To the Islands Read Online Free PDF Page A

body.
    But his mind came home again, slowly, first noting the filtered sunlight suspending dust above the floor, then her feet, then quickly her face. When he looked into the light his eyes were very old, faded and blue. ‘Helen,’ he said, slowly. ‘I was many miles away.’
    ‘I know, I hated to disturb you.’
    ‘You needn’t have. I wanted to be woken.’
    ‘I came,’ she said, opposite him at the desk, ‘to see if there was any mail for me. Also to ask if you’d slept well.’
    He pushed some letters towards her and said: ‘Yes, very well. That stuff is good.’
    ‘I hoped it would be. Try it for a week or two, you’ll probably feel much better.’
    ‘Why, I’m not sick, am I?’
    ‘No, very well—for your age. But sleep—’
    ‘It is a blessed thing.’
    ‘And no more dreams?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘No need to worry.’
    ‘It’s you who worry, Helen.’
    ‘And soon,’ she said, ‘you’ll be free, at last.’
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘not free, not yet,’ looking blindly past her through the door. ‘Not as easily as that.’
    ‘How—?’
    ‘Do I know?’ he asked, slapping on the desk with his broad palm. ‘From this, this effusion from the council. They regret to say they’ve interviewed the two applicants and found them impossible. One confesses openly he’s agnostic, and the other, even worse, isn’t one of us at all, he’s a lapsed Methodist.’
    ‘Oh, really,’ she said, ‘that smug little bunch of clerics and do-gooders by proxy—’
    But he regretted already having let her see his discontent, and said nothing, only glanced at her with his bitter blue eyes from the depths of silence.
    ‘After so many years,’ she said, ‘to treat your resignation so lightly—’
    ‘Certainly not lightly. They’re treating it very seriously indeed.’
    ‘And aren’t you,’ she asked boldly, ‘aren’t you disappointed?’
    ‘Of course. But not,’ he said with a faint twist of the lips, ‘scandalized.’
    She smiled then, catching his eyes, and standing there in front of his table with her letters in her hand, looked suddenly much younger, like a strong-minded schoolgirl. ‘You make me sound very bumptious sometimes.’
    ‘I enjoy it. It’s unusual.’
    A bell rang.
    ‘Breakfast,’ he said. ‘Young Gunn looks tired.’
    ‘So I told him. He met the boat last night.’
    ‘He’s younger than you, isn’t he?’
    He was stone and iron, she thought, impassive, accustomed through decades to deal with wooings, marriages, disputes. There was nothing which did not concern him, no situation on which he might not be called from his remoteness to arbitrate.
    ‘He’s twenty-two,’ she said, smiling stiffly. ‘I’m twenty-four. And we scarcely know each other.’
    ‘Oh, I wasn’t suggesting—’
    ‘I’m sorry then if I—’
    Watching the colour deepen under her tanned skin he smiled with genuine amusement, showing the crude, ill-fitting teeth some wandering dentist years ago had made him. ‘How suspicious you are, Sister Bond. Do I look like a matchmaker?’
    ‘Anything but that.’
    ‘Too sour, do you think?’
    ‘Too rocklike,’ she said, slightly uneasy.
    ‘Like a crumbling cliff?’
    ‘No, not crumbling. A foundation. Or monument. Or something. You’re making me feel very bumptious now.’
    ‘Someday I must go,’ Heriot said quietly. ‘When I do, I like to know—have some faint idea—what will happen after. And who will do it. And all this wretched morning my head’s been full of poetry.’
    A hen, half-bald, mounted the steps to the doorway, peered in and fled. The flurry of its going merged with the crying crows, the weak and unreal invasion of sound on the earth’s essential silence.
    ‘Have, get, before it cloy,
    Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
    Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy—’
    His voice, husky but not old, proceeded towards the still light which his eyes so intently watched; his hands,