Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Mrs. Thwale glanced at him searchingly, then averted her eyes. For a few seconds she did not speak. Then, slowly and in the tone of one who has thought out a problem and come at last to a decision, she gave her answer.
‘You’re one of the few people I wouldn’t mind showing them to.’
‘I feel flattered,’ said Eustace.
Mrs. Thwale opened her handbag and, from among its perfumed contents, extracted half a sheet of notepaper.
‘Here’s something I was working on before breakfast this morning.’
He took it and put up his monocle. The drawing was in ink and, in spite of its smallness, extraordinarily detailed and meticulous. Competent, was Eustace’s verdict, but unpleasantly niggling. He peered at it closely. The drawing represented a woman, dressed in the severest and most correctly fashionable of tailor-made suits, walking, prayer-book in hand, up the aisle of a church. Behind her, at the end of a string, she trailed a horseshoe magnet — but a horseshoe magnet so curved and rounded as to suggest a pair of thighs tapering down to the knees. On the ground, a little way behind the woman, lay an enormous eyeball, as big as a pumpkin, its pupil staring wildly at the retreating magnet. From the sides of the eye sprouted two wormlike arms, ending in a pair of huge hooked hands that clawed at the floor. So strong had been the attraction and so desperate the futile effort to resist, that the dragging fingers had scored long grooves in the flagstones.
Eustace raised his left eyebrow and allowed the monocle to drop.
‘There’s only one thing about the parable I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why the church?’
‘Oh, for any number of reasons,’ Mrs. Thwale answered, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Respectability always heightens a woman’s attractiveness. And blasphemy gives an extra spice to pleasure. And, after all, churches are places people get married in. Besides, who tells you that that isn’t the Decameron she’s carrying, bound in black leather like a prayer-book?’
She took the sheet of paper and put it away again in her bag.
‘It’s a pity fans have gone out of fashion,’ she added in another tone. ‘And those big white masks they used to wear in Casanova. Or talking from behind screens, like the ladies in “The Tale of Genji.” Wouldn’t that be heavenly!’
‘Would it?’
She nodded, her face bright with unwonted animation.
‘One could do the oddest things while one was chatting with the Vicar about … well, let’s say the League of Nations. Oh, the oddest!’
‘Such as?’
A little grunt of voiceless laughter was all the answer she vouchsafed. There was a pause.
‘And then,’ she added, ‘think of the enormities one could bring out without blushing!’
‘And you feel you’d like to bring out enormities?’
Mrs. Thwale nodded.
‘I’d have been a good scientist,’ she said.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘But can’t you see?’ she said impatiently. ‘Can’t you see? Cutting bits off frogs and mice, grafting cancer into rabbits, boiling things together in test-tubes — just to see what’ll happen, just for the fun of the thing. Wantonly committing enormities — that’s all science is.’
‘And you’d enjoy it outside the laboratory?’
‘Not in public, of course.’
‘But if you were ambushed behind a screen, where the Good couldn’t see you …’
‘Ambushed behind a screen,’ Mrs. Thwale repeated slowly. ‘And now,’ she went on in another tone, ‘I shall have to get out. There’s a shop somewhere here on the Lungarno where you can buy rubber rats for dogs. Rats with a chocolate flavour. Foxy’s very keen on the chocolate, it seems. Ah, here we are!’
She leaned forward and rapped the glass.
Eustace watched her go. Then, replacing his hat, he ordered the chauffeur to drive to Weyl’s in the Via Tornabuoni.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘WEYL FRÈRES, BRUXELLES, Paris …’
Eustace pushed open the door and walked into the crowded shop. ‘“Where every prospect pleases,”’ he was humming, as he always hummed on these occasions, ‘“and only man is Weyl Frères, Bruxelles, Paris, Florence, Vienne.”’
But this morning it was woman, not man. Mme Weyl was engaged, as he entered, in trying to talk what was obviously an Anglo-Indian colonel into buying a Braque. The performance was so ludicrous and the performer so ravishingly pretty that Eustace simulated an interest in a particularly hideous piece of majolica in order to have an excuse to watch and listen at close quarters.
Pearly, golden, deliciously pink and plump, how had this sumptuous young creature escaped from the Rubens canvas which was so obviously her home? And how, good heavens, did it happen that a figure from Peter Paul’s mythology was wearing clothes? But even in her incongruous twentieth-century frills, Weyl’s Flemish Venus remained enchanting. Which only heightened the absurdity of the act she was now staging for the colonel. With the earnestness of a little girl who is doing her very best to reproduce, word-perfect, the lesson so laboriously learned by heart, she was conscientiously repeating the nonsense phrases with which her husband adorned his incomparable patter. ‘Tactile Values,’ ‘rhythm,’ ‘significant forms,’ ‘repoussoirs,’ ‘calligraphic outline’ — Eustace recognized all the stereotypes of contemporary criticism, and along with them such products of Weyl’s own luxuriant genius as ‘four-dimensional volumes,’ ‘couleur d’éternité,’ and ‘plastic polyphony’; the whole uttered with a French accent so strong, so indecently ‘cute,’ so reminiscent of the naughty-naughty twitterings of a Parisian miss on the English musical comedy stage, that the colonel’s ruddy face was fairly beaming with concupiscence.
Suddenly there was a rush of feet and the loud, delighted cry of ‘Monsieur Eustache!’ Eustace turned his head. Short, broad-shouldered, astonishingly quick and agile, it was Gabriel Weyl himself, darting towards him between the baroque statues and the cinquecento furniture. Seizing Eustace’s hand in both of his, he shook it long and ardently, assured him, in a torrent of incorrigibly Belgian English, how happy he was, how proud, how deeply touched and flattered; and then, lowering his voice, whispered dramatically that he had just received something from his brother in Paris, a consignment of treasures which he had said to himself the very first moment he looked at them that he wouldn’t show to anyone, not a soul, not to Pierpont Morgan himself, by God, until ce cher Monsieur Eustache had plucked the virginity of the portfolio and rifled its choicest sweets. And what sweets! Degas drawings such as nobody had ever seen the like of.
Still boiling over with enthusiasm, he led the way into the back room. On an elaborately carved Venetian table lay a black portfolio.
‘There!’ he cried, pointing at it with the gesture of one who, in an Old Master, somewhat superfluously calls attention to the Transfiguration or the martyrdom of St. Erasmus.
He was silent for a moment; then, changing his expression to the libidinous leer of a slave-dealer peddling Circassians to an ageing pasha, he started to undo the strings of the portfolio. The hands, Eustace noticed, were deft and powerful, their backs furred with a growth of soft black hair, their short fingers exquisitely manicured. With a flourish M. Weyl threw back the heavy flap of cardboard.
‘Look!’
The tone was triumphant and assured. At the sight of those newly budded paps, that incomparable navel, no pasha, however jaded, could possibly resist.
‘But look!’
Putting up his monocle, Eustace looked, and saw the charcoal sketch of a naked woman standing in a tin bath like a Roman sarcophagus. One foot, much distorted by the wearing of tight shoes, was planted on the edge of the bath, and the woman was bending down, hair and bosom falling one way, rump bonily jutting another, one knee crooked outward at the most ungraceful of all possible angles, to scrub a heel which one divined, through some unanalysable subtlety of the drawing, as yellow and, in spite of soap, chronically dirty-looking.
‘Was this the face …?
’ Eustace murmured.
But really there was nobody quite like Degas, nobody who could render the cosy and domestic squalors of our physiology with so much intensity and in forms so exquisitely beautiful.
‘You oughtn’t to have sold me that Magnasco,’ he said aloud. ‘How can I possibly afford one of these?’
The slave-dealer shot a glance at his pasha and saw that the Circassians were beginning to have the desired effect. But they were so cheap, he protested; and the soundest of investments — as good as shares in the Suez Canal Company. And now let Monsieur Eustache look at this one!
He removed the first drawing; and this time the face that launched the thousand ships was seen squarely from the rear, leaning forward over the tin sarcophagus and vigorously towelling the back of its neck.
Gabriel Weyl laid a thick, perfectly manicured forefinger on the buttocks.
‘What values!’ he breathed ecstatically, ‘what volumes, what calligraphy!’
Eustace burst out laughing. But, as usual, it was M. Weyl who laughed last. Little by little the jaded pasha began to yield. He might perhaps consider it — that was to say, if the price weren’t too exorbitant….
Only eight thousand lire, wheedled the slave-dealer, eight thousand for something that was not only a masterpiece, but also a gilt-edged security.
It was quite a reasonable figure; but Eustace felt bound to protest.
No, no, not a centesimo less than eight thousand. But if Monsieur Eustache would take two of them, and pay cash, he could have them for only fourteen.
Fourteen, fourteen … After this morning’s letter from the bank one might almost say that one was getting two Degases free gratis and for nothing. His conscience salved, Eustace pulled out his cheque-book.
‘I’ll take them with me,’ he said, indicating the foot-washer and the towel-wielder.
Five minutes later, with the square flat package under his arm, he emerged again into the sunlight of the Via Tornabuoni.
From Weyl’s Eustace made his way to Vieusseux’s lending library, to see if they had a copy of Lamettrie’s L’Homme Machine. But of course they hadn’t; and after turning over the pages of the latest French and English reviews in the vain hope of finding something one could read, he walked out again into the jostle of the narrow streets.
After a moment of hesitation he decided to pop into the Bargello for a moment and then, on the way to lunch, to look in on Bruno Rontini and ask him to arrange about taking Sebastian round the Villa Galigai.
Ten minutes were enough to whizz through the Donatellos and, his head full of heroic bronze and marble, he strolled up the street in the direction of the bookshop.
Yes, it would have been nice, he was thinking, it would have been very nice indeed if one’s life had had the quality of those statues. Nobility without affectation. Serenity combined with passionate energy. Dignity wedded to grace. But, alas, those were not precisely the characteristics that one’s life had exhibited. Which was regrettable, no doubt. But of course it had its compensating advantages. Being a Donatello would have been altogether too strenuous for his taste. That sort of thing was much more John’s cup of tea — John who had always seen himself as the equivalent of a mixture between Gattamelata and the Baptist. Instead of which, his actual life was … what? Eustace cast about for the answer, and finally decided that John’s life was best compared to a war picture by one of those deplorable painters who were born to be magazine illustrators but had unfortunately seen the Cubists and taken to High Art. Poor John! He had no taste, no sense of style….
But here was Bruno’s corner. He opened the door and walked into the dark little book-lined cavern.
Seated at the counter, a man was reading by the light of a green-shaded lamp that hung from the ceiling. At the sound of the door-bell he put away his book and, with movements that were expressive more of resignation to the interruption than of delight at seeing a customer, got up and advanced to meet the newcomer. He was a young man in the middle twenties, tall, large-boned, with a narrow convex face like that of a rather tense and over-earnest, but still not very intelligent ram.
‘Buon giorno,’ said Eustace genially.
The young man returned his greeting without the trace of an answering smile. Not, Eustace felt sure, from any desire to be discourteous, but just because, to a face of that kind, smiling was all but an impossibility.
He asked where Bruno was, and was told that Bruno would be out for at least another hour.
‘Gallivanting about as usual!’ Eustace commented with that unnecessary and rather pointless jocularity into which the desire to display his perfect command of the Tuscan idiom so often betrayed him when he spoke Italian.
‘If you like to put it that way, Mr. Barnack,’ said the young man with quiet gravity.
‘Oh, you know who I am?’
The other nodded.
‘I came into the shop one day last autumn, when you were talking with Bruno.’
‘And when I’d gone, he treated you to a thorough dissection of my character!’
‘How can you say that!’ the young man cried reproachfully. ‘You who’ve known Bruno for so long.’
Eustace laughed and patted him on the shoulder. The boy was humourless, of course; but in his loyalty to Bruno, in the solemn ovine sincerity of all he said, curiously touching.
‘I was only joking,’ he said aloud. ‘Bruno’s the last person to gossip about a man when his back is turned.’
For the first time during the conversation, the young man’s face brightened into a smile.
‘I’m glad you realize it,’ he said.
‘Not only realize, but sometimes even regret it,’ said Eustace mischievously. ‘There’s nothing that so effectively ruins conversation as charitableness. After all, nobody can be amusing about other people’s virtues. What’s your name, by the way?’ he added, before the other had time to translate the pained disapproval of his expression into words.
‘Malpighi, Carlo Malpighi.’
‘No relation of Avvocato Malpighi?’
The other hesitated; an expression of embarrassment appeared on his face.
‘He’s my father,’ he said at last.
Eustace betrayed no surprise; but his curiosity was aroused. Why was the son of a highly successful lawyer selling secondhand books? He set himself to find out.
‘I expect Bruno’s been very helpful to you,’ he began, taking what he divined would be the shortest way to the young man’s confidence.
He was not mistaken. In a little while he had young ram-face almost chattering. About his sickly and conventional mother; about his father’s preference for the two older and cleverer sons; about the impact of il Darwinismo and his loss of faith; about his turning to the Religion of Humanity.
‘The Religion of Humanity!’ Eustace repeated with relish. How deliciously comic that people should still be worshipping Humanity!
From theoretical socialism the step to an active anti-fascism was short and logical — particularly logical in Carlo’s case, since both his brothers were party members and climbing rapidly up the hierarchical ladder. Carlo had spent a couple of years distributing forbidden literature; attending clandestine meetings; talking to peasants and workmen in the hope of persuading them to put up some kind of resistance to the all-pervading tyranny. But nothing happened; there were no results to show for all these efforts. In private, people grumbled and exchanged whispered jokes and little obscenities about their masters; in public, they continued to shout ‘Duce, Duce!’ And meanwhile, from time to time, one of Carlo’s associates would be caught, and either beaten up in the old-fashioned way, or else shipped off to the islands. That was all, that was absolutely all.
‘And even if it hadn’t been all,’ Eustace put in, ‘even if you’d persuaded them to do something violent and decisive, what then? There’d have been anarchy for a little while. And then, to cure the anarchy, another dictator, calling himself a communist, no doubt, but otherwise indistinguishable from this one. Qui
te indistinguishable,’ he repeated with the jolliest of chuckles. ‘Unless, of course, he happened to be rather worse.’
The other nodded.
‘Bruno said something of that kind too.’
‘Sensible fellow!’
‘But he also said something else …’
‘Ah, I was afraid of that!’
Carlo ignored the interruption, and his face glowed with sudden ardour.
‘… That there’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. Your own self,’ he repeated. ‘So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you’ve worked on your own corner. You’ve got to be good before you can do good — or at any rate do good without doing harm at the same time. Helping with one hand and hurting with the other — that’s what the ordinary reformer does.’
‘Whereas the truly wise man,’ said Eustace, ‘refrains from doing anything with either hand.’
‘No, no,’ the other protested with unsmiling earnestness. ‘The wise man begins by transforming himself, so that he can help other people without running the risk of being corrupted in the process.’
And with the incoherence of passion he began to talk about the French Revolution. The men who made it had the best of intentions; but these good intentions were hopelessly mixed up with vanity and ambition and insensitiveness and cruelty. With the inevitable consequence that what had begun as a movement of liberation degenerated into terrorism and a squabble for power, into tyranny and imperialism and the world-wide reactions to imperialism. And this sort of thing was bound to happen wherever people tried to do good without being good. Nobody could do a proper job with dirty or misshapen instruments. There was no way out except Bruno’s way. And, of course, Bruno’s way was the way that had been pointed out by …
Suddenly he broke off and, taking cognizance of Eustace as a potential customer, looked very sheepish.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a tone of apology. ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this. I ought to have asked you what you wanted.’