Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Because you’re too young,’ she said at last. It was a very feeble answer; but she had been unable to think of a better one.
‘But, Aunt Lilian, don’t you remember? You always said that people ought to marry young. I remember so well, one time, when we talked about Juliet being only fourteen when she first saw Romeo, that you said . . .’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, cutting short her niece’s mnemonic display. Irene’s memory, Mrs. Aldwinkle had often had reason to complain, was really too good.
‘But if you said . . .’ Irene began again.
‘Romeo and Juliet have nothing to do with you and Hovenden,’ retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘I repeat: you’re too young.’
‘I’m nineteen.’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Practically nineteen,’ Irene insisted. ‘My birthday’s in December.’
‘Marry in haste and repent at leisure,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, making use of any missile, even a proverb, that came ready to hand. ‘At the end of six months you’ll come back howling and complaining and asking me to get you out of the mess.’
‘But why should I?’ asked Irene. ‘We love one another.’
‘They all say that. You don’t know your own minds.’
‘But we do.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly changed her tactics. ‘And what makes you so anxious all at once to run away from me?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you bear to stay with me a moment longer? Am I so intolerable and odious and . . . and . . . brutal and . . . She clawed at the air. ‘Do you hate me so much that . . .’
‘Aunt Lilian!’ protested Irene, who had begun to cry in earnest.
Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that tactlessness, that lack of measure that were characteristic of her, went on piling question upon rhetorical question, until in the end she completely spoiled the effect she had meant to achieve, exaggerating into ludicrousness what might otherwise have been touching. ‘Can’t you bear me? Have I ill-treated you? Tell me. Have I bullied you, or scolded you, or . . . or not given you enough to eat? Tell me.’
‘How can you talk like that, Aunt Lilian?’ Irene dabbed her eyes with a corner of her dressing-gown. ‘How can you say that I don’t love you? And you were always telling me that I ought to get married,’ she added, breaking out into fresh tears.
‘How can I say that you don’t love me?’ echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘But is it true that you’re longing to leave me as soon as possible? Is that true or not? I merely ask what the reason is, that’s all.’
‘But the reason is that we want to get married; we love each other.’
‘Or that you hate me,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle persisted.
‘But I don’t hate you, Aunt Lilian. How can you say such a thing? You know I love you.’
‘And yet you’re anxious to run away from me as fast as you possibly can,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘And I shall be left all alone, all alone.’ Her voice trembled; she shut her eyes, she contorted her face in an effort to keep it closed and rigid. Between her eyelids the tears came welling out. ‘All alone,’ she repeated brokenly. Getting old, said the little clock on the mantel-piece, getting old, getting old.
Irene knelt down beside her, took her hands between her own and kissed them, pressed them against her tear-wet face. ‘Aunt Lilian,’ she begged, ‘Aunt Lilian.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.
‘Don’t cry,’ said Irene, crying herself. She imagined that she alone was the cause of Aunt Lilian’s unhappiness. In reality, she was only the pretext; Mrs. Aldwinkle was weeping over her whole life, weeping at the approach of death. In that first moment of agonized sympathy and self-reproach, Irene was on the point of declaring that she would give up Hovenden, that she would spend all her life with her Aunt Lilian. But something held her back. Obscurely she was certain that it wouldn’t do, that it was impossible, that it would even be wrong. She loved Aunt Lilian and she loved Hovenden. In a way she loved Aunt Lilian more than Hovenden, now. But something in her that looked prophetically forward, something that had come through innumerable lives, out of the obscure depths of time, to dwell within her, held her back. The conscious and individual part of her spirit inclined towards Aunt Lilian. But consciousness and individuality — how precariously, how irrelevantly almost, they flowered out of that ancient root of life planted in the darkness of her being! The flower was for Aunt Lilian, the root for Hovenden.
‘But you won’t be all alone,’ she protested. ‘We shall constantly be with you. You’ll come and stay with us.’
The assurance did not seem to bring much consolation to Mrs. Aldwinkle. She went on crying. The clock ticked away as busily as ever.
CHAPTER III
IN THE COURSE of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s note-book had changed their character. From being amorous they had turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion was replaced by quiet contemplation. De Lespinasse had yielded to de Guyon.
‘Do you remember, darling Jim,’ she wrote, ‘how, when we were ten, we used to discuss what was the sin against the Holy Ghost? I remember we agreed that using the altar as a W.C. was probably the unforgivable sin. It’s a great pity that it isn’t, for then it would be so extremely easy to avoid committing it. No, I’m afraid it’s not quite so straightforward as that, the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s most perilously easy to fall into it. Stifling the voices inside you, filling the mind with so much earthy rubbish that God has no room to enter it, not giving the spirit its fair chance — that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s unforgivable because it’s irremediable. Last-minute repentances are no good. The sin and the corresponding virtue are affairs of a lifetime. And almost everybody commits the sin; they die unforgiven, and at once they begin again another life. Only when they’ve lived in the virtue of the Holy Ghost are they forgiven, let off the pains of life and allowed to sink into unity with All. Isn’t that the meaning of the text? It’s terribly difficult not to commit the sin. Whenever I stop to think, I am appalled by the badness of my own life. Oh, Jim, Jim, how easily one forgets, how unthinkingly one allows oneself to be buried under a mountain of little earthy interests! The voices are muffled, the mind is blocked up, there’s no place for the spirit of God. When I’m working, I feel it’s all right; I’m living in the virtue of the Holy Ghost. For then I’m doing the best I can. But the rest of the time, that’s when I go wrong. One can’t be doing all the time, one can’t always give out. One must also be passive, must receive. That’s what I fail to do. I flutter about, I fill my mind with lumber, I make it impossible for myself to receive. One can’t go on like this; one can’t go on sinning against the Holy Ghost — not if one once realizes it.’
There was a line. The next note began: ‘To think steadily and intensely of one thing is a wonderful mental exercise; it serves to open up the mysteries that lie below the commonplace surface of existence; and perhaps, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might get through the mystery to its explanation. When I think, for example, of my hand . . .’ The note was a long one; it covered, in Miss Thriplow’s clear, cultured writing, more than two pages of the book.
‘Recently,’ she had written after that, ‘I have been saying my prayers again, as I used to when I was a child. Our Father which art in heaven — the words help to clear out one’s mind, to rid it of the lumber and leave it free for the coming of the spirit.’
The next three notes had got there by mistake. Their place was not in the secret, personal book, but in the other volume, wherein she recorded little snippets that might come in useful for her novels. Not, of course, that the entries in the secret book didn’t also come in useful for her fiction sometimes; but they were not recorded expressly for that purpose.
‘A man in riding breeches,’ the first note ran: ‘he makes a little creaking noise as he walks along, whipcord rubbing against whipcord, that is like the creaking noise that swans make, flying, when they move their big white wings.’
Then followed two lines of
comic dialogue.
‘Me. I find the Fall of the House of Usher a most blood-curdling story.
‘Frenchman. Yes, yes, she bloods my curdle also.’
The third note recorded that ‘moss after a shower on a sultry day is like a sponge still damp from the hot bath.’
There followed a corollary to the note on prayer. ‘There is no doubt,’ she had written, ‘that the actual technique of prayer — the kneeling, the hiding the face in the hands, the uttering of words in an audible voice, the words being addressed into empty space — helps by its mere dissimilarity from the ordinary actions of everyday life to put one into a devout frame of mind. . . .’
To-night she sat for some time in front of the open book, pen in hand, without writing anything. She frowned pensively and bit the end of her pen. In the end she put it on record that ‘St. Augustine, St. Francis and St. Ignatius Loyola lived dissolute lives before their conversions.’ Then, opening her other, her un-secret note-book, she wrote: ‘X and Y are old friends from childhood. X dashing, Y timid; Y admires X. Y marries, while X is at the war, a passionate creature who takes Y more out of pity (he is wounded) than from love. There is a child. X returns, falls in love with Y’s wife, A. Great passion amid growing anguish of mind — on her part because she is deceiving Y, whom she likes and respects, and daren’t undeceive him for fear of losing the child; on his part because he feels that he ought to give up all this sort of thing and devote himself to God, etc.; in fact, he feels the premonitions of conversion. One night they decide that the time has come to part; it can’t go on — she because of the deception, he because of mysticism, etc. It is a most touching scene, lasting all a last chaste night. Unfortunately Y finds out for some reason — baby ill, or something of the kind — that A is not staying at her mother’s as she said, but is elsewhere. Early in the morning Y comes to X’s flat to ask him to help in the search for A. Sees A’s coat and hat lying on the drawing-room sofa; understands all. In a fury flies at X, who, defending himself, kills him. The end. Question, however; doesn’t it end with too much of a click? too epigrammatically, so to speak? I wonder whether in this twentieth century one can permit oneself the luxury of such effective dramatic devices. Oughtn’t one to do it more flatly, somehow? More terre-à-terreishly, more real-lifeishly? I feel that a conclusion like that is almost an unfair advantage taken at the reader’s expense. One ought to arrange it differently. But the question is, how? Can one let them separate and show them living, she en bonne mère de famille, he as a coenobite? It would drag it out terribly, wouldn’t it? Must think of this carefully.’
She shut the book and put the cap on her fountain pen, feeling that she had done a good evening’s work. Calamy was now safely laid down in pickle, waiting to be consumed whenever she should be short of fictional provisions.
After having undressed, washed, brushed her hair, polished her nails, greased her face and cleaned her teeth, Miss Thriplow turned out the light, and kneeling down by the side of her bed said several prayers, aloud. She then got into bed, and lying on her back, with all her muscles relaxed, she began to think about God.
God is a spirit, she said to herself, a spirit, a spirit. She tried to picture something huge and empty, but alive. A huge flat expanse of sand, for example, and over it a huge blank dome of sky; and above the sand everything should be tremulous and shimmering with heat — an emptiness that was yet alive. A spirit, an all-pervading spirit. God is a spirit. Three camels appeared on the horizon of the sandy plain and went lolloping along in an absurd ungainly fashion from left to right. Miss Thriplow made an effort and dismissed them. God is a spirit, she said aloud. But of all animals camels are really almost the queerest; when one thinks of their frightfully supercilious faces, with their protruding under lips like the last Hapsburg kings of Spain . . . No, no; God is a spirit, all-pervading, everywhere. All the universes are made one in him. Layer upon layer . . . A Neapolitan ice floated up out of the darkness. She had never liked Neapolitan ices since that time, at the Franco-British exhibition, when she had eaten one and then taken a ride on Sir Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machines. Round and round and round. Lord, how she had been sick, afterwards, in the Blue Grotto of Capri! ‘Sixpence each, ladies and gentlemen, only sixpence each for a trip to the celebrated Blue Grotto of Capri, the celebrated Blue Grotto, ladies and gentlemen. . . .’ How sick! It must have been most awkward for the grown-ups. . . . But God is a spirit. All the universes are one in the spirit. Mind and matter in all their manifestations — all one in the spirit. All one — she and the stars and the mountains and the trees and the animals and the blank spaces between the stars and . . . and the fish, the fish in the Aquarium at Monaco. . . . And what fish! What extravagant fantasies! But no more extravagant or fantastic, really, than the painted and jewelled old women outside. It might make a very good episode in a book — a couple of those old women looking through the glass at the fishes. Very beautifully and discreetly described; and the fundamental similarity between the creatures on either side of the glass would just be delicately implied — not stated, oh, not stated; that would be too coarse, that would spoil everything, but just implied, by the description, so that the intelligent reader could take the hint. And then in the Casino . . . Miss Thriplow brusquely interrupted herself. God is a spirit. Yes. Where was she? All things are one, ah yes, yes. All, all, all, she repeated. But to arrive at the realization of their oneness one must climb up into the spirit. The body separates, the spirit unites. One must give up the body, the self; one must lose one’s life to gain it. Lose one’s life, empty oneself of the separating Me. She clasped her hands tightly together, tighter, tighter, as though she were squeezing out her individual life between them. If she could squeeze it all out, make herself quite empty, then the other life would come rushing in to take its place.
Miss Thriplow lay quite still, hardly breathing. Empty, she said to herself every now and then, quite empty. She felt wonderfully tranquil. God was surely very near. The silence grew more profound, her spirit became calmer and emptier. Yes, God was very near.
Perhaps it was the distant roaring of a train in the valley far below that reminded her of the noise of the whirling drill; or perhaps the thin bright line of light that came in, through a chink in the top of the rickety old door, from the illuminated corridor, to reach half across the ceiling above her — perhaps it was this long sharp probe of brightness that reminded her of a surgical instrument. Whatever may have been the cause, Miss Thriplow suddenly found herself thinking of her dentist. Such a charming man; he had a china bull-dog on the mantel-piece of his consulting-room and a photograph of his wife and twins. His hair wouldn’t lie down. He had such kind grey eyes. And he was an enthusiast. ‘This is an instrument of which I’m particularly fond, Miss Thriplow,’ he used to say, picking out a little curved harpoon from his armoury. ‘A little wider, please, if you don’t mind. . . .’ What about a story of a dentist who falls in love with one of his patients? He shows her all the instruments, enthusiastically, wants her to like his favourites as much as he does. He pretends that there’s more wrong with her teeth than there really is, in order to see her more often.
The dentist grew dim, he began the same gesture again and again, very slowly, but could never finish it, having forgotten, half-way through the act, what he meant to do. At last he disappeared altogether. Miss Thriplow had fallen into a profound and tranquil sleep.
CHAPTER IV
IT HAD BEEN raining, stormily; but now the wind had fallen and between the heavy clouds the sun was brightly shining. The yellowing chestnut trees stood motionless in the still bright air, glittering with moisture. A noise of rapidly running water filled the ear. The grass of the steep meadows shone in the sunlight. Calamy stepped out from the dark and frowsty living-room of the cottage and walked up the steep path on to the road. He halted here and looked about him. The road at this point was terraced out of one of the sides of a deep valley. The ground rose steeply, in places almost precipitously, above it. Below it the g
reen mountain meadows, brilliant in the sunshine and dotted here and there with clumps of chestnut trees, fell away into the depths of the valley, which the afternoon sun had left already in a vaporous smoky shadow. Profoundly shadowed, too, were the hills on the further side of the narrow cleft. Huge black masses, smoky with the same vapour as that which floated at the bottom of the valley, they rose up almost in silhouette against the bright light beyond. The sun looked down, over their clouded summits, across the intervening gulf, touching the green hillside, on the slope of which Calamy was standing, with a radiance that, in contrast to the dark hills opposite, seemed almost unearthly. To the right, at the head of the valley, a great pinnacle of naked rock, pale brown and streaked here and there with snow-white veins of marble, reached up into the clouds and above them, so that the summit shone like a precious stone in the sunlight, against the blue of the sky. A band of white vapour hung round the shoulders of the mountain. Beneath it appeared the lower buttresses of rock and the long slopes of hanging wood and meadowland falling away into the valley, all shadowy under the clouds, shadowy and dead, save where, here and there, a great golden beam broke through, touching some chosen tract of grass or woodland or rock with an intense and precarious life.
Calamy stood for a long time looking out at the scene. How beautiful it was, how beautiful! Glittering in the light, the withering trees seemed to have prepared themselves as though for a feast. For a feast — and yet it was winter and death that awaited them. Beautiful the mountains were, but menacing and terrible; terrible the deep gulf below him with its smoky vaporous shadows, far down, below the shining green. And the shadows mounted second after second as the sun declined. Beautiful, terrible and mysterious, pregnant with what enormous secret, symbolic of what formidable reality?
From the direction of the cottage below the road came a tinkle of bells and the shrill shouting of a child’s voice. Half a dozen tall black and white goats, with long black beards, long twisted horns and yellow eyes, slitted with narrow pupils, came trotting up the slope, shaking their flat bells. A little boy scrambled after them, brandishing a stick and shouting words of command. To Calamy he touched his cap; they exchanged a few words in Italian, about the rain, the goats, the best pasture; then, waving his stick and peremptorily shouting at his little flock, the child moved on up the road. The goats trotted on in front, their hoofs clicking on the stones; every now and then they paused to pull a mouthful of grass from the bank at the side of the road; but the little boy would not let them pause. ‘Via!’ he shouted, and banged them with his stick. They bounded forward. Soon herdsman and flock were out of sight.