Free To the Ends of the Earth by William Golding Page B

rivulets, there have been washed together casually and indifferently a number of features that Nature had tossed away as of no use to any of her creations. Some vital spark that might have gone to the animation of a sheep assumed the collection. The result is this fledgling of the church.
    Your lordship may detect in the foregoing, a tendency to fine writing : a not unsuccessful attempt, I flatter myself. Yet as I surveyed the scene the one thought uppermost in my mind was that Colley was a living proof of old Aristotle’s dictum. There is after all an order to which the man belongs by nature though some mistaken quirk of patronage has elevated him beyond it. You will find that order displayed in crude medieval manuscripts where the colour has no shading and the drawing no perspective. Autumn will be illustrated by men, peasants, serfs, who are reaping in the fields and whose faces are limned with just such a skimped and jagged line under their hoods as Colley’s is! His eyes were turned down in diffidence and possibly recollection. The corners of his mouth were turned up—and there was the triumph and complacency! Much bone was strewn about the rest of his countenance. Indeed, his schooling should have been the open fields, withstone-collecting and bird-scaring, his university the plough. Then all those features so irregularly scarred by the tropic sun might have been bronzed into a unity and one, modest expression animated the whole!
    We are back with fine writing, are we not? But my restlessness and indignation are still hot within me. He knows of my consequence. At times it was difficult to determine whether he was addressing Edmund Talbot or the Almighty. He was theatrical as Miss Brocklebank. The habit of respect for the clerical office was all that prevented me from breaking into indignant laughter. Among the respectable emigrants that attended was the poor, pale girl, carried devotedly by strong arms and placed in a seat behind us. I have learned that she suffered a miscarriage in our first blow and her awful pallor was in contrast with the manufactured allure of La Brocklebank. The decent and respectful attention of her male companions was mocked by these creatures that were ostensibly her betters—the one in paint pretending devotion, the other with his book surely pretending sanctity! When the service began there also began the most ridiculous of all the circumstances of that ridiculous evening. I set aside the sound of pacing steps from above our heads where Mr Prettiman demonstrated his anticlericalism as noisily on the afterdeck as possible. I omit the trampings and shouts at the changing of the watch—all done surely at the captain’s behest or with his encouragement or tacit consent with as much rowdiness as can be procured among skylarking sailors. I think only of the gently swaying saloon, the pale girl and the farce that was played out before her! For no sooner did Mr Colley catch sight of Miss Brocklebank than he could not take his eyes off her. She for her part—and “part” I am very sure it was—gave us such a picture of devotion as you might find in the hedge theatres of the country circuits. Her eyes never lefthis face but when they were turned to heaven. Her lips were always parted in breathless ecstasy except when they opened and closed swiftly with a passionate “Amen!” Indeed there was one moment when a sanctimonious remark in the course of his address from Mr Colley, followed by an “Amen!” from Miss Brocklebank was underlined , as it were (well, a snail has a gait !) by a resounding fart from that wind-machine Mr Brocklebank so as to set most of the congregation sniggering like schoolboys on their benches.
    However much I attempted to detach myself from the performance I was made deeply ashamed by it and vexed at myself for my own feelings. Yet since that time I have discovered a sufficient reason for my discomfort and think my feelings in this instance wiser than my reason. For I