The Bell - Iris Murdoch [62]
They both stopped, taking a deep breath, and looked in silence, enjoying the great space and the warm expanse of air and colour. Then from across the lake came sharply and delicately the voices of the madrigal singers. The voices plied and wove, supporting and answering each other in the enchanting and slightly absurd precision of the madrigal. Most clearly heard was Catherine's thin triumphant soprano, retaining and re-asserting the melody. It was too far away to catch the words, but Michael knew them well.
The silver swan that living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
She sang her first and last, and sang no more.
The song came to an end. Toby and Michael smiled at each other and began to walk slowly toward the ferry. It was too magical a time for hurrying. Then as they neared the lake another sound was heard. Michael could not at first think what it was; then he recognized it as the rising crescendo of a jet engine. From a tiny mutter the noise rose in an instant to a great tearing roar that ripped the heavens apart. They looked up. Gleaming like angels four jet planes had appeared and roared from nowhere to the zenith of the sky above Imber. They were flying in formation, and at this point still perfectly together turned suddenly upward and climbed in line quite vertically into the sky, turned with an almost leisurely movement onto their backs and roared down again, looping the loop with such precision that they seemed to be tied together by invisible wires. Then they began to climb again, standing upon their tails, absolutely straight up above the watchers' heads. Still roaring together they reached a distant peak and then peeled off like a flower, each one to a different point of the compass. In another second they had gone, leaving behind their four trails of silver vapour and a shattering subsiding roar. Then there was complete silence. It had all happened very quickly.
Michael found himself open-mouthed, head back and heart thumping. The noise and speed and beauty of the things had made him for a moment almost unconscious. Toby looked at him, equally dazed and excited. Michael looked down and found that he had fastened both his hands onto the boy's bare arm. Laughing they drew apart.
CHAPTER 9
'The chief requirement of the good life,' said James Tayper Pace, 'is to live without any image of oneself. I speak, dear brothers and sisters, as one who is most conscious of being remote from this condition.' It was the next day, Sunday, and James was standing on the dais in the Long Room, one arm resting lightly on the music stand, delivering the weekly talk. He frowned nervously and swayed to and fro as he spoke, tilting the stand with him.
He went on. 'The study of personality, indeed the whole conception of personality, is, as I see it, dangerous to goodness. We were told at school, at least I was told at school, to have ideals. This, it seems to me, is rot. Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality - when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection? Not in some imaginary concoction out of our idea of our own character - but in something so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a distant hint of it.
'Now you will say to me, dear James, you tell us to seek perfection and then you tell us it is so remote we can only guess at it - and where do we go from there? The fact is, God has not left us without guidance. How, otherwise, could our Lord have given us the high command "Be ye therefore perfect"? Matthew five forty-eight.