that you should make me responsible for every action that any N.I.C.E. official has taken—or is said to have taken in the gutter press?”
“Gutter press!” thundered Dimble, who seemed to Mark to be even physically larger than he was a few minutes before. “What nonsense is this? Do you suppose I don’t know that you have control of every paper in the country except one? And that one has not appeared this morning. Its printers have gone on strike. The poor dupes say they will not print articles attacking the people’s Institute. Where the lies in all the other papers come from you know better than I.”
It may seem strange to say that Mark, having long lived in a world without charity, had nevertheless very seldom met real anger. Malice in plenty he had encountered, but it all operated by snubs and sneers and stabbing in the back. The forehead and eyes and voice of this elderly man had an effect on him which was stifling and unnerving. At Belbury one used the words “whining” and “yapping” to describe any opposition which the actions of Belbury aroused in the outer world. And Mark had never had enough imagination to realise what the “whining” would really be like if you met it face to face.
“I tell you I knew nothing about it,” he shouted. “Damn it, I’m the injured party. The way you talk, anyone would think it was your wife who’d been ill treated.”
“So it might have been. So it may be. It may be any man or woman in England. It was a woman and a citizen. What does it matter whose wife it was?”
“But I tell you I’ll raise hell about it. I’ll break the infernal bitch who did it, if it means breaking the whole N.I.C.E.”
Dimble said nothing. Mark knew that Dimble knew that he was now talking nonsense. Yet Mark could not stop. If he did not bluster, he would not know what to say.
“Sooner than put up with this,” he shouted, “I’ll leave the N.I.C.E.”
“Do you mean that?” asked Dimble with a sharp glance. And to Mark, whose ideas were now all one fluid confusion of wounded vanity and jostling fears and shames, this glance once more appeared accusing and intolerable. In reality it had been a glance of awakened hope: for charity hopes all things. But there was caution in it: and between hope and caution Dimble found himself once more reduced to silence.
“I see you don’t trust me,” said Mark, instinctively summoning to his face the manly and injured expression which had often served him well in headmasters’ studies.
Dimble was a truthful man. “No,” he said after a longish pause. “I don’t quite.”
Mark shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
“Studdock,” said Dimble, “this is not a time for foolery, or compliments. It may be that both of us are within a few minutes of death. You have probably been shadowed into the college. And I, at any rate, don’t propose to die with polite insincerities in my mouth. I don’t trust you. Why should I? You are (at least in some degree) the accomplice of the worst men in the world. Your very coming to me this afternoon may be only a trap.”
“Don’t you know me better than that?” said Mark.
“Stop talking nonsense!” said Dimble. “Stop posturing and acting, if only for a minute. Who are you to talk like that? They have corrupted better men than you or me before now. Straik was a good man once. Filostrato was at least a great genius. Even Alcasan—yes, yes, I know who your Head is—was at least a plain murderer: something better than they have now made of him. Who are you to be exempt?”
Mark gaped. The discovery of how much Dimble knew had suddenly inverted his whole picture of the situation.
“Nevertheless,” continued Dimble, “knowing all this—knowing that you may be only the bait in the trap—I will take a risk. I will risk things compared with which both our lives are a triviality. If you seriously wish to leave the N.I.C.E., I will help you.”
One moment it was like the gates of Paradise opening—then, at once, caution and the incurable wish to temporise rushed back. The chink had closed again.
“I—I’d need to think that over,” he mumbled.
“There is no time,” said Dimble. “And there is really nothing to think about. I am offering you a way back into the human family. But you must come at once.”
“It’s a question affecting my whole future career.”
“Your career!” said Dimble. “It’s a question of damnation or—a last chance. But you must come at once.”
“I don’t think I understand,” said Mark. “You keep on suggesting some kind of danger. What is it? And what powers have you to protect me—or Jane—if I do bolt?”
“You must risk that,” said Dimble. “I can offer you no security. Don’t you understand? There is no security for anyone now. The battle has started. I’m offering you a place on the right side. I don’t know which will win.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Mark, “I had been thinking of leaving. But I must think it over. You put things in rather an odd way.”
“There is no time,” said Dimble.
“Supposing I look you up again to-morrow?”
“Do you know that you’ll be able?”
“Or in an hour? Come, that’s only sensible. Will you be here in an hour’s time?”
“What can an hour do for you? You are only waiting in the hope that your mind will be less clear.”
“But will you be here?”
“If you insist. But no good can come of it.”
“I want to think. I want to think,” said Mark, and left the room without waiting for a reply.
Mark had said he wanted to think: in reality he wanted alcohol and tobacco. He had thoughts in plenty—more than he desired. One thought prompted him to cling to Dimble as a lost child clings to a grown-up. Another whispered to him “Madness. Don’t break with the N.I.C.E. They’ll be after you. How can Dimble save you? You’ll be killed.” A third implored him not, even now, to write off as a total loss his hard-won position in the Inner Ring at Belbury: there must, must be some middle course. A fourth recoiled from the idea of ever seeing Dimble again: the memory of every tone Dimble had used caused horrible discomfort. And he wanted Jane, and he wanted to punish Jane for being a friend of Dimble, and he wanted never to see Wither again, and he wanted to creep back and patch things up with Wither somehow. He wanted to be perfectly safe and yet also very nonchalant and daring—to be admired for manly honesty among the Dimbles and yet also for realism and knowingness at Belbury—to have two more large whiskies and also to think everything out very clearly and collectedly. And it was beginning to rain and his head had begun to ache again. Damn the whole thing! Damn, damn! Why had he such a rotten heredity? Why had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so irrational? Why was his luck so bad?
It was raining quite hard as he reached the College lodge. Some sort of van seemed to be standing in the street outside, and there were three or four uniformed men in capes. He remembered afterwards how the wet oilskin shone in the lamplight. A torch was flashed in his face.
“Excuse
