Lord of the Flies - William Golding [41]
"Smoke."
He sucked his bruised fist.
"Jack! Come on."
But Jack was not there. A knot of boys, making a great noise that he had not noticed, were heaving and pushing at a rock. As he turned, the base cracked and the whole mass toppled into the sea so that a thunderous plume of spray leapt half-way up the cliff.
"Stop it! Stop it!"
His voice struck a silence among them.
"Smoke."
A strange thing happened in his head. Something flittered there in front of his mind like a bat's wing, obscuring his idea.
"Smoke."
At once the ideas were back, and the anger.
"We want smoke. And you go wasting your time. You roll rocks."
Roger shouted.
"We've got plenty of time!"
Ralph shook his head.
"We'll go to the mountain."
The clamor broke out. Some of the boys wanted to go back to the beach. Some wanted to roll more rocks. The sun was bright and danger had faded with the darkness.
"Jack. The beast might be on the other side. You can lead again. You've been."
"We could go by the shore. There's fruit."
Bill came up to Ralph.
"Why can't we stay here for a bit?"
"That's right.'
"Let's have a fort."
"There's no food here," said Ralph, "and no shelter. Not much fresh water."
"This would make a wizard fort."
"We can roll rocks―"
"Right onto the bridge―"
"I say we'll go on!" shouted Ralph furiously. "We've got to make certain. We'll go now."
"Let's stay here―"
"Back to the shelter―"
"I'm tired―" "No!"
Ralph struck the skin off his knuckles. They did not seem to hurt. "I'm chief. We've got to make certain. Can't you see the mountain? There's no signal showing. There may be a ship out there. Are you all off your rockers?" Mutinously, the boys fell silent or muttering. Jack led the way down the rock and across the bridge.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shadows and Tall Trees
The pig-run kept close to the jumble of rocks that lay down by the water on the other side and Ralph was content to follow Jack along it. If you could shut your ears to the slow suck down of the sea and boil of the return, if you could forget how dun and unvisited were the ferny coverts on either side, then there was a chance that you might put the beast out of mind and dream for a while. The sun had swung over the vertical and the afternoon heat was closing in on the island. Ralph passed a message forward to Jack and when they next came to fruit the whole party stopped and ate.
Sitting, Ralph was aware of the heat for the first time that day. He pulled distastefully at his grey shirt and wondered whether he might undertake the adventure of washing it. Sitting under what seemed an unusual heat, even for this island, Ralph planned his toilet. He would like to have a pair of scissors and cut this hair―he flung the mass back―cut this filthy hair right back to half an inch. He would like to have a bath, a proper wallow with soap. He passed his tongue experimentally over his teeth and decided that a toothbrush would come in handy too. Then there were his nails― Ralph turned his hand over and examined them. They were bitten down to the quick though he could not remember when he had restarted this habit nor any time when he indulged it.
"Be sucking my thumb next―"
He looked round, furtively. Apparently no one had heard. The hunters sat, stuffing themselves with this easy meal, trying to convince themselves that they got sufficient kick out of bananas and that other olive-grey, jelly-like fruit. With the memory of his sometime clean self as a standard, Ralph looked them over. They were dirty, not with the spectacular dirt of boys who have fallen into mud or been brought down hard on a rainy day. Not one of them was an obvious subject for a shower, and yet―hair, much too long, tangled here and there, knotted round a dead leaf or a twig; faces cleaned fairly well by the process of eating and sweating but marked in the less accessible angles with a kind of shadow; clothes, worn away, stiff like his own with sweat, put on, not for decorum or comfort but out of custom; the skin of the body, scurfy with brine― He discovered with a little fall of the heart that these were the conditions he took as normal now and that he did not mind. He sighed and pushed away the stalk from which he had stripped the fruit. Already the hunters were stealing away to do their business in the woods or down by the rocks. He turned and looked out to sea.