Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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PART IV. THE JOURNEY
CHAPTER I
LORD HOVENDEN DETACHED from his motor car was an entirely different being from the Lord Hovenden who lounged with such a deceptive air of languor behind the steering-wheel of a Vauxhall Velox. Half an hour spent in the roaring wind of his own speed transformed him from a shy and diffident boy into a cool-headed hero, daring not merely in the affairs of the road, but in the affairs of life as well. The fierce wind blew away his diffidence; the speed intoxicated him out of his self-consciousness. All his victories had been won while he was in the car. It was in the car — eighteen months ago, before he came of age — that he had ventured to ask his guardian to increase his allowance; and he had driven faster and faster until, in sheer terror, his guardian had agreed to do whatever he wished. It was on board the Velox that he had ventured to tell Mrs. Terebinth, who was seventeen years older than he, had four children and adored her husband, that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; he had bawled it at her while they were doing seventy-five on the Great North Road. At sixty, at sixty-five, at seventy, his courage had still been inadequate to the achievement; but at seventy-five it reached the sticking-point: he had told her. And when she laughed and told him that he was an impudent young shrimp, he felt not a whit abashed, but laughed back, pressed the accelerator down a little further, and when the needle of the speedometer touched eighty, shouted through the wind and the noise of the engine: ‘But I love you.’ Unfortunately, however, the drive came to an end soon after; all drives must come to an end, sooner or later. The affaire Terebinth went no further. If only, Lord Hovenden regretfully sighed, if only one could spend all one’s life in the Velox! But the Velox had its disadvantages. There were occasions when the heroic, speed-intoxicated self had got the timorous pedestrian into awkward scrapes. There was that time, for example, when, rolling along at sixty, he had airily promised one of his advanced political friends to make a speech at a meeting. The prospect, while one was doing sixty, had seemed not merely unalarming, but positively attractive. But what agonies he suffered when he was standing on the solid earth again, at his journey’s end! How impossibly formidable the undertaking seemed! How bitterly he cursed himself for his folly in having accepted the invitation! In the end he was reduced to telegraphing that his doctor had ordered him peremptorily to the south of France. He fled, ignominiously.
To-day the Velox had its usual effect on him. At Vezza, when they started, he was all shyness and submission. He assented meekly to all the arrangements that Mrs. Aldwinkle made and remade every five minutes, however contradictory and impossible. He did not venture to suggest that Irene should come in his car; it was through no good management of his own, but by the mere luck of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s final caprice before the actual moment of starting, that he did in fact find her sitting next him when at last they moved off from before the palace doors. At the back sat Mr. Falx, in solitude, surrounded by suit-cases. To him Lord Hovenden had even dutifully promised that he would never go more than five-and-twenty miles an hour. Pedestrian slavishness could hardly go further.
Heavily loaded, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s limousine started first. Miss Elver, who had begged to be granted this special favour, sat in front, next the chauffeur. An expression of perfect and absolute bliss irradiated her face. Whenever the car passed any one by the roadside, she made a shrill hooting noise and waved her handkerchief. Luckily she was unaware of the feelings of disgust and indignation which her conduct aroused in the chauffeur; he was English and enormously genteel, he had the reputation of his country and his impeccable car to keep up. And this person waved handkerchiefs and shouted as though she were on a char-à-banc. Miss Elver even waved at the cows and horses, she shouted even to the cats and the chickens.
In the body of the car sat Mrs. Aldwinkle, Mrs. Chelifer, Chelifer and Mr. Cardan. Calamy and Miss Thriplow had decided that they had no time to go to Rome and had been left — without a word of objection on Mrs. Aldwinkle’s part — at the palace. The landscape slid placidly past the windows. Mr. Cardan and Mrs. Chelifer talked about traditional games.
Meanwhile, a couple of hundred yards behind, Lord Hovenden disgustfully sniffed the dusty air. ‘How intolerably slowly old Ernest drives!’ he said to his companion.
‘Aunt Lilian doesn’t allow him to do more than thirty miles an hour,’ Irene explained.
Hovenden snorted derisively. ‘Firty! But must we eat veir filthy dust all ve way?’
‘Perhaps you might drop back a bit,’ Irene suggested.
‘Or perhaps we might pass vem?’
‘Well . . .’ said Irene doubtfully. ‘I don’t think we ought to make poor Aunt Lilian eat our dust.’
‘She wouldn’t eat it for long, if old Ernest is only allowed to do firty.’
‘Well, in that case,’ said Irene, feeling that her duty towards Aunt Lilian had been done, ‘in that case . . .’
Lord Hovenden accelerated. The road was broad, flat and straight. There was no traffic. In two minutes Mrs. Aldwinkle had eaten her brief, unavoidable meal of dust; the air was clear again. Far off along the white road, a rapidly diminishing cloud was all that could be seen of Lord Hovenden’s Velox.
‘Well, fank God,’ Lord Hovenden was saying in a cheerful voice, ‘now we can get along at a reasonable rate.’ He grinned, a young ecstatic giant.
Irene also found the speed exhilarating. Under her grey silk mask, with its goggling windows for the eyes, her short lip was lifted in a joyful smile from the white small teeth. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said.
‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Hovenden. ‘Vat’s splendid.’
But a tap on his shoulder reminded him that there was somebody else in the car besides Irene and himself. Mr. Falx was far from finding the present state of affairs splendid. Blown by the wind, his white beard shook and fluttered like a living thing in a state of mortal agitation. Behind the goggles, his dark eyes had an anxious look in them. ‘Aren’t you going rather fast?’ he shouted, leaning forward, so as to make himself heard.
‘Not a bit,’ Hovenden shouted back. ‘Just ve usual speed. Perfectly safe.’ His ordinary pedestrian self would never have dreamed of doing anything contrary to the wishes of the venerated master. But the young giant who sat at the wheel of the Velox cared for nobody. He went his own way.
They passed through the sordid outskirts of Viareggio, through the pinewoods beyond, solemn with dark green shadow, and aromatic. Islanded in their grassy meadow within the battlemented walls, the white church, the white arcaded tower miraculously poised on the verge of falling, the round white baptistery seemed to meditate in solitude of ancient glories — Pisan dominion, Pisan arts and thoughts — of the mysteries of religion, of inscrutable fate and unfathomed godhead, of the insignificance and the grandeur of man.
‘Why ve deuce it shouldn’t fall,’ said Hovenden, as the Leaning Tower came in sight, ‘I can’t imagine.’
They drove past the house on the water, where Byron had bored himself through an eternity of months, out of the town. After Pontedera the road became more desolate. Through a wilderness of bare, unfertile hills, between whose yellowing grasses showed a white and ghastly soil, they mounted towards Volterra. The landscape took on something of an infernal aspect; a prospect of parched hills and waterless gulleys, like the undulations of a petrified ocean, expanded interminably round them. And on the crest of the highest wave, the capital of this strange hell, stood Volterra — three towers against the sky, a dome, a line of impregnable walls, and outside the walls, still outside but advancing ineluctably year by year towards them, the ravening gulf that eats its way into the flank of the hill, devouring the works of civilization after civilization, the tombs of the Etruscans, Roman villas, abbeys and mediaeval fortresses, renaissance churches and the houses of yesterday.
‘Must be a bit slow, life in a town like vis,’ said Hovenden, racing round the hairpin turns with an easy virtuosity that appalled Mr. Falx.
‘Think if one had been born there,’ said Ire
ne.
‘Well, if we’d both been born vere,’ replied Lord Hovenden, flushed with insolence and speed, ‘it wouldn’t have been so bad.’
They left Volterra behind them. The hellish landscape was gradually tempered with mundane greenness and amenity. They descended the headlong street of Colle. The landscape became once more completely earthly. The soil of the hills was red, like that from which God made Adam. In the steep fields grew rows of little pollard trees, from whose twisted black arms hung the festooned vines. Here and there between the trees shuffled a pair of white oxen, dragging a plough.
‘Excellent roads, for a change,’ said Lord Hovenden. On one straight stretch he managed to touch eighty-eight. Mr. Falx’s beard writhed and fluttered with the agonized motions of some captive animal. He was enormously thankful when they drew up in front of the hotel at Siena.
‘Wonderful machine, don’t you fink?’ Lord Hovenden asked him, when they had come to a standstill.
‘You go much too fast,’ said Mr. Falx severely.
Lord Hovenden’s face fell. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he apologized. The young giant in him was already giving place to the meek pedestrian. He looked at his watch. ‘The others won’t be here for another three-quarters of an hour, I should fink,’ he added, in the hope that Mr. Falx would be mollified by the information.
Mr. Falx was not mollified, and when the time came, after lunch, for setting out on the Perugia road, he expressed a decided preference for a seat in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s limousine. It was decided that he should change places with Miss Elver.
Miss Elver had no objection to speed; indeed, it excited her. The faster they went, the more piercing became her cries of greeting and farewell, the more wildly she waved her handkerchief at the passing dogs and children. The only trouble about going so fast was that the mighty wind was always tearing the handkerchiefs from between her fingers and whirling them irretrievably into receding space. When all the four handkerchiefs in her reticule had been blown away, Miss Elver burst into tears. Lord Hovenden had to stop and lend her his coloured silk bandana. Miss Elver was enchanted by its gaudy beauty; to secure it against the assaults of the thievish wind, she made Irene tie one corner of it round her wrist.
‘Now it’ll be all right,’ she said triumphantly; lifting her goggles, she wiped away the last traces of her recent grief.
Lord Hovenden set off again. On the sky-line, lifted high above the rolling table-land over which they were travelling, the solitary blue shape of Monte Amiata beckoned from far away. With every mile to southward the horns of the white oxen that dragged the carts became longer and longer. A sneeze — one ran the risk of a puncture; a sideways toss of the head — one might have been impaled on the hard and polished points. They passed through San Quirico; from that secret and melancholy garden within the walls of the ruined citadel came a whiff of sun-warmed box. In Pienza they found the Platonic idea of a city, the town with a capital T; walls with a gate in them, a short street, a piazza with a cathedral and palaces round the other three sides, another short street, another gate and then the fields, rich with corn, wine and oil; and the tall blue peak of Monte Amiata looking down across the fertile land. At Montepulciano there were more palaces and more churches; but the intellectual beauty of symmetry was replaced by a picturesque and precipitous confusion.
‘Gosh!’ said Lord Hovenden expressively, as they slid with locked wheels down a high street that had been planned for pack-asses and mules. From pedimented windows between the pilasters of the palaces, curious faces peered out at them. They tobogganed down, through the high renaissance, out of an arch of the Middle Ages, into the dateless and eternal fields. From Montepulciano they descended on to Lake Trasimene.
‘Wasn’t there a battle here, or something?’ asked Irene, when she saw the name on the map.
Lord Hovenden seemed to remember that there had indeed been something of the kind in this neighbourhood. ‘But it doesn’t make much difference, does it?’
Irene nodded; it certainly didn’t seem to make much difference.
‘Nofing makes any difference,’ said Lord Hovenden, making himself heard with difficulty in the teeth of a wind which his speedometer registered as blowing at forty-five miles an hour. ‘Except’ — the wind made him bold— ‘except you.’ And he added hastily, in case Irene might try to be severe. ‘Such a bore going down-hill on a twiddly road like vis. One can’t risk ve slightest speed.’
But when they turned into the flat highway along the western shore of the lake, his face brightened. ‘Vis is more like it,’ he said. The wind in their faces increased from a capful to half a gale, from half a gale to a full gale, from a full gale very nearly to a hurricane. Lord Hovenden’s spirits rose with the mounting speed. His lips curved themselves into a smile of fixed and permanent rapture. Behind the glass of his goggles his eyes were very bright. ‘Pretty good going,’ he said.
‘Pretty good,’ echoed Irene. Under her mask, she too was smiling. Between her ears and the flaps of her leather cap the wind made a glorious roaring. She was happy.
The road swung round to the left following the southern shore of the lake.
‘We shall soon be at Perugia,’ said Hovenden regretfully. ‘What a bore!’
And Irene, though she said nothing, inwardly agreed with him.
They rushed on, the gale blew steadily in their faces. The road forked; Lord Hovenden turned the nose of his machine along the leftward branch. They lost sight of the blue water.
‘Good-bye, Trasimene,’ said Irene regretfully. It was a lovely lake; she wished she could remember what had happened there.
The road began to climb and twist; the wind abated to a mere half-gale. From the top of the hill, Irene was surprised to see the blue waters, which she had just taken leave of for ever, sparkling two or three hundred feet below on the left. At the joyous sight Miss Elver clapped her hands and shouted.
‘Hullo,’ Irene said, surprised. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘Taken ve wrong road,’ Hovenden explained. ‘We’re going norf again up ve east side of ve lake. We’ll go right round. It’s too much bore to stop and turn.’
They rushed on. For a long time neither of them spoke. Behind them Miss Elver hooted her greetings to every living creature on the road.
They were filled with happiness and joy; they would have liked to go on like this for ever. They rushed on. On the north shore of the lake the road straightened itself out and became flat again. The wind freshened. Far off on their respective hills Cortona and Montepulciano moved slowly, as they rushed along, like fixed stars. And now they were on the west shore once more. Perched on its jutting peninsula Castiglione del Lago reflected itself complacently in the water. ‘Pretty good,’ shouted Lord Hovenden in the teeth of the hurricane. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘wasn’t it Hannibal or somebody who had a battle here? Wiv elephants, or somefing.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ said Irene.
‘Not vat it matters in ve least.’
‘Not in the least.’ She laughed under her mask.
Hovenden laughed too. He was happy, he was joyful, he was daring.
‘Would you marry me if I asked you?’ he said. The question followed naturally and by a kind of logic from what they had been saying about Hannibal and his elephants. He did not look at her as he asked the question; when one is doing sixty-seven one must keep one’s eyes on the road.
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Irene.
‘I’m not talking nonsense,’ Lord Hovenden protested. ‘I’m asking a straightforward question. Would you marry me?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Irene.
They had passed Castiglione. The fixed stars of Montepulciano and Cortona had set behind them.
‘Don’t you like me?’ shouted Lord Hovenden. The wind had swelled into a hurricane.
‘You know I do.’
‘Ven why not?’
‘Because, because . . . Oh, I don’t kn
ow. I wish you’d stop talking about it.’
The machine rushed on. Once more they were running along the southern shore. A hundred yards before the forking of the roads, Lord Hovenden broke silence. ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Irene.
Lord Hovenden turned the nose of his machine to the left. The road climbed and twisted, the wind of their speed abated.
‘Stop,’ said Irene. ‘You’ve taken the wrong turn again.’
But Hovenden did not stop. Instead, he pressed down the accelerator. If the car got round the corners it was more by a miracle than in obedience to the laws of Newton or of nature.
‘Stop!’ cried Irene again. But the car went on.
From the hill-top they looked down once more upon the lake.
‘Will you marry me?’ Lord Hovenden asked again. His eyes were fixed on the road in front of him. Rapturously, triumphantly he smiled. He had never felt happier, never more daring, more overflowing with strength and power. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘No,’ said Irene. She felt annoyed; how stupidly he was behaving!
They were silent for several minutes. At Castiglione del Lago he asked again. Irene repeated her answer.
‘You’re not going to do this clown’s trick again, are you?’ she asked as they approached the bifurcation of the roads.
‘It depends if you’re going to marry me,’ he answered. This time he laughed aloud; so infectiously that Irene, whose irritation was something laid on superficially over her happiness, could not help laughing too. ‘Are you going to?’ he asked.
‘No.’
Lord Hovenden turned to the left. ‘It’ll be late before we get to Perugia,’ he said.
‘Oo-ooh!’ cried Miss Elver, as they topped the long hill. ‘How lovely!’ She clapped her hands. Then, leaning forward, she touched Irene’s shoulder. ‘What a lot of lakes there are here!’ she said.