Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Ve-ry pretty,’ he repeated. ‘But what an implacable Puritan you are, my dear! And without the smallest metaphysical justification.’
‘Metaphysics!’ said Mrs. Poulshot in the contemptuous tone of one who is above and beyond such fooleries.
The soup plates, meanwhile, had been cleared away and the saddle of mutton brought in. In silence and without in any way altering his expression of irremediable suffering, Mr. Poulshot set to work to carve the roast.
Eustace glanced at him, then back at Alice. She, poor thing, was looking at Fred with an expression of apprehensive distress — wishing, no doubt, that the sulky old baby would be on his good behaviour in front of strangers. And perhaps, Eustace went on to reflect, perhaps that was why she had been so sharp towards himself. White-washing her husband by black-washing her brother. Not very logical, no doubt, but all too human.
‘I hope it’s cooked as you like it, Fred,’ she called down the table.
Without answering or even looking up, Mr. Poulshot shrugged his narrow shoulders.
With an effort, Mrs. Poulshot adjusted her expression and turned to Eustace.
‘Poor Fred has such a dreadful time with his sinus,’ she said, trying to make amends to her husband for what she had done in the drawing-room.
As old Ellen came in with the vegetables, a half-grown kitten slipped into the room and came to rub itself against the leg of Alice’s chair. She stooped and picked it up.
‘Well, Onyegin,’ she said, tickling the little beast behind the ears. ‘We call him Onyegin,’ she explained brightly to her brother, ‘because he’s the masterpiece of our late-lamented Puss-kin.’
Eustace smiled politely.
The consolations of philosophy, he reflected, of religion, of art, of love, of politics — none of these for poor dear Alice. No, hers were the consolations of an Edwardian sense of humour and the weekly copy of Punch. Still it was better to make bad puns and be whimsical in the style of 1912 than to indulge in self-pity or capitulate to Fred’s black moods, as everyone else at the table had done. And, by God, it was pretty difficult not to capitulate. Sitting there behind his bulwark of mutton, Fred Poulshot fairly beamed with negativity. You could positively feel it as it beat against you — a steady, penetrating radiation that was the very antithesis of life, the total denial of all human warmth. Eustace decided to attempt a diversion.
‘Well, Fred!’ he called out in his jolliest tone. ‘How’s that City of yours? How’s the gorgeous East? Business pretty good?’
Mr. Poulshot looked up, pained but, after a moment, forgiving.
‘It could hardly be worse,’ he pronounced.
Eustace raised his eyebrows in mock alarm.
‘Heavens! How’s that going to affect my Yangtze and South China Bank dividends?’
‘They talk of reducing them this year.’
‘Oh dear!’
‘From eighty per cent. to seventy-five per cent.,’ said Mr. Poulshot gloomily; and turning away to help himself to the vegetables, he relapsed once more into a silence that engulfed the entire table.
How much less awful the man would be, Eustace was thinking, as he ate his mutton and brussels sprouts, if only he sometimes lost his temper, or got drunk, or went to bed with his secretary — though God help the poor secretary if he did! But there had never been anything violent or extreme in Fred’s behaviour. Except for being absolutely intolerable, he was the perfect husband. One who loved the routine of marriage and domestic life — carving mutton, begetting children — just as he loved the routine of being (what was it?) Secretary and Treasurer of that City and Far Eastern thingummy-bob. And in all that concerned these routines, he was the soul of probity and regularity. Swear, get angry, deceive poor dear Alice with another woman? Why, he’d as soon embezzle the company’s petty cash. No, no, Fred took it out of people in a very different way. He didn’t have to do anything; it was enough for him just to be. They shrivelled and turned black by mere infection.
Suddenly Mr. Poulshot broke the long silence, and in a dead, toneless voice asked for the red-currant jelly.
Startled as though by a summons from the other world, Jim looked wildly round the table.
‘Here you are, Jim.’ Eustace Barnack pushed the dish across to him.
Jim gave him a grateful look, and passed it on to his father. Mr. Poulshot took it without a word or a smile, helped himself, and then, with the evident intention of involving another victim in this rite of woe, handed it back, not to Jim, but to Susan, who was in the very act of raising her fork from her plate. As he had foreseen and desired, Mr. Poulshot had to wait, dish in hand and with an expression on his face of martyred patience, while Susan hastily poked the mutton into her mouth, put down her knife and fork with a clatter and, blushing crimson, accepted the proffered jelly.
From his front-row seat at the human comedy, Eustace smiled appreciatively. What an exquisite refinement of the will to power, what elegant cruelty! And what an amazing gift for that contagious gloom which damps even the highest spirits and stifles the very possibility of joy. Well, nobody could accuse dear Fred of having buried his talent.
Silence, as though there were a coffin in the room, settled all at once upon the table. Mrs. Poulshot tried desperately to think of something to say — something bright, something defiantly funny — but could find nothing, nothing at all. Fred had broken through her defences and stopped up the source of speech, of life itself, with sand and ashes. She sat there empty, conscious only of the awful fatigue accumulated during thirty years of unremitting defence and counter-attack. And as though it had somehow become aware of her defeat, the kitten sleeping on her knee uncurled itself, stretched and jumped noiselessly to the floor.
‘Onyegin!’ she cried, and reached out a hand; but the little cat slid away, silky and serpentine, from under her fingers. If she had been less old and sensible, Mrs. Poulshot would have burst into tears.
The silence lengthened out, punctuated by the ticking, now for the first time audible, of the brass clock on the mantelpiece. Eustace, who had begun by thinking that it would be amusing to see how long the intolerable situation could last, found himself suddenly overcome by pity and indignation. Alice needed help, and it would be monstrous if that creature there, that tapeworm, were left to enjoy his triumph. He leaned back in his chair, wiped his mouth and, looking about him, gaily smiled.
‘Cheer up, Sebastian,’ he called across the table. ‘I hope you’re not going to be glum like this when you’re staying with me next week.’
The spell was broken. Alice Poulshot’s fatigue dropped away from her, and she found it once more possible to speak.
‘You forget,’ she broke in waggishly, as the boy tried to mumble something in response to his uncle’s challenge, ‘our little Sebastian’s got the poetic temperament.’ And rolling her r’s like an old-fashioned reciter, she added, ‘“Tear-rs from the depth of some divine despair-r.”’
Sebastian flushed and bit his lip. He was very fond of Aunt Alice — as fond of her as she herself would ever allow anyone to be. And yet, in spite of his affection, there were times — and this was one of them — when he would have liked to kill her. It wasn’t merely himself that she outraged with this sort of remark; it was beauty, poetry, genius, everything above the level of the commonplace and the conventional.
Eustace observed the expression of his nephew’s face, and felt sorry for the poor boy. Alice could be curiously hard, he reflected — on principle, just as she preferred bad cooking. Tactfully, he tried to change the subject. Alice had quoted Tennyson; what did the young think of Tennyson nowadays?
But Mrs. Poulshot did not permit the subject to be changed. She had undertaken Sebastian’s education, and if she allowed him to indulge his native moodiness, she wouldn’t be doing her duty. It was because that silly mother of his had always given in to him that Fred now behaved as he did.
‘Or perhaps,’ she went on, her tone growing more flippant as her intention became more severely didactic, ‘
perhaps it’s a case of first love. “Deep as first love, and wild with all regret.” Unless, of course, it’s Epsom Salts that the poor boy needs.’
At this reference to Epsom Salts, young Jim broke into a peal of laughter all the more explosive because of the constraint imposed upon him by his proximity to the source of gloom behind the mutton. Susan glanced with solicitude at Sebastian’s reddening face, then frowned angrily at her brother, who didn’t even notice it.
‘I’ll cap your Tennyson with some Dante,’ said Eustace, coming once again to Sebastian’s relief. ‘Do you remember? In the fifth circle of Hell:
Tristi fummo
Nell’ aer dolce che del sol s’allegra.
And because they were sad, they were condemned to pass eternity stuck there in the swamp; and their horrid little Weltschmerz came bubbling up through the mud, like marsh gas. So you’d better be careful, my lad,’ he concluded mock-menacingly, but with a smile which signified that he was entirely on Sebastian’s side, and understood his feelings.
‘He needn’t bother about the next world,’ said Mrs. Poulshot with a touch of asperity. She felt strongly about this immortality nonsense — so strongly that she didn’t like to hear it talked about, even in joke. ‘I’m thinking about what’ll happen to him when he’s grown up.’
Jim laughed again. Sebastian’s youthfulness seemed to him almost as funny as his possible need of a purge.
That second laugh spurred Mr. Poulshot into action. Eustace, of course, was just a hedonist, and even from Alice he could really expect nothing better. She had always (it was her only failing, but how enormous!) proved herself shockingly insensitive to his inner sufferings. But Jim, happily, was different. Unlike Edward and Marjorie, who in this respect were altogether too like their mother, Jim had always shown a decent respect and sympathy. That he should now so far forget himself as to laugh twice, was therefore doubly painful — painful as an outrage to his sensibilities and an interruption to his sad and sacred thoughts; painful, too, because so disappointing, such a blow to one’s faith in the boy’s better nature. Raising the eyes which he had kept so resolutely fixed upon his plate, Mr. Poulshot looked at his son with an expression of sorrow. Jim flinched away from that reproachful regard and, to cover his confusion, filled his mouth with bread. Almost in a whisper, Mr. Poulshot spoke at last.
‘Do you know what day this is?’ he asked.
Anticipating the rebuke that was to come, Jim blushed and muttered indistinctly through the bread that he thought it was the twenty-seventh.
‘March the twenty-seventh,’ Mr. Poulshot repeated. He nodded slowly and emphatically. ‘This day, eleven years ago, your poor grandfather was taken from us.’ He looked fixedly for a few seconds into Jim’s face, observing with satisfaction the symptoms of his discomfiture, then dropped his eyes and lapsed once again into silence, leaving the young man to feel ashamed of himself.
At the other end of the table Alice and Eustace were laughing together over reminiscences of their childhood. Mr. Poulshot did his best to pity them for the frivolity that made them so heartlessly insensitive to the finer feelings of others. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ he said to himself; then, closing his mind against their idle chatter, he addressed himself to the task of reconstructing in detail his negotiations, on the evening of March the twenty-seventh, 1918, with the undertaker.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN THE DRAWING-ROOM, when dinner was over, Jim and Susan settled down to chess, while the others grouped themselves around the fire. Fascinated, Sebastian looked on, while his Uncle Eustace lighted the massive Romeo and Juliet which, knowing Alice’s principles and Fred’s economical habits, he had prudently brought with him. First the ritual of piercing; then, as he raised the cigar to his mouth, the smile of happy anticipation. Damply, lovingly, the lips closed over the butt; the match was ignited; he pulled at the flame. And suddenly Sebastian was reminded of his cousin Marjorie’s baby, nuzzling with blind concupiscence for the nipple, seizing it at last between the soft prehensile flaps of its little mouth and working away, working away in a noiseless frenzy of enjoyment. True, Uncle Eustace had rather better manners; and in this case the nipple was coffee-coloured and six inches long. Images floated up before his mind’s eye; words, grotesque and mock-heroic, started to arrange themselves:
Old but an infant, mouthing with lustful lip
The wet brown teat, incarnate where he sucks,
Of some imaginary, largest Queen
Of all the Hottentots …
He was interrupted by the sudden opening and then the slam of the door. John Barnack entered the room, and strode over to where Mrs. Poulshot was sitting on the sofa.
‘Sorry I couldn’t be with you for dinner,’ he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. ‘But it was my only chance of seeing Cacciaguida. Who tells me, by the way,’ he added, turning to his brother, ‘that Mussolini has definitely got cancer of the throat.’
Eustace took the tobacco-teat from between his lips and smiled indulgently.
‘It’s the throat this time, is it? My anti-fascists seem to prefer the liver.’
John Barnack was offended, but made an effort not to show it.
‘Cacciaguida has very reliable sources of information,’ he said a little stiffly.
‘Don’t I remember somebody saying something about wishes being fathers to thoughts?’ Eustace asked with exasperating mildness.
‘Of course you do,’ said John. ‘You remember it because you need an excuse for disparaging a great political cause and belittling its heroes.’ He spoke in his usual measured and perfectly articulated style, but in a tone that betrayed his inner feelings by being a trifle louder and more vibrant than usual. ‘Cynical realism — it’s the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.’
Alice Poulshot glanced from one to the other and wished to goodness that her two brothers didn’t have to quarrel every time they met. Why couldn’t John just accept the fact that Eustace was a bit of an old pig, and have done with it? But, no; he always lost his temper in that awful suppressed way of his, and then pretended it was moral indignation. And on his side Eustace deliberately provoked the explosions by waving political red rags and throwing poisoned darts. They were really incorrigible.
‘King Log or King Stork?’ Eustace was saying blandly. ‘I’m for dear old Log every time. Just keeping out of mischief — it’s the greatest of all the virtues.’
Standing there by the fireplace, his arms hanging by his sides, his feet apart, his body very straight and tense, in the posture of an athlete poised on the brink of action, John Barnack looked down at his brother with the calm unwavering regard which, in the law courts, he reserved for hostile witnesses and prevaricating defendants. It was a look which, even when directed on someone else, filled Sebastian with a shrinking terror. But Eustace merely let himself sink more deeply into the upholstery of the sofa. Closing his eyes, he tenderly kissed the end of his cigar and sucked.
‘And you imagine, I suppose,’ said John Barnack after a long silence, ‘that you’re one of the great exponents of that virtue?’
Eustace blew out a cloud of aromatic smoke, and answered that he did his best.
‘You do your best,’ John repeated. ‘But I believe you’ve got a comfortable holding in the Yangtze and South China Bank?’
Eustace nodded.
‘And along with the right to fatten on exploitation in China and Japan, a lot of jute shares — isn’t that so?’
‘Very nice shares too,’ said Eustace.
‘Very nice indeed. Thirty per cent. even in a bad year. Earned for you by Indians who are getting paid a daily wage that wouldn’t buy more than a third of one of your cigars.’
Mr. Poulshot, who had sat in gloomy silence, disregarded by all, startlingly broke into the conversation.
‘They were all right until the agitators got to work on them,’ he said. ‘Organizing unions, stirring up trouble against the owners. They ought to be
shot. Yes, they ought to be shot!’ he repeated with ferocious emphasis.
John Barnack smiled ironically.
‘Don’t you worry, Fred. The City of London will see to it.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Alice irritably. ‘The City of London isn’t in India.’
‘No; but its agents are. And they’re the fellows with the machine-guns. Fred’s agitators will duly get shot, and Eustace here will go on keeping out of mischief — keeping out of it with all the inimitable grace we’ve learnt to admire in him.’
There was a silence. Sebastian, who had dearly hoped to see his father discomfited, glanced miserably in the direction of his uncle. But instead of sitting there crushed and dejected, Eustace was heaving with noiseless laughter.
‘Admirable!’ he cried, when he had recovered breath enough to speak. ‘Quite admirable! And now, John, you should drop the sarcasm and give them five minutes of simple pathos and indignation; five heart-warming minutes of straightforward manly sentiment. After which the jury finds me guilty without even leaving the box, and adds a rider recommending that counsel for the plaintiffs be appointed Tribune of the People. Tribune of the People,’ he repeated sonorously. ‘All in classical fancy dress. And, by the way, what’s the technical name for that noble Roman toga that political gentlemen drape over the will-to-power when they want to make it look respectable? You know that, don’t you, Sebastian?’ And when Sebastian shook his head, ‘Goodness,’ he exclaimed, ‘what do they teach you nowadays? Why, its technical name is Idealism. Yes, my dear,’ he went on, addressing himself to Susan, who had looked up, startled, from her game of chess, ‘that was what I said: Idealism.’