Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Revolting!’ Illidge said to himself as he turned the pages. ‘Criminal!’ And he cherished his indignation, he cultivated it. To be angry was a distraction, and at the same time a justification. Raging at plutocratic callousness and frivolity, he could half forget and half excuse to himself the horrible thing that had happened. Webley’s body was lying on the other side of the screen. But there were women who paid two hundred guineas for a fur coat. Two hundred guineas! His Uncle Joseph would have thought himself happy if he could have made as much in eighteen months of cobbling. And they bought scent at twenty-five shillings the quarter-pint. He remembered the time when his little brother Tom had had pneumonia after influenza. Ghastly! And when he was convalescent, the doctor had said he ought to go away to the sea for a few weeks. They hadn’t been able to afford it. Tom’s lungs had never been too strong after that. He worked in a motor factory now (making machines for those bitches in two-hundred-guinea coats to sit in); Illidge had paid for him to go to a technical school – paid, he reflected, beating up his anger, that the boy might have the privilege of standing eight hours a day in front of a milling machine. The air of Manchester wasn’t doing Tom any good. There was no superfluous fat to be rolled off him, poor devil. Swinish guzzling! Why couldn’t they do a little useful work instead of squeegeeing their hams and bellies? That would take the fat off all right. If they worked as his mother had done … She had no fat to rub off with rolling-pins, or sweat off under a rubber belt, or stew off in hot baths and brine. He thought indignantly of that endless dreary labour of housework. Day after day, year after year. Making beds, that they might be unmade. Cooking to fill bellies eternally empty. Washing up what the next meal was to make dirty again. Scrubbing the floor for muddy boots to defile. Darning and patching that yet more holes might be made. It was like the labouring of Sisyphus and the Danaids, hopeless and interminable – or would have been interminable (except by his mother’s death), if he hadn’t been able to send her those two pounds a week out of his salary. She could get a girl in now to help with the hardest work. But she still did more than enough to make rubber belts unnecessary. What a life! And in the world of fur coats and Songe Nègre they complained of boredom and fatigue, they had to retire into nursing homes for rest cures. If they could lead her life for a bit! And perhaps they’d be made to, one of these days (he hoped so), even in England. Illidge thought with satisfaction of those ex-officers of the Tsar driving taxis and working in factories, those ex-countesses with their restaurants and cabarets and hat-shops; of all the ex-rich of Russia, all over the world, from Harbin and Shanghai to Rome and London and Berlin, bankrupt, humiliated, reduced to the slavish estate of the common people on whom they had once parasitically lived. That was good, that served them right. And perhaps it might happen here too. But they were strong here, the fat-reducers and the fur-coated; they were numerous, they were an organized army. But the army had lost its chief. He had got his packet. Embodied beastliness and plutocracy, he lay there behind the screen. But his mouth had been open and the muscles of his face, before the reeking handkerchief had covered it, had twitched grotesquely. Illidge shuddered. He looked again for indignant distraction and justification at the picture of the young lady in the two-hundred-guinea fur, of the young lady stepping, naked but coyly towelled, out of her reducing bath. Strumpets and gluttons! They belonged to the class that Webley had fought to perpetuate. The champion of all that was vile and low. He had got what he deserved, he had …
‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Spandrell suddenly, looking up from his book. The sound of his voice in the silence made Illidge start with an uncontrollable terror. ‘I’d absolutely forgotten. They get stiff, don’t they?’ He looked at Illidge. ‘Corpses, I mean.’
Illidge nodded. He drew a deep breath and steadied himself with an effort of will.
‘What about getting him into the car, then?’ He sprang up and walked quickly round the screen, out of sight. Illidge heard the latch of the house door rattling. He was seized with a sudden horrible terror: Spandrell was going to make off, leaving him locked in with the body.
‘Where are you going?’ he shouted and darted off in panic pursuit. ‘Where are you going?’ The door was open, Spandrell was not to be seen, and the thing lay on the floor, its face uncovered, open-mouthed and staring secretly, significantly, as though through spy-holes, between half-closed eyelids. ‘Where are you going?’ Illidge’s voice had risen almost to a scream.
‘What is the excitement about?’ asked Spandrell as the other appeared, pale and with desperation in his looks, on the doorstep. Standing by Webley’s car, he was engaged in undoing the tightly stretched waterproof which decked in all that part of the open body lying aft of the front seats. ‘These thingumbobs are horribly hard to unfasten.’
Illidge put his hands in his pockets and pretended that it was merely an idle curiosity that had brought him out with such precipitation.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked off-handedly.
Spandrell gave a final tug; the cover came loose along the whole length of one side of the car. He turned it back and looked in. ‘Empty, thank goodness,’ he said and, stretching his hand, he played imaginary octaves, span after span, over the coach-work. ‘Say four feet wide,’ he concluded, ‘by about the same in length. Of which half is taken up by the seat. With two foot six of space under the cover. Plenty of room to curl up in and be very comfortable. But if one were stiff?’ He looked enquiringly at Illidge. ‘A man could be got in, but not a statue.’
Illidge nodded. Spandrell’s last words had made him suddenly remember Lady Edward’s mocking commentary on Webley. ‘He wants to be treated like his own colossal statue – posthumously, if you see what I mean.’
‘We must do something quickly,’ Spandrell went on. ‘Before the stiffness sets in.’ He pulled back the cover and laying a hand on Illidge’s shoulder, propelled him gently into the house. The door slammed behind them. They stood looking down at the body.
‘We shall have to pull the knees up and the arms down,’ said Spandrell.
He bent down and moved one of the arms towards the side. It returned, when he let go, half-way to its former position. Like a puppet, Spandrell reflected, with elastic joints. Grotesque rather than terrible; not tragical, but only rather tiresome and even absurd. That was the essential horror – that it was all (even this) a kind of bad and tedious jape. ‘We shall have to find some string,’ he said. ‘Something to tie the limbs into place.’ It was like amateur plumbing, or mending the summerhouse oneself; just rather unpleasant and ludicrous.
They ransacked the house. There was no string to be found. They had to be content with three bandages, which Spandrell found among the aspirin and iodine, the boracic powder and vegetable laxatives of the little medicine cupboard in the bathroom.
‘Hold the arms in place while I tie,’ commanded Spandrell.
Illidge did as he was told. But the coldness of those dead wrists against his fingers was horrible; he felt sick again, he began to tremble.
‘There!’ said Spandrell, straightening himself up. ‘Now the legs. Thank goodness we didn’t leave it much longer.’
‘Treated like his own statue.’ The words reverberated in Illidge’s memory. ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean.’ Posthumously … Spandrell bent one of the legs till the knee almost touched the chin.
‘Hold it.’
Illidge grasped the ankle; the socks were grey and clocked with white. Spandrell let go, and Illidge felt a sudden and startlingly powerful thrust against his retaining hand. The dead man was trying to kick. Black voids began to expand in front of his eyes, eating out holes in the solid world before him. And the solid world itself swayed and swam round the edges of those interstellar vacancies. His gorge turned, he felt horribly giddy.
‘Look here,’ he began, turning to Spandrell, who had squatted down on his heels and was tearing the wrapping off another bandage. Then shutting his eyes, he relinquished his grasp.
The leg straightened itself ou
t like a bent spring, and the foot, as it shot forward, caught Spandrell on the shoulder and sent him, unsteadily balanced as he was, sprawling backwards on to the floor.
He picked himself up. ‘You bloody fool!’ But the anger aroused by that first shock of surprise died down. He uttered a little laugh. ‘We might be at the circus,’ he said. It was not only not tragic; it was a clownery.
By the time the body was finally trussed, Illidge knew that Tom’s weak lungs and two-hundred-guinea coats, that superfluous fat and his mother’s life-long slaving, that rich and poor, oppression and revolution, justice, punishment, indignation – all, as far as he was concerned, were utterly irrelevant to the fact of these stiffening limbs, this mouth that gaped, these half-shut, glazed and secretly staring eyes. Irrelevant, and beside the point.
Philip was dining alone. In front of his plate half a bottle of claret and the water-jug propped up an open volume. He read between the mouthfuls, as he masticated. The book was Bastian’s On the Brain. Not very up to date, perhaps, but the best he could find in his father’s library to keep him amused in the train. Halfway through the fish, he came upon the case of the Irish gentleman who had suffered from paraphasia, and was so much struck by it that he pushed aside his plate and, taking out his pocket-book, made a note of it at once. The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. ‘It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.’ What the patient actually read was: ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastrei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido as that kekritest.’ Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! what majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.’ He repeated it to himself. ‘I shall print it on the title-page of my next novel,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘The epigraph the text of the whole sermon.’ Shakespeare only talked about tales told by an idiot. But here was the idiot actually speaking – Shakespeareanly, what was more. ‘The final word about life,’ he added in pencil.
At the Queen’s Hall Tolley began with Erik Satie’s Borborygmes Symphoniques. Philip found the joke only moderately good. A section of the audience improved it, however, by hissing and booing. Ironically polite, Tolley bowed with more than his usual grace. When the hubbub subsided, he addressed himself to the second item on the programme. It was the Coriolan overture. Tolley prided himself on a catholic taste and omnicompetence. But, oh dear! thought Philip as he listened, how abominably he conducted real music! As though he were rather ashamed of Beethoven’s emotions and were trying to apologize for them. But fortunately Coriolanus was practically Tolley-proof. The music was heroically beautiful, it was tragic and immense in spite of him. The last of the expiring throbs of sound died away, a demonstration of man’s indomitable greatness and the necessity, the significance of suffering.
In the interval Philip limped out for a smoke in the bar. A hand plucked at his sleeve.
‘The melomaniac discovered!’ said a familiar voice. He turned and saw Willie Weaver twinkling all over with good-humour, kindliness and absurdity. ‘What did you think of our modern Orpheus?’
‘If you’re referring to Tolley, I don’t think he can conduct Beethoven.’
‘A shade too light and fantastic for old man Ludwig’s portentosities?’ suggested Willie.
‘That’s about it,’ said Philip smiling. ‘Not up to him.’
‘Or too far up. Portentosity belongs to the prepositivistic epoch. It’s bourgeois as Comrade Lenin would say. Tolley’s nothing if not contemporaneous. Didn’t you like him in the Satie? Or did you,’ he went on, in response to Philip’s contemptuous shrug, ‘did you wish he’d committed it?’ He coughed his own appreciation of the pun.
‘He’s almost as modern as the Irish genius whose works I discovered this evening.’ Philip took out his pocket-book and, after a word of explanation, read aloud. ‘An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo …’ At the foot of the page were his own comments of an hour before. ‘The text of the whole sermon. The final word about life.’ He did not read them out. He happened to be thinking quite differently now. ‘The difference between portentosity and Satie-cum-Tolleyism,’ he said, ’is the same as the difference between the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin, and this bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.’
He was blankly contradicting himself. But, after all, why not?
Illidge wanted to go home and to bed; but Spandrell had insisted that he should spend at least an hour or two at Tantamount House.
‘You must get yourself seen,’ he said. ‘For the sake of the alibi. I’m going on to Sbisa’s. There’ll be a dozen people to vouch for me.’
Illidge agreed only under the threat of violence. He dreaded the ordeal of talking with anyone – even with someone so incurious, preoccupied and absent as Lord Edward. ‘I shan’t be able to stand it,’ he kept repeating, almost in tears. They had had to carry the body, trussed into the posture of a child in the womb – carry it amorously pressed in a close and staggering embrace – out of the door, down the steps into the roadway. A single greenish gas-lamp under the archway threw but a feeble light up the mews; enough, however, to have betrayed them, if anyone had happened to be passing the entrance as they carried their burden out and lifted it into the car. They had begun by dumping the thing on its back on the floor; but the up-drawn knees projected above the level of the carriage-work. Spandrell had to climb into the car and push and lug the heavy body on to its side, so that the knees rested on the edge of the back seat. They shut the doors, pulled the cover over and fastened it tautly into place. ‘Perfect,’ said Spandrell. He took his companion by the elbow. ‘You need a little more brandy,’ he added. But in spite of the brandy Illidge was still faint and tremulous when they drove away. Nor was Spandrell’s bungling with the mechanism of the unfamiliar car at all calculated to soothe his nerves. They had begun by backing violently into the wall at the end of the mews; and before he discovered the secret of the gears, Spandrell twice inadvertently stopped the engine. He relieved his irritation by a few curses and laughed. But to Illidge these little mishaps, entailing as they did a minute’s delay in escaping from that horrible and accursed place, were catastrophes. His terror, his anxious impatience became almost hysterical.
‘No. I can’t, I really can’t,’ he protested when Spandrell had told him that he must spend the evening at Tantamount House.
‘All the same,’ said the other, ‘you’re damned well going to,’ and he headed the car into the Mall. ‘I’ll drop you at the door.’
‘No, really!’
‘And if necessary kick you in.’
‘But I couldn’t stand being there, I couldn’t stand it.’
‘This is an extremely nice car,’ said Spandrell pointedly changing the subject. ‘Delightful to drive.’
‘I couldn’t stand it,’ Illidge whimperingly repeated.
‘I believe the makers guarantee a hundred miles an hour on the track.’
They turned up past St James’s Palace into Pall Mall.
‘Here you are,’ said Spandrell, drawing up at the kerb. Obediently, Illidge got out, crossed the pavement, climbed the steps and rang the bell. Spandrell waited till the door had closed behind him, then drove on into St James’s Square. Twenty or thirty cars were parked round the central gardens. He backed in among them, stopped the engine, got out and walked up to Piccadilly Circus. A penny ‘bus-ride took him to the top of the Charing Cross Road. The trees of Soho Square shone green in the lamplight at the end of the narrow lane, between the factory buildings. Two minutes later he was at Sbisa’s, apologizing to Burlap and Rampion for being so late.
‘Ah, here you are,’ said Lord Edward. ‘So glad you’ve come.’
Illidge mumbled vague apologies for not having come soo
ner. An appointment with a man. About business. But suppose, he wondered in terror while he spoke, suppose Lord Edward should ask what man, what business? He wouldn’t know what to answer; he would utterly break down. But the Old Man seemed not even to have heard his excuses.
‘Afraid I must ask you to do a little arithmetic for me,’ he said in his deep blurred voice. Lord Edward had made himself a tolerably good mathematician; but ‘sums’ had always been beyond his powers. He had never been able to multiply correctly. And as for long division – it was fifty years since he had even attempted it. ‘I’ve got the figures here.’ He tapped the notebook that lay open in front of him on the desk. ‘It’s for the chapter on phosphorus. Human interference with the cycle. How much P2O5 did we find out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?’ He turned a page. ‘Four hundred thousand tons. That was it. Practically irrecoverable. Just thrown away. Then there’s the stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three-quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide in every body. Restored to the earth, you may say.’ Lord Edward was ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut, every shift of advocacy. ‘But how inadequately!’ he swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to bits. ‘Huddling bodies together in cemeteries! How can you expect the phosphorus to get distributed? It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency. Now, given three-quarters of a kilo of P2O5 for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an average death-rate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored every year to the earth? You can do sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.’ Illidge sat in silence, shielding his face with his hand. ‘But then one has to remember,’ the Old Man continued, ‘that there are a lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that the phosphorus is taken out of circulation. Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick vaults. The only people more wasteful than we are are the Indians. Burning bodies and throwing the ashes into rivers! But the Indians are stupid about everything. The way they burn all the cow-dung instead of putting it back on the land. And then they’re surprised that half the population hasn’t enough to eat. We shall have to make a separate calculation about the Indians. I haven’t got the figures, though. But meanwhile will you work out the grand total for the world? And another, if you don’t mind, for the white races. I’ve got a list of the populations here somewhere. And, of course, the death-rate will be lower than the average for the whole world, at any rate in Western Europe and America. Would you like to sit here? There’s room at this end of the table.’ He cleared a space. ‘And here’s paper. And this is quite a decent pen.