Perelandra (23 page)

‘Where did you learn Aramaic?’ asked Ransom, keeping his eyes on the other.

‘Aramaic?’ said Weston’s voice. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not much of a game to make fun of a dying man.’

‘But are you really Weston?’ said Ransom, for he began to think that Weston had actually come back.

‘Who else should I be?’ came the answer, with a burst of weak temper, on the verge of tears.

‘Where have you been?’ asked Ransom.

Weston – if it was Weston – shuddered. ‘Where are we now?’ he asked presently.

‘In Perelandra – Venus, you know,’ answered Ransom.

‘Have you found the space-ship?’ asked Weston. ‘I never saw it except at a distance,’ said Ransom. ‘And I’ve
no idea where it is now – a couple of hundred miles away for all I know.’

‘You mean we’re trapped?’ said Weston, almost in a scream. Ransom said nothing and the other bowed his head and cried like a baby.

‘Come,’ said Ransom at last, ‘there’s no good taking it like that. Hang it all, you’d not be much better off if you were on Earth. You remember they’re having a war there. The Germans may be bombing London to bits at this moment!’ Then seeing the creature still crying, he added, ‘Buck up, Weston. It’s only death, all said and done. We should have to die some day, you know. We shan’t lack water, and hunger – without thirst – isn’t too bad. As for drowning – well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse.’

‘You mean to say you’re going to leave me,’ said Weston. ‘I can’t, even if I wanted to,’ said Ransom. ‘Don’t you see I’m in the same position as yourself?’

‘You’ll promise not to go off and leave me in the lurch?’ said Weston.

‘All right, I’ll promise if you like. Where could I go to?’

Weston looked very slowly all round and then urged his fish little nearer to Ransom’s.

‘Where is … it?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘You know,’ and he made meaningless gestures.

‘I might ask you the same question,’ said Ransom.

‘Me?’ said Weston. His face was, in one way and another, so disfigured that it was hard to be sure of its expression.

‘Have you any idea of what’s been happening to you for the last few days?’ said Ransom.

Weston once more looked all round him uneasily.

‘It’s all true, you know,’ he said at last.

‘What’s all true?’ said Ransom.

Suddenly Weston turned on him with a snarl of rage. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said. ‘Drowning doesn’t hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It’s all true, I tell you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life,’ said Weston. ‘Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race … trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It’s all rot, do you see?’

‘And something else is truer!’

‘Yes,’ said Weston, and then was silent for a long time.

‘We’d better turn our fishes head on to this,’ said Ransom presently, his eyes on the sea, ‘or we’ll be driven apart.’ Weston obeyed without seeming to notice what he did, and for a time the two men were riding very slowly side by side.

‘I’ll tell you what’s true,’ said Weston presently. ‘What?’

‘A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out – and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand.’

‘What do you mean by saying that’s truer?’

‘I mean that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide.’

Ransom said nothing.

‘Lots of things,’ said Weston presently. ‘Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night, and the grown-ups tell them not to be silly: but the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night – and missionaries and civil servants say it’s all superstition. Well, the blacks know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That’s what it all
means.’

‘I’m not quite clear –’ began Ransom, when Weston interrupted him.

‘That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now – a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then – the
real
universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre – to live one week, one day, one half hour longer – that’s the only thing that matters. Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say “What difference does a short reprieve make?” What difference!!’

‘But nobody need go there,’ said Ransom.

‘I know that’s what you believe,’ said Weston. ‘But you’re wrong. It’s only a small parcel of civilised people who think that. Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows – Homer knew – that
all
the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every
savage knows that
all
ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It’s quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You’re going to be one all the same.’

‘You don’t believe in God,’ said Ransom.

‘Well, now, that’s another point,’ said Weston. ‘I’ve been to church as well as you when I was a boy. There’s more sense in parts of the Bible than you religious people know. Doesn’t it say He’s the God of the living, not of the dead? That’s just it. Perhaps your God does exist – but it makes no difference whether He does or not. No, of course you wouldn’t see it; but one day you will. I don’t think you’ve got the idea of the rind – the thin outer skin which we call life – really clear. Picture the universe as an infinite glove with this very thin crust on the outside. But remember its thickness is a thickness of
time
. It’s about seventy years thick in the best places. We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe – He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. You would express it by saying He’s not in time – which you think comforting! In other words He stays put: out in the light and air, outside. But we are in time. We “move with the times”. That is, from His point of view, we move
away
, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was. He may be there in what you call “Life”, or He may not. What difference does it make?
We’re
not going to be there for long!’

‘That could hardly be the whole story,’ said Ransom. ‘If the whole universe were like that, then we, being parts of it, would feel at home in such a universe. The very fact that it strikes us as monstrous –’

‘Yes,’ interrupted Weston, ‘that would be all very well if it wasn’t that reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe. Even the ordinary scientists – like what I used to be myself – are beginning to find that out. Haven’t you seen the real meaning of all this modern stuff about the dangers of extrapolation and bent space and the indeterminacy of the atom? They don’t say it in so many words, of course, but what they’re getting to, even before they die nowadays, is what all men get to when they’re dead – the knowledge that reality is neither rational nor consistent nor anything else. In a sense you might say it isn’t there. “Real” and “Unreal”, “true” and “false” – they’re all only on the surface. They give way the moment you press them.’

‘If all this were true,’ said Ransom, ‘what would be the point of saying it?’

‘Or of anything else?’ replied Weston. ‘The only point in anything is that there isn’t any point. Why do ghosts want to frighten? Because they
are
ghosts. What else is there to do?’

‘I get the idea,’ said Ransom. ‘That the account a man gives of the universe, or of any other building, depends very much on where he is standing.’

‘But specially,’ said Weston, ‘on whether he’s inside or out. All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, or like Perelandra, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant
shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink.’

They ploughed forward for a few minutes in silence over waves which were now growing larger. The fish seemed to be making little headway.

‘Of course you don’t care,’ said Weston. ‘What do you people in the rind care about us? You haven’t been pulled down yet. It’s like a dream I once had, though I didn’t know then how true it was. I dreamed I was lying dead – you know, nicely laid out in the ward in a nursing home with my face settled by the undertaker and big lilies in the room. And then a sort of a person who was all falling to bits – like a tramp, you know, only it was himself not his clothes that was coming to pieces – came and stood at the foot of the bed, just hating me. “All right,” he said, “all right. You think you’re mighty fine with your clean sheet and your shiny coffin being got ready. I began like that. We all did. Just wait and see what you come down to in the end.”’

‘Really,’ said Ransom, ‘I think you might just as well shut up.’

‘Then there’s Spiritualism,’ said Weston, ignoring this suggestion. ‘I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn’t. It’s all true. You’ve noticed that all
pleasant
accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm – slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.’

‘Are
you Weston?’ said Ransom, suddenly turning upon his companion. The persistent mumbling voice, so
articulate that you had to listen to it and yet so inarticulate that you had to strain your ears to follow what it said, was beginning to madden him.

‘Don’t be angry,’ said the voice. ‘There’s no good being angry with me. I thought you might be sorry. My God, Ransom, it’s awful. You don’t understand. Right down under layers and layers. Buried alive. You try to connect things and can’t. They take your head off … and you can’t even look back on what life was like in the rind, because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.’

‘What are you?’ cried Ransom. ‘How do you know what death is like? God knows, I’d help you if I could. But give me the facts. Where have you been these few days?’

‘Hush,’ said the other suddenly, ‘what’s that?’

Ransom listened. Certainly there did seem to be a new element in the great concourse of noises with which they were surrounded. At first he could not define it. The seas were very big now and the wind was strong. All at once his companion reached out his hand and clutched Ransom’s arm.

‘Oh, my God!’ he cried. ‘Oh, Ransom, Ransom! We shall be killed. Killed and put back under the rind. Ransom, you promised to help me. Don’t let them get me again.’

‘Shut up,’ said Ransom in disgust, for the creature was wailing and blubbering so that he could hear nothing else: and he wanted very much to identify the deeper note that had mingled with the piping wind and roar of water.

‘Breakers,’ said Weston, ‘breakers, you fool! Can’t you hear? There’s a country over there! There’s a rocky
coast. Look there – no, to your right. We shall be smashed into a jelly. Look – O God, here comes the dark!’

And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Ransom: finally, horror with no definite object. In a few minutes he could see through the jet-black night the luminous cloud of foam. From the way in which it shot steeply upward he judged it was breaking on cliffs. Invisible birds, with a shriek and flurry, passed low overhead.

‘Are you there, Weston?’ he shouted. ‘What cheer? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you’ve been talking is lunacy. Say a child’s prayer if you can’t say a man’s. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment. We’ll do very well.’

His hand was clutched in the darkness, rather more firmly than he wished. ‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it,’ came Weston’s voice.

‘Steady now. None of that,’ he shouted back, for Weston had suddenly gripped his arm with both hands.

‘I can’t bear it,’ came the voice again.

‘Hi!’ said Ransom. ‘Let go. What the devil are you doing?’ and as he spoke strong arms had plucked him from the saddle, had wrapped him round in a terrible embrace just below his thighs, and, clutching uselessly at the smooth surface of the fish’s body, he was dragged down. The waters closed over his head: and still his enemy pulled him down into the warm depth, and down farther yet to where it was no longer warm.

‘I can’t hold my breath any longer,’ thought Ransom. ‘I can’t. I can’t.’ Cold slimy things slid upwards over his agonised body. He decided to stop holding his breath, to open his mouth and die, but his will did not obey this decision. Not only his chest but his temples felt as if they were going to burst. It was idle to struggle. His arms met no adversary and his legs were pinioned. He became aware that they were moving upwards. But this gave him no hope. The surface was too far away, he could not hold out till they reached it. In the immediate presence of death all ideas of the after life were withdrawn from his mind. The mere abstract proposition, ‘This is a man dying’ floated before him in an unemotional way. Suddenly a roar of sound rushed back upon his ears – intolerable boomings and clangings. His mouth opened automatically. He was breathing again. In a pitch darkness full of echoes he was clutching what seemed to be gravel and kicking wildly to throw off the grip that still held his legs. Then he was free and fighting once more: a blind struggle half in and half out of the water on what seemed to be a pebbly beach, with sharper rocks here and there that cut his feet and elbows. The blackness was filled with gasping curses, now in his own voice, now in Weston’s, with yelps of pain, thudding concussions, and
the noise of laboured breath. In the end he was astride of the enemy. He pressed its sides between his knees till its ribs cracked and clasped his hands round its throat. Somehow he was able to resist its fierce tearing at his arms – to keep on pressing. Once before he had had to press like this, but that had been on an artery, to save life, not to kill. It seemed to last for ages. Long after the creature’s struggles had ceased he did not dare to relax his grip. Even when he was quite sure that it breathed no longer he retained his seat on its chest and kept his tired hands, though now loosely, on its throat. He was nearly fainting himself, but he counted a thousand before he would shift his posture. Even then he continued to sit on its body. He did not know whether in the last few hours the spirit which had spoken to him was really Weston’s or whether he had been the victim of a ruse. Indeed, it made little difference. There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle held over the gas ring. The question whether Satan, or one whom Satan has digested, is acting on any given occasion, has in the long run no clear significance. In the meantime, the great thing was not to be tricked again.