Free Fall Read online

  “You did not choose your rationalism rationally. You chose because they showed you the wrong maker. Oh, yes, I know all about the lip-service they paid. She—Rowena Pringle—paid lip-service and I know how much lip-service is worth. The maker they mimed for you in your Victorian slum was the old male maker, totem of the conquering Hebrews, totem of our forefathers, the subjectors and quiet enslavers of half the world. I saw that totem in a German picture. He stands to attention beside the cannon. There is a Hindu tied across the muzzle and presently the male totem of the Hebrews will blow him to pieces, the mutinous dog, for his daring. The male totem is jack-booted and topee’d and ignorant and hypocritical and splendid and cruel. You rejected him as my generation rejects him. But you were innocent, you were good and innocent like Johnny Spragg, blown to pieces five miles above his own county of Kent. You and he could live in one world at a time. You were not caught in the terrible net where we guilty ones are forced to torture each other . . .”

  But Nick was in hospital dying of a tired heart. Even then it seemed to me he had less than his share, a bed in a ward in a town he always wanted to avoid. I saw him that evening from far off down the ward. He was propped up on pillows and leaned his immense head on his hand. The light from a bulb behind him lay smoothly over his curved cranium, snowed on him like the years, hung whitely in the eaves over his eyes. Beneath their pent his face was worn away. He seemed to me then to have become the image of labouring mind: and I was awed. Whatever was happening to him in death was on a scale and level before which I felt my own nothingness. I came away, my single verse unspoken.

  To her my speech was to be simple.

  “We were two of a kind, that is all. You were forced to torture me. You lost your freedom somewhere and after that you had to do to me what you did. You see? The consequence was perhaps Beatrice in the looney bin, our joint work, my work, the world’s work. Do you not see how our imperfections force us to torture each other? Of course you do! The innocent and the wicked live in one world—Philip Arnold is a minister of the crown and handles life as easy as breathing. But we are neither the innocent nor the wicked. We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.

  “Therefore I have come back—since we are both adults and live in two worlds at once—to offer forgiveness with both hands. Somewhere the awful line of descent must be broken. You did that and I forgive it wholly, take the spears into me. As far as I can I will make your part in our story as if it had never been.”

  But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

  She lived in a village some miles from the school now, a bitsy village with reed thatch and wrought-iron work. She cried out delightedly when she saw me at the end of the garden path.

  “Mountjoy!”

  And then she took off her gardener’s glove and offered me her white hand while the speech and everything I knew flew out of my head. For there are some people who paralyse us as if we were chicken, our beaks at the chalk line. I knew at once I should say nothing; but even so I was not prepared for the position and opinion of Miss Pringle; nor did our pictures of the past agree. My fame and Philip’s fame, were the consolations of teaching. She liked to think that her care of me—Sammy; may I say Sammy? And I muttered of course, of course, because my beak was on the chalk line—she liked to think that her care of me had been a little bit, a teeny bit (there was a plaster rabbit sitting by the plaster bird-bath) a teeny-weeny bit responsible for the things of beauty I was able to give the world.

  And so, in ten seconds, I wanted nothing but to get away. My flesh crept. She was still this being of awful power and now her approval of me was as terrible as her hatred and I knew we had nothing to say to each other. For that woman had achieved an unexpected kind of victory; she had deceived herself completely and now she was living in only one world.

  All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long, year in, year out, the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail, the oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour. The gorgeous dance is self-contained, then; does not need the music which in my mad moments I have heard. Nick’s universe is real.

  All day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate or ill-advised, but good or evil. For this mode which we must call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it; touches only the dark things, held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on.

  Her world was real, both worlds are real. There is no bridge.

  The bright line became a triangle sweeping in over a suddenly visible concrete floor.

  “Heraus!”

  Rising from my knees, holding my trousers huddled I walked uncertainly out towards the judge. But the judge had gone.

  The commandant was back.

  “Captain Mountjoy. This should not be happening. I am sorry.”

  The noise turned me round. I could see down the passage now over the stain shaped like a brain, could see into the cell where I had received what I had received. They were putting the buckets back, piles of them, were throwing back the damp floorcloths. I could see that they had forgotten one, or perhaps left it deliberately, when they emptied the cupboard for me. It still lay damply in the centre of the floor. Then a soldier shut the buckets and the floorcloths away with an ordinary cupboard door.

  “Captain Mountjoy. You have heard?”

  “I heard.”

  The commandant indicated the door back to the camp dismissively. He spoke the inscrutable words that I should puzzle over as though they were the Sphinx’s riddle.

  “The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples.”

  About the Author

  When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel Foundation said of his novels that they ‘illuminate the human condition in the world of today’. Born in Cornwall in 1911, Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor, a musician and a schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck.

  Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers and one literary agent. It was rescued from the ‘slush pile’ by a young editor at Faber and Faber and published in 1954. The book would go on to sell several million copies; it was translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. He wrote eleven other novels, The Inheritors and The Spire among them, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.

  www.william-golding.co.uk

  Books by

  Sir William Golding

  1911–1993

  Nobel Prize for Literature

  Fiction

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  THE INHERITORS

  PINCHER MARTIN

  FREE FALL

  THE SPIRE

  THE SCORPION GOD

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  THE PAPER MEN

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  CLOSE QUARTERS

  FIRE DOWN BELOW

  THE DOUBLE TONGUE

  TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  (a revised text of Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in one volume)

  Essays

  THE HOT GATES

  A MOVING TARGET

  Travel

  AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL

  Play

  THE BRASS BUTTERFLY

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  adapted for the stage by

  Nigel Williams

  WILLIAM GOLDING:

  A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS

  LORD OF THE FLIES

  by Mar
k Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor

  Copyright

  First published in 1959

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © William Golding, 1959

  Introduction © John Gray, 2013

  The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26878–8