In the Time of Greenbloom by Gabriel Fielding

Author:Gabriel Fielding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was only as they were climbing the dark staircase to the first floor that John remembered he had left his boater at the Carpenter’s Arms. Michael said they could get it later when ‘they opened again’ and that in the meantime they were better off without it in view of the fact that by going into a college they would be breaking another school rule. John found himself quite satisfied with this argument. The day seemed to be taking a particular and predestined shape of its own; and perhaps as a result of the cyder or perhaps because of a hollowness which he had sensed somewhere inside him ever since ‘the Moors’, he was able to assume a new courage and nonchalance about everything that was happening.

Of late he had been worried by an increasing tendency to discount all the appearances of the world through which he moved. The spaces about him seemed to be filled with persons and things as remote and insignificant as the stars of the night sky. He found it difficult to believe in all the sounds sights and movements which betokened the living world, and if he had been blind dumb and deaf and so inhabited a dark consciousness of his own, he would have felt no more divorced from the appearances which his senses continually forced him to accept; he might even have accepted them more readily. Within his mind there were unused dimensions which were quite different from those his senses offered him; dimensions of light and shade, of nobility and degradation, better fitted than those the world had used to clothe the passions and aspirations which walked its surfaces. Opening his eyes to people and things, seeing their faces and facades, listening with his ears to the sounds they made, he was often tempted to rock with a dreadful laughter at their demand for serious acceptance, and at such times knew himself to be poised on the edge of a void filled with conceptions more awful even than those which he sensibly encountered.

Now, as he walked with Michael past the black gates of St John’s College he looked about him greedily, willing himself to accept the trees in the walled sanctuary, the embellishments of the Martyr’s Memorial, and the wide-windowed front of the Randolph Hotel. These things, he told himself, were all that there was, he must walk beneath them round them and through them as other people walked on their two legs, seriously giving them their due.

At the head of the stairs in Balliol College Michael knocked on the outer door and a muffled though somewhat raucous voice called out “Come in!”

Michael shouted that since the door was locked, they could not get in, whereat on the other side of the door they heard the utterance of a tired blasphemy followed by a long pause. They heard the springs of a chair squeaking, the sound of something being knocked over and a few moments later the thud-pad of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.