vanished from her face. It was as easy to read as that of a man in a shelter when a bomb is coming.
“What is it?” she repeated.
“It is called Fear,” said Weston’s mouth. Then the creature turned its face full on Ransom and grinned.
“Fear,” she said. “This is Fear,” pondering the discovery; then, with abrupt finality, “I do not like it.”
“It will go away,” said the Un-man, when Ransom interrupted.
“It will never go away if you do what he wishes. It is into more and more fear that he is leading you.”
“It is,” said the Un-man, “into the great waves and through them and beyond. Now that you know Fear, you see that it must be you who shall taste it on behalf of your race. You know the King will not. You do not wish him to. But there is no cause for fear in this little thing: rather for joy. What is fearful in it?”
“Things being two when they are one,” replied the Lady decisively. “That thing” (she pointed at the mirror) “is me and not me.”
“But if you do not look you will never know how beautiful you are.”
“It comes into my mind, Stranger,” she answered, “that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself.”
“A fruit cannot do that because it is only a fruit,” said the Un-man. “But we can do it. We call this thing a mirror. A man can love himself, and be together with himself. That is what it means to be a man or a woman-to walk alongside oneself as if one were a second person and to delight in one’s own beauty. Mirrors were made to teach this art.”
“Is it a good?” said the Lady. “No,” said Ransom.
“How can you find out without trying?” said the Un-man. “If you try it and it is not good,” said Ransom, “how do you know whether you will be able to stop doing it?”
“I am walking alongside myself already,” said the Lady. “But I do not yet know what I look like. If I have become two I had better know what the other is. As for you, Piebald, one look will show me this woman’s face and why should I look more than once?”
She took the mirror, timidly but firmly, from the Un-man and looked into it in silence for the better part of a minute. Then she let it sink and stood holding it at her side.
“It is very strange,” she said at last.
“It is very beautiful,” said the Un-man. “Do you not think so?”
“Yes.”
“But you have not yet found what you set out to find.”
“What was that? I have forgotten.”
“Whether the robe of feathers made you more beautiful or less.”
“I saw only a face.”
“Hold it further away and you will see the whole of the alongside woman-the other who is yourself. Or no-I will hold it.”
The commonplace suggestions of the scene became grotesque at this stage. She looked at herself first with the robe, then without it, then with it again; finally she decided against it and threw it away. The Un-man picked it up.
“Will you not keep it?” he said; “you might wish to carry it on some days even if you do not wish for it on all days.”
“Keep it?” she asked, not clearly understanding.
“I had forgotten,” said the Un-man. “I had forgotten that you would not live on the Fixed Land nor build a house nor in any way become mistress of your own days. Keeping means putting a thing where you know you can always find it again, and where rain, and beasts, and other people cannot reach it. I would give you this mirror to keep. It would be the Queen’s mirror, a gift brought into the world from Deep Heaven: the other women would not have it. But you have reminded me. There can be no gifts, no keeping, no foresight while you live as you do-from day to day, like the beasts.”
But the Lady did not appear to be listening to him. She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BECAUSE he had slept so late that morning Ransom found it easy to keep awake the following night. The sea had become calm and there was no rain. He sat upright in the darkness with his back against a tree. The others were close beside him-the Lady, to judge by her breathing, asleep and the Un-man doubtless waiting to arouse her and resume its solicitations the moment Ransom should doze. For the third time, more strongly than ever before, it came into his head, “This can’t go on.”
The Enemy was using Third Degree methods. It seemed to Ransom that, but for a miracle, the Lady’s resistance was bound to be worn away in the end. Why did no miracle come? Or rather, why no miracle on the right side? For the presence of the Enemy was in itself a kind of Miracle. Had Hell a prerogative to work wonders? Why did Heaven work none? Not for the first time he found himself questioning Divine Justice. He could not understand why Maleldil should remain absent when the Enemy was there in person.
But while he was thinking thus, as suddenly and sharply as if the solid darkness about him had spoken with articulate voice, he knew that Maleldil was not absent. That sense-so very welcome yet never welcomed without the overcoming of a certain resistance-that sense of the Presence which he had once or twice before experienced on Perelandra, returned to him. The darkness was packed quite full. It seemed to press upon his trunk so that he could hardly use his lungs; it seemed to close in on his skull like a crown of intolerable weight so that for a space he could hardly think. Moreover, he became aware in some indefinable fashion that it had never been absent, that only some unconscious activity of his own had succeeded in ignoring it for the past few days.
Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places. Thus, while; one part of Ransom remained, as it were, prostrated in a hush of fear and love that resembled a kind of death, something else inside him unaffected by reverence, continued. to pour queries and objections into his brain. “It’s all very well,” said this voluble critic, “a presence of that sort! But the Enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is Maleldil’s representative?”
The answer which came back to him, quick as a fencer’s or a tennis player’s riposte, out of the silence and the darkness, almost took his breath away. It seemed blasphemous. “Anyway, what can I do?” babbled the voluble self. “I’ve done all I can. I’ve talked till I’m sick of it. It’s no good, I tell you.” He tried to persuade himself that he, Ransom, could not possibly be Maleldil’s representative as the Un-man was the representative of Hell. The suggestion was, he argued, itself diabolical-a temptation to fatuous pride, to megalomania. He was horrified when the darkness simply flung back this argument in his face, almost impatiently. And then-he wondered how it had escaped him till now-lie was forced to perceive that his own coming to Perelandra was at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy’s. That miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle.
“Oh, but this is nonsense,” said the voluble self. He, Ransom, with his ridiculous piebald body and his ten times defeated arguments-what sort of a miracle was that? His mind darted hopefully down a side-alley that seemed to promise escape. Very well then. He had been brought here miraculously. He was in God’s hands. As long as he did his best-and he had done his best-God would see to the final issue. He had not succeeded. But he had done his best. No one could do more. “Tis not in mortals to command success.” He must not be worried about the final result. Maleldil would see to that. And Maleldil would bring him safe back to Earth after his very real, though unsuccessful, efforts. Probably Maleldil’s real intention was that he should publish to the human race the truths he
