Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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John Barnack yawned ostentatiously behind his hand.
‘One gets a bit bored with this kind of cheap seventeenth-century psychology,’ he said.
‘And now tell us,’ said Eustace, ‘what do you expect to get when the right people come into power? The Attorney-Generalship, I suppose.’
‘Now, Eustace,’ said Mrs. Poulshot firmly, ‘that’s enough.’
‘Enough?’ Eustace repeated in a tone of mock-outrage. ‘You think it’s enough — a piddling little Attorney-Generalship? My dear, you underrate your brother. But now, John,’ he added, in another tone, ‘let’s get down to more serious matters. I don’t know what your plans are; but whatever happens, I’ve got to leave for Florence tomorrow. I’m expecting my mother-in-law on Tuesday.’
‘Old Mrs. Gamble?’ Alice looked up from her knitting in surprise. ‘Do you mean to say she still travels about Europe? At her age?’
‘Eighty-six,’ said Eustace, ‘and, except for being pretty well blind with cataract, as fit as a fiddle.’
‘Goodness!’ exclaimed Mrs. Poulshot. ‘I do hope I don’t have to hang on as long as that!’ She shook her head emphatically, appalled by the thought of thirty-one more years of housekeeping, and Fred’s black moods, and the utter pointlessness of everything.
Eustace turned back to his brother.
‘And when do you two intend to start?’
‘Next Thursday. But we spend a night in Turin. I have to get in touch with some of Cacciaguida’s people,’ John explained.
‘Then you’ll deliver Sebastian to me on Saturday?’
‘Or rather he’ll deliver himself. I’m getting off the train at Genoa.’
‘Oh, you don’t deign to come yourself?’
John Barnack shook his head. The boat was leaving Genoa that same evening. He’d be in Egypt for three or four weeks. Then his paper wanted him to report on the condition of the natives in Kenya and Tanganyika.
‘And while you’re about it,’ said Eustace, ‘do find out why my East African coffee shares aren’t doing better.’
‘I can tell you here and now,’ his brother answered. ‘A few years ago there was a lot of money in coffee. Result: millions of acres of new plantations, with all the Gadarene swine of London and Paris and Amsterdam and New York rushing down a steep place into coffee investments. Now there’s such a surplus of beans, and the price is so low, that even sweated black labour can’t give you a dividend.’
‘Too bad!’
‘You think so? Wait till your keeping out of mischief has brought on rebellion among the subject peoples and revolution at home!’
‘Luckily,’ said Eustace, ‘we shall all be dead by that time.’
‘Don’t you be too sure.’
‘We may all hang on like poor old Mrs. Gamble,’ said Alice, who had been trying to imagine what Fred and she would be like in 1950.
‘No need for that,’ said John Barnack with manifest satisfaction. ‘It’s coming a great deal sooner than any of you imagine.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, I’ve got some work to do,’ he announced. ‘And tomorrow I must be up at cockcrow. So I’ll say good-night, Alice.’
Sebastian’s heart started to beat violently, he felt all at once rather sick. The moment had come at last, the absolutely final opportunity. He drew a deep breath, got up and walked over to where his father was standing.
‘Good-night, father,’ he said; and then, ‘Oh, by the way,’ he brought out in the most casual tone he could command, ‘don’t you think I might … I mean, don’t you think I really ought to have some evening clothes now?’
‘Ought?’ his father repeated. ‘Ought? It’s a case of the Categorical Imperative, eh?’ And suddenly, alarmingly, he uttered a short explosive bray of laughter.
Overwhelmed, Sebastian mumbled something to the effect that it hadn’t been necessary when he asked last time; but now … now it was really urgent: he had been asked to a party.
‘Oh, you’ve been asked to a party,’ said Mr. Barnack; and he recalled the ecstatic tone in which Rosie used to pronounce that hated word; he remembered the brightening of her eyes as she heard the music and the confused roaring of the crowd, the all but frenzy of her wild gaiety as the evening progressed.
‘More and more categorical,’ he added sarcastically.
‘Your father’s had a lot of expense recently,’ Mrs. Poulshot interposed in a well-meant effort to cushion poor Sebastian against the impact of her brother’s intransigence. After all, it hadn’t been Rosie’s fault entirely. John had always been hard and exacting, even as a boy. And now, to make things worse, he had to poison people’s lives with these ridiculous political principles of his. But meanwhile the hardness and the principles were facts; and so was Sebastian’s sensitiveness. Her policy was to try to keep the two sets of facts from colliding. But the attempt, on this occasion, was worse than fruitless.
‘My dear Alice,’ said John Barnack in the tone of a courteous but absolutely determined debater, ‘it isn’t a question of whether I can afford to buy the boy his fancy dress.’ (The words evoked an image of the red velvet breeches of Lady Caroline Lamb as Byron’s — as young Tom Hilliard’s — page.) ‘The point at issue is whether it’s right to do so.’
Eustace took the teat out of his mouth to protest that this was worse than Savonarola.
John Barnack emphatically shook his head.
‘It has nothing in common with Christian asceticism, it’s just a question of decency — of not exploiting one’s accidental advantages. Noblesse oblige.’
‘Very nice,’ said Eustace. ‘But meanwhile, you begin by oblige-ing the noblesse. It’s just plain coercion.’
‘Sebastian has absolutely no sense of social responsibility. He’s got to learn it.’
‘Isn’t that exactly what Mussolini says about the Italian people?’
‘And anyhow,’ Mrs. Poulshot put in, glad of this opportunity of fighting Sebastian’s battle with the support of an ally, ‘why make all this fuss about a miserable dinner jacket?’
‘A paltry smoking,’ Eustace elaborated in a tone that was meant to shift the whole argument on to the level of mere farce, ‘a twopenny-halfpenny Tuxedo. Oh, and that reminds me of my young man of Peoria — you didn’t know I was a poet, did you, Sebastian?
Who to keep up his sense of euphoria
Would don his Tuxedo
And murmur the Credo,
Along with the Sanctus and Gloria.
And here you go, John, depriving your poor child of the benefit of the sacraments.’
More loudly than usual, because of his nervousness, Sebastian started to laugh; then, at the sight of his father’s grave, unsmiling face and resolutely closed lips, he checked himself abruptly.
Eustace twinkled at him between his puffy eyelids.
‘Thank you for the applause,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid we are not amused.’
Mrs. Poulshot intervened once more, in an attempt to undo the effects of Eustace’s false step.
‘After all,’ she said, trying to bring the discussion back to seriousness, ‘what is evening dress? Nothing but a silly little convention.’
‘Silly, I grant you,’ said John in his measured, judicious way. ‘But when it involves a class symbol, no convention can be called little.’
‘But, Father,’ Sebastian broke in, ‘all the boys of my age have got evening clothes.’ His voice was shrill and unsteady with emotion.
Bent over the chess-board, Susan heard it, recognized the danger signal, and at once raised her eyes. Sebastian’s face was darkly flushed, and his lips had started to tremble. More than ever he looked like a little boy. A little boy in distress, a helpless little boy to whom a grown-up is being cruel. Susan was overwhelmed by loving pity. But what a mess he was making of the whole business! she thought, feeling suddenly furious with him, not in despite of her love and pity, but precisely because she cared so much. And why on earth couldn’t he use a little self-control, or if that was impossible, just keep his mouth shut?
For a few seconds John Barnack looked in silence at his son — looked intently at the image of the childish wife who had betrayed him, and was now dead. Then he smiled sarcastically.
‘All the other boys,’ he repeated, ‘every single one.’ And, in the tone he employed in court to discredit the other side’s star witness, he added, contemptuously ironic: ‘In South Wales the sons of the unemployed miners make a point of wearing tails and white ties. Not to mention gardenias in their buttonholes. And now,’ he commanded peremptorily, ‘go to bed, and don’t ever talk to me about this foolery again.’
Sebastian turned and, speechless, hurried out of the room.
‘Your play,’ said Jim impatiently.
Susan looked down again, saw the black knight standing immediately in front of her queen and took it.
‘Got him!’ she said ferociously. The black knight was Uncle John.
Triumphantly, Jim moved a castle across the board and, as he dropped her queen into the box, shouted, ‘Check!’
Three-quarters of an hour later, in her pyjamas, Susan was squatting on the floor in front of the gas fire in her bedroom, writing her diary. ‘B+ for History, B for Algebra. Which might be worse. Miss C. gave me a bad mark for untidiness, but of course didn’t say a word to her beloved Gladys. Really!!! Scarlatti went better, but Pfeiffy tried to be funny with S. about cigars, and then Tom B. met us and asked him to come to his party, and S. was miserable about his wretched dinner jacket. Otherwise I should have hated him because he was with Mrs. E. again today and she was wearing black lace next her skin. But I only felt dreadfully sorry for him. And this evening Uncle J. was horrible about the dinner jacket; I really hate him sometimes. Uncle E. tried to stick up for S., but it wasn’t any good.’ It wasn’t any good, and what made it worse was that she had to sit there, waiting till first Uncle John and then Uncle Eustace took leave; and even when she had been free to go to bed, she hadn’t dared to go and comfort him, for fear her mother or Jim might hear her and come up and find her in his room, and, if it were Jim, guffaw as though he had seen her in the lavatory, or if her mother, make some little jocular remark that would be worse than death. But now — she looked at the clock on the mantelpiece — now it ought to be safe. She got up, locked the diary into the drawer of her writing-desk and hid the key in its usual place behind the looking-glass. Then she turned out the light, cautiously opened the door, and looked out. The lights on the lower landings had been extinguished; the house was so still that she could hear the heavy beating of her own heart. Three steps brought her to the door on the other side of the landing; the handle turned noiselessly, and noiselessly she slipped in. The room was not entirely dark; for the blinds had not been drawn, and the lamp across the street threw an oblong of greenish twilight across the ceiling. Susan closed the door behind her and stood, listening — listening at first only to her own heart. Then the springs of the bed creaked faintly, and there was the sound of a long sobbing inhalation of breath. He was crying. Impulsively, she moved forward; her outstretched hand touched a brass rail, moved to the blanket beyond, and, from wool, slid over to the smoothness of the turned-back sheet. The white linen was ghostly in the darkness, and against the dimly seen pillow Sebastian’s head was a black silhouette. Her fingers touched the nape of his neck.
‘It’s me, Sebastian.’
‘Get away,’ he muttered angrily. ‘Get away!’
Susan said nothing, but sat down on the edge of the bed. The little bristles left by the barber’s clippers were electrical against her finger-tips.
‘You mustn’t mind, Sebastian darling,’ she whispered. ‘You mustn’t let yourself be hurt.’
She was patronizing him, of course; she was treating him like a child. But he was utterly miserable; and besides, humiliation had gone so far that he no longer had the energy of pride to keep up his resentment. He lay still, permitting himself to enjoy the comforting reassurance of her proximity.
Susan lifted her hand from his neck and held it poised in midair, breathlessly hesitant. Did she dare? Would he be furious if she did? Her heart thumped yet more violently against her ribs. Then, swallowing hard, she made up her mind to risk it. Slowly the lifted hand moved forwards and downwards through the darkness, until the fingers were touching his hair — that pale bright hair, curly and wind-ruffled, but now invisible, no more now than a scarcely perceptible unravelling of living silk against her skin. She waited tremulously, expecting every moment to hear his angry command to let him alone. But no sound came, and, emboldened by his silence, she lowered her hand a little further.
Inert, Sebastian abandoned himself to the tenderness which at ordinary times he would never allow her to express, and in the very act of self-abandonment found a certain consolation. Suddenly and irrelevantly, it came into his mind that this was one of the situations he had always looked forward to in his dream of a love-affair with Mary Esdaile — or whatever other name one chose to give the dark-haired mistress of his imagination. He would lie there inert in the darkness, and she would kneel beside the bed, stroking his hair; and sometimes she would bend down and kiss him — or perhaps it wouldn’t be her lips on his, but the touch of her naked breast. But, of course, this was only Susan, not Mary Esdaile.
She was running her hand through his hair now, openly, undisguisedly, just as she had always longed to do — the fingertips passing from the smooth taut skin behind the ears, pushing their way among the roots of his hair, while the thick resilient curls slid along between the fingers as she moved her hand up to the crown of his head. Again, again, indefatigably.
‘Sebastian?’ she whispered at last; but he did not answer, and his breathing was almost imperceptibly soft.
With eyes that had grown accustomed to the darkness, she looked down at the sleeping face, and the happiness she experienced, the unutterable bliss, was like what she had sometimes felt while she was holding Marjorie’s baby, but with all these other things added — this desire and apprehension, this breathless sense of forbiddenness, as she felt the electrical contact of his hair against her finger-tips, this aching pleasure in her breasts. Bending down, she touched his cheek with her lips. Sebastian stirred a little, but did not wake.
‘Darling,’ she repeated and, sure that he could not hear her, ‘my love, my precious love.’
CHAPTER SIX
EUSTACE WOKE UP, that Saturday morning, at a few minutes before nine, after a night of dreamless sleep, induced by nothing stronger in the way of narcotics than a pint of stout taken at midnight, with two or three small anchovy sandwiches.
Waking was painful, of course; but the taste in his mouth was less brassy, and that tired ache in all his limbs decidedly less acute than it ordinarily was at this black hour of the morning. True, he coughed a bit and brought up some phlegm; but the exhausting paroxysm was over more quickly than usual. After his early cup of tea and a hot bath he felt positively young again.
Beyond the circular shaving-mirror and the image of his lathered face lay the city of Florence, framed between the cypresses of his descending terraces. Over Monte Morello hung fat clouds, like the backsides of Correggio’s cherubs at Parma; but the rest of the sky was flawlessly blue, and in the flower-beds below the bathroom window the hyacinths were like carved jewels in the sunlight, white jade and lapis-lazuli and pale-pink coral.
‘The pearl-grey,’ he called out to his valet without looking round, and then paused to wonder which tie would go best with the suit and the gay weather. A black-and-white check? But that would be too much the jaunty stockbroker. No; what the place and time required was something in the style of those tartans on a white ground from the Burlington Arcade. Or better still, that delicious salmon-pink fellow from Sulka’s. ‘And the pink tie,’ he added, ‘the new one.’
There were white and yellow roses on the breakfast table. Really quite prettily arranged! Guido was beginning to learn. He pulled out a virginal white bud and stuck it in his buttonhole, then addressed himself to his hot-house grapes. A bowl of porridge f
ollowed, then two poached eggs on toast, a kipper and some scones and marmalade.
As he ate, he read his letters.
A note, first of all, from Bruno Rontini. Was he back in Florence? And, if so, why not drop in at the shop one day for a chat and a glance at the books? A catalogue of the new arrivals was enclosed.
Then there were two charity appeals from England — those beastly Orphans again, and a brand-new lot of Incurables, whom he’d have to send a couple of guineas to, because Molly Carraway was on the committee. But to make up for the Incurables was a most cheering note from the manager of his Italian bank. Using the two thousand pounds of liquid capital he’d given them to play with, they’d succeeded in netting him, during the previous month, fourteen thousand lire. Just by buying and selling on the dollar-franc exchange. Fourteen thousand…. It was quite a windfall. He’d give the Incurables a fiver and buy himself a little birthday present. A few nice books perhaps; and he unfolded Bruno’s catalogue. But, really, who wanted the first edition of Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat? Or the Opera Omnia of St. Bonaventura edited by the Franciscans of Quaracchi? Eustace threw the catalogue aside and settled down to the task of deciphering the long illegible scribble from Mopsa Schottelius, which he had reserved to the last. In pencil and the most disconcerting mixture of German, French and English, Mopsa described for him what she was doing at Monte Carlo. And what that girl wasn’t doing could have been set down on the back of a postage-stamp. How appallingly thorough these Germans always managed to be, how emphatic! In sex no less than in war — in scholarship, in science. Diving deeper than anyone else and coming up muddier. He decided to send Mopsa a picture, postcard advising her to read John Morley on ‘Compromise.’