The Pilgrim's Regress Read online

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow

  When I attempt the ineffable name, murmuring Thou;

  And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart

  Meanings, I know, that cannot be the thing thou art.

  All prayers always, taken at their word, blaspheme,

  Invoking with frail imageries a folk-lore dream;

  And all men are idolaters, crying unheard

  To senseless idols, if thou take them at their word,

  And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address

  One that is not (so saith that old rebuke) unless

  Thou, of mere grace, appropriate, and to thee divert

  Men’s arrows, all at hazard aimed, beyond desert.

  Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense, but in thy great,

  Unbroken speech our halting metaphor translate.

  When he came to think over the words that had gone out of him he began once more to be afraid of them. Day was declining and in the narrow chasm it was already almost dark.

  V

  Food at a Cost

  FOR A WHILE HE went on cautiously, but he was haunted by a picture in his mind of a place where the path would break off short when it was too dark for him to see, and he would step on air. This fear made him halt more and more frequently to examine his ground: and when he went on it was each time more slowly: till at last he came to a standstill. There seemed to be nothing for it but to rest where he was. The night was warm, but he was both hungry and thirsty. And he sat down. It was quite dark now.

  Then I dreamed that once more a Man came to him in the darkness and said, ‘You must pass the night where you are, but I have brought you a loaf and if you crawl along the ledge ten paces more you will find that a little fall of water comes down the cliff.’

  ‘Sir,’ said John. ‘I do not know your name and I cannot see your face, but I thank you. Will you not sit down and eat, yourself?’

  ‘I am full and not hungry,’ said the Man. ‘And I will pass on. But one word before I go. You cannot have it both ways.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Your life has been saved all this day by crying out to something which you call by many names, and you have said to yourself that you used metaphors.’

  ‘Was I wrong, sir?’

  ‘Perhaps not. But you must play fair. If its help is not a metaphor, neither are its commands. If it can answer when you call, then it can speak without your asking. If you can go to it, it can come to you.’

  ‘I think I see, sir. You mean that I am not my own man: in some sense I have a Landlord after all?’

  ‘Even so. But what is it that dismays you? You heard from Wisdom how the rules were yours and not yours. Did you not mean to keep them? And if so, can it scare you to know that there is one who will make you able to keep them?’

  ‘Well,’ said John, ‘I suppose you have found me out. Perhaps I did not fully mean to keep them—not all—or not all the time. And yet, in a way, I think I did. It is like a thorn in your finger, sir. You know when you set about taking it out yourself—you mean to get it out—you know it will hurt—and it does hurt—but somehow it is not very serious business—well, I suppose, because you feel that you always could stop if it was very bad. Not that you intend to stop. But it is a very different thing to hold your hand out to a surgeon to be hurt as much as he thinks fit. And at his speed.’

  The Man laughed. ‘I see you understand me very well,’ He said, ‘but the great thing is to get the thorn out.’ And then He went away.

  VI

  Caught

  JOHN HAD NO DIFFICULTY in finding the stream and when he had drunk he sat by it and ate. The bread had a rather flat taste which was somehow familiar and not very agreeable, but he was in no position to be dainty. Extreme weariness prevented him from thinking much of the conversation that had just passed. At the bottom of John’s heart the stranger’s words lay like a cold weight that he must some day take up and carry: but his mind was full of the pictures of cliff and chasm, of wondering about Vertue, and of smaller fears for the morrow and the moment, and, above all, the blessedness of food and of sitting still; and all these jumbled themselves together in an even dimmer confusion till at last he could no longer remember which he had been thinking of the moment before: and then he knew that he was sleeping: and at last he was in deep sleep and knew nothing.

  In the morning it was not so. Jump with his first waking thought the full-grown horror leaped upon him. The blue sky above the cliffs was watching him: the cliffs themselves were imprisoning him: the rocks behind were cutting off his retreat: the path ahead was ordering him on. In one night the Landlord—call him by what name you would—had come back to the world, and filled the world, quite full without a cranny. His eyes stared and His hand pointed and His voice commanded in everything that could be heard or seen, even from this place where John sat, to the end of the world: and if you passed the end of the world He would be there too. All things were indeed one—more truly than Mr. Wisdom dreamed—and all things said one word: CAUGHT—Caught into slavery again, to walk warily and on sufferance all his days, never to be alone; never the master of his own soul, to have no privacy, no corner whereof you could say to the whole universe: This is my own, here I can do as I please. Under that universal and inspecting gaze, John cowered like some small animal caught up in a giant’s hands and held beneath a magnifying-glass.

  When he had drunk and splashed his face in the stream he continued his way, and presently he made this song.

  You rest upon me all my days

  The inevitable Eye,

  Dreadful and undeflected as the blaze

  Of some Arabian sky;

  Where, dead still, in their smothering tent

  Pale travellers crouch, and, bright

  About them, noon’s long-drawn Astonishment

  Hammers the rocks with light.

  Oh, for but one cool breath in seven,

  One air from northern climes,

  The changing and the castle-clouded heaven

  Of my old Pagan times!

  But you have seized all in your rage

  Of Oneness. Round about,

  Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage,

  I flutter, but not out.

  And as he walked on, all day, in the strength of the bread he had eaten, not daring often to look down into the gulf and keeping his head mostly turned a little inward to the cliff, he had time to turn his trouble over in his mind and discover new sides to it. Above all it grew upon him that the return of the Landlord had blotted out the Island: for if there still were such a place he was no longer free to spend his soul in seeking it, but must follow whatever designs the Landlord had for him. And at the very best it now seemed that the last of things was at least more like a person than a place, so that the deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world. But sometimes he comforted himself by saying that this new and real Landlord must yet be very different from him whom the Stewards proclaimed and indeed from all images that men could make of him. There might still hang about him some of that promising darkness which had covered the Absolute.

  VII

  The Hermit

  PRESENTLY HE HEARD a bell struck, and he looked and saw a little chapel in a cave of the cliff beside him; and there sat a hermit whose name was History, so old and thin that his hands were transparent and John thought that a little wind would have blown him away.

  ‘Turn in, my son,’ said the hermit, ‘and eat bread and then you shall go on your journey.’ John was glad to hear the voice of a man among the rocks and he turned in and sat. The hermit gave him bread and water but he himself ate no bread and drank a little wine.

  ‘Where are you going, son?’ he said.

  ‘It seems to me, Father, that I am going where I do not wish; for I set out to find an Island and I have found a Landlord instead.’

  And the hermit sat looking at him, nodding almost imperceptibly with the tremors of age.
/>   ‘The Clevers were right and the pale men were right,’ said John, thinking aloud, ‘since the world holds no allaying for the thirst I was born with, and seemingly the Island was an illusion after all. But I forget, Father, that you will not know these people.’

  ‘I know all parts of this country,’ said the hermit, ‘and the genius of places. Where do these people live?’

  ‘To the North of the road. The Clevers are in the country of Mammon, where a stone giant is the lord of the soil, and the pale men are on the Tableland of the Tough-Minded.’

  ‘I have been in these countries a thousand times, for in my young days I was a pedlar and there is no land I have not been in. But tell me, do they still keep their old customs?’

  ‘What customs were those?’

  ‘Why, they all sprang from the ownership of the land there, for more than half of the country North of the road is now held by the Enemy’s tenants. Eastward it was the giant, and under him Mammon and some others. But westward, on the Tableland, it was two daughters of the Enemy—let me see—yes, Ignorantia and Superbia. They always did impose strange customs on the smaller tenants. I remember many tenants there—Stoics and Manichees, Sparitates, and all sorts. One time they had a notion to eat better bread than is made of wheat. Another time their very nurses took up a strange ritual of always emptying the baby out along with the bath. Then once the Enemy sent a fox without a tail among them and it persuaded them that all animals should be without tails and they docked all their dogs and horses and cows. I remember they were very puzzled how to apply any corresponding treatment to themselves, until at last a wise man suggested that they could cut off their noses. But the strangest custom of all was one that they practised all the time through all their other changes of customs. It was this—that they never set anything to rights but destroyed it instead. When a dish was dirty they did not wash it, they broke it; and when their clothes were dirty they burned them.’

  ‘It must have been a very expensive custom.’

  ‘It was ruinous, and it meant, of course, that they were constantly importing new clothes and new crockery. But indeed they had to import everything for this is the difficulty of the Tableland. It never has been able to support life and it never will. Its inhabitants have always lived on their neighbours.’

  ‘They must always have been very rich men.’

  ‘They always were very rich men. I don’t think I remember a single case of a poor or a common person going there. When humble people go wrong they generally go South. The Tough-Minded nearly always go to the Tableland as colonists from Mammon’s country. I would guess that your pale men are reformed Clevers.’

  ‘In a kind of way I believe they are. But can you tell me, Father, why these Tough-Minded people behave so oddly?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, they know very little. They never travel and consequently never learn anything. They really do not know that there are any places outside Mammon’s country and their own Tableland—except that they have heard exaggerated rumours about the Southern swamps, and suppose that everything is swamp a few miles South of themselves. Thus, their disgust with bread came about through sheer ignorance. At home in Mammon’s country they knew only the standard bread that Mammon makes, and a few sweet, sticky cakes which Mammon imported from the South—the only kind of Southern product that Mammon would be likely to let in. As they did not like either of these, they invented a biscuit of their own. It never occurred to them to walk a mile off the Tableland into the nearest cottage and try what an honest loaf tasted like. The same with the babies. They disliked babies because babies meant to them the various deformities spawned in the brothels of Mammon: again, a moderate walk would have shown them healthy children at play in the lanes. As for their poor noses—on the Tableland there is nothing to smell, good, bad, or indifferent, and in Mammon’s land whatever does not reek of scent reeks of ordure. So they saw no good in noses, though five miles away from them the hay was being cut.’

  ‘And what about the Island, Father?’ said John. ‘Were they equally wrong about that?’

  ‘That is a longer story, my son. But I see it is beginning to rain, so perhaps you may as well hear it.’

  John went to the mouth of the cave and looked out. The sky had grown dark while they talked and a warm rain, blotting out the cliffs like a steam, was descending as far as his eye could reach.

  VIII

  History’s Words

  WHEN JOHN HAD RETURNED and seated himself, the hermit resumed:

  ‘You may be sure that they make the same mistake about the Island that they make about everything else. But what is the current lie at present?’

  ‘They say it is all a device of Mr. Halfways—who is in the pay of the Brown Girls.’

  ‘Poor Halfways! They treat him very unfairly—as if he were anything more than the local representative of a thing as widespread and as necessary (though, withal, as dangerous) as the sky! Not a bad representative, either, if you take his songs in your stride and use them as they are meant to be used: of course people who go to him in cold blood to get as much pleasure as they can, and therefore hear the same song over and over again, have only themselves to thank if they wake in the arms of Media.’

  ‘That is very true, Father. But they wouldn’t believe that I had seen and longed for the Island before I met Mr. Halfways—before I ever heard a song at all. They insist on treating it as his invention.’

  ‘That is always the way with stay-at-homes. If they like something in their own village they take it for a thing universal and eternal, though perhaps it was never heard of five miles away; if they dislike something, they say it is a local, backward, provincial convention, though, in fact, it may be the law of nations.’

  ‘Then it is really true that all men, all nations, have had this vision of an Island?’

  ‘It does not always come in the form of an Island: and to some men, if they inherit particular diseases, it may not come at all.’

  ‘But what is it, Father? And has it anything to do with the Landlord? I do not know how to fit things together.’

  ‘It comes from the Landlord. We know this by its results. It has brought you to where you now are: and nothing leads back to him which did not at first proceed from him.’

  ‘But the Stewards would say that it was the Rules which come from him.’

  ‘Not all Stewards are equally travelled men. But those who are, know perfectly well that the Landlord has circulated other things besides the Rules. What use are Rules to people who cannot read?’

  ‘But nearly everyone can.’

  ‘No one is born able to read: so that the starting point for all of us must be a picture and not the Rules. And there are more than you suppose who are illiterate all their lives, or who, at the best, never learn to read well.’

  ‘And for these people the pictures are the right thing?’

  ‘I would not quite say that. The pictures alone are dangerous, and the Rules alone are dangerous. That is why the best thing of all is to find Mother Kirk at the very beginning, and to live from infancy with a third thing which is neither the Rules nor the pictures and which was brought into the country by the Landlord’s Son. That, I say, is the best: never to have known the quarrel between the Rules and the pictures. But it very rarely happens. The Enemy’s agents are everywhere at work, spreading illiteracy in one district and blinding men to the pictures in another. Even where Mother Kirk is nominally the ruler men can grow old without knowing how to read the Rules. Her empire is always crumbling. But it never quite crumbles: for as often as men become Pagans again, the Landlord again sends them pictures and stirs up sweet desire and so leads them back to Mother Kirk even as he led the actual Pagans long ago. There is, indeed, no other way.’

  ‘Pagans?’ said John. ‘I do not know that people.’

  ‘I forgot that you had travelled so little. It may well be that you were never in the country of Pagus in the flesh, though in another sense, you have lived there all your life. The curious th
ing about Pagus was that the people there had not heard of the Landlord.’

  ‘Surely, a great many other people don’t know either?’

  ‘Oh, a great many deny his existence. But you have to be told about a thing before you can deny it. The pecularity of the Pagans was that they had not been told: or if they had, it is so long ago that the tradition had died out. You see, the Enemy had practically supplanted the Landlord, and he kept a sharp watch against any news from that quarter reaching the tenants.’

  ‘Did he succeed?’

  ‘No. It is commonly thought that he did, but that is a mistake. It is commonly thought that he fuddled the tenants by circulating a mass of false stories about the Landlord. But I have been through Pagus in my rounds too often to think it was quite so simple. What really happened was this: The Landlord succeeded in getting a lot of messages through.’

  ‘What sort of messages?’

  ‘Mostly pictures. You see, the Pagans couldn’t read, because the Enemy shut up the schools as soon as he took over Pagus. But they had pictures. The moment you mentioned your Island I knew what you were at. I have seen that Island dozens of times in those pictures.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘Almost certainly the same thing has happened to you. These pictures woke desire. You understand me?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘And then the Pagans made mistakes. They would keep on trying to get the same picture again: and if it didn’t come, they would make copies of it for themselves. Or even if it did come they would try to get out of it not desire but satisfaction. But you must know all this.’

  ‘Yes, yes, indeed. But what came of it?’

  ‘They went on making up more and more stories for themselves about the pictures, and then pretending the stories were true. They turned to brown girls and tried to believe that that was what they wanted. They went far South, some of them, and became magicians, and tried to believe it was that. There was no absurdity and no indecency they did not commit. But however far they went, the Landlord was too many for them. Just when their own stories seemed to have completely overgrown the original messages and hidden them beyond recovery, suddenly the Landlord would send them a new message and all their stories would look stale. Or just when they seemed to be growing really contented with lust or mystery mongering, a new message would arrive and the old desire, the real one, would sting them again, and they would say “Once more it has escaped us.” ’