Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘The well!’ said Dr. Obispo, remembering a passage in the Fifth Earl’s notebook.
He almost ran towards the tunnel on the further side of the room. Ten feet from the entrance, his progress was barred by a heavy, nail-studded oak door. Dr. Obispo took out his bunch of keys, chose at random and opened the door at the first trial. They were on the threshold of a small oblong chamber. His bull’s-eye revealed a second door on the opposite wall. He started at once towards it.
‘Canned beef!’ said Mr. Stoyte in astonishment, as he ran the beam of his lantern over the rows of tins and jars on the shelves of a tall dresser that occupied almost the whole of one of the sides of the room. ‘Biloxi Shrimps. Sliced Pineapple. Boston Baked Beans,’ he read out, then turned towards Dr. Obispo. ‘I tell you, Obispo, I don’t like it.’
The Baby had taken out a handkerchief saturated in ‘Shocking’ and was holding it to her nose. ‘The smell!’ she said indistinctly through its folds, and shuddered with disgust. ‘The smell!’
Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, was trying his keys on the lock of the other door. It opened at last. A draught of warm air flowed in, and at once the little room was filled with an intolerable stench. ‘Christ!’ said Mr. Stoyte, and behind her handkerchief the Baby let out a scream of nauseated horror.
Dr. Obispo made a grimace and advanced along the stream of foul air. At the end of a short corridor was a third door, of iron bars this time, like the door (Dr. Obispo reflected) of a death-cell in a prison. He flashed his lantern between the bars, into the foetid darkness beyond.
From the little room Mr. Stoyte and the Baby suddenly heard an astonished exclamation and then, after a moment’s silence, a violent, explosive guffaw, succeeded by peal after peal of Dr. Obispo’s ferocious, metallic laughter. Paroxysm upon uncontrollable paroxysm, the noise reverberated back and forth in the confined space. The hot, stinking air vibrated with a deafening and almost maniacal merriment.
Followed by Virginia, Mr. Stoyte crossed the room and hastened through the open door into the narrow tunnel beyond. Dr. Obispo’s laughter was getting on his nerves. ‘What the hell …?’ he shouted angrily as he advanced; then broke off in the middle of the sentence. ‘What’s that?’ he whispered.
‘A foetal ape,’ Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.
‘Holy Mary,’ the Baby began behind her handkerchief.
Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.
‘A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,’ Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. ‘It’s too good!’ Laughter overtook him again. ‘Just look at his face!’ he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.
Suddenly, out of the black darkness, another simian face emerged into the beam of the lantern — a face only lightly hairy, so that it was possible to see, not only the ridge above the eyes, but also the curious distortions of the lower jaws, the accretions of bone in front of the ears. Clothed in an old check ulster and some glass beads, a body followed the face into the light.
‘It’s a woman,’ said Virginia, almost sick with the horrified disgust she felt at the sight of those pendulous and withered dugs.
The doctor exploded into even noisier merriment.
Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. ‘Who are they?’ he demanded.
Dr. Obispo wiped his eyes and drew a deep breath; the storm of his laughter was flattened to a heaving calm. As he opened his mouth to answer Mr. Stoyte’s question, the creature in the shirt suddenly turned upon the creature in the ulster and hit out at her head. The palm of the enormous hand struck the side of the face. The creature in the ulster uttered a scream of pain and rage, and shrank back out of the light. From the shadow came a shrill, furious gibbering that seemed perpetually to tremble on the verge of articulate blasphemy.
‘The one with the Order of the Garter,’ said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, ‘he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.’
‘But what’s happened to them?’
‘Just time,’ said Dr. Obispo airily.
‘Time?’
‘I don’t know how old the female is,’ Dr. Obispo went on. ‘But the Earl there — let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.’
From the shadows the shrill voice continued to scream its all but articulate abuse. Impassibly the Fifth Earl scratched the sore on his leg and stared at the light.
Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates … one of the mechanisms of evolution … the older an anthropoid, the stupider … senility and sterol poisoning … the intestinal flora of the carp … the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery … no sterol poisoning, no senility … no death, perhaps, except through an accident … but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity … It was the finest joke he had ever known.
Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor. A shriller chattering arose from the darkness. He turned in the direction from which it came and bellowed the guttural distortions of almost forgotten obscenities.
‘No need of any further experiment,’ Dr. Obispo was saying. ‘We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,’ he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.
Mr. Stoyte said nothing.
On the other side of the bars, the Fifth Earl rose to his feet, stretched, scratched, yawned, then turned and took a couple of steps towards the boundary that separated the light from the darkness. His housekeeper’s chattering became more agitated and rapid. Affecting to pay no attention, the Earl halted, smoothed the broad ribbon of his order with the palm of his hand, then fingered the jewel at his neck, making as he did so a curious humming noise that was like a simian memory of the serenade in Don Giovanni. The creature in the ulster whimpered apprehensively, and her voice seemed to retreat further into the shadows. Suddenly, with a ferocious yell, the Fifth Earl sprang forward, out of the narrow universe of lantern light into the darkness beyond. There was a rush of footsteps, a succession of yelps; then a scream and the sound of blows and more screams; then no more screams, but only a stertorous growling in the dark and little cries.
Mr. Stoyte broke the silence. ‘How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?’ he said in a slow, hesitating voice. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once … there’d be a long time while a person … well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock — well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?’ he insisted.
Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again.
Time Must Have a Stop
Time Must Have a Stop was first published in the USA in 1944 by Harper & Brothers and released a year later in Britain by Chatto & Windus. Huxley was immensely proud of the novel and considered it to be one of his most successful works at merging together his philosophical ideas with a good narrative. The title of book is taken from the death speech by Hotspur (Harry Percy) i
n Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One. The novel introduces seventeen-year-old poet, Sebastian Barnack, whose frivolous and decadent lifestyle frustrates and enrages his father. Sebastian is a strikingly handsome young man, who cares much for his appearance, so when his father refuses to help him acquire expensive formal wear for a friend’s party, he decides to leave for Italy with his debauched and hedonistic uncle to acquire the funds for his clothing. It is during this holiday that Sebastian begins to question his beliefs and values. He develops a close relationship with Bruno, a profoundly religious bookshop owner and is inspired to pursue a different path in life.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
EPILOGUE
The title of the novel was taken from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1
CHAPTER ONE
SEBASTIAN BARNACK CAME out of the reading room of the public library and paused in the vestibule to put on his shabby overcoat. Looking at him, Mrs. Ockham felt a sword in her heart. This small and exquisite creature with the seraphic face and the pale curly hair was the living image of her own, her only, her dead and vanished darling.
The boy’s lips were moving, she noticed, as he struggled into his coat. Talking to himself — just as her Frankie used to do. He turned and began to walk past the bench on which she was sitting, towards the door.
‘It’s a raw evening,’ she said aloud, acting on a sudden impulse to detain this living phantom, to turn the sharp memory in her wounded heart.
Startled out of his preoccupying thoughts, Sebastian halted, turned and, for a second or two, stared at her uncomprehending. Then he took in the significance of that yearningly maternal smile. His eyes hardened. This sort of thing had happened before. She was treating him as though he were one of those delicious babies one pats the heads of in perambulators. He’d teach the old bitch! But as usual he lacked the necessary courage and presence of mind. In the end he just feebly smiled and said, Yes, it was a raw evening.
Mrs. Ockham, meanwhile, had opened her bag and pulled out a white cardboard box.
‘Would you like one of these?’
She held out the box. It was French chocolate, Frankie’s favourite — her own too, for that matter. Mrs. Ockham had a weakness for sweet things.
Sebastian considered her uncertainly. Her accent was all right, and in their rather shapeless tweedy way the clothes were substantial and of good quality. But she was fat and old — at least forty, he guessed. He hesitated, torn between a desire to put this tiresome creature in her place and a no less urgent desire for those delicious langues de chat. Like a pug, he said to himself, as he looked at that blunt, soft face of hers. A pink, hairless pug with a bad complexion. After which he felt that he could accept the chocolates without compromising his integrity.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and gave her one of those enchanting smiles which middle-aged ladies always found completely irresistible.
To be seventeen, to have a mind which one felt to be agelessly adult, and to look like a Della Robbia angel of thirteen — it was an absurd and humiliating fate. But last Christmas he had read Nietzsche, and since then he had known that he must Love his Fate. Amor Fad — but tempered with a healthy cynicism. If people were ready to pay one for looking less than one’s age, why not give them what they wanted?
‘How good!’
He smiled at her again, and the corners of his mouth were brown with chocolate. The sword in Mrs. Ockham’s heart gave another agonizing twist.
‘Take the whole box,’ she said. Her voice trembled, her eyes were bright with tears.
‘No, no, I couldn’t …’
‘Take it,’ she insisted, ‘take it.’ And she pressed it into his hand — into Frankie’s hand.
‘Oh, thank you….’ It was just what Sebastian had hoped, even expected. He had had experience of these sentimental old dodoes.
‘I had a boy once,’ Mrs. Ockham went on brokenly. ‘So like you he was. The same hair and eyes …’ The tears overflowed on to her cheeks. She took off her glasses and wiped them; then, blowing her nose, she got up and hurried into the reading room.
Sebastian stood looking after her until she was out of sight. All at once he felt horribly guilty and mean. He looked at the box in his hand. A boy had died in order that he might have these langues de chat: and if his own mother were alive, she would be nearly as old now as that poor creature in the spectacles. And if he had died, she’d have been just as unhappy and sentimental. Impulsively, he made a movement to throw the chocolates away; then checked himself. No, that would be just silliness and superstition. He slipped the box into his pocket and walked out into the foggy twilight.
‘Millions and millions,’ he whispered to himself; and the enormity of the evil seemed to grow with every repetition of the word. All over the world, millions of men and women lying in pain; millions dying, at this very moment; millions more grieving over them, their faces distorted, like that poor old hag’s, the tears running down their cheeks. And millions starving, millions frightened, and sick, and anxious. Millions being cursed and kicked and beaten by other brutal millions. And everywhere the stink of garbage and drink and unwashed bodies, everywhere the blight of stupidity and ugliness. The horror was always there, even when one happened to be feeling well and happy — always there, just round the corner and behind almost every door.
As he walked down Haverstock Hill, Sebastian felt himself evercome by a vast impersonal sadness. Nothing else seemed to exist now, or to matter, except death and agony.
And then that phrase of Keats’s came back to him— ‘The giant agony of the world!’ The giant agony. He racked his memory to find the other lines. ‘None may usurp this height …’ How did it go?
None may usurp this height, returned that shade,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest….
How exactly right that was! And perhaps Keats had thought of it one cold spring evening, walking down the hill from Hampstead, just as he himself was doing now. Walking down, and stopping sometimes to cough up a morsel of his lungs and think of his own death as well as of other people’s. Sebastian began again, whispering articulately to himself.
None may usurp this height, returned that shade,
But those …
But, good heavens, how awful it sounded when you spoke it aloud! None may usurp this height, returned that shade, but those … How could he have let a thing like that get past him? But, of course, old Keats was pretty careless sometimes. And being a genius didn’t preserve him from the most ghastly lapses into bad taste. There were things in Endymion that made one shudder. And when one reflected that it was supposed to be Greek … Sebastian smiled to himself with compassionate irony. One of these days he’d show them what could be done with Greek mythology. Meanwhile, his mind went back to the phrases that had come to him just now in the library, while he was reading Tarn’s book on Hellenistic civilization. ‘Ignore the dried figs!’ that was how it was to begin. ‘Ignore the dried figs …’ But, after all, dried figs can be good figs. Fo
r slaves there would never be anything but the spoilage and refuse of the crop. ‘Ignore the stale figs,’ then. Besides, in this particular context of sound, ‘stale’ carried the proper vowel.
Ignore the stale figs, the weevils and the whippings,
The old men terrified of death …
But that was horribly flat. Steam-rolled and macadamized, like bad Wordsworth. What about ‘scared of dying’?
The old men scared of dying, the women …
He hesitated, wondering how to sum up that dismal life of the Gyneceum. Then, from the mysterious source of light and energy at the back of his skull, out popped the perfect phrase: ‘… the women in cages.’
Sebastian smiled at the image that bobbed up — a whole zoo of ferocious and undomesticable girls, a deafening aviary of dowagers. But these would be for another poem — a poem in which he would take vengeance on the whole female sex. At the moment his business was with Hellas — with the historical squalor that was Greece and the imaginary glory. Imaginary, of course, so far as a whole people was concerned, but surely realizable by an individual, a poet above all. Some day, somehow, somewhere, that glory would be within his grasp; of that Sebastian was convinced. But meanwhile it was important not to make a fool of oneself. The passion of his nostalgia would have to be tempered, in the expression, with a certain irony, the splendour of the longed-for ideal with a spice of the absurd. Forgetting all about the dead boy and the giant agony of the world, he helped himself to a langue de chat from the store in his pocket and, his mouth full, resumed the intoxicating labour of composition.
Ignore the stale figs, the weevils and the whippings,
The old men scared of dying, the women in cages.
So much for history. Now for imagination.
In a perpetual June …
He shook his head. ‘Perpetual’ was like the headmaster talking about the climate of Ecuador in those asinine geography lessons of his. ‘Chronic’ suggested itself as an alternative. The associations with varicose veins and the language of Cockney charwomen delighted him.