Flying to Nowhere: A Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

even though two of them appeared together at the other end of the courtyard while she was standing at the Abbot’s door. After a while she returned to the farm, feeling that she would be more help there.
    The Abbot had woken early, with much on his mind. He was irritated by the investigations of Vane, which threatened not only to disturb his work but perhaps also to lead to changes in its very foundation. Suppose Vane, in his consideration of the efficacy of the holy waters, were irretrievably to damage the well? Might there be any action forthcoming from the Bishop as a result of anything adverse about its administration conveyed to him by Vane?
    The Abbot had slept on his right arm, and the pain of its numbness was what had awoken him. Turning carefully, he moved the dead arm with his left hand from under his body, laid it on his chest and slowly massaged the life back into it. What, he reflected, if life could be similarly given back to a dead body?
    What indeed was life? It was not the body, even though the body itself were preserved indefinitely. It was not motion, for motion could be suspended. Was it, after all, simply the spirit, whose location his long researches were designed to establish?
    The body was like a house, whose single inhabitant might be impossible at any one time to find. You could move from room to room, even on one floor or around a single stairwell, and be forever entering the chamber just vacated by the object of your pursuit.
    And what was this object? The Abbot had for a long time pursued it, but he could not say what it was. He dissected each part to understand its working, but finally each organ, each bone, each sustaining mechanism of tissue was revealed as little more than an empty room in a house that seemed to grow larger the more familiar you became with it.
    This was the house, indeed, that must according to the text in Matthew be guarded against the thief who might come at any hour, the least expected. Si sciret paterfamilias qua bora fur venturus esset, vigilaret utique et non sineret perfodi domum suam. But the Abbot had ceased to be much interested in sin, and the image of the robber in the house came to mean something other than the Devil. Wielding the knife and laying aside the skin in layers from the flesh and packed muscles, he often felt himself to be the unexpected intruder. And where was the householder? No longer vigilant, for sure.
    In his own house, the Abbot was not certain which role he played. Sometimes he walked half-purposefully, half with designed carelessness, through the passageways of one of the wings as though to establish his right to be there. But the extent of these corridors and the strangeness of unvisited rooms often perplexed him: it seemed to him like another house, not his own, in which he must necessarily be not proprietor but intruder.
    This feeling was increased by the real strangeness of some of the rooms he came across, rooms that he sometimes remembered using before and sometimes hardly felt that he had ever visited at all. He had only to turn left instead of the customary right on the third floor above his dining-room (at the head of the staircase that led from the anteroom to the dining-room, not the stairway by the fireplace) to find himself in a strangely dusty stretch of the house. He had been there unexpectedly just the week before, having taken the wrong turning without thinking, and had looked in fascination at rooms that had not been used since the days of his predecessor. He began by walking round the rooms, lifting the hangings and looking up chimneys and peering out of the tiny mullioned windows at unaccustomed views. Then he moved more quickly down the corridor, simply glancing into each room and if the door stuck hardly bothering to open it. His feeling was one of exasperation at not finding what he had come for, and then of perplexity when he reflected that he had not in the first place come for anything at all, but was wandering about