Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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And Elinor had laughed. ‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’
‘But he wouldn’t have got into such a habit of deliberately avoiding them. He wouldn’t have so systematically retired from all personal contacts – and not with girls only; with men, too. Intellectual contacts – those are the only ones he admits.’
‘It’s as though he only felt safe among ideas,’ Elinor had said.
‘Because he can hold his own there; because he can be certain of superiority. He’s got into the habit of feeling afraid and suspicious outside that intellectual world. He needn’t have. And I’ve always tried to reassure him and tempt him out; but he won’t let himself be tempted, he creeps back into his shell.’ And after a silence, ‘It’s had only one good result,’ she had added, ‘the accident, I mean. It saved him from going to the War, from being killed, probably. Like his brother.’
The launch began to move towards the shore. From being an impending wall of black iron, the liner, as they receded, became a great ship, seen in its entirety. Fixed motionless between the sea and the blue glare of the sky, it looked like the advertisement of tropical cruises in the window of a Cockspur Street shipping office.
‘It was an impertinence to ask,’ Philip was thinking. ‘What business was it of his whether I’d been damaged in the War? How they go on gloating over their War, those professional soldiers! Well, I can be thankful I kept out of the bloody business. Poor Geoffrey!’ He thought of his dead brother.
‘And yet,’ Mrs Quarles had concluded after a pause, ‘in a certain sense I wish he had gone to the War. Oh, not for fire-eating patriotic reasons. But because, if one could have guaranteed that he wouldn’t have been killed or mangled, it would have been so good for him – violently good, perhaps; painfully good; but still good. It might have smashed his shell for him and set him free from his own prison. Emotionally free; for his intellect’s free enough already. Too free, perhaps, for my old-fashioned taste.’ And she had smiled rather sadly. ‘Free to come and go in the human world, instead of being boxed up in that indifference of his.’
‘But isn’t the indifference natural to him?’ Elinor had objected.
‘Partly. But in part it’s a habit. If he could break the habit, he’d be so much happier. And I think he knows it, but can’t break it himself. If it could be broken for him … But the War was the last chance. And circumstances didn’t allow it to be taken.’
‘Thank heaven!’
‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’
The launch had arrived; they stepped ashore. The heat was terrific, the pavements glared, the air was full of dust. With much display of teeth, much flashing of black and liquid eyes, much choreographic gesticulation, an olive-coloured gentleman in a tarboosh tried to sell them carpets. Elinor was for driving him away. But, ‘Don’t waste energy,’ said Philip. ‘Too hot. Passive resistance, and pretend not to understand.’
They walked on like martyrs across an arena; and like a hungry lion, the gentleman in the tarboosh frisked round them. If not carpets, then artificial pearls. No pearls? Then genuine Havana cigars at three-halfpence each. Or a celluloid comb. Or imitation amber. Or almost genuine gold bangles. Philip continued to shake his head.
‘Nice corals. Nice scarabs – real old.’ That winning smile was beginning to look like a snarl.
Elinor had seen the drapery shop she was looking for; they crossed the street and entered.
‘Saved!’ she said. ‘He daren’t follow. I had such a horrible fear that he might suddenly begin to bite. Poor wretch, though. I think we ought to buy something.’ She turned and addressed herself to the assistant behind the counter.
‘Meanwhile,’ said Philip, foreseeing that Elinor’s shopping would be interminably tedious, ‘I’ll go and get a few cigarettes.’
He stepped out into the glare. The man in the tarboosh was waiting. He pounced, he caught Philip by the sleeve. Desperately, he played his last trump.
‘Nice post-cards,’ he whispered confidentially and produced an envelope from his breast-pocket. ‘Hot stuff. Only ten shillings.’
Philip stared uncomprehending. ‘No English,’ he said and limped away along the street. The man in the tarboosh hurried at his side.
‘Très curieuses,’ he said. ‘Très amusantes. Mœurs arabes. Pour passer le temps à bord. Soixante francs seulement.’ He saw no answering light of comprehension. ‘Moho artistiche,’ he suggested in Italian. ‘Proprio curiose. Cinquanta franchi.’ He peered in desperation into Philip’s face; it was a blank. ‘Huebsch,’ he went on, ‘sehr geschlechtlich. Zehn mark.’ Not a muscle moved. ‘Muy hermosas, muy agraciadas, mucho indecorosas.’ He tried again. ‘Skon bref kort. Liderlig fotografi bild. Nakna jungfrun. Verklig smutsig.’ Philip was evidently no Scandinavian. Was he a Slav? ‘Sprosny obraz,’ the man wheedled. It was no good. Perhaps Portuguese would do it. ‘Photographia deshonesta,’ he began.
Philip burst out laughing. ‘Here,’ he said, and gave him half a crown. ‘You deserve it.’
‘Did you discover what you wanted?’ asked Elinor when he returned.
He nodded. ‘And I also discovered the only possible basis for the League of Nations. The one common interest. Our toothy friend offered me indecent post-cards in seventeen languages. He’s wasting himself at Port Said. He ought to be at Geneva.’
‘Two ladies to see you, sir,’ said the office boy.
‘Two?’ Burlap raised his dark eyebrows. ‘Two?’ The office boy insisted. ‘Well, show them up.’ The boy retired. Burlap was annoyed. He was expecting Romola Saville, the Romola Saville who had written,
‘Already old in passion, I have known
All the world’s lovers since the world began;
Have held in Leda’s arms the immortal Swan;
And felt fair Paris take me as his own.’
And she was coming with a duenna. It wasn’t like her. Two ladies …
The two doors of his sanctum opened simultaneously. Ethel Cobbett appeared at one holding a bunch of galley proofs. By the other entered the two ladies. Standing on the threshold Ethel looked at them. One of them was tall and remarkably thin. Almost equally tall, the other was portly. Neither of them was any longer young. The thin lady seemed a withered and virgin forty-three or four. The portly one was perhaps a little older, but had preserved a full-blown and widowed freshness. The thin one was sallow, with sharp bony features, nondescript brown hair and grey eyes, and was dressed rather fashionably not in the style of Paris, but in the more youthful and jaunty mode of Hollywood, in pale grey and pink. The other lady was very blonde, with blue eyes, and long dangling earrings and lapis lazuli beads to match. Her style of dressing was more matronly and European than the other’s, and numbers of not very precious ornaments were suspended here and there all over her person and tinkled a little as she walked.
The two ladies advanced across the room. Burlap pretended to be so deeply immersed in composition that he had not heard the opening of the door. It was only when the ladies had come to within a few feet of his table that he looked up from the paper on which he had been furiously scribbling – with what a start of amazement, what an expression of apologetic embarrassment! He sprang to his feet.
‘I’m so sorry. Forgive … I hadn’t noticed. One gets so deeply absorbed.’ The n’s and m’s had turned to d’s and b’s. He had a cold. ‘So idvolved id ode’s work.’
He came round the table to meet them, smiling his subtlest and most spiritual Sodoma smile. But, ‘Oh God!’ he was inwardly exclaiming. ‘What appalling females!’
‘And which,’ he went on aloud, smiling from one to the other, ‘which, may I venture to ask, is Miss Saville?’
‘Neither of us,’ said the portly lady in a rather deep voice, but playfully and with a smile.
‘Or both, if you like,’ said the other. Her voice was high and metallic and she spoke sharply, in little spurts, and with an extraordinary and vertiginous rapidity. ‘Both and neither.’
And the two ladies burst into simultaneous laughter.
Burlap looked and listened with a sinking heart. What had he let himself in for? They were formidable. He blew his nose; he coughed. They were making his cold worse.
‘The fact is,’ said the portly lady, cocking her head rather archly on one side and affecting the slightest lisp, ‘the fact ith …’
But the thin one interrupted her. ‘The fact is,’ she said pouring out her words so fast that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to articulate them at all, ‘that we’re a partnership, a combination, almost a conspiracy.’ She uttered her sharp shrill laugh.
‘Yeth, a conthpirathy,’ said the portly one lisping from sheer playfulness.
‘We’re the two parts of Romola Saville’s dual personality.’
‘I being the Dr Jekyll,’ put in the portly one, and both laughed yet once more.
‘A conspiracy,’ thought Burlap with a growing sense of horror. ‘I should think it was!’
‘Dr Jekyll, alias Ruth Goffer. May I introduce you to Mrs Goffer?’
‘While I do the same for Mr Hyde, alias Miss Hignett?’
‘While together we introduce ourselves as the Romola Saville whose poor poems you said such very kind things about.’
Burlap shook hands with the two ladies and said something about his pleasure at beeting the authors of work he had so much adbired. ‘But how shall I ever get rid of them?’ he wondered. So much energy, such an exuberance of force and will! Getting rid of them would be no joke. He shuddered inwardly. ‘They’re like steam engines,’ he decided. And they’d pester him to go on printing their beastly verses. Their obscene verses – for that’s what they were, in the light of these women’s age and energy and personal appearance – just obscene. ‘The bitches!’ he said to himself, feeling resentfully that they’d got something out of him on false pretences, that they’d taken advantage of his innocence and swindled him. It was at this moment that he caught sight of Miss Cobbett. She held up her bundle of proofs enquiringly. He shook his head. ‘Later,’ he said to her, with a dignified and editorial expression. Miss Cobbett turned away, but not before he had remarked the look of derisive triumph on her face. Damn the woman! It was intolerable.
‘We were so thrilled and delighted by your kind letter,’ said the stouter of the ladies.
Burlap smiled Franciscanly. ‘One’s glad to be able to do something for literature.’
‘So few take any interest.’
‘Yes, so few,’ echoed Miss Hignett. And speaking with the rapidity of one who tries to say ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper’ in the shortest possible time and with the fewest possible mistakes, she poured out their history and their grievances. It appeared that they had been living together at Wimbledon and conspiring to be Romola Saville for upwards of six years now, and that only on nine occasions in all that time had any of their works been printed. But they hadn’t lost courage. Their day, they knew, would come. They had gone on writing. They had written a great deal. Perhaps Mr Burlap would be interested to see the plays they had written? And Miss Hignett opened a despatch case and laid four thick wads of typescript on the table. Historical plays they were, in blank verse. And the titles were ‘Fredegond’, ‘The Bastard of Normandy’, ‘Semiramis’ and ‘Gilles de Retz’.
They went at last, taking with them Burlap’s promise to read their plays, to print a sonnet sequence, to come to lunch at Wimbledon. Burlap sighed; then recomposing his face to stoniness and superiority, rang for Miss Cobbett.
‘You’ve got the proofs?’ he asked distantly and without looking at her.
She handed them to him. ‘I’ve telephoned to say they must hurry up with the rest.’
‘Good.’
There was a silence. It was Miss Cobbett who broke it, and though he did not deign to look up at her, Burlap could tell from the tone of her voice that she was smiling.
‘Your Romola Saville,’ she said; ‘that was a bit of a shock, wasn’t it?’
Miss Cobbett’s loyalty to Susan’s memory was the intenser for being forced and deliberate. She had been in love with Burlap herself. Her loyalty to Susan and to that platonic spirituality which was Burlap’s amorous speciality (she believed, at first, that he meant what he so constantly and beautifully said) was exercised by a continual struggle against love, and grew strong in the process. Burlap, who was experienced in these matters, had soon realized, from the quality of her response to his first platonic advances, that there was, in the vulgar language which even his devil hardly ever used, ‘nothing doing’. Persisting, he would only damage his own high spiritual reputation. In spite of the fact that the girl was in love with him, or even in a certain sense because of it (for, loving, she realized how dangerously easy it would be to betray the cause of Susan and pure spirit and, realizing the danger, braced herself against it), she would never, he saw, permit his passage, however gradual, from spirituality to a carnality however refined. And since he himself was not in love with her, since she had aroused in him only the vague adolescent itch of desire which almost any personable woman could satisfy, it cost him little to be wise and retire. Retirement, he calculated, would enhance her admiration for his spirituality, would quicken her love. It is always useful, as Burlap had found in the past, to have employees who are in love with one. They work much harder and ask much less than those who are not in love. For a little everything went according to plan. Miss Cobbett did the work of three secretaries and an office boy, and at the same time worshipped. But there were incidents. Burlap was too much interested in female contributors. Some women he had actually been to bed with came and confided in Miss Cobbett. Her faith was shaken. Her righteous indignation at what she regarded as Burlap’s treachery to Susan and his ideals, his deliberate hypocrisy, was inflamed by personal feelings. He had betrayed her too. She was angry and resentful. Anger and resentment intensified her ideal loyalty. It was only in terms of loyalty to Susan and the spirit that she could express her jealousy.
The last straw was Beatrice Gilray. The cup of Miss Cobbett’s bitterness overflowed when Beatrice was installed at the office – in the editorial department, what was more, actually doing some of the writing for the paper. Miss Cobbett comforted herself a little by the thought that the writing was only Shorter Notices, which were quite unimportant. But still, she was bitterly resentful. She was much better educated than that fool of a Beatrice, much more intelligent too. It was just because Beatrice had money that she was allowed to write. Beatrice had put a thousand pounds into the paper. She worked for nothing – and worked, what was more, like mad; just as Miss Cobbett herself had worked, at the beginning. Now, Miss Cobbett did as little as she could. She stood on her rights, never arrived a minute early, never stayed a minute past her allotted time. She did no more than she was paid to do. Burlap was annoyed, resentful, distressed; he would either have to do more work himself or employ another secretary. And then, providentially, Beatrice turned up. She took over all the sub-editing which Miss Cobbett now had no time to do. To compensate her for the sub-editing and the thousand pounds he allowed her to do a little writing. She didn’t know how to write, of course; but that didn’t matter. Nobody ever read the Shorter Notices.
When Burlap went to live in Beatrice Gilray’s house, Miss Cobbett’s cup overflowed again. In the first moment of anger she was rash enough to give Beatrice a solemn warning against her tenant. But her disinterested solicitude for Beatrice’s reputation and virginity was too manifestly and uncontrollably tinged with spite against Burlap. The only effect of her admonition was to exasperate Beatrice into sharp retort.
‘She’s really insufferable,’ Beatrice complained to Burlap afterwards, without, however, detailing all the reasons she had for finding the woman insufferable.
Burlap looked Christ-like. ‘She’s difficult,’ he admitted. ‘But one’s sorry for her. She’s had a hard life.’
‘I don’t see that a hard life excuses anybody from behaving properly,’ she rapped out.
‘But one has to make allowances,’ said Burlap, wagg
ing his head.
‘If I were you,’ said Beatrice, ‘I wouldn’t have her in the place; I’d send her away.’
‘No, I couldn’t do that,’ Burlap answered, speaking slowly and ruminatively, as though the whole discussion were taking place inside himself. ‘Not in the circumstances.’ He smiled a Sodoma smile, subtle, spiritual and sweet; once more he wagged his dark, romantic head. ‘The circumstances are rather peculiar.’ He went on vaguely, never quite definitely explaining what the rather peculiar circumstances were, and with a kind of diffidence, as though he were reluctant to sing his own praises. Beatrice was left to gather that he had taken and was keeping Miss Cobbett out of charity. She was filled with a mixed feeling of admiration and pity – admiration for his goodness and pity for his helplessness in an ungrateful world.