Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Is there going to be another war?” asked the old lady to whom he had predicted this end.
“Very soon,” said Mr. Scogan, with an air of quiet confidence.
The old lady was succeeded by a girl dressed in white muslin, garnished with pink ribbons. She was wearing a broad hat, so that Denis could not see her face; but from her figure and the roundness of her bare arms he judged her young and pleasing. Mr. Scogan looked at her hand, then whispered, “You are still virtuous.”
The young lady giggled and exclaimed, “Oh, lor’!”
“But you will not remain so for long,” added Mr. Scogan sepulchrally. The young lady giggled again. “Destiny, which interests itself in small things no less than in great, has announced the fact upon your hand.” Mr. Scogan took up the magnifying-glass and began once more to examine the white palm. “Very interesting,” he said, as though to himself— “very interesting. It’s as clear as day.” He was silent.
“What’s clear?” asked the girl.
“I don’t think I ought to tell you.” Mr. Scogan shook his head; the pendulous brass ear-rings which he had screwed on to his ears tinkled.
“Please, please!” she implored.
The witch seemed to ignore her remark. “Afterwards, it’s not at all clear. The fates don’t say whether you will settle down to married life and have four children or whether you will try to go on the cinema and have none. They are only specific about this one rather crucial incident.”
“What is it? What is it? Oh, do tell me!”
The white muslin figure leant eagerly forward.
Mr. Scogan sighed. “Very well,” he said, “if you must know, you must know. But if anything untoward happens you must blame your own curiosity. Listen. Listen.” He lifted up a sharp, claw-nailed forefinger. “This is what the fates have written. Next Sunday afternoon at six o’clock you will be sitting on the second stile on the footpath that leads from the church to the lower road. At that moment a man will appear walking along the footpath.” Mr. Scogan looked at her hand again as though to refresh his memory of the details of the scene. “A man,” he repeated— “a small man with a sharp nose, not exactly good looking nor precisely young, but fascinating.” He lingered hissingly over the word. “He will ask you, ‘Can you tell me the way to Paradise?’ and you will answer, ‘Yes, I’ll show you,’ and walk with him down towards the little hazel copse. I cannot read what will happen after that.” There was a silence.
“Is it really true?” asked white muslin.
The witch gave a shrug of the shoulders. “I merely tell you what I read in your hand. Good afternoon. That will be sixpence. Yes, I have change. Thank you. Good afternoon.”
Denis stepped down from the bench; tied insecurely and crookedly to the tentpole, the Union Jack hung limp on the windless air. “If only I could do things like that!” he thought, as he carried the bench back to the tea-tent.
Anne was sitting behind a long table filling thick white cups from an urn. A neat pile of printed sheets lay before her on the table. Denis took one of them and looked at it affectionately. It was his poem. They had printed five hundred copies, and very nice the quarto broadsheets looked.
“Have you sold many?” he asked in a casual tone.
Anne put her head on one side deprecatingly. “Only three so far, I’m afraid. But I’m giving a free copy to everyone who spends more than a shilling on his tea. So in any case it’s having a circulation.”
Denis made no reply, but walked slowly away. He looked at the broadsheet in his hand and read the lines to himself relishingly as he walked along:
“This day of roundabouts and swings,
Struck weights, shied cocoa-nuts, tossed rings,
Switchbacks, Aunt Sallies, and all such small
High jinks — you call it ferial?
A holiday? But paper noses
Sniffed the artificial roses
Of round Venetian cheeks through half
Each carnival year, and masks might laugh
At things the naked face for shame
Would blush at — laugh and think no blame.
A holiday? But Galba showed
Elephants on an airy road;
Jumbo trod the tightrope then,
And in the circus armed men
Stabbed home for sport and died to break
Those dull imperatives that make
A prison of every working day,
Where all must drudge and all obey.
Sing Holiday! You do not know
How to be free. The Russian snow
Flowered with bright blood whose roses spread
Petals of fading, fading red
That died into the snow again,
Into the virgin snow; and men
From all ancient bonds were freed.
Old law, old custom, and old creed,
Old right and wrong there bled to death;
The frozen air received their breath,
A little smoke that died away;
And round about them where they lay
The snow bloomed roses. Blood was there
A red gay flower and only fair.
Sing Holiday! Beneath the Tree
Of Innocence and Liberty,
Paper Nose and Red Cockade
Dance within the magic shade
That makes them drunken, merry, and strong
To laugh and sing their ferial song:
‘Free, free...!’
But Echo answers
Faintly to the laughing dancers,
‘Free’ — and faintly laughs, and still,
Within the hollows of the hill,
Faintlier laughs and whispers, ‘Free,’
Fadingly, diminishingly:
‘Free,’ and laughter faints away...
Sing Holiday! Sing Holiday!”
He folded the sheet carefully and put it in his pocket. The thing had its merits. Oh, decidedly, decidedly! But how unpleasant the crowd smelt! He lit a cigarette. The smell of cows was preferable. He passed through the gate in the park wall into the garden. The swimming-pool was a centre of noise and activity.
“Second Heat in the Young Ladies’ Championship.” It was the polite voice of Henry Wimbush. A crowd of sleek, seal-like figures in black bathing-dresses surrounded him. His grey bowler hat, smooth, round, and motionless in the midst of a moving sea, was an island of aristocratic calm.
Holding his tortoise-shell-rimmed pince-nez an inch or two in front of his eyes, he read out names from a list.
“Miss Dolly Miles, Miss Rebecca Balister, Miss Doris Gabell...”
Five young persons ranged themselves on the brink. From their seats of honour at the other end of the pool, old Lord Moleyn and Mr. Callamay looked on with eager interest.
Henry Wimbush raised his hand. There was an expectant silence. “When I say ‘Go,’ go. Go!” he said. There was an almost simultaneous splash.
Denis pushed his way through the spectators. Somebody plucked him by the sleeve; he looked down. It was old Mrs. Budge.
“Delighted to see you again, Mr. Stone,” she said in her rich, husky voice. She panted a little as she spoke, like a short-winded lap-dog. It was Mrs. Budge who, having read in the “Daily Mirror” that the Government needed peach stones — what they needed them for she never knew — had made the collection of peach stones her peculiar “bit” of war work. She had thirty-six peach trees in her walled garden, as well as four hot-houses in which trees could be forced, so that she was able to eat peaches practically the whole year round. In 1916 she ate 4200 peaches, and sent the stones to the Government. In 1917 the military authorities called up three of her gardeners, and what with this and the fact that it was a bad year for wall fruit, she only managed to eat 2900 peaches during that crucial period of the national destinies. In 1918 she did rather better, for between January 1st and the date of the Armistice she ate 3300 peaches. Since the Armistice she had relaxed her efforts; now she did not eat more than two or three peaches a day. Her constitutio
n, she complained, had suffered; but it had suffered for a good cause.
Denis answered her greeting by a vague and polite noise.
“So nice to see the young people enjoying themselves,” Mrs. Budge went on. “And the old people too, for that matter. Look at old Lord Moleyn and dear Mr. Callamay. Isn’t it delightful to see the way they enjoy themselves?”
Denis looked. He wasn’t sure whether it was so very delightful after all. Why didn’t they go and watch the sack races? The two old gentlemen were engaged at the moment in congratulating the winner of the race; it seemed an act of supererogatory graciousness; for, after all, she had only won a heat.
“Pretty little thing, isn’t she?” said Mrs. Budge huskily, and panted two or three times.
“Yes,” Denis nodded agreement. Sixteen, slender, but nubile, he said to himself, and laid up the phrase in his memory as a happy one. Old Mr. Callamay had put on his spectacles to congratulate the victor, and Lord Moleyn, leaning forward over his walking-stick, showed his long ivory teeth, hungrily smiling.
“Capital performance, capital,” Mr. Callamay was saying in his deep voice.
The victor wriggled with embarrassment. She stood with her hands behind her back, rubbing one foot nervously on the other. Her wet bathing-dress shone, a torso of black polished marble.
“Very good indeed,” said Lord Moleyn. His voice seemed to come from just behind his teeth, a toothy voice. It was as though a dog should suddenly begin to speak. He smiled again, Mr. Callamay readjusted his spectacles.
“When I say ‘Go,’ go. Go!”
Splash! The third heat had started.
“Do you know, I never could learn to swim,” said Mrs. Budge.
“Really?”
“But I used to be able to float.”
Denis imagined her floating — up and down, up and down on a great green swell. A blown black bladder; no, that wasn’t good, that wasn’t good at all. A new winner was being congratulated. She was atrociously stubby and fat. The last one, long and harmoniously, continuously curved from knee to breast, had been an Eve by Cranach; but this, this one was a bad Rubens.
“...go — go — go!” Henry Wimbush’s polite level voice once more pronounced the formula. Another batch of young ladies dived in.
Grown a little weary of sustaining a conversation with Mrs. Budge, Denis conveniently remembered that his duties as a steward called him elsewhere. He pushed out through the lines of spectators and made his way along the path left clear behind them. He was thinking again that his soul was a pale, tenuous membrane, when he was startled by hearing a thin, sibilant voice, speaking apparently from just above his head, pronounce the single word “Disgusting!”
He looked up sharply. The path along which he was walking passed under the lee of a wall of clipped yew. Behind the hedge the ground sloped steeply up towards the foot of the terrace and the house; for one standing on the higher ground it was easy to look over the dark barrier. Looking up, Denis saw two heads overtopping the hedge immediately above him. He recognised the iron mask of Mr. Bodiham and the pale, colourless face of his wife. They were looking over his head, over the heads of the spectators, at the swimmers in the pond.
“Disgusting!” Mrs. Bodiham repeated, hissing softly.
The rector turned up his iron mask towards the solid cobalt of the sky. “How long?” he said, as though to himself; “how long?” He lowered his eyes again, and they fell on Denis’s upturned curious face. There was an abrupt movement, and Mr. and Mrs. Bodiham popped out of sight behind the hedge.
Denis continued his promenade. He wandered past the merry-go-round, through the thronged streets of the canvas village; the membrane of his soul flapped tumultuously in the noise and laughter. In a roped-off space beyond, Mary was directing the children’s sports. Little creatures seethed round about her, making a shrill, tinny clamour; others clustered about the skirts and trousers of their parents. Mary’s face was shining in the heat; with an immense output of energy she started a three-legged race. Denis looked on in admiration.
“You’re wonderful,” he said, coming up behind her and touching her on the arm. “I’ve never seen such energy.”
She turned towards him a face, round, red, and honest as the setting sun; the golden bell of her hair swung silently as she moved her head and quivered to rest.
“Do you know, Denis,” she said, in a low, serious voice, gasping a little as she spoke— “do you know that there’s a woman here who has had three children in thirty-one months?”
“Really,” said Denis, making rapid mental calculations.
“It’s appalling. I’ve been telling her about the Malthusian League. One really ought...”
But a sudden violent renewal of the metallic yelling announced the fact that somebody had won the race. Mary became once more the centre of a dangerous vortex. It was time, Denis thought, to move on; he might be asked to do something if he stayed too long.
He turned back towards the canvas village. The thought of tea was making itself insistent in his mind. Tea, tea, tea. But the tea-tent was horribly thronged. Anne, with an unusual expression of grimness on her flushed face, was furiously working the handle of the urn; the brown liquid spurted incessantly into the proffered cups. Portentous, in the farther corner of the tent, Priscilla, in her royal toque, was encouraging the villagers. In a momentary lull Denis could hear her deep, jovial laughter and her manly voice. Clearly, he told himself, this was no place for one who wanted tea. He stood irresolute at the entrance to the tent. A beautiful thought suddenly came to him; if he went back to the house, went unobtrusively, without being observed, if he tiptoed into the dining-room and noiselessly opened the little doors of the sideboard — ah, then! In the cool recess within he would find bottles and a siphon; a bottle of crystal gin and a quart of soda water, and then for the cups that inebriate as well as cheer...
A minute later he was walking briskly up the shady yew-tree walk. Within the house it was deliciously quiet and cool. Carrying his well-filled tumbler with care, he went into the library. There, the glass on the corner of the table beside him, he settled into a chair with a volume of Sainte-Beuve. There was nothing, he found, like a Causerie du Lundi for settling and soothing the troubled spirits. That tenuous membrane of his had been too rudely buffeted by the afternoon’s emotions; it required a rest.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
TOWARDS SUNSET THE fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour for the dancing to begin. At one side of the village of tents a space had been roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on posts, cast a piercing white light. In one corner sat the band, and, obedient to its scraping and blowing, two or three hundred dancers trampled across the dry ground, wearing away the grass with their booted feet. Round this patch of all but daylight, alive with motion and noise, the night seemed preternaturally dark. Bars of light reached out into it, and every now and then a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence, to disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.
Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the swaying, shuffling crowd. The slow vortex brought the couples round and round again before him, as though he were passing them in review. There was Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque, still encouraging the villagers — this time by dancing with one of the tenant farmers. There was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to the disorganised, passoverish meal that took the place of dinner on this festal day; he one-stepped shamblingly, his bent knees more precariously wobbly than ever, with a terrified village beauty. Mr. Scogan trotted round with another. Mary was in the embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was looking up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously. What about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in the corner among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of virtuosity upon the drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to herself. A whole subterranean life seemed to be expressing itself in those loud rat-tats, those long ro
lls and flourishes of drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered the red notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure he was cutting now. But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming past — Anne with her eyes almost shut and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining wings of movement and music — dissipated these preoccupations. Male and female created He them...There they were, Anne and Gombauld, and a hundred couples more — all stepping harmoniously together to the old tune of Male and Female created He them. But Denis sat apart; he alone lacked his complementary opposite. They were all coupled but he; all but he...
Somebody touched him on the shoulder and he looked up. It was Henry Wimbush.
“I never showed you our oaken drainpipes,” he said. “Some of the ones we dug up are lying quite close to here. Would you like to come and see them?”
Denis got up, and they walked off together into the darkness. The music grew fainter behind them. Some of the higher notes faded out altogether. Jenny’s drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on, tuneless and meaningless in their ears. Henry Wimbush halted.
“Here we are,” he said, and, taking an electric torch out of his pocket, he cast a dim beam over two or three blackened sections of tree trunk, scooped out into the semblance of pipes, which were lying forlornly in a little depression in the ground.
“Very interesting,” said Denis, with a rather tepid enthusiasm.
They sat down on the grass. A faint white glare, rising from behind a belt of trees, indicated the position of the dancing-floor. The music was nothing but a muffled rhythmic pulse.
“I shall be glad,” said Henry Wimbush, “when this function comes at last to an end.”
“I can believe it.”
“I do not know how it is,” Mr. Wimbush continued, “but the spectacle of numbers of my fellow-creatures in a state of agitation moves in me a certain weariness, rather than any gaiety or excitement. The fact is, they don’t very much interest me. They’re aren’t in my line. You follow me? I could never take much interest, for example, in a collection of postage stamps. Primitives or seventeenth-century books — yes. They are my line. But stamps, no. I don’t know anything about them; they’re not my line. They don’t interest me, they give me no emotion. It’s rather the same with people, I’m afraid. I’m more at home with these pipes.” He jerked his head sideways towards the hollowed logs. “The trouble with the people and events of the present is that you never know anything about them. What do I know of contemporary politics? Nothing. What do I know of the people I see round about me? Nothing. What they think of me or of anything else in the world, what they will do in five minutes’ time, are things I can’t guess at. For all I know, you may suddenly jump up and try to murder me in a moment’s time.”