Island - Aldous Huxley [13]
Of course he knew Wells. Why did she pester him with her silly reminiscences?
“I used to love walking there by the water,” Susila went on, “looking across the moat at the cathedral”—and thinking, while she looked at the cathedral, of Dugald under the palm trees on the beach, of Dugald giving her her first lesson in rock climbing. “You’re on the rope. You’re perfectly safe. You can’t possibly fall…” Can’t possibly fall, she repeated bitterly—and then remembered here and now, remembered that she had a job to do, remembered, as she looked again at the flayed emphatic face, that here was a human being in pain. “How lovely it was,” she went on, “and how marvelously peaceful!”
The voice, it seemed to Will Farnaby, had become more musical and in some strange way more remote. Perhaps that was why he no longer resented its intrusion.
“Such an extraordinary sense of peace. Shanti, shanti, shanti. The peace that passes understanding.”
The voice was almost chanting now—chanting, it seemed, out of some other world.
“I can shut my eyes,” it chanted on, “can shut my eyes and see it all so clearly. Can see the church—and it’s enormous, much taller than the huge trees round the bishop’s palace. Can see the green grass and the water and the golden sunlight on the stones and the slanting shadows between the buttresses. And listen! I can hear the bells. The bells and the jackdaws. The jackdaws in the tower—can you hear the jackdaws?”
Yes, he could hear the jackdaws, could hear them almost as clearly as he now heard those parrots in the trees outside his window. He was here and at the same time he was there—here in this dark, sweltering room near the equator, but also there, outdoors in that cool hollow at the edge of the Mendips, with the jackdaws calling from the cathedral tower and the sound of the bells dying away into the green silence.
“And there are white clouds,” the voice was saying, “and the blue sky between them is so pale, so delicate, so exquisitely tender.”
Tender, he repeated, the tender blue sky of that April weekend he had spent there, before the disaster of their marriage, with Molly. There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds with its austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation. That was how it should have been with himself and Molly—how it had been then.
“And the swans,” he now heard the voice dreamily chanting, “the swans…”
Yes, the swans. White swans moving across a mirror of jade and jet—a breathing mirror that heaved and trembled, so that their silvery images were forever breaking and coming together again, disintegrating and being made whole.
“Like the inventions of heraldry. Romantic, impossibly beautiful. And yet there they are—real birds in a real place. So near to me now that I can almost touch them—and yet so far away, thousands of miles away. Far away on that smooth water, moving as if by magic, softly, majestically…”
Majestically, moving majestically, with the dark water lifting and parting as the curved white breasts advanced—lifting, parting, sliding back in ripples that widened in a gleaming arrowhead behind them. He could see them moving across their dark mirror, could hear the jackdaws in the tower, could catch, through this nearer mingling of disinfectants and gardenias, the cold, flat, weedy smell of that Gothic moat in the faraway green valley.
“Effortlessly floating.”
“Effortlessly floating.” The words gave him a deep satisfaction.
“I’d sit there,” she was saying, “I’d sit there looking and looking, and in a little while I’d be floating too. I’d be floating with the swans on that smooth surface between the darkness below and the pale tender sky above. Floating at the same time on that other surface between here and far away, between then and now.” And between remembered happiness, she was thinking,