The Great Divorce (7 page)

One of the most painful meetings we witnessed was between a woman's Ghost and a Bright Spirit who had apparently been her brother. They must have met only a moment before we ran across them, for the Ghost was just saying in a tone of unconcealed disappointment, ‘Oh…Reginald! It's
you,
is it?'

‘Yes, dear,' said the Spirit. ‘I know you expected someone else. Can you…I hope you can be a little glad to see even me; for the present.'

‘I did think Michael would have come,' said the Ghost; and then, almost fiercely, ‘He is
here,
of course?'

‘He's there—far up in the mountains.'

‘Why hasn't he come to meet me? Didn't he know?'

‘My dear (don't worry, it will all come right presently) it wouldn't have done. Not yet. He wouldn't be able to
see or hear you as you are at present. You'd be totally invisible to Michael. But we'll soon build you up.'

‘I should have thought if
you
can see me, my own son could!'

‘It doesn't always happen like that. You see, I have specialised in this sort of work.'

‘Oh, it's work, is it?' snapped the Ghost. Then, after a pause, ‘Well. When
am
I going to be allowed to see him?'

‘There's no question of being
allowed,
Pam. As soon as it's possible for him to see you, of course he will. You need to be thickened up a bit.'

‘How?' said the Ghost. The monosyllable was hard and a little threatening.

‘I'm afraid the first step is a hard one,' said the Spirit. ‘But after that you'll go on like a house on fire. You will become solid enough for Michael to perceive you when you learn to want Someone Else besides Michael. I don't say “more than Michael”, not as a beginning. That will come later. It's only the little germ of a desire for God that we need to start the process.'

‘Oh, you mean religion and all that sort of thing? This is hardly the moment…and from
you,
of all people. Well, never mind. I'll do whatever's necessary. What do you
want me to do? Come on. The sooner I begin it, the sooner they'll let me see my boy. I'm quite ready.'

‘But, Pam, do think! Don't you see you are not beginning at all as long as you are in that state of mind? You're treating God only as a means to Michael. But the whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake.'

‘You wouldn't talk like that if you were a mother.'

‘You mean, if I were
only
a mother. But there is no such thing as being only a mother. You exist as Michael's mother only because you first exist as God's creature. That relation is older and closer. No, listen, Pam! He also loves. He also has suffered. He also has waited a long time.'

‘If He loved me He'd let me see my boy. If He loved me why did He take Michael away from me? I wasn't going to say anything about that. But it's pretty hard to forgive, you know.'

‘But He had to take Michael away. Partly for Michael's sake…'

‘I'm sure I did my best to make Michael happy. I gave up my whole life…'

‘Human beings can't make one another really happy for long. And secondly, for your sake. He wanted your
merely instinctive love for your child (tigresses share
that,
you know!) to turn into something better. He wanted you to love Michael as He understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God. Sometimes this conversion can be done while the instinctive love is still gratified. But there was, it seems, no chance of that in your case. The instinct was uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac. (Ask your daughter, or your husband. Ask our own mother. You haven't once thought of
her
.) The only remedy was to take away its object. It was a case for surgery. When that first kind of love was thwarted, then there was just a chance that in the loneliness, in the silence, something else might begin to grow.'

‘This is all nonsense—cruel and wicked nonsense. What
right
have you to say things like that about Mother-love? It is the highest and holiest feeling in human nature.'

‘Pam, Pam—no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.'

‘My love for Michael would never have gone bad. Not if we'd lived together for millions of years.'

‘You are mistaken. And you must know. Haven't you
met—down there—mothers who have their sons with them, in Hell? Does
their
love make them happy?'

‘If you mean people like the Guthrie woman and her dreadful Bobby, of course not. I hope you're not suggesting…If I had Michael I'd be perfectly happy, even in that town. I wouldn't be always talking about him till everyone hated the sound of his name, which is what Winifred Guthrie does about
her
brat. I wouldn't quarrel with people for not taking enough notice of him and then be furiously jealous if they did. I wouldn't go about whining and complaining that he wasn't nice to me. Because, of course, he would be nice. Don't you dare to suggest that Michael could ever become like the Guthrie boy. There are some things I won't stand.'

‘What you have seen in the Guthries is what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted.'

‘It's a lie. A wicked, cruel lie. How could anyone love their son more than I did? Haven't I lived only for his memory all these years?'

‘That was rather a mistake, Pam. In your heart of hearts you know it was.'

‘What was a mistake?'

‘All that ten years' ritual of grief. Keeping his room exactly as he'd left it; keeping anniversaries; refusing to
leave that house though Dick and Muriel were both wretched there.'

‘Of course they didn't care. I know that. I soon learned to expect no real sympathy from them.'

‘You're wrong. No man ever felt his son's death more than Dick. Not many girls loved their brothers better than Muriel. It wasn't against Michael they revolted: it was against you—against having their whole life dominated by the tyranny of the past: and not really even Michael's past, but your past.'

‘You are heartless. Everyone is heartless. The past was all I had.'

‘It was all you chose to have. It was the wrong way to deal with a sorrow. It was Egyptian—like embalming a dead body.'

‘Oh, of course. I'm wrong. Everything I say or do is wrong, according to you.'

‘But of course!' said the Spirit, shining with love and mirth so that my eyes were dazzled. ‘That's what we all find when we reach this country. We've all been wrong! That's the great joke. There's no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.'

‘How dare you laugh about it? Give me my boy. Do you hear? I don't care about all your rules and regulations. I don't
believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one had a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.'

‘He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.'

‘What? Not my own son, born out of my own body?'

‘And where is your own body now? Didn't you know that Nature draws to an end? Look! The sun is coming, over the mountains there: it will be up any moment now.'

‘Michael is mine.'

‘How yours? You didn't make him. Nature made him to grow in your body without your will. Even against your will…you sometimes forget that you didn't intend to have a baby then at all. Michael was originally an Accident.'

‘Who told you that?' said the Ghost: and then, recovering itself, ‘It's a lie. It's not true. And it's no business of yours. I hate your religion and I hate and despise your God. I believe in a God of Love.'

‘And yet, Pam, you have no love at this moment for your own mother or for me.'

‘Oh, I see!
That's
the trouble, is it?
Really,
Reginald! The idea of your being hurt because…'

‘Lord love you!' said the Spirit with a great laugh. ‘You needn't bother about that! Don't you know that you
can't
hurt anyone in this country?'

The Ghost was silent and open-mouthed for a moment; more wilted, I thought, by this re-assurance than by anything else that had been said.

‘Come. We will go a bit further,' said my Teacher, laying his hand on my arm.

 

‘Why did you bring me away, Sir?' said I when we had passed out of earshot of this unhappy Ghost.

‘It might take a long while, that conversation,' said my Teacher. ‘And ye have heard enough to see what the choice is.'

‘Is there any hope for her, Sir?'

‘Aye, there's some. What she calls her love for her son has turned into a poor, prickly, astringent sort of thing. But there's still a wee spark of something that's not just herself in it. That might be blown into a flame.'

‘Then some natural feelings are really better than others—I mean, are a better starting-point for the real thing?'

‘Better
and
worse. There's something in natural affec
tion which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.'

‘I don't know that I dare repeat this on Earth, Sir,' said I. ‘They'd say I was inhuman: they'd say I believed in total depravity: they'd say I was attacking the best and the holiest things. They'd call me…'

‘It might do you no harm if they did,' said he with (I really thought) a twinkle in his eye.

‘But could one dare—could one have the face—to go to a bereaved mother, in her misery—when one's not bereaved oneself?…'

‘No, no, Son, that's no office of yours. You're not a good enough man for that. When your own heart's been broken it will be time for you to think of talking. But someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.'

‘The saying is almost too hard for us.'

‘Ah, but it's cruel not to say it. They that know have grown afraid to speak. That is why sorrows that used to purify now only fester.'

‘Keats was wrong, then, when he said he was certain of the holiness of the heart's affections.'

‘I doubt if he knew clearly what he meant. But you and I must be clear. There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion. But look!'

I saw coming towards us a Ghost who carried something on his shoulder. Like all the Ghosts, he was unsubstantial, but they differed from one another as smokes differ. Some had been whitish; this one was dark and oily. What sat on his shoulder was a little red lizard, and it was twitching its tail like a whip and whispering things in his ear. As we caught sight of him he turned his head to the reptile with a snarl of impatience. ‘Shut up, I tell you!' he
said. It wagged its tail and continued to whisper to him. He ceased snarling, and presently began to smile. Then he turned and started to limp westward, away from the mountains.

‘Off so soon?' said a voice.

The speaker was more or less human in shape but larger than a man, and so bright that I could hardly look at him. His presence smote on my eyes and on my body too (for there was heat coming from him as well as light) like the morning sun at the beginning of a tyrannous summer day.

‘Yes. I'm off,' said the Ghost. ‘Thanks for all your hospitality. But it's no good, you see. I told this little chap' (here he indicated the Lizard) ‘that he'd have to be quiet if he came—which he insisted on doing. Of course his stuff won't do here: I realise that. But he won't stop. I shall just have to go home.'

‘Would you like me to make him quiet?' said the flaming Spirit—an angel, as I now understood.

‘Of course I would,' said the Ghost.

‘Then I will kill him,' said the Angel, taking a step forward.

‘Oh—ah—look out! You're burning me. Keep away,' said the Ghost, retreating.

‘Don't you
want
him killed?'

‘You didn't say anything about
killing
him at first. I hardly meant to bother you with anything so drastic as that.'

‘It's the only way,' said the Angel, whose burning hands were now very close to the Lizard. ‘Shall I kill it?'

‘Well, that's a further question. I'm quite open to consider it, but it's a new point, isn't it? I mean, for the moment I was only thinking about silencing it because up here—well, it's so damned embarrassing.'

‘May I kill it?'

‘Well, there's time to discuss that later.'

‘There is no time. May I kill it?'

‘Please, I never meant to be such a nuisance. Please—really—don't bother. Look! It's gone to sleep of its own accord. I'm sure it'll be all right now. Thanks ever so much.'