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 cant go on.
The Enemy was using Third Degree methods. It seemed to Ransom that, but for a miracle, the Ladys 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. Its 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 Maleldils representative?
The answer which came back to him, quick as a fencers or a tennis players 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. Ive done all I can. Ive talked till Im sick of it. Its no good, I tell you. He tried to persuade himself that he, Ransom, could not possibly be Maleldils 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 Enemys. 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