Free Fall by William Golding Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William Golding
gardens were translated. There was a silver wink from a pool nearer the house, cypresses, tall and hugely still, turned one frosted side to her light. I looked at Johnny and his face was visible and bland. Nothing could hurt us or would hurt us. We stood up and began to wander without saying anything. Sometimes we were waist-deep in darkness and then again drowned and then out in full light. Statues meditated against black deepnesses of evergreen and corners of the garden were swept by dashes of flowering trees that at that month were flowering nowhere else. There was a walk with stone railings on our right and a succession of stone jars with stone flowers draped roundthem. This was better than the park because forbidden and dangerous; better than the park because of the moon and the silence; better because of the magic house, the lighted windows and the figure pacing by them. This was a sort of home.
There was a burst of laughter from the house and the dog howled. I spoke again mechanically.
“I want to go home.”
What was the secret of the strange peace and security we felt? Now if I invent I can see us from outside, starry-eyed ragamuffins, I with nothing but shirt and trousers, Johnny with not much more, wandering together through the gardens of the great house. But I never saw us from outside. To me, then, we remain these two points of perception, wandering in paradise. I can only guess our innocence, not experience it. If I feel a kindly goodwill towards the ragamuffins, it is towards two unknown people. We went slowly towards the trees where the wall had broken down. I think we had a kind of faith that the policeman would be gone and that nothing would embarrass us. Once, we came to a white path and found too late that it was new, unset concrete where we slid; but we broke nothing else in the whole garden—we took nothing, almost we touched nothing. We were eyes.
Before we buried ourselves in undergrowth again, I turned to look back. I can remember this. We were in the upper part of the garden, looking back and down. The moon was flowering. She had a kind of sanctuary of light round her, sapphire. All the garden was black and white. There was one tree between me and the lawns, the stillest tree that ever grew, a tree that grew when no one was looking. The trunk was huge and each branchsplayed up to a given level; and there, the black leaves floated out like a level of oil on water. Level after horizontal level these leaves cut across the splaying branches and there was a crumpled, silver-paper depth, an ivory quiet beyond them. Later, I should have called the tree a cedar and passed on, but then, it was an apocalypse.
“Sammy! He’s gone.”
Johnny had undone the chicken wire and poked out his heroic head. The road was deserted. We became small savages again. We nipped through and dropped down on the pavement. We left the wall to be rebuilt and the tree to grow, unseen of us, in the garden.
I see now what I am looking for and why these pictures are not altogether random. I describe them because they seem to be important. They contributed very little to the straight line of my story. If we had been caught—as later I was indeed caught—and taken by the ear to the general, he might have set in motion some act that changed my whole life or Johnny’s. But they are not important in that way. They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry round with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree. It is the difference between time, the endless row of dead bricks, and time, the retake and coil. And there is something even more simple. I can love the child in the garden, on the airfield, in Rotten Row, the
There was a burst of laughter from the house and the dog howled. I spoke again mechanically.
“I want to go home.”
What was the secret of the strange peace and security we felt? Now if I invent I can see us from outside, starry-eyed ragamuffins, I with nothing but shirt and trousers, Johnny with not much more, wandering together through the gardens of the great house. But I never saw us from outside. To me, then, we remain these two points of perception, wandering in paradise. I can only guess our innocence, not experience it. If I feel a kindly goodwill towards the ragamuffins, it is towards two unknown people. We went slowly towards the trees where the wall had broken down. I think we had a kind of faith that the policeman would be gone and that nothing would embarrass us. Once, we came to a white path and found too late that it was new, unset concrete where we slid; but we broke nothing else in the whole garden—we took nothing, almost we touched nothing. We were eyes.
Before we buried ourselves in undergrowth again, I turned to look back. I can remember this. We were in the upper part of the garden, looking back and down. The moon was flowering. She had a kind of sanctuary of light round her, sapphire. All the garden was black and white. There was one tree between me and the lawns, the stillest tree that ever grew, a tree that grew when no one was looking. The trunk was huge and each branchsplayed up to a given level; and there, the black leaves floated out like a level of oil on water. Level after horizontal level these leaves cut across the splaying branches and there was a crumpled, silver-paper depth, an ivory quiet beyond them. Later, I should have called the tree a cedar and passed on, but then, it was an apocalypse.
“Sammy! He’s gone.”
Johnny had undone the chicken wire and poked out his heroic head. The road was deserted. We became small savages again. We nipped through and dropped down on the pavement. We left the wall to be rebuilt and the tree to grow, unseen of us, in the garden.
I see now what I am looking for and why these pictures are not altogether random. I describe them because they seem to be important. They contributed very little to the straight line of my story. If we had been caught—as later I was indeed caught—and taken by the ear to the general, he might have set in motion some act that changed my whole life or Johnny’s. But they are not important in that way. They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry round with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree. It is the difference between time, the endless row of dead bricks, and time, the retake and coil. And there is something even more simple. I can love the child in the garden, on the airfield, in Rotten Row, the