Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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At the door of his little shop sat the grocer, unoccupied at the moment, taking the sun and air and looking on at such stray drops from the flux of life as trickled occasionally along the village street. He was a stout man with a large fleshy face that looked as though it had been squeezed perpendicularly, so broadly it bulged, so close to one another the horizontal lines of eyes, nose and mouth. His cheeks and chin were black with five days’ beard — for to-day was Thursday and shaving-time only came round on Saturday evening. Small, sly, black eyes looked out from between pouchy lids. He had thick lips, and his teeth when he smiled were yellow. A long white apron, unexpectedly clean, was tied at neck and waist and fell down over his knees. It was the apron that struck Miss Thriplow’s imagination — the apron and the thought that this man wore it, draped round him like an ephod, when he was cutting up ham and sausages, when he was serving out sugar with a little shovel. . . .
‘How extraordinarily nice and jolly he looks!’ she said enthusiastically, as they approached.
‘Does he?’ asked Mr. Cardan in some surprise. To his eyes the man looked like a hardly mitigated ruffian.
‘So simple and happy and contented!’ Miss Thriplow went on. ‘One envies them their lives.’ She could almost have wept over the little shovel — momentarily the masonic emblem of pre-lapsarian ingenuousness. ‘We make everything so unnecessarily complicated for ourselves, don’t we?’
‘Do we?’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘These people have no doubts, or after-thoughts,’ pursued Miss Thriplow, ‘or — what’s worse than after-thoughts — simultaneous-thoughts. They know what they want and what’s right; they feel just what they ought to feel by nature — like the heroes in the Iliad — and act accordingly. And the result is, I believe, that they’re much better than we are, much gooder, we used to say when we were children; the word’s more expressive. Yes, much gooder. Now you’re laughing at me!’
Mr. Cardan twinkled at her with benevolent irony. ‘I assure you I’m not,’ he declared.
‘But I shouldn’t mind if you were,’ said Miss Thriplow. ‘For after all, in spite of all that you people may say or think, it’s the only thing that matters — being good.’
‘I entirely agree,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘And it’s easier if you’re like that.’ She nodded in the direction of the white apron.
Mr. Cardan nodded, a little dubiously.
‘Sometimes,’ Miss Thriplow continued, with a gush of confidence that made her words come more rapidly, ‘sometimes, when I get on a bus and take my ticket from the conductor, I suddenly feel the tears come into my eyes at the thought of this life, so simple and straightforward, so easy to live well, even if it is a hard one — and perhaps, too, just because it is a hard one. Ours is so difficult.’ She shook her head.
By this time they were within a few yards of the shopkeeper, who, seeing that they were proposing to enter his shop, rose from his seat at the door and darted in to take up his stand, professionally, behind the counter.
They followed him into the shop. It was dark within and filled with a violent smell of goat’s milk cheese, pickled tunny, tomato preserve and highly flavoured sausage.
‘Whee-ew!’ said Miss Thriplow, and pulling out a small handkerchief, she took refuge with the ghost of Parma violets. It was a pity that these simple lives in white aprons had to be passed amid such surroundings.
‘Rather deafening, eh?’ said Mr. Cardan, twinkling. ‘Puzza,’ he added, turning to the shopkeeper. ‘It stinks.’
The man looked at Miss Thriplow, who stood there, her nose in the oasis of her handkerchief, and smiled indulgently. ‘I forestieri sono troppo delicati. Troppo delicati,’ he repeated.
‘He’s quite right,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘We are. In the end, I believe, we shall come to sacrifice everything to comfort and cleanliness. Personally, I always have the greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias. As for this particular stink,’ he sniffed the air, positively with relish, ‘I don’t really know what you have to object to it. It’s wholesome, it’s natural, it’s tremendously historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers, you may be sure, smelt just as this does. No, on the whole, I entirely agree with our friend here.’
‘Still,’ said Miss Thriplow, speaking in a muffled voice through the folds of her handkerchief, ‘I shall stick to my violets. However synthetic.’
Having ordered a couple of glasses of wine, one of which he offered to the grocer, Mr. Cardan embarked on a diplomatic conversation about the object of his visit. At the mention of his brother and the sculpture, the grocer’s face took on an expression of altogether excessive amiability. He bent his thick lips into smiles; deep folds in the shape of arcs of circles appeared in his fat cheeks. He kept bowing again and again. Every now and then he joyously laughed, emitting a blast of garlicky breath that smelt so powerfully like acetylene that one was tempted to put a match to his mouth in the hope that he would immediately break out into a bright white flame. He confirmed all that the butcher’s boy had said. It was all quite true; he had a brother; and his brother had a piece of marble statuary that was beautiful and old, old, old. Unfortunately, however, his brother had removed from this village and had gone down to live in the plain, near the lake of Massaciuccoli, and the sculpture had gone with him. Mr. Cardan tried to find out from him what the work of art looked like; but he could gather nothing beyond the fact that it was beautiful and old and represented a man.
‘It isn’t like this, I suppose?’ asked Mr. Cardan, bending himself into the attitude of a Romanesque demon and making a demoniac grimace.
The grocer thought not. Two peasant women who had come in for cheese and oil looked on with a mild astonishment. These foreigners . . .
‘Or like this?’ He propped his elbow on the counter and, half reclining, conjured up, by his attitude and his fixed smile of imbecile ecstasy, visions of Etruscan revelry.
Again the grocer shook his head.
‘Or like this?’ He rolled his eyes towards heaven, like a baroque saint.
But the grocer seemed doubtful even of this.
Mr. Cardan wiped his forehead. ‘If I could make myself look like a Roman bust,’ he said to Miss Thriplow, ‘or a bas-relief of Giotto, or a renaissance sarcophagus, or an unfinished group by Michelangelo, I would. But it’s beyond my powers.’ He shook his head. ‘For the moment I give it up.’
He took out his pocket-book and asked for the brother’s address. The grocer gave directions; Mr. Cardan carefully took them down. Smiling and bowing, the grocer ushered them out into the street, Miss Thriplow vailed her handkerchief and drew a breath of air — redolent, however, even here, of organic chemistry.
‘Patience,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘tenacity of purpose. One needs them here.’
They walked slowly down the street. They had only gone a few yards when the noise of a violent altercation made them turn round. At the door of the shop the grocer and his two customers were furiously disputing. Voices were raised, the grocer’s deep and harsh, the women’s shrill; hands moved in violent and menacing gestures, yet gracefully withal, as was natural in the hands of those whose ancestors had taught the old masters of painting all they ever knew of expressive and harmonious movement.
‘What is it?’ asked Miss Thriplow. ‘It looks like the preliminaries of a murder.’
Mr. Cardan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘They’re just calling him a robber; that’s all.’ He listened for a moment more to the shouting. ‘A little question of short weight, it seems.’ He smiled at Miss Thriplow. ‘Should we go on?’
They turned away; the sound of the dispute followed them down the street. Miss Thriplow did not know whether to be grateful to Mr. Cardan for saying nothing more about her friend in the white apron. These simple folk . . . the little shovel for the sugar . . . so much better, so much gooder than we. . . . In the end she almost wished that he would say something about it. Mr. Cardan’s silence seemed more ironic than any words.
CHAPTER VI
THE SUN HAD set. Against a pale green sky the blue and purple mountains lifted a jagged silhouette. Mr. Cardan found himself alone in the middle of the flat plain at their feet. He was standing on the bank of a broad ditch, brimming with gleaming water, that stretched away in a straight line apparently for miles across the land, to be lost in the vague twilight distance. Here and there a line of tall thin poplars marked the position of other dykes, intersecting the plain in all directions. There was not a house in sight, not a human being, not even a cow or a grazing donkey. Far away on the slopes of the mountains, whose blue and purple were rapidly darkening to a uniform deep indigo, little yellow lights began to appear, singly or in clusters, attesting the presence of a village or a solitary farm. Mr. Cardan looked at them with irritation; very pretty, no doubt, but he had seen it done better on many musical comedy stages. And in any case, what was the good of a light six or seven miles away, on the hills, when he was standing in the middle of the plain, with nobody in sight, night coming on, and these horrible ditches to prevent one from taking the obvious bee-line towards civilization? He had been a fool, he reflected, three or four times over: a fool to refuse Lilian’s offer of the car and go on foot (this fetish of exercise! still, he would certainly have to cut down his drinking if he didn’t take it); a fool to have started so late in the afternoon; a fool to have accepted Italian estimates of distance; and a fool to have followed directions for finding the way given by people who mixed up left and right and, when you insisted on knowing which they meant, told you that either would bring you where you wanted to go. The path which Mr. Cardan had been following seemed to have come to a sudden end in the waters of this ditch; perhaps it was a suicides’ path. The lake of Massaciuccoli should be somewhere on the further side of the ditch; but where? and how to get across? The twilight rapidly deepened. In a few minutes the sun would have gone down its full eighteen degrees below the horizon and it would be wholly dark. Mr. Cardan swore; but that got him no further. In the end he decided that the best thing to do would be to walk slowly and cautiously along this ditch, in the hope that in time one might arrive, at any rate somewhere. Meanwhile, it would be well to fortify oneself with a bite and a sup. He sat down on the grass and opening his jacket, dipped into the capacious poacher’s pockets excavated in its lining, producing first a loaf, then a few inches of a long polony, then a bottle of red wine; Mr. Cardan was always prepared against emergencies.
The bread was stale, the sausage rather horsey and spiced with garlic; but Mr. Cardan, who had had no tea, ate with a relish. Still more appreciatively he drank. In a little while he felt a little more cheerful. Such are the little crosses, he reflected philosophically, the little crosses one has to bear when one sets out to earn money. If he got through the evening without falling into a ditch, he’d feel that he had paid lightly for his treasure. The greatest bore was these mosquitoes; he lighted a cigar and tried to fumigate them to a respectful distance. Without much success, however. Perhaps the brutes were malarial, too. There might be a little of the disease still hanging about in these marshes; one never knew. It would be tiresome to end one’s days with recurrent fever and an enlarged spleen. It would be tiresome, for that matter, to end one’s days anyhow, in one’s bed or out, naturally or unnaturally, by the act of God or of the King’s enemies. Mr. Cardan’s thoughts took on, all at once, a dismal complexion. Old age, sickness, decrepitude; the bath-chair, the doctor, the bright efficient nurse; and the long agony, the struggle for breath, the thickening darkness, the end, and then — how did that merry little song go?
More work for the undertaker,
‘Nother little job for the coffin-maker.
At the local cemetery they are
Very very busy with a brand new grave.
He’ll keep warm next winter.
Mr. Cardan hummed the tune to himself cheerfully enough. But his tough, knobbly face became so hard, so strangely still, an expression of such bitterness, such a profound melancholy, appeared in his winking and his supercilious eye, that it would have startled and frightened a man to look at him. But there was nobody in that deepening twilight to see him. He sat there alone.
At the local cemetery they are
Very very busy with a brand new grave . .
He went on humming. ‘If I were to fall sick,’ he was thinking, ‘who would look after me? Suppose one were to have a stroke. Hemorrhage on the brain; partial paralysis; mumbling speech; the tongue couldn’t utter what the brain thought; one was fed like a baby; clysters; such a bright doctor, rubbing his hands and smelling of disinfectant and eau-de-Cologne; saw nobody but the nurse; no friends; or once a week, perhaps, for an hour, out of charity; ‘Poor old Cardan, done for, I’m afraid; must send the old chap a fiver — hasn’t a penny, you know; get up a subscription; what a bore; astonishing that he can last so long. . . .’
He’ll keep warm next winter.
The tune ended on a kind of trumpet call, rising from the dominant to the tonic — one dominant, three repeated tonics, drop down again to the dominant and then on the final syllable of ‘winter’ the last tonic. Finis, and no da capo, no second movement.
Mr. Cardan took another swig from his bottle; it was nearly empty now.
Perhaps one ought to have married. Kitty, for example. She would be old now and fat; or old and thin, like a skeleton very imperfectly disguised. Still, he had been very much in love with Kitty. Perhaps it would have been a good thing if he had married her. Pooh! with a burst of mocking laughter Mr. Cardan laughed aloud savagely. Marry indeed! She looked very coy, no doubt; but you bet, she was a little tart underneath, and lascivious as you make them. He remembered her with hatred and contempt. Portentous obscenities reverberated through the chambers of his mind.
He thought of arthritis, he thought of gout, of cataract, of deafness. . . . And in any case, how many years were left him? Ten, fifteen, twenty if he were exceptional. And what years, what years!
Mr. Cardan emptied the bottle and replacing the cork threw it into the black water beneath him. The wine had done nothing to improve his mood. He wished to God he were back at the palace, with people round him to talk to. Alone, he was without defence. He tried to think of something lively and amusing; indoor sports, for example. But instead of indoor sports he found himself contemplating visions of disease, decrepitude, death. And it was the same when he tried to think of reasonable, serious things: what is art, for example? and what was the survival value to a species of eyes or wings or protective colouring in their rudimentary state, before they were developed far enough to see, fly or protect? Why should the individuals having the first and still quite useless variation in the direction of something useful have survived more effectively than those who were handicapped by no eccentricity? Absorbing themes. But Mr. Cardan couldn’t keep his attention fixed on them. General paralysis of the insane, he reflected, was luckily an ailment for which he had not qualified in the past; luckily! miraculously, even! But stone, but neuritis, but fatty degeneration, but diabetes. . . . Lord, how he wished he had somebody to talk to!
And all at once, as though in immediate answer to his prayer, he heard the sound of voices approaching through the now complete darkness. ‘Thank the Lord!’ said Mr. Cardan, and scrambling to his feet he walked in the direction from which the voices came. Two black silhouettes, one tall and masculine, the other, very small, belonging to a woman, loomed up out of the dark. Mr. Cardan removed the cigar from his mouth, took off his hat and bowed in their direction.
‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,’ he began,
‘mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.’
How lucky that Dante should also have lost his way, six hundred and twenty-four years ago! ‘In a word,’ Mr. Cardan went on, ‘ho perso la mia strada — though I have my doubts whether that’s very idiomatic. Forse potrebbero darmi qualche indicazione.’ In the presence of the strangers and at the sound of his own voice conversing, all Mr.
Cardan’s depression had vanished. He was delighted by the fantastic turn he had managed to give the conversation at its inception. Perhaps with a little ingenuity he would be able to find an excuse for treating them to a little Leopardi. It was so amusing to astonish the natives.
The two silhouettes, meanwhile, had halted at a little distance. When Mr. Cardan had finished his macaronic self-introduction, the taller of them answered in a harsh and, for a man’s, a shrill voice: ‘There’s no need to talk Italian. We’re English.’
‘I’m enchanted to hear it,’ Mr. Cardan protested. And he explained at length and in his mother tongue what had happened to him. It occurred to him, at the same time, that this was a very odd place to find a couple of English tourists.
The harsh voice spoke again. ‘There’s a path to Massarosa through the fields,’ it said. ‘And there’s another, in the opposite direction, that joins the Viareggio road. But they’re not very easy to find in the dark, and there are a lot of ditches.’
‘One can but perish in the attempt,’ said Mr. Cardan gallantly.
This time it was the woman who spoke. ‘I think it would be better,’ she said, ‘if you slept at our house for the night. You’ll never find the way. I almost tumbled into the ditch myself just now.’ She laughed shrilly and more loudly, Mr. Cardan thought, at greater length, than was necessary.
‘But have we room?’ asked the man in a tone which showed that he was very reluctant to receive a guest.
‘But you know we’ve got room,’ the feminine voice answered in a tone of child-like astonishment. ‘It’s rough, though.’
‘That doesn’t matter in the least,’ Mr. Cardan assured her. ‘I’m most grateful to you for your offer,’ he added, making haste to accept the invitation before the man could take it back. He had no desire to go wandering at night among these ditches. Moreover, the prospect of having company, and odd company, he guessed, was alluring. ‘Most grateful,’ he repeated.