Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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She did not answer for a moment, but stood holding him, her face hidden on his shoulder, pressing herself against him. ‘Dr Crowther says it’s meningitis,’ she whispered at last.
At half-past five arrived the nurse for whom Mrs Bidlake had telegraphed in the morning. The evening papers came by the same train; the chauffeur returned with a selection of them. On the front page was the announcement of the discovery, in his own motor car, of Everard Webley’s body. It was to old John Bidlake, dozing listlessly in the library, that the papers were first brought. He read and was so excited by the news of another’s death that he entirely forgot all his preoccupations with his own. Rejuvenated, he sprang to his feet and ran, waving the paper, into the hall. ‘Philip!’ he shouted in the strong resonant voice that had not been his for weeks past. ‘Philip! Come here at once!’
Philip, who had just come out of the sick-room and was standing in the corridor, talking to Mrs Bidlake, hurried down to see what was the matter. John Bidlake held out the paper with an expression almost of triumph on his face. ‘Read that,’ he commanded importantly.
When Elinor was told the news, she almost fainted.
‘I believe he’s better this morning, Dr Crowther.’
Dr Crowther fingered his tie to feel if it were straight. He was a small man, brisk and almost too neatly dressed. ‘Quieter, eh? Sleeps?’ he enquired telegraphically. His conversation had been reduced to bed-rock efficiency. It was just comprehensible and nothing more. No energy was wasted on the uttering of unnecessary words. Dr Crowther spoke as Ford cars are made. Elinor disliked him intensely, but believed in him for just those qualities of perky efficiency and self-confidence which she detested.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said. ‘He’s sleeping.’
‘He would be,’ said Dr Crowther, nodding, as though he had known everything in advance – which indeed he had; for the disease was running its invariable course.
Elinor accompanied him up the stairs. ‘Is it a good sign?’ she asked in a voice that implored a favourable answer.
Dr Crowther pushed out his lips, cocked his head a little on one side, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well …’ he said non-committally and was silent. He had saved at least five foot-pounds of energy by not explaining that, in meningitis, a phase of depression follows the initial phase of excitement.
The child now dozed away his days in a kind of stupor, suffering no pain (Elinor was thankful for that), but dis-quietingly unresponsive to what was going on about him, as though he were not fully alive. When he opened his eyes she saw that the pupils were so enormously dilated that there was hardly any iris left. Little Phil’s blue and mischievous regard had turned to expressionless blackness. The light which had caused him such an agony during the first days of his illness no longer troubled him. No longer did he start and tremble at every sound. Indeed, the child did not seem to hear when he was spoken to. Two days passed and then, quite suddenly and with a horrible sinking sense of apprehension, Elinor realized that he was almost completely deaf.
‘Deaf?’ echoed Dr Crowther, when she told him of her dreadful discovery. ‘Common symptom.’
‘But isn’t there anything to be done about it?’ she asked. The trap was closing on her again, the trap from which she had imagined herself free when that terrible screaming had quieted into silence. Dr Crowther shook his head, briskly, but only once each way. He did not speak. A foot-pound saved is a foot-pound gained.
‘But we can’t let him be deaf,’ she said, when the doctor was gone, appealing with a kind of incredulous despair to her husband. ‘We can’t let him be deaf.’ She knew he could do nothing; and yet she hoped. She realized the horror; but she refused to believe in it.
‘But if the doctor says there isn’t anything to be done …’
‘But deaf?’ she kept repeating, questioningly. ‘Deaf, Phil? Deaf?’
‘Perhaps it’ll pass off by itself,’ he suggested consolingly and wondered, as he spoke the words, whether she still imagined that the child would recover.
Early next morning when, in her dressing-gown, she tiptoed upstairs for nurse’s report on the night, she found the child already awake. One eyelid was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.
‘He can’t open it,’ the nurse explained. It’s paralysed.’
Between those long and curly lashes, which she had so often envied him, Elinor could see that the eyeball had rolled away to the exterior corner of the eye and was staring out sideways in a fixed unseeing squint.
‘Why the devil,’ said Cuthbert Arkwright, in the tone of one who has a personal grievance, ‘why the devil doesn’t Quarles come back to London?’ He hoped to extort from him a preface to his new illustrated edition of the Mimes of Herondas.
The rustication, Willie Weaver explained polysyllabically, was not voluntary. ‘His child’s ill,’ he added, uttering his little cough of self-applause; ‘it seems very reluctant, as they would say in Denmark, to absent itself from felicity much longer.’
‘Well, I wish it would hurry up about it,’ grumbled Arkwright. He frowned. ‘Perhaps I’d better try to get hold of someone else for my preface.’
At Gattenden the days had been like the successive stages of an impossibly horrible dream. When he had been deaf for a couple of days, little Phil ceased also to see. The squinting eyes were quite blind. And after nearly a week’s respite there was a sudden recurrence of the pain of the first days; he began to scream. Later he was seized several times with violent attacks of convulsions; it was as though a devil had entered into him and were torturing him from within. Then, one side of his face and half his body became paralysed and the flesh began to waste almost visibly from off his bones, like wax melting away in the heat of some inward and invisible fire. Trapped by her helplessness and by that horrible sense of guilt, which the news of Everard’s murder had enormously intensified, Elinor sat by her child’s bed and watched the phases of the malady succeeding one another – each one worse, it seemed to her, than the last, each more atrociously impossible. Yes, impossible. For such things could not, did not happen. Not to oneself at any rate. One’s own child was not gratuitously tortured and deformed before one’s eyes. The man who loved one and whom one had (oh wrongly, guiltily and as it had turned out, fatally!) almost made up one’s mind to love in return, was not suddenly and mysteriously murdered. Events like that simply did not occur. They were an impossibility. And yet, in spite of this impossibility, Everard was dead and for little Phil each day reserved a new and more excruciating torment. As in a nightmare, the impossible was being actualized.
Outwardly Elinor was very calm, silent and efficient. When Nurse Butler complained that the meals brought up to the sick-room got very cold on the way (and might she have Indian tea, as China didn’t agree with her digestion?), she ordered Lipton and arranged, in spite of Dobbs’s passionate objections, that lunch and dinner should be brought up in the water-heated breakfast dishes. All that Dr Crowther telegraphically ordered her to do, she did, punctually, except to take more rest. Even Nurse Butler had grudgingly to admit that she was thorough and methodical. But she backed up the doctor, partly because she wanted to rule alone and undisputed in the sick-room and partly disinterestedly, for Elinor’s own sake. That calmness, she could see, was the result of effort; it was the rigidity of extreme tension. Philip and Mrs Bidlake were no less insistent that she should rest; but Elinor would not listen to them.
‘But I’m perfectly all right,’ she protested, denying the evidence of her pallor and of those dark circles round her eyes.
She would have liked, if it had been humanly possible, never to eat or sleep at all. With Everard dead and the child in torture before her eyes, eating and sleeping seemed almost cynical. But the very possession of a body is a cynical comment on the soul and all its ways. It is a piece of cynicism, however, which the soul must a
ccept, whether it likes it or no. Elinor duly went to bed at eleven and came down to meals – if only that she might have strength to endure yet more unhappiness. To suffer was the only thing she could do; she wanted to suffer as much and intensely as she could.
‘Well, how’s the boy?’ her father would ask perfunctorily, over his chicken-broth, when they met at lunch. And when she had given some vague reply, he would hastily pass on to another topic.
John Bidlake had steadily refused, throughout his grandchild’s illness, to come near the sick-room. He had always hated the spectacle of suffering and disease, of anything that might remind him of the pain and death he so agonizingly dreaded for himself. And in this case he had a special reason for terror. For, with that talent for inventing private superstitions which had always distinguished him, he had secretly decided that his own fate was bound up with the child’s. If the child recovered, so would he. If not … Once formulated, the superstition could not be disregarded. ‘It’s absurd,’ he tried to assure himself ‘It’s utterly senseless and idiotic.’ But every unfavourable bulletin from the nursery made him shudder. To have entered the room might have been to discover, quite gratuitously, the most horrible confirmation of his forebodings. And perhaps (who knows?) the child’s sufferings might in some mysterious way infect himself. He did not even wish to hear of the boy. Except for that single brief enquiry at lunch-time, he never alluded to him and whenever someone else spoke of him, he either changed the subject of conversation (surreptitiously touching wood as he did so) or else withdrew out of earshot. After a few days the others learned to understand and respect his weakness. Moved by that sentiment which decrees that condemned criminals shall be treated with a special kindness, they were careful, in his presence, to avoid any allusion to what was happening upstairs.
Philip, meanwhile, hovered uneasily about the house. From time to time he went up to the nursery; but after having made an always vain attempt to persuade Elinor to come away, he would go down again in a few minutes. He could not have borne to sit there for long at a time. The futility of Elinor’s helpless vigil appalled him; he had at all times a dread of doing nothing and in circumstances like these a long spell of mental disoccupation would have been a torture. In the intervals between his visits to the sick-room, he read, he tried to write. And then there was that affair of Gladys Helmsley to be attended to. The child’s illness had made a journey to London impossible and so absolved him from the necessity of personally interviewing Gladys. It was to Willie Weaver – Willie, who was a solicitor as well as the most reliable of friends – that he delegated the business. With what immense relief! He had really dreaded the encounter with Gladys. Willie, on the contrary, seemed to enjoy the business. ‘My dear Philip,’ he wrote, ‘I have been doing my best for your Aged Parent; but even my best promises to be somewhat expensive. The lady has all the endearing young charms (only professional etiquette prevented me from attempting a little playful superfoetation on my own account); but she is also a business woman. Moreover, her feelings about the Aged P. are ferocious. Rather justifiably so, I must confess to thinking, after what I heard from her. Do you know where he feeds his paramours? Chez Lyons. The man must be a barmecidal maniac, as I said to the young lady when she told me. (Needless to say, she didn’t understand the witticism; so I offer it to you, on the basis of a five per cent commission on all royalties accruing from the sales of any work or works into which you may introduce it.) Tell the Aged P. that, next time, he must really spend a little more on his amusements; it’ll probably be cheaper in the long run. Advise him to indulge his gulosity as well as his lubricity; bid him control his thrift and temperance. I return to the attack tomorrow, when I hope to get the terms of the peace treaty set down in black and white. So sorry to hear your offspring’s not well. Yours, W. W.’
Philip smiled as he read the letter, and ‘Thank goodness,’ he thought, ‘that’s settled.’ But the last phrase made him feel ashamed of his amusement and his sense of relief ‘What bottomless selfishness,’ he reproached himself. And as though to make some amends, he limped upstairs to the nursery to sit for a while with Elinor. Little Phil lay in a stupor. His face was almost unrecognizably fleshless and shrunken, and the paralysed side of it was twisted into a kind of crooked grin. His little hands plucked unceasingly at the bedclothes. He breathed now very quickly, now so slowly that one began to wonder whether he was breathing at all.
Nurse Butler had gone to take a nap; for her nights were half sleepless. They sat together in silence. Philip took his wife’s hand and held it. Measured by that light irregular breathing from the bed, time slowly passed.
In the garden John Bidlake was painting – his wife had finally induced him to make the experiment – for the first time since his arrival at Gattenden. And for the first time, forgetting himself and his illness, he was happy. What an enchantment! he was thinking. The landscape was all curves and bulges and round recessions, like a body. Orbism, by God, orbism! The clouds were cherubic back-sides; and that sleek down was a Nereid’s glaucous belly; and Gattenden Punch Bowl was an enormous navel; and each of those elms in the middle distance was a paunchy great Silenus straight out of Jordaens; and these absurd round bushes of evergreen in the foreground were the multitudinous breasts of a green Diana of the Ephesians. Whole chunks of anatomy in leaves and vapour and swelling earth. Marvellous! And by God, what one could make of it! Those seraphic buttocks should be the heavenly reflection of Diana’s breasts; one orbic theme, with variations; the buttocks slanting outwards and across the canvas towards the surface of the picture; the breasts slanting inwards, towards the interior. And the sleek belly should be a transverse and horizontal reconciliation of the two diagonal movements, with the great Sileni, zig-zagging a little, disposed in front of it. And in the foreground on the left there’d be the silhouetted edge of the Wellingtonia, imaginatively transplanted there to stop the movements from running right out of the picture; and the stone griffon would come in very nicely on the right – for this was to be a closed composition, a little universe with boundaries beyond which the imagination was not to be allowed to stray. And the eye was to gaze as through an imaginary tunnel, unable to stray from the focal point in the middle of the great navel of Gattenden Punch Bowl, round which all the other fragments of divine anatomy would be harmoniously grouped. ‘By God,’ John Bidlake said to himself, swearing aloud in pure satisfaction of spirit, ‘by God!’ And he began to paint with a kind of fury.
Wandering through the garden in her endless crusade against weeds, Mrs Bidlake halted for a moment behind him and looked over his shoulder.
‘Admirable,’ she said, as much in comment on her husband’s activity as on its pictorial results.
She moved away and, having uprooted a dandelion, paused and, with eyes shut, began to repeat her own name, ‘Janet Bidlake, Janet Bidlake, Janet Bidlake,’ again and again, until the syllables had lost all significance for her and had become as mysterious, meaningless and arbitrary as the words of a necromancer’s spell. Abracadabra, Janet Bidlake – was she really herself? did she even exist? and the trees? and people? this moment and the past? everything … ?
Meanwhile, in the nursery, an extraordinary thing had happened. Suddenly and without warning, little Phil had opened his eyes and looked about him. They met his mother’s. As well as his twisted face would permit him, he smiled.
‘But he can see!’ cried Elinor. And kneeling down by the bed, she put her arms round the child and began to kiss him with a love that was quickened by an outburst of passionate gratitude. After all these days of squinting blindness, she was thankful to him, she was profoundly grateful for that look of answering intelligence in his eyes, that poor twisted essay at a smile. ‘My darling,’ she repeated and, for the first time for days, she began to cry. She averted her face, so that the child should not see her tears, got up and walked away from the bed. ‘Too stupid,’ she said apologetically to her husband, as she wiped her eyes. ‘But I can’t help it.’
‘I�
�m hungry,’ said little Phil suddenly.
Elinor was down on her knees again beside the bed. ‘What would you like to eat, my darling?’ But the child did not hear her question.
‘I’m hungry,’ he repeated.
‘He’s still deaf,’ said Philip.
‘But he can see again, he can speak.’ Elinor’s face was transfigured. She had known all the time, in spite of everything, that it was impossible he shouldn’t get well. Quite impossible. And now she was being proved right. ‘Stay here,’ she went on. ‘I’ll run and get some milk.’ She hurried out of the room.
Philip remained at the bedside. He stroked the child’s hand and smiled. Little Phil smiled back. He too began to believe that there really might have been a miracle.
‘Draw me something,’ the child commanded.
Philip pulled out his fountain pen and, on the back of an old letter, scribbled one of those landscapes full of elephants and airships, trains and flying pigs and steamers, for which his son had such a special partiality. An elephant came into collision with a train. Feebly, but with a manifest enjoyment, little Phil began to laugh. There could be no doubt of it; the miracle had really happened.
Elinor returned with some milk and a plate of jelly. There was colour in her cheeks, her eyes were bright and the face which, all these days, had been drawn and rigidly set had in a moment recovered all its mobility of expression. It was as though she had suddenly come to life again.
‘Come and look at the elephants,’ said little Phil. ‘So funny!’ And between each sip of milk, each spoonful of jelly, Philip had to show him the latest additions to his crowded landscape – whales in the sea, and divers being pinched by lobsters, two submarines fighting and a hippopotamus in a balloon; a volcano in eruption, cannons, a lighthouse, a whole army of pigs.
‘Why don’t you ever say anything?’ the child suddenly asked.
They looked at one another. ‘He can’t hear us,’ said Philip.