The Great Divorce Read Online Free

wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond. There was a leaf—a young tender beech-leaf, lying in the grass beside it. I tried to pick the leaf up: my heart almost cracked with the effort, and I believe I did just raise it. But I had to let it go at once; it was heavier than a sack of coal. As I stood, recovering my breath with great gasps and looking down at the daisy, I noticed that I could see the grass not only between my feet but through them. I also was a phantom. Who will give me words to express the terror of that discovery? ‘Golly!’ thought I, ‘I’m in for it this time.’
    â€˜I don’t like it! I don’t like it,’ screamed a voice. ‘It gives me the pip!’ One of the ghosts had darted past me, back into the bus. She never came out of it again as far as I know.
    The others remained, uncertain.
    â€˜Hi, Mister,’ said the Big Man, addressing the Driver, ‘when have we got to be back?’
    â€˜You need never come back unless you want to,’ he replied. ‘Stay as long as you please.’ There was an awkward pause.
    â€˜This is simply ridiculous,’ said a voice in my ear. One of the quieter and more respectable ghosts had sidled up to me. ‘There must be some mismanagement,’ he continued. ‘What’s the sense of allowing all that riff-raff to float about here all day? Look at them. They’re not enjoying it. They’d be far happier at home. They don’t even know what to do.’
    â€˜I don’t know very well myself,’ said I. ‘What does one do?’
    â€˜Oh me? I shall be met in a moment or two. I’m expected. I’m not bothering about that. But it’s rather unpleasant on one’s first day to have the whole place crowded out with trippers. Damn it, one’s chief object in coming here at all was to avoid them!’
    He drifted away from me. And I began to look about. In spite of his reference to a ‘crowd’, the solitude was so vast that I could hardly notice the knot of phantoms in the foreground. Greenness and light had almost swallowed them up. But very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains. Sometimes I could make out in it steep forests, far-withdrawing valleys, and even mountain cities perched on inaccessible summits. At other times it became indistinct. The height was so enormous that my waking sight could not have taken in such an object at all. Light brooded on the top of it: slanting down thence it made long shadows behind every tree on the plain. There was no change and no progression as the hours passed. The promise—or the threat—of sunrise rested immovably up there.
    Long after that I saw people coming to meet us. Because they were bright I saw them while they were still very distant, and at first I did not know that they were people at all. Mile after mile they drew nearer. The earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew. Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seemless adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh. Some were bearded but no one in that company struck me as being of any particular age. One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless—heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that. They came on steadily. I did not entirely like it. Two of the ghosts screamed and ran for the bus. The rest of us huddled closer to one another.

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    As the solid people came nearer still I noticed that they were moving with order and determination as though