The Great Divorce - C. S. Lewis [15]
‘But who are “They”? This might be run by someone different?’
‘Entirely new management, eh? Don’t you believe it! It’s never a new management. You’ll always find the same old Ring. I know all about dear, kind Mummie coming up to your bedroom and getting all she wants to know out of you: but you always found she and Father were the same firm really. Didn’t we find that both sides in all the wars were run by the same Armament Firms? or the same Firm, which is behind the Jews and the Vatican and the Dictators and the Democracies and all the rest of it. All this stuff up here is run by the same people as the Town. They’re just laughing at us.’
‘I thought they were at war?’
‘Of course you did. That’s the official version. But who’s ever seen any signs of it? Oh, I know that’s how they talk. But if there’s a real war why don’t they do anything? Don’t you see that if the official version were true these chaps up here would attack and sweep the Town out of existence? They’ve got the strength. If they wanted to rescue us they could do it. But obviously the last thing they want is to end their so-called “war”. The whole game depends on keeping it going.’
This account of the matter struck me as uncomfortably plausible. I said nothing.
‘Anyway,’ said the Ghost, ‘who wants to be rescued? What the hell would there be to do here?’
‘Or there?’ said I.
‘Quite,’ said the Ghost. ‘They’ve got you either way.’
‘What would you like to do if you had your choice?’ I asked.
‘There you go!’ said the Ghost with a certain triumph. ‘Asking me to make a plan. It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it? It’s their job. Why should we do it for them? That’s just where all the parsons and moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking us to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and so powerful, why don’t they find something to suit their public? All this poppycock about growing harder so that the grass doesn’t hurt our feet, now! There’s an example. What would you say if you went to a hotel where the eggs were all bad and when you complained to the Boss, instead of apologising and changing his dairyman, he just told you that if you tried you’d get to like bad eggs in time?’
‘Well, I’ll be getting along,’ said the Ghost after a short silence. ‘You coming my way?’
‘There doesn’t seem to be much point in going anywhere on your showing,’ I replied. A great depression had come over me. ‘And at least it’s not raining here.’
‘Not at the moment,’ said the Hard-Bitten Ghost. ‘But I never saw one of those bright mornings that didn’t turn to rain later on. And, by gum, when it does rain here! Ah, you hadn’t thought of that? It hadn’t occurred to you that with the sort of water they have here every raindrop will make a hole in you, like a machine-gun bullet. That’s their little joke, you see. First of all tantalise you with ground you can’t walk on and water you can’t drink and then drill you full of holes. But they won’t catch me that way.’
A few minutes later he moved off.
8
I sat still on a stone by the river’s side feeling as miserable as I ever felt in my life. Hitherto it had not occurred to me to doubt the intentions of the Solid People, nor to question the essential goodness of their country even if it were a country which I could not long inhabit. It had indeed once crossed my mind that if these Solid People were as benevolent as I had heard one or two of them claim to be, they might