The Discovery Of Slowness Read Free

really like to be able to race, he thought, to be like the sun, which only seems to wander slowly across the sky, yet whose rays are as quick as the blink of an eye. Early in the morning they reach in one instant the most distant mountains. ‘Quick as the sun,’ he said aloud and permitted himself to drop back onto the pillows.
    In his dream he saw Peregrine Bertie, that marble Lord of Willoughby. He held Tom Barker tight in his grip, so that he would have to listen to John. Tom didn’t get free. His quickness was only enough for a few tiny movements. John watched him for a while and thought again and again what he might say to him.

2
The Ten-year-old and the Shore
    W hat was the trouble? Perhaps it was a kind of cold. Humans and animals became stiff when they froze. Or was it like the people from Ing Ming who were hungry? His movements dragged, so some special food was lacking. He had to find it and eat it. John sat up high in the tree beside the Partney Road when he thought this. The sun was shining on Spilsby’s chimney pots, and the clock of St James’s, which had just been reset, showed four hours past noon. Large animals, John thought, move more slowly than mice and wasps. Perhaps he was secretly a giant. But it seemed he was as small as the others and he’d do well to move cautiously to keep from squashing anyone to death.
    He climbed down and then up again. It was really too slow: his hand reached for the branch and found that it held. He should have had his eye on the next branch long ago. But what did the eye do? It remained fixed on the hand. So it was all a matter of looking. He knew the tree pretty well, but that didn’t make it any faster. His eyes refused to be rushed.
    Again he sat in the fork of the tree. Quarter past four. He still had time. No one was looking for him – at most Sherard, and he wouldn’t find him. The carriage that morning! With rigid stares his brothers and sisters had watched him climb aboard, for they were impatient and didn’t enjoy being his brothers and sisters. John knew he looked odd when he did anything in a hurry. Those wide-open eyes, to begin with. For him, the door handle could suddenly turn into a wheel spoke or a horse’s tail. Tongue in the corner of his mouth, tense forehead, panting – ‘He’s spelling again,’ said the others. That’s what they called the way he moved. Father himself had thought up that expression.
    He made out things too slowly. Blind, it might work better. He had an idea. He climbed down again, lay on his back, and learned the entire tree by heart from below – every branch, every handhold. Then he tied a stocking round his eyes, groped for the lowest branch, and moved his body from memory while counting out loud. The method was good but a bit dangerous. He didn’t yet know the tree precisely; mistakes happened. He was determined to become fast, so fast that his mouth wouldn’t be able to keep up with the counting.
    Five hours past noon. He sat, panting and sweating, in the fork of the tree and pushed the stocking up on his forehead. No time to lose; just catch a little breath. Soon he would be the fastest man in the world, but he’d make believe slyly that nothing had changed. For the sake of appearance, he’d still seem sluggish about his hearing; his speech would drag; he’d walk as though he were spelling and lag behind everywhere pitifully. But then there would be a public performance: ‘No one is faster than John Franklin!’ At the horse fair at Horncastle he’d have them put up a tent. They’d all come to have a good laugh at him, the Barkers from Spilsby, the Tennysons from Market Rasen, the sour-faced apothecary Flinders from Donington, the Cracrofts – in short, all of them from this morning. He’d show first that he could follow the fastest talker, even with completely unfamiliar phrases, and then he’d answer so fast that nobody