Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Dancing, dancing . . . Oh, if only, thought Helen, one could go on dancing for ever! If only one didn’t have to spend all that time doing other things! Wrong things, mostly, stupid things, things one was sorry for after they were done. Dancing, she lost her life in order to save it; lost her identity and became something greater than herself; lost perplexities and self-hatreds in a bright harmonious certitude; lost her bad character and was made perfect; lost the regretted past, the apprehended future, and gained a timeless present of consummate happiness. She who could not paint, could not write, could not even sing in tune, became while she danced an artist; no, more than an artist; became a god, the creator of a new heaven and a new earth, a creator rejoicing in his creation and finding it good.
‘ ”Yes, sir, she’s my baby. No, sir . . .” ’ Gerry broke off his humming. ‘I won sixty pounds at poker last night,’ he said. ‘Pretty good, eh?’
She smiled up at him and nodded in a rapturous silence. Good, good — everything was wonderfully good.
*
‘And I can’t tell you,’ Staithes was saying, ‘how intensely I enjoy those advertisements.’ The muscles in his face were working as though for an anatomical demonstration. ‘The ones about bad breath and body odours.’
‘Hideous!’ Mrs Amberley shuddered. ‘Hideous! There’s only one Victorian convention I appreciate, and that’s the convention of not speaking about those things.’
‘Which is precisely why it’s such fun to speak about them,’ said Staithes, beaming at her between contracted sphincters. ‘Forcing humans to be fully, verbally conscious of their own and other people’s disgustingness. That’s the beauty of this kind of advertising. It shakes them into awareness.’
‘And into buying,’ put in Anthony. ‘You’re forgetting the profits.’
Staithes shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re incidental,’ he said; and it was obvious, Anthony reflected, as he watched him, it was obvious that the man was telling the truth. For him, the profits were incidental. Breaking down your protective convention,’ he went on, turning again to Mary, ‘that’s the real fun. Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can’t do without your fellow humans, and that, when you’re with them, they make you sick.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN. July 7th 1912
MRS FOXE WAS looking through her engagement book. The succession of committee meetings, of district visitings, of afternoons at the cripples’ playroom, darkened the pages. And in between whiles there would be calls, and tea at the vicarage and luncheon-parties in London. And yet (she knew it in advance) the total effect of the coming summer would be one of emptiness. However tightly crammed with activity, time always seemed strangely empty when Brian was away. In other years there had been a wedge of well-filled time each summer. But this July, after only a week or two at home, Brian was going to Germany. To learn the language. It was essential. She knew that he had to go; she earnestly wanted him to go. All the same, when the moment actually came for his departure, it was painful. She wished she could be frankly selfish and keep him at home.
‘This time tomorrow,’ she said, when Brian came into the room, ‘you’ll be driving across London to Liverpool Street.’
He nodded without speaking and, laying a hand on her shoulder, bent down and kissed her.
Mrs Foxe looked up at him and smiled. Then, forgetting for a moment that she had vowed not to say anything to him about her feelings, ‘It’ll be a sadly empty summer, I’m afraid,’ she said; and immediately reproached herself for having brought that expression of distress to his face; reproached herself even while, with a part of her being, she rejoiced to find him so responsibly loving, so sensitively concerned with her feelings. ‘Unless you fill it with your letters,’ she added by way of qualification. ‘You will write, won’t you?’
‘Of c-c-c . . . N-naturally, I’ll wr-write.’
Mrs Foxe proposed a walk; or what about a little drive in the dogcart? Embarrassed, Brian looked at his watch.
‘But I’m l-lunching with the Th-Thursleys,’ he answered uncomfortably. ‘There w-wouldn’t be much t-t-t . . . much leisure’ (how he hated these ridiculous circumlocutions!) ‘for a drive.’
‘But how silly of me!’ cried Mrs Foxe. ‘I’d quite forgotten your lunch.’ It was true that she had forgotten; and this sudden, fresh realization that for long hours, on this last day, she would have to do without him was like a wound. She made an effort to prevent any sign of the pain she felt from appearing on her face or sounding in her voice. ‘But there’ll be time at least for a stroll in the garden, won’t there?’
They walked out through the French window and down the long green alley between the herbaceous borders. It was a sunless day, but warm, almost sultry. Under the grey sky the flowers took on a brilliance that seemed somehow almost unnatural. Still silent, they turned at the end of the alley and walked back again.
‘I’m glad it’s Joan,’ said Mrs Foxe at last; ‘and I’m glad you care so much. Though in a way it’s a pity you met her when you did. Because, I’m afraid, it’ll be such a weary long time before you’ll be able to get married.’
Brian nodded without speaking.
‘It’ll be a testing time,’ she went on. ‘Difficult; not altogether happy perhaps. All the same’ (and her voice vibrated movingly), ‘I’m glad it happened, I’m glad,’ she repeated. ‘Because I believe in love.’ She believed in it, as the poor believe in a heaven of posthumous comfort and glory, because she had never known it. She had respected her husband, admired him for his achievements, had liked him for what was likeable in him, and, maternally, had pitied him for his weaknesses. But there had been no transfiguring passion, and his carnal approach had always remained for her an outrage, hardly supportable. She had never loved him. That was why her belief in love’s reality was so strong. Love had to exist in order that the unfavourable balance of her own personal experience might be at least vicariously redressed. Besides, there were the attestations of the poets; it did exist and was wonderful, holy, a revelation. ‘It’s a kind of special grace,’ she went on, ‘sent by God to help us, to make us stronger and better, to deliver us from evil. Saying no to the worst is easy when one has said yes to the best.’
Easy, Brian was thinking in the ensuing silence, even when one hasn’t said yes to the best. The woman who had come and sat at their table in the Café-Concert, when Anthony and he were learning French at Grenoble, two years before — it hadn’t been difficult to resist that temptation.
‘Tu as l’air bien vicieux,’ she had said to him in the first entr’acte; and to Anthony, ‘Il doit être terrible avec les femmes, hein?’ Then she had suggested that they should come home with her. ‘Tous les deux, j’ai une petite amie. Nous nous amuserons bien gentiment. On vous fera voir des choses drôles. Toi qui es si vicieux — ça t’amusera.’
No, that certainly hadn’t been difficult to resist, even though he had never set eyes on Joan at the time. The real temptations were not the worst, but the best. At Grenoble, it had been the best in literature. Et son ventre, et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne. . . . Elle se coula à mon côté, m’appela des noms les plus tendres et des noms les plus effroyablement grossiers, qui glissaient sur ses lèvres en suaves murmures. Puis elle se tût et commença à me donner ces baisers qu’elle savait. . . . The creations of the best stylists had proved to be far more dangerously attractive, far less easily resistible than the sordid realities of the Café-Concert. And now that he had said yes to the best possible reality, the appeal of the worst was even less effective, had ceased altogether to be anything remotely resembling a temptation. Such temptation as there was came once more from the best. It had been impossible to desire the low, vulgar, half-animal creature of the Café-Concert. But Joan was beautiful, Joan was refined, Joan shared his interests — and precisely for those reasons was desirable. Just because she was the best (and this for him was the paradox that it was so painful and bewildering to live through), he desired he
r in the wrong way, physically. . . .
‘Do you remember those lines of Meredith’s?’ said Mrs Foxe, breaking the silence. Meredith was one of her favourite authors. ‘From the Woods,’ she specified, affectionately abbreviating the title of the poem almost to a nickname. And she quoted:
‘Love, the great volcano, flings
Fires of lower earth to sky.
Love’s a kind of philosopher’s stone,’ she went on. ‘Not only does it deliver us; it also transforms. Dross into gold. Earth into heaven.’
Brian nodded affirmatively. And yet, he was thinking, those voluptuous and faceless bodies created by the stylists had actually come to assume Joan’s features. In spite of love, or just because of it, the succubi now had a name, a personality.
The stable clock struck twelve; and at the first stroke there was a noiseless explosion of doves, like snowflakes whirling up against the clotted darkness of the elms beyond.
‘The beauty of it!’ said Mrs Foxe with a kind of muted intensity.
But suppose, it suddenly occurred to Brian, suppose she were suddenly left with no money at all? And if Joan were as poor as that wretched woman at Grenoble, as hopelessly without an alternative resource?
Slowly the last bell note expired, and one by one the whirling doves dropped back on to their turreted cote above the clock.
‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs Foxe, ‘you ought to be starting if you’re going to get there punctually.’
Brian knew how reluctant his mother was to let him go; and this display of generosity produced in him a sense of guilt and, along with it (since he did not want to feel guilty), a certain resentment. ‘B-but I d-don’t need an hour,’ he said almost angrily, ‘to c-cycle three m-miles.’
A moment later he was feeling ashamed of himself for the note of irritation in his voice, and for the rest of the time he was with her he showed himself more than ordinarily affectionate.
At half past twelve he took his bicycle and rode over to the Thursleys’. The maid opened the nineteenth-century Gothic front door and he stepped into a faint smell of steamed pudding flavoured with cabbage. As usual. The vicarage always smelt of steamed pudding and cabbage. It was a symptom, he had discovered, of poverty and, as such, gave him a feeling of moral discomfort, as though he had done something wrong and were suffering from an uneasy conscience.
He was ushered into the drawing-room. Behaving as if he were some very distinguished old lady, Mrs Thursley rose from her writing-table and advanced to meet him. ‘Ah, dear Brian!’ she cried. Her professionally Christian smile was pearly with the flash of false teeth. ‘So nice to see you!’ She took and held his hand. ‘And your dear mother — how’s she? Sad because you’re going to Germany, I’m sure. We’re all sad, if it comes to that. You’ve got such a gift for making people miss you,’ she continued in the same complimentary strain, while Brian blushed and fidgeted in an agony of discomfort. Saying nice things to people’s faces, particularly to the faces of the rich, the influential, the potentially useful, was a habit with Mrs Thursley. A Christian habit she would have called it, if she had been pressed for an explanation. Loving one’s neighbour; seeing the good in everybody; creating an atmosphere of sympathy and trust. But below the level of the avowal, almost below the level of consciousness, she knew that most people were greedy for flattery, however outrageous, and were prepared, in one way or another, to pay for it.
‘Ah, but here’s Joan,’ she cried, interrupting her praise of him, and added, in a tone that was charged with sprightly meaning, ‘You won’t want to go on talking with her tiresome old mother — will he, Joanie?’
The two young people looked at one another in a speechless embarrassment.
The door suddenly flew open and Mr Thursley hurried into the room. ‘Look at this!’ he cried in a voice that trembled with rage, and held out a glass ink-pot. ‘How do you expect me to do my work with an eighth of an inch of sediment? Dipping, dipping, dipping the whole morning. Never able to write more than two words at a time. . . .’
‘Here’s Brian, Daddy,’ said Joan in the hope, which she knew in advance was vain, that the stranger’s presence might shame him into silence.
His pointed nose still white with rage, Mr Thursley glared at Brian, shook hands and, turning away, at once went on with his angry complaint. ‘It’s always like that in this house. How can one be expected to do serious work?’
‘Oh, God,’ Joan inwardly prayed, ‘make him stop, make him shut up.’
‘As if he couldn’t fill the pot himself!’ Brian was thinking. ‘Why doesn’t she tell him so?’
But it was impossible for Mrs Thursley to say or even think anything of the kind. He had his sermons, his articles in the Guardian, his studies in Neo-Platonism. How could he be expected to fill his own ink-pot? For her as well as for him it was obvious, it had become, after these five and twenty years of abjectly given and unreflectingly accepted slavery, completely axiomatic that he couldn’t do such a thing. Besides, if she were to suggest in any way that he wasn’t perfectly right, his anger would become still more violent. Goodness only knew what he mightn’t do or say — in front of Brian! It would be awful. She began to make excuses for the empty ink-pot. Abject excuses on her own behalf, on Joan’s, on her servants’. Her tone was at once deprecatory and soothing; she spoke as though she were dealing with a mixture between Jehovah and a very savage dog that might bite at any moment.
The gong — the Thursleys had a gong that would have been audible from end to end of a ducal mansion — rumbled up to a thunderous fortissimo that reduced even the vicar to silence. But as the sound ebbed, he began again.
‘It’s not as though I asked for very much,’ he said.
‘He’ll be quieter when he’s had something to eat,’ Mrs Thursley thought, and led the way into the dining-room, followed by Joan. Brian wanted the vicar to precede him; but even in his righteous anger Mr Thursley remembered his good manners. Laying his hand on Brian’s shoulder, he propelled him towards the door, keeping up all the time a long-range bombardment of his wife.
‘Only a little quiet, only the simplest material conditions for doing my work. The barest minimum. But I don’t get it. The house is as noisy as a railway station, and my ink-pot’s neglected till I have nothing but a little black mud to write with.’
Under the bombardment, Mrs Thursley walked as though shrunken and with bowed head. But Joan, Brian noticed, had gone stiff; her body was rigid and ungraceful with excess of tension.
In the dining-room they found the two boys, Joan’s younger brothers, already standing behind their chairs. At the sight of them, Mr Thursley reverted from his ink-pot to the noise in the house. ‘Like a railway station,’ he repeated, and the righteous indignation flared up in him with renewed intensity. ‘George and Arthur have been rushing up and down the stairs and round the garden the whole morning. Why can’t you keep them in order?’
They were all at their places now; Mrs Thursley at one end of the table, her husband at the other; the two boys on the left; Joan and Brian on her right. They stood there, waiting for the vicar to say grace.
‘Like hooligans,’ said Mr Thursley; the flames of wrath ran through him; he was filled with a tingling warmth, horribly delicious. ‘Like savages.’
Making an effort, he dropped his long cleft chin on his chest and was silent. His nose was still deathly pale with anger; like marine animals in an aquarium, the nostrils contracted and expanded in a pulse of regular but fluttering movement. In his right hand he still held the ink-pot.
‘Benedictus benedicat, per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum,’ he said at last in his praying voice, which was deep, with the suspicion of a tremolo, and charged with transcendental significance.
With the noise of pent-up movement suddenly released, they all sat down.
‘Screaming and howling,’ said Mr Thursley, reverting from the tone of piety to his original shrill harshness. ‘How am I expected to do my work?’ With an indignant bang, he put the ink-pot down on the table in fro
nt of him, then unfolded his napkin.
At the other end of the table Mrs Thursley was cutting up the mock duck with extraordinary rapidity.
‘Pass that to your father,’ she said to the nearest boy. It was essential to get him eating as soon as possible.
A second or two later the parlour-maid was offering Mr Thursley the vegetable. Her apron and cap were stiff with starch and she was as well drilled as a guardsman. The vegetable dishes were hideous, but had been expensive; the spoons were of heavy Victorian silver. With them, the vicar helped himself first to boiled potatoes, then to cabbage, mashed and moulded into damp green bricks.
Still indulging himself in the luxury of anger, ‘Women simply don’t understand what serious work is,’ Mr Thursley went on; then started eating.
When she had helped the others to their mock duck, Mrs Thursley ventured a remark. ‘Brian’s just off to Germany,’ she said.
Mr Thursley looked up, chewing his food very rapidly with his front teeth, like a rabbit. ‘What part of Germany?’ he asked, darting a sharp inquisitorial look at Brian. His nose had flushed again to its normal colour.
‘M-marburg.’
‘Where there’s the university?’
Brian nodded.
Startlingly, with a noise like coke being poured down a chute, Mr Thursley burst out laughing. ‘Don’t take to beer-drinking with the students,’ he said.
The storm was over. In part out of the thankfulness of her heart, in part to make her husband feel that she had found his joke irresistible, Mrs Thursley also laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ she cried, don’t take to that!’