The Pilgrim's Regress (18 page)

‘I am not fit for anything, apparently,' said Vertue. ‘But I must go on.'

‘Go on where? You are not still hoping to cross the canyon? Do you not believe what Wisdom has told us?'

‘I do. That is why I am going on.'

‘Sit down at least for a moment,' said John, ‘and explain yourself.'

‘It is plain enough!'

‘It isn't plain at all.'

Vertue spoke impatiently.

‘Did you not hear what Wisdom said about the rules?' he asked.

‘Of course I did,' said John.

‘Well, then, he has given me back the rules. T
hat
puzzle is solved. The rules have to be obeyed, as I always thought. I know that now better than I have ever known it before.'

‘Well?'

‘And didn't you see what all the rest came to? The rules are from this Spirit or whatever he calls it, which is somehow also me. And any disinclination to obey the rules is the other part of me—the mortal part. Does it not follow from that, and from everything else he said, that the real disobedience to the rules begins with being in this country at all? This country is simply
not
the Island,
not
the rules: that is its definition. My mortal self—that is, for all practical purposes, myself—can be defined only as the part of me that is against the rules. Just as the Spirit answers to the Landlord, so this whole world answers to the black hole.'

‘I take it all exactly the other way,' said John. ‘Rather this world corresponds to the Landlord's castle. Everything is this Spirit's imagination, and therefore everything, properly understood, is good and happy. That the glory of this world in the end is appearance, leaves the world more glorious yet. I quite agree that the rules—the authority of the rules—becomes stronger than ever: but their content must be—well, easier. Perhaps I should say richer—more concrete.

‘Their content must become harsher. If the real good is simply “what is not here” and
here
means simply “the place where the good is not,” what can the real rule be except to live here as little as possible, to commit ourselves as little as we can to the system of this world? I used to talk of innocent pleasures, fool that I was—as if anything could be innocent for us whose mere existence is a fall—as if all that a man eats or drinks or begets were not propagated curse.'

‘Really, Vertue, this is a very strange view. The effect of Mr. Wisdom's lessons on me has been just the opposite. I have been thinking how much of the Puritanian virus there must still be in me, to have held me back so long from the blameless generosity of Nature's breasts. Is not the meanest thing, in its degree, a mirror of the One; the lightest or the wildest pleasure as necessary to the perfection of the whole as the most herioc sacrifice? I am assured that in the Absolute, every flame even of carnal passion burns on—'

‘Can even eating, even the coarsest food and the barest pittance, be justified? The flesh is but a living corruption—'

‘There was a great deal to be said for Media after all—'

‘I see that Savage was wiser than he knew—'

‘It is true she had a dark complexion. And yet—is not brown as necessary to the spectrum as any other colour?'

‘Is not every colour equally a corruption of the white radiance?'

‘What we call evil—our greatest wickednesses—seen in the true setting is an element in the good. I am the doubter and the doubt.'

‘What we call our righteousness is filthy rags. You are a fool, John, and I am going. I am going up into the rocks till I find where the wind is coldest and the ground hardest and the life of man furthest away. My notice to quit has not yet come, and I must be stained a while longer with the dye of our country. I shall still be part of that dark cloud which offends the white light: but I shall make that part of the cloud which is called Me as thin, as nearly not a cloud, as I can. Body and mind shall pay for the crime of their existence. If there is any fasting, or watching, any mutilation or self-torture more harsh to nature than another, I shall find it out.'

‘Are you mad?' said John.

‘I have just become sane,' said Vertue. ‘Why are you staring at me thus? I know I am pale and my pulse beats like a hammer. So much the saner! Disease is better than health and sees clearer, for it is one degree nearer to the Spirit, one degree less involved in the riot of our animal existence. But it will need stronger pains than this to kill the obscene thirst for life which I drank in with my mother's milk.'

‘Why should we leave this pleasant valley?' John began, but Vertue cut him short.

‘Who spoke of We? Do you think that I asked or expected
you
to accompany me?
You
to sleep on thorns and eat sloes?'

‘You don't mean that we are to part?' said John.

‘Pah!' said Vertue. ‘You could not do the things I intend to do: and if you could, I would have none of you. Friendship—affection—what are these but the subtlest chains that tie us to our present country? He would be a fool indeed who mortified the body and left the mind free to be happy and thus still to affirm—to wallow in—her finite will. It is not this pleasure or that, but
all
that are to be cut off. No knife will cut deep enough to end the cancer. But I'll cut as deep as I can.'

He rose, still swaying, and continued his way over the meadow northward. He held his hand to his side as though he was in pain. Once or twice he nearly fell.

‘What are you following me for?' he shouted to John. ‘Go back.'

John stopped for a moment, checked by the hatred in his friend's face. Then, tentatively, he went on again. He thought that Vertue's illness had harmed his brain and had some indistinct hope that he might find means to humour him and bring him back. Before they had gone many paces, however, Vertue turned again and lifted a stone in his hand. ‘Be off,' he said, ‘or I'll throw it. We have nothing to do with one another, you and I. My own body and my own soul are enemies, and do you think I will spare
you
?'

John halted, undetermined, and then ducked, for the other had hurled the stone. I saw them go on like this for some way, John following at a distance, and stopping, and then continuing again, while Vertue every now and then stoned him and reviled him. But at last the distance between them was too great either for voice or stone to carry.

II

John Led

A
S THEY WENT ON
thus John saw that the valley narrowed and the sides of it grew steeper. At the same time, the crevasse on his left hand which separated him from the western forest, became wider and wider: so that, what with that, and with the narrowing of the valley as a whole, the level piece where they were travelling was constantly diminished. Soon it was no longer the floor of the valley but only a ledge on its eastern side: and the crevasse revealed itself as being not a slot in the floor but the very floor. John saw that he was, in fact, walking on a shelf half-way down one side of the Grand Canyon. The cliff towered above him.

Presently a kind of spur or root of rock came out from the cliff and barred their way—crossing the ledge with a ruin of granite. And as Vertue began to scramble about the bases of this ascent, trying this grip and that to go up, John gained on him and came again within ear-shot. Before he came to the foot of the crags, however, Vertue had begun to climb. John heard his gasping as he struggled from hold to hold. Once he slipped back and left a little trail of blood where the rock skinned his ankle: but he went on again, and soon John saw him stand up, shaking and wiping the sweat out of his eyes, apparently at the top. He looked down and made gestures threateningly, and shouted, but he was too far for John to hear his words. Next moment John leaped aside to save his limbs, for Vertue had sent a great boulder rolling down: and as its thunder ceased echoing in the gorge and John looked up again, Vertue had gone over the spur out of sight and he saw no more of him.

John sat down in the desolate place. The grass here was finer and shorter, such grass as sheep love, which grows in the quiet intervals between the rocks. The windings of the gorge had already shut off the sight of Wisdom's Valley: yet I saw that John had no thought save of going back. There was indeed a confusion of shame and sorrow and bewilderment in his mind, but he put it all aside and held fast to his fear of the rocks and of meeting Vertue, now mad, in some narrow place whence he could not retreat. He thought, ‘I will sit here and rest, till I get my wind, and then I will go back. I must live out the rest of my life as best I can.' Then suddenly he heard himself hailed from above. A Man was descending where Vertue had gone up.

‘Hi!' shouted the Man. ‘Your friend has gone on. Surely you will follow him?'

‘He is mad, sir,' said John.

‘No madder than you, and no saner,' said the Man. ‘You will both recover if only you will keep together.'

‘I cannot get up the rocks,' said John.

‘I will give you a hand,' said the Man. And he came down till he was within reach of John, and held out his hand. And John grew pale as paper and nausea came upon him.

‘It's now or never,' said the Man.

Then John set his teeth and took the hand that was offered him. He trembled at the very first grip he was made to take but he could not go back for they were speedily so high that he dared not attempt the return alone: and what with pushing and pulling the Man got him right up to the top and there he fell down on his belly in the grass to pant and to goan at the pains in his chest. When he sat up the Man was gone.

III

John Forgets Himself

J
OHN LOOKED BACK AND
turned away with a shudder. All thought of descending again must be put aside at once and for ever. ‘That fellow has left me in a nice fix,' he said bitterly. Next, he looked ahead. The cliffs still rose high above him and dropped far below him: but there was a ledge on a level with him, a narrow ledge, ten feet broad at its best and two at its worst, winding away along the cliff till it became but a green thread. His heart failed him. Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom, whether they would give him any strength. ‘It is only myself,' he said. ‘It is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I—I—I. Can I remember that?' But then he felt so different from the eternal Spirit that he could call it ‘I' no longer. ‘It is all very well for
him,
' said John, ‘but why does he give me no help? I want help. Help.' Then he gazed up at the cliffs and the narrow sky, blue and remote, between them, and he thought of that universal mind and of the shining tranquillity hidden somewhere behind the colours and the shapes, the pregnant silence under all the sounds, and he thought, ‘If one drop of all that ocean would flow into me now—if I, the mortal, could but realize that I
am
that, all would be well. I know there is something there. I know the sensuous curtain is not a cheat.' In the bitterness of his soul he looked up again, saying: ‘Help. Help. I want Help.'

But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, a new fear, far deeper than his fear of the cliffs, sprang at him from the hiding-place, close to the surface, where it had lain against this moment. As a man in a dream talks without fear to his dead friend, and only afterwards bethinks himself, ‘It was a ghost! I have talked with a ghost!' and wakes screaming: even so John sprang up as he saw what he had done.

‘I have been
praying,
' he said. ‘It is the Landlord under a new name. It is the rules and the black hole and the slavery dressed out in a new fashion to catch me. And I am caught. Who would have thought the old spider's web was so subtle?'

But this was insupportable to him and he said that he had only fallen into a metaphor. Even Mr. Wisdom had confessed that Mother Kirk and the Stewards gave an account of the truth in picture writing. And one must use metaphors. The feelings and the imagination needed that support. ‘The great thing,' said John, ‘is to keep the intellect free from them: to remember that they
are
metaphors.'

IV

John Finds his Voice

H
E WAS MUCH COMFORTED
by this idea of metaphor, and as he was now also rested, he began his journey along the cliff path with some degree of timid resolution. But it was very dreadful to him in the narrower places: and his courage seemed to him to decrease rather than to grow as he proceeded. Indeed he soon found that he could go forward at all only by remembering Mr. Wisdom's Absolute incessantly. It was necessary by repeated efforts of the will to turn thither, consciously to draw from that endless reservoir the little share of vitality that he needed for the next narrow place. He knew now that he was praying, but he thought that he had drawn the fangs of that knowledge. ‘In a sense,' he said, ‘Spirit is not I. I am it, but I am not the whole of it. When I turn back to that part of it which is not I—that far greater part which my soul does not exhaust—surely that part is to me an Other. It must become, for my imagination, not really “I” but “Thou.” A metaphor—perhaps more than a metaphor. Of course there is no need at all to confuse it with the
mythical
Landlord. . . . However I think of it, I think of it inadequately.'

Then a new thing happened to John, and he began to sing: and this is as much of his song as I remember from my dream:

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow

When I attempt the ineffable name, murmuring T
hou
;

And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart

Meanings, I know, that cannot be the thing thou art.