The Double Tongue by William Golding
Let it be. Let the curtains hang there. Apollo send Ionides back to me! He is more than a husband, that quicksilver, quicksand, learned mountebank of the gods! I believe in him, liar, soothsayer, self-deceiver, fool, the eighth wise man –
Well, Arieka, what did you expect?
A god, that’s what you expected.
They turned their backs on you.
They vanished and there was grief before the void. The Void.
Presently I came out of that unprofitable feeling and found myself walking down the street, my face bare and people looking strangely at me. So with an automatic gesture I veiled myself and entered the Pythion.
He was sitting on one of the chairs like a woman. Or like an ancient statue. His eyes were shut.
‘Ion. Ionides, oh you, you fool. You moron, you, you –’
‘Get up, for god’s sake. No, not that. Just get up. Stop wetting my feet. I’ve had enough. I shall kill myself –’
‘Ion –’
‘I know, I know. Imagine. They let me go. Lucius Galba, that Roman bastard. He let me go. He said the secret of Roman Power was that it robbed men of their dignity. Then they were nothing. Oh God, the Father of Gods and Men, strike him blind! Apollo spill his seed with your arrow – Artemis freeze his bed – You demons that I called up, torment him!’
‘Ion –’
The strange man clasped himself with his arms and began to chant.
‘Ion. Ion. Ion. Ion. Ion. Ion –’
Then I knew what he was doing. He was finding a place to hide, to draw into and away from himself, his shame the last bit of clothing to be dropped before the void, where at last there is the peace of not-god, not-man – nothingness –
‘Ion. Ion. Ion –’
Suddenly he stopped. He wiped his eyes and stood up. Spoke briskly.
‘Well, that’s that, then.’
He stood, looking down at me.
‘Well, Pythia. That’s that. You don’t understand do you? You with your knack of suffering. I can’t. I mean I can for a bit, like just now and before you came in. Real, genuine – shame. And now it’s over. That’s the difference between us.’
‘You’re back –’
‘No I’m not.’
*
So that was how His Holiness came home. But, as he said, he wasn’t home. And the little that had really come did not last long. I saw him dwindle. Presently it became plain that he would dwindle right away. I asked the god if it was possible for him to live. And I knew what the god’s answer was, for it was the same as my own. I had taken, indeed, not to addressing an Apollo out there – somewhere in the empyrean it may be – but that woman’s image, as a child would. So I suppose that at last the Pythia did indeed answer herself.
Perseus said something acute.
‘If His Holiness was a slave he would live.’
I saw that was true; and it was in a way a compliment to Ion, so I passed it on to him. He laughed crazily when he heard it.
‘Perseus thinks there is a man in here!’
‘So there is, Ion. Be a man.’
‘You lack conviction. How wonderful, though, if something real like dying because I had lost my dignity actually happened to me! No, no, my dear. I shall totter on, growing senile and finding not death but oblivion. You may have the leavings burnt.’
That is what happened more or less. He did become silly, not in the way he always had been at times, but a silliness without any wisdom in it. There was oblivion and presently his body died. I did not suffer with him because as so often in these cases of extreme age he had really died a long time before.
The day his body died I went and sat in his niche for the first time in my life and, I think, the last time. There was nothing. He did not come back. It seemed to me that with his death, though I was the Pythia with a Second Lady ready to take over my duties, nevertheless with Ion the oracle died. I let her go through the motions. I understood that old First Lady I had known so many years ago. Sixty? More, I think. I have lost count. But the world has changed. Sixty will do.
When the winter came and the Second Lady ceased giving oracles and the young man who sat in Ion’s niche had ceased interpreting her noises for the questioner – when, I say, that deadly wind blew down and sifted the unmelting snow along the cobbled street, I returned to the oracle, as was my right, and opened one leaf of the door. I passed through the colonnade, down the steps past the niches, round the tripod and stood before the curtains. The key with the double labrys was hanging round my neck. I pulled the drawstrings slowly and the curtains slid back. There was a double door behind them. I stood before it for a long time but the only thought that came to me was that whatever happened it did not matter much. So I put the silver labrys into the silver lock and turned the key. The doors were easy enough to open. There was the solid, impenetrable rock of the mountain behind them.
It was only the next day that I received a letter from the Archon of Athens. In view of my long service as Pythia of the Apolline Oracle the city wished to erect a stone image of me among the altars on the Field of Mars. I wrote back – remembering the void – and feeling strangely that there was a kind of tenderness in it that I could explain to nobody. I asked that rather than an image of me they should erect a simple altar and inscribe there:
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD
About the Author
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.
Books by
Sir William Golding
1911–1993
Nobel Prize for Literature
Fiction
LORD OF THE FLIES
THE INHERITORS
PINCHER MARTIN
FREE FALL
THE SPIRE
THE PYRAMID
THE SCORPION GOD
DARKNESS VISIBLE
THE PAPER MEN
RITES OF PASSAGE
CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRE DOWN BELOW
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
(a revised text of Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below in one volume)
Essays
THE HOT GATES
A MOVING TARGET
Travel
AN EGYPTIAN JOURNAL
Play
THE BRASS BUTTERFLY
LORD OF THE FLIES
adapted for the stage by
Nigel Williams
Copyright
First published in 1995
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© The Estate of William Golding, 1995
The right of William Golding to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied,
ISBN 978–0–571–26742–2
William Golding, The Double Tongue
(Series: # )