Of Other Worlds

by C. S. Lewis

  Did I ever work my way into another man’s house and steal his woman? Paris does that to me. I try to have my revenge in the right way, single combat before both armies. Then there’s some divine interference—a kind of black-out—I don’t know what happened to me—and he has escaped. I was winning. He was as good as a dead man if I’d had two minutes more. Why do the gods never interfere on the side of the man who was wronged?

  I never fought against gods as Diomede did, or says he did. I never turned against our own side and worked for the defeat of the Greeks, like Achilles. And now he’s a god and they make his tomb an altar. I never shirked like Odysseus, I never committed sacrilege like Odysseus. And now he’s the real captain of them all—Agamemnon for all his winks and knowingness couldn’t rule the army for a day without him—and I’m nothing.

  Nothing and nobody. I thought I was the King of Sparta. Apparently I’m the only one who ever thought so. I am simply that woman’s head servant. I’m to fight her wars and collect her tribute and do all her work, but she’s the Queen. She can turn whore, turn traitress, turn Trojan. That makes no difference. The moment she’s in our camp she is Queen just as before. All the archers and horseboys can tell me to mend my manners and take care I treat her majesty with proper respect. Even Eteoneus—my own sworn brother—taunts me with being no true king. Then next moment he says he’ll die with me if the Spartans decide I’d better be murdered. I wonder. Probably he’s a traitor too. Perhaps he’s this raddled Queen’s next lover.

  Not a king. It’s worse than that. I’m not even a freeman. Any hired man, any peddlar, any beggar, would be allowed to teach his own wife a lesson, if she’d been false to him, in the way he thought best. For me it’s ‘Hands off. She’s the Queen, the Daughter of Zeus.’

  And then comes Agamemnon sneering—just as he always did ever since we were boys—and making jokes because she’s lost her beauty. What right has he to talk to me about her like that? I wonder what his own Clytemnestra looks like now. Ten years, ten years. And they must have had short commons in Troy for some time. Unhealthy too, cooped up inside the walls. Lucky there seems to have been no plague. And who knows how those barbarians treated her once the war began to turn against them? By Hera, I must find out about that. When I can talk to her. Can I talk to her? How would I begin?

  Eteoneus worships her, and Agamemnon jeers at her, and the army wants to cut her throat. Whose woman is she? Whose business is she? Everyone’s except mine, it seems. I count for nothing. I’m a bit of her property and she’s a bit of everyone else’s.

  I’ve been a puppet in a war about corn-ships.

  I wonder what she’s thinking herself. Alone all those hours in that hut. Wondering and wondering, no doubt. Unless she’s giving an audience to Eteoneus.

  Shall we get away safely tonight? We’ve done all we can do by daylight. Nothing to do but wait.

  Perhaps it would be best if the army got wind of it and we were all killed, fighting, on the beach. She and Eteoneus would see there’s one thing I can still do. I’d kill her before they took her. Punish her and save her with one stroke.

  Curse these flies.

  V

  (Later. Landed in Egypt and entertained by an Egyptian.)

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve asked for that, Father,’ said Menelaus, ‘but you said it to spare me. Indeed, indeed, the woman’s not worth your having.’

  ‘The cold water a man wants is better than the wine he’s no taste for,’ said the old man.

  ‘I’d give something better than such cold water. I beseech you to accept this cup. The Trojan king drank from it himself.’

  ‘Will you deny me the woman, Guest?’ said the old man, still smiling.

  ‘You must pardon me, Father,’ said Menelaus. ‘I’d be ashamed—’

  ‘She’s the thing I ask for.’

  ‘Curse these barbarians and their ways,’ thought Menelaus to himself. ‘Is this a courtesy of theirs? Is it the rule always to ask for something of no value?’

  ‘You will not deny me surely?’ said his host, still not looking at Helen, but looking sidelong at Menelaus.

  ‘He really wants her,’ Menelaus thought. It began to make him angry.

  ‘If you won’t give her,’ said the Egyptian, a little scornfully, ‘perhaps you’ll sell?’

  Menelaus felt his face reddening. He had found a reason for his anger now: it accordingly grew hotter. The man was insulting him.

  ‘I tell you the woman’s not for giving,’ he said. ‘And a thousand times not for selling.’

  The old man showed no anger—could that smooth, brown face ever show it?—and kept on smiling.

  ‘Ah,’ he said at last, drawing it out very long. ‘You should have told me. She is perhaps your old nurse or—’

  ‘She’s my wife,’ Menelaus shouted. The words came out of his mouth, loud, boyish, and ridiculous; he hadn’t meant to say them at all. He darted his eyes round the room. If anyone laughed he’d kill them. But all the Egyptian faces were grave, though anyone could see that the minds within them were mocking him. His own men sat with their eyes on the floor. They were ashamed of him.

  ‘Stranger,’ said the old man, ‘are you sure that woman is your wife?’

  Menelaus glanced sharply towards Helen, half-believing for the moment that these foreign wizards might have played some trick. The glance was so quick that it caught hers and for the first time their eyes met. And indeed she was changed. He surprised a look of what seemed to be, of all things, joy. In the name of the House of Hades, why? It passed in an instant; the set desolation returned. But now his host was speaking again.

  ‘I know very well who your wife is, Menelaus, son of Atreus. You married Helen Tyndareus. And that woman is not she.’

  ‘But this is madness,’ said Menelaus. ‘Do you think I don’t know?’

  ‘That is indeed what I think,’ replied the old man, now wholly grave. ‘Your wife never went to Troy. The gods have played a trick with you. That woman was in Troy. That woman lay in Paris’s bed. Helen was caught away.’

  ‘Who is that, then?’ said Menelaus.

  ‘Ah, who could answer? It is a thing—it will soon go away—such things sometimes go about the Earth for a while. No one knows what they are.’

  ‘You are making fun of me,’ said Menelaus. He did not think so; still less did he believe what he was told. He thought he was out of his right mind; drunk perhaps, or else the wine had been drugged.

  ‘It is no wonder if you say that,’ replied the host. ‘But you will not say it when I have shown you the real Helen.’

  Menelaus sat still. He had the sense that some outrage was being done to him. One could not argue with these foreign devils. He had never been clever. If Odysseus had been here he would have known what to say. Meanwhile the musicians resumed their playing. The slaves, cat-footed, were moving about. They were moving the lights all into one place, over on the far side near a doorway, so that the rest of the large hall grew darker and darker and one looked painfully at the glare of the clustered candles. The music went on.

  ‘Daughter of Leda, come forth,’ said the old man.

  And at once it came. Out of the darkness of the doorway

  [The manuscript ends here.]

  NOTES ON AFTER TEN YEARS

  I

  ROGER LANCELYN GREEN

  This story of Helen and Menelaus after the fall of Troy was started, and the first chapter written in, I think, 1959—before Lewis’s visit to Greece. It began, as Lewis wrote that the Narnian stories began and grew, from ‘seeing pictures’ in his mind—the picture of Yellowhead in the Wooden Horse and the realisation of what he and the rest must have experienced during almost twenty-four hours of claustrophobia, discomfort, and danger. I remember him reading to me the first chapter, and the thrill of the growing knowledge of where we were and who Yellowhead was.

  But Lewis had not worked out any plot for the rest of the story. We discussed all the legends of Helen and Menelaus that either of us knew—and I was
rather ‘up’ in Trojan matters at the time, as I was writing my own story The Luck of Troy which ends where Lewis’s begins. I remember pointing out that Menelaus was only King of Sparta on account of his marriage with Helen, who was the heiress of Tyndareus (after the death of Castor and Polydeuces)—a point which Lewis did not know, but seized upon eagerly and used in the next chapters.

  He read the rest of the fragment to me in August 1960, after our visit to Greece—and after the death of Joy (his wife) . The Egyptian scrap came later still, I think: but after that year Lewis found that he could no longer make up stories—nor go on with this one. It was because of this drying up of the imaginative spring (perhaps the inability to ‘see pictures’ any longer) that he planned to collaborate with me in a new version of my story The Wood That Time Forgot which I had written about 1950 and which Lewis always said was my best—though no publisher would risk it. But this was late 1962 and early 1963—and nothing came of it.

  Naturally it is not possible to be certain what Lewis would have done in After Ten Years if he had gone on with it: he did not know himself—and we discussed so many possibilities that I cannot even be certain which he preferred.

  The next ‘picture’ after the scene in the Horse was the idea of what Helen must really have looked like after ten years as a captive in besieged Troy. Of course the Classical authors—Quintus Smyrnaeus, Tryphiodorus, Apollodorus, etc.—insist on her divine beauty remaining unimpaired. Some authors say that Menelaus drew his sword to kill her after Troy had fallen, then saw her beauty, and the sword fell from his hand; others say that the soldiers were preparing to stone her—but she let fall her veil, and they dropped the stones and worshipped instead of slaying. Her beauty excused all: ‘To Heracles Zeus gave strength, to Helen beauty, which naturally rules over even strength itself,’ wrote Isocrates—and as I pointed out to Lewis, Helen returned to Sparta with Menelaus and was not only the beautiful queen who welcomes Telemachus in the Odyssey, but was worshipped as a goddess, whose shrine may still be seen at Therapnai near Sparta.

  However, the scrap of the story set in Egypt is based on the legend, begun by Stesichorus and developed by Euripides in his play Helena, that Helen never went to Troy at all. On the way, she and Paris stopped in Egypt, and the gods fashioned an imitation Helen, an ‘Eidolon’, a thing of air, which Paris took to Troy, thinking it was the real Helen. For this phantom the Greeks fought and Troy fell. On his return (and he took nearly as long to get home as Odysseus) Menelaus visited Egypt; and there the Eidolon vanished and he found the true Helen, lovely and unsullied, and took her back to Sparta with him. (This legend gave Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang the idea for their romance of Helen in Egypt, The World’s Desire, though it was set some years after the end of the Odyssey—a book which Lewis read and admired, even if he did not value it quite as highly as I do.)

  The idea which Lewis was following—or with which he was experimenting—was a ‘twist’ of the Eidolon legend. ‘Out of the darkness of the doorway’ came the beautiful Helen whom Menelaus had originally married—Helen so beautiful that she must have been the daughter of Zeus—the dream beauty whose image Menelaus had built up during the ten years of the siege of Troy, and which had been so cruelly shattered when he found Helen in chapter II. But this was the Eidolon: the story was to turn on the conflict between dream and reality. It was to be a development of the Mary Rose theme, again with a twist: Mary Rose comes back after many years in Fairyland, but exactly as on the moment of her disappearance—her husband and parents have thought of her, longed for her, like this—but when she does return, she just doesn’t fit.

  Menelaus had dreamed of Helen, longed for Helen, built up his image of Helen and worshipped it as a false idol: in Egypt he is offered that idol, the Eidolon. I don’t think he was to know which was the true Helen, but of this I am not certain. But I think he was to discover in the end that the middle-aged, faded Helen he had brought from Troy was the real woman, and between them was the real love or its possibility: the Eidolon would have been a belle dame sans merci . . .

  But I repeat that I do not know—and Lewis did not know—what exactly would have happened if he had gone on with the story.

  II

  ALASTAIR FOWLER

  Lewis spoke more than once about the difficulties he was having with this story. He had a clear idea of the kind of narrative he wanted to write, of the theme, and of the characters; but he was unable to get beyond the first few chapters. As his habit was in such cases, he put the piece aside and went on with something else. From the fragment written, one might expect that the continuation would have been a myth of very general import. For the dark belly of the horse could be taken as a womb, the escape from it as a birth and entry on life. Lewis was well aware of this aspect. But he said that the idea for the book was provoked by Homer’s tantalisingly brief account of the relationship between Menelaus and Helen after the return from Troy (Odyssey, iv, 1–305). It was, I suppose, a moral as much as a literary idea. Lewis wanted to tell the story of a cuckold in such a way as to bring out the meaningfulness of his life. In the eyes of others Menelaus might seem to have lost almost all that was honourable and heroic; but in his own he had all that mattered: love. Naturally, the treatment of such a theme entailed a narrative stand-point very different from Homer’s. And this is already apparent in the present fragment: instead of looking on the horse from without as we do when Demodocus sings (Odyssey, viii, 499–520), here we feel something of the difficult life inside.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS

  A Grief Observed

  George MacDonald: An Anthology

  Mere Christianity

  Miracles

  The Abolition of Man

  The Great Divorce

  The Problem of Pain

  The Screwtape Letters (with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”)

  The Weight of Glory

  The Four Loves

  Till We Have Faces

  Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

  Reflections on the Psalms

  Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer

  The Personal Heresy

  The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays

  Poems

  The Dark Tower: And Other Stories

  Narrative Poems

  A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

  Letters of C. S. Lewis

  All My Road Before Me

  The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis

  Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

  Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics

  On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS

  The Chronicles of Narnia

  The Magician’s Nephew

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

  The Horse and His Boy

  Prince Caspian

  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

  The Silver Chair

  The Last Battle

  FURTHER READING

  COPYRIGHT

  OF OTHER WORLDS. Copyright © 1966 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed
1994 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Originally published in 1966 by Harcourt Brace. Harvest edition published in 1975.

  EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062565808

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author. | Hooper, Walter, writer of supplementary textual content.

  Title: Of other worlds : essays and stories / C. S. Lewis.

  Description: San Francisco : HarperOne, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016030645 | ISBN 9780062565808 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780062643544 (e-book)

  Classification: LCC PR6023.E926 A6 2017 | DDC 824/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030645

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