The Pilgrim's Regress (24 page)

The the Guide sang:

‘Nearly they stood who fall;

Themselves as they look back

See always in the track

The one false step, where all

Even yet, by lightest swerve

Of foot not yet enslaved,

By smallest tremor of the smallest nerve,

Might have been saved.

‘Nearly they fell who stand,

And with cold after fear

Look back to mark how near

They grazed the Sirens' land,

Wondering that subtle fate,

By threads so spidery fine,

The choice of ways so small, the event so great,

Should thus entwine.

‘Therefore oh, man, have fear

Lest oldest fears be true,

Lest thou too far pursue

The road that seems so clear,

And step, secure, a hair's

Breadth past the hair-breadth bourne,

Which, being once crossed forever unawares,

Denies return.'

V

Superbia

T
HEN THEY WENT FURTHER
and saw in the rocks beside them on the left what seemed at first sight a skeleton, but as they drew nearer they saw that there was indeed skin stretched over its bones and eyes flaming in the sockets of its skull. And it was scrabbling and puddering to and fro on what appeared to be a mirror; but it was only the rock itself scraped clean of every speck of dust and fibre of lichen and polished by the continued activity of this famished creature.

‘This is one of the Enemy's daughters,' said the Guide, ‘and her name is Superbia. But when you last saw her, perhaps she wore the likeness of three pale men.'

As they passed her she began to croak out her song.

‘I have scraped clean the plateau from the filthy earth,

Earth the unchaste, the fruitful, the great grand maternal,

Sprawling creature, lolling at random and supine

The broad-faced, sluttish helot, the slave wife

Grubby and warm, who opens unashamed

Her thousand wombs unguarded to the lickerous sun.

Now I have scoured my rock clean from the filthy earth.

On it no root can strike and no blade come to birth,

And though I starve of hunger it is plainly seen

That I have eaten nothing common or unclean.

‘I have by fasting purged away the filthy flesh,

Flesh the hot, moist, salt scrum, the obscenity

And parasitic tetter, from my noble bones.

I have torn from my breasts—I was an udder'd beast—

My child, for he was fleshly. Flesh is caught

By a contagion carried from impure

Generation to generation through the body's sewer.

And now though I am barren, yet no man can doubt

I am clean and my iniquities are blotted out.

‘I have made my soul (once filthy) a hard, pure, bright

Mirror of steel: no damp breath breathes upon it

Warming and dimming: it would freeze the finger

If any touched it. I have a mineral soul.

Minerals eat no food and void no excrement,

So I, borrowing nothing and repaying

Nothing, neither growing nor decaying,

Myself am to myself, a mortal God, a self-contained

Unwindowed monad, unindebted and unstained.'

John and the Guide were hurrying past, but Vertue hesitated.

‘Her means may be wrong,' he said, ‘but there is something to be said for her idea of the End.'

‘What idea?' said the Guide.

‘Why—self-sufficiency, integrity. Not to commit herself, you know. All said and done, there is something foul about all these natural processes.'

‘You had better be careful of your thoughts here,' said the Guide. ‘Do not confuse Repentance with Disgust: for the one comes from the Landlord and the other from the Enemy.'

‘And yet disgust has saved many a man from worse evils.'

‘By the power of the Landlord it may be so—now and then. But don't try to play that game for yourself. Fighting one vice with another is about the most dangerous strategy there is. You know what happens to kingdoms that use alien mercenaries.'

‘I suppose you are right,' said Vertue, ‘and yet this feeling goes very deep. Is it wholly wrong to be ashamed of being in the body?'

‘The Landlord's Son was not. You know the verses—“When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man.” '

‘That was a special case.'

‘It was a special case because it was the archtypal case. Has no one told you that that Lady spoke and acted for all that bears, in the presence of all that begets: for this country as against the things East and West: for matter as against form and patiency against agency? Is not the very word Mother akin to Matter? Be sure that the whole of this land, with all its warmth and wetness and fecundity with all the dark and the heavy and the multitudinous for which you are too dainty, spoke through her lips when she said that He had regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden. And if that Lady was a maid though a mother, you need not doubt that the nature which is, to human sense, impure, is also pure.'

‘Well,' said Vertue, turning away from Superbia, ‘I will think this over.'

‘One thing you may as well know,' remarked the Guide, ‘whatever virtues you may attribute to the Landlord, decency is not one of them. That is why so few of your national jokes have any point in my country.'

And as they continued their journey, Vertue sang:

‘Because of endless pride

Reborn with endless error,

Each hour I look aside

Upon my secret mirror

Trying all postures there

To make my image fair.

‘Thou givest grapes, and I,

Though starving, turn to see

How dark the cool globes lie

In the white hand of me,

And linger gazing thither

Till the live clusters wither.

‘So should I quickly die

Narcissus-like of want,

But, in the glass, my eye

Catches such forms as haunt

Beyond nightmare, and make

Pride humble for pride's sake.

‘Then and then only turning

The stiff neck round, I grow

A molten man all burning

And look behind and know

Who made the lass, whose light makes dark, whose fair

Makes foul, my shadowy form reflected there

That Self-Love, brought to bed of Love may die and bear

Her sweet son in despair.'

VI

Ignorantia

S
TILL I LAY DREAMING
and saw these three continue their journey through that long and narrow land with the rocks upon their left and the swamps on their right. They had much talk on the way of which I have remembered only snatches since I woke. I remember that they passed Ignorantia some miles beyond her sister Superbia and that led the pilgrims to question their Guide as to whether the Ignorance of the Tough-minded and the Clevers would some day be cured. He said there was less chance of that now than there had ever been: for till recently the Northern people had been made to learn the languages of Pagus ‘and that meant,' said the Guide, ‘that at least they started no further from the light than the old Pagans themselves and had therefore the chance to come at last to Mother Kirk. But now they are cutting themselves off even from that roundabout route.'

‘Why have they changed?' asked one of the others.

‘Why did the shadow whom you call Sensible leave his old house and go to practise
in a hotel? Because his Drudge revolted. The same thing is happening all over the plateau and in Mammon's country: their slaves are escaping further north and becoming dwarfs, and therefore the masters are turning all their attention to machinery, by which they hope to be able to lead their old life without slaves. And this seems to them so important that they are suppressing every kind of knowledge except mechanical knowledge. I am speaking of the sub-tenants. No doubt the great landowners in the back-ground have their own reasons for encouraging this movement.'

‘There must be a good side somewhere to this revolution,' said Vertue. ‘It is too solid—it looks too lasting—to be a mere evil. I cannot believe that the Landlord would otherwise allow the whole face of nature and the whole structure of life to be so permanently and radically changed.'

The Guide laughed. ‘You are falling into their own error,' he said. ‘The change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught—an inability to disbelieve advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. Their next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves—though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do. It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change. And as for permanence—consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.'

And the Guide sang:

‘Iron will eat the world's old beauty up.

Girder and grid and gantry will arise,

Iron forest of engines will arise,

Criss-cross of iron crotchet. For your eyes

No green or growth. Over all, the skies

Scribbled from end to end with boasts and lies.

(When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou

Saw'st beyond death the resurrection of the dead.)

‘Clamour shall clean put out the voice of wisdom,

The printing-presses with their clapping wings,

Fouling your nourishment. Harpy wings,

Filling your minds all day with foolish things,

Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings

Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.

(When Israel descended into Egypt, Thou

Didst purpose both the bondage and the coming out.)

‘The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,

And fools crying, Because it has begun

It will continue as it has begun!

The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run

Faster for ever. The old age is done,

We have new lights and see without the sun.

(Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,

Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)'

VII

Luxuria

A
FTER THIS, JOHN LOOKED
up and saw that they were approaching a concourse of living creatures beside the road. Their way was so long and desolate (and he was footsore too) that he welcomed any diversion, and he cast his eyes curiously upon this new thing. When he was nearer he saw that the concourse was of men, but they lay about in such attitudes and were so disfigured that he had not recognized them for men: moreover, the place was to the south of the road, and therefore the ground was very soft and some of them were half under water and some hidden in the reeds. All seemed to be suffering from some disease of a crumbling and disintegrating kind. It was doubtful whether all the life that pulsated in their bodies was their own: and soon John was certain, for he saw what seemed to be a growth on a man's arm slowly detach itself under his eyes and become a fat reddish creature, separable from the parent body, though it was in no hurry to separate itself. And once he had seen that, his eyes were opened and he saw the same thing happening all round him, and the whole assembly was but a fountain of writhing and reptilian life quickening as he watched and sprouting out of the human forms. But in each form the anguished eyes were alive, sending to him unutterable messages from the central life which survived, self-conscious, though the self were but a fountain of vermin. One old cripple, whose face was all gone but the mouth and eyes, was sitting up to receive drink from a cup which a woman held to his lips. When he had as much as she thought good, she snatched the cup from his hands and went on to her next patient. She was dark but beautiful.

‘Don't lag,' said the Guide, ‘this is a very dangerous place. You had better come away. This is Luxuria.'

But John's eyes were caught by a young man to whom the witch had just come in her rounds. The disease, by seeming, had hardly begun with him: there was an unpleasant suspicion about his fingers—something a little too supple for joints—a little independent of his other movements—but, on the whole, he was still a well-looking person. And as the witch came to him the hands shot out to the cup, and the man drew them back again: and the hands went crawling out for the cup a second time, and again the man wrenched them back, and turned his face away, and cried out: