Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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The desire to break down his barriers, enter into his intimacy and master his secret quickened her love.
From the moment of her discovery of him, in those romantic circumstances which her imagination had made so much more romantic, Mrs. Aldwinkle had tried to take possession of Chelifer; she had tried to make him as much her property as the view, or Italian art. He became at once the best living poet; but it followed as a corollary that she was his only interpreter. In haste she had telegraphed to London for copies of all his books.
‘When I think,’ she would say, leaning forward embarrassingly close and staring into his face with those bright, dangerous eyes of hers, ‘when I think how nearly you were drowned. Like Shelley . . .’ She shuddered. ‘It’s too appalling.’
And Chelifer would bend his full Egyptian lips into a smile and answer: ‘They’d have been inconsolable on the staff of the Rabbit Fancier,’ or something of the sort. Oh, queer, queer, queer!
‘He slides away from one,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle complained to her young confidante of the small hours.
She might try to take his barriers by storm, might try to creep subtly into his confidence from the flank, so to speak; but Chelifer was never to be caught napping. He evaded her. There was no taking possession of him. It was for nothing, so far as Mrs. Aldwinkle was concerned, that he was the best living poet and she his prophetess.
He evaded her — evaded her not merely mentally and spiritually, but even in the flesh. For after a day or two in the Cybo Malaspina palace he developed an almost magical faculty for disappearing. One moment he’d be there, walking about in the garden or sitting in one of the saloons; something would distract Mrs. Aldwinkle’s attention, and the next moment, when she turned back towards the place where he had been, he was gone, he was utterly vanished. Mrs. Aldwinkle would search; there was no trace of him to be found. But at the next meal he’d walk in, punctual as ever; he would ask his hostess politely if she had had an agreeable morning or afternoon, whichever the case might be, and when she asked him where he had been, would answer vaguely that he’d gone for a little walk, or that he’d been writing letters.
After one of these disappearances Irene, who had been set by her aunt to hunt for him, finally ran him to earth on the top of the tower. She had climbed the two hundred and thirty-two steps for the sake of the commanding view of the whole garden and hillside to be obtained from the summit. If he was anywhere above ground, she ought to see him from the tower. But when at last, panting, she emerged on to the little square platform from which the ancient marquesses had dropped small rocks and molten lead on their enemies in the court below, she got a fright that nearly made her fall backwards down the steps. For as she came up through the trap-door into the sunlight, she suddenly became aware of what seemed, to eyes that looked up from the level of the floor, a gigantic figure advancing, toweringly, towards her.
Irene uttered a little scream; her heart jumped violently and seemed to stop beating.
‘Allow me,’ said a very polite voice. The giant bent down and took her by the hand. It was Chelifer. ‘So you’ve climbed up for a bird’s-eye view of the picturesque beauties of nature?’ he went on, when he had helped her up through the hatchway. ‘I’m very partial to bird’s-eye views myself.’
‘You gave me such a start,’ was all that Irene could say. Her face was quite pale.
‘I’m exceedingly sorry,’ said Chelifer. There was a long and, for Irene, embarrassing silence.
After a minute she went down again.
‘Did you find him?’ asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, when her niece emerged a little while later on to the terrace.
Irene shook her head. Somehow she lacked the courage to tell Aunt Lilian the story of her adventure. It would make her too unhappy to think that Chelifer was prepared to climb two hundred and thirty-two steps for the sake of getting out of her way.
Mrs. Aldwinkle tried to guard against his habit of vanishing by never, so far as it was practicable, letting him out of her sight. She arranged that he should always sit next to her at table. She took him for walks and drives in the motor car, she made him sit with her in the garden. It was with difficulty and only by the employment of stratagems that Chelifer managed to procure a moment of liberty and solitude. For the first few days of his stay Chelifer found that ‘I must go and write’ was a good excuse to get away. Mrs. Aldwinkle professed such admiration for him in his poetical capacity that she could not decently refuse to let him go. But she soon found a way of controlling such liberty as he could get in this way by insisting that he should write under the ilex trees, or in one of the mouldering sponge-stone grottoes hollowed in the walls of the lower terrace. Vainly Chelifer protested that he loathed writing or reading out of doors.
‘These lovely surroundings,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle insisted, ‘will inspire you.’
‘But the only surroundings that really inspire me,’ said Chelifer, ‘are the lower middle class quarters of London, north of the Harrow Road, for example.’
‘How can you say such things?’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle.
‘But I assure you,’ he protested, ‘it’s quite true.’
None the less, he had to go and write under the ilexes or in the grotto. Mrs. Aldwinkle, at a moderate distance, kept him well in sight. Every ten minutes or so she would come tip-toeing into his retreat, smiling, as she imagined, like a sibyl, her finger on her lips, to lay beside his permanently virgin sheet of paper a bunch of late-flowering roses, a dahlia, some Michaelmas daisies or a few pink berries from the spindle tree. Courteously, in some charming and frankly insincere formula, Chelifer would thank her for the gift, and with a final smile, less sibylline, but sweeter, tenderer, Mrs. Aldwinkle would tip-toe away again, like Egeria bidding farewell to King Numa, leaving her inspiration to do its work. It didn’t seem to do its work very well, however. For whenever she asked him how much he had written, he regularly answered ‘Nothing,’ smiling at her meanwhile that courteous and Sphingine smile which Mrs. Aldwinkle always found so baffling, so pre-eminently ‘queer.’
Often Mrs. Aldwinkle would try to lead the conversation upwards on to those high spiritual planes from which the most satisfactory and romantic approach to love is to be made. Two souls that have acclimatized themselves to the thin air of religion, art, ethics or metaphysics have no difficulty in breathing the similar atmosphere of ideal love, whose territory lies contiguous to those of the other inhabitants of high mental altitudes. Mrs. Aldwinkle liked to approach love from the heights. One landed, so to speak, by aeroplane on the snowy summit of Popocatepetl, to descend by easy stages into the tropical tierra caliente in the plains below. But with Chelifer it was impossible to gain a footing on any height at all. When, for example, Mrs. Aldwinkle started rapturously on art and the delights of being an artist, Chelifer would modestly admit to being a tolerable second-rate halma player.
‘But how can you speak like that?’ cried Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘How can you blaspheme so against art and your own talent? What’s your talent for?’
‘For editing the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette, it appears,’ Chelifer answered, courteously smiling.
Sometimes she started on the theme of love itself; but with no greater success. Chelifer just politely agreed with everything she said, and when she pressed him for a definite opinion of his own replied, ‘I don’t know.’
‘But you must know,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle insisted, ‘you must have some opinion. You have had experience.’
Chelifer shook his head. ‘Alas,’ he deplored, ‘never.’
It was hopeless.
‘What am I to do?’ asked Mrs. Aldwinkle despairingly in the small hours.
Wise in the experience of eighteen years, Irene suggested that the best thing to do would be to think no more about him — in that way.
Mrs. Aldwinkle only sighed and shook her head. She had started loving because she believed in love, because she wanted to love and because a romantic opportunity had presented itself. She had rescued a Poet from death. How could she help loving him?
The circumstances, the person were her invention; she had fallen in love, deliberately almost, with the figments of her own imagination. But there was no deliberately falling out again. The romantic yearnings had aroused those profounder instincts of which they were but the polite and literary emanation. The man was young, was beautiful — these were facts, not imaginings. These deep desires once started by the conscious mind from their sleep, once made aware of their quarry, how could they be held back? ‘He is a poet. For the love of poetry, for the love of passion and because I saved him from death, I love him.’ If that had been all, it might have been possible for Mrs. Aldwinkle to take Irene’s advice. But from the obscure caves of her being another voice was speaking. ‘He is young, he is beautiful. The days are so few and short. I am growing old. My body is thirsty.’ How could she cease to think of him?
‘And suppose he did come to love me a little,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, taking a perverse delight in tormenting herself in every possible way, ‘suppose he should come to love me just a little for what I am and think and do — should come to love me because, to begin with, I love him and admire his work, and because I understand what an artist feels and can sympathize with him — suppose all that, wouldn’t he be repelled at the same time by the fact that I’m old?’ She peered into the mirror. ‘My face looks terribly old,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ protested Irene encouragingly.
‘He’d be disgusted,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle went on. ‘It would be enough to drive him away even if he were attracted in some other way.’ She sighed profoundly. The tears trickled slowly down her sagging cheeks.
‘Don’t talk like that, Aunt Lilian,’ Irene implored her. ‘Don’t talk like that.’ She felt the tears coming into her own eyes. At that moment she would have done anything, given anything to make Aunt Lilian happy. She threw her arms round Mrs. Aldwinkle’s neck and kissed her. ‘Don’t be unhappy,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t think any more about it. What does it matter about that man? What does it matter? You must think only of the people who do love you. I love you, Aunt Lilian. So much, so much.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle suffered herself to be a little comforted. She dried her eyes. ‘I shall make myself look still uglier,’ she said, ‘if I go on crying.’ There was a silence. Irene went on brushing her aunt’s hair; she hoped that Aunt Lilian had turned her thoughts elsewhere.
‘At any rate,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle at last, breaking the long silence, ‘my body is still young.’
Irene was distressed. Why couldn’t Aunt Lilian think of something else? But her distress turned into an uneasy sense of embarrassment and shame as Mrs. Aldwinkle pursued the subject started by her last words into more and more intimate detail. In spite of her five years’ training in Aunt Lilian’s school, Irene felt profoundly shocked.
CHAPTER II
‘WE TWO,’ SAID Mr. Cardan one late afternoon some fortnight after Chelifer’s arrival, ‘we two seem to be rather left out of it.’
‘Left out of what?’ asked Mr. Falx.
‘Out of love,’ said Mr. Cardan. He looked down over the balustrade. On the next terrace below, Chelifer and Mrs. Aldwinkle were walking slowly up and down. On the terrace below that strolled the diminished and foreshortened figures of Calamy and Miss Thriplow. ‘And the other two,’ said Mr. Cardan, as if continuing aloud the enumeration which he and his companion had made in silence, with the eye alone, ‘your young pupil and the little niece, have gone for a walk in the hills. Can you ask what we’re left out of?’
Mr. Falx nodded. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I don’t much like the atmosphere of this house. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s an excellent woman, of course, in many respects. But . . .’ he hesitated.
‘Yes; but . . .’ Mr. Cardan nodded. ‘I see your point.’
‘I shall be rather glad when I have got young Hovenden away from here,’ said Mr. Falx.
‘If you get him alone I shall be surprised.’
Mr. Falx went on, shaking his head: ‘There’s a certain moral laxity, a certain self-indulgence. . . . I confess I don’t like this way of life. I may be prejudiced; but I don’t like it.’
‘Every one has his favourite vice,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘You forget, Mr. Falx, that we probably don’t like your way of life.’
‘I protest,’ said Mr. Falx hotly. ‘Is it possible to compare my way of life with the way of life in this house? Here am I, working incessantly for a noble cause, devoting myself to the public good . . .’
‘Still,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘they do say that there’s nothing more intoxicating than talking to a crowd of people and moving them the way you want them to go; they do say, too, that it’s piercingly delicious to listen to applause. And people who have tried both have told me that the joys of power are far preferable, if only because they are a good deal more enduring, to those one can derive from wine or love. No, no, Mr. Falx; if we chose to climb on to our high horses we should be as amply justified in disapproving of your laxity and self-indulgence as you are in disapproving of ours. I always notice that the most grave and awful denunciations of obscenity in literature are to be found precisely in those periodicals whose directors are most notoriously alcoholic. And the preachers and politicians with the greatest vanity, the most inordinate itch for power and notoriety, are always those who denounce most fiercely the corruptions of the age. One of the greatest triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word “immoral” in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous. And not only could but can — even now. This exaltation of two out of the seven deadly sins is most unfair. In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice. Believe me, Mr. Falx, we are no more reprehensible than the rest of you. Indeed, compared with some of your political friends, I feel I have a right to consider myself almost a saint.’
‘Still,’ said Mr. Falx, whose face, where it was not covered by his prophetical white beard, had become very red with ill-suppressed indignation, ‘you won’t persuade me out of my conviction that these are not the most healthy surroundings for a young fellow like Hovenden at the most impressionable period of his life. Be as paradoxical and ingenious as you like: you will not persuade me, I repeat.’
‘No need to repeat, I assure you,’ said Mr. Cardan, shaking his head. ‘Did you think I ever supposed I could persuade you? You don’t imagine I’d waste my time trying to persuade a full-grown man with fixed opinions of the truth of something he doesn’t already believe? If you were twelve years old, even if you were twenty, I might try. But at your age — no, no.’
‘Then why do you argue, if you don’t want to persuade?’ asked Mr. Falx.
‘For the sake of argument,’ Mr. Cardan replied, ‘and because one must murder the time somehow.
Come ingannar questi noiosi e lenti
Giorni di vita cui si lungo tedio
E fastidio insoffribile accompagna
Or io t’insegnero.
I could write a better handbook of the art than old Parini.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mr. Falx, ‘but I don’t know Italian.’
‘Nor should I,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘if I had your unbounded resources for killing time. Unhappily, I was born without much zeal for the welfare of the working classes.’
‘Working classes . . .’ Mr. Falx swooped down on the words. Passionately he began to talk. What was that text, thought Mr. Cardan, about the measure with which ye mete? How fearfully applicable it was! For the last ten minutes he’d been boring poor old Mr. Falx. And now Mr. Falx had turned round and was paying him back with his own measure — but, oh Lord, pressed down and, heaven help us! running over. He looked down over the balustrade. On the lower terraces the couples were still parading up and down. He wondered what they were saying; he wished he were down there to listen. Boomingly,
Mr. Falx played his prophetic part.
CHAPTER III
IT WAS A pity that Mr. Cardan could not hear what his hostess was saying. He would have been delighted; she was talking about herself. It was a subject on which he specially loved to hear her. There were few people, he used to say, whose Authorized Version of themselves differed so strikingly from that Revised, formed of them by others. It was not often, however, that she gave him a chance to compare them. With Mr. Cardan she was always a little shy; he had known her so long.
‘Sometimes,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying, as she walked with Chelifer on the second of the three terraces, ‘sometimes I wish I were less sensitive. I feel everything so acutely — every slightest thing. It’s like being . . . like being . . .’ she fumbled in the air with groping fingers, feeling for the right word, ‘like being flayed,’ she concluded triumphantly, and looked at her companion.
Chelifer nodded sympathetically.
‘I’m so fearfully aware,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, ‘of other people’s thoughts and feelings. They don’t have to speak to make me know what they’ve got in their minds. I know it, I feel it just by seeing them.’
Chelifer wondered whether she felt what was going on in his mind. He ventured to doubt it. ‘A wonderful gift,’ he said.
‘But it has its disadvantages,’ insisted Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘For example, you can’t imagine how much I suffer when people round me are suffering, particularly if I feel myself in any way to blame. When I’m ill, it makes me miserable to think of servants and nurses and people having to sit up without sleep and run up and down stairs, all because of me. I know it’s rather stupid; but, do you know, my sympathy for them is so . . . so . . . profound, that it actually prevents me from getting well as quickly as I should. . . .’
‘Dreadful,’ said Chelifer in his polite, precise voice.
‘You’ve no idea how deeply all suffering affects me.’ She looked at him tenderly. ‘That day, that first day, when you fainted — you can’t imagine . . .’