"Ah," said Ransom, "but it is different there. It is cold."
"So the Stranger said," she answered. "But not in all of your world. He says they do it even where it is warm. "Has he said why they do it?"
"To be beautiful. Why else?" said the Lady, with some wonder in her face.
'Thank Heaven,' thought Ransom, 'he is only teaching he vanity'; for he had feared something worse. Yet could it t possible, in the long run, to wear clothes without learning modesty, and through modesty lasciviousness?
"Do you think we are more beautiful?" said the Lad interrupting his thoughts.
"No," said Ransom; and then, correcting himself, "I do know." It was, indeed, not easy to reply. The Un-man, m that Weston's prosaic shirt and shorts were concealed, looked more exotic and therefore a more imaginatively, less squab( hideous figure. As for the Lady - that she looked in some worse was not doubtful. Yet there is a plainness in nudity - as we speak of 'plain' bread. A sort of richness, a flamboyancy, a concession, as it were, to lower conceptions of the beautiful, had come with the purple robe. For the first (and last) time she appeared to him at that moment as a woman whom an earthborn man might conceivably love. And this was intolerable. The ghastly inappropriateness of the idea had, all in one moment, stolen something from the colours of the landscape and the scent of the flowers.
"Do you think we are more beautiful?" repeated the Lady. "What does it matter?" said Ransom dully.
"Everyone should wish to be as beautiful as they can," she answered. "And we cannot see ourselves."
"We can," said Weston's body.
"How can this be?" said the Lady, turning to it. "Even if you could roll your eyes right round to look inside they would see only blackness."
"Not that way," it answered. "I will show you." It walked a few paces away to where Weston's pack lay in the yellow turf. With that curious distinctness which often falls upon us when we are anxious and preoccupied Ransom noticed the exact make and pattern of the pack. It must have been from the same shop in London where he had bought his own: and that little fact, suddenly reminding him that Weston had once been a man, that he too had once had pleasures and pains and a human mind, almost brought the tears into his eyes. The horrible fingers which Weston would never use again worked at the buckles and brought out a small bright object - an English pocket mirror that might have cost three-and-six. He handed it to the Green Lady. She turned it over in her hands.
"What is it? What am I to do with it?" she said.
"Look in it," said the Un-man.
"How?"
"Look!" he said. Then taking it from her he held it up to her face. She stared for quite an appreciable time without apparently making anything of it. Then she started back with a cry and covered her face. Ransom started too. It was the first time he had seen her the mere passive recipient of any emotion. The world about him was big with change.
"Oh - oh," she cried. "What is it? I saw a face."
"Only your own face, beautiful one," said the Un-man. "I know," said the Lady, still averting her eyes from the mirror. "My face - out there - looking at me. Am I growing older or is it something else? I feel ... I feel ... my heart is beating too hard. I am not warm. What is it?" She glanced from one of them to the other. The mysteries had all vanished from her face. It was as easy to read as that of a man in a shelter when a bomb is coming.
"What is it?" she repeated.
"It is called Fear," said Weston's mouth. Then the creature turned its face full on Ransom and grinned.
"Fear," she said. "This is Fear," pondering the discovery; then, with abrupt finality, "I do not like it."
"It will go away," said the Un-man, when Ransom interrupted.
"It will never go away if you do what he wishes. It is into more and more fear that he is leading you."
"It is," said the Un-man, "into the great waves and through them and beyond. Now that you know Fear, you see that it must be you who shall taste it on behalf of your race. You know the King will not. You do not wish him to. But there is no cause for fear in this little thing: rather for joy. What is fearful in it?"
"Things being two when they are one," replied the Lady decisively. "That thing" (she pointed at the mirror) "is me and not me."
"But if you do not look you will never know how beautiful you are."
"It comes into my mind, Stranger," she answered, "that a fruit does not eat itself, and a man cannot be together with himself."
"A fruit cannot do that because it is only a fruit," said the Un-man. "But we can do it. We call this thing a mirror. A man can love himself, and be together with himself. That is what it means to be a man or a woman - to walk alongside oneself as if one were a second person and to delight in one's own beauty. Mirrors were made to teach this art."
"Is it a good?" said the Lady. "No," said Ransom.
"How can you find out without trying?" said the Un-man. "If you try it and it is not good," said Ransom, "how do you know whether you will be able to stop doing it?"
"I am walking alongside myself already," said the Lady. "But I do not yet know what I look like. If I have become two I had better know what the other is. As for you, Piebald, one look will show me this woman's face and why should I look more than once?"
She took the mirror, timidly but firmly, from the Un-man and looked into it in silence for the better part of a minute. Then she let it sink and stood holding it at her side.
"It is very strange," she said at last.
"It is very beautiful," said the Un-man. "Do you not think so?"
"Yes. "
"But you have not ,yet found what you set out to find."
"What was that? I have forgotten."
"Whether the robe of feathers made you more beautiful or less."
"I saw only a face."
"Hold it further away and you will see the whole of the alongside woman - the other who is yourself. Or no - I will hold it."
The commonplace suggestions of the scene became grotesque at this stage. She looked at herself first with the robe, then without it, then with it again; finally she decided against it and threw it away. The Un-man picked it up.
"Will you not keep it?" he said; "you might wish to carry it on some days even if you do not wish for it on all days."
"Keep it?" she asked, not clearly understanding.
"I had forgotten," said the Un-man. "I had forgotten that you would not live on the Fixed Land nor build a house nor in any way become mistress of your own days. Keeping means putting a thing where you know you can always find it again, and where rain, and beasts, and other people cannot reach it. I would give you this mirror to keep. It would be the Queen's mirror, a gift brought into the world from Deep Heaven: the other women would not have it. But you have reminded me. There can be no gifts, no keeping, no foresight while you live as you do - from day to day, like the beasts."
But the Lady did not appear to be listening to him. She stood like one almost dazed with the richness of a day-dream. She did not look in the least like a woman who is thinking about a new dress. The expression of her face was noble. It was a great deal too noble. Greatness, tragedy, high sentiment these were obviously what occupied her thoughts. Ransom perceived that the affair of the robes and the mirror had been only superficially concerned with what is commonly called female vanity. The image of her beautiful body had been offered to her only as a means to awake the far more perilous image of her great soul. The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.
Chapter Eleven
BECAUSE he had slept so late that morning Ransom found it easy to keep awake the following night. The sea had become calm and there was no rain. He sat upright in the darkness with his back against a tree. The others were close beside him - the Lady, to judge by her breathing, asleep and the Un-man doubtless waiting to arouse her and resume its solicitations the moment Ransom should doze. For the third time, more strongly than ever before, it came into his head, 'This can't go on.'