Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page B

and beasts at Ephesus, and the natural body. But Anthony hardly heard, because he could think of nothing except those germs that were still there in spite of the smell of the flowers, and of the spittle that kept flowing into his mouth and that he had to swallow in spite of the typhoid and influenza, and of that horrible sick feeling in his stomach. How long would it last?
    â€˜Like a goat,’ James Beavis said to himself as he listened to the intoning from the lectern. He looked again at that young son-in-law of the Champernownes. Anderton, Abdy . . .? What a fine, classical profile!
    His brother sat with bent head and a hand across his eyes,thinking of the ashes in the casket there beneath the flowers – the ashes that had been her body.
    The service was over at last. ‘Thank goodness!’ thought Anthony, as he spat surreptitiously into his handkerchief and folded away the germs into his pocket, ‘Thank goodness!’ He hadn’t been sick. He followed his father to the door and, rapturously, as he stepped out of the twilight, breathed the pure air. The sun was still shining. He looked around and up into the pale sky. Overhead, in the church tower, a sudden outcry of jackdaws was like the noise of a stone flung glancingly on to a frozen pond and skidding away with a reiteration of glassy chinking across the ice.
    â€˜But, Anthony, you mustn’t throw stones on the ice,’ his mother had called to him. ‘They get frozen in, and then the skaters . . .’
    He remembered how she had come swerving round towards him, on one foot – swooping, he had thought, like a sea-gull; all in white: beautiful. And now . . . The tears came into his eyes again. But, oh, why had she insisted on his trying to skate?
    â€˜I don’t want to,’ he had said; and when she asked why, it had been impossible to explain. He was afraid of being laughed at, of course. People made such fools of themselves. But how could he have told her that? In the end he had cried – in front of everyone. It couldn’t have been worse. He had almost hated her that morning. And now she was dead, and up there in the tower the jackdaws were throwing stones on last winter’s ice.
    They were at the grave-side now. Once more Mr Beavis pressed his son’s hand. He was trying to forestall the effect upon the child’s mind of these last, most painful moments.
    â€˜Be brave,’ he whispered. The advice was tendered as much to himself as to the boy.
    Leaning forward, Anthony looked into the hole. It seemedextraordinarily deep. He shuddered, closed his eyes; and immediately there she was, swooping towards him, white, like a sea-gull, and white again in the satin evening-dress when she came to say good-night before she went out to dinner, with that scent on her as she bent over him in bed, and the coolness of her bare arms. ‘You’re like a cat,’ she used to say when he rubbed his cheek against her arms. ‘Why don’t you purr while you’re about it?’
    â€˜Anyhow,’ thought Uncle James with satisfaction, ‘he was firm about the cremation.’ The Christians had been scored off there. Resurrection of the body, indeed! In AD 1902!
    When his time came, John Beavis was thinking, this was where he would be buried. In this very grave. His ashes next to hers.
    The clergyman was talking again in that extraordinary voice. ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secret of our hearts . . .’ Anthony opened his eyes. Two men were lowering into the hole a small terra-cotta box, hardly larger than a biscuit tin. The box touched the bottom; the ropes were hauled up.
    â€˜Earth to earth,’ bleated the goat-like voice, ‘ashes to ashes.’
    â€˜My ashes to her ashes,’ thought John Beavis. ‘Mingled.’
    And suddenly he remembered that time in Rome, a year after they were married; those June nights and the fire-flies, under the