Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘How little you understand women,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, shaking her head. ‘Doesn’t he, Mary?’
‘Some women, at any rate,’ Miss Thriplow agreed. ‘You seem to forget, Mr. Cardan, that Diana is quite as real a type as Venus.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘You couldn’t have put it more succinctly.’ Eighteen years ago, she and Mr. Cardan had been lovers. Elzevir, the pianist, had succeeded him — a short reign — to be followed by Lord Trunion — or was it Dr. Lecoing? — or both? At the moment Mrs. Aldwinkle had forgotten these facts. And when she did remember, it was not quite in the way that other people — Mr. Cardan, for example — remembered them. It was all wonderfully romantic, now; and she had been Diana all the time.
‘But I entirely agree with you,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘I unequivocally admit the existence of Artemis. I could even prove it for you empirically.’
‘That’s very good of you,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, trying to be sarcastic.
‘The only figure on Olympus whom I have always regarded as being purely mythical,’ Mr. Cardan went on, ‘as having no foundation in the facts of life, is Athena. A goddess of wisdom — a goddess!’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘Isn’t that a little too thick?’
Majestically Mrs. Aldwinkle rose from the table. ‘Let us go out into the garden,’ she said.
CHAPTER IV
MRS. ALDWINKLE HAD even bought the stars.
‘How bright they are!’ she exclaimed, as she stepped out at the head of her little troop of guests on to the terrace. ‘And how they twinkle! How they palpitate! As though they were alive. They’re never like this in England, are they, Calamy?’
Calamy agreed. Agreeing, he had found, was a labour-saving device — positively a necessity in this Ideal Home. He always tried to agree with Mrs. Aldwinkle.
‘And how clearly one sees the Great Bear!’ Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, speaking almost perpendicularly upwards into the height of heaven. The Bear and Orion were the only constellations she could recognize. ‘Such a strange and beautiful shape, isn’t it?’ It might almost have been designed by the architect of the Malaspina palace.
‘Very strange,’ said Calamy.
Mrs. Aldwinkle dropped her eyes from the zenith, turned and smiled at him, penetratingly, forgetting that in the profound and moonless darkness her charm would be entirely wasted.
Miss Thriplow’s voice spoke softly, with a kind of childish drawl through the darkness. ‘They might be Italian tenors,’ she said, ‘tremoloing away like that so passionately in the sky. No wonder, with those stars overhead, no wonder life tends to become a bit operatic in this country at times.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle was indignant. ‘How can you blaspheme like that against the stars?’ she said. Then, remembering that she had also bought Italian music, not to mention the habits and customs of the whole Italian people, she went on: ‘Besides, it’s such a cheap joke about the tenors. After all, this is the only country where bel canto is still . . .’ She waved her hand. ‘And you remember how much Wagner admired what’s-his-name. . . .’
‘Bellini,’ prompted the little niece as self-effacingly as possible. She had heard her aunt speak of Wagner’s admiration before.
‘Bellini,’ repeated Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘Besides, life isn’t operatic in Italy. It’s genuinely passionate.’
Miss Thriplow was, for a moment, rather at a loss for an answer. She had a faculty for making these little jokes; but at the same time she was so very much afraid that people might regard her as merely clever and unfeeling, a hard and glittering young woman. Half a dozen smart repartees were possible, of course; but then she mustn’t forget that she was fundamentally so simple, so Wordsworthian, such a violet by a mossy stone — particularly this evening, in her shawl.
However much we should like to do so, however highly, in private, we think of our abilities, we generally feel that it is bad form to boast of our intelligence. But in regard to our qualities of heart we feel no such shame; we talk freely of our kindness, bordering on weakness, of our generosity carried almost to the point of folly (tempering our boasting a little by making out that our qualities are so excessive as to be defects). Miss Thriplow, however, was one of those rare people so obviously and admittedly clever that there could be no objection to her mentioning the fact as often as she liked; people would have called it only justifiable self-esteem. But Miss Thriplow, perversely, did not want to be praised or to praise herself for her intelligence. She was chiefly anxious to make the world appreciative of her heart. When, as on this occasion, she followed her natural bent towards smartness too far, or when, carried away by the desire to make herself agreeable in flashing company, she found herself saying something whose brilliance was not in harmony with the possession of simple and entirely natural emotions, she would recollect herself and hastily try to correct the misapprehension she had created among her hearers. Now, therefore, at the end of a moment’s lightning meditation, she managed to think of a remark which admirably combined, she flattered herself, the most genuine feeling for Nature with an elegantly recondite allusion — this last for the benefit particularly of Mr. Cardan, who as a scholarly gentleman of the old school was a great appreciator and admirer of learning.
‘Yes, Bellini,’ she said rapturously, picking up the reference from the middle of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s last sentence. ‘What a wonderful gift of melody! Casta diva — do you remember that?’ And in a thin voice she sang the first long phrase. ‘What a lovely line the melody traces out! Like the line of those hills against the sky.’ She pointed.
On the further side of the valley to westward of the promontory of hill on which the palace stood, projected a longer and higher headland. From the terrace one looked up at its huge impending mass. . . . It was at this that Miss Thriplow now pointed. With her forefinger she followed the scalloped and undulating outline of its silhouette.
‘Even Nature, in Italy, is like a work of art,’ she added.
Mrs. Aldwinkle was mollified. ‘That’s very true,’ she said; and stepping out, she began the evening’s promenading along the terrace. The train of her velvet robe rustled after her over the dusty flagstones. Mrs. Aldwinkle didn’t mind in the least if it got dirty. It was the general effect that mattered; stains, dust, clinging twigs and millepedes — those were mere details. She treated her clothes, in consequence, with a fine aristocratic carelessness. The little troop followed her.
There was no moon; only stars in a dark blue firmament. Black and flat against the sky, the Herculeses and the bowed Atlases, the kilted Dianas and the Venuses who concealed their charms with a two-handed gesture of alluring modesty, stood, like as many petrified dancers, on the piers of the balustrade. The stars looked between them. Below, in the blackness of the plain, burned constellations of yellow lights. Unremittingly, the croaking of frogs came up, thin, remote, but very clear, from invisible waters.
‘Nights like this,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, halting and addressing herself with intensity to Calamy, ‘make one understand the passion of the South.’ She had an alarming habit, when she spoke to any one at all intimately or seriously, of approaching her face very close to that of her interlocutor, opening her eyes to their fullest extent and staring for a moment with the fixed penetrating stare of an oculist examining his patient.
Like trucks at the tail of a suddenly braked locomotive, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s guests came joltingly to a stop when she stopped.
Calamy nodded. ‘Quite,’ he said, ‘quite.’ Even in this faint starlight, he noticed, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes glittered alarmingly as she approached her face to his.
‘In this horrible bourgeois age’ — Mrs. Aldwinkle’s vocabulary (like Mr. Falx’s, though for different reasons) contained no word of bitterer disparagement than ‘bourgeois’— ‘it’s only Southern people who still understand or even, I believe, feel passion.’ Mrs. Aldwinkle believed in passion, passionately.
From behind the glowing red end of his cigar Mr. Cardan began to speak. In the darkness his voice sounded more
than ever ripe and fruity. ‘You’re quite right,’ he assured Mrs. Aldwinkle, ‘quite right. It’s the climate, of course. The warmth has a double effect on the inhabitants, direct and indirect. The direct effect needs no explaining; warmth calls to warmth. It’s obvious. But the indirect is fully as important. In a hot country one doesn’t care to work too hard. One works enough to keep oneself alive (and it’s tolerably easy to keep alive under these stars), and one cultivates long leisures. Now it’s sufficiently obvious that practically the only thing that anybody who is not a philosopher can do in his leisure is to make love. No serious-minded, hard-working man has the time, the spare energy or the inclination to abandon himself to passion. Passion can only flourish among the well-fed unemployed. Consequently, except among women and men of the leisured class, passion in all its luxuriant intricacy hardly exists in the hard-working North. It is only among those whose desires and whose native idleness are fostered by the cherishing Southern heat that it has flourished and continues to flourish, as you rightly point out, my dear Lilian, even in this burgess age.’
Mr. Cardan had hardly begun to speak before Mrs. Aldwinkle indignantly moved on again. He outraged all her feelings.
Mr. Cardan talking all the way, they passed the silhouettes of modest Venus, of Diana and her attendant dog, of Hercules leaning on his club and Atlas bending under the weight of his globe, of Bacchus lifting to heaven the stump of a broken arm whose hand had once held the wine cup. Arrived at the end of the terrace, they turned and walked back again past the same row of symbols.
‘It’s easy to talk like that,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when he had finished. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference to the grandeur of passion, to its purity and beauty and . . .’ She faded out breathlessly.
‘Wasn’t it Bossuet,’ asked Irene timidly, but with determination, for she felt that she owed it to Aunt Lilian to intervene; and besides, Aunt Lilian liked her to take part in the conversation, ‘wasn’t it Bossuet who said that there was something of the Infinite in passion?’
‘Splendid, Irene,’ Mr. Cardan cried encouragingly.
Irene blushed in the concealing darkness. ‘But I think Bossuet’s quite right,’ she declared. She could become a lioness, in spite of her blushes, when it was a question of supporting Aunt Lilian. ‘I think he’s absolutely right,’ she confirmed, after a moment of recollection, out of her own experience. She herself had felt most infinitely, more than once — for Irene had run through a surprising number of passions in her time. ‘I can’t think,’ her Aunt Lilian used to say to her, when Irene came in the evenings to brush her hair before she went to bed, ‘I can’t think how it is that you’re not wildly in love with Peter — or Jacques — or Mario.’ (The name might change as Mrs. Aldwinkle and her niece moved in their seasonal wanderings, backwards and forwards across the map of Europe; but, after all, what’s in a name?) ‘If I were your age I should be quite bowled over by him.’ And thinking more seriously now of Peter, or Jacques, or Mario, Irene would discover that Aunt Lilian was quite right; the young man was indeed a very remarkable young man. And for the remainder of their stay at the Continental, the Bristol, the Savoia, she would be in love — passionately. What she had felt on these occasions was decidedly infinite. Bossuet, there was no doubt of it, knew what he was talking about.
‘Well, if you think he’s right, Irene,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘why then, there’s nothing for me to do but retire from the argument. I bow before superior authority.’ He took the cigar out of his mouth and bowed.
Irene felt herself blushing once more. ‘Now you’re making fun of me,’ she said.
Mrs. Aldwinkle put her arm protectively round the young girl’s shoulders. ‘I won’t let you tease her, Cardan,’ she said. ‘She’s the only one of you all who has a real feeling for what is noble and fine and grand.’ She drew Irene closer to her, pressed her in a sidelong and peripatetic embrace. Happily, devotedly, Irene abandoned herself. Aunt Lilian was wonderful!
‘Oh, I know,’ said Mr. Cardan apologetically, ‘that I’m nothing but an old capripede.’
Meanwhile Lord Hovenden, humming loudly and walking a little apart from the rest of the company, was making it clear, he hoped, to every one that he was occupied with his own thoughts and had not heard anything that had been said for the last five minutes. What had been said disturbed him none the less. How did Irene know so much about passion, he wondered? Had there been, could there still be . . . other people? Painfully and persistently the question asked itself. With the idea of dissociating himself still more completely from all that had been said, he addressed himself to Mr. Falx.
‘Tell me, Mr. Falx,’ he said in a pensive voice, as though he had been thinking about the subject for some time before he spoke, ‘what do you think of the Fascist Trades Unions?’
Mr. Falx told him.
Passion, Calamy was thinking, passion. . . . One could have enough of it, good Lord! He sighed. If one could say: Never again, and be sure of meaning what one said, it would be a great comfort. Still, he reflected, there was something rather perversely attractive about this Thriplow woman.
Miss Thriplow meanwhile would have liked to say something showing that she too believed in passion — but in a passion of a rather different brand from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s; in a natural, spontaneous and almost childish kind of passion, not the hot-house growth that flourishes in drawing-rooms. Cardan was right in not thinking very seriously of that. But he could hardly be expected to know much about the simple and dewy loves that she had in mind. Nor Mrs. Aldwinkle, for that matter. She herself understood them perfectly. On second thoughts, however, Miss Thriplow decided that they were too tenuous and delicate — these gossamer passions of hers — to be talked of here, in the midst of unsympathetic listeners.
Casually, as she passed, she plucked a leaf from one of the overhanging trees. Absent-mindedly she crushed it between her fingers. From the bruised leaf a fragrance mounted to her nostrils. She lifted her hand towards her face, she sniffed, once, again. And suddenly she was back in the barber’s shop at Weltringham, waiting there while her cousin Jim had his hair cut. Mr. Chigwell, the barber, had just finished with the revolving brush. The shaft of the machine was still turning, the elastic driving band went round and round over the wheel, writhing from side to side as it went round, like a dying snake suspended, dangerously, above Jim’s cropped head.
‘A little brilliantine, Mr. Thriplow? Hair’s rather dry, you know, rather dry, I’m afraid. Or the usual bay rum?’
‘Bay rum,’ said Jim in the gruffest, most grown-up voice he could get out of his chest.
And Mr. Chigwell would pick up a vaporizer and squirt Jim’s hair with clouds made out of a clear brown liquid. And the air in the shop was filled with a fragrance which was the fragrance of this leaf, this leaf from Apollo’s tree, that she held in her hand. It all happened years ago and Jim was dead. They had loved one another childishly, with that profound and delicate passion of which she could not speak — not here, not now.
The others went on talking. Miss Thriplow sniffed at her crushed bay leaf and thought of her girlhood, of the cousin who had died. Darling, darling Jim, she said to herself; darling Jim! Again and again. How much she had loved him, how terribly unhappy she had been when he died. And she still suffered; still, after all these years. Miss Thriplow sighed. She was proud of being able to suffer so much; she encouraged her suffering. This sudden recollection of Jim, when he was a little boy, in the barber’s shop, this vivid remembrance conjured up by the smell of a crushed leaf, was a sign of her exquisite sensibility. Mingled with her grief there was a certain sense of satisfaction. After all, this had happened quite by itself, of its own accord, and spontaneously. She had always told people that she was sensitive, had a deep and quivering heart. This was a proof. Nobody knew how much she suffered, underneath. How could people guess what lay behind her gaiety? ‘The more sensitive one is,’ she used to tell herself, ‘the more timid and spiritually chaste, the more necessary it is for one to wear
a mask.’ Her laughter, her little railleries were the mask that hid from the outside world what was in her soul; they were her armour against a probing and wounding curiosity. How could they guess, for example, what Jim had meant to her, what he still meant — after all these years? How could they imagine that there was a little holy of holies in her heart where she still held communion with him? Darling Jim, she said to herself, darling, darling Jim. The tears came into her eyes. With a finger that still smelt of crushed bay leaves she brushed them away.
It suddenly occurred to her that this would make a splendid short story. There would be a young man and a young girl walking like this under the stars — the huge Italian stars, tremoloing away like tenors (she would remember to bring that into the description) overhead in the velvet sky. Their conversation edges nearer and nearer to the theme of love. He’s rather a timid young man. (His name, Miss Thriplow decided, would be Belamy.) One of those charming young men who adore at long range, feel that the girl’s too good for them, daren’t hope that she might stoop from her divinity, and all that. He’s afraid of saying definitely that he loves her for fear of being ignominiously rejected. She, of course, likes him most awfully and her name is Edna. Such a delicate, sensitive creature; his gentleness and diffidence are the qualities in him that particularly charm her.
The conversation gets nearer and nearer to love; the stars palpitate more and more ecstatically. Edna picks a leaf from the fragrant laurel as she passes. ‘What must be so wonderful about love,’ the young man is just saying (it’s a set speech and he’s been screwing up his courage to get it out for the last half-hour), ‘about real love, I mean, is the complete understanding, the fusion of spirits, the ceasing to be oneself and the becoming some one else, the . . .’ But sniffing at the crushed leaf, she suddenly cries out, uncontrollably (impulsiveness is one of Edna’s charms), ‘Why, it’s the barber’s shop at Weltringham! Funny little Mr. Chigwell with the squint! And the rubber band still going round and round over the wheel, wriggling like a snake.’ But the poor young man, poor Belamy, is most dreadfully upset. If that’s the way she’s going to respond when he talks about love, he may as well be silent.