Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Prefer being dead.’ The words went echoing through Spandrell’s mind. Everard Webley lying on the floor, trussed up like a chicken. Did he prefer being dead? ‘All the same,’ he said slowly, ‘some things must always remain absolutely and radically wrong. Killing, for example.’ He wanted to believe that it was more than merely low and sordid and disgusting. He wanted to believe that it was also terrible and tragic. ‘That’s an absolute wrong.’
‘But why more absolute than anything else?’ said Rampion. ‘There are circumstances when killing’s obviously necessary and right and commendable. The only absolutely evil act, so far as I can see, that a man can perform, is an act against life, against his own integrity. He does wrong if he perverts himself, if he falsifies his instincts.’
Spandrell was sarcastic. ‘We’re getting back to the beasts again,’ he said. ‘Go ravening round fulfilling all your appetites as you feel them. Is that the last word in human wisdom?’
‘Well, it isn’t really so stupid as you try to make out,’ said Rampion. ‘If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human beings behave today. It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that make men so beastly – no, “beastly” is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals – so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then. It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, its principles, its tradition and education. Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession – why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation. It’s not instinct that makes Casanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence. If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs. They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous. And it’s the same with the other instincts. It’s not the possessive instinct that’s made modern civilization insane about money. The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles. The money-grubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian Service. Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime. It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect. And then, think of civilized war. It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness. Men have to be compelled by law and then tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight. You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.’
‘You’d do still more,’ said Burlap, ‘by telling them to obey Jesus.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Telling them to obey Jesus is telling them to be more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more than human always means succeeding in being less than human. Telling men to obey Jesus literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like idiots and finally like devils. Just consider the examples. Old Tolstoy – a great man who deliberately turned himself into an idiot by trying to be more than a great man. Your horrid little St Francis.’ He turned to Burlap. ‘Another idiot. But already on the verge of diabolism. With the monks of Thebaid you see the process carried a step further. They went over the verge. They got to the stage of being devils. Self-torture, destruction of everything decent and beautiful and living. That was their programme. They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness. They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts. But no, they wanted to be more than human. So they just became devils. Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils. Ugh!’ Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust. ‘And to think,’ he went on indignantly, ‘that the world’s full of these creatures! Not quite so far gone as St Anthony and his demons or St Francis and his half-wits. But of the same kind. Different only in degree. And all perverted in the same way – by trying to be non-human. Non-humanly religious, non-humanly moral, non-humanly intellectual and scientific, non-humanly specialized and efficient, non-humanly the business man, non-humanly avaricious and property-loving, non-humanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, non-humanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts. There are four of them at this table now.’ He looked round with a grin. ‘A pure little Jesus pervert.’ Burlap forgivingly smiled. ‘An intellectual-aesthetic pervert.’
‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Philip.
‘A morality-philosophy pervert.’ He turned to Spandrell. ‘Quite the little Stavrogin. Pardon my saying so, Spandrell; but you really are the most colossal fool.’ He looked intently into his face. ‘Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one! But it won’t do. It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.’
Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew … But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?
‘Laugh away, old Dostoievsky! But let me tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin. He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.’
‘And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?’ asked Philip.
‘What indeed!’ Rampion shook his head. His fine hair floated up silkily. He smiled. ‘A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah pervert. A worry-about-the-bloody-old-world pervert. Above all a gibber pervert.’ He got up. ‘That’s why I’m going home,’ he said. ‘The way I’ve been talking – it’s really non-human. Really scandalous. I’m ashamed. But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against non-human things and people, you inevitably become non-human yourself. It’s all your fault.’ He gave a final grin, waved good-night and was gone.
Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him. Sitting – for such was the engagingly child-like habit he had formed during the last few weeks – on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion. An extra-ordinary man, a great man, even. Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly. She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself. Hardly great, she insisted jealously. Well, perhaps not quite. But very nearly. If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot. The attitude was comprehensible. Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other. His incapacity to understand St Francis, for example. The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint. That was extraordinary and deplorable.
‘What does he say?’ asked Beatrice severely. Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St Francis under her protection.
Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said. Beatrice was indignant. How could he say such things? How did he dare? It was an outrage. Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real defect. But so few people, he added in charitable palliation, were born with a real feeling for spiritual beauty. Rampion was an extraordinary man in many ways, but it was as tho
ugh he lacked that extra sense-organ which enables men like St Francis to see the beauty that is beyond earthly beauty. In a rudimentary form he himself, he thought, had the power. How rarely he met anyone who seemed to be like him! Almost everybody was in this respect a stranger. It was like seeing normally in a country where most people were colour blind. Didn’t Beatrice feel that too? For of course she was one of the rare clear-seeing ones. He had felt it at once, the first time he met her. Beatrice nodded gravely. Yes, she too felt like that. Burlap smiled up at her; he knew it. She felt proud and important. Rampion’s idea of love, for example; Burlap shook his head. So extraordinarily gross and animal and corporeal.
‘Dreadful,’ said Beatrice feelingly. Denis, she was thinking, was so different. Tenderly she looked down at the head that reposed, so trustingly, against her knee. She adored the way his hair curled, and his very small, beautiful ears, and even the pink bare spot on the top of his crown. That little pink tonsure was somehow rather engagingly pathetic. There was a long silence.
Burlap at last profoundly sighed. ‘How tired I am!’ he said.
‘You ought to go to bed.’
‘Too tired even to move.’ He pressed his cheek more heavily against her knee and shut his eyes.
Beatrice raised her hand, hesitated a moment, dropped it again, then raised it once more and began to run her fingers soothingly through his dark curls. There was another long silence.
‘Ah, don’t stop,’ he said, when at last she withdrew her hand. ‘It’s so comforting. Such a virtue seems to go out from you. You’d almost cured my headache.’
‘You’ve got a headache?’ asked Beatrice, her solicitude running as usual to a kind of anger. ‘Then you simply must go to bed,’ she commanded.
‘But I’m so happy here.’
‘No, I insist.’ Her protective motherliness was thoroughly aroused. It was a bullying tenderness.
‘How cruel you are!’ Burlap complained, rising reluctantly to his feet. Beatrice was touched with compunction. ‘I’ll stroke your head when you’re in bed,’ she promised. She too now regretted that soft warm silence, that speechless intimacy, which her outburst of domineering solicitude had too abruptly shattered. She justified herself by an explanation. The headache would return if he didn’t go to sleep the moment it was cured. And so on.
Burlap had been in bed nearly ten minutes when she came to keep her promise. She was dressed in a green dressing-gown and her yellow hair was plaited into a long thick pigtail that swung heavily as she moved, like the heavy plaited tail of a cart-horse at a show.
‘You look about twelve with that pigtail hanging down your back,’ said Burlap, enchanted.
Beatrice laughed, rather nervously, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He raised his hand and took hold of the thick plait. ‘Too charming,’ he said. ‘It simply invites pulling.’ He gave a little tug at it, playfully.
‘Look out,’ she warned. ‘I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.’ She took hold of one of his dark curls.
‘Pax, pax!’ he begged, reverting to the vocabulary of the preparatory school. ‘I’ll let go. The real reason,’ he added, ‘why little boys don’t like fighting with little girls is simply that little girls are so much more ruthless and ferocious.’
Beatrice laughed again. There was a silence. She felt a little breathless and fluttering, as one feels when one is anxiously expecting something to happen. ‘Head bad?’ she asked.
‘Rather bad.’
She stretched out a hand and touched his forehead.
‘Your hand’s magical,’ he said. With a quick unexpected movement he wriggled round sideways under the sheets and laid his head on her lap. ‘There,’ he whispered and, with a sigh of contentment, closed his eyes.
For a moment Beatrice was taken aback, almost frightened. That dark head lying hard and heavy on her thighs – it seemed strange, terrifying. She had to suppress a little shudder before she could feel glad at the confiding childishness of his movement. She began stroking his forehead, stroking his scalp through the thick dark curls. Time passed. The soft warm silence enveloped them once more, the dumb intimacy of contact was re-established. She was no longer domineering in her protective solicitude, only tender. The armour of her hardness was as though melted away from her, melted away in this warm intimacy along with the terrors which made it necessary.
Burlap sighed again. He was in a kind of blissful doze of sensual passivity.
‘Better?’ she asked in a soft whisper.
‘Still rather bad on the side,’ he whispered back. ‘Just over the ear.’ And he rolled his head over so that she could more easily reach the painful spot, rolled it over so that his face was pressed against her belly, her soft belly that stirred so livingly with her breathing, that was so warm and yielding against his face.
At the touch of his face against her body Beatrice felt a sudden renewal of those spasmodic creepings of apprehension. Her flesh was terrified by the nearness of that physical intimacy. But as Burlap did not stir, as he made no dangerous gesture, no movement towards a closer contact, the terrors died gradually down and their flutterings served only to enhance and intensify that wonderful warm emotion of tenderness which succeeded them. She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again. The warmth of his breathing was against her belly. She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with apprehensions and anticipations. Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through its terrors, timidly desired.
‘Better?’ she whispered again.
He made a little movement with his head and pressed his face closer to her soft flesh.
‘Shall I stop now?’ she went on, ‘shall I go away?’
Burlap raised his head and looked at her. ‘No, no,’ he implored. ‘Don’t go. Not yet. Don’t break the magic. Stay here for a moment longer. Lie down here for a moment under the quilt. For a moment.’
Without speaking she stretched herself out beside him and he drew the quilt over her, he turned out the light.
The fingers that caressed her arm under its wide sleeve touched delicately, touched spiritually and as it were disembodiedly, like the fingers of those inflated rubber gloves that brush so thrillingly against one’s face in the darkness of séances, bringing comfort from the Great Beyond and a message of affection from the loved ones who have passed over. To caress and yet be a spiritualized rubber glove at a séance, to make love but as though from the Great Beyond – that was Burlap’s talent. Softly, patiently, with an infinite disembodied gentleness he went on caressing. Beatrice’s armour was melted quite away. It was the soft young-girlish, tremulous core of her that Burlap caressed with that delicate touch of spirit fingers from the Great Beyond. Her armour was gone; but she felt so wonderfully safe with Denis. She felt no fears, or at least only such faint breathless flutterings of her still almost childish flesh as served to quicken her happiness. She felt so wonderfully safe even when – after what had seemed a delicious eternity of patiently repeated caresses from wrist to shoulder and back again – the spirit hand reached out of the Beyond and touched her breast. Delicately, almost disembodiedly it touched, like a skin of rubber stuffed with air; spiritually it slid over the rounded flesh, and its angelic fingers lingered along the skin. At the first touch the round breast shuddered; it had its private terrors within Beatrice’s general happiness and sense of security. But patiently, gently, unalarmingly, the spirit hand repeated its caress again, again, till the reassured and at last eager breast longed for its return and her whole body was alive with the tingling ramifications of the breast’s desires. In the darkness the eternities prolonged themselves.
CHAPTER XXXV
NEXT DAY, INSTEAD of whimpering with every return of pain, the child began to scream – cry after shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity of recurrence for what seemed to Elinor an eternity of hours. Like the scream of a rabbit in a trap. But a thousand times worse; for it was a child that scre
amed, not an animal; her child, trapped and in agony. She felt as though she too were trapped. Trapped by her own utter helplessness to alleviate his pain. Trapped by that obscure sense of guilt, that irrational belief (but haunting in spite of its irrationality), that ever more closely pressing and suffocating conviction that it was all, in some inscrutable fashion, her fault, a punishment, malevolently vicarious, for her offence. Caged within her own snare, but outside his, she sat there holding the small hand as it were between invisible bars, unable to come to his aid, waiting through the child’s quick-breathed and feverish silence for the recurrence of that dreadful cry, for yet another sight of that suddenly distorted face, that shuddering little body racked by a pain which was somehow of her own inflicting.
The doctor came at last with his opiates.
Philip arrived by the twelve-twenty. He had been in no hurry to get up and come by an earlier train. It annoyed him to have to leave town. His late arrival was in the nature of a protest. Elinor must really learn not to make such a fuss every time the child had a stomach-ache. It was absurd.
She met him at the door as he stepped out of the car, so white and haggard, and with such dark-circled and desperate eyes, that he was shocked to see her.
‘But you’re the one who’s ill,’ he said anxiously. ‘What is it?’