Perelandra Read Online Free PDF Page B

younger. In the old days he had been beginning to show a few grey hairs; but now the beard which swept his chest was pure gold.
    ‘Hullo, you’ve cut your foot,’ said Humphrey: and I saw now that Ransom was bleeding from the heel.
    ‘Ugh, it’s cold down here,’ said Ransom. ‘I hope you’ve got the boiler going and some hot water – and some clothes.’
    ‘Yes,’ said I, as we followed him into the house. ‘Humphrey thought of all that. I’m afraid I shouldn’t have.’
    Ransom was now in the bathroom, with the door open, veiled in clouds of steam, and Humphrey and I were talking to him from the landing. Our questions were more numerous than he could answer.
    ‘That idea of Schiaparelli’s is all wrong,’ he shouted. ‘They have an ordinary day and night there,’ and ‘No, my heel doesn’t hurt – or, at least, it’s only just begun to,’ and ‘Thanks, any old clothes. Leave them on the chair,’ and ‘No, thanks. I don’t somehow feel like bacon or eggs or anything of that kind. No fruit, you say? Oh well, no matter. Bread or porridge or something,’ and ‘I’ll be down in five minutes now.’
    He kept on asking if we were really all right and seemed to think we looked ill. I went down to get the breakfast, and Humphrey said he would stay and examine and dress the cut on Ransom’s heel. When he rejoined me I was looking at one of the red petals which had come in the casket.
    ‘That’s rather a beautiful flower,’ said I, handing it to him. ‘Yes,’ said Humphrey, studying it with the handsand eyes of a scientist. ‘What extraordinary delicacy! It makes an English violet seem like a coarse weed.’
    ‘Let’s put some of them in water.’
    ‘Not much good. Look – it’s withered already.’
    ‘How do you think he is?’
    ‘Tip-top in general. But I don’t quite like that heel. He says the haemorrhage has been going on for a long time.’ Ransom joined us, fully dressed, and I poured out the tea. And all that day and far into the night he told us the story that follows.

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    What it is like to travel in a celestial coffin was a thing that Ransom never described. He said he couldn’t. But odd hints about that journey have come out at one time or another when he was talking of quite different matters.
    According to his own account he was not what we call conscious, and yet at the same time the experience was a very positive one with a quality of its own. On one occasion, someone had been talking about ‘seeing life’ in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B., who was present (and who is an Anthroposophist), said something I can’t quite remember about ‘seeing life’ in a very different sense. I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make ‘the form of Life itself’ visible to the inner eye. At any rate Ransom let himself in for a long cross-examination by failing to conceal the fact that he attached some very definite idea to this. He even went so far – under extreme pressure – as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a ‘coloured shape’. Asked ‘what colour?’, he gave a curious look and could only say ‘what colours! yes, what colours!’ But then he spoiled it all by adding, ‘of course it wasn’t colour at all really. I mean, not what we’d call colour,’ and shutting up completely for the rest of the evening. Another hint came outwhen a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment, and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as ‘So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!’ when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, ‘Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a