Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Disinterested,’ she was saying, ‘disinterested . . .’ Mrs. Aldwinkle had a way, when she wanted to insist on an idea, of repeating the same word several times. ‘Disinterested . . .’ It saved her the trouble of looking for phrases which she could never find, of making explanations which always turned out, at the best, rather incoherent. ‘Joy in the work for its own sake. . . . Flaubert spent days over a single sentence. . . . Wonderful. . . .’
‘Wonderful!’ Irene echoed.
A little breeze stirred among the bay trees. Their stiff leaves rattled dryly together, like scales of metal. Irene shivered a little; it was downright cold.
‘It’s the only really creative . . .’ Mrs. Aldwinkle couldn’t think of the word ‘activity’ and had to content herself with making a gesture with her free hand. ‘Through art man comes nearest to being a god . . . a god. . . .’
The night wind rattled more loudly among the bay leaves. Irene crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself to keep warm. Unfortunately, this boa of flesh and blood was itself sensitive. Her frock was sleeveless. The warmth of her bare arms drifted off along the wind; the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere rose by a hundred-billionth of a degree.
‘It’s the highest life,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘It’s the only life.’
Tenderly she rumpled Irene’s hair. And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was meditating, at this very moment, on tram-cars in the Argentine, among Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton, in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea — at this very moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they — albeit unconscious of the privilege — for art in her.
Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian.
‘Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?’ Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something half-way between Shelley and Walt Whitman.
‘Me!’ said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha! It was a jarring note.
Mrs. Aldwinkle drew back, pained. ‘I don’t know why you should think the idea so impossibly comic,’ she said.
‘Perhaps he has other work to do,’ said Mr. Falx out of the darkness. ‘More important work.’ And at the sound of that thrilling, deep, prophetical voice Lord Hovenden felt that, indeed, he had.
‘More important?’ queried Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘But can anything be more important? When one thinks of Flaubert . . .’ One thought of Flaubert — working through all a fifty-four hour week at a relative clause. But Mrs. Aldwinkle was too enthusiastic to be able to say what followed when one had thought of Flaubert.
‘Think of coal-miners for a change,’ said Mr. Falx in answer. ‘That’s what I suggest.’
‘Yes,’ Lord Hovenden agreed, gravely nodding. A lot of his money came from coal. He felt particularly responsible for miners when he had time to think of them.
‘Think,’ said Mr. Falx in his deep voice; and he relapsed into a silence more eloquently prophetical than any speech.
For a long time nobody spoke. The wind came draughtily and in ever chillier gusts. Irene clasped her arms still tightlier over her breast; she shivered, she yawned with cold. Mrs. Aldwinkle felt the shaking of the young body that leaned against her knees. She herself was cold too; but after what she had said to Cardan and the others it was impossible for her to go indoors yet awhile. She felt, in consequence, annoyed with Irene for shivering. ‘Do stop,’ she said crossly. ‘It’s only a stupid habit. Like a little dog that shivers even in front of the fire.’
‘All ve same,’ said Lord Hovenden, coming to Irene’s defence, ‘it is getting raver cold.’
‘Well, if you find it so,’ retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle, with overwhelming sarcasm, ‘you’d better go in and ask them to light a fire.’
It was nearly midnight before Mrs. Aldwinkle finally gave the word to go indoors.
CHAPTER VII
TO SAY GOOD-NIGHT definitely and for the last time was a thing which Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words she pronounced sentence of death on yet another day (on yet another, and the days were so few now, so agonizingly brief); she pronounced it also, temporarily at least, on herself. For, the formula once finally uttered, there was nothing for her to do but creep away out of the light and bury herself in the black unconsciousness of sleep. Six hours, eight hours would be stolen from her and never given back. And what marvellous things might not be happening while she was lying dead between the sheets! Extraordinary happinesses might present themselves and, finding her asleep and deaf to their calling, pass on. Or some one, perhaps, would be saying the one supremely important, revealing, apocalyptic thing that she had been waiting all her life to hear. ‘There!’ she could imagine somebody winding up, ‘that’s the secret of the Universe. What a pity poor Lilian should have gone to bed. She would have loved to hear it.’ Good-night — it was like parting with a shy lover who had not yet ventured to declare himself. A minute more and he would speak, would reveal himself the unique soul-mate. Good-night, and he would remain for ever merely diffident little Mr. Jones. Must she part with this day too, before it was transfigured?
Good-night. Every evening she put off the saying of it as long as she possibly could. It was generally half-past one or two before she could bring herself to leave the drawing-room. And even then the words were not finally spoken. For on the threshold of her bed-chamber she would halt, desperately renewing the conversation with whichever of her guests had happened to light her upstairs. Who knew? Perhaps in these last five minutes, in the intimacy, in the nocturnal silence, the important thing really would be said. The five minutes often lengthened themselves out to forty, and still Mrs. Aldwinkle stood there, desperately putting off and putting off the moment when she would have to pronounce the sentence of death.
When there was nobody else to talk to, she had to be content with the company of Irene, who always, when she herself had undressed, came back in her dressing-gown to help Mrs. Aldwinkle — since it would have been unfair to keep a maid up to such late hours — make ready for the night. Not that little Irene was particularly likely to utter the significant word or think the one apocalyptic thought. Though of course one never knew: out of the mouths of babes and sucklings . . . And in any case, talking with Irene, who was a dear child and so devoted, was better than definitely condemning oneself to bed.
To-night, it was one o’clock before Mrs. Aldwinkle made a move towards the door. Miss Thriplow and Mr. Falx, protesting that they too were sleepy, accompanied her. And like an attendant shadow, Irene silently rose when her aunt rose and silently walked after her. Half-way across the room Mrs. Aldwinkle halted and turned round. Formidable she was, a tragedy queen in coral-red velvet. Her little white muslin mirage halted too. Less patient, Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow moved on towards the door.
‘You must all come to bed soon, you know,’ she said, addressing herself to the three men who remained at the further end of the room in a tone at once imperious and cajoling. ‘I simply won’t allow you, Cardan, to keep those poor young men out of their beds to all hours of the night. Poor Calamy has been travelling all day. And Hovenden needs all the sleep, at his age, that he can get.’ Mrs. Ald
winkle took it hardly that any of her guests should be awake and talking while she was lying dead in the tomb of sleep. ‘Poor Calamy!’ she pathetically exclaimed, as though it were a case of cruelty to animals. She felt herself filled, all at once, with an enormous and maternal solicitude for this young man.
‘Yes, poor Calamy!’ Mr. Cardan repeated, twinkling. ‘Out of pure sympathy I was suggesting that we should drink a pint or two of red wine before going to bed. There’s nothing like it for making one sleep.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle turned her bright blue eyes on Calamy, smiled her sweetest and most piercing smile. ‘Do come,’ she said. ‘Do.’ She extended her hand in a clumsy and inexpressive gesture. ‘And you, Hovenden,’ she added, almost despairingly.
Hovenden looked uncomfortably from Mr. Cardan to Calamy, hoping that one or other of them would answer for him.
‘We shan’t be long,’ said Calamy. ‘The time to drink a glass of wine, that’s all. I’m not a bit tired, you know. And Cardan’s suggestion of Chianti is very tempting.’
‘Ah well,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, ‘if you prefer a glass of wine . . .’ She turned away with a sad indignation and rustled off towards the door, sweeping the tiled floor with the train of her velvet dress. Mr. Falx and Miss Thriplow, who had been lingering impatiently near the door, drew back in order that she might make her exit in full majesty. With a face that looked very gravely out of the little window in her bell of copper hair, Irene followed. The door closed behind them.
Calamy turned to Mr. Cardan. ‘If I prefer a glass of wine?’ he repeated on a note of interrogation. ‘But prefer it to what? She made it sound as if I had had to make a momentous and eternal choice between her and a pint of Chianti — and had chosen the Chianti. It passes my understanding.’
‘Ah, but then you don’t know Lilian as well as I do,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘And now, let’s go and hunt out that flask and some glasses in the dining-room.’
Half-way up the stairs — they were a grand and solemn flight loping gradually upwards under a slanting tunnel of barrel vaulting — Mrs. Aldwinkle paused. ‘I always think of them,’ she said ecstatically, ‘going up, coming down. Such a spectacle!’
‘Who?’ asked Mr. Falx.
‘Those grand old people.’
‘Oh, the tyrants.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled pityingly. ‘And the poets, the scholars, the philosophers, the painters, the musicians, the beautiful women. You forget those, Mr. Falx.’ She raised her hand, as though summoning their spirits from the abyss. Psychical eyes might have seen a jewelled prince with a nose like an ant-eater’s slowly descending between obsequious human hedges. Behind him a company of buffoons and little hunch-backed dwarfs, stepping cautiously, sidelong, from stair to stair. . . .
‘I forget nothing,’ said Mr. Falx. ‘But I think tyrants are too high a price to pay.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle sighed and resumed her climbing. ‘What a queer fellow Calamy is, don’t you think?’ she said, addressing herself to Miss Thriplow. Mrs. Aldwinkle, who liked discussing other people’s characters and who prided herself on her perspicacity and her psychological intuition, found almost everybody ‘queer,’ even, when she thought it worth while discussing her, little Irene. She liked to think that every one she knew was tremendously complicated; had strange and improbable motives for his simplest actions, was moved by huge, dark passions; cultivated secret vices; in a word, was larger than life and a good deal more interesting. ‘What did you think of him, Mary?’
‘Very intelligent,’ thought Miss Thriplow.
‘Oh, of course, of course,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle agreed almost impatiently; that wasn’t anything much to talk about. ‘But one hears odd stories of his amorous tastes, you know.’ The party halted at the door of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s room. ‘Perhaps that was one of the reasons,’ she went on mysteriously, ‘why he went travelling all that time — right away from civilization. . . .’ On such a theme a conversation might surely be almost indefinitely protracted; the moment for uttering the final, fatal good-night had not yet come.
Downstairs in the great saloon the three men were sitting over their red wine. Mr. Cardan had already twice refilled his glass. Calamy was within sight of the bottom of his first tumbler; young Lord Hovenden’s was still more than half full. He was not a very accomplished drinker and was afraid of being sick if he swallowed too much of this young and generous brew.
‘Bored, you’re just bored. That’s all it is,’ Mr. Cardan was saying. He looked at Calamy over the top of his glass and took another sip, as though to his health. ‘You haven’t met any one of late who took your fancy; that’s all. Unless, of course, it’s a case of catarrh in the bile ducts.’
‘It’s neither,’ said Calamy, smiling.
‘Or perhaps it’s the first great climacteric. You don’t happen to be thirty-five, I suppose? Five times seven — a most formidable age. Though not quite so serious as sixty-three. That’s the grand climacteric.’ Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘Thank the Lord, I got past it without dying, or joining the Church of Rome, or getting married. Thank the Lord; but you?’
‘I’m thirty-three,’ said Calamy.
‘A most harmless time of life. Then it’s just boredom. You’ll meet some little ravishment and all the zest will return.’
Young Lord Hovenden laughed in a very ventriloquial, man-of-the-worldly fashion.
Calamy shook his head. ‘But I don’t really want it to return, he said. ‘I don’t want to succumb to any more little ravishments. It’s too stupid; it’s too childish. I used to think that there was something rather admirable and enviable about being an homme à bonnes fortunes. Don Juan has an honoured place in literature; it’s thought only natural that a Casanova should complacently boast of his successes. I accepted the current view, and when I was lucky in love — and I’ve always been only too deplorably fortunate — I used to think the more highly of myself.’
‘We have all thought the same,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘The weakness is a pardonable one.’
Lord Hovenden nodded and took a sip of wine to show that he entirely agreed with the last speaker.
‘Pardonable, no doubt,’ said Calamy. ‘But when one comes to think it over, not very reasonable. For, after all, there’s nothing really to be very proud of, there’s nothing very much to boast about. Consider first of all the other heroes who have had the same sort of successes — more notable, very probably, and more numerous than one’s own. Consider them. What do you see? Rows of insolent grooms and pugilists; leather-faced ruffians and disgusting old satyrs; louts with curly hair and no brains, and cunning little pimps like weasels; soft-palmed young epicenes and hairy gladiators — a vast army composed of the most odious specimens of humanity. Is one to be proud of belonging to their numbers?’
‘Why not?’ asked Mr. Cardan. ‘One should always thank God for whatever native talents one possesses. If your talent happens to lie in the direction of higher mathematics, praise God; and if in the direction of seduction, praise God just the same. And thanking God, when one comes to examine the process a little closely, is very much the same as boasting or being proud. I see no harm in boasting a little of one’s Casanovesque capacities. You young men are always so damned intolerant. You won’t allow any one to go to heaven, or hell, or nowhere, whichever the case may be, by any road except the one you happen to approve of. . . . You should take a leaf out of the Indians’ book. The Indians calculate that there are eighty-four thousand different types of human beings, each with its own way of getting through life. They probably underestimate.’
Calamy laughed. ‘I only speak for my type,’ he said.
‘And Hovenden and I for ours,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Don’t we, Hovenden?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, of course,’ Lord Hovenden answered; and for some reason he blushed.
‘Proceed,’ said Mr. Cardan, refilling his glass.
‘Well then,’ Calamy went on, ‘belonging to the species I do belong to, I can’t take much satisfaction in these successes. The more so when I c
onsider their nature. For either you’re in love with the woman or you aren’t; either you’re carried away by your inflamed imagination (for, after all, the person you’re really violently in love with is always your own invention and the wildest of fancies) or by your senses and your intellectual curiosity. If you aren’t in love, it’s a mere experiment in applied physiology, with a few psychological investigations thrown in to make it a little more interesting. But if you are, it means that you become enslaved, involved, dependent on another human being in a way that’s positively disgraceful, and the more disgraceful the more there is in you to be enslaved and involved.’
‘It wasn’t Browning’s opinion,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘The woman yonder, there’s no use in life
But just to obtain her.’
‘Browning was a fool,’ said Calamy.
But Lord Hovenden was silently of opinion that Browning was quite right. He thought of Irene’s face, looking out of the little window in the copper bell.
‘Browning belonged to another species,’ Mr. Cardan corrected.
‘A foolish species, I insist,’ said Calamy.
‘Well, to tell the truth,’ Mr. Cardan admitted, closing his winking eye a little further, ‘I secretly agree with you about that. I’m not really as entirely tolerant as I should like to be.’
Calamy was frowning pensively over his own affairs, and without discussing the greater or less degree of Mr. Cardan’s tolerance he went on. ‘The question is, at the end of it all: what’s the way out? what’s to be done about it? For it’s obvious, as you say, that the little ravishments will turn up again. And appetite grows with fasting. And philosophy, which knows very well how to deal with past and future temptations, always seems to break down before the present, the immediate ones.’
‘Happily,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘For, when all is said, is there a better indoor sport? Be frank with me; is there?’