MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
So! Your man is in love—and in the worst kind he could possibly have fallen
into—and with a girl who does not even appear in the report you sent me. You may
be interested to learn that the little misunderstanding with the Secret Police
which you tried to raise about some unguarded expressions in one of my letters
has been tided over. If you were reckoning on that to secure my good offices,
you will find yourself mistaken. You shall pay for that as well as for your
other blunders. Meanwhile I enclose a little booklet, just issued, on the new
House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters. It is profusely illustrated and
you will not find a dull page in it.
I have looked up this girl's dossier and am horrified at what I find. Not only a
Christian but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure,
monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter
miss. The little brute. She makes me vomit. She stinks and scalds through the
very pages of the dossier. It drives me mad, the way the world has worsened.
We'd have had her to the arena in the old days. That's what her sort is made
for. Not that she'd do much good there, either. A two-faced little cheat (I know
the sort) who looks as if she'd faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a
smile.
A cheat every way. Looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and yet
has a satirical wit. The sort of creature who'd find ME funny! Filthy insipid
little prude—and yet ready to fall into this booby's arms like any other
breeding animal. Why doesn't the Enemy blast her for it, if He's so moonstruck
by virginity—instead of looking on there, grinning?
He's a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are
only a fa?ade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea,
there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right
hand are "pleasures for evermore". Ugh! I don't think He has the least inkling
of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He's
vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of
pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in
the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying,
working, Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under
cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses
you. I'll settle with you presently. You have always hated me and been insolent
when you dared.)
Then, of course, he gets to know this woman's family and whole circle. Could you
not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have
entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour. The very gardener, though
he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it. Even guests,
after a week-end visit, carry some of the smell away with them. The dog and the
cat are tainted with it. And a house full of the impenetrable mystery. We are
certain (it is a matter of first principles) that each member of the family must
in some way be making capital out of the others—but we can't find out how. They
guard as jealously as the Enemy Himself the secret of what really lies behind
this pretence of disinterested love. The whole house and garden is one vast
obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer
made of Heaven; "the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is
not music is silence".
Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever
since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light
years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal
time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been
occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that
is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly
qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole
universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this
direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be
shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything
like it. Research is in progress. Meanwhile you, disgusting little——
[Here the MS. breaks off and is resumed in a different hand.]
In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed myself to
assume the form of a large centipede. I am accordingly dictating the rest to my
secretary. Now that the transformation is complete I recognise it as a
periodical phenomenon. Some rumour of it has reached the humans and a distorted
account of it appears in the poet Milton, with the ridiculous addition that such
changes of shape are a "punishment" imposed on us by the Enemy. A more modern
writer—someone with a name like Pshaw—has, however, grasped the truth.
Transformation proceeds from within and is a glorious manifestation of that Life
Force which Our Father would worship if he worshipped anything but himself. In
my present form I feel even more anxious to see you, to unite you to myself in
an indissoluble embrace,
(Signed) TOADPIPE
Letter TWENTYTWO
For his Abysmal Sublimity Under-Secretary
Screwtape, T.E., B.S., etc.