Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘One awaits the arrival of the surgeon,’ he added, ‘at any moment.’
But instead, it was John Barnack who came back into the room, carrying plates and a handful of cutlery. The Professor turned in his direction, but did not speak at once; instead, he put his cigarette to his lips, inhaled, held his breath for a couple of seconds, then voluptuously spouted smoke through his imperial nostrils. After which, his craving momentarily assuaged, he called across the room to his host.
‘It’s positively prophetic!’ He indicated the room with a wave of his hand. ‘A fragment of the rational and hygienic future.’
‘Thank you,’ said John Barnack without looking up. He was laying the table with the same focussed attention, Sebastian noticed, the same exasperatingly meticulous care, as he gave to all his tasks, from the most important to the humblest — laying it as though he were manipulating an intricate piece of apparatus in the laboratory, or (yes, the Professor was quite right) performing the most ticklish of surgical operations.
‘All the same,’ the other went on with a little laugh, ‘where the arts are concerned, I confess to being sentimental. Give me yesterday rather than tomorrow. Isabella’s apartment at Mantova, for example. Much dust, no doubt, in the mouldings. And all that sculptured wood!’ He traced a series of volutes with the smoke of his burning cigarette. ‘Full of archaeological filth! But what warmth, what wealth!’
‘Quite,’ said Mr. Barnack. He straightened himself up and stood there, upright and assertive, looking down at his guest. ‘But whose pockets did the wealth come out of?’ And without waiting for an answer, he marched back to the kitchen.
But the Professor had only just begun.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, turning to Sebastian. The words were accompanied by a genial smile; but it became sufficiently obvious, as he went on, that he took not the smallest interest in what Sebastian thought. All he wanted was an audience.
‘Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses’ beard!’
He paused triumphantly, waiting for applause. Sebastian gave it in the form of a delighted laugh. The effortless virtuosity of the Professor’s talk delighted him; and the Italian accent, the odd unexpected vocabulary, lent an adventitious charm to the performance. But as the improvisation prolonged itself, Sebastian’s feelings towards it underwent a change. Five minutes later, he was wishing to God that the old bore would shut up.
It was the smell and sizzling of fried lamb chops which finally produced that much-desired result. The Professor threw back his noble head and sniffed appreciatively.
‘Ambrosial!’ he cried. ‘I see we have a second Baronius among the pots and pans.’
Sebastian, who did not know who the first Baronius was, turned round and looked through the open door into the kitchen. His father was standing with his back to him, his grizzled head and the broad strong shoulders bent forward as he pored over the range.
‘Not only a great mind, but a great cook as well,’ the Professor was saying.
Yes, that was the trouble, Sebastian reflected. And not only a great cook (though he had the utmost contempt for those who cared about food for its own sake), but also a great desk-tidier, a great mountain-climber, a great account-maker, a great botanizer and bird-watcher, a great letter-answerer, a great socialist, a great four-mile-an-hour walker, teetotaler and non-smoker, a great report-reader and statistics-knower, a great everything, in short, that was tiresome, efficient, meritorious, healthful, social-minded. If only he’d take a rest sometimes! If only his armour had a few chinks in it!
The Professor raised his voice a little, evidently hoping that what he was about to say would be heard even in the kitchen and through the noise of frying.
‘And the great mind is associated with an even greater heart and soul,’ he pronounced in a tone of vibrant solemnity. He leaned over and laid a small hand, very white except for the yellowed finger-tips, upon Sebastian’s knee.
‘I hope you’re as proud of your father as you ought to be,’ he went on.
Sebastian smiled vaguely and made a faint inarticulate noise of assent. But how anyone who knew his father could talk about his great heart, he really couldn’t imagine.
‘A man who could have aspired to the highest political honours under the old party system — but he had his principles, he refused to play their game. And who knows?’ the Professor added parenthetically, with a confidential lowering of the voice. ‘Perhaps he’ll get his reward very soon. Socialism is much nearer than anyone imagines — and when it comes, when it comes …’ he raised his hand expressively, as though prophesying Mr. Barnack’s apotheosis. ‘And when one thinks,’ he went on, ‘of all those thousands he might have made at the Bar. Thousands and thousands! But he abandons all. Like San Francesco. And what he has, he lavishes with a heroic generosity. Causes, movements, suffering individuals — he gives to all. To all,’ he repeated, nodding his noble head emphatically. ‘All!’
All but one, Sebastian inwardly amended. There was still money enough for political organizations and, he guessed, for exiled professors; but when it came to sending his own son to a decent school, to getting him a few decent suits and a dinner jacket — nothing doing. Sonorously, the Professor renewed his infuriating eloquence. Almost bursting with suppressed anger, Sebastian was thankful when at last the arrival of the chops cut short the panegyric and set him free.
‘Tell Aunt Alice I’ll be with her after dinner,’ Mr. Barnack called after him as he ran down the stairs. ‘And make sure that Uncle Eustace doesn’t leave before I get there; I’ve got to make all sorts of arrangements with him.’
Outside in the street his little squalor of a chapel still darkened up into poetry, into inexplicable significance and beauty; but this time Sebastian felt so bitterly aggrieved that he would not even look at it.
CHAPTER FOUR
SHERRY-GLASS IN HAND, Eustace Barnack was standing on the hearth-rug, looking up at the portrait of his father over the mantelpiece. From its black background, the square, strong face of that cotton-spinning philanthropist glared out into vacancy like a head-lamp.
Meditatively, Eustace shook his head.
‘Hundreds of guineas,’ he said. ‘That’s what the subscribers paid for that object. And you’d be lucky if you could get a fiver for it now. Personally,’ he added, turning to where his sister was sitting, slender and very upright, on the sofa, ‘personally I’d be very ready to give you ten pounds for the privilege of not possessing it.’
Alice Poulshot said nothing. She was thinking, as she looked at him, how shockingly Eustace had aged since last she saw him. Grosser even than he had been three years ago. And the face was like a loose rubber mask sagging from the bones, flabby and soft and unwholesomely blotched. As for the mouth … She remembered the brilliant, laughing boy she had once been so proud of; in him, those parted, childish lips had seemed amusing in their incongruity with the manly stature — amusing and at the same time profoundly touching. You couldn’t look at him without feeling that you’d like to mother him. But now — now the sight was enough to make you shudder. The damp, mobile looseness of that mouth, its combination of senility and babyishness, of the infantile with the epicurean! Only in the humorously twinkling eyes could she discover a trace of the Eustace she had loved so much. And now the whites of those eyes were yellow and bloodshot, and under them were pouches of discoloured skin.
With a thick forefinger, Eustace tapped the canvas.
‘Wouldn’t he be furious if he knew! I remember how bitterly he resented it at the time. All that good money going on a mere picture, when it might have been spent on something really useful, like a drinking-fountain or a public lavatory.’
At the words ‘public lavatory,’ his
nephew, Jim Poulshot, looked up from the Evening Standard and uttered a loud guffaw. Eustace turned and regarded him curiously.
‘That’s right, my boy,’ he said with mock heartiness. ‘It’s English humour that has made the Empire what it is.’
He walked over to the sofa and cautiously lowered his soft bulk into a sitting posture. Mrs. Poulshot moved further into the corner to give him room.
‘Poor old father!’ he said, continuing the previous conversation.
‘What’s poor about him?’ Alice asked rather sharply. ‘I should have thought we were the poor ones. After all, he accomplished something. Where’s our achievement, I’d like to know?’
‘Where?’ Eustace repeated. ‘Well, certainly not in the rubbish-heap, which is where his is. The mills working half-time because of Indian and Japanese competition. Individual paternalism replaced by State interference, which he regarded as the devil. The Liberal Party dead and buried. And earnest high-minded rationalism transformed into cynical libertinage. If the old man isn’t to be pitied, I’d like to know who is?’
‘It’s not the results that matter,’ said Mrs. Poulshot, changing her ground.
She had worshipped her father; and to defend a memory which she still reverenced as something all but divine, she was ready to sacrifice much more than mere logical consistency.
‘It’s motives, and intentions and hard work — yes, and self-denial,’ she added significantly.
Eustace uttered a wheezy chuckle.
‘Whereas I’m disgustingly self-indulgent,’ he said. ‘And if I happen to be fat, it’s entirely my own vicious fault. Has it ever struck you, my dear, that if Mother had lived, she’d have probably grown to be as big as Uncle Charles?’
‘How can you say such things!’ cried Mrs. Poulshot indignantly. Uncle Charles had been a monster.
‘It was in the family,’ he answered; and patting his belly complacently, ‘It still is,’ he added.
The sound of a door being opened made him turn his head.
‘Aha,’ he cried, ‘here comes my future guest!’
Still brooding on his reasons for being angry and miserable, Sebastian looked up with a start. Uncle Eustace … in his preoccupation with his own affairs he had forgotten all about him. He stood there, gaping.
‘“In vacant or in pensive mood,”’ Eustace continued genially. ‘It’s all in the great poetical tradition.’
Sebastian advanced and shook the hand extended to him. It was soft, rather damp and surprisingly cold. The realization that he was making a deplorable impression just at the very moment when he ought to have been at his best, increased his shyness to the point of rendering him speechless. But his mind continued to work. In that expanse of flabby face the little eyes, he thought, were like an elephant’s. An elegant little elephant in a double-breasted black coat and pale-grey check trousers. Oh, and even a monocle on the end of a string to make him look still more like the elderly dandy on the musical comedy stage!
Eustace turned to his sister.
‘He gets more and more like Rosie every year,’ he said. ‘It’s fantastic.’
Mrs. Poulshot nodded without speaking. Sebastian’s mother was a subject which it was best, she thought, to avoid.
‘Well, Sebastian, I hope you’re prepared for a pretty strenuous holiday.’ Once again Eustace patted his stomach. ‘You see before you the world’s champion sight-seer. Author of “Canters through Florence,” “The Vatican on Roller Skates,” “Round the Louvre in Eighty Minutes.” And my speed record for the English cathedrals has never even been challenged.’
‘Idiot!’ said Mrs. Poulshot, laughing.
Jim roared in unison, and in spite of the dinner jacket, Sebastian couldn’t help joining in. The idea of this dandified elephant galloping through Canterbury in sponge-bag trousers and a monocle was irresistibly grotesque.
Noiselessly, in the midst of their merriment, the door swung open again. Grey, lugubrious, long-faced like a horse, like his own image in a distorting mirror, Fred Poulshot entered as though on soles of felt. Catching sight of him, Jim and Sebastian checked themselves abruptly. He walked over to the sofa to greet his brother-in-law.
‘You’re looking well,’ said Eustace as they shook hands.
‘Well?’ Mr. Poulshot repeated in an offended tone. ‘Get Alice to tell you about my sinus some time.’
He turned away, and, with the scrupulous care of one who measures out a purgative, poured himself one-third of a glass of sherry.
Eustace looked at him and felt, as he had so often done in the past, profoundly sorry for poor Alice. Thirty years of Fred Poulshot — imagine it! Well, such was family life. He felt very thankful that he was now alone in the world.
Susan’s headlong entrance at this moment did nothing to mitigate his thankfulness. True, she possessed the enormous adventitious advantage of being seventeen; but even the perverse and slightly comic charms of adolescence could not disguise the fact that she was a Poulshot and, like all the other Poulshots, unutterably dull. The most that could be said for her was that, up to the present at any rate, she was a cut above Jim. But then, at twenty-five, poor Jim was just an empty pigeon-hole waiting to be occupied by the moderately successful stockbroker he would be in 1949. Well, that was what came of choosing a father like Fred. Whereas Sebastian had had the wit to get himself sired by a Barnack and conceived by the loveliest of irresponsible gipsies.
‘Did you tell him about my sinus?’ Mr. Poulshot insisted.
But Alice pretended not to have heard him.
‘Talking of canters through Florence,’ she said rather loudly, ‘do you ever see Cousin Mary’s son when you’re out there?’
‘You mean Bruno Rontini?’
Mrs. Poulshot nodded.
‘Why on earth she should ever have married that Italian I simply cannot imagine,’ she said in a tone of disapproval.
‘But even Italians are very nearly human.’
‘Don’t be silly, Eustace. You know exactly what I mean.’
‘But how you’d hate it if I were to tell you!’ said Eustace, smiling.
For what she meant, of course, was just plain prejudice and snobbery — an insular dislike of foreigners, a bourgeois conviction that all unsuccessful people must be in some way immoral.
‘Father was endlessly kind to the man,’ Mrs. Poulshot went on. ‘When I think of all the opportunities he gave him!’
‘And wise old Carlo made a mess of every one of them!’
‘Wise?’
‘Well, he got himself paid four pounds a week to keep out of the cotton business and go back to Tuscany. Don’t you call that wisdom?’
Eustace drank the rest of his sherry and put down the glass.
‘The son still runs his second-hand bookshop,’ he went on. ‘I’m really very fond of funny old Bruno. In spite of that tiresome religiosity of his. Nothing but the Gaseous Vertebrate!’
Mrs. Poulshot laughed. In the Barnack family, Haeckel’s definition of God had been a standing joke for the past forty years.
‘The Gaseous Vertebrate,’ she repeated. ‘But then, think how he was brought up! Cousin Mary used to take him to those Quaker meetings of hers when he was a boy. Quakers!’ she repeated with a kind of incredulous emphasis.
The parlour-maid appeared and announced that dinner was served. Active and wiry, Alice was on her feet in an instant. Her brother hoisted himself up more painfully. Followed by the rest of the family, they moved towards the door. Mr. Poulshot walked over to the electric switches and, as the last person crossed the threshold, turned out the lights.
As they went downstairs to the dining-room, Eustace laid a hand on Sebastian’s shoulder.
‘I had the devil of a time persuading your father to let you come and stay with me,’ he said. ‘He was afraid you’d learn to live like the idle rich. Luckily, we were able to checkmate him with an appeal to culture — weren’t we, Alice?’
Mrs. Poulshot nodded a little stiffly. She didn’t like her brother’s habi
t of discussing grown-up affairs in front of the children.
‘Florence is part of a liberal education,’ she said.
‘Exactly. What Every Young Boy Ought to Know.’
Suddenly the staircase lights went out. Even in his blackest moods, Fred never forgot to be economical.
They entered the dining-room — red-papered still, Eustace noticed, and as uncompromisingly hideous as ever — and took their seats.
‘Mock turtle,’ said Alice as the parlour-maid set down the soup in front of him.
Mock turtle — it would be! Dear Alice had always displayed a positive genius for serving the dreariest kind of English food. On principle. With a smile at once affectionate and faintly ironic, Eustace laid a thick oedematous hand over his sister’s bony fingers.
‘Well, my dear, it’s been a long, long time since last I sat here at your festive board.’
‘No fault of mine,’ Mrs. Poulshot answered. Her voice took on a note of rather sharp and perky jocularity. ‘The Prodigal’s place was always laid for him. But I suppose he was too busy filling his belly with the caviar that the swine did eat.’
Eustace laughed with unaffected good-humour. Twenty-three years before, he had given up what everybody said was a most promising career in radical politics to marry a rich widow with a weak heart, and retire to Florence. It was an act which neither his sister nor his brother, though for different reasons, had ever forgiven. With John it was a matter of outraged political principle. But what Alice resented was the insult to her father’s memory, the wound inflicted on her family pride. Theirs was the third generation of low-living, high-minded Barnacks; and, with the exception of unmentionable Great-Uncle Luke, Eustace was the first who had ever gone over to the hostile camp of luxury and leisure.
‘Ve-ry pretty,’ he said to her in the phrase and tone of one who applauds a particularly well directed stroke at billiards.
With an income of six thousand a year, he could afford to be magnanimous. Besides, his conscience had never troubled him for what he had done. For the five years of their brief married life he had been as good a husband as poor dear Amy could expect. And why any quick-witted and sensitive person should feel ashamed of having said good-bye to politics, he couldn’t imagine. The sordid intrigues behind the scenes! The conscious or unconscious hypocrisy of every form of effective public speaking! The asinine stupidity of that interminable repetition of the same absurd over-simplifications, the same illogical arguments and vulgar personalities, the same bad history and baseless prophecy! And that was supposed to be a man’s highest duty. And if he chose instead the life of a civilized human being, he ought to be ashamed of himself.