Jack already knew this. “Yes,” he said, “that is their power.”
“Think of all the myths and origin stories,” said Hugo with his jowly smile, his rumpled tie loose. “Of all the gods who sacrifice their lives to save others.” He stopped and straightened his hat, eyeing Jack with a look both casual and intense.
Jack stopped. “In almost every tradition there is the dying god who rises again,” he said, turning to his friends. His eyes, always alert and warm, held their gaze. He was never tired of this conversation about myth and story, and yet this one seemed to be going in circles. “Yes. Balder. Adonis. Bacchus.” He named just a few gods from his favorite pagan myths. “And of course, Jesus Christ.”
“The difference,” said Tollers, “is that the story of Jesus Christ is true. It really happened. Christianity is not less than a myth, but more than one. The true one.”
“The only true myth,” added Hugo.
“The myth of the dying God . . . ,” Jack said, and the three friends continued their walk and talk.
Jack resisted.
He debated.
He listened.
They talked into the night, walking round about that river island until well into the early morning when Jack saw light—not of a rising sun, but of a spiritual conviction. He finally understood what his friends had wanted to show him, what he could see only in the middle of the night while the birch trees swayed in the wind alongside the river. All those years with the Knock, arguing logic, Jack had known that his intellect stood over his imagination, that the two hemispheres, as it were, of his mind were in sharp contrast. He realized that all he’d loved, he believed to be imaginary, and all he’d believed was real, he thought grim and meaningless.
Near dawn, Jack went home, and morning rose over the Kilns to see him a different man.
Something within him had shifted.
“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”
*
George sits quietly and stares at his sister, who is still gazing at the notebook. There’s more, but she’s stopped.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
She looks to him with brimming tears. George hates when Megs cries because there is rarely anything he can do to fix it. “I don’t want this to end,” she says.
“I don’t either, but everything ends.”
“Honestly, George.” She shook her head and put down the notebook. “How do you know more than me when you are so much younger?”
“That’s silly. You can add numbers in your head. You can—”
“But in the things that matter, you know more.”
George thinks about this. Maybe it’s true he knows more than her about some things, but he doesn’t have the time to know about everything. He wants to know if it’s true that there’s something more when this something ends. Not whether there is a doorway in the back of his wardrobe; he knows that is just a way to tell a story about something more. But maybe in the back of his life there is a place he will go, a place they will all go.
He wipes a tear from his sister’s face. “Tell me what’s left in the notebook.”
“Well,” she says without even looking at it, “after that night with his friends, Mr. Lewis began to write books, almost a book a year—stories, allegories, and arguments for God’s very existence: The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. He wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce. He met with his writer friends, the Inklings, in a pub called The Eagle and Child—Bird and Baby is its nickname—every Tuesday between one and two in the afternoon.”
“Have you been there?” George asks.
“I have. It’s a lovely place, and they have gorgeous fish and chips.”
“Have you ever seen the Inklings there? Reading to each other and such?”
His sister shakes her head. “No, when they read their manuscripts out loud it was in Mr. Lewis’s Magdalen rooms on Thursday nights. They stopped meeting years ago, but they are all still friends. Mr. Lewis’s dearest Inkling, Charles Williams, has died. But this group of men all shared their stories and work.” She half smiles. “No women far as I can tell.”
“Did Mr. Lewis take Narnia to them? Did he read it to them when he wrote it?” George is afraid she’ll skip over the part that matters. The part where the author shares his story with his friends.
“Let me go on,” Megs says and opens the notebook once again. “One afternoon at the Bird and Baby, pints on the dark wood table, low lighting casting shadows across their pages, Jack turned to Tollers and a conversation among the Inklings began about what they should write next.”
She stops and takes his hand.
“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”
George smiles and closes his eyes. “And not very far away . . . in a pub in Oxford.”
*
Jack, Tollers, Warnie, Hugo, and man named Dr. Havard, those Inklings who were there that afternoon at the Bird and Baby, were settled on chairs and on the long bench along the wall. Frothy pints, tobacco tins, and matchboxes littered the table under a circle of lamplight in a small alcove called the Rabbit Room. Wood-paneled walls almost glowed. The men’s hats hung on a stand in the corner with their coats.
Tollers, his thinning gray hair swept back from his high forehead, his angular features beginning to soften with age, tapped his pipe on the table and ordered another pint. Spectacles low on his nose, he said, “I despair for the state of children’s literature these days. They are reading pure rubbish.”
Jack nodded, his laughter at something Warnie had said fading. “Yes,” Jack said, “no more Edith Nesbit or Beatrix Potter. That’s true.”
“If we”—Tollers took a long swig of his pint, then slammed his hand on the table—“if we are to read something like that then . . .”
“We must write it,” Jack declared, crossed his right leg over his left, and nodded as if he’d just won a debate point.
There under the low-slung ceiling and on hard benches, with their rustling papers and ink-stained fingers, all the Inklings agreed.
Jack Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien decided they would write what they would have wanted to read when they were children. Tollers began working on a story called The Lost Road. His book The Hobbit was already a huge success. And Jack remembered the story with the four children who tumbled out of his pen in 1939.
One afternoon in the summer of 1948, after Jack had completed a lecture at the library and answered his correspondence, he sat down in his study at the Kilns and began the story.
“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy . . .”
And this time, he didn’t stop writing.
*
Megs ruffles the pages of her notebook, turning to the end. George interrupts the jolly good story to tell his sister, “Look at you!”
George sits straight and turns to her, placing his hand on her shoulders. “Did you just hear what you told? That was so beautiful. You described it perfectly. Megs, you’re . . . a storyteller!”
She blushes, truly blushes, and kisses George’s cheek. “This is fun.”