C. Lewis - The Pilgrim’s Regress

With that she put up her hands to her mouth and called. Instantly from behind every tree there slipped out a brown girl: each of them was just like herself: the little wood was full of them.

‘What are these?’

‘Our daughters,’ said she. ‘Did you not know you were a father? Did you think I was barren, you fool? And now, children,’ she added, turning to the mob, ‘go with your father.’

Suddenly John became very much afraid and leaped over the wall into the road. There he ran home as fast as he could.

6

QUEM QUAERITIS IN SEPULCHRO? NON EST HIC

Sin and the Law torment John, each aggravating the other – Sweet Desire returns and he resolves to make it the object of his life

From that day forth until he left his home John was not happy. First of all the weight of all the rules that he had broken descended upon him: for while he was going daily to the wood he had almost forgotten the Landlord, and now suddenly the whole reckoning was to pay. In the second place, his last sight of the Island was now so long ago that he had forgotten how to wish for it even, and almost how to set about looking for it. At first he feared to go back to the window in the wall, lest he should meet the brown girl: but he soon found that her family were so constantly with him that place made no difference. Wherever he sat down to rest on a walk, there sooner or later, would be a little brown girl beside him. When he sat of an evening with his father and mother, a brown girl, visible only to him, would sidle in and sit at his feet: and sometimes his mother would fix her eyes on him and even ask him what he was staring at. But most of all they plagued him whenever he had a fit of fright about the Landlord and the black hole. It was always the same. He would wake one morning full o f fear, and take down his card and read it – the front of it – and determine that today he would really begin to keep the rules. And for that day he would, but the strain was intolerable. He used to comfort himself by saying, It will get more easy as I go on. Tomorrow it will be easier. But tomorrow was always harder, and on the third day it was worst of all. And on that third day when he crept away to bed, tired to death and raw in his soul, always he would be sure to find a brown girl waiting for him there: and on such a night he had no spirit to resist her blandishments.

But when he perceived that no place was more, or less, haunted than another, then he came sidling back to the window in the wall. He had little hopes of it. He visited it more as a man visits a grave. It was full winter now, and the grove was naked and dark, the trees dripped in it, and the stream – he saw now that it was little more than a gutter – was full of dead leaves and mud. The wall, too, was broken where he had jumped over it. Yet John stood there a long time, many a winter evening, looking in. And he seemed to himself to have reached the bottom of misery.

One night he was trudging home from it, when he began to weep. He thought of that first day when he had heard the music and seen the Island: and the longing, not now for the Island itself, but for that moment when he had so sweetly longed for it, began to swell up in a warm wave, sweeter, sweeter, till he thought he could bear no more, and then yet sweeter again, till on the top of it, unmistakably, there came the short sound of music, as if a string had been plucked or a bell struck once. At the same moment a coach had gone past him. He turned and looked after it, in time to see a head even then being withdrawn from the window: and he thought he heard a voice say, Come. And far beyond the coach, among the hills of the western horizon, he thought that he saw a shining sea, and a faint shape of an Island, not much more than a cloud. It was nothing compared with what he had seen the first time: it was so much further away. But his mind was made up. That night he waited till his parents were asleep, and then, putting some few needments together, he stole out by the back door and set his face to the West to seek for the Island.

BOOK 2

THRILL

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything that is in the heaven above.

EXODUS

The soul of man, therefore, desiring to learn what manner of things these are, casteth her eyes upon objects akin to herself, whereof none sufficeth. And then it is that she saith, ‘With the Lord and with the things whereof I spoke, there is nothing in that likeness; what then is it like?’ This is the question, oh son of Dionysius, that is the cause of all evils – or rather the travail wherein the soul travaileth about it.

PLATO 1

Following false copies of the good, that no Sincere fulfilment of their promise make.

DANTE

In hand she boldly took To make another like the former dame, Another Florimell in shape and look So lively and so like that many it mistook.

SPENSER

1Some think it wrongly attributed to him.

1

DIXIT INSIPIENS

John begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth Century Rationalism, which can explain away religion by any number of methods – ‘Evolution’ and ‘Comparative Religion’, and all the guess-work which masquerades as ‘Science’

Still I lay dreaming in bed, and looked, and I saw John go plodding along the road westward in the bitter black of a frosty night. He walked so long that the morning broke. Then presently John saw a little inn by the side of the road and a woman with a broom who had opened the door and was sweeping out the rubbish. So he turned in there and called for a breakfast, and while it was cooking he sat down in a hard chair by the newly-lit fire and fell asleep. When he woke the sun was shining in through the window and there was his breakfast laid. Another traveller was already eating: he was a big man with red hair and a red stubble on all his three chins, buttoned up very tight. When they had both finished the traveller rose and cleared his throat and stood with his back to the fire. Then he cleared his throat again and said:

‘A fine morning, young sir.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said John.

‘You are going West, perhaps, young man?’

‘I – I think so.’

‘It is possible that you don’t know me.’

‘I am a stranger here.’

‘No offence,’ said the stranger. ‘My name is Mr Enlightenment, and I believe it is pretty generally known. I shall be happy to give you my assistance and protection as far as our ways lie together.’

John thanked him very much for this and when they went out from the inn there was a neat little trap waiting, with a fat little pony between the shafts: and its eyes were so bright and its harness was so well polished that it was difficult to say which was twinkling the keener in the morning sunshine. They both got into the trap and Mr Enlightenment whipped up the fat little pony and they went bowling along the road as if nobody had a care in the world. Presently they began to talk.

‘And where might you come from, my fine lad?’ said Mr Enlightenment.

‘From Puritania, sir,’ said John.

‘A good place to leave, eh?’

‘I am so glad you think that,’ cried John. ‘I was afraid –’

‘I hope I am a man of the world,’ said Mr Enlightenment. ‘Any young fellow who is anxious to better himself may depend on finding sympathy and support in me. Puritania! Why, I suppose you have been brought up to be afraid of the Landlord.’

‘Well, I must admit I sometimes do feel rather nervous.’

‘You may make your mind easy, my boy. There is no such person.’

‘There is no Landlord?’

‘There is absolutely no such thing – I might even say no such entity – in existence. There never has been and never will be.’