and there was a drumming noise of rain on firm leaves above their heads. They lay down again. “And another time,” began the Un-man at once, “there was a queen in our world who ruled over a little land-”
“Hush!” said the Lady, “let us listen to the rain.” Then, after a moment, she added, “What was that? It was some beast I never heard before”-and indeed, there had been something very like a low growl close beside them.
“I do not know,” said the voice of Weston. “I think I do,” said Ransom.
“Hush!” said the Lady again, and no more was said that night.
This was the beginning of a series of days and nights which Ransom remembered with loathing for the rest of his life. He had been only too correct in supposing that his enemy required no sleep. Fortunately the Lady did, but she needed a good deal less than Ransom and possibly, as the days passed, came to take less than she needed. It seemed to Ransom that whenever he dozed he awoke to find the Un-man already in conversation with her. He was dead tired. He could hardly have endured it all but for the fact that their hostess quite frequently dismissed them both from her presence. On such occasions Ransom kept close to the Un-man. It was a rest from the main battle, but was a very imperfect rest. He did not dare to let the enemy out of his sight for a moment, and every day its society became more unendurable. He had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a sombre tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a wicked politician at all: it was much more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child. What had staggered and disgusted him when it first began saying, “Ransom . . . Ransom . . .” continued to disgust him every day and every hour. It showed plenty of subtlety and intelligence when talking to the Lady; but Ransom soon perceived that it regarded intelligence simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. It assumed reason as externally and inorganically as it had assumed Weston’s body. The moment the Lady was out of sight it seemed to relapse. A great deal of his time was spent in protecting the animals from it. Whenever it got out of sight, or even a few yards ahead, it would make a grab at any beast or bird within its reach and pull out some fur or feathers. Ransom tried whenever possible to get between it and its victim. On such occasions there were nasty moments when the two stood facing each other. It never came to a fight, for the Un-man merely grinned and perhaps spat and fell back a little, but before that happened Ransom usually had opportunity to discover how terribly he feared it. For side by side with his disgust, the more childlike terror of living with a ghost or a mechanised corpse never left him for many minutes together. The fact of being alone with it sometimes rushed upon his mind with such dismay that it took all his reason to resist his longing for society-his impulse to rush madly over the island until he found the Lady and to beg her protection. When the Un-man could not get animals it was content with plants. It was fond of cutting their outer rinds through with its nails, or grubbing up roots, or pulling off leaves, or even tearing up handfuls of turf. With Ransom himself it had innumerable games to play. It had a whole repertory of obscenities to perform with its own -or rather with Weston’s-body: and the mere silliness of them was almost worse than the dirtiness. It would sit making grimaces at him for hours together; and then, for hours more, it would go back to its old repetition of “Ransom . . . Ransom.” Often its grimaces achieved a horrible resemblance to people whom Ransom had known and loved in our own world. But worst of all were those moments when it allowed Weston to come back into its countenance. Then its voice, which was always Weston’s voice, would begin a pitiful, hesitant mumbling, “You be very careful, Ransom. I’m down in the bottom of a big black hole. No, I’m not, though. I’m on Perelandra. I can’t think very well now, but that doesn’t matter, he does all my thinking for me. It’ll get quite easy presently. That boy keeps on shutting the windows. That’s all right, they’ve taken off my head and put someone else’s on me. I’ll soon be all right now. They won’t let me see my press cuttings. So then I went and told him that if they didn’t want me in the First Fifteen they could jolly well do without me, see. We’ll tell that young whelp it’s an insult to the examiners to show up this kind of work. What I want to know is why I should pay for a first-class ticket and then be crowded out like this. It’s not fair. Not fair. I never meant any harm. Could you take some of this weight off my chest, I don’t want all those clothes. Let me alone. Let me alone. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. What enormous bluebottles. They say you get used to them”-and then it would end in the canine howl. Ransom never could make up his mind whether it was a trick or whether a decaying psychic energy that had once been Weston were indeed fitfully and miserably alive within the body that sat there beside him. He discovered that any hatred he had once felt for the Professor was dead. He found it natural to pray fervently for his soul. Yet what he felt for Weston was not exactly pity. Up till that moment, whenever he had thought of Hell, he had pictured the lost souls as being still human; now, as the frightful abyss which parts ghosthood from manhood yawned before him, pity was almost swallowed up in horror-in the unconquerable revulsion of the life within him from positive and selfconsuming Death. If the remains of Weston were, at such moments, speaking through the lips of the Un-man, then Weston was not now a man at all. The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affections had now at last poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left-an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odour of decay. “And this,” thought Ransom, “might be my destination; or hers.”
But of course the hours spent alone with the Un-man were like hours in a back area. The real business of life was the interminable conversation between the Tempter and the Green Lady. Taken hour by hour the progress was hard to estimate; but as the days passed Ransom could not resist the conviction that the general development was in the enemy’s favour. There were, of course, ups and downs. Often the Un-man was unexpectedly repulsed by some simplicity which it seemed not to have anticipated. Often, too, Ransom’s own contributions to the terrible debate were for the moment successful. There were times when he thought, “Thank God! We’ve won at last.” But the enemy was never tired, and Ransom grew more weary all the time; and presently he thought he could see signs that the Lady was becoming tired too. In the end he taxed her with it and begged her to send them both away. But she rebuked him, and her rebuke revealed how dangerous the situation had already become. “Shall I go and rest and play,” she asked, “while all this lies on our hands? Not till I am certain that there is no great deed to be done by me for the King and for the children of our children.”
It was on those lines that the enemy now worked almost exclusively. Though the Lady had no word for Duty he had made it appear to her in the light of a Duty that she should continue to fondle the idea of disobedience, and convinced her that it would be a cowardice if she repulsed him. The idea of the Great Deed, of the Great Risk, of a kind of martyrdom, were presented to her every day, varied in a thousand forms. The notion of waiting to ask the King before a decision was made had been unobtrusively shuffled aside. Any such cowardice was not not to be thought of. The whole point of her action-the whole grandeur-would lie in taking it without the King’s knowledge, in leaving him utterly free to repudiate it, so that all the benefits should be his, and all the risks hers; and with the risk, of course, all the magnanimity, the pathos, the tragedy, and the originality. And also, the Tempter hinted, it would be no use asking the King, for he would certainly not approve the action men were like that. The King must be forced to be free. Now, while she was on her own-now or never-the noble thing must be achieved; and with that “Now or never” he began to play on a fear which the Lady apparently shared with the women of earth-the fear that life might be wasted, some great opportunity let slip. “How if I were as a tree that could have borne gourds and yet bore none,” she said. Ransom tried to convince her that children were fruit enough. But the Un- man asked whether this elaborate division of the human race into two sexes could possibly be meant for no other purpose than offspring?-a matter which might have been more simply provided for, as it was in many of the plants. A moment later it was explaining that men like Ransom in his own world-men of that intensely male and backward-looking type who always shrank away from the new good-had continuously laboured to keep woman down to mere child-bearing and to ignore the high destiny for which Maleldil had actually created her. It told her that such men had already done incalculable harm. Let her look to it that nothing of the sort happened on Perelandra. It was at this stage that it began to teach her many new words: words like Creative and Intuition and Spiritual. But that was one of its false steps. When she had at last been made to understand what “creative” meant she forgot all about the Great Risk and the tragic loneliness and laughed for a whole minute on end. Finally she told the Unman that it was younger even than Piebald, and sent them both away.
Ransom gained ground over that; but on the following day he lost it all by losing his temper. The enemy had been pressing on her with more than usual ardour the nobility of self sacrifice and self-dedication, and the enchantment seemed to be deepening in her mind every moment, when Ransom, goaded beyond all patience, had
