The Great Divorce - C. S. Lewis [28]
‘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 affection 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