Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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His uncle’s voice brought him back to reality.
‘Ah, you’ve discovered my little Magnasco.’
Eustace came and took his arm.
‘Amusing, isn’t it?’
But before the boy could answer, he began to speak again.
‘And now you must come and look at what I did yesterday,’ he went on, drawing him away. ‘There!’
He pointed. In an arched recess stood a black papier-maché table, painted with scrolls of gilding and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Upon it stood a bouquet of wax flowers under a glass bell and a tall cylindrical case of stuffed humming-birds. On the wall, between and a little above these two objects, hung a small fourteenth-century painting of young men with bobbed hair and cod-pieces, shooting arrows at a St. Sebastian attached to a flowering apple tree.
‘Your namesake,’ Eustace said. ‘But the real point is that at last one’s discovered a way of using minor primitives. Obviously, it’s ridiculous to treat this sort of rubbish as though it were serious art. But on the other hand, it’s charming rubbish; one doesn’t want to waste it. Well, here’s the way out of the dilemma. Mix with Mid-Victorian! It makes the most delicious salad. And now, my dear, let’s go and eat. The dining-room’s over here, through the library.’
They moved away. From behind the door at the other end of the long tunnel of books came the sound of a harsh cracked voice and the clinking of silver and porcelain.
‘Well, here we are at last!’ Eustace cried gaily as he opened.
Dressed in a steel-blue evening gown, with seven rows of pearls about her mummied neck, the Queen Mother turned sightlessly in their direction.
‘You know my habits, Eustace,’ she said in her ghost of a sergeant-major’s voice. ‘Never wait dinner for anyone after seven forty-five. Not for anyone,’ she repeated emphatically. ‘We’ve almost finished.’
‘Some more fruit?’ said Mrs. Thwale softly, putting into the old woman’s hand a fork, on which was impaled a quarter of a pear. Mrs. Gamble took a bite.
‘Where’s the boy?’ she asked with her mouth full.
‘Here.’
Sebastian was pushed forward, and gingerly shook the jewelled claw which was held out for him to take.
‘I knew your mother,’ Mrs. Gamble rasped. ‘Pretty, very pretty. But badly brought up. I hope you’ve been brought up better.’ She finished off the rest of the pear and put down the fork.
Sebastian blushed crimson, and made a deprecating, inarticulate noise to the effect that he hoped so.
‘Speak up,’ said Mrs. Gamble sharply. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t tolerate, it’s mumbling. All young people mumble nowadays. Veronica?’
‘Yes, Mrs. Gamble?’
‘Oh, by the way, boy, this is Mrs. Thwale.’
Sebastian advanced into an aura of perfume and, raising abashed eyes from the folds of a dove-grey dress, almost cried out in amazement at what he saw. That oval face in its setting of smooth dark hair — it was Mary Esdaile’s.
‘How do you do, Sebastian?’
Oddly enough, he had never, with his inward ear, clearly heard the sound of Mary’s voice. But it was obvious, now, that these were its very tones — rather low, but clear and exquisitely distinct.
‘How do you do?’
They shook hands.
It was only in the eyes that he found a difference between his fancy and its incarnation. The Mary Esdaile of his day-dreams had always dropped her eyes when he looked at her. And how unwaveringly he was able to look in his dreams, how firmly and commandingly! Like his father. But this was not dream, but reality. And in reality he was still as shy as ever, and those dark eyes were now fixed upon him with a steady and slightly ironic scrutiny, which he found intensely embarrassing. His glance faltered, and at last flinched away.
‘You know how to speak the king’s English, Veronica,’ Mrs. Gamble creaked on. ‘Give him a few lessons while he’s here.’
‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ said Veronica Thwale, as though she were reading from a book of Victorian etiquette. She raised her eyes once again to Sebastian’s face, the corners of her beautifully sculptured mouth quivered into a tiny smile. Then, turning away, she busied herself with peeling the rest of Mrs. Gamble’s pear.
‘Let the poor boy come and eat,’ called Eustace, who had sat down and was already half-way through his soup. Thankfully, Sebastian moved away to the place assigned to him.
‘I ought to have warned you about our Queen Mother,’ Eustace went on jocularly. ‘Her bite is worse even than her bark.’
‘Eustace! I never heard such impertinence!’
‘That’s because you’ve never listened to yourself,’ he answered.
The old lady cackled appreciatively, and sank her false teeth into another piece of pear. The juice ran down her chin and dropped into the bunch of cattleyas pinned to her corsage.
‘As for Mrs. Veronica Thwale,’ Eustace went on, ‘I know the young lady too little to be able to offer you advice about her. You’ll have to find out for yourself when she gives you your mumbling lessons. Do you like giving lessons, Mrs. Thwale?’
‘It depends on the intelligence of the pupil,’ she answered gravely.
‘And do you think that this one looks intelligent?’
Once more Sebastian found himself compelled to flinch away from the steady scrutiny of those dark eyes. But she was beautiful in that grey dress, and the neck was smooth like a white pillar; and the breasts were rather small.
‘Very,’ said Mrs. Thwale at last. ‘But of course,’ she added, ‘where mumbling is concerned, you can never be quite certain. Mumbling is rather special, don’t you think?’
And before Eustace could answer, she uttered her odd little snorting stertorous laugh. For a second only; then the face resumed its grave marble serenity. Delicately, she began to peel a tangerine.
Mrs. Gamble turned in the direction of her son-in-law.
‘Mr. De Vries came to see me this afternoon. So I know where you had lunch.’
‘“And from whom no secrets are hid,”’ said Eustace.
Mrs. Thwale raised her eyelids to give him a quick glance of complicity, then looked down again at her plate.
‘A most instructive young man,’ he continued.
‘I like him,’ the Queen Mother pronounced emphatically.
‘And he simply adores you,’ said Eustace with hardly veiled irony. ‘And meanwhile, how are you getting on with your Einstein, Mrs. Thwale?’
‘I do my best,’ she answered without lifting her eyes.
‘I bet you do,’ said Eustace in a tone of genial mischief.
Mrs. Thwale looked up; but this time there was no complicity in her glance, no hint of answering amusement — only stony coldness. Tactfully, Eustace changed the subject.
‘I had a long talk with Laurina Acciaiuoli this afternoon,’ he said, turning back to Mrs. Gamble.
‘What, hasn’t she passed on yet?’ The Queen Mother seemed disappointed, almost aggrieved. ‘I thought the woman was so desperately ill,’ she added.
‘Evidently not quite ill enough,’ said Eustace.
‘Sometimes they drag on for years,’ rasped Mrs. Gamble. ‘Your mother passed on some time ago, didn’t she, Sebastian?’
‘In 1921.’
‘What?’ she cried. ‘What? You’re mumbling again.’
‘In 1921,’ he repeated more loudly.
‘Don’t yell like that,’ barked back the ghostly sergeant-major. ‘I’m not deaf. Have you had any communications with her since then?’
‘Communications?’ he repeated in bewilderment.
‘Through a medium,’ Eustace explained.
‘Oh, I see. No; no, I haven’t.’
‘Not because of religious objections, I hope?’
Eustace laughed aloud.
‘What a preposterous question!’
‘Not preposterous at all,’ the Queen Mother snapped back. ‘Seeing that my own granddaughter has religious objections. Mainly d
ue to your father, Veronica,’ she added.
Mrs. Thwale apologized for the Canon.
‘No fault of yours,’ said the Queen Mother generously. ‘But Daisy’s an idiot to listen to him. There she sits with a husband and a child on the other side, and does nothing whatever about it. It makes me sick.’
She pushed back her chair and stood up.
‘We’re going upstairs now,’ she said. ‘Good-night, Eustace.’
Since she couldn’t see him, Eustace didn’t bother to stand up.
‘Good-night, Queen Mother,’ he called back to her.
‘And you, boy, you’re to have a mumbling lesson tomorrow, do you understand? Now, Veronica.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
MRS. THWALE TOOK THE old woman’s arm and steered her through the door which Sebastian had opened for them. Her perfume, as she passed him, was sweet in his nostrils — sweet, but at the same time obscurely animal, as though a whiff of sweat had been perversely mingled with the gardenias and the sandalwood. He closed the door and returned to his place.
‘A good joke, our Queen Mother,’ said Eustace. ‘But one’s always rather grateful when it’s over. Most people never ought to be there for more than five minutes at a time. But that little Thwale, on the contrary … Quite a museum piece.’
He broke off to protest against the inadequacy of the portion of filleted sole to which Sebastian had helped himself. A recipe from the Trois Faisans at Poitiers. He had had to bribe the chef to get it. Obediently Sebastian took some more. The butler moved on to the head of the table.
‘Quite a museum piece,’ he repeated. ‘If I were twenty years younger, or you were five years older … Except, of course, that you don’t have to be any older, do you?’
He beamed with a kind of arch significance. Sebastian did his best to return the right sort of smile.
‘Verb. sap.,’ Eustace continued. ‘And never put off till tomorrow the pleasure you can enjoy today.’
Sebastian said nothing. His pleasures, he was thinking bitterly, were only those of phantasy. When reality presented itself, he was merely terrified. Couldn’t he at least have looked her in the eyes?
Wiping the sauce from his large loose lips, Eustace drank some of the champagne which had been poured into his glass.
‘Roederer 1916,’ he said. ‘I’m really very pleased with it.’
Acting the part of a relishing connoisseur, Sebastian took an appreciative sip or two, then gulped down half a glassful. It had the taste, he thought, of an apple peeled with a steel knife.
‘It’s awfully good,’ he said aloud. Then, remembering Susan’s latest piece, ‘It’s … it’s like Scarlatti’s harpsichord music,’ he forced himself to bring out, and blushed because it sounded so unnatural.
But Eustace was delighted by the comparison.
‘And I’m so glad,’ he added, ‘that you don’t take after your father. That indifference to all the refinements of life — it’s really shocking. Just Calvinism, that’s all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin’s theology.’
He swallowed the last mouthful of his second helping of fish and, leaning back in his chair, looked round with pleasure at the beautifully appointed table, at the Empire furniture, at the Domenichino landscape over the mantelpiece, the life-sized goats by Rosa di Tivoli above the sideboard, at the two men-servants working with the noiseless precision of conjurers.
‘No Calvin for me,’ he said. ‘Give me Catholicism every time. Father Cheeryble with his thurible; Father Chatterjee with his liturgy. What fun they have with all their charades and conundrums! If it weren’t for the Christianity they insist on mixing in with it, I’d be converted tomorrow.’
He leaned forward and, with a surprising deftness and delicacy of touch, rearranged the fruits in the silver bowl between the candlesticks.
‘“The beauty of holiness,”’ he said, ‘“the beauty of holiness.” I’m delighted you used that phrase in your poem. And, remember, it doesn’t apply only to churches. There, that’s better.’ He made a final adjustment on the hot-house grapes, and leaned back again in his chair. ‘I used to have a darling old butler once — never hope to find his equal.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘That man could make a dinner-party go off with the solemn perfection of High Mass at the Madeleine.’
Creamed chicken succeeded the fish. Eustace made a brief digression on the subject of truffles, then returned to the beauty of holiness, and from that proceeded to life as a fine art.
‘But an unrecognized fine art,’ he complained. ‘Its masters aren’t admired; they’re regarded as idlers and wasters. The moral codes have always been framed by people like your father — or, at the very best, people like Bruno. People like me have hardly been able to get a word in edgeways. And when we do get our word in — as we did once or twice during the eighteenth century — nobody listens to us seriously. And yet we demonstrably do much less mischief than the other fellows. We don’t start any wars, or Albigensian crusades, or communist revolutions. “Live and let live” — that’s our motto. Whereas their idea of goodness is “die and make to die” — get yourself killed for your idiotic cause, and kill everybody who doesn’t happen to agree with you. Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.’
To Sebastian, after his second glass of champagne, this remark seemed, for some reason, extremely funny, and he broke into a giggle that ended embarrassingly in a belch. This stuff was as bad as ginger beer.
‘You’re familiar, of course, with the Old Man of Moldavia?’
‘You mean the one who wouldn’t believe in Our Saviour?’
Eustace nodded.
‘“So he founded instead,”’ he quoted, ‘“with himself as the head,” — though that’s out of character, mark you; he wouldn’t want to be the head; he’d just want to enjoy himself quietly and have good manners— “the cult of Decorous Behaviour.” Or, in other words, Confucianism. But, unfortunately, China was also full of Buddhists and Taoists and miscellaneous war-lords. People with bullying temperaments, and people with inhibited, scrupulous temperaments. Horrible people like Napoleon, and other horrible people like Pascal. There was an Old Man of Corsica who would not believe in anything but power. And an Old Man of Port Royal who tortured himself by believing in the God of Abraham and Isaac, not of the philosophers. Between them, they don’t give the poor Old Man of Moldavia a dog’s chance. Not in China or anywhere else.’
He paused to help himself to the chocolate soufflé.
‘If I had the knowledge,’ he went on, ‘or the energy, I’d write an outline of world history. Not in terms of geography, or climate, or economics, or politics. None of these is fundamental. In terms of temperament. In terms of the eternal three-cornered struggle between the Old Man of Moldavia, the Old Man of Corsica, and the Old Man of Port Royal.’
Eustace broke off to ask for some more cream; then continued. Christ, of course, had been an Old Man of Port Royal. So were Buddha and most of the other Hindus. So was Lao-Tsu. But Mahomet had had a lot of the Old Man of Corsica in him. And the same, of course, was true of any number of the Christian saints and doctors. So you got violence and rapine, practised by proselytizing bullies and justified in terms of a theology devised by introverts. And meanwhile the poor Old Men of Moldavia got kicked and abused by everybody. Except perhaps among the Pueblo Indians, there had never been a predominantly Moldavian society — a society where it was bad form to nourish ambitions, heretical to have a personal religion, criminal to be a leader of men, and virtuous to have a good time in peace and quietness. Outside of Zuñi and Taos, the Old Men of Moldavia had had to be content with registering a protest, with applying the brakes, with sitting down on their broad bottoms and refusing to move unless dragged. Confucius had had the best success in moderating the furies of the Corsicans and Port Royalists; whereas, in the West, Epicurus had become a by-word; Boccaccio and Rabelais and Fielding were disregarded as mere men of letters; and nobody bothered to read Benth
am any more, or even John Stuart Mill. And recently the Old Men of Port Royal had begun to be treated as badly as those of Moldavia. Nobody read Bentham any more; but equally nobody now read À-Kempis. Traditional Christianity was in process of becoming almost as discreditable as Epicureanism. The philosophy of action for action, power for the sake of power, had become an established orthodoxy. ‘Thou hast conquered, O go-getting Babbitt.’
‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘let’s go and have our coffee where we can be a bit more comfortable.’
Moving delicately and deliberately within his fragile world of incipient tipsiness, Sebastian followed his uncle into the drawing-room.
‘No, thank you,’ he said politely to the offer of a cigar even larger and darker than Dr. Pfeiffer’s.
‘Then take a cigarette,’ said Eustace, as he helped himself to a Romeo and Juliet. Damply, lovingly the unweaned lips closed on the object of their desire. He sucked at the flame of the little silver lamp, and a moment later the teat was yielding its aromatic milk, his mouth was full of smoke. Eustace breathed a sigh of contentment. The taste of the tobacco was as new, as exquisitely a revelation as it had seemed when he was a young man; it was as though his palate were virgin and this were its first astounding introduction to pleasure. ‘You should hurry up,’ he said, ‘and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear. Though of course,’ he added, remembering Mimi, ‘even love can be considerably simplified. Very considerably.’ He took Sebastian’s arm affectionately. ‘You haven’t seen the prize exhibit yet.’ And leading him across the room, he turned a switch. Under the light a lovely fragment of mythology sprang into existence. In a green glade, with the Mediterranean in the distance, and a couple of Capris off-shore, Adonis lay asleep among his sleeping dogs. Bending over him a blonde and amorous Venus was in the act of drawing aside the veil of gold-embroidered gauze which was his only covering, while a Cupid in the foreground playfully menaced her left pap with an arrow from the young hunter’s quiver.