To the Ends of the Earth
Page 69
My letter to Miss Chumley grew to immense length. The sloop Henrietta put in but needed much attention to her rigging. There now occurred exasperating delays which were no one’s fault in particular but endemic to the naval service in time of war. I transferred my gear to another ship, which incontinently left without me but with my gear and letter. Henrietta—but why should I elaborate? I followed hard on my letter but was delayed at Madras, which proved to be a fortunate circumstance since it gives me an opportunity of allowing the reader a glimpse of Miss Chumley’s epistolary genius. I had, of course, in my own letter proposed matrimony formally. The words in which the Dear Object of my Passion consented to make me the happiest of men must be forever sacred to me. However, she consents to my copying some of the rest of that letter here.
The climate continues oppressive. Oh, for an English day! Well, I am busy counting my blessings, of which the greatest—but I shall not flatter you, for that would be the worst of beginnings, would it not? Let me turn rather to the “Draft of my Maiden Speech”, which you was kind enough to include and invite me to criticize. Dear Mr Talbot, I found it truly admirable! When you declare “I accept election by the route of what has been called a ‘Rotten Borough’ solely that I may devote myself to the reform of an insane and unfair system!” my very heart cried out—This was noble! By the way, who is Mrs Prettiman?
Will you think me too oncoming if I refer to our proposed journey home together? My cousin (you know he is in the Church) has some reservations on the subject and I enclose a letter to you from him. I do so agree with you that we should attempt on the way to visit the great Centres of Civilization. The Pyramids! What excitement among all the others! But should we not get you to your important Parliamentary Duties as quickly as possible?? The Holy Land—you know of course how the Hallowed Places must shine in the heart of any young person! But I have always found it difficult to love the Israelites as I should! There! I have confessed it! I am sure they were a most estimable people, for they lived on manna, did they not, and a wholly vegetable diet is so lowering as to render a person young or old incapable of energetic wrong-doing. But when their diet changed—all that smiting hip and thigh, whatever that means—I am sure it is very violent! Of course, I would not dare to criticize the Great Founder of our Religion and do not mean to: but following that Sacred Career in the very Footsteps of the Master would be too painfully affecting for a young person to contemplate. In short, sir, may we not, as Mr Jesperson would say, “omit the Holy Land altogether”? But naturally I shall in all things be guided by you and my only wish is to stand by you in what you call “this momentous translation from Fourth Secretary to a Member of the most powerful Body of Legislators in the world!”
My readers may imagine with what joy I read and reread this tender missive! I turned at last to the letter from Miss Chumley’s cousin. It was no lessened joy to find that he was a churchman indeed, for he was a bishop and signed himself “Calcutta +”.
What more is there to say? So must end this account of Edmund Talbot’s journey to the ends of the earth and his attempt to learn Tarpaulin! Yet I divine in my unborn readers an unease. Something is missing, is there not? The bishop could not consent to our journeying from India to England while still unmarried. It would be an extremely bad example set in a part of the world only too open to licence of every kind! He himself very cordially offered to perform the ceremony! So, my dear readers may rest contentedly assured: there did come a day when I leapt ashore in India from a pinnace. A “young person” under a rosy parasol stood, as it might be, twenty yards away. Valuable Janet was behind her and a group of dark servants. Above the rosy parasol a greater was held and spread. But she took no heed of the sun when she saw me. I swept off my hat—she broke into a run—and your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother fairly sprang into my arms!
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After I read Oldmeadow’s letter I went for a walk, remembering all those old acquaintances—enemies who in retrospect now seem to be friends. They came up one by one, some I had forgotten entirely—Jacobs, Manley, yes, Howell. I seemed to touch them all with my mind, one by one, Bowles, Celia Brocklebank, Zenobia, little Pike, Wheeler, Bates, Colley—and so on, from Captain Anderson down. It was a curious exercise. I found that I could remember them without much emotion—even Lieutenant Summers. Even Mr and Mrs Prettiman. That night I had a kind of dream. I hope it was a dream, for dreams in any event are mysterious enough. I do not mean their content but the very fact of them. I do not wish it to have been more than a dream: because if it was, then I have to start all over again in a universe quite unlike the one which is my sanity and security. This dream was me seeing them as it were from ground level, and I was seeing them from ground level because I was quite comfortably buried in the earth of Australia, all except my head. They rode past me a few yards away. They were laughing and chattering in a high excitement, the men and women following them with faces glowing as in a successful hunt for treasure. They were high on horses—she leading, astride with a wide hat, and he following, side-saddle, since his right leg was useless. You would have thought from the excitement and the honey light, from the crowd that followed them, from the laughter and, yes, the singing, you would have thought they were going to some great festival of joy, though where in the desert around them it might be found there was no telling. They were so happy! They were so excited!
I woke from my dream and wiped my face and stopped trembling and presently worked out that we could not all do that sort of thing. The world must be served, must it not? Only it did cross my mind before I had properly dealt with myself that she had said, or he had said, that I could come too, although I never countenanced the idea. Still, there it is.
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 College, 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 in Literature
Fiction
LORD OF THE FLIES
THE INHERITORS
PINCHER MARTIN
FREE FALL
THE SPIRE
THE PYRAMID
THE SCORPION GOD
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE PAPER MEN
RITES OF PASSAGE
CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRE DOWN BELOW
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
(comprising Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in a revised text; foreword by the author)
THE DOUBLE TONGUE
Essays
THE HOT GATES
A MOVING TARGET
Travel
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL
Plays
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY
LORD OF THE FLIES
adapted for the stage by Nigel Williams
WILLIAM GOLDING: A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS
by Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2013
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by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
Foreword and text revisions throughout © William Golding, 1991
Rites of Passage © William Golding, 1980
Close Quarters © William Golding, 1987
Fire Down Below © William Golding, 1989
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 978–0–571–26745–3