Perelandra (4 page)

‘And then?’

‘Well, then comes the difficult part. You must hold yourself in readiness to come down here again the moment you are summoned, to take off the lid and let me out when I return.’

‘When do you expect to return?’

‘Nobody can say. Six months – a year – twenty years. That’s the trouble. I’m afraid I’m laying a pretty heavy burden on you.’

‘I might be dead.’

‘I know. I’m afraid part of your burden is to select a successor: at once, too. There are four or five people whom we can trust.’

‘What will the summons be?’

‘Oyarsa will give it. It won’t be mistakable for anything else. You needn’t bother about that side of it. One other point. I’ve no particular reason to suppose I shall come back wounded. But just in case – if you can find a doctor whom we can let into the secret, it might be just as well to bring him with you when you come down to let me out.’

‘Would Humphrey do?’

‘The very man. And now for some more personal matters. I’ve had to leave you out of my will, and I’d like you to know why.’

‘My dear chap, I never thought about your will till this moment.’

‘Of course not. But I’d like to have left you something. The reason I haven’t, is this. I’m going to disappear. It is possible I may not come back. It’s just conceivable there might be a murder trial, and if so one can’t be too careful. I mean, for your sake. And now for one or two other private arrangements.’

We laid our heads together and for a long time we talked about those matters which one usually discusses with relatives and not with friends. I got to know a lot more about Ransom than I had known before, and from the number of odd people whom he recommended to my care, ‘If ever I happened to be able to do anything’, I came to realise the extent and intimacy of his charities. With every sentence the shadow of approaching separation and a kind of graveyard gloom began to settle more emphatically upon us. I found myself noticing and loving all sorts of little mannerisms and expressions in him such as we notice always in a woman we love, but notice in a man only as the last hours of his leave run out or the date of the probably fatal operation draws near. I felt our nature’s incurable incredulity; and could hardly believe that what was now so close, so tangible and (in a sense) so much at my command, would in a few hours be wholly inaccessible, an image – soon, even an elusive image – in my memory. And finally a sort of shyness fell between us because each knew what the other was feeling. It had got very cold.

‘We must be going soon,’ said Ransom.

‘Not till he – the Oyarsa – comes back,’ said I – though, indeed, now that the thing was so near I wished it to be over.

‘He has never left us,’ said Ransom, ‘he has been in the cottage all the time.’

‘You mean he has been waiting in the next room all these hours?’

‘Not waiting. They never have that experience. You and I are conscious of waiting, because we have a body that grows tired or restless, and therefore a sense of
cumulative duration. Also we can distinguish duties and spare time and therefore have a conception of leisure. It is not like that with him. He has been here all this time, but you can no more call it waiting than you can call the whole of his existence waiting. You might as well say that a tree in a wood was waiting, or the sunlight waiting on the side of a hill.’ Ransom yawned. ‘I’m tired,’ he said, ‘and so are you. I shall sleep well in that coffin of mine. Come. Let us lug it out.’

We went into the next room and I was made to stand before the featureless flame which did not wait but just was, and there, with Ransom as our interpreter, I was in some fashion presented and with my own tongue sworn in to this great business. Then we took down the blackout and let in the grey, comfortless morning. Between us we carried out the casket and the lid, so cold they seemed to burn our fingers. There was a heavy dew on the grass and my feet were soaked through at once. The
eldil
was with us, outside there, on the little lawn; hardly visible to my eyes at all in the daylight. Ransom showed me the clasps of the lid and how it was to be fastened on, and then there was some miserable hanging about, and then the final moment when he went back into the house and reappeared, naked; a tall, white, shivering, weary scarecrow of a man at that pale, raw hour. When he had got into the hideous box he made me tie a thick black bandage round his eyes and head. Then he lay down. I had no thoughts of the planet Venus now and no real belief that I should see him again. If I had dared I would have gone back on the whole scheme: but the other thing – the creature that did not wait – was there, and the fear of it was upon me. With feelings that have since often returned to
me in nightmare I fastened the cold lid down on top of the living man and stood back. Next moment I was alone. I didn’t see how it went. I went back indoors and was sick. A few hours later I shut up the cottage and returned to Oxford.

Then the months went past and grew to a year and a little more than a year, and we had raids and bad news and hopes deferred and all the earth became full of darkness and cruel habitations, till the night when Oyarsa came to me again. After that there was a journey in haste for Humphrey and me, standings in crowded corridors and waitings at small hours on windy platforms, and finally the moment when we stood in clear early sunlight in the little wilderness of deep weeds which Ransom’s garden had now become and saw a black speck against the sunrise and then, almost silently, the casket had glided down between us. We flung ourselves upon it and had the lid off in about a minute and a half.

‘Good God! All smashed to bits,’ I cried at my first glance of the interior.

‘Wait a moment,’ said Humphrey. And as he spoke the figure in the coffin began to stir and then sat up, shaking off as it did so a mass of red things which had covered its head and shoulders and which I had momentarily mistaken for ruin and blood. As they streamed off him and were caught in the wind I perceived them to be flowers. He blinked for a second or so, then called us by our names, gave each of us a hand, and stepped out on the grass.

‘How are you both?’ he said. ‘You’re looking rather knocked up.’

I was silent for a moment, astonished at the form which had risen from that narrow house – almost a new
Ransom, glowing with health and rounded with muscle and seemingly ten years younger. In the old days he had been beginning to show a few grey hairs; but now the beard which swept his chest was pure gold.

‘Hullo, you’ve cut your foot,’ said Humphrey: and I saw now that Ransom was bleeding from the heel.

‘Ugh, it’s cold down here,’ said Ransom. ‘I hope you’ve got the boiler going and some hot water – and some clothes.’

‘Yes,’ said I, as we followed him into the house. ‘Humphrey thought of all that. I’m afraid I shouldn’t have.’

Ransom was now in the bathroom, with the door open, veiled in clouds of steam, and Humphrey and I were talking to him from the landing. Our questions were more numerous than he could answer.

‘That idea of Schiaparelli’s is all wrong,’ he shouted. ‘They have an ordinary day and night there,’ and ‘No, my heel doesn’t hurt – or, at least, it’s only just begun to,’ and ‘Thanks, any old clothes. Leave them on the chair,’ and ‘No, thanks. I don’t somehow feel like bacon or eggs or anything of that kind. No fruit, you say? Oh well, no matter. Bread or porridge or something,’ and ‘I’ll be down in five minutes now.’

He kept on asking if we were really all right and seemed to think we looked ill. I went down to get the breakfast, and Humphrey said he would stay and examine and dress the cut on Ransom’s heel. When he rejoined me I was looking at one of the red petals which had come in the casket.

‘That’s rather a beautiful flower,’ said I, handing it to him. ‘Yes,’ said Humphrey, studying it with the hands
and eyes of a scientist. ‘What extraordinary delicacy! It makes an English violet seem like a coarse weed.’

‘Let’s put some of them in water.’

‘Not much good. Look – it’s withered already.’

‘How do you think he is?’

‘Tip-top in general. But I don’t quite like that heel. He says the haemorrhage has been going on for a long time.’ Ransom joined us, fully dressed, and I poured out the tea. And all that day and far into the night he told us the story that follows.

What it is like to travel in a celestial coffin was a thing that Ransom never described. He said he couldn’t. But odd hints about that journey have come out at one time or another when he was talking of quite different matters.

According to his own account he was not what we call conscious, and yet at the same time the experience was a very positive one with a quality of its own. On one occasion, someone had been talking about ‘seeing life’ in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B., who was present (and who is an Anthroposophist), said something I can’t quite remember about ‘seeing life’ in a very different sense. I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make ‘the form of Life itself’ visible to the inner eye. At any rate Ransom let himself in for a long cross-examination by failing to conceal the fact that he attached some very definite idea to this. He even went so far – under extreme pressure – as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a ‘coloured shape’. Asked ‘what colour?’, he gave a curious look and could only say ‘what colours! yes, what colours!’ But then he spoiled it all by adding, ‘of course it wasn’t colour at all really. I mean, not what we’d call colour,’ and shutting up completely for the rest of the evening. Another hint came out
when a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment, and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as ‘So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!’ when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, ‘Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?’ That, of course, directed McPhee’s fire to him. What emerged was that in Ransom’s opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said ‘engulfed’. He used the word ‘transsexual’, I remember, and began to hunt about for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting ‘trans-gastronomic’), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels. But I am pretty sure he was thinking of something he had experienced on his voyage to Venus. But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject – which he doesn’t often allow – and had incautiously said, ‘Of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,’ when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, ‘On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too
definite
for language.’ And that is about all I can tell you of his journey. One thing is certain, that he came back from Venus even more changed than he had come back from Mars. But of course
that may have been because of what happened to him after his landing.

To that landing, as Ransom narrated it to me, I will now proceed. He seems to have been awakened (if that is the right word) from his indescribable celestial state by the sensation of falling – in other words, when he was near enough to Venus to feel Venus as something in the downward direction. The next thing he noticed was that he was very warm on one side and very cold on the other, though neither sensation was so extreme as to be really painful. Anyway, both were soon swallowed up in the prodigious white light from below which began to penetrate through the semi-opaque walls of the casket. This steadily increased and became distressing in spite of the fact that his eyes were protected. There is no doubt this was the
albedo
, the outer veil of very dense atmosphere with which Venus is surrounded and which reflects the sun’s rays with intense power. For some obscure reason he was not conscious, as he had been on his approach to Mars, of his own rapidly increasing weight. When the white light was just about to become unbearable, it disappeared altogether, and very soon after the cold on his left side and the heat on his right began to decrease and to be replaced by an equable warmth. I take it he was now in the outer layer of the Perelandrian atmosphere – at first in a pale, and later in a tinted, twilight. The prevailing colour, as far as he could see through the sides of the casket, was golden or coppery. By this time he must have been very near the surface of the planet, with the length of the casket at right angles to that surface – falling feet downwards like a man in a lift. The sensation of falling – helpless as he was and unable to move his arms
became frightening. Then suddenly there came a great green darkness, an unidentifiable noise – the first message from the new world – and a marked drop in temperature. He seemed now to have assumed a horizontal position and also, to his great surprise, to be moving not downwards but upwards; though, at the moment, he judged this to be an illusion. All this time he must have been making faint, unconscious efforts to move his limbs, for now he suddenly found that the sides of his prison-house yielded to pressure. He
was
moving his limbs, encumbered with some viscous substance. Where was the casket? His sensations were very confused. Sometimes he seemed to be falling, sometimes to be soaring upwards, and then again to be moving in the horizontal plane. The viscous substance was white. There seemed to be less of it every moment … white, cloudy stuff just like the casket, only not solid. With a horrible shock he realised that it
was
the casket, the casket melting, dissolving away, giving place to an indescribable confusion of colour – a rich, varied world in which nothing, for the moment, seemed palpable. There was no casket now. He was turned out – deposited – solitary. He was in Perelandra.