The Complete Works: Fantasy & Sci-Fi Novels, Religious Studies, Poetry & Autobiography. C. S. Lewis
tangled, endless woods, silted with the accumulated decay of autumns that had been dropping leaves since before Britain was an island; wolves slinking, beavers building, wide shallow marshes, dim horns and drummings, eyes in the thickets, eyes of men not only Pre-Roman but Pre-British, ancient creatures, unhappy and dispossessed, who became the elves and ogres and wood-wooses of the later tradition. But worse than the forests, the clearings. Little strongholds with unheard-of kings. Little colleges and covines of Druids. Houses whose mortar had been ritually mixed with babies’ blood. They had tried to do that to Merlin. And now all that age, horribly dislocated, wrenched out of its place in the time series and forced to come back and go through all its motions yet again with doubled monstrosity, was flowing towards them and would, in a few minutes, receive them into itself.
Then came a check. They had walked right into a hedge. They wasted a minute, with the aid of the torch, disentangling Jane’s hair. They had come to the end of a field. The light of the fire, which kept on growing stronger and weaker in fitful alternations, was hardly visible from here. There was nothing for it but to set to work and find a gap or a gate. They went a long way out of their course before they found one. It was a gate that would not open: and as they came down on the far side, after climbing it, they went ankle-deep into water. For a few minutes, plodding slightly uphill, they were out of sight of the fire, and when it reappeared it was well away on their left and much farther off than anyone had supposed.
Hitherto Jane had scarcely attempted to think of what might lie before them. As they went on, the real meaning of that scene in the kitchen began to dawn on her. He had sent the men to bid good-bye to their wives. He had blessed them all. It was likely, then, that this—this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field—meant death. Death—the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point. Jane was trying to see death in the new light of all she had heard since she left Edgestow. She had long ceased to feel any resentment at the Director’s tendency, as it were, to dispose of her—to give her, at one time or in one sense, to Mark, and in another to Maleldil; never, in any sense, to keep her for himself. She accepted that. And of Mark she did not think much, because to think of him increasingly aroused feelings of pity and guilt. But Maleldil. Up till now she had not thought of Maleldil either. She did not doubt that the eldils existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed . . . whom the Director obeyed, and through him the whole household, even MacPhee. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as “religion,” she had put the thought aside. The distance between these alarming and operative realities and the memory, say, of fat Mrs. Dimble saying her prayers, was too wide. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, the tingling light and sound from under the Director’s door, and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive girl), the embarrassment of confirmation classes, the nervous affability of clergymen. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. Because, really, it now appeared that almost anything might be true. The world had already turned out to be so very unlike what she had expected. The old ring-fence had been smashed completely. One might be in for anything. Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell. The thought glowed in her mind for a second like a spark that has fallen on shavings, and then a second later, like those shavings, her whole mind was in a blaze—or with just enough left outside the blaze to utter some kind of protest. “But . . . this is unbearable. I ought to have been told.” It did not, at that moment, occur to her even to doubt that if such things existed they would be totally and unchangeably adverse to her.
“Look out, Jane,” said Denniston. “That’s a tree.”
“I—I think it’s a cow,” said Jane.
“No. It’s a tree. Look. There’s another.”
“Hush,” said Dimble. “This is Jane’s little wood. We are very close now.”
The ground rose in front of them for about twenty yards and there made an edge against the firelight. They could see the wood quite clearly now, and also each other’s faces, white and blinking.
“I will go first,” said Dimble.
“I envy you your nerve,” said Jane.
“Hush,” said Dimble again.
They walked slowly and quietly up to the edge and stopped. Below them a big fire of wood was burning at the bottom of a little dingle. There were bushes all about, whose changing shadows, as the flames rose and fell, made it difficult to see clearly. Beyond the fire there seemed to be some rude kind of tent made out of sacking, and Denniston thought he saw an upturned cart. In the foreground, between them and the fire, there was certainly a kettle.
“Is there anyone here?” whispered Dimble to Denniston.
“I don’t know. Wait a few seconds.”
“Look!” said Jane suddenly. “There! When the flame blew aside.”
“What?” said Dimble.
“Didn’t you see him?”
“I saw nothing.”
“I thought I saw a man,” said Denniston.
“I saw an ordinary tramp,” said Dimble. “I mean a man in modern clothes.”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“We must go down,” said Dimble.
“Can one get down?” said Denniston.
“Not this side,” said Dimble. “It looks as if a sort of path came into it over there to the right. We must go along the edge till we find the way down.”
They had all been talking in low voices and the crackling of the fire was now the loudest sound, for the rain seemed to be stopping. Cautiously, like troops who fear the eye of the enemy, they began to skirt the lip of the hollow, stealing from tree to tree.
“Stop!” whispered Jane suddenly.
“What is it?”
“There’s something moving.”
“Where?”
“In there. Quite close.”
“I heard nothing.”
“There’s nothing now.”
“Let’s go on.”
“Do you still think there’s something, Jane?”
“It’s quiet now. There was something.”
They made a few paces more.
“’St!” said Denniston. “Jane’s right. There is something.”
“Shall I speak?” said Dimble.
“Wait a moment,” said Denniston. “It’s just there. Look!—damn it, it’s only an old donkey!”
“That’s what I said,” said Dimble. “The man’s a gypsy; a tinker or something. This is his donkey. Still, we must go down.”
They proceeded. In a few moments they found themselves descending a rutted grassy path which wound about till the whole hollow opened before them; and now the fire was no longer between them and the tent. “There he is,” said Jane.
“Can you see him?” said Dimble. “I haven’t got your eyes.”
“I can see him all right,” said Denniston. “It is a tramp. Can’t you see him Dimble? An old man with a ragged beard in what looks like the remains of a British warm and a pair of black trousers. Don’t you see his left foot, stuck out,