got back from the Dimbles at about half-past four, feeling much exhilarated by her walk and hungry, and quite sure that her experiences on the previous night and at lunch were over and done with. She had had to light up and draw the curtains before she had finished tea, for the days were getting short. While doing so the thought had come into her mind that her fright at the dream and at the mere mention of a mantle, an old man, an old man buried but not dead, and a language like Spanish, had really been as irrational as a child’s fear of the dark. This had led her to remember moments when she had feared the dark as a child. Perhaps she allowed herself to remember them too long. At any rate, when she sat down to drink her last cup of tea, the evening had somehow deteriorated. It never recovered. First she found it rather difficult to keep her mind on her book. Then, when she had acknowledged this difficulty, she found it difficult to fix on any book. Then she realised that she was restless. From being restless she became nervous. Then followed a long time when she was not frightened, but knew that she would be very frightened indeed if she did not keep herself in hand. Then came a curious reluctance to go into the kitchen to get herself some supper, and a difficulty—indeed an impossibility—of eating anything when she had got it. And now there was no disguising the fact that she was frightened. In desperation she rang up the Dimbles. “I think I might go and see the person you suggested, after all,” she said. Mrs. Dimble’s voice came back, after a curious little pause, giving her the address. Ironwood was the name, Miss Ironwood, apparently. Jane had assumed it would be a man and was rather repelled. Miss Ironwood lived out at St. Anne’s on the Hill. Jane asked if she should make an appointment. “No,” said Mrs. Dimble, “they’ll be—you needn’t make an appointment.” Jane kept the conversation going as long as she could. She had rung up not chiefly to get the address but to hear Mother Dimble’s 51 voice. Secretly she had had a wild hope that Mother Dimble would recognise her distress and say at once, “I’ll come straight up to you by car.” Instead, she got the mere information and a hurried “Good night.” It seemed to Jane that there was something queer about Mrs. Dimble’s voice. She felt that by ringing up she had interrupted a conversation about herself: or no—not about herself but about something else more important, with which she was somehow connected. And what had Mrs. Dimble meant by “They’ll be.” “They’ll be expecting you?” Horrible, childish night-nursery visions of They “expecting her” passed before her mind. She saw Miss Ironwood, dressed all in black, sitting with her hands folded on her knees and then someone leading her into Miss Ironwood’s presence and saying “She’s come” and leaving her there.

“Damn the Dimbles!” said Jane to herself, and then unsaid it, more in fear than in remorse. And now that the life-line had been used and brought no comfort, the terror, as if insulted by her futile attempt to escape it, rushed back on her with no possibility of disguise, and she could never afterwards remember whether the horrible old man and the mantle had actually appeared to her in a dream or whether she had merely sat there, huddled and wild-eyed, hoping, hoping, hoping (even praying, though she believed in no one to pray to) that they would not.

And that is why Mark found such an unexpected Jane on the door-mat. It was a pity, he thought, that this should have happened on a night when he was so late and so tired and, to tell the truth, not perfectly sober.