Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘And you think all that would have happened to me?’ asked Mary.
‘What else could have happened? You don’t imagine you’d have gone about buying Pascins in Quetta?’
Mary laughed.
‘Or reading Max Jacob in Rawalpindi? You’d have been a mem-sahib like all the other mem-sahibs. A bit more bored and discontented than most of them, perhaps. But still a mem-sahib.’
‘I suppose so,’ she agreed. ‘But is one so hopelessly at the mercy of circumstances?’
He nodded.
‘You don’t think I’d have escaped?’
‘I can’t see why.’
‘But that means there isn’t really any such thing as me. Me,’ she repeated, laying a hand on her breast. ‘I don’t really exist.’
‘No, of course you don’t. Not in that absolute sense. You’re a chemical compound, not an element.’
‘But if one doesn’t really exist, one wonders why . . .’ she hesitated.
‘Why one makes such a fuss about things,’ Anthony suggested. ‘All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn’t really a self — just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course,’ he went on, ‘once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don’t make a fuss — that is, if you’re sensible. Like me,’ he added, smiling.
There was a silence. ‘You don’t make a fuss,’ Mrs Amberley repeated to herself, and thought of Gerry Watchett. ‘You don’t make a fuss.’ But how was it possible not to make a fuss, when he was so stupid, so selfish, so brutal, and at the same time so excruciatingly desirable — like water in the desert, like sleep after insomnia? She hated him; but the thought that in a few days he would be there, staying in the house, sent a prickling sensation of warmth through her body. She shut her eyes and drew a deep breath.
Still carrying the kitten, like a furry baby, in her arms, Helen had walked away across the lawn. She wanted to be alone, out of ear-shot of that laughter, those jarringly irrelevant voices. ‘Seven thousand days,’ she repeated again and again. And it was not only the declining sun that made everything seem so solemnly and richly beautiful; it was also the thought of the passing days, of human limitations, of the final unescapable dissolution. ‘Seven thousand days,’ she said aloud, ‘seven thousand days.’ The tears came into her eyes; she pressed the sleeping kitten more closely to her breast.
*
Savernake, the White Horse, Oxford; and in between whiles the roar and screech of Gerry’s Bugatti, the rush of the wind, the swerves and bumps, the sickening but at the same time delicious terrors of excessive speed. And now they were back again. After an age, it seemed; and at the same time it was as though they had never been away. The car came to a halt; but Helen made no move to alight.
‘What’s the matter?’ Gerry asked. ‘Why don’t you get out?’
‘It seems so terribly final,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Like breaking a spell. Like stepping out of the magic circle.’
‘Magic?’ he repeated questioningly. ‘What kind? White or black?’
Helen laughed. ‘Piebald. Absolutely heavenly and absolutely awful. You know, Gerry, you ought to be put in jail, the way you drive. Or in a lunatic asylum. Crazy and criminal. But I adored it,’ she added, as she opened the door and stepped out.
‘Good!’ was all he answered, while he gave her a smile that was as studiedly unamorous as he could make it. He threw the car into gear and, in a stink of burnt castor oil, shot off round the house, towards the garage.
Charming! he was thinking. And how wise he had been to take that jolly, honest-to-God, big-brother line with her! Ground bait. Getting the game accustomed to you. She’d soon be eating out of his hand. The real trouble, of course, was Mary. Tiresome bitch! he thought, with a sudden passion of loathing. Jealous, suspicious, interfering. Behaving as though he were her private property. And greedy, insatiable. Perpetually thrusting herself upon him — thrusting that ageing body of hers. His face, as he manoeuvred the car into the garage, was puckered into the folds of distaste. But thank God, he went on to reflect, she’d got this chill on the liver, or whatever it was. That ought to keep her quiet for a bit, keep her out of the way.
Without troubling to take off her coat, and completely forgetting her mother’s illness and for the moment her very existence, Helen crossed the hall and, almost running, burst into the kitchen.
‘Where’s Tompy, Mrs Weeks?’ she demanded of the cook. The effect of the sunshine and the country and Gerry’s Bugatti had been such that it was now absolutely essential to her that she should take the kitten in her arms. Immediately. ‘I must have Tompy,’ she insisted. And by the way of excuse and explanation, ‘I didn’t have time to see him this morning,’ she added; ‘we started in such a hurry.’
‘Tompy doesn’t seem to be well, Miss Helen.’ Mrs Weeks put away her sewing.
‘Not well?’
‘I put him in here,’ Mrs Weeks went on, getting up from her Windsor chair and leading the way to the scullery. ‘It’s cooler. He seemed to feel the heat so. As though he was feverish like. I’m sure I don’t know what’s the matter with him,’ she concluded in a tone half of complaint, half of sympathy. She was sorry for Tompy. But she was also sorry for herself because Tompy had given her all this trouble.
The kitten was lying in the shadow, under the sink. Crouching down beside the basket, Helen stretched out her hand to take him; then, with a little exclamation of horror, withdrew it, as though from the contact of something repellent.
‘But what has happened to him?’ she cried.
The little cat’s tabby coat had lost all its smoothness, all its silky lustre, and was matted into damp uneven tufts. The eyes were shut and gummy with a yellow discharge. A running at the nose had slimed the beautifully patterned fur of the face. The absurd lovely little Tompy she had played with only yesterday, the comic and exquisite Tompy she had held up, pathetically helpless, in one hand, had rubbed her face against, had stared into the eyes of, was gone, and in his place lay a limp unclean little rag of living refuse. Like those kidneys, it suddenly occurred to her with a qualm of disgust; and at once she felt ashamed of herself for having had the thought, for having, in that first gesture of recoil, automatically acted upon the thought even before she had consciously had it.
‘How beastly I am!’ she thought. ‘Absolutely beastly!’
Tompy was sick, miserable, dying perhaps. And she had been too squeamish even to touch him. Making an effort to overcome her distaste, she reached out once more, picked up the little cat, and with the fingers of her free hand caressed (with what a sickening reluctance!) the dank bedraggled fur. The tears came into her eyes, overflowed, ran down her cheeks.
‘It’s too awful, it’s too awful,’ she repeated in a breaking voice. Poor little Tompy! Beautiful, adorable, funny little Tompy! Murdered — no; worse than murdered: reduced to a squalid little lump of dirt; for no reason, just senselessly; and on this day of all days, this heavenly day with the clouds over the White Horse, the sunshine between the leaves in Savernake forest. And now, to make it worse, she was disgusted by the poor little beast, couldn’t bear to touch him, as though he were one of those filthy kidneys — she, who had pretended to love him, who did love him, she insisted to herself. But it was no good her holding him like this and stroking him; it made no difference to what she was really feeling. She might perform the gesture of overcoming her disgust; but the disgust was still there. In spite of the love.
She lifted a streaming face to Mrs Weeks. ‘What shall we do?’
Mrs Weeks shook her head. ‘I never found there was much you could do,’ she said. ‘Not for cats.’
‘But there must be something.’
‘Nothing except leave them alone,’ insisted Mrs Weeks, with a pessimism evidently reinforced by her determination not to be bothered. Then, touched by the spectacle of Helen’s misery, ‘He’ll be all right, dear,’ she added consolingly. ‘There’s no
need to cry. Just let him sleep it off.’
Footsteps sounded on the flagstones of the stable yard, and through the open window came the notes of ‘Yes, sir, she’s my baby,’ whistled slightly out of rune. Helen straightened herself up from her crouching position and, leaning out, ‘Gerry!’ she called; then added, in response to his expression of surprised commiseration, ‘Something awful has happened.’
In his large powerful hands Tompy seemed more miserably tiny than ever. But how gentle he was, and how efficient! Watching him, as he swabbed the little cat’s eyes, as he wiped away the slime from the nostrils, Helen was amazed by the delicate precision of his movements. She herself, she reflected with a heightened sense of her own shameful ineptitude, had been incapable of doing anything except stroke Tompy’s fur and feel disgusted. Hopeless, quite hopeless! And when he asked for her help in getting Tompy to swallow half an aspirin tablet crushed in milk, she bungled everything and spilt the medicine.
‘Perhaps I can do it better by myself,’ he said, and took the spoon from her. The cup of her humiliation was full. . . .
*
Mary Amberley was indignant. Here she was, feverish and in pain, worrying herself, what was more, into higher fever, worse pain, with the thought of Gerry’s dangerous driving. And here was Helen, casually strolling into her room after having been in the house for more than two hours — more than two hours without having had the common decency to come and see how she was, more than two hours while her mother — her mother, mind you! — had lain there, in an agony of distress, thinking that they must have had an accident.
‘But Tompy was dying,’ Helen explained. ‘He’s dead now.’ Her face was very pale, her eyes red with tears.
‘Well, if you prefer a wretched cat to your mother . . .’
‘Besides, you were asleep. If you hadn’t been asleep, you’d have heard the car coming back.’
‘Now you’re begrudging me my sleep,’ said Mrs Amberley bitterly. ‘Aren’t I to be allowed a moment’s respite from pain? Besides,’ she added, ‘I wasn’t asleep. I was delirious. I’ve been delirious several times today. Of course I didn’t hear the car.’ Her eyes fell on the bottle of Somnifaine standing on the table by her bed, and the suspicion that Helen might also have noticed it made her still more angry. ‘I always knew you were selfish,’ she went on. ‘But I must say I didn’t think you’d be quite as bad as this.’
At another time Helen would have flared up in angry self-defence, or else, convicted of guilt, would have burst out crying. But today she was feeling too miserable to be able to shed any more tears, too much subdued by shame and unhappiness to resent even the most flagrant injustice. Her silence exasperated Mrs Amberley still further.
‘I always used to think,’ she resumed, ‘that you were only selfish from thoughtlessness. But now I see that it’s heartlessness. Plain heartlessness. Here am I — having sacrificed the best years of my life to you; and what do I get in return?’ Her voice trembled as she asked the question. She was convinced of the reality of that sacrifice, profoundly moved by the thought of its extent, its martyr-like enormity. ‘The most cynical indifference. I might die in a ditch; but you wouldn’t care. You’d be much more upset about your cat. And now go away,’ she almost shouted, ‘go away! I know my temperature’s gone up. Go away.’
*
After a lonely dinner — for Helen was keeping her room on the plea of a headache — Gerry went up to sit with Mrs Amberley. He was particularly charming that evening, and so affectionately solicitous that Mary forgot all her accumulated grounds of complaint and fell in love with him all over again, and for another set of reasons — not because he was so handsome, so easily and insolently dominating, such a ruthless and accomplished lover, but because he was kind, thoughtful, and affectionate, was everything, in a word, she had previously known he wasn’t.
Half past ten struck. He rose from his chair. ‘Time for your spot of shut-eye.’
Mary protested; he was firm — for her own good.
Thirty drops were the normal dose of Somnifaine; but he measured out forty-five, so as to make quite sure of her sleeping, made her drink, then tucked her up (‘like an old Nanny,’ she cried laughing with pleasure, as he busied himself round the bed) and, after kissing her good night with an almost material tenderness, turned out the light and left her.
The clock of the village church sounded eleven — how sadly, Helen thought as she listened to the strokes of the distant bell, how lonely! It was as though she were listening to the voice of her own spirit, reverberated in some mysterious way from the walls of the enclosing night. One, two, three, four . . . Each sweet, cracked note seemed more hopelessly mournful, seemed to rise from the depths of a more extreme solitude, than the last. Tompy had died, and she hadn’t even been capable of giving him a spoonful of milk and crushed aspirin, hadn’t had the strength to overcome her disgust.
Selfish and heartless: her mother was quite right. But lonely as well as selfish, all alone among the senseless malignities that had murdered poor little Tompy; and her heartlessness spoke with the despairing voice of that bell; night was empty and enormous all around.
‘Helen!’
She started and turned her head. The room was impenetrably black.
‘It’s me,’ Gerry’s voice continued. ‘I was so worried about you. Are you feeling better?’
Her first surprise and alarm had given place to a feeling of resentment that he should intrude upon the privacy of her unhappiness. ‘You needn’t have bothered,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m quite all right.’
Enclosed in his faint aura of Turkish tobacco, of peppermint-flavoured tooth-paste and bay rum, he approached invisibly. Through the blanket, a groping hand touched her shin; then the springs creaked and tilted under his weight as he sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘Felt a bit responsible,’ he went on. ‘All that looping the loop!’ The tone of his voice implied the unseen smile, suggested a whimsical and affectionate twinkling of hidden eyes.
She made no comment; there was a long silence. A bad start, Gerry thought, and frowned to himself in the darkness; then began again on another tack.
‘I can’t help thinking of that miserable little Tompy,’ he said in a different voice. ‘Extraordinary how upsetting it is when an animal gets ill like that. It seems frightfully unfair.’
In a few minutes she was crying, and he had an excuse to console her.
Gently, as he had handled Tompy, and with all the tenderness that had so much touched Mrs Amberley, he stroked her hair, and later, when the sobs began to subside, drew the fingers of his other hand along her bare arm. Again and again, with the patient regularity of a nurse lulling her charge to sleep; again and again . . . Three hundred times at least, he was thinking, before he risked any gesture that could possibly be interpreted as amorous. Three hundred times; and even then the caresses would have to deviate by insensible degrees, as though by a series of accidents, till gradually, unintentionally, the hand that was now on her arm would come at last to be brushing, with the same maternal persistence, against her breast, while the fingers that came and went methodically among the curls would have strayed to the ear, and from the ear across the cheek to the lips, and would linger there lightly, chastely, but charged with the stuff of kisses, proxies, and forerunners of the mouth that would ultimately come down on hers, through the darkness, for the reward of its long patience.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE. May 20th 1931
IT WAS ANOTHER ‘knock’. Fitzimmons, Jefferies, Jack Johnson, Carpentier, Dempsey, Gene Tunney — the champions came and went; but the metaphor in which Mr Beavis described his successive bereavements remained unaltered.
Yes, a hard knock. And yet, it seemed to Anthony, there was a note almost of triumph in his father’s reminiscences, over the luncheon table, of Uncle James as a schoolboy.
‘Poor James . . . such curly hair he had then . . . nos et mutamur.’ The commiseration and regret were mingled with a certain satisfaction — the satis
faction of an old man who finds himself still alive, still able to attend the funerals of his contemporaries, his juniors.
‘Two years,’ he insisted. ‘There was the best part of two years between James and me. I was Beavis major at school.’
He shook his head mournfully; but the old, tired eyes had brightened with an irrepressible light. ‘Poor James!’ He sighed. ‘We hadn’t seen one another much these last years. Not since his conversion. How did he do it? It beats me. A Catholic — he of all people . . .’
Anthony said nothing. But after all, he was thinking, it wasn’t so surprising. The poor old thing had grown up as a Bradlaugh atheist. Ought to have been blissfully happy, parading his cosmic defiance, his unyielding despair. But he had had the bad luck to be a homosexual at a time when one couldn’t avow it even to oneself. Ingrowing pederasty — it had poisoned his whole life. Had turned that metaphysical and delightfully Pickwickian despair into real, common or garden misery. Misery and neurasthenia; the old man had been half mad, really. (Which hadn’t prevented him from being a first-rate actuary.) Then, during the war, the clouds had lifted. One could be kind to wounded soldiers — be kind pro patria and with a blameless conscience. Anthony remembered Uncle James’s visits to him in hospital. He had come almost every day. Loaded with gifts for a dozen adopted nephews as well as for the real one. On his thin, melancholy face there had been, in those days, a perpetual smile. But happiness never lasts. The armistice had come; and, after those four years in paradise, hell had seemed blacker than ever. In 1923 he had turned papist. It was only to be expected.