But of course the hours spent alone with the Un-man were like hours in a back area. The real business of life was the interminable conversation between the Tempter and the Green Lady. Taken hour by hour the progress was hard to estimate; but as the days passed Ransom could not resist the conviction that the general development was in the enemy’s favour. There were, of course, ups and downs. Often the Un-man was unexpectedly repulsed by some simplicity which it seemed not to have anticipated. Often, too, Ransom’s own contributions to the terrible debate were for the moment successful. There were times when he thought, “Thank God! We’ve won at last.” But the enemy was never tired, and Ransom grew more weary all the time; and presently he thought he could see signs that the Lady was becoming tired too. In the end he taxed her with it and begged her to send them both away. But she rebuked him, and her rebuke revealed how dangerous the situation had already become. “Shall I go and rest and play,” she asked, “while all this lies on our hands? Not till I am certain that there is no great deed to be done by me for the King and for the children of our children.”
It was on those lines that the enemy now worked almost exclusively. Though the Lady had no word for Duty he had made it appear to her in the light of a Duty that she should continue to fondle the idea of disobedience, and convinced her that it would be a cowardice if she repulsed him. The idea of the Great Deed, of the Great Risk, of a kind of martyrdom, were presented to her every day, varied in a thousand forms. The notion of waiting to ask the King before a decision was made had been unobtrusively shuffled aside. Any such cowardice was not not to be thought of. The whole point of her action-the whole grandeur-would lie in taking it without the King’s knowledge, in leaving him utterly free to repudiate it, so that all the benefits should be his, and all the risks hers; and with the risk, of course, all the magnanimity, the pathos, the tragedy, and the originality. And also, the Tempter hinted, it would be no use asking the King, for he would certainly not approve the action men were like that. The King must be forced to be free. Now, while she was on her own-now or never-the noble thing must be achieved; and with that “Now or never” he began to play on a fear which the Lady apparently shared with the women of earth-the fear that life might be wasted, some great opportunity let slip. “How if I were as a tree that could have borne gourds and yet bore none,” she said. Ransom tried to convince her that children were fruit enough. But the Un-man asked whether this elaborate division of the human race into two sexes could possibly be meant for no other purpose than offspring?-a matter which might have been more simply provided for, as it was in many of the plants. A moment later it was explaining that men like Ransom in his own world-men of that intensely male and backward-looking type who always shrank away from the new good-had continuously laboured to keep woman down to mere child-bearing and to ignore the high destiny for which Maleldil had actually created her. It told her that such men had already done incalculable harm. Let her look to it that nothing of the sort happened on Perelandra. It was at this stage that it began to teach her many new words: words like Creative and Intuition and Spiritual. But that was one of its false steps. When she had at last been made to understand what “creative” meant she forgot all about the Great Risk and the tragic loneliness and laughed for a whole minute on end. Finally she told the Unman that it was younger even than Piebald, and sent them both away.
Ransom gained ground over that; but on the following day he lost it all by losing his temper. The enemy had been pressing on her with more than usual ardour the nobility of self sacrifice and self-dedication, and the enchantment seemed to be deepening in her mind every moment, when Ransom, goaded beyond all patience, had leaped to his feet and really turned upon her, talking far too quickly and almost shouting, and even forgetting his Old Solar and intermixing English words. He tried to tell her that he’d seen this kind of “unselfishness” in action: to tell her of women making themselves sick with hunger rather than begin the meal before the man of the house returned, though they knew perfectly well that there was nothing he disliked more; of mothers wearing themselves to a ravelling to marry some daughter to a man whom she detested; of Agrippina and of Lady Macbeth. “Can you not see,” he shouted, “that he is making you say words that mean nothing? What is the good of saying you would do this for the King’s sake when you know it is what the King would hate most? Are you Maleldil that you should determine what is good for the King?” But she understood only a very small part of what he said and was bewildered by his manner. The Un-man made capital out of this speech.