Magic Seeds Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought.
    He gave up the idea of books. But then one day, near the end of his walk, he had gone into an antique shop, attracted by its casual choked display of coloured glass and lamps and vases and other rich-looking and delicate things of the 1920s and 1930s which had somehow survived the war. There were books on one table, mainly paper-bound German books in the German black letter; but among them, and noticeable because of their faded cloth binding and English script, were English-language textbooks about algebra, advanced geometry, and mechanics and hydrostatics. These books had been printed in the 1920s, and the paper, from that earlier time of stringency, was cheap and grey; perhaps some student or teacher had brought these textbooks from England to Berlin. Willie had liked mathematics at school. He had liked the logic, the charm of solutions; and it occurred to him now that these were the books he would need in the forest. They would keep his mind alive; they would not repeat; they would move from lesson to lesson, stage to stage; they would offer no disturbing pictures of men and women in played-out, too-simple societies.
    In his Indian hotel now, near the railway station, with a night and a day to spend before he could get on the train to Joseph’s town, Willie took the books out from his little canvas suitcase, to get started on his new discipline. He began with the geometrybook. The ceiling light was very dim. He could barely see the faint print on the old grey paper. His straining eyes began to ache. To deal with the problems he needed paper and a pen or pencil. He had none of those things. So there was nothing he could do. But he couldn’t hide from himself the fact that the geometry book and the others were too hard for him. He had overestimated his powers; he needed to start at a lower level; and even then it was clear he would need a teacher and an encourager. He had been reading, or trying to read, in bed; there was no table in the little room. He put the books back in the canvas case.
    He thought, “I would have had to get rid of those books anyway. They would have given me away.”
    This failure, so simple, so quick, so comprehensive, before he had got started, filled him with gloom, made it hard for him to stay in the little room with the blotched walls, and even harder for him to go out into the warm, buzzing city. The books had given him a kind of pride, a kind of protection. Now he was naked. He ground out the night, ticking off the quarter-hours, and he ground out the next day. And all the way in the train to Joseph’s town his gloom grew; but all the time, through the night, through all the stops at squalling railway stations, the train was taking him on, whether he liked it or not, to what he had now committed himself to.
    In the early morning, when the sun rose, the moving train cast a complete shadow from the top of the coaches to the wheels on the rails. He looked for his own shadow, and when he found it he played with it for a while, moving his head and hands and seeing the shadow answer. He thought, “That’s me.” It was oddly reassuring, seeing himself at this distance, possessed of life like everybody else.
    T HE TOWN IN which Joseph lived was big, but it was without a metropolitan feel. The road outside the station was a mess, with a lot of urgent shouting and excitement but very little movement. Everybody was in everybody else’s way. Pedal rickshaws and scooter rickshaws and taxis competed for space with horse-drawn or mule-drawn carriages that tilted dangerously downwards at the back, seemingly about to throw out their heavy load of women and children. There were various hotel agents about, and Willie, choosing at random, allowed himself to be led by one of these men to the Hotel Riviera. They took a carriage. “Modern, all modern,” the Riviera man said all the time, and then vanished as soon as he led Willie into the little lobby of the hotel, as though not wishing now to be