Complete Short Stories Read Free Page B

his head byhurrying him. All that he remembered was that the man was first a Japanese, then an Italian, and finally a kangaroo.
    In return she eagerly told her dream, gabbling over the words. ‘I was walking in the sand hills; there were rabbits there, too; how does that tally with what he said of life and death? I saw the man and you walking arm in arm towards me, and I ran from you both and I noticed thathe had a black silk handkerchief; he ran after me and my shoe buckle came off and I could not wait to pick it up. I left it lying, and he stooped and put it into his pocket.’
    ‘How do you know that it was the same man?’ he asked.
    ‘Because,’ she said, laughing, ‘he had a black face and wore a blue coat like that picture of Captain Cook. And because it was in the sand hills.’
    He said, kissingher neck: ‘We not only live together and talk together and sleep together, but it seems we now even dream together.’
    So they laughed.
    Then he got up and brought her breakfast.
    At about half past eleven, she said: ‘Go out now for a walk, my dear, and bring home something for me to think about: and be back in time for dinner at one o’clock.’
    It was a hot morning in the middle of May, and hewent out through the wood and struck the coast road, which after half a mile led into Lampton.
    (‘Do you know Lampton well?’ asked Crossley. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am only here for the holidays, staying with friends.’)
    He went a hundred yards along the coast road, but then turned off and went across the links: thinking of Rachel and watching the blue butterflies and looking at the heath roses and thyme,and thinking of her again, and how strange it was that they could be so near to each other; and then taking a pinch of gorse flower and smelling it, and considering the smell and thinking, ‘If she should die, what would become of me?’ and taking aslate from the low wall and skimming it across the pond and thinking, ‘I am a clumsy fellow to be her husband’; and walking towards the sand hills,and then edging away again, perhaps half in fear of meeting the person of their dream, and at last making a half circle towards the old church beyond Lampton, at the foot of the mountain.
    The morning service was over and the people were out by the cromlechs behind the church, walking in twos and threes, as the custom was, on the smooth turf. The squire was talking in a loud voice about King Charles,the Martyr: ‘A great man, a very great man, but betrayed by those he loved best,’ and the doctor was arguing about organ music with the rector. There was a group of children playing ball. ‘Throw it here, Elsie! No, to me, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!’ Then the rector appeared and pocketed the ball and said that it was Sunday; they should have remembered. When he was gone they made faces after him.
    Presentlya stranger came up and asked permission to sit down beside Richard; they began to talk. The stranger had been to the church service and wished to discuss the sermon. The text had been the immortality of the soul: the last of a series of sermons that had begun at Easter. He said that he could not grant the preacher’s premiss that
the soul is continually resident in the body
. Why should this beso? What duty did the soul perform in the daily routine task of the body? The soul was neither the brain, nor the lungs, nor the stomach, nor the heart, nor the mind, nor the imagination. Surely it was a thing apart? Was it not indeed less likely to be resident in the body than outside the body? He had no proof one way or the other, but he would say: Birth and death are so odd a mystery that the principleof life may well lie outside the body which is the visible evidence of living. ‘We cannot,’ he said, ‘even tell to a nicety what are the moments of birth and death. Why, in Japan, where I have travelled, they reckon a man to be already one year old when he is born; and lately in Italy a dead man – but come and walk on the sand