Perelandra Read online

  yellow beast danced round him in a fashion that headed him off from every direction but the one it wanted him to go. He yielded to their pressure and allowed himself to be shepherded, first through a wood of higher and browner trees than he had yet seen and then across a small open space and into a kind of alley of bubble trees and beyond that into large fields of silver flowers that grew waist-high. And then he saw that they had been bringing him to be shown to their mistress. She was standing a few yards away, motionless but not apparently disengaged – doing something with her mind, perhaps even with her muscles, that he did not understand. It was the first time he had looked steadily at her, himself unobserved, and she seemed more strange to him than before. There was no category in the terrestrial mind which would fit her. Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, naked, shameless, young – she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street – that made her a Madonna. The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like Artemis or dance like a Maenad. All this against the golden sky which looked as if it were only an arm’s length above her head. The beasts raced forward to greet her, and as they rushed through the feathery vegetation they startled from it masses of the frogs, so that it looked as if huge drops of vividly coloured dew were being tossed in the air. She turned as they approached her and welcomed them, and once again the picture was half like many earthly scenes but in its total effect unlike them all. It was not really like a woman making much of a horse, nor yet a child playing with a puppy. There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior – raised them from the status of pets to that of slaves. As Ransom reached her she stooped and whispered something in the ear of the yellow creature, and then, addressing the dragon, bleated to it almost in its own voice. Both of them, having received their congé, darted back into the woods.

  ‘The beasts in your world seem almost rational,’ said Ransom.

  ‘We make them older every day,’ she answered. ‘Is not that what it means to be a beast?’

  But Ransom clung to her use of the word we.

  ‘That is what I have come to speak to you about,’ he said. ‘Maleldil has sent me to your world for some purpose. Do you know what it is?’

  She stood for a moment almost like one listening and then answered ‘No.’

  ‘Then you must take me to your home and show me to your people.’

  ‘People? I do not know what you are saying.’

  ‘Your kindred – the others of your kind.’

  ‘Do you mean the King?’

  ‘Yes. If you have a King, I had better be brought before him.’

  ‘I cannot do that,’ she answered. ‘I do not know where to find him.’

  ‘To your own home then.’

  ‘What is home?’

  ‘The place where people live together and have their possessions and bring up their children.’

  She spread out her hands to indicate all that was in sight. ‘This is my home,’ she said.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ asked Ransom.

  ‘What is alone?’

  Ransom tried a fresh start. ‘Bring me where I shall meet others of our kind.’

  ‘If you mean the King, I have already told you I do not know where he is. When we were young – many days ago – we were leaping from island to island, and when he was on one and I was on another the waves rose and we were driven apart.’

  ‘But can you take me to some other of your kind? The King cannot be the only one.’

  ‘He is the only one. Did you not know?’

  ‘But there must be others of your kind – your brothers and sisters, your kindred, your friends.’

  ‘I do not know what these words mean.’

  ‘Who is this King?’ said Ransom in desperation.

  ‘He is himself, he is the King,’ said she. ‘How can one answer such a question?’

  ‘Look here,’ said Ransom. ‘You must have had a mother. Is she alive? Where is she? When did you see her last?’

  ‘I have a mother?’ said the Green Lady, looking full at him with eyes of untroubled wonder. ‘What do you mean? I am the Mother.’ And once again there fell upon Ransom the feeling that it was not she, or not she only, who had spoken. No other sound came to his ears, for the sea and the air were still, but a phantom sense of vast choral music was all about him. The awe which her apparently witless replies had been dissipating for the last few minutes returned upon him.

  ‘I do not understand,’ he said.

  ‘Nor I,’ answered the Lady. ‘Only my spirit praises Maleldil who comes down from Deep Heaven into this lowness and will make me to be blessed by all the times that are rolling towards us. It is He who is strong and makes me strong and fills empty worlds with good creatures.’

  ‘If you are a mother, where are your children?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she answered.

  ‘Who will be their father?’

  ‘The King – who else?’

  ‘But the King – had he no father?’

  ‘He is the Father.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Ransom slowly, ‘that you and he are the only two of your kind in the whole world?’

  ‘Of course.’ Then presently her face changed. ‘Oh, how young I have been,’ she said. ‘I see it now. I had known that there were many creatures in that ancient world of the hrossa and the sorns. But I had forgotten that yours also was an older world than ours. I see – there are many of you by now. I had been thinking that of you also there were only two. I thought you were the King and Father of your world. But there are children of children of children by now, and you perhaps are one of these.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ransom.

  ‘Greet your Lady and Mother well from me when you return to your own world,’ said the Green Woman. And now for the first time there was a note of deliberate courtesy, even of ceremony, in her speech. Ransom understood. She knew now at last that she was not addressing an equal. She was a queen sending a message to a queen through a commoner, and her manner to him was henceforward more gracious. He found it difficult to make his next answer.

  ‘Our Mother and Lady is dead,’ he said.

  ‘What is dead?’

  ‘With us they go away after a time. Maleldil takes the soul out of them and puts it somewhere else – in Deep Heaven, we hope. They call it death.’

  ‘Do not wonder, O Piebald Man, that your world should have been chosen for time’s corner. You live looking out always on heaven itself, and as if this were not enough Maleldil takes you all thither in the end. You are favoured beyond all worlds.’

  Ransom shook his head. ‘No. It is not like that,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder,’ said the woman, ‘if you were sent here to teach us death.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It is not like that. It is horrible. It has a foul smell. Maleldil Himself wept when He saw it.’ Both his voice and his facial expression were apparently something new to her. He saw the shock, not of horror, but of utter bewilderment, on her face for one instant and then, without effort, the ocean of her peace swallowed it up as if it had never been, and she asked him what he meant.

  ‘You could never understand, Lady,’ he replied. ‘But in our world not all events are pleasing or welcome. There may be such a thing that you could cut off both your arms and your legs to prevent it happening – and yet it happens: with us.’

  ‘But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maleldil is rolling towards us?’

  Against his better judgment Ransom found himself goaded into argument.

  ‘But ev
en you,’ he said, ‘when you first saw me, I know now you were expecting and hoping that I was the King. When you found I was not, your face changed. Was that event not unwelcome? Did you not wish it to be otherwise?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Lady. She turned aside with her head bowed and her hands clasped in an intensity of thought. She looked up and said, ‘You make me grow older more quickly than I can bear,’ and walked a little farther off. Ransom wondered what he had done. It was suddenly borne in upon him that her purity and peace were not, as they had seemed, things settled and inevitable like the purity and peace of an animal – that they were alive and therefore breakable, a balance maintained by a mind and therefore, at least in theory, able to be lost. There is no reason why a man on a smooth road should lose his balance on a bicycle; but he could. There was no reason why she should step out of her happiness into the psychology of our own race; but neither was there any wall between to prevent her doing so. The sense of precariousness terrified him: but when she looked at him again he changed that word to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind. Once more he could not look steadily at her. He knew now what the old painters were trying to represent when they invented the halo. Gaiety and gravity together, a splendour as of martyrdom yet with no pain in it at all, seemed to pour from her countenance. Yet when she spoke her words were a disappointment.

  ‘I have been so young till this moment that all my life now seems to have been a kind of sleep. I have thought that I was being carried, and behold, I was walking.’

  Ransom asked what she meant.

  ‘What you have made me see,’ answered the Lady, ‘is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished – if it were possible to wish – you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.’

  Ransom interrupted. ‘That is hardly the same thing as finding a stranger when you wanted your husband.’

  ‘Oh, that is how I came to understand the whole thing. You and the King differ more than two kinds of fruit. The joy of finding him again and the joy of all the new knowledge I have had from you are more unlike than two tastes; and when the difference is as great as that, and each of the two things so great, then the first picture does stay in the mind quite a long time – many beats of the heart – after the other good has come. And this, O Piebald, is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.’

  ‘I don’t see the wonder and the glory of it,’ said Ransom.

  Her eyes flashed upon him such a triumphant flight above his thoughts as would have been scorn in earthly eyes; but in that world it was not scorn.

  ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of yours when men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is delight with terror in it! One’s own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths – but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.’

  ‘And have you no fear,’ said Ransom, ‘that it will ever be hard to turn your heart from the thing you wanted to the thing Maleldil sends?’

  ‘I see,’ said the Lady presently. ‘The wave you plunge into may be very swift and great. You may need all your force to swim into it. You mean, He might send me a good like that?’

  ‘Yes – or like a wave so swift and great that all your force was too little.’

  ‘It often happens that way in swimming,’ said the Lady. ‘Is not that part of the delight?’

  ‘But are you happy without the King? Do you not want the King?’

  ‘Want him?’ she said. ‘How could there be anything I did not want?’

  There was something in her replies that began to repel Ransom. ‘You can’t want him very much if you are happy without him,’ he said: and was immediately surprised at the sulkiness of his own voice.

  ‘Why?’ said the Lady. ‘And why, O Piebald, are you making little hills and valleys in your forehead and why do you give a little lift of your shoulders? Are these the signs of something in your world?’

  ‘They mean nothing,’ said Ransom hastily. It was a small lie; but there it would not do. It tore him as he uttered it, like a vomit. It became of infinite importance. The silver meadow and the golden sky seemed to fling it back at him. As if stunned by some measureless anger in the very air he stammered an emendation: ‘They mean nothing I could explain to you.’ The Lady was looking at him with a new and more judicial expression. Perhaps in the presence of the first mother’s son she had ever seen, she was already dimly forecasting the problems that might arise when she had children of her own.

  ‘We have talked enough now,’ she said at last. At first he thought she was going to turn away and leave him. Then, when she did not move, he bowed and drew back a step or two. She still said nothing and seemed to have forgotten about him. He turned and retraced his way through the deep vegetation until they were out of sight of each other. The audience was at an end.

  6

  As soon as the Lady was out of sight Ransom’s first impulse was to run his hands through his hair, to expel the breath from his lungs in a long whistle, to light a cigarette, to put his hands in his pockets, and in general, to go through all that ritual of relaxation which a man performs on finding himself alone after a rather trying interview. But he had no cigarettes and no pockets: nor indeed did he feel himself alone. That sense of being in Someone’s Presence which had descended on him with such unbearable pressure during the very first moments of his conversation with the Lady did not disappear when he had left her. It was, if anything, increased. Her society had been, in some degree, a protection against it, and her absence left him not to solitude but to a more formidable kind of privacy. At first it was almost intolerable; as he put it to us, in telling the story, ‘There seemed no room.’ But later on, he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments – at just those moments in fact (symbolised by his impulse to smoke and to put his hands in his pockets) when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at last he’s on his own. When you felt like that, then the very air seemed too crowded to breathe; a complete fulness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. At first, of course, the wrong moments occurred pretty often. But like a man who has a wound that hurts him in certain positions and who gradually learns to avoid those positions, Ransom learned not to make that inner gesture. His day became better and better as the hours passed.

  During the course of the
day he explored the island pretty thoroughly. The sea was still calm and it would have been possible in many directions to have reached neighbouring islands by a mere jump. He was placed, however, at the edge of this temporary archipelago, and from one shore he found himself looking out on the open sea. They were lying, or else very slowly drifting, in the neighbourhood of the huge green column which he had seen a few moments after his arrival in Perelandra. He had an excellent view of this object at about a mile’s distance. It was clearly a mountainous island. The column turned out to be really a cluster of columns – that is, of crags much higher than they were broad, rather like exaggerated dolomites, but smoother: so much smoother in fact that it might be truer to describe them as pillars from the Giant’s Causeway magnified to the height of mountains. This huge upright mass did not, however, rise directly from the sea. The island had a base of rough country, but with smoother land at the coast, and a hint of valleys with vegetation in them between the ridges, and even of steeper and narrower valleys which ran some way up between the central crags. It was certainly land, real fixed land with its roots in the solid surface of the planet. He could dimly make out the texture of true rock from where he sat. Some of it was inhabitable land. He felt a great desire to explore it. It looked as if a landing would present no difficulties, and even the great mountain itself might turn out to be climbable.

  He did not see the Lady again that day. Early next morning, after he had amused himself by swimming for a little and eaten his first meal, he was again seated on the shore looking out towards the Fixed Land. Suddenly he heard her voice behind him and looked round. She had come forth from the woods with some beasts, as usual, following her. Her words had been words of greeting, but she showed no disposition to talk. She came and stood on the edge of the floating island beside him and looked with him towards the Fixed Land.

  ‘I will go there,’ she said at last.

  ‘May I go with you?’ asked Ransom.

  ‘If you will,’ said the Lady. ‘But you see it is the Fixed Land.’

  ‘That is why I wish to tread on it,’ said Ransom. ‘In my world all the lands are fixed, and it would give me pleasure to walk in such a land again.’

  She gave a sudden exclamation of surprise and stared at him.

  ‘Where, then, do you live in your world?’ she asked.

  ‘On the lands.’

  ‘But you said they are all fixed.’

  ‘Yes. We live on the fixed lands.’

  For the first time since they had met, something not quite unlike an expression of horror or disgust passed over her face.

  ‘But what do you do during the nights?’

  ‘During the nights?’ said Ransom in bewilderment. ‘Why, we sleep, of course.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Where we live. On the land.’

  She remained in deep thought so long that Ransom feared she was never going to speak again. When she did, her voice was hushed and once more tranquil, though the note of joy had not yet returned to it.