Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘John must be a pretty difficult father,’ said Bruno after a little pause.
‘Difficult? He’s nothing but a bullying fool. And of course the boy dislikes him and loathes everything he stands for.’
Eustace smiled. It gave him real pleasure to think of his brother’s shortcomings.
‘Yes, if only people would realize that moral principles are like measles …’
The soft voice tailed away into silence and a sigh.
‘Like measles?’
‘They have to be caught. And only the people who’ve got them can pass on the contagion.’
‘Fortunately,’ said Eustace, ‘they don’t always succeed in passing it on.’
He was thinking of that little Thwale woman. Any amount of contagion from the Canon and his wife; but no sign of any moral or pietistic rash on the daughter’s white, voluptuous skin.
‘You’re right,’ Bruno agreed. ‘One doesn’t have to catch the infection of goodness if one doesn’t want to. The will is always free.’
Always free. People had been able to say no even to Filippo Neri and François de Sales, even to the Christ and the Buddha. As he named them to himself, the little flame in his heart seemed to expand, as it were, and aspire, until it touched that other light beyond it and within; and for a moment it was still in the timeless intensity of a yearning that was also consummation. The sound of his cousin’s voice brought his attention back again to what was happening in the shop.
‘There’s nothing I enjoy more,’ Eustace was remarking with relish, ‘than the spectacle of the Good trying to propagate their notions and producing results exactly contrary to what they intended. It’s the highest form of comedy.’
He chuckled wheezily.
Listening to that laughter coming up from the depths and darkness of a sepulchre, Bruno was moved almost to despair.
‘If only you could forgive the Good!’ The quiet voice was raised almost to vehemence. ‘Then you might allow yourself to be forgiven.’
‘For what?’ Eustace enquired.
‘For being what you are. For being a human being. Yes, God can forgive you even that, if you really want it. Can forgive your separateness so completely that you can be made one with him.’
‘The solid vertebrate united with the Gaseous.’
Bruno looked at him for a moment in silence. In their setting of tired soft flesh the eyes were gaily twinkling; the babyish lips were curved into a smile of irony.
‘What about the comedy of the Clever?’ he said at last. ‘Achieving self-destruction in the name of self-interest, and delusion in the name of realism. I sometimes think it’s even higher than the comedy of the Good.’
He went behind the counter, and came back with a very old Gladstone bag.
‘If you’re going to meet that young nephew of yours,’ he said, ‘I’ll go with you to the station.’
He was taking the seven-thirty train to Arezzo, he explained. There was an old retired professor there, who wanted to sell his library. And Monday was the opening day of a very important auction at Perugia. Dealers would be attending from all over the country. He hoped to pick up some of the unconsidered trifles.
Bruno turned out the lights, and they went out into a twilight that was fast deepening into night. Eustace’s car was waiting in a side street. The two men got in, and were driven slowly towards the station.
‘Do you remember the last time we drove to the station together?’ Bruno suddenly asked after a period of silence.
‘The last time we drove together to the station,’ Eustace repeated doubtfully.
And then, all at once, it came back to him. He and Bruno in the old Panhard. And it was just after Amy’s funeral, and he was going back to the Riviera — back to Laurina. No, it hadn’t been too creditable, that episode of his life. Definitely on the squalid side. He made a little grimace, as though he had caught a whiff of rotten cabbage. Then, imperceptibly, he shrugged his shoulders. After all, what did it matter? It would all be the same a hundred years hence; it would all be the same.
‘Yes, I remember,’ he said. ‘You talked to me about the Gaseous Vertebrate.’
Bruno smiled. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t have dared to break the taboo,’ he said. ‘You began it.’
‘Perhaps I did,’ Eustace admitted.
Death and that insane passion and his own discreditable behaviour had conspired to make him do a lot of funny things at that time. He felt, all at once, extremely depressed.
‘Poor Amy!’ he said aloud, speaking under a kind of obscure compulsion that was stronger than all his resolutions to refrain, in Bruno’s presence, from being serious. ‘Poor Amy!’
‘I don’t think she was to be pitied,’ said Bruno. ‘Amy had reconciled herself to what was happening to her. You don’t have to feel sorry for people who are prepared for death.’
‘Prepared? But what difference does that make?’ Eustace’s tone was almost truculent. ‘Dying is always dying,’ he concluded, happy to be able thus to escape from seriousness into controversy.
‘Physiologically, perhaps,’ Bruno agreed. ‘But psychologically, spiritually …’
The car came to a halt before a policeman’s outstretched arm.
‘Now, now,’ Eustace broke in. ‘No nonsense about immortality! None of your wishful thinking!’
‘And yet,’ said Bruno softly, ‘annihilation would be pretty convenient, wouldn’t it? What about the wish to believe in that?’
From the sepulchre of his privation Eustace made confident answer.
‘One doesn’t wish to believe in annihilation,’ he said. ‘One just accepts the facts.’
‘You mean, one accepts the inferences drawn from one particular set of facts, and ignores the other facts from which different inferences might be drawn. Ignores them because one really wants life to be a tale told by an idiot. Just one damned thing after another, until at last there’s a final damned thing, after which there isn’t anything.’
There was a blast of the policeman’s whistle; and as the car moved on again, the light from a shop window passed slowly across Eustace’s face, showing up every pouch and line and blotch in the loose skin. Then the darkness closed down once more, like the lid of a sarcophagus. Closed down irrevocably, it seemed to Bruno, closed down for ever. Impulsively, he laid his hand on the other’s arm.
‘Eustace,’ he said, ‘I implore you …’
Eustace started. Something strange was happening. It was as though the slats of a Venetian blind had suddenly been turned so as to admit the sunlight and the expanse of the summer sky. Unobstructed, an enormous and blissful brightness streamed into him. But with the brightness came the memory of what Bruno had said in the shop: ‘To be forgiven … forgiven for being what you are.’ With a mixture of anger and fear, he jerked his arm away.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked sharply. ‘Trying to hypnotize me?’
Bruno did not answer. He had made his final desperate effort to raise the lid; but from within the sarcophagus it had been pulled down again. And of course, he reflected, resurrection is optional. We are under no compulsion except to persist — to persist as we are, growing always a little worse and a little worse; indefinitely, until we wish to rise again as something other than ourselves; inexorably, unless we permit ourselves to be raised.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TRAIN WAS unexpectedly punctual and, when they reached the station, the passengers were already elbowing their way through the gates.
‘If you see a small cherub in grey flannel trousers,’ said Eustace, as he stood on tiptoes to peer over the heads of the crowd, ‘that’s our man.’
Bruno pointed a bony finger.
‘Does that answer your description?’
‘Which one?’
‘That little non Anglus sed angelus behind the pillar there,’
Eustace caught sight of a familiar head of pale and curly hair and, waving his hand, pushed his way closer to the gate.
‘And this is your long-lost second-
cousin once removed,’ he said, as he returned a minute later with the boy. ‘Bruno Rontini — who sells second-hand books and would like everybody to believe in the Gaseous Vertebrate.’ And as they shook hands, ‘Let me warn you,’ he continued in a mock-solemn tone, ‘he’ll probably try to convert you.’
Sebastian looked again at Bruno and, under the influence of his uncle’s introduction, saw only foolishness in the bright eyes, only bigotry in that thin bony face, with its hollows under the cheek-bones, its beaky protrusion of a nose. Then he turned to Eustace and smiled.
‘So this is Sebastian,’ said Bruno slowly. Ominously significant, it was the name of fate’s predestined target.
‘Somehow, I can’t help thinking of all those arrows,’ he went on. ‘The arrows of the lusts which this beauty would evoke and would permit its owner to satisfy; the arrows of vanity and self-satisfaction and …’
‘But arrows go both ways,’ said Eustace. ‘This martyr will give as good as he gets — won’t he, Sebastian?’ He smiled knowingly, as from man to man.
Flattered by this display of confidence in his prowess, Sebastian laughed and nodded.
With an affectionate, almost a possessive gesture, Eustace laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘Andiamo!’ he cried.
There was a note of something like triumph in his tone. Not only had he got even with Bruno for what had happened in the car; he had also cut him off from any chance of exerting an influence on Sebastian.
‘Andiamo!’ Bruno repeated. ‘I’ll take you to the car and get my bag.’ Picking up Sebastian’s suitcase, he started towards the exit. The others followed.
Hooting in a melodious baritone, the Isotta slowly nosed its way along the crowded street. Sebastian pulled the fur rug a little higher over his knees and thought how wonderful it was to be rich. And to think that, if it weren’t for his father’s idiotic ideas …
‘Funny old Bruno!’ his uncle remarked in a tone of amused condescension. ‘For some reason he always reminds me of those preposterous Anglo-Saxon saints. St. Willibald and St. Wunnibald, St. Winna and St. Frideswide …’
He made the names sound so ludicrous that Sebastian burst out laughing.
‘But a thoroughly kind, gentle creature,’ Eustace went on. ‘And considering he’s one of the Good, not too much of a bore.’
Interrupting himself, he touched Sebastian’s arm and pointed through the left-hand window.
‘The Medici tombs are up there,’ he said. ‘Talk about the Sublime! I can’t look at them now. Donatello’s my limit these days. But of course it’s quite true: the damned things are the greatest sculptures in the world. And that’s Rossi’s, the tailor,’ he went on without transition, pointing again. ‘Order decent English cloth, and the man will make you as good a suit as you can get in Savile Row, and at half the price. We’ll take time off from our sight-seeing to get you measured for those evening clothes.’
Scarcely daring to believe his ears, Sebastian looked at him questioningly.
‘You mean …? Oh, thank you, Uncle Eustace,’ he cried, as the other smiled and nodded.
Eustace looked at the boy and saw, by the transient light of a street lamp, that his face had reddened and his eyes were bright. Touched, he patted him on the knee.
‘No need for gratitude,’ he said. ‘If I were in Who’s Who, which I’m not, you’d see that my chief recreation was “Annoying my brother.”’
They laughed together, conspirators in mischief.
‘And now,’ cried Eustace, ‘bend down and take a squint up through this window at the second-largest egg ever laid.’
Sebastian did as he was told, and saw great cliffs of marble and, above the cliffs, an enormous dome floating up into the sky and darkening, as it rose, from the faint lamplight that still lingered about its base into a mystery more impenetrable than the night itself. It was the transfiguration, not of a little squalor this time, but of a vast harmonious magnificence.
‘Light first,’ said Eustace, pointing a bloated finger that travelled upwards as he spoke, ‘then darkness.’
Sebastian looked at him in astonishment. He too …?
‘It’s like a looking-glass equation,’ the other went on. ‘You start with the values of x and y, and you end with an unknown quantity. The most romantic kind of lighting.’
‘I didn’t know anyone else had noticed it,’ said Sebastian.
‘Optimist!’ Eustace smiled indulgently. What fun to be young, to be convinced, each time one lost a virginity, that this sort of thing had never happened before! ‘The Victorian etchers and engravers hardly noticed anything else. All their romantic Matterhorns and ruined castles are darker on top than at the bottom. Which doesn’t make the looking-glass equation less amusing.’
There was a little silence. The car turned out of the cathedral square into a street even narrower and more crowded than the one by which they had come from the station.
‘I wrote a poem about it,’ Sebastian confided at last.
‘Not one of those you sent me for Christmas?’
The boy shook his head.
‘I didn’t think you’d like it. It’s a bit … well, I don’t know … a bit religious; that is, if it was about religion, which it isn’t. But seeing you’ve noticed it too … I mean, the way things are lighted from the bottom …’
‘Can you recite it?’
Torn between shyness and a desire to show off, Sebastian hummed and hawed, then finally said yes.
Little squalor! transfigured into Ely,
Into Bourges, into the beauty of holiness …
Leaning back in his corner, Eustace listened to the still almost childish voice and, as the lights came and went, scanned the averted face as it gazed with angelic gravity, wide-eyed, into the darkness. Yes, there was talent there all right. But what touched him so profoundly, what moved him almost to tears, was the whole-heartedness, the guileless good faith, the essential purity. Purity, he insisted — even though one couldn’t really say what the word meant, or even justify its use. For obviously the boy was obsessed with sex — certainly masturbated — probably had affairs, homosexual or otherwise. And yet there was a purity there, a real purity.
The recitation came to an end, there was a long silence — so long, indeed, that Sebastian began to wonder uneasily if his little squalor were really as good as he believed. Uncle Eustace had taste; and if he thought it was no good, then … But the other spoke at last.
‘That was very beautiful,’ he said quietly. The words referred less to the poem than to what he himself had felt while listening to it — this unexpected uprush of high emotion and protective tenderness. ‘Very beautiful.’ He laid his hand affectionately on Sebastian’s knee. Then, after a pause, he added, smiling, ‘I used to write verses when I was a few years older than you are now.’
‘You did?’
‘Dowson and water,’ said Eustace, shaking his head. ‘With occasional flashes of Wilde and cat-piss.’ He laughed. Enough of sentimentality. ‘I don’t rise above limericks nowadays,’ he went on. ‘But as Wordsworth so justly remarked,
Scorn not the Limerick, Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his pants; th’ obscenity
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound …
And so on — until, of course, in Milton’s hand
The Thing became a strumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains — alas, too few!
After which I really must tell you about the “Young Girl of Spokane.”’
He did. The car, meanwhile, had emerged into a larger darkness. Lights gleamed on water; a bridge was crossed, and with gathering speed they rolled for a minute or two along a wide embankment. Then their road swung to the right, grew tortuous, began to climb. Through his window, Sebastian looked on fascinated, as the head-lamps created out of nothingness a confluent series of narrow universes. A gaunt grey goat standing up on its hind legs to
munch the wistaria buds that hung across an expanse of peeling stucco; a priest in black skirts pushing a lady’s bicycle up the steep hill; a great ilex tree, writhing like a wooden octopus; and at the foot of a flight of steps two startled lovers, breaking apart from their embrace and turning with a flash of eyes and laughing teeth towards the light which had evoked and now, passing, abolished them.
A moment later, the car drew up before tall iron gates. Musically, but imperiously, it hooted for admittance, and a little old man came running out of the shadows to undo the bolts.
The drive wound its way under tall cypresses; a bed of blue hyacinths appeared and vanished, then a little fountain in a shell-shaped niche. As the Isotta made its final turn, the head-lights called into existence half a dozen weathered nymphs, naked on pedestals, then came to rest, as though this were the final, the all-explaining revelation, on an orange tree growing in a very large earthenware pot.
‘Here we are,’ said Eustace; and at the same moment a butler in a white jacket opened the door and deferentially inclined his head.
They entered a high square vestibule, pillared and barrel-vaulted like a church. The butler took their things, and Eustace led the way up the stone staircase.
‘Here’s your room,’ he said, throwing open a door. ‘Don’t be alarmed by that,’ he added, pointing at the enormous canopied bed. ‘It’s only the carving that’s antique. The mattress is contemporary. And your bathroom is in there.’ He waved his hand towards another door. ‘Do you think you can get yourself washed and brushed in five minutes?’
Sebastian was sure he could; and five minutes later he was downstairs again in the hall. A half-opened door invited; he entered and found himself in the drawing-room. A faint spicy perfume of potpourri haunted the air, and the lamps that hung from the coffered ceiling were reflected, in innumerable curving high-lights, from surfaces of porcelain and silver, turned wood and sculptured bronze and ivory. Mountains of glazed chintz, enormous armchairs and sofas alternated with the elaborately carved and gaily painted discomfort of eighteenth-century Venetian furniture. Underfoot, a yellow Chinese carpet lay like an expanse of soft and ancient sunshine. On the walls, the picture-frames were doorways leading into other worlds. The first he looked into was a strange, bright universe, intensely alive and yet static, definitive and serene — a world in which everything was made of innumerable dots of pure colour, and the men wore stove-pipe hats and the women’s bustles were monumental like Egyptian granite. And next to it was the opening into another, a Venetian world, where a party of ladies in a gondola trailed their pink satins against the complementary jade of the Grand Canal. And here, over the mantelpiece, in a maniac’s universe of candlelight and brown bituminous shadows, a company of elongated monks sat feasting under the vaults of a cathedral …