Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Of the nightmare that followed Sebastian could not think without a shudder. That rubber corset and, when they were in his room, her body, as unresponsive as its carapace. The bored perfunctory kisses, and the breath that stank of beer and caries and onions. His own excitement, so frenzied as to be almost instantly self-stultifying; and then, irremediable, the hideously sober coldness that brought with it a disgust for what lay there beside him, a horror as though for a corpse — and the corpse laughed and offered him its derisive condolences.
On the way down to the front door, the girl asked to look at the drawing-room. Her eyes opened wide as the light revealed its modest splendours. ‘Hand painted!’ she said admiringly, crossing over to the fireplace and running her fingers over the varnish of the presentation portrait of Sebastian’s grandfather. That seemed to settle it for her. She turned to Sebastian and announced that she wanted another quid. But he hadn’t got another quid. The girl in blue sat down emphatically on the sofa. Very well, then; she’d stay there until he found one. Sebastian emptied his pockets of small change. Three and elevenpence. No, she insisted, nothing less than a quid; and in a hoarse contralto she started to chant the words, ‘A quid, a quid, a quid-o,’ to the tune of ‘When Irish Eyes …’
‘Don’t do that,’ he begged. The chant swelled to full-throated song. ‘A quid, a quid, a quid-o, a lovely, lovely quid …’ Almost in tears, Sebastian interrupted her: there was a servant sleeping upstairs, and even the neighbours might hear. ‘Well, let them all come,’ said the girl in blue. ‘They’re welcome.’ ‘But what would they say?’ Sebastian’s voice quavered as he spoke, his lips were trembling. The girl looked at him contemptuously, and broke out into her loud, ugly laugh. ‘Serve you right, cry-baby: that’s what they’d say. Wanting to go with girls, when he ought to be staying at ‘ome and letting ’is mother blow ’is nose for him.’ She started to beat time. ‘Now, one, two, three. All together, boys. “When Irish quids are quidding …”’
On the little table by the sofa Sebastian caught sight of that gold-mounted tortoise-shell paper-knife which had been presented to Uncle Fred on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his association with the City and Far Eastern Investment Company. Worth much more than a pound. He picked it up and tried to press it into her hands. ‘Take this,’ he implored. ‘Yes, and ‘ave them call the p’lice the moment I try to sell it.’ She pushed it aside. In another key and more loudly than ever, she began again. ‘When Irish quids …’ ‘Stop,’ he cried despairingly, ‘stop! I’ll get you the money. I swear I will.’ The girl in blue broke off and looked at her wrist-watch. ‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ she said. Sebastian hurried out of the room and up the stairs. A minute later he was hammering on one of the doors that gave on to the fourth-floor landing. ‘Ellen, Ellen!’ There was no answer. Deaf as a post. Damn the woman, damn her! He knocked again and shouted. Suddenly, and without any warning, the door opened and there was Ellen in a grey flannelette dressing-gown, with her grey hair done up into two little pigtails tied with tape, and no false teeth, so that her round, apple-like face seemed to have caved in and, when she asked him if the house was on fire, he could hardly understand what she said. Making a great effort, he turned on his most angelic smile — the smile with which he had always managed to get round her, all his life. ‘Sorry, Ellen. I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t so urgent.’ ‘So what?’ she asked, turning her better ear towards him. ‘Do you think you could lend me a pound?’ She looked blank, and he had to yell at her. ‘A POUND.’ ‘A pound?’ she echoed in amazement. ‘I borrowed it from a friend of mine, and he’s waiting at the door.’ Toothlessly, but still with her north-country intonation, Ellen enquired why he couldn’t pay it back tomorrow. ‘Because he’s going away,’ Sebastian explained. ‘Going to Liverpool.’ ‘Oh, to Liverpool,’ said Ellen in another tone, as though that cast quite a new light on the matter. ‘Is he taking a ship?’ she asked. ‘Yes, to America,’ Sebastian shouted, ‘to Philadelphia.’ Off to Philadelphia in the morning. He glanced at his watch. Only another minute or thereabouts, and she’d be starting that other Irish song again. He gave Ellen a yet more enchanting smile. ‘Could you manage it, Ellen?’ The old woman smiled back at him, took his hand and laid it for a moment against her cheek, then without a word she turned back into the room to look for her purse.
It was when they came back from that week-end — on the Monday afternoon, to be precise, while he was walking home with her from old Pfeiffer’s — that he had first told Susan about Mrs. Esdaile. Exquisite, cultured, wildly voluptuous Esdaile in the arms of her triumphant young lover — the reverse of that medal whose other, real face bore the image of the girl in blue and a nauseated child, abject and blubbering.
At the corner of Glanvil Place they parted company.
‘You go straight home,’ said Sebastian, breaking the long silence. ‘I’m going to see if Father’s in.’ And without waiting for Susan’s comments, he turned and quickly walked away.
Susan stood there looking after him as he hurried down the street, so frail and helpless, but marching with such desperate resolution towards inevitable failure. For, of course, if the poor boy imagined he could get the better of Uncle John, he was just asking to be hurt again.
Under the street lamp at the corner, the pale hair came to life like an aureole of tousled flame; then he turned and was lost to sight. And that was life, Susan reflected as she walked on — a succession of street corners. You met with something — something strange, something beautiful and desirable; and the next moment you were at another corner; it had turned and was gone. And even when it didn’t turn, it was in love with Mrs. Esdaile.
She mounted the steps of number eighteen, and rang the bell. Ellen opened the door and, before admitting her, made her wipe her feet again on the mat.
‘Can’t have you muddying my carpets,’ she said in her ordinary tone of grumbling affection.
On her way upstairs, Susan looked in to say good-evening to her mother. Mrs. Poulshot seemed preoccupied, and her kiss was perfunctory.
‘Try not to do anything to annoy your father,’ she recommended. ‘He’s feeling a bit out of sorts this evening.’
Oh God, thought Susan, who had suffered ever since she could remember from those moods of his.
‘And change into your pale blue,’ Mrs. Poulshot added. ‘I want Uncle Eustace to see you at your prettiest.’
A fat lot she cared if Uncle Eustace thought her pretty! And anyhow, she went on to reflect, as she climbed the stairs, what hope was there of competing with someone who had been married, who had money, who bought her clothes in Paris and was probably drenched — though oddly enough Sebastian had never mentioned the fact — in the most indecent kind of scent.
She lit the gas fire in her room, undressed and walked down half a flight to the bathroom.
The pleasure of soaking in hot water was unpleasantly tempered by Mr. Poulshot’s insistence that none but carbolic soap should ever be used in his household. The result was that one came out of one’s bath smelling, not like Mrs. Esdaile, but like a newly washed dog. Susan sniffed at herself as she reached for the towel, and made a wry face of disgust at the stink of her own cleanliness.
Sebastian’s room was on the opposite side of the landing to hers, and, knowing him absent, she went boldly in, opened the top drawer of his dressing-table and took out the safety-razor which he had bought two months before to keep down a still hypothetical beard.
Meticulously, as though preparing for an evening in a sleeveless gown and a night of passion, she shaved her armpits; then picked out the tell-tale hairs and replaced the razor in its box.
CHAPTER THREE
SEBASTIAN, MEANWHILE, HAD walked down Glanvil Place, frowning to himself and biting his lips. This was probably his last chance of getting those evening clothes in time for Tom Boveney’s party. His father, he knew, was not expected to dinner that evening, and the next day he was going to Huddersfield, or somewhere, for a conference; wouldn’t be back till Wednesday e
vening, and on Thursday morning they were to set out together for Florence. It must be now or never.
‘Evening clothes were a class symbol, and it was a crime to spend money on useless luxuries when people as good as oneself were starving!’ Sebastian knew in advance what his father’s arguments would be. But behind the arguments was the man — dominating and righteous, hard on others because even harder on himself. If the man were approached in the right way, perhaps the arguments would not be pressed home to their logical conclusion. The great thing, Sebastian had learnt from long and bitter experience, was never to seem too anxious or insistent. He must ask for the dinner jacket — but in such a way that his father wouldn’t think that he really longed for it. That, he knew, would be to invite a refusal — nominally, of course, on the score of economy and socialist ethics, but really, he had come to suspect, because his father took a certain pleasure in thwarting the too explicit manifestations of desire. If he managed to avoid the pitfall of over-eagerness, perhaps he would be able to talk his father out of the other, avowable reasons for refusal. But it would take good acting to bring it off, and a lot of finesse, and above all that presence of mind in which, at moments of crisis, he was always so woefully lacking. But perhaps if he worked out a plan of campaign in advance, a piece of brilliant and inspired strategy …
Sebastian had kept his eyes fixed upon the pavement at his feet; but now he raised his head, as though the perfect, the irresistible plan were up there in the murky sky, waiting only to be seen and seized. He raised his head, and suddenly there it was on the other side of the street — not the plan, of course, but the Primitive Methodist Chapel, his Chapel, the thing that it was worth walking down Glanvil Terrace of an evening on purpose to see. But today, lost as he was in the labyrinth of his own miseries, he had forgotten all about it. And now here it confronted him, faithfully itself, the lower part of its façade suffused with the greenish gas-light of the street lamp in front of it, and the upper part growing dimmer and dimmer as it mounted from the light, until the last spiky pinnacles of Victorian brickwork hung there, opaquely black against the foggy darkness of the London sky. Bright little details and distinctions fading upwards into undifferentiated mystery; a topless darkness of the London sky. Bright little details and distinctions at its foot. Sebastian stood there, looking; and in spite of the memory of his humiliations and his dread of what might be in store for him at his father’s, he felt something of that strange, inexplicable elation which the spectacle always evoked in him.
Little squalor! transfigured into Ely,
Into Bourges, into the beauty of holiness;
Burgeoning out of gas-light into Elephanta;
Out of school-treats, out of the Reverend Wilkins,
Flowering into Poetry …
He repeated to himself the opening lines of his poem, then looked again at its subject. Built at the worst period, of the shoddiest materials. Hideous, in the day-time, beyond belief. But an hour later, when the lamps were lit, as lovely and significant as anything he had ever seen. Which was the real chapel — the little monstrosity that received the Reverend Wilkins and his flock on Sunday mornings? Or this unfathomably pregnant mystery before him? Sebastian shook his head, and walked on. The questions admitted of no answer, the only thing you could do was to re-formulate them in terms of poetry.
Little squalor! transfigured into Ely,
Into Bourges, into the beauty of holiness …
Number twenty-three was a tall stucco-fronted house, identical with all the others in the row. Sebastian turned in under the pillared porch, crossed the hall, and with a renewal of his momentarily banished apprehension began to climb the stairs.
One flight, two flights, three flights, yet another, and he was standing at the door of his father’s flat. Sebastian raised a hand to the bell button, then let it fall again. He felt sick, and his heart was beating violently. It was the blue tart over again, the headmaster, the nausea of the threshold. He looked at his watch. Six forty-seven and a half. At six forty-eight he would ring and go in and just blurt it out, anyhow.
‘Father, you really must let me have a dinner jacket….’ He lifted his hand again and pressed the ball of his thumb firmly against the button. Inside, the bell buzzed like an angry wasp. He waited half a minute, then rang again. There was no answer. His last chance had vanished. Disappointment was mingled in Sebastian’s mind with a profound sense of relief that he had been allowed to postpone the hour of his ordeal. Tom Boveney’s party was four weeks away; whereas, if his father had been at home, the dreaded interview would be going on now, at this very moment.
Sebastian had gone down only a single flight when the sound of a familiar voice made him halt.
‘Seventy-two stairs,’ his father was saying down there in the hall.
‘Dio!’ said another, a foreign voice. ‘You live half-way up to paradise.’
‘This house is a symbol,’ the ringing, upper-class English voice continued. ‘A symbol of the decay of capitalism.’
Sebastian recognized the conversational gambit. It was the one John Barnack usually played upon his visitors the first time he accompanied them up those interminable stairs.
‘Once the home of a single prosperous Victorian family.’ That was it. ‘Now a nest of bachelors and struggling business women, with a childless couple or two thrown in for good measure.’
The voice grew louder and more distinct as its owner approached.
‘… and it’s a product, too, of rising unemployment and a falling birth-rate. In a word, of blighted hopes and Marie Stopes.’ And on that there was the startling explosion of John Barnack’s loud, metallic laughter.
‘Christ!’ Sebastian whispered to himself. It was the third time he had heard that joke and the subsequent outburst.
‘Stope?’ queried the foreign voice through the tail-end of the other’s merriment. ‘Do I know what it signifies, to stope? Stopare? Stopper? Stopfen?’ But neither Italian, nor French, nor German seemed to throw any light.
Very elaborately, the Cambridge accent started to explain.
Not wishing it to appear that he had been eavesdropping, Sebastian started once more to run down the stairs, and when the two men came round the corner into sight, he uttered a well-simulated exclamation of astonishment.
Mr. Barnack looked up and saw in that small slender figure poised there, six steps above him, not Sebastian, but Sebastian’s mother — Rosie on the evening of the Hilliards’ fancy-dress dance, in the character of Lady Caroline Lamb disguised, in a monkey-jacket and tight red velvet breeches, as Byron’s page. Three months later had come the war, and two years after that she had left him for that vicious imbecile, Tom Hilliard.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Mr. Barnack said aloud, without allowing the faintest symptom of surprise, or pleasure, or any other emotion to appear on his brown leathery face.
To Sebastian that was one of the most disquieting things about his father: you never knew from his expression what he was feeling or thinking. He would look at you straight and unwaveringly, his grey eyes brightly blank, as though you were a perfect stranger. The first intimation of his state of mind always came verbally, in that loud, authoritative, barrister’s voice of his, in those measured phrases, so carefully chosen, so beautifully articulated. There would be silence, or perhaps talk of matters indifferent; and then suddenly, out of the blue of his impassivity, a pronouncement, as though from Sinai.
Smiling uncertainly, Sebastian came down to meet them.
‘This is my youngster,’ said Mr. Barnack.
And the stranger turned out to be Professor Cacciaguida — the famous Professor Cacciaguida, Mr. Barnack added. Sebastian smiled deferentially and shook hands; this must be that antifascist man he had heard his father talking about. Well, it was a fine head, he thought, as he turned away. Roman of the best period, but with an incongruous mane of grey hair brushed romantically back from the forehead — he shot another surreptitious glance — as though the Emperor Augustus had tried to get himself
up as Liszt.
But how strangely, Sebastian went on to reflect as they climbed the final flight, how pathologically even, the stranger’s body fell away from that commanding head! The emperor-genius declined into the narrow chest and shoulders of a boy, then, incongruously, into the belly and wide hips almost of a middle-aged woman, and finally into a pair of thin little legs and the tiniest of patent-leather button-boots. Like some sort of larva that had started to develop and then got stuck, with only the front end of the organism fully adult and the rest hardly more than a tadpole.
John Barnack opened the door of his flat and turned on the light.
‘I’d better go and see about supper,’ he said. ‘Seeing you’ve got to get away so early, Professor.’
It was an opportunity to talk about the dinner jacket. But when Sebastian offered to come and give a hand, his father peremptorily ordered him to stay where he was and talk to their distinguished guest.
‘Then when I’m ready,’ he added, ‘you must scuttle. We’ve got some important things to discuss.’
And having thus tersely put Sebastian in his childish place, Mr. Barnack turned and, with quick, decided steps, like an athlete going into combat, strode out of the room.
Sebastian stood hesitating for a few seconds, then made up his mind to disobey, follow his father into the kitchen and have it out with him, there and then. But at this moment the Professor, who had been looking inquisitively around the room, turned to him with a smile.
‘But how it is aseptic!’ he exclaimed in that melodious voice of his, and with that charming trace of a foreign accent, those odd and over-literary turns of phrase, which merely served to emphasize the completeness of his command of the language.
In that bare, bleak sitting-room, everything, except the books, was enamelled the colour of skim milk, and the floor was a polished sheet of grey linoleum. Professor Cacciaguida sat down in one of the metal chairs and with tremulous, nicotine-stained fingers, lighted a cigarette.