Island - Aldous Huxley [14]
She laid her hand on his forehead, and suddenly the words transformed themselves into the things and events for which they stood; the images turned into facts. He actually was floating.
“Floating,” the voice softly insisted. “Floating like a white bird on the water. Floating on a great river of life—a great smooth silent river that flows so still, so still, you might almost think it was asleep. A sleeping river. But it flows irresistibly.
“Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and unhappiness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance. And it’s into that peace that you’re floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it’s sleeping. And I’m floating with it.” She was speaking for the stranger. She was speaking on another level for herself. “Effortlessly floating. Not having to do anything at all. Just letting go, just allowing myself to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take me where it’s going—and knowing all the time that where it’s going is where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace. Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation.”
Involuntarily, unconsciously, Will Farnaby gave a deep sigh. How silent the world had become! Silent with a deep crystalline silence, even though the parrots were still busy out there beyond the shutters, even though the voice still chanted here beside him! Silence and emptiness and through the silence and the emptiness flowed the river, sleeping and irresistible.
Susila looked down at the face on the pillow. It seemed suddenly very young, childlike in its perfect serenity. The frowning lines across the forehead had disappeared. The lips that had been so tightly closed in pain were parted now, and the breath came slowly, softly, almost imperceptibly. She remembered suddenly the words that had come into her mind as she looked down, one moonlit night, at the transfigured innocence of Dugald’s face: “She giveth her beloved sleep.”
“Sleep,” she said aloud. “Sleep.”
The silence seemed to become more absolute, the emptiness more enormous.
“Asleep on the sleeping river,” the voice was saying. “And above the river, in the pale sky, there are huge white clouds. And as you look at them, you begin to float up towards them. Yes, you begin to float up towards them, and the river now is a river in the air, an invisible river that carries you on, carries you up, higher and higher.”
Upwards, upwards through the silent emptiness. The image was the thing, the words became the experience.
“Out of the hot plain,” the voice went on, “effortlessly, into the freshness of the mountains.”
Yes, there was the Jungfrau, dazzlingly white against the blue. There was Monte Rosa…
“How fresh the air feels as you breathe it. Fresh, pure, charged with life!”
He breathed deeply and the new life flowed into him. And now a little wind came blowing across the snowfields, cool against his skin, deliciously cool. And, as though echoing his thoughts, as though describing his experience, the voice said, “Coolness. Coolness and sleep. Through coolness into more life. Through sleep into reconciliation, into wholeness, into living peace.”
Half an hour later Susila re-entered the sitting room.
“Well?” her father-in-law questioned. “Any success?”
She nodded.
“I talked to him about a place in England,” she said. “He went off more quickly than I’d expected. After that I gave him some suggestions about his temperature…”
“And the knee, I hope.”
“Of course.”
“Direct suggestions?”
“No, indirect. They’re always better. I got him