Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Elinor’s expression of happiness was momentarily clouded. ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If the blindness has gone today why shouldn’t he hear tomorrow?’
‘Why do you whisper?’ said the child.
The only answer she could make was to kiss him and stroke his forehead.
‘We mustn’t tire him,’ said Elinor at last. ‘I think he ought to go to sleep.’ She shook up his pillow, she smoothed the sheets, she bent over him. ‘Good-bye, my little darling.’ He could answer at least to her smile.
Elinor drew the curtains and they tiptoed out. In the passage she turned and waited for her husband to come up to her. Philip put his arm round her and she pressed herself against him with a great sigh.
‘I was beginning to be afraid,’ she said, ‘that the nightmare was going on for ever. To the end.’
Luncheon that day was like a festival of resurrection, an Easter sacrament. Elinor was unfrozen, a woman of flesh again, not of stone. And poor Miss Fulkes, in whom the symptoms of misery had been identical with those of a very bad cold in the head accompanied by pimples, reassumed an almost human appearance and was moved to all but hysterical laughter by the jokes and anecdotes of the resuscitated John Bidlake. The old man had come in, rubbing his hands.
‘What a landscape!’ he exclaimed as he took his seat. ‘So juicy, so succulent, if you know what I mean, so fleshy – there’s no other word. It makes one’s mouth water to look at it. Perhaps that’s why I’m so ravenously hungry.’
‘Here’s your broth,’ said Mrs Bidlake.
‘But you can’t expect me to do a morning’s painting on slops!’ And in spite of protests, he insisted on eating a cutlet.
The news that little Phil was better increased his satisfaction. (He touched wood three times with both hands at once.) Besides, he was really very fond of his grandchild. He began to talk, and it was the old Gargantuan Bidlake who spoke. Miss Fulkes laughed so violently at one of his anecdotes about Whistler that she choked and had to hide her face in her napkin. In the vague benevolence even of Mrs Bidlake’s smile there was a hint of something like hilarity.
At about three o’clock John Bidlake began to feel a familiar discomfort, growing momently more acute, in the region of his midriff. He was shaken by spasmodic hiccoughs. He tried to go on painting; but all his pleasure in the work had evaporated. Diana’s breasts and the angel’s hind-quarters had lost all their charm for him. ‘A slight obstruction at the pylorus.’ Sir Herbert’s medical phrases re-echoed in his memory. ‘The contents of the stomach … a certain difficulty in passing into the duodenum.’ After a particularly violent hiccough, he put down his brushes and walked into the house to lie down.
‘Where’s father?’ Elinor enquired, when she came down to tea.
Mrs Bidlake shook her head. ‘He’s not feeling very well again.’
‘Oh, dear.’
There was a silence, and it was as though death were suddenly in the room with them. But, after all, he was old, Elinor reflected; the thing was inevitable. He might be worse, but little Phil was better; and that was all that really mattered. She began to talk to her mother about the garden. Philip lighted a cigarette.
There was a knock at the door. It was the housemaid with a message from Nurse Butler: would they please come up at once.
The convulsions had been very violent; the wasted body was without strength. By the time they reached the nursery, little Phil was dead.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE WEBLEY MYSTERY, as the papers lost no time in calling it, was complete. There was no clue. At the offices of the British Freemen nobody knew anything. Webley had left at the usual hour and by his usual mode of conveyance. He was not in the habit of talking to his subordinates about his private affairs; nobody had been told where he was going. And outside the office nobody had observed the car from the time Webley had told his chauffeur he could go and the time when the policeman in St James’s Square began to wonder, at about midnight, how much longer it was going to be left there unattended. Nobody had noticed the car being parked, nobody had remarked the driver as he left it. The only fingerprints on the paintwork and the steering wheel were those of the dead man. The person who drove the car after the murder had evidently worn gloves. No, there was no clue. Direct evidence was absolutely lacking. The police did what they could with the indirect. The fact that the body had not been robbed seemed obviously to point to a political motive for the crime. At the offices of the British Freemen reposed a whole collection of threatening letters. Webley received two or three of them every week. ‘They’re my favourite reading,’ he was fond of saying. A search was made for the writers. Two Russian Jews from Houndsditch, a Nottingham typist and an ardent young undergraduate of Balliol, were identified as the authors of the most menacing and arrested, only to be released again almost immediately. The days passed. The murderers remained at large. Public interest in the crime was not allowed to abate. In part of the conservative press it was openly affirmed that the Liberal-Labour Government had given orders to the police that the affair was not to be too closely looked into. ‘Screening the Murderers.’ ‘Socialists fear the Light.’ ‘Politics before the Ten Commandments.’ The headlines were lively. The crime was a godsend to the opposition. The Daily Mail offered ten thousand pounds reward to any person who would give information leading to the arrest of Webley’s murderers. Meanwhile, the British Freemen had almost doubled their numbers in a week. ‘Are you on the side of Murder? If not, join the British Freemen.’ The posters glared from every hoarding. Troops of Freemen in uniform and plain clothes scoured London canvassing for recruits, making patriotic demonstrations, doing amateur detective work. They also took the opportunity to beat a number of people with whose opinions they disagreed. In Tottenham and East Ham they fought pitched battles with hostile crowds and damaged numerous policemen. At Everard’s funeral a green procession more than three miles long followed the coffin to the grave.
Spandrell read all the papers every morning. They amused him. What a farce! What knockabout! What an incomparable idiocy! To Illidge, who had gone down to Lancashire to stay with his mother, he sent a picture post-card of Everard in uniform on his white horse – the shops were full of them now; hawkers peddled them in the streets. ‘The dead lion seems likely to do much more damage than the live dog,’ he wrote on the back. ‘God was always a joker.’
God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there. Simply not there. Neither God nor the devil. For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too. All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout. First an affair of dust-bins and then a farce. But perhaps that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dust-bins. And God? God in that case would be simply the absence of dust-bins.
‘God’s not apart, not above, not outside.’ He remembered what Rampion had once said. ‘At any rate, no relevant, humanly important aspect of God’s above and outside. Neither is God inside, in the sense that the Protestants use the phrase – safely stowed away in the imagination, in the feelings and intellect, in the soul. He’s there, of course among other places. But he’s also inside in the sense that a lump of bread’s inside when you’ve eaten it. He’s in the very body, in the blood and bowels, in the heart and skin and loins. God’s the total result, spiritual and physical, of any thought or action that makes for life, of any vital relation with the world. God’s a quality of actions and relations – a felt, experienced quality. At any rate, he’s that for our purposes, for purposes of living. Because, of course for purposes of knowing and speculating he may be dozens of other things as well. He may be a Rock of Ages; he may be the Jehovah of the Old Testament; he may be anything you like. But what’s that got to do with us as living corporeal beings? Nothing, nothing but harm, at any rate. The moment you allow speculative truth to take the place of felt instinctive truth as a guide to living, you ruin everything.’
Spandrell had protested. Men must have absolutes,
must steer by fixed external marks. ‘Music exists,’ he concluded, ‘even though you personally happen to be unmusical. You must admit its existence, absolutely, apart from your own capacity for listening and enjoying.’
‘Speculatively, theoretically, yes. Admit it as much as you like. But don’t allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life. In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic music-snobs one meets at Lady Edward Tantamount’s. Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It’s exactly the same with God. The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs. They’re as grotesque and contemptible as the music-snobs at Lady Edward’s. But nobody has the sense to say so. The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian. When they’re merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.’
Spandrell thought of the conversation now, as he addressed his post-card to Illidge. God was not there, the devil was not there; only the memory of a piece of squalid knockabout among the dust-bins, a piece of dirty dung-beetle’s scavenging. A God-snob – that’s what Rampion would call him. Dung-beetling in search of a non-existent God. But no, but no, God was there, outside, absolute. Else how account for the efficacy of prayer – for it was efficacious; how explain providence and destiny? God was there, but hiding. Deliberately hiding. It was a question of forcing him to come out of his lair, his abstract absolute lair, and compelling him to incarnate himself as a felt experienced quality of personal actions. It was a matter of violently dragging him from outsideness and aboveness to insideness But God was a joker. Spandrell had conjured him with violence to appear; and out of the bloody stream of the magically compelling sacrifice had emerged only a dust-bin. But the very failure of the incantation had been a proof that God was there, outside. Nothing happens to a man except that which is like himself. Dust-bin to dust-bin, dung to dung. He had not succeeded in compelling God to pass from outsideness to insideness. But the appearance of the dust-bin confirmed the reality of God as a providence, God as a destiny, God as the giver or withholder of grace, God as the predestinating saviour or destroyer. Dust-bins had been his predestined lot. In giving him dustbins yet again, the providential joker was merely being consistent.
One day, in the London Library, he met Philip Quarles.
‘I was very sorry to hear about your little boy,’ he said.
Philip mumbled something and looked rather uncomfortable, like a man who finds himself involved in an embarrassing situation. He could not bear to let anyone come near his misery. It was private, secret, sacred. It hurt him to expose it, it made him feel ashamed.
‘It was a peculiarly gratuitous horror,’ he said, to bring the conversation away from the particular and personal to the general.
‘All horrors are gratuitous,’ said Spandrell. ‘How’s Elinor standing it?’
The question was direct, had to be answered. ‘Badly.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s quite broken her down.’ Why did his voice, he wondered, sound so strangely unreal and, as it were, empty?
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘We shall go abroad in a few days, if Elinor feels up to the journey. To Siena, I’d thought. And then perhaps to the seaside somewhere in the Maremma.’ It was a comfort to be able to go into these geographical details.
‘No more English domesticity then,’ said Spandrell after a little pause.
‘The reason of it has been taken away.’
Spandrell nodded slowly. ‘Do you remember that conversation we had at the Club, with Illidge and Walter Bidlake? Nothing ever happens to a man except what’s like him. Settling down in the country in England wasn’t at all like you. It didn’t happen. It’s been prevented. Ruthlessly, by God! But providence uses foul means as well as fair. Travelling about, being unfixed, being a spectator – that was like you. You’re being compelled to do what’s like you.’ There was a silence. ‘And living in a kind of dust-heap,’ Spandrell added, ‘that’s like me. Whatever I do, however hard I try to escape, I remain on the dust-heap. I suppose I always shall.’ Yes always, he went on thinking. He had played the last card and lost. No, not the last card; for there was one other. The last but one. Would he also lose with the last?
CHAPTER XXXVII
SPANDRELL WAS VERY insistent that they should come without delay. The heilige Dankgesang eines genesenen an die Gotthet, in dir lydischen Tonart simply must be heard.
‘You can’t understand anything until you have heard it,’ he declared. ‘It proves all kinds of things – God, the soul, goodness – unescapably. It’s the only real proof that exists; the only one, because Beethoven was the only man who could get his knowledge over into expression. You must come.’
‘Most willingly,’ said Rampion. ‘But …’
Spandrell interrupted him. ‘I heard quite by accident yesterday that the A minor quartet had been recorded for the gramophone. I rushed out and bought a machine and the records specially for you.’
‘For me? But why this generosity?’
‘No generosity,’ Spandrell answered laughing. ‘Pure selfishness. I want you to hear and confirm my opinion.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I believe in you and, if you confirm, I shall believe in myself.’
‘What a man!’ mocked Rampion. ‘Ought to join the Church of Rome and have a confessor.’
‘But you must come.’ He spoke earnestly.
‘But not now,’ said Mary.
‘Not to-day,’ her husband echoed, wondering as he spoke why the man was so strangely insistent. What was the matter with him? The way he moved and spoke, the look in his eyes … So excited. ‘I have innumerable things to do this afternoon.’
‘Then tomorrow.’
As though he were drunk, Rampion was reflecting. ‘Why not the day after?’ he said aloud. ‘It would be much easier for me. And the machine won’t fly away in the interval.’
Spandrell uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘No, but I may,’ he said. ‘I shall probably be gone by the day after tomorrow.’
‘You hadn’t told us you were going away,’ said Mary. ‘Where?’
‘Who knows?’ Spandrell answered, laughing once more. ‘All I know is that I shan’t be here any more.’
‘All right,’ said Rampion, who had been watching him curiously, ‘I’ll make it tomorrow.’ Why is he so melodramatic? he wondered.
Spandrell took his leave.
‘What was wrong with him?’ said Rampion, when he was gone.
‘I didn’t notice anything particularly wrong with him,’ Mary answered.
Rampion made a gesture of impatience. ‘You wouldn’t notice the Last Judgment,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see that he was holding down his excitement. Like the lid of a saucepan on the boil – holding it down. And that melodramatic way of laughing. Like the conscious villain in the play …’
‘But was he acting?’ said Mary, ‘was he playing the fool for our benefit?’
‘No, no. He was genuine all right. But when you’re genuinely in the position of the conscious villain in the melodrama, you inevitably begin to behave like the conscious villain. You act in spite of yourself.’
‘But what’s he being a conscious villain about?’
‘How on earth should I know?’ said Rampion impatiently. Mary always expected him, by some mysterious and magical intuition, to know everything. Her faith sometimes amused and sometimes pleased, b
ut sometimes also annoyed him. ‘Do you take me for Spandrell’s father confessor?’
‘There’s nothing to fly in a rage about.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Rampion, ‘there’s practically nothing not to fly in a rage about. If one keeps one’s temper, it’s because one lives most of the time with one’s eyes shut, half asleep. If one were always awake, my God! There wouldn’t be much crockery unsmashed.’ He stalked off to his studio.
Spandrell walked slowly eastwards from Chelsea along the river whistling to himself over and over again the opening phrases of the Lydian melody from the heilige Danksgesang. Over and over again. The river stretched away into the hot haze. The music was like water in a parched land. After so many years of drought, a spring, a fountain. A watering-cart rumbled past trailing its artificial shower. The wetted dust was fragrant. That music was a proof, as he had said to Rampion. In the gutter a little torrent was hurrying a crumpled cigarette packet and a piece of orange peel towards the drain. He stopped whistling. The essential horror. Like carting garbage; that was what it had been. Just nasty and unpleasant, like cleaning a latrine. Not terrible so much as stupid, indescribably stupid. The music was a proof; God existed. But only so long as the violins were playing. When the bows were lifted from the strings, what then? Garbage and stupidity, the pitiless drought.
In the Vauxhall Bridge Road he bought a shilling packet of writing-paper and envelopes. For the price of a cup of coffee and a bun he hired a table in a tea-shop. With a stump of pencil he wrote. ‘To the Secretary General, Brotherhood of British Freemen. Sir, Tomorrow, Wednesday, at five p.m., the murderer of Everard Webley will be at 37 Catskill Street, S.W.7. The flat is on the second floor. The man will probably answer the bell in person. He is armed and desperate.’
He read it through and was reminded of those communications (written in red ink, to imitate blood, and under the influence of the serial stories in Chums and the B.O.P.) with which he and Pokinghorne Minor had hoped, at nine years old, to startle and terrify Miss Veal, the matron of their preparatory school. They had been discovered and reported to the head master. Old Nosey had given them three cuts apiece over the buttocks. ‘He is armed and desperate.’ That was pure Pokinghorne. But if he didn’t say it, they wouldn’t carry revolvers. And then, why, then it wouldn’t happen. Nothing would happen. Let it go. He folded the paper and put it into the envelope. There was an essential silliness, as well as an essential nastiness and stupidity. He scribbled the address.