Free Darkness Visible by William Golding Page B

rotavator through the dust of the vegetable patch,or laying out the hoses, or waiting at traffic lights, the engine idling, or carrying parcels or sweeping, dusting, polishing—
    Sometimes Mrs Sweet was near enough to hear.
    “—one silver charger of the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 56 One golden spoon of ten shekels full of incense: 57 One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year for a burnt offering: 58 One kid of the goats—”
    Sometimes she would hear him in the house as his voice got louder and louder, stuck like a scratched gramophone record.
    “21 And he said unto them—said unto them—said unto them—said unto them—”
    Then she would hear a few quick steps and know that he had gone into his own place to look at the book lying open on the table. He would come back after a few moments; and through the rub and squeak of the window being polished she would hear him once more.
    “said unto them Is a candle bought to be put under a bushel or under a bed? And not to be set on a candlestick? 22 For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was anything kept secret, but that it should come abroad. 23 If any man—”
    A happy year, all things considered! Only there were things—as he said to himself once in a moment of quite brilliant and articulate explanation—there were things moving about under the surface. If things moved about on the surface there was something to be done. For example, there were explicit instructions as to conduct if a man should defile himself. But how if the thing that moves beneath the surface is not to be defined but stays there, a must without any instructions? Must drove him to things he could not explain but only accept as a bit of easing when to do nothing was intolerable. Such was the placing of stones in a pattern, the making of gestures over them. Such was the slow trickling of dust from the hand and the pouring of good water into a hole.
    It was during this year that Matty ceased to go to a church which had made only perfunctory efforts to retain him. Ceasing to go to church was as much a must as the other gestures, and positive. Yet the change from that year to the next, which might have slippedby in the usual well-oiled manner leaving no trace anywhere but on the calendar, came to creak for Matty like a rusty hinge. Mrs Sweet’s widowed sister came from Perth to spend the Christmas break and the New Year and brought her daughter. Sight of the girl with her fair hair and a skin to match sent Matty walking the road again until the small hours and it turned his eyes to the sky as if he might find some help there. Then lo! high in the sky he saw a familiar constellation. It was Orion the hunter, glittering, but with his dagger bursting fiery up. Matty’s cry stirred the birds awake like a false dawn; and in the silence after they had settled again he understood the roundness of the earth and the terror of things hung in emptiness, the sun moving the witchway, the moon on its head; and when he added in the ease with which people lived in the midst of majesty and terror then the rusty hinge creaked round and the question which went with him always, changed and came clearer.
    Not—who am I?
    “ What am I.”
    There on the open road in the small hours at New Year a few miles from the city of Melbourne he asked it aloud and stayed for an answer. It was silly, of course, like so much that he did. There was no one awake and up for miles; and when at last he turned away from the spot where he had cried out and then asked his question, though the sun was already lightening the hills on the horizon he still had no answer.
    So the winter and the summer and the spring and the autumn were the second year only there wasn’t any winter, not really, and not much spring. It was the time when the question seemed