Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/aldous-huxley/page,249,480199-complete_works_of_aldous_huxley.html
‘Which was that Roman emperor?’ she asked through the yapping and the noise of the rushing water. ‘The one who passed on in the W.C. Was it Marcus Aurelius or Julius Caesar?’
‘I think it was Vespasian,’ Sebastian ventured.
‘Vespasian? I never heard of him,’ said the Queen Mother emphatically. ‘It smells of cigar smoke here,’ she added. ‘I always told him he smoked too many cigars. Give me your arm again.’
They walked back through the hall and into the drawing-room.
‘Veronica,’ said the Queen Mother, speaking at random into the darkness that constituted her world, ‘did you ring up that tiresome woman again?’
‘Not yet, Mrs. Gamble.’
‘I wonder why she didn’t answer.’ The old lady’s tone was fretful and aggrieved.
‘She was out,’ said Mrs. Thwale quietly. ‘Giving a séance perhaps.’
‘Nobody has séances at nine in the morning. And anyhow, she ought to have left somebody to take her calls.’
‘She probably can’t afford a servant.’
‘Nonsense!’ barked the Queen Mother. ‘I’ve never known a good medium who couldn’t afford a servant. Particularly in Florence, where they’re dirt-cheap. Ring her up again, Veronica. Ring her up every hour until you get her. And now, boy, I want to walk up and down the terrace for a little, and you shall talk to me about poetry. How do you start writing a poem?’
‘Well,’ Sebastian began, ‘I usually …’
He broke off.
‘But it’s really too difficult to explain.’
He turned and gave her one of his irresistible, his angelic smiles.
‘What a stupid answer!’ exclaimed the Queen Mother. ‘It may be difficult, but it certainly isn’t impossible.’
Remembering too late that she couldn’t see his smile, and feeling very foolish indeed, Sebastian relaxed his facial muscles into seriousness.
‘Go on!’ commanded the old lady.
Stammering, he did his best.
‘Well, it’s as if you … I mean, it’s like suddenly hearing something. And then it seems to grow by itself — you know, like a crystal in a super-saturated solution.’
‘In a what?’
‘A super-saturated solution.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, well, it’s … it’s the thing that crystals grow in. But as a matter of fact,’ he hastily added, ‘that isn’t quite the right metaphor. It’s more like flowers coming up from seed. Or even like sculpture — you know: adding on little bits of clay and at last it’s a statue. Or, still better, you might compare it to …’
The Queen Mother cut him short.
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying,’ she rasped. ‘And you mumble worse than ever.’
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ he muttered, yet more inaudibly.
‘I shall tell Veronica to give you a lesson in talking the king’s English every afternoon, while I’m having my rest. And now start again about your poetry.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘BACKWARDS AND DOWNWARDS,’ the laughter and the cigar. For long durations there was nothing else. This was all of himself that he possessed, all of himself that he had been able to find. Nothing but the memory of three words, of a sudden glory and a slobbered cylinder of tobacco. But it sufficed. The knowledge was delightful and reassuring.
Meanwhile, on the fringes of awareness, the light still lingered; and suddenly, between two rememberings, he perceived that it had somehow changed.
In the beginning the brightness had been everywhere, and everywhere the same, a shining silence, boundless and uniform. And essentially it was still without flaw, still indeterminate. And yet, while it remained what it had always been, it was as though that calm boundlessness of bliss and knowledge had been limited by the interpenetration of an activity. An activity that was at the same time a pattern, a kind of living lattice; ubiquitous, infinitely complex, exquisitely delicate. A vast ubiquitous web of beknottednesses and divergences, of parallels and spirals, of intricate figures and their curiously distorted projections — all shining and active and alive.
Once more his single fragment of selfhood came back to him — the same as ever, but in some way associated, this time, with a particular figure in that bright lattice of intricate relationships, located, as it were, on one of its innumerable nodes of intersecting movement.
‘Backwards and downwards,’ and then the sudden glory of laughter.
But this pattern of intersections was projected from another pattern, and within that other pattern he suddenly found another, larger fragment of himself — found the remembered image of a small boy, scrambling up out of the water of a ditch, wet and muddy to above the knees. And ‘Sucks, John, sucks!’ he remembered himself shouting; and when the boy said, ‘Jump, you coward,’ he only shouted ‘Sucks!’ again, and howled with laughter.
And the laughter brought back the cigar, all slobbered, and along with the cigar, somewhere else in the heart of that ubiquitous lattice, the memory of the feeling of a thumb between the lips, the memory of the pleasure of sitting interminably in the W.C., reading the Boy’s Own Paper and sucking on a stringy length of liquorice.
And here, going back from projection to projector, was the image of an enormous, firm-fleshed presence, smelling of disinfectant soap. And when he failed to do Töpfchen, Fräulein Anna laid him deliberately across her knees, gave him two smacks, and left him lying face downwards on the cot, while she went to fetch the Sprite. Yes, the Spritze, the Spritze …. And there were other names for it, English names; for sometimes it was his mother who inflicted the pleasure-anguish of the enema. And when that happened the looming presence smelt, not of disinfectant, but of orris root. And though, of course, he could have done Töpfchen if he had wanted to, he wouldn’t — just for the sake of that agonizing pleasure.
The lines of living light fanned out, then came together in another knot; and this was no longer Fräulein Anna or his mother; this was Mimi. Spicciati, Bebino! And with an uprush of elation he remembered the claret-coloured dressing-gown, the warmth and resilience of flesh beneath the silk.
Through the interstices of the lattice he was aware of the other aspect of the light — of the vast undifferentiated silence, of the beauty austerely pure, but fascinating, desirable, irresistibly attractive.
The brightness approached, grew more intense. He became part of the bliss, became identical with the silence and the beauty. For ever, for ever.
But with participation in the beauty there went participation in the knowledge. And suddenly he knew these recovered fragments of himself for what they so shamefully were; knew them for mere clots and disintegrations, for mere absences of light, mere untransparent privations, nothingnesses that had to be annihilated, had to be held up into the incandescence, considered in all their hideousness by the light of that shining silence, considered and understood and then repudiated, annihilated to make place for the beauty, the knowledge, the bliss.
The claret-coloured dressing-gown fell apart, and he discovered another fragment of his being — a memory of round breasts, wax-white, tipped with a pair of blind brown eyes. And in the thick flesh, deeply embedded, the navel, he recalled, had the absurd primness of a Victorian mouth. Prunes and prisms. Adesso commincia la tortura.
Abruptly, almost violently, the beauty of the light and the anguish of participating in its knowledge were intensified beyond the limits of possibility. But in the same instant he realized that it was in his power to avert his attention, to refuse to participate. Deliberately, he limited his awareness to the claret-coloured dressing-gown. The light died down again into insignificance. He was left in peace with his little property of memories and images. To treasure and enjoy them interminably — to enjoy them to the point of identification, to the point of being transubstantiated into them. Again and again, through comfortable durations of cigars and dressing-gowns and laughter and Fräulein Anna, and then cigars again and dressing-gowns….
Then sud
denly, within the framework of the lattice, there was an abrupt displacement of awareness, and he was discovering another fragment of himself…. They were sitting in that church at Nice, and the choir was singing Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus — the men’s voices filling all the hollow darkness with a passion of grief and yearning, and the boyish trebles passing back and forth between them, harmonious but beautifully irrelevant with the virginal otherness of things before the Fall, before the discovery of good and evil. Effortlessly, the music moved on from loveliness to loveliness. There was the knowledge of perfection, ecstatically blissful and at the same time sad, sad to the point of despair. Ave Verum, Verum Corpus. Before the motet was half over, the tears were streaming down his cheeks. And when he and Laurina left the church, the sun had set and above the dark house-tops the sky was luminous and serene. They found the car and drove back to Monte Carlo along the Comiche. At a bend of the road, between two tall cypresses, he saw the evening star. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Like the boys singing!’ But twenty minutes later they were in the Casino. It was the evening Laurina had her extraordinary run of luck. Twenty-two thousand francs. And in her room, at midnight, she had spread the money all over the carpet — hundreds of gold pieces, dozens and dozens of hundred-franc notes. He sat down beside her on the floor, put an arm round her shoulders and drew her close. ‘Ave Verum Corpus,’ he said, laughing. This was the true body.
And now he was at another but an almost identical intersection of the lattice, remembering himself lying in the long grass beside the cricket field at school. Looking up sleepily, through half-closed eyelids, at the hazy, almost tangible blueness of an English summer afternoon. And as he looked, something extraordinary happened. Nothing moved, but it was as though there had been an enormous circular gesture, as though something like a curtain had been drawn back. To all outward seeming that blue nostalgic canopy just above the tree-tops remained unruffled. And yet everything was suddenly different, everything had fallen to bits. The half-holiday afternoon, the routine of the game, the friendliness of familiar things and happenings — all were in bits. Shattered, for all that they were physically intact, by an inward and invisible earthquake. Something had broken through the crust of customary appearance. A lava gush from some other, more real order of existence. Nothing had changed; but he perceived everything as totally different, perceived himself as capable of acting and thinking in totally new ways appropriate to that revolutionary difference in the world.
‘What about going down town when the game’s over?’
He looked up. It was Timmy Williams — but even Timmy Williams, he suddenly perceived, was something other, better, more significant than the ferret-faced creature he enjoyed talking literature and smut with.
‘Something rather queer happened to me this afternoon,’ he was confiding, half an hour later, as they sat at the confectioner’s, eating strawberries and cream.
But when the story was told Timmy merely laughed and said that everybody had spots in front of their eyes sometimes. It was probably constipation.
It wasn’t true, of course. But now that the shattered world had come together again, now that the curtain had fallen into place and the lava gush had flowed back to where it had come from, how nice and comfortable everything was! Better to leave well enough alone. Better to go on behaving as one had always behaved, not risk having to do anything strange or uncomfortable. After a moment’s hesitation, he joined in the laughter.
Probably constipation. Yes, probably constipation. And, as though endowed with a life of its own, the refrain began to chant itself to the tune of ‘Under the Bamboo Tree.’
Probably constip,
Probably constip,
Probably constipaysh;
Probably const,
Probably const,
Probably constipay, pay, pay.
And da capo, da capo — like that barrel organ which was playing the tune outside the Kensington Registry Office the morning he and Amy were married.
Under the bamboo,
Under the bamboo,
Probably constipaysh …
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘WELL,’ SAID MRS. THWALE, as Foxy’s barking and the thin croak of the Queen Mother’s endearments died away into the distance, ‘now you’re my pupil. Perhaps I ought to have provided myself with a birch. Do you get birched at school?’
Sebastian shook his head.
‘No? What a pity! I’ve always thought that birching had considerable charm.’
She looked at him with a faint smile; then turned away to sip her coffee. There was a long silence.
Sebastian raised his eyes and surreptitiously studied her averted face — the face of Mary Esdaile come to life, the face of the woman with whom, in imagination, he had explored what he believed to be the uttermost reaches of sensuality. And here she sat, decorously in black among all the coloured richness of the room, utterly unaware of the part she had played in his private universe, the things she had done and submitted to. Messalina inside his skull, Lucretia inside hers. But of course she wasn’t Lucretia, not with those eyes of hers, not with that way of silently impregnating the space around her with her physically feminine presence.
Mrs. Thwale looked up.
‘Obviously,’ she said, ‘the first thing is to discover why you mumble, when it’s just as easy to speak clearly and coherently. Why do you?’
‘Well, if one feels shy …’
‘If one feels shy,’ said Mrs. Thwale, ‘the best thing to do, I’ve always found, is to imagine how the person you’re shy of would look if he or she were squatting in a hip bath.’
Sebastian giggled.
‘It’s almost infallible,’ she continued. ‘The old and ugly ones look so grotesque that you can hardly keep a straight face. Whereas the young, good-looking ones look so attractive that you lose all alarm and even all respect. Now, shut your eyes and try it.’
Sebastian glanced at her, and the blood rushed up into his face.
‘You mean …?’
He found himself unable to finish the question.
‘I have no objection,’ said Mrs. Thwale composedly.
He shut his eyes; and there was Mary Esdaile in black lace, Mary Esdaile on a pink divan in the attitude of Boucher’s Petite Morphil.
‘Well, do you feel less shy now?’ she asked when he had reopened his eyes.
Sebastian looked at her for a moment; then, overwhelmed by embarrassment at the thought that she now knew something of what was happening in the world of his phantasy, emphatically shook his head.
‘You don’t?’ said Mrs. Thwale, and the low voice modulated upwards on a rising coo. ‘That’s bad. It almost looks as if yours were a case for surgery. S-surgery,’ she repeated, and took another sip of coffee, looking at him all the time with bright ironic eyes over the top of her cup.
‘However,’ she added, as she wiped her mouth, ‘it may still be possible to achieve a cure by psychological methods. There’s the technique of outrage, for example.’
Sebastian repeated the words on a tone of enquiry.
‘Well, you know what an outrage is,’ she said. ‘A non sequitur in action. For example, rewarding a child for being good by giving it a sound whipping and sending it to bed. Or better still, whipping it and sending it to bed for no reason at all. That’s the perfect outrage — completely disinterested, absolutely platonic.’
She smiled to herself. Those last words were the ones her father liked to use when he talked about Christian charity. That damned charity, with which he had poisoned all her childhood and adolescence. Surrounding himself, in its name, with a rabble of the unfortunate and the worthy. Turning what should have been their home into a mere waiting-room and public corridor. Bringing her up among the squalors and uglinesses of poverty. Blackmailing her into a service she didn’t want to give. Forcing her to spend her leisure with dull and ignorant strangers, when all she desired was to be alone. And as though to add insult to injury, he made her recite I Corinthians xiii every Sunday evenin
g.
‘Absolutely platonic,’ Mrs. Thwale repeated, looking up again at Sebastian. ‘Like Dante and Beatrice.’ And after a second or two she added pensively: ‘One day that pretty face of yours is going to get you into trouble.’
Sebastian laughed uncomfortably, and tried to change the subject.
‘But where does shyness come in?’ he asked.
‘It doesn’t,’ she answered. ‘It goes out. The outrage drives it out.’
‘What outrage?’
‘Why, the outrage you commit when you simply don’t know what else to do or say.’
‘But how can you? I mean, if you’re shy …’
‘You’ve got to do violence to yourself. As if you were committing suicide. Put the revolver to your temple. Five more seconds, and the world will come to an end. Meanwhile, nothing matters.’
‘But it does matter,’ Sebastian objected. ‘And the world doesn’t really come to an end.’
‘No; but it’s really transformed. The outrage creates an entirely novel situation.’
‘An unpleasant situation.’
‘So unpleasant,’ Mrs. Thwale agreed, ‘that you can’t think of being shy any more.’
Sebastian looked doubtful.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she said. ‘Well, we’ll stage a rehearsal. I’m Mrs. Gamble asking you to tell me how you write a poem.’
‘God, wasn’t that ghastly!’ cried Sebastian.
‘And why was it ghastly? Because you didn’t have the sense to see that it was the sort of question that couldn’t be answered except by an outrage. It made me laugh to hear you humming and hawing over psychological subtleties which the old lady couldn’t possibly have understood even if she had wanted to. Which, of course, she didn’t.’
‘But what else could I have done? Seeing that she wanted to know how I wrote.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Mrs. Thwale. ‘You shouldn’t have spoken for at least five seconds; then very slowly and distinctly you should have said: “Madame, I do it with an indelible pencil on a roll of toilet paper.” Now, say it.’