Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/aldous-huxley/page,112,480199-complete_works_of_aldous_huxley.html
‘But if you’re bored by it, if you hate it,’ Philip Quarles had interrogated, focusing on Spandrell his bright intelligent curiosity, ‘why the devil do you go on with the life?’ It was nearly a year since the question had been asked; the paralysis had not then crept so deep into Spandrell’s soul. But even in those days Philip had found his case very puzzling. And since the man was prepared to talk about himself without demanding any personalities in return, since he didn’t seem to mind being an object of scientific curiosity and was boastful rather than reticent about his weaknesses, Philip had taken the opportunity of cross-examining him. ‘I can’t see why,’ he insisted.
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because I’m committed to it. Because in some way it’s my destiny. Because that’s what life finally is – hateful and boring; that’s what human beings are, when they’re left to themselves – hateful and boring again. Because, once one’s damned, one ought to damn oneself doubly. Because … yes, because I really like hating and being bored.’
He liked it. The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone. The concert season was in full swing, there was opera at Covent Garden, all the theatres were open; but Spandrell only read the advertisements – the Eroica at the Queen’s Hall, Schnabel playing O at the Wigmore, Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Little Tich at the Alhambra, Othello at the Old Vic, Charlie Chaplin at Marble Arch – read them very carefully and stayed at home. There was a pile of music on the piano, his shelves were full of books, all the London Library was at his disposal; Spandrell read nothing but magazines and the illustrated weeklies and the morning and evening papers. The rain went sliding incessantly down the dirty glass of the windows; Spandrell turned the enormous crackling pages of The Times. ‘The Duke of York,’ he read, having eaten his way, like a dung beetle’s maggot in its native element, through Births, Deaths and the Agony Column, through Servants and Real Estate, through Legal Reports, through Imperial and Foreign News, through Parliament, through the morning’s history, through the five leading articles, through Letters to the Editor, as far as Court and Personal and the little clerical essay on The Bible in Bad Weather, ‘the Duke of York will be presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers Company on Monday next. His Royal Highness will take luncheon with the Master and Wardens of the Company after the presentation.’ Pascal and Blake were within reach, on the bookshelf. But ‘Lady Augusta Crippen has left England on the Berengaria. She will travel across America to visit her brother-in-law and sister, the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Spandrell laughed, and the laughter was a liberation, was a source of energy. He got up; he put on his mackintosh and went out. ‘The Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Still smiling, he turned into the public-house round the corner. It was early; there was only one other drinker in the bar.
‘But why should two people stay together and be unhappy?’ the barmaid was saying. ‘Why? When they can get a divorce and be happy?’
‘Because marriage is a sacrament,’ replied the stranger.
‘Sacrament yourself,’ the barmaid retorted contemptuously. Catching sight of Spandrell, she nodded and smiled. He was a regular customer.
‘Double brandy,’ he ordered, and leaning against the bar examined the stranger. He had a face like a choir-boy’s – but a choir-boy suddenly overwhelmed by middle age; chubby, prettily doll-like, but withered. The mouth was horribly small, a little slit in a rosebud. The cherub’s cheeks had begun to sag and were grey, like the chin, with a day’s beard.
‘Because,’ the stranger went on – and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of self-consciousness, ‘because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. One flesh,’ he repeated and accompanied the words by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter. He caught Spandrell’s eye, blushed, and to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.
‘What do you think, Mr Spandrell?’ asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.
‘Of what? Of being one flesh?’ The barmaid nodded. ‘H’m. As a matter of fact, I was just envying the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter for being so unequivocally two fleshes. If you were called the Governor-General of South Melanesia,’ he went on, addressing himself to the withered choir-boy, ‘and your wife was Lady Ethelberta Todhunter, do you imagine you’d be one flesh?’ The stranger wriggled like a worm on a hook. ‘Obviously not. It would be shocking if you were.’
The stranger ordered another whiskey. ‘But joking apart,’ he said, ‘the sacrament of marriage …’
‘But why should two people be unhappy?’ persisted the barmaid. ‘When it isn’t necessary?’
‘Why shouldn’t they be unhappy?’ Spandrell enquired. ‘Perhaps it’s what they’re here for. How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?’
A positivist, the barmaid laughed. ‘What rot!’
‘But the Anglicans don’t regard it as a sacrament,’ Spandrell continued.
The choir-boy writhed indignantly. ‘Do you take me for an Anglican?’
The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation. Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously. In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalents of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy, of poetry and a week-end with Cleopatra, of big-game hunting and music. The choir-boy ordered another drink.
‘What an age we live in!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Barbarous. Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.’
‘Not to mention hygienic truths,’ said Spandrell. ‘These damp clothes! And not a window.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.
The choir-boy shuddered and held up his hands. ‘But what a handkerchief!’ he exclaimed, ‘what a horror!’
Spandrell held it out for inspection. ‘It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,’ he said. It was a silk bandana, red with bold patterns in black and pink. ‘Extremely expensive, I may add.’
‘But the colour, my dear sir. The colour!’
‘I like it.’
‘But not at this season of the year. Not between Easter and Whitsun. Impossible! The liturgical colour is white.’ He pulled out his own handkerchief. It was snowy. ‘And my socks.’ He lifted a foot.
‘I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.’
‘White, white,’ said the choir-boy. ‘It’s prescribed. Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white. Not to mention the fact that to-day’s the feast of St Natalia the Virgin. And white’s the colour for all virgins who aren’t also martyrs.’
‘I should have thought they were all martyrs,’ said Spandrell. ‘That is, if they’ve been virgins long enough.’
The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. Outside was loneliness and the damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact. The choir-boy began to talk of little St Hugh of Lincoln and St Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin-miners. He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.
‘Another wet Derby,’ prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company with the fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls. The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever, – a steam of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening. Into Spandrell’s face the withered choir-boy breathed alcohol and poetry.
‘To and fro, to and fro,
Piran of Perranzabuloe,’
he intoned. Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacin
g. He had lost his self-consciousness. The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep. A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.
‘Walked weightless,’
he continued,
‘Walked weightless on the heaving seas
Among the Cassiterides.’
‘That was Piran’s chief miracle,’ he explained; ‘walking from Land’s End to the Scilly Islands.’
‘Pretty nearly the world’s record, I should think,’ said Spandrell.
The other shook his head. ‘There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales. But I can’t remember his name. Miss!’ he called. ‘Here! Another whiskey, please.’
‘I must say,’ said Spandrell, ‘you seem to make the best of both worlds. Six whiskeys …’
‘Only five,’ the choir-boy protested. ‘This is only the fifth.’
‘Five whiskeys, then, and the liturgical colours. Not to mention St Piran of Perranzabuloe. Do you really believe in that walk to the Scillies?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And here’s for young Sacramento,’ said the barmaid, pushing his glass across the counter.
The choir-boy shook his head as he paid. ‘Blasphemies all round,’ he said. ‘Every word another wound in the Sacred Heart.’ He drank. ‘Another bleeding, agonizing wound.’
‘What fun you have with your Sacred Heart!’
‘Fun?’ said the choir-boy indignantly.
‘Staggering from the bar to the altar rails. And from the confessional to the bawdy house. It’s the ideal life. Never a dull moment. I envy you.’
‘Mock on, mock on!’ He spoke like a dying martyr. ‘And if you knew what a tragedy my life has been, you wouldn’t say you envied me.’
The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. God-thirsty from the spiritual deserts of the workshop and the office, men came, as to a temple. Bottled and barrelled by Clyde and Liffey, by Thames, Douro and Trent, the mysterious divinity revealed itself to them. For the Brahmins who pressed and drank the soma, its name was Indra; for the hemp-eating yogis, Siva. The gods of Mexico inhabited the peyotl. The Persian Sufis discovered Allah in the wine of Shiraz, the shamans of the Samoyedes ate toadstools and were filled with the spirit of Num.
‘Another whiskey, Miss,’ said the choir-boy, and turning back to Spandrell almost wept over his misfortunes. He had loved, he had married – sacramentally; he insisted on that. He had been happy. They had both been happy.
Spandrell raised his eyebrows. ‘Did she like the smell of whiskey?’
The other shook his head sadly. ‘I had my faults,’ he admitted. ‘I was weak. This accursed drink! Accursed!’ And in a sudden enthusiasm for temperance he poured his whiskey on the floor. ‘There!’ he said triumphantly.
‘Very noble!’ said Spandrell. He beckoned to the barmaid. ‘Another whiskey for this gentleman.’
The choir-boy protested, but without much warmth. He sighed. ‘It was always my besetting sin,’ he said. ‘But I was always sorry afterwards. Genuinely repentant.’
‘I’m sure you were. Never a dull moment.’
‘If she’d stood by me, I might have cured myself.’
‘A pure woman’s help, what?’ said Spandrell.
‘Exactly,’ the other nodded. ‘That’s exactly it. But she left me. Ran off. Or rather, not ran. She was lured. She wouldn’t have done it on her own. It was that horrible little snake in the grass. That little …’ He ran through the sergeant-major’s brief vocabulary. ‘I’d wring his neck if he were here,’ the choir-boy went on. The Lord of Battles had been in his fifth whiskey. ‘Dirty little swine!’ He banged the counter. ‘You know the man who painted those pictures in the Tate; Bidlake? Well, it was that chap’s son. Walter Bidlake.’
Spandrell raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. The choir-boy talked on.
At Sbisa’s, Walter was dining with Lucy Tantamount.
‘Why don’t you come to Paris too?’ Lucy was saying.
Walter shook his head. ‘I’ve got to work.’
‘I find it’s really impossible to stay in one place more than a couple of months at a time. One gets so stale and wilted, so unutterably bored. The moment I step into the aeroplane at Croydon I feel as though I had been born again – like the Salvation Army.’
‘And how long does the new life last?’
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘As long as the old one. But fortunately there’s an almost unlimited supply of aeroplanes. I’m all for Progress.’
The swing-doors of the temple of the unknown god closed behind them. Spandrell and his companion stepped out into the cold and rainy darkness.
‘Oof!’ said the choir-boy, shivering, and turned up the collar of his raincoat. ‘It’s like jumping into a swimming-bath.’
‘It’s like reading Haeckel after Fénelon. You Christians live in such a jolly little public-house of a universe.’
They walked a few yards down the street.
‘Look here,’ said Spandrell, ‘do you think you can get home on foot? Because you don’t look as though you could.’
Leaning against a lamp-post the choir-boy shook his head.
‘We’ll wait for a cab.’
They waited. The rain fell. Spandrell looked at the other man with a cold distaste. The creature had amused him, while they had been in the pub, had served as a distraction. Now, suddenly, he was merely repulsive.
‘Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?’ he asked. ‘They’ll make you drink burning whiskey there. A perpetual Christmas pudding in your belly. If you could see yourself. The revolting spectacle …’
The choir-boy’s sixth whiskey had been full of contrition. ‘I know, I know,’ he groaned. ‘I’m disgusting. I’m contemptible. But if you knew how I’d struggled and striven and …’
‘There’s a cab.’ Spandrell gave a shout.
‘How I’d prayed,’ the choir-boy continued.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens. I’ve wrestled …’
The cab drew up in front of them. Spandrell opened the door.
‘Get in, you sot,’ he said, and gave the other a push. ‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens,’ he said to the driver. The choir-boy, meanwhile, had crawled into his seat. Spandrell followed. ‘Disgusting slug!’
‘Go on, go on. I deserve it. You have every right to despise me.’
‘I know,’ said Spandrell. ‘But if you think I’m going to do you the pleasure of telling you so any more, you’re much mistaken.’ He leaned back in his corner and shut his eyes. All his appalling weariness and disgust had suddenly returned. ‘God,’ he said to himself. ‘God, God, God.’ And like a grotesque derisive echo of his thoughts, the choir-boy prayed aloud. ‘God have mercy upon me,’ the maudlin voice repeated. Spandrell burst out laughing.
Leaving the drunkard on his front door step, Spandrell went back to the cab. He remembered suddenly that he had not dined. ‘Sbisa’s Restaurant,’ he told the driver. ‘God, God,’ he repeated in the darkness. But the night was a vacuum.
‘There’s Spandrell,’ cried Lucy, interrupting her companion in the middle of a sentence. She raised her arm and waved.
‘Lucy!’ Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. He sat down at their table. ‘It’ll interest you to hear, Walter, that I’ve just been doing a good Samaritan to your victim.’
‘My victim?’
‘Your cuckold. Carling; isn’t that his name?’ Walter blushed in an agony. ‘He wears his horns without any difference. Quite traditionally.’ He looked at Walter and was glad to see the signs of distress on his face. ‘I found him drowning his sorrows,’ he went on maliciously. ‘In whiskey. The grand romantic remedy.’ It was a relief to be able to take some revenge for his miseries.
CHAPTER XVIII
AT PORT SAID they went ashore. The flank of the ship was an iron precipice. At its foot the launch heaved on a dirty and slowly wallowing sea; between its gunwale and the end of the ship’s ladder a little chasm alternately shrank and
expanded. For a sound pair of legs the leap would have been nothing. But Philip hesitated. To jump with his game leg foremost might mean to collapse under the impact of arrival; and if he trusted to the game leg to propel him, he had a good chance of falling ignominiously short. He was delivered from his predicament by the military gentleman who had preceded him in the leap.
‘Here, take my hand,’ he called, noticing Philip’s hesitation and its cause.
‘Thanks so much,’ said Philip when he was safely in the launch.
‘Awkward, this sort of thing,’ said the other. ‘Particularly if one’s short of a leg, what?’
‘Very.’
‘Damaged in the War?’
Philip shook his head. ‘Accident when I was a boy,’ he explained telegraphically, and the blood mounted to his cheeks. ‘There’s my wife,’ he mumbled, glad of an excuse to get away. Elinor jumped, steadied herself against him; they picked their way to seats at the other end of the launch.
‘Why didn’t you let me go first and help you over?’ she asked.
‘I was all right,’ he answered curtly and in a tone that decided her to say no more. She wondered what was the matter. Something to do with his lameness? Why was he so queer about it?
Philip himself would have found it hard to explain what there was in the military gentleman’s question to distress him. After all there was nothing in the least discreditable in having been run over by a cart. And to have been rejected as totally unfit for military service was not in the least unpatriotic. And yet, quite unreasonably, the question had disturbed him, as all such questions, as any too overt reference to his lameness, unless deliberately prepared for by himself, invariably did.
Discussing him with Elinor, ‘Philip was the last person,’ his mother had once said, ‘the very last person such an accident ought to have happened to. He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more, if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world. It meant no games, to begin with; and no games meant fewer contacts with other boys, more solitude, more leisure for books. And then (poor Phil!) it meant fresh causes for shyness. A sense of inferiority. Children can be so horribly ruthless; they used to laugh at him sometimes at school. And later, when girls began to matter, how I wish he’d been able to go to dances and tennis parties! But he couldn’t waltz or play. And of course he didn’t want to go as an onlooker and an outsider. His poor smashed leg began by keeping him at a physical distance from girls of his own age. And it kept him at a psychological distance, too. For I believe he was always afraid (secretly, of course, and without admitting it) that they might laugh at him, as some of the boys did; and he didn’t want to run the risk of being rejected in favour of someone who wasn’t handicapped as he was. Not that he’d ever have taken very much interest in girls,’ Mrs Quarles had added.