Out of the Silent Planet - C. S. Lewis [33]
"Who do you speak to, Hrikki?" said Ransom.
"To the eldil."
"Where?"
"Did you not see him?"
"I saw nothing."
"There! There! " she cried suddenly. "Ah! He is gone. Did you not see him?"
"I saw no one."
"Hyoi," said the cub, "the hmân cannot see the eldil!"
But Hyoi, continuing steadily on his way, was already out of earshot, and had apparently noticed nothing. Ransom concluded that Hrikki was 'pretending' like the young of his own species. In a few moments he rejoined his companion.
XII
THEY WORKED hard at Hyoi's boat till noon and then spread themselves on the weed close to the warmth of the creek, and began their midday meal. The war-like nature of their preparations suggested many questions to Ransom. He knew no word for war, but he managed to make Hyoi understand what he wanted to know. Did séroni and hrossa and pfifltriggi ever go out like this, with weapons, against each other?
"What for?" asked Hyoi.
It was difficult to explain. "If both wanted one thing and neither would give it," said Ransom, "would the other at last come with force? Would they say, give it or we kill you?"
"What sort of thing?"
"Well - food, perhaps."
"If the other hnau wanted food, why should we not give it to them? We often do."
"But how if we had not enough for ourselves?"
"But Maleldil will not stop the plants growing."
"Hyoi, if you had more and more young, would Maleldil broaden the handramit and make enough plants for them all?"
"The séroni know that sort of thing. But why should we have more young?"
Ransom found this difficult. At last he said:
"Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?"
"A very great one, Hman. This is what we call love."
"If a thing is a pleasure, a hmân wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed."
It took Hyoi a long time to get the point.
"You mean," he said slowly, "that he might do it not only in one or two years of his life but again?"
"Yes."
"But - why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand."
"But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?"
"But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom."
"But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?"
"That is like saying 'My food I must be content only to eat.' "
"I do not understand."
"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmân, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?"
"Perhaps some of them do," said Ransom. "But even in a poem does a hross never long to hear one splendid line over again?"
Hyoi's reply unfortunately turned on one of those points in their language which Ransom had not mastered. There were two verbs which both, as far as he could see, meant to long or yearn;but the hrossa drew a sharp distinction, even an opposition, between them. Hyoi seemed to him merely to be saying that every one would long for it (wondelone) but no one in his senses could long for it (hluntheline).
"And indeed," he continued, "the poem is a good