Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Burlap’s sweating you, Walter,’ she had said.
‘The paper’s very hard up.’ He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people towards himself.
‘But why should you let yourself be swindled?’
‘I’m not being swindled.’ There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong. ‘And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh. After all, it’s my business.’
‘And mine!’ She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began. ‘If you knew the price of vegetables!’
He had flushed up and left the room without answering. The conversation, the case were typical of many others. Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself. She had never resented these injustices. They proved how closely he associated her with himself. But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness. The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else – somebody ruthless and full of hate – was deliberately making her suffer.
Lady Edward laughed. ‘One wonders what he saw in her, if she’s so deplorable as you make out.’
‘What does one ever see in anyone?’ John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone. Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill. An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccough. It often happened now. Just after eating. Bicarbonate didn’t seem to do much good. ‘In these matters,’ he added, ‘we’re all equally insane.’
‘Thanks!’ said Lady Edward, laughing.
Making an essay to be gallant, ‘Present company excepted,’ he said with a smile and a little bow. He stifled another hiccough. How miserable he was feeling! ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ he asked. ‘All this standing about …’ He dropped heavily into a chair.
Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing. She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.
‘It must have been that caviar,’ he was thinking. ‘That beastly caviar.’ He violently hated caviar. Every sturgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy.
‘Poor Walter!’ said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped. ‘And he has such a talent.’
John Bidlake snorted contemptuously.
Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing – by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time. She changed the subject.
‘And Elinor?’ she asked. ‘When’s your Elinor coming home? Elinor and Quarles?’
‘Leaving Bombay tomorrow,’ John Bidlake answered telegraphically. He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.
CHAPTER VI
‘DE INDIANS DRANK deir liberalism at your fountains,’ said Mr Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India. One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose. It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments. There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it. At the word ‘fountain’, it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr Sita Ram’s plate.
‘Burke and Bacon,’ Mr Sita Ram went on sonorously, ‘Milton and Macaulay …’
‘Oh, look!’ Elinor Quarles’s voice was shrill with alarm. She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backwards. Mr Sita Ram turned towards her.
‘What’s de matter?’ he asked in a tone of annoyance. It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.
Elinor pointed. A very large grey toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda. In the silence its movements were audible – a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.
‘De toad can do no harm,’ said Mr Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.
Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband. The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.
‘Really, my darling,’ he protested. He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals. But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically. It was the same with the food. There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish. But he had managed, none the less, to eat it. Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind driving it away,’ she whispered. Her face expressed her inward agony. ‘You know how much I detest them.’
Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda. With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform. It flopped down heavily into the garden below. Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems. The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky. Not a leaf stirred. It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced. Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it. But this stifling darkness … Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.
‘You were saying, Mr Sita Ram?’
But Mr Sita Ram’s first fine careless rapture had evaporated. ‘I was re-reading some of de works of Morley today,’ he announced.
‘Golly!’ said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang. It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.
But Mr Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that ‘Golly’. ‘What a tinker!’ he pursued. ‘What a great tinker! And de style is so chaste.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘Dere are some good phrases,’ Mr Sita Ram went on. ‘I wrote dem down.’ He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘But dey were good phrases. Sometimes one reads a whole book widout finding a single phrase one can remember or quote. What’s de good of such a book, I ask you?’
‘What indeed?’
Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates. A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance. Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat. Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom. They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea. The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats – large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.
Under the influence of the champagne, Mr Sita Ram recovered his eloquence. His latest oration re-uttered itself.
‘Dere is one law for de English,’ he said, ‘and anoder for de Indians, one for de oppressors and anoder for de oppressed. De word justice has eider disappeared from your vocab’lary, or else it has changed its meaning.’
‘I’m inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,’ said Philip.
Mr Sita Ram paid no attention. He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent. ‘Consider de case,’ he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control), ‘of de unfortunate station-master of Bhowanipore.’
But Philip refused to consider it. He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning. Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country. It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.
The station-master of Bhowanipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.
‘But why don’t you teach them birth control, Mr Sita Ram?’ Elinor had asked. These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince. She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born. And after
all, she had had chloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet. Whereas the wife of the station-master of Bhowanipore … She had heard accounts of Indian midwives. She shuddered. ‘Isn’t it the only hope for India?’
Mr Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government. He went on with the station-master’s history. The man had passed all his examinations with credit; his qualifications were the highest possible. And yet he had been passed over for promotion no less than four times. Four times, and always in favour of Europeans or Eurasians. Mr Sita Ram’s blood boiled when he thought of the five thousand years of Indian civilization, Indian spirituality, Indian moral superiority, cynically trampled, in the person of the station-master of Bhowanipore, under English feet …
‘Is dat justice, I ask?’ He banged the table.
Who knows? Philip wondered. Perhaps it is.
Elinor was still thinking of the nine children. To obtain a quick delivery, the midwives, she had heard, stamp on their patients. And, instead of ergot, they use a paste made of cow-dung and powdered glass.
‘Do you call dat justice?’ Mr Sita Ram repeated.
Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, ‘No.’
‘You ought to write about it,’ said Mr Sita Ram, ‘you ought to show de scandal up.’
Philip excused himself; he was only a writer of novels, not a politician, not a journalist. ‘Do you know old Daulat Singh?’ he added with apparent irrelevance. ‘The one who lives at Ajmere?’
‘I have met de man,’ said Mr Sita Ram, in a tone that made it quite clear that he didn’t like Daulat Singh, or perhaps (more probably, thought Philip) hadn’t been liked or approved by him.
‘A fine man, I thought,’ said Philip. For men like Daulat Singh justice would have to mean something very different from what it meant for Mr Sita Ram or the station-master of Bhowanipore. He remembered the noble old face, the bright eyes, the restrained passion of his words. If only he could have refrained from chewing pan …
The time came for them to go. At last. They said good-bye with an almost excessive cordiality, climbed into the waiting car and were driven away. The ground beneath the palm trees of Joohoo was littered with a mintage of shining silver, splashed with puddles of mercury. They rolled through a continuous flickering of light and dark – the cinema film of twenty years ago – until, emerging from under the palm trees, they found themselves in the full glare of the enormous moon.
‘Three-formed Hecate,’ he thought, blinking at the round brilliance. ‘But what about Sita Ram and Daulat Singh and the station-master, what about old appalling India, what about justice and liberty, what about progress and the future? The fact is, I don’t care. Not a pin. It’s disgraceful. But I don’t. And the forms of Hecate aren’t three. They’re a thousand, they’re millions. The tides. The Nemorensian goddess, the Tifatinian. Varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distances. A florin at arm’s length, but as big as the Russian Empire. Bigger than India. What a comfort it will be to be back in Europe again! And to think there was a time when I read books about yoga and did breathing exercises and tried to persuade myself that I didn’t really exist! What a fool! It was the result of talking with that idiot Burlap. But luckily people don’t leave much trace on me. They make an impression easily, like a ship in water. But the water closes up again. I wonder what this Italian ship will be like tomorrow? The Lloyd Triestino boats are always supposed to be good. “Luckily,” I said; but oughtn’t one to be ashamed of one’s indifference? That parable of the sower. The seed that fell in shallow ground. And yet, obviously, it’s no use pretending to be what one isn’t. One sees the results of that in Burlap. What a comedian! But he takes in a lot of people. Including himself, I suppose. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a conscious hypocrite, except for special occasions. You can’t keep it up all the time. All the same, it would be good to know what it’s like to believe in something to the point of being prepared to kill people or get yourself killed. It would be an experience …’
Elinor had lifted her face towards the same bright disc. Moon, full moon … And instantly she had changed her position in space and time. She dropped her eyes and turned towards her husband; she took his hand and leaned tenderly against him.
‘Do you remember those evenings?’ she asked. ‘In the garden, at Gattenden. Do you remember, Phil?’
Elinor’s words came to his ears from a great distance and from a world in which, for the moment, he felt no interest. He roused himself with reluctance. ‘Which evenings?’ he asked, speaking across gulfs, and in the rather flat and colourless voice of one who answers an importunate telephone.
At the sound of that telephone voice Elinor quickly drew away from him. To press yourself against someone who turns out simply not to be there is not only disappointing; it is also rather humiliating. Which evenings, indeed!
‘Why don’t you love me any more?’ she asked despairingly. As if she could have been talking about any other evenings than those of that wonderful summer they had spent, just after their marriage, at her mother’s house. ‘You don’t even take any interest in me now – less than you would in a piece of furniture, much less than in a book.’
‘But, Elinor, what are you talking about?’ Philip put more astonishment into his voice than he really felt. After the first moment, when he had had time to come to the surface, so to speak, from the depths of his reverie, he had understood what she meant, he had connected this Indian moon with that which had shone, eight years ago, on the Hertfordshire garden. He might have said so, of course. It would have made things easier. But he was annoyed at having been interrupted, he didn’t like to be reproached, and the temptation to score a debater’s point against his wife was strong. ‘I ask a simple question,’ he went on, ‘merely wanting to know what you mean. And you retort by complaining that I don’t love you. I fail to see the logical connection.’
‘But you know quite well what I was talking about,’ said Elinor. ‘And besides, it is true – you don’t love me any more.’
‘I do, as it happens,’ said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit vainly, as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination. ‘But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started. We began with evenings and now …’
But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic. ‘Oh, I know you don’t want to say you don’t love me,’ she interrupted. ‘Not in so many words. You don’t want to hurt my feelings. But it would really hurt them less if you did so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now. Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement. And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there’s suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain. So long as the words haven’t been definitely spoken, there’s always just a chance that they mayn’t have been tacitly implied. Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied. There’s still room for hope. And where there’s hope there’s disappointment. It isn’t really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it’s crueller.’
‘But I don’t evade the question,’ he retorted. ‘Why should I, seeing that I do love you?’
‘Yes, but how? How do you love me? Not in the way you used to, at the beginning. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten. You didn’t even remember the time when we were first married.’
‘But, my dear child,’ Philip protested, ‘do be accurate. You just said “those evenings” and expected me to guess which.’
‘Of course I expected,’ said Elinor. ‘You ought to have known. You would have known, if you took any interest. That’s what I complain of. You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you. Do you think I can forget those evenings?’
She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two
stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall, where they had sat together. She remembered what he had said and his kisses, the touch of his hands. She remembered everything – remembered with the minute precision of one who loves to explore and reconstruct the past, of one who is for ever turning over and affectionately verifying each precious detail of recollected happiness.
‘It’s all simply faded out of your mind,’ she added, mournfully reproachful. For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.