Perelandra Page 8

  and pointed to the mass of islands. Their surface was no longer level. At the same moment he realised that the noise was that of waves: small waves as yet, but definitely beginning to foam on the rocky headlands of the Fixed Island. ‘The sea is rising,’ said the Lady. ‘We must go down and leave this land at once. Soon the waves will be too great – and I must not be here by night.’

  ‘Not that way,’ shouted Ransom. ‘Not where you will meet the man from my world.’

  ‘Why?’ said the Lady. ‘I am Lady and Mother of this world. If the King is not here, who else should greet a stranger?’

  ‘I will meet him.’

  ‘It is not your world, Piebald,’ she replied.

  ‘You do not understand,’ said Ransom. ‘This man – he is a friend of that eldil of whom I told you – one of those who cling to the wrong good.’

  ‘Then I must explain it to him,’ said the Lady. ‘Let us go and make him older,’ and with that she slung herself down the rocky edge of the plateau and began descending the mountain slope. Ransom took longer to manage the rocks; but once his feet were again on the turf he began running as fast as he could. The Lady cried out in surprise as he flashed past her, but he took no notice. He could now see clearly which bay the little boat was making for and his attention was fully occupied in directing his course and making sure of his feet. There was only one man in the boat. Down and down the long slope he raced. Now he was in a fold: now in a winding valley which momentarily cut off the sight of the sea. Now at last he was in the cove itself. He glanced back and saw to his dismay that the Lady had also been running and was only a few yards behind. He glanced forward again. There were waves, though not yet very large ones, breaking on the pebbly beach. A man in shirt and shorts and a pith helmet was ankle-deep in the water, wading ashore and pulling after him a little canvas punt. It was certainly Weston, though his face had something about it which seemed subtly unfamiliar. It seemed to Ransom of vital importance to prevent a meeting between Weston and the Lady. He had seen Weston murder an inhabitant of Malacandra. He turned back, stretching out both arms to bar her way and shouting ‘Go back!’ She was too near. For a second she was almost in his arms. Then she stood back from him, panting from the race, surprised, her mouth opened to speak. But at that moment he heard Weston’s voice, from behind him, saying in English, ‘May I ask you, Dr Ransom, what is the meaning of this?’

  7

  In all the circumstances it would have been reasonable to expect that Weston would be much more taken aback at Ransom’s presence than Ransom could be at his. But if he were, he showed no sign of it, and Ransom could hardly help admiring the massive egoism which enabled this man in the very moment of his arrival on an unknown world to stand there unmoved in all his authoritative vulgarity, his arms akimbo, his face scowling, and his feet planted as solidly on that unearthly soil as if he had been standing with his back to the fire in his own study. Then, with a shock, he noticed that Weston was speaking to the Lady in the Old Solar language with perfect fluency. On Malacandra, partly from incapacity, and much more from his contempt for the inhabitants, he had never acquired more than a smattering of it. Here was an inexplicable and disquieting novelty. Ransom felt that his only advantage had been taken from him. He felt that he was now in the presence of the incalculable. If the scales had been suddenly weighted in this one respect, what might come next?

  He awoke from his abstraction to find that Weston and the Lady had been conversing fluently, but without mutual understanding. ‘It is no use,’ she was saying. ‘You and I are not old enough to speak together, it seems. The sea is rising; let us go back to the islands. Will he come with us, Piebald?’

  ‘Where are the two fishes?’ said Ransom.

  ‘They will be waiting in the next bay,’ said the Lady.

  ‘Quick, then,’ said Ransom to her; and then, in answer to her look: ‘No, he will not come.’ She did not, presumably, understand his urgency, but her eye was on the sea and she understood her own reason for haste. She had already begun to ascend the side of the valley, with Ransom following her, when Weston shouted, ‘No, you don’t.’ Ransom turned and found himself covered by a revolver. The sudden heat which swept over his body was the only sign by which he knew that he was frightened. His head remained clear.

  ‘Are you going to begin in this world also by murdering one of its inhabitants?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked the Lady, pausing and looking back at the two men with a puzzled, tranquil face.

  ‘Stay where you are, Ransom,’ said the Professor. ‘That native can go where she likes; the sooner the better.’

  Ransom was about to implore her to make good her escape when he realised that no imploring was needed. He had irrationally supposed that she would understand the situation; but apparently she saw nothing more than two strangers talking about something which she did not at the moment understand – that, and her own necessity of leaving the Fixed Land at once.

  ‘You and he do not come with me, Piebald?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Ransom, without turning round. ‘It may be that you and I shall not meet soon again. Greet the King for me if you find him and speak of me always to Maleldil. I stay here.’

  ‘We shall meet when Maleldil pleases,’ she answered, ‘or if not, some greater good will happen to us instead.’ Then he heard her footsteps behind him for a few seconds, and then he heard them no more and knew he was alone with Weston.

  ‘You allowed yourself to use the word Murder just now, Dr Ransom,’ said the Professor, ‘in reference to an accident that occurred when we were in Malacandra. In any case, the creature killed was not a human being. Allow me to tell you that I consider the seduction of a native girl as an almost equally unfortunate way of introducing civilisation to a new planet.’

  ‘Seduction?’ said Ransom. ‘Oh, I see. You thought I was making love to her.’

  ‘When I find a naked civilised man embracing a naked savage woman in a solitary place, that is the name I give to it.’

  ‘I wasn’t embracing her,’ said Ransom dully, for the whole business of defending himself on this score seemed at that moment a mere weariness of the spirit. ‘And no one wears clothes here. But what does it matter? Get on with the job that brings you to Perelandra.’

  ‘You ask me to believe that you have been living here with that woman under these conditions in a state of sexless innocence?’

  ‘Oh, sexless!’ said Ransom disgustedly. ‘All right, if you like. It’s about as good a description of living in Perelandra as it would be to say that a man had forgotten water because Niagara Falls didn’t immediately give him the idea of making it into cups of tea. But you’re right enough if you mean that I have had no more thought of desiring her than – than …’ Comparisons failed him and his voice died. Then he began again: ‘But don’t say I’m asking you to believe it, or to believe anything. I am asking you nothing but to begin and end as soon as possible whatever butcheries and robberies you have come to do.’

  Weston eyed him for a moment with a curious expression: then, unexpectedly, he returned his revolver to its holster.

  ‘Ransom,’ he said, ‘you do me a great injustice.’

  For several seconds there was silence between them. Long breakers with white woolpacks of foam on them were now rolling into the cove exactly as on Earth.

  ‘Yes,’ said Weston at last, ‘and I will begin with a frank admission. You may make what capital of it you please. I shall not be deterred. I deliberately say that I was, in some respects, mistaken – seriously mistaken – in my conception of the whole interplanetary problem when I went to Malacandra.’

  Partly from the relaxation which followed the disappearance of the pistol, and partly from the elaborate air of magnanimity with which the great scientist spoke, Ransom felt very much inclined to laugh. But it occurred to him that this was possibly the first occasion in his whole life in which Weston had ever acknowledged himself in the wrong, and that even the false dawn of hum
ility, which is still ninety-nine per cent of arrogance, ought not to be rebuffed – or not by him.

  ‘Well, that’s very handsome,’ he said. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you presently,’ said Weston. ‘In the meantime I must get my things ashore.’ Between them they beached the punt, and began carrying Weston’s primus-stove and tins and tent and other packages to a spot about two hundred yards inland. Ransom, who knew all the paraphernalia to be needless, made no objection, and in about a quarter of an hour something like an encampment had been established in a mossy place under some blue-trunked silver-leaved trees beside a rivulet. Both men sat down and Ransom listened at first with interest, then with amazement, and finally with incredulity. Weston cleared his throat, threw out his chest, and assumed his lecturing manner. Throughout the conversation that followed, Ransom was filled with a sense of crazy irrelevance. Here were two human beings, thrown together in an alien world under conditions of inconceivable strangeness; the one separated from his space-ship, the other newly released from the threat of instant death. Was it sane – was it imaginable – that they should find themselves at once engaged in a philosophical argument which might just as well have occurred in a Cambridge combination room? Yet that, apparently, was what Weston insisted upon. He showed no interest in the fate of his space-ship; he even seemed to feel no curiosity about Ransom’s presence on Venus. Could it be that he had travelled more than thirty million miles of space in search of – conversation? But as he went on talking, Ransom felt himself more and more in the presence of a monomaniac. Like an actor who cannot think of anything but his celebrity, or a lover who can think of nothing but his mistress, tense, tedious, and unescapable, the scientist pursued his fixed idea.

  ‘The tragedy of my life,’ he said, ‘and indeed of the modern intellectual world in general, is the rigid specialisation of knowledge entailed by the growing complexity of what is known. It is my own share in that tragedy that an early devotion to physics has prevented me from paying any proper attention to Biology until I reached the fifties. To do myself justice, I should make it clear that the false humanist ideal of knowledge as an end in itself never appealed to me. I always wanted to know in order to achieve utility. At first, that utility naturally appeared to me in a personal form – I wanted scholarships, an income, and that generally recognised position in the world without which a man has no leverage. When those were attained, I began to look farther: to the utility of the human race!’

  He paused as he rounded his period and Ransom nodded to him to proceed.

  ‘The utility of the human race,’ continued Weston, ‘in the long run depends rigidly on the possibility of interplanetary, and even inter-sidereal, travel. That problem I solved. The key of human destiny was placed in my hands. It would be unnecessary – and painful to us both – to remind you how it was wrenched from me in Malacandra by a member of a hostile intelligent species whose existence, I admit, I had not anticipated.’

  ‘Not hostile exactly,’ said Ransom, ‘but go on.’

  ‘The rigours of our return journey from Malacandra led to a serious breakdown in my health –’

  ‘Mine too,’ said Ransom.

  Weston looked somewhat taken aback at the interruption and went on. ‘During my convalescence I had that leisure for reflection which I had denied myself for many years. In particular I reflected on the objections you had felt to that liquidation of the non-human inhabitants of Malacandra which was, of course, the necessary preliminary to its occupation by our own species. The traditional and, if I may say so, the humanitarian form in which you advanced those objections had till then concealed from me their true strength. That strength I now began to perceive. I began to see that my own exclusive devotion to human utility was really based on an unconscious dualism.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that all my life I had been making a wholly unscientific dichotomy or antithesis between Man and Nature – had conceived myself fighting for Man against his non-human environment. During my illness I plunged into Biology, and particularly into what may be called biological philosophy. Hitherto, as a physicist, I had been content to regard Life as a subject outside my scope. The conflicting views of those who drew a sharp line between the organic and the inorganic and those who held that what we call Life was inherent in matter from the very beginning had not interested me. Now it did. I saw almost at once that I could admit no break, no discontinuity, in the unfolding of the cosmic process. I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning.’

  Here he paused. Ransom had heard this sort of thing pretty often before and wondered when his companion was coming to the point. When Weston resumed it was with an even deeper solemnity of tone.

  ‘The majestic spectacle of this blind, inarticulate purposiveness thrusting its way upward and ever upward in an endless unity of differentiated achievements towards an ever-increasing complexity of organisation, towards spontaneity and spirituality, swept away all my old conception of a duty to Man as such. Man in himself is nothing. The forward movements of Life – the growing spirituality – is everything. I say to you quite freely, Ransom, that I should have been wrong in liquidating the Malacandrians. It was a mere prejudice that made me prefer our own race to theirs. To spread spirituality, not to spread the human race, is henceforth my mission. This sets the coping-stone on my career. I worked first for myself; then for science; then for humanity; but now at last for Spirit itself I might say, borrowing language which will be more familiar to you, the Holy Spirit.’

  ‘Now what exactly do you mean by that?’ asked Ransom. ‘I mean,’ said Weston, ‘that nothing now divides you and me except a few outworn theological technicalities with which organised religion has unhappily allowed itself to get incrusted. But I have penetrated that crust. The Meaning beneath it is as true and living as ever. If you will excuse me for putting it that way, the essential truth of the religious view of life finds a remarkable witness in the fact that it enabled you, on Malacandra, to grasp, in your own mythical and imaginative fashion, a truth which was hidden from me.’

  ‘I don’t know much about what people call the religious view of life,’ said Ransom, wrinkling his brow. ‘You see, I’m a Christian. And what we mean by the Holy Ghost is not a blind, inarticulate purposiveness.’

  ‘My dear Ransom,’ said Weston, ‘I understand you perfectly. I have no doubt that my phraseology will seem strange to you, and perhaps even shocking. Early and revered associations may have put it out of your power to recognise in this new form the very same truths which religion has so long preserved and which science is now at last re-discovering. But whether you can see it or not, believe me, we are talking about exactly the same thing.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure that we are.’

  ‘That, if you will permit me to say so, is one of the real weaknesses of organised religion – that adherence to formulae, that failure to recognise one’s own friends. God is a spirit, Ransom. Get hold of that. You’re familiar with that already. Stick to it. God is a spirit.’

  ‘Well, of course. But what then?’

  ‘What then? Why, spirit – mind – freedom – spontaneity – that’s what I’m talking about. That is the goal towards which the whole cosmic process is moving. The final disengagement of that freedom, that spirituality, is the work to which I dedicate my own life and the life of humanity. The goal, Ransom, the goal: think of it! Pure spirit: the final vortex of self-thinking, self-originating activity.’

  ‘Final?’ said Ransom. ‘You mean it doesn’t yet exist?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Weston, ‘I see what’s bothering you. Of course I know. Religion pictures it as being there from the beginning. But surely that is not a real difference? To make it one, would be to take time too seriously. When it has once been attained, you might then say it had been at the beginning just as well as at the end. Time is one of the things it will trans
cend.’

  ‘By the way,’ said Ransom, ‘is it in any sense at all personal – is it alive?’

  An indescribable expression passed over Weston’s face. He moved a little nearer to Ransom and began speaking in a lower voice.

  ‘That’s what none of them understand,’ he said. It was such a gangster’s or a schoolboy’s whisper and so unlike his usual orotund lecturing style that Ransom for a moment felt a sensation almost of disgust.

  ‘Yes,’ said Weston, ‘I couldn’t have believed, myself, till recently. Not a person, of course. Anthropomorphism is one of the childish diseases of popular religion’ (here he had resumed his public manner), ‘but the opposite extreme of excessive abstraction has perhaps in the aggregate proved more disastrous. Call it a Force. A great, inscrutable Force, pouring up into us from the dark bases of being. A Force that can choose its instruments. It is only lately, Ransom, that I’ve learned from actual experience something which you have believed all your life as part of your religion.’ Here he suddenly subsided again into a whisper – a croaking whisper unlike his usual voice. ‘Guided,’ he said. ‘Chosen. Guided. I’ve become conscious that I’m a man set apart. Why did I do physics? Why did I discover the Weston rays? Why did I go to Malacandra? It – the Force – has pushed me on all the time. I’m being guided. I know now that I am the greatest scientist the world has yet produced. I’ve been made so for a purpose. It is through me that Spirit itself is at this moment pushing on to its goal.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Ransom, ‘one wants to be careful about this sort of thing. There are spirits and spirits, you know.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Weston. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I mean a thing might be a spirit and not good for you.’

  ‘But I thought you agreed that Spirit was the good – the end of the whole process? I thought you religious people were all out for spirituality? What is the point of asceticism – fasts and celibacy and all that? Didn’t we agree that God is a spirit? Don’t you worship Him because He is pure spirit?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! We worship Him because He is wise and good. There’s nothing specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit.’

  ‘Now your mentioning the Devil is very interesting,’ said Weston, who had by this time quite recovered his normal manner. ‘It is a most interesting thing in popular religion, this tendency to fissiparate, to breed pairs of opposites: heaven and hell, God and Devil. I need hardly say that in my view no real dualism in the universe is admissible; and on that ground I should have been disposed, even a few weeks ago, to reject these pairs of doublets as pure mythology. It would have been a profound error. The cause of this universal religious tendency is to be sought much deeper. The doublets are really portraits of Spirit, of cosmic energy – self-portraits, indeed, for it is the Life-Force itself which has deposited them in our brains.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ said Ransom. As he spoke he rose to his feet and began pacing to and fro. A quite appalling weariness and malaise had descended upon him.

  ‘Your Devil and your God,’ said Weston, ‘are both pictures of the same Force. Your heaven is a picture of the perfect spirituality ahead; your hell a picture of the urge or nisus which is driving us on to it from behind. Hence the static peace of the one and the fire and darkness of the other. The next stage of emergent evolution, beckoning us forward, is God; the transcended stage behind, ejecting us, is the Devil. Your own religion, after all, says that the devils are fallen angels.’

  ‘And you are saying precisely the opposite, as far as I can make out – that angels are devils who’ve risen in the world.’

  ‘It comes to the same thing,’ said Weston.

  There was another long pause. ‘Look here,’ said Ransom, ‘it’s easy to misunderstand one another on a point like this. What you are saying sounds to me like the most horrible mistake a man could fall into. But that may be because in the effort to accommodate it to my supposed “religious views”, you’re saying a good deal more than you mean. It’s only a metaphor, isn’t it, all this about spirits and forces? I expect all you really mean is that you feel it your duty to work for the spread of civilisation and knowledge and that kind of thing.’ He had tried to keep out of his voice the involuntary anxiety which he had begun to feel. Next moment he recoiled in horror at the cackling laughter, almost an infantile or senile laughter, with which Weston replied.

  ‘There you go, there you go,’ he said. ‘Like all you religious people. You talk and talk about these things all your life, and the moment you meet the reality you get frightened.’