Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Blasphemy!’ cried Mrs. Aldwinkle, flying to the defence of Buonarroti.
Mr. Falx harked back to an earlier grievance. ‘You malign human nature,’ he said.
‘All very true and indeed obvious,’ was Mr. Cardan’s comment. ‘But I can’t see why you shouldn’t allow us to amuse ourselves with Michelangelo if we want to. God knows, it’s hard enough for a man to adapt himself to circumstances; why should you deprive him of his little assistants in the difficult task? Wine, for example, learning, cigars and conversation, art, cooking, religion for those that like it, sport, love, humanitarianism, hashish and all the rest. Every man has his own recipe for facilitating the process of adaptation. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to indulge in his dope in peace? You young men are all so damned intolerant. How often have I had occasion to say it? You’re nothing but a set of prohibitionists, the whole lot of you.’
‘Still,’ said Mrs. Chelifer in her gentle and musical voice, ‘you can’t deny that prohibition has done a great deal of good in America.’
They strolled back to the tea-table, which they had left a few minutes before to look at the view. Miss Elver was just finishing an éclair. Two empty dishes stood in front of her.
‘Had a good tea?’ asked Mr. Cardan.
Miss Elver nodded; her mouth was too full to speak.
‘Perhaps you’d like some more cakes?’ he suggested.
Miss Elver looked at the two empty dishes, then at Mr. Cardan. She seemed on the point of saying yes. But Mrs. Chelifer, who had taken the chair next hers, laid a hand on her arm.
‘I don’t think Grace really wants any more,’ she said.
Grace turned towards her; a look of disappointment and melancholy came into her eyes, but it gave place after a moment to a happier expression. She smiled, she took Mrs. Chelifer’s hand and kissed it.
‘I like you,’ she said.
On the back of Mrs. Chelifer’s hand her lips had left a brown print of melted chocolate. ‘I think you’d better just give your face a little wipe with your napkin,’ Mrs. Chelifer suggested.
‘Perhaps if you dipped the corner of it first into the hot water . . .’
There was a silence. From the open-air dancing-floor, a hundred yards away beneath the trees, came the sound, a little dimmed by the intervening distance and the pervading Roman noise, of the jazz band. Monotonously, unceasingly, the banjos throbbed out the dance rhythms. An occasional squeak indicated the presence of a violin. The trumpet could be heard tooting away with a dreary persistence at the tonic and dominant; and clear above all the rest the saxophone voluptuously caterwauled. At this distance every tune sounded exactly the same. Suddenly, from the band-stand of the tea-garden a pianist, two fiddlers and a ‘cellist began to play the Pilgrims’ Chorus out of Tannhäuser.
Irene and Lord Hovenden, locked in one another’s arms, were stepping lightly, meanwhile, lightly and accurately over the concrete dance-floor. Obedient to the music of the jazz band, forty other couples stepped lightly round them. Percolating insidiously through the palisade that separated the dance-floor from the rest of the world, thin wafts of the Pilgrims’ Chorus intruded faintly upon the jazz.
‘Listen,’ said Hovenden. Dancing, they listened. ‘Funny it sounds when you hear bof at ve same time!’
But the music from beyond the palisade was not strong enough to spoil their rhythm. They listened for a little, smiling at the absurdity of this other music from outside; but they danced on uninterruptedly. After a time they did not even take the trouble to listen.
CHAPTER IV
MR. FALX HAD expected to find no difficulty, once they were arrived in Rome, in recalling his pupil to what he considered a better and more serious frame of mind. In the bracing atmosphere of an International Labour Conference Lord Hovenden, he hoped, would recover his moral and intellectual tone. Listening to speeches, meeting foreign comrades, he would forget the corrupting charms of life under Mrs. Aldwinkle’s roof and turn to nobler and more important things. Moreover, on a young and generous spirit like his the prospect of possible persecution at the hands of the Fascists might be expected to act as a stimulant; the fact of being in opposition ought to make him feel the more ardently for the unpopular cause. So Mr. Falx calculated.
But it turned out in the event that he had calculated badly. Arrived in Rome, Lord Hovenden seemed to take even less interest in advanced politics than he had during the last two or three weeks at Vezza. He suffered himself, but with a reluctance that was only too obvious to Mr. Falx, to be taken to a few of the meetings of the conference. Their bracing intellectual atmosphere had no tonic effect upon him whatsoever, and he spent his time at the meetings yawning and looking with an extraordinary frequency at his watch. In the evenings, when Mr. Falx wanted to take him to see some distinguished comrade, Lord Hovenden either made some vague excuse or, more frequently, was simply undiscoverable. The next day Mr. Falx learned with distress that he had passed half the night at a Dancing Club with Irene Aldwinkle. He could only look forward hopefully to the date of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s return journey. Lord Hovenden — it had been arranged before they left England — would stay on with him in Rome till the end of the conference. With the removal of all temptations to frivolity he might be relied upon to re-become his better self.
Lord Hovenden’s conscience, meanwhile, occasionally troubled him.
‘I sometimes feel I’ve raver left old Mr. Falx in ve lurch,’ he confided uneasily to Irene on the evening of their second day in Rome. ‘But still, he can’t really expect me to spend all ve day wiv him, can he?’
Irene agreed that he really couldn’t.
‘Besides,’ Lord Hovenden went on, reassuring himself, ‘I’d really be raver out of it wiv his friends. And it’s not as if he were lonely. Vere’s such a lot of people he wants to talk to. And, you know, I fink I’d really be in ve way more van anyfing.’
Irene nodded. The band struck up again. Simultaneously the two young people got up and, united, stepped off on to the floor. It was a sordid and flashy cabaret, frequented by the worst sort of international and Italian public. The women were mostly prostitutes; a party of loud and tipsy young Englishmen and Americans were sitting in one corner with a pair of swarthy young natives who looked altogether too sober; the couples who took the floor danced with an excessive intimacy. Irene and Lord Hovenden were discussing the date of their wedding; they thought the cabaret delightful.
In the day-time, when Hovenden could get off going to the conferences, they wandered about the town buying what they imagined to be antiques for their future home. The process was a little superfluous. For, absorbed in the delights of shopping, they forgot that their future home was also a highly ancestral home.
‘Vat looks an awfully nice dinner-service,’ Lord Hovenden would say; and darting into the shop they would buy it out of hand. ‘A bit chipped’ — he shook his head. ‘But never mind.’ Among the twenty-three valuable dinner-services with which their future home was already supplied was one of solid gold and one of silver gilt for less important occasions. Still, it was such fun buying, such fun to poke about in the shops! Under the pale blue sky of autumn the city was golden and black — golden where the sunlight fell on walls of stucco or travertine, black in the shadows, deeply black under archways, within the doors of churches, glossily black where the sculptured stone of fountains shone wet with the unceasing gush of water. In the open places the sun was hot; but a little wind from the sea blew freshly, and from the mouth of narrow alleys, sun-proof these thousand years, there breathed forth wafts of a delicious vault-like coolness. They walked for hours without feeling tired.
Mrs. Aldwinkle meanwhile went the round of the sights with Chelifer. She had hopes that the Sistine Chapel, the Appian Way at sunset, the Coliseum by moonlight, the gardens of the Villa d’Este might arouse in Chelifer’s mind emotions which should in their turn predispose him to feel romantically towards herself. The various emotions, she knew by experience, are not boxed off from one another in separate pi
geon-holes; and when one is stimulated it is likely that its neighbours will also be aroused. More proposals are made in the taxi, on the way home from a Wagner opera, in the face of an impressive view, within the labyrinth of a ruined palace, than in drab parlours or the streets of West Kensington. But the Appian Way, even when the solitary pine trees were black against the sunset and the ghosts were playing oboes, not for the sensual ear, in the ruined sepulchres; the Coliseum, even under the moon; the cypresses, the cascades and the jade-green pools of Tivoli — all were ineffective. Chelifer never committed himself; his behaviour remained perfectly courteous.
Seated on a fallen column in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, Mrs. Aldwinkle even went so far as to tell him about certain amorous passages in her past life. She told him, with various little modifications of the facts, modifications in which she herself had long ago come implicitly to believe, the story of the affair with Elzevir, the pianist — such an artist! to his finger-tips; with Lord Trunion — such a grand seigneur of the old school! But concerning Mr. Cardan she was silent. It was not that Mrs. Aldwinkle’s mythopoeic faculties were not equal to making something very extraordinary and romantic out of Mr. Cardan. No, no; she had often described the man to those who did not know him; he was a sort of village Hampden, a mute inglorious What’s-his-name, who might have done anything — but anything — if he had chosen to give himself the trouble. He was a great Don Juan, actual in this case, not merely potential. He was a mocking devil’s advocate, he was even a devil. But that was because he was misunderstood — misunderstood by everybody but Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. Secretly he was so sensitive and kind-hearted. But one had to be gifted with intuition to find it out. And so on; she had made a capital mythical figure out of him. But an instinct of caution restrained her from showing off her myths too freely before people who were well acquainted with the originals. Chelifer had never met Lord Trunion or the immortal Elzevir. He had met Mr. Cardan.
But the effect of the confidences was as small as that of the romantic scenery and the stupendous works of art. Chelifer was not encouraged by them either to confide in return or to follow the example of Elzevir and Lord Trunion. He listened attentively, gave vent, when she had finished, to a few well-chosen expressions of sympathy, such as one writes to acquaintances on the deaths of their aged grandmothers, and after a considerable silence, looking at his watch, said he thought it was time to be getting back: he had promised to meet his mother for tea, and after tea, he added, he was going to take her to look at pensions. Seeing that she was going to stay in Rome the whole winter, it was worth taking some trouble about finding a nice room. Wasn’t it? Mrs. Aldwinkle was forced to agree. They set off through the parched Campagna towards the city. Mrs. Aldwinkle preserved a melancholy silence all the way.
On their way from the hotel to the tea-shop in the Piazza Venezia Mrs. Chelifer, Miss Elver and Mr. Cardan passed through the forum of Trajan. The two little churches lifted their twin domes of gold against the sky. From the floor of the forum, deep-sunk beneath the level of the road — a foot for every hundred years — rose the huge column, with tumbled pillars and blocks of masonry lying confusedly round its base. They paused to look round.
‘I’ve always been a Protestant,’ said Mrs. Chelifer after a moment’s silence; ‘but all the same I’ve always felt, whenever I came here, that Rome was somehow a special place; that God had marked it out in some peculiar way from among other cities as a place where the greatest things should happen. It’s a significant place, a portentous place — though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. One just feels that it is portentous; that’s all. Look at this piazza, for example. Two florid little counter-Reformation churches, all trumpery pretentiousness and no piety; a mixed lot of ordinary houses all round, and in the hole in the middle a huge heathen memorial of slaughter. And yet for some reason it all seems to me to have a significance, a spiritual meaning; it’s important. And the same applies to everything in this extraordinary place. You can’t regard it with indifference as you can an ordinary town.’
‘And yet,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘a great many tourists and all the inhabitants contrive to do so with complete success.’
‘That’s only because they’ve never looked at the place,’ said Mrs. Chelifer. ‘Once you’ve really looked . . .’
She was interrupted by a loud whoop from Miss Elver, who had wandered away from her companions and was looking over the railing into the sunken forum.
‘What is it?’ called Mr. Cardan. They hurried across the street towards her.
‘Look,’ cried Miss Elver, pointing down, ‘look. All the cats!’
And there they were. On the sun-warmed marble of a fallen column basked a large tabby. A family of ginger kittens were playing on the ground below. Small tigers stalked between the blocks of masonry. A miniature black panther was standing up on its hind legs to sharpen its claws on the bark of a little tree. At the foot of the column lay an emaciated corpse.
‘Puss, puss,’ Miss Elver shrilly yelled.
‘No good,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘They only understand Italian.’
Miss Elver looked at him. ‘Perhaps I’d better learn a little, then,’ she said. ‘Cat’s Italian.’
Mrs. Chelifer meanwhile was looking down very earnestly into the forum. ‘Why, there are at least twenty,’ she said. ‘How do they get there?’
‘People who want to get rid of their cats just come and drop them over the railing into the forum,’ Mr. Cardan explained.
‘And they can’t get out?’
‘So it seems.’
An expression of distress appeared on Mrs. Chelifer’s gentle face. She made a little clicking with her tongue against her teeth and sadly shook her head. ‘Dear, dear,’ she said, ‘dear, dear. And how do they get fed?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘Perhaps they feed on one another. People throw things down from time to time, no doubt.’
‘There’s a dead one there, in the middle,’ said Mrs. Chelifer; and a note of something like reproach came into her voice, as though she found that Mr. Cardan was to blame for the deadness of the little corpse at the foot of the triumphal column.
‘Very dead,’ said Mr. Cardan.
They walked on. Mrs. Chelifer did not speak; she seemed preoccupied.