Happy Valley Read Online Free Page A

sound. You could touch it. You could feel it. You could feel a stillness and a music all at once. You were at once floating andstationary, in time, all time, and space, without barrier, passing with a fresher knowledge of the tangible to a point where this dissolved, became the spiritual.
    A great boulder of black rock rose nakedly at the edge of the whitened road. He stopped and kicked at it with his ski. The tangible. There is a stubborn, bitter ring if you kick at a piece of black rock. And how would serene, Christian, German, eighteenth-century Johann Sebastian have dealt with a lump of antipodal rock? Serenity perhaps was the effect of environment, not so much the result of spiritual conflict. At least you would like to think that. It would make things easier. You could give up the ghost at the start. But you did not give up the ghost, you went on swerving, wheeling, in the direction of Happy Valley, ducking beneath the arm of a tree when it nearly hit you in the face, half closing your eyes to keep out the spray of snow and the wind, and it was exciting, and you held your breath, hoping this wasn’t your last moment, almost, but not the last.
    Oliver Halliday caught the point of his ski in a trough of snow and fell over in a heap, though it might have been a knot, it felt like a knot. He had that blue, constricted sensation of being winded. He felt that his face was a distinct, bright blue, then that his toes were hurting. He put his hand on the snow to raise himself up, sank in an inch or two, touched the ground. He was almost out of the snow. He would take off his skis and walk, if he could walk, if he wasn’t dead, but he felt he was dead, physically more than thirty-four. So he lay back on the cold snow, to consider the situation, and it was good and cold lying there, the way the ribs moved with his panting, in and out. His ribs movedin and out the day he won the quarter-mile, and the cup he received from the Governor dropped on the gravel drive as coming down, and somebody sniggered, he was very foolish bending to pick up the cup. He laughed. He was lying on his back in the present. His bag made a pillow under his neck. He was laughing up at a patch of sky that looked rather chaste and bewildered in the scud of cloud. Once he had written nature poems, on clouds and things. But he did not do that any more. He would get to his feet, and take off his skis, and after reaching the car he would drive on home to lunch, probably find cold mutton and pickles out of a bottle, it was a Monday, and Hilda said, you can’t expect anything hot on Monday, there’s always the wash. So the present was cold mutton and pickles, not nature poems about a cloud or mountains, he used to be keen on the idea of mountains, they recurred over and over again, generally blue, or else there was a mist, but that was before he had heard of Kambala. The way that man clung to the door, shivering on the mountaintop, perhaps standing there still, waiting for someone to come, and the whole winter nobody would come except a half-baked Chinese, creeping along the snow tunnel from one of the other houses.
    But you needn’t think, of course. The Miracle of Thought, he had read somewhere, in a Sunday newspaper. God making a clockwork toy and feeling pleased with it, then scratching his head and seeing that it might work too well, so he put in an extra mechanism in a moment of compassion, you just pushed down a lever and the action was held up.
    He walked along slowly. He would not think. There wasthe car now, with a thin powdering of snow on the roof. He began to whistle a tune, a Ständchen. Elisabeth Schumann sang it on the gramophone. It was thin and very cold and very sexless, but there were moments when it persisted it coming into your head, jamming down the lever, on cold, thin, sexless mornings walking over the snow.

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    The hawk continued to circle in wide, empty sweeps. It might have been anywhere, heading towards Kambala, over the roofs of