Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘No, I can’t … really …’
He gave her one of his appealing, irresistible smiles. But, instead of melting, Mrs. Thwale contemptuously shook her head.
‘No, no,’ she said, ‘I’m not a bit fond of children. And as for you, you ought to be ashamed of playing those tricks. At seventeen a man ought to be begetting babies, not trying to imitate them.’
Sebastian blushed and uttered a nervous laugh. Her frankness had been horribly painful; and yet with a part of his being he was glad that she should have spoken as she did, glad that she didn’t want, like all the rest, to treat him as a child.
‘And now,’ Mrs. Thwale went on, ‘this time you’ll say it — do you understand?’
The tone was so coolly imperious that Sebastian obeyed without further protest or demur.
‘Madame, I do it with an indelible pencil,’ he began.
‘That’s not an outrage,’ said Mrs. Thwale. ‘That’s a bleat.’
‘I do it with an indelible pencil,’ he repeated more loudly.
‘Fortissimo!’
‘… With an indelible pencil on a roll of toilet paper….’
Mrs. Thwale clapped her hands.
‘Excellent!’
She uttered a delicate grunt of laughter. More boisterously, Sebastian joined in.
‘And now,’ she went on, ‘I ought to box your ears. Hard, so that it hurts. And you’ll be so startled and angry that you’ll shout, “You bloody old bitch,” or words to that effect. And then the fun will begin. I’ll start screeching like a macaw, and you’ll start …’
The door of the drawing-room was thrown open.
‘Il Signor De Vries,’ announced the footman.
Mrs. Thwale broke off in the middle of her sentence and instantaneously readjusted her expression. It was a grave madonna who faced the new arrival as he hurried across the room towards her.
‘I was out all morning,’ said Paul De Vries, as he took her extended hand. ‘Didn’t get your phone message till I came back to the hotel after lunch. What a shocking piece of news!’
‘Shocking,’ Mrs. Thwale repeated, nodding her head. ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘this is poor Mr. Barnack’s nephew, Sebastian.’
‘This must be a dreadful blow to you,’ said De Vries as they shook hands.
Sebastian nodded and, feeling rather hypocritical, mumbled that it was.
‘Dreadful, dreadful,’ the other repeated. ‘But of course one must never forget that even death has its values.’
He turned back to Mrs. Thwale.
‘I came up here to see if there was anything I could do to help you.’
‘That was very kind of you, Paul.’
She lifted her eyelids and gave him an intent, significant look; the unparted lips trembled into a faint smile. Then she looked down again at the white hands lying folded in her lap.
Paul De Vries’s face lit up with pleasure; and suddenly, in a flash of insight, Sebastian perceived that the fellow was in love with her, and that she knew it and permitted it.
He was overcome with a fury of jealousy, jealousy all the more painful for knowing itself futile, all the more violent because he was too young to be able to avow it without making a fool of himself. If he told her what he felt, she would simply laugh at him. It would be another of his humiliations.
‘I think I ought to go,’ he muttered, and began to move towards the door.
‘You’re not running away, are you?’ said Mrs. Thwale.
Sebastian halted and looked round. Her eyes were fixed upon him. He flinched away from their dark enigmatic regard.
‘I’ve got to … to write some letters,’ he invented; and turning, he hurried out of the room.
‘Do you see that?’ said Mrs. Thwale as the door closed. ‘The poor boy’s jealous of you.’
‘Jealous?’ the young man repeated in a tone of incredulous astonishment.
He hadn’t noticed anything. But then, of course, he seldom did notice things. It was a fact about himself which he knew and was even rather proud of. When one’s mind is busy with really important, exciting ideas, one can’t be bothered with the trivial little events of daily life.
‘Well, I suppose you’re right,’ he said with a smile. ‘“The desire of the moth for the star.” It’s probably very good for the boy,’ he added in the tone of a wise, benevolent humanist. ‘Hopeless passions are part of a liberal education. That’s the way adolescents learn how to sublimate sex.’
‘Do they?’ said Mrs. Thwale with a seriousness so absolute that a more perspicacious man would have divined the underlying irony.
But Paul De Vries only nodded emphatically.
‘By discovering the values of romantic love,’ he said. ‘That’s how they achieve sublimation. Havelock Ellis has some beautiful things to say about it in one of his …’
Becoming suddenly aware that this wasn’t at all what he really wanted to talk to her about, he broke off.
‘Damn Havelock Ellis!’ he said; and there was a long silence.
Mrs. Thwale sat quite still, waiting for what she knew was going to happen next. And, sure enough, he suddenly sat down on the sofa beside her, took her hand and squeezed it between both of his.
She raised her eyes, and Paul De Vries gazed back at her with a tremulous little smile of the most intense yearning. But Mrs. Thwale’s face remained unalterably grave, as though love were too serious a thing to be smiled over. With those nostrils of his, she was thinking, he looked like one of those abjectly sentimental dogs. Ludicrous, but at the same time a bit distasteful. But then it was always a question of choosing between two evils. She looked down again.
The young man raised her unresponsive fingers to his lips and kissed them with a kind of religious reverence. But her perfume had a kind of sultry and oppressive sweetness; her neck was flawlessly round and smooth and white; under the stretched black silk he could imagine the firmness of the small breasts. Yearning came sharply into focus as desire. He whispered her name and, abruptly, rather clumsily, put one arm round her shoulders and with the other hand raised her face towards his own. But before he could kiss her Mrs. Thwale had drawn away from him.
‘No, Paul. Please.’
‘But, my darling …’
He caught hold of her hand and tried once again to draw her towards him. She stiffened and shook her head.
‘I said no, Paul.’
Her tone was peremptory: he desisted.
‘Don’t you care for me at all, Veronica?’ he said plaintively.
Mrs. Thwale looked at him in silence, and for a moment she was tempted to answer the fool as he deserved. But that would be silly. Gravely, she nodded.
‘I’m very fond of you, Paul. But you seem to forget,’ she added with a sudden smile and change of tone, ‘that I’m what’s known as a respectable woman. Sometimes I wish I weren’t. But there it is!’
Yes, there it was — an insurmountable obstacle in the way of modified celibacy. And meanwhile he loved her as he had never loved anyone before. Loved uncontrollably, beyond reason, to the verge of insanity. Loved to the point of being haunted by the thought of her, of being possessed by the lovely demon of her desirableness.
The small inert hand which he had been holding came suddenly to life and was withdrawn.
‘Besides,’ she went on gravely, ‘we’re forgetting poor Mr. Barnack.’
‘Damn Mr. Barnack!’ he couldn’t help snapping.
‘Paul!’ she protested, and her face took on an expression of distress. ‘Really …’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, between his teeth.
Elbows on knees, head between hands, he stared unseeingly at the patch of Chinese carpet between his feet. He was thinking, resentfully, how the demon would break in upon him while he was reading. There was no preservative or exorcism; even the most excitingly new and important books were powerless against the obsession. Instead of quantum mechanics, instead of the individuation field, it would suddenly be the pale oval of her face that filled his
mind, it would be her voice, and the way she looked at you, and her perfume, and the white roundness of her neck and arms. And yet he had always sworn to himself that he would never get married, that he’d give all his time and thought and energies to this great work of his, to the bridge-building which was so obviously and providentially his vocation.
All at once he felt the touch of her hand on his hair and, looking up, found her smiling at him, almost tenderly.
‘You mustn’t be sad, Paul.’
He shook his head.
‘Sad, and mad, and probably bad as well.’
‘No, don’t say that,’ she said, and with a quick movement she laid her fingers lightly over his mouth. ‘Not bad, Paul; never bad.’
He caught her hand and covered it with kisses. Unprotestingly, she abandoned it for a few seconds to his passion, then gently took it back.
‘And now,’ she said, ‘I want to hear all about your visit to that man you were telling me about yesterday.’
His face brightened.
‘You mean Loria?’
She nodded.
‘Oh, that was really exciting,’ said Paul De Vries. ‘He’s the man who’s been carrying on Peano’s work in mathematical logic.’
‘Is he as good as Russell?’ asked Mrs. Thwale, who recalled an earlier conversation on the same subject.
‘That’s just the question I’ve been asking myself,’ the young man cried delightedly.
‘Great minds think alike,’ said Mrs. Thwale.
Smiling an enchantingly playful smile, she rapped with her knuckles first on her own forehead, then on his.
‘And now I want to hear about your exciting Professor Loria.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TO THE TUNE of ‘Under the Bamboo Tree,’ to the accompaniment of Timmy Williams’s knowing laughter, again, again:
Probably constip,
Probably constip,
Probably constipaysh …
But of course it wasn’t true. He had always known that it wasn’t true.
There was an awareness once more of an all-pervading silence that shone and was alive. Beautiful with more than the beauty of even Mozart’s music, more than the beauty of the sky after sunset, of the evening star emerging into visibility between the cypresses.
And from those cypresses he found himself moving across the lattice to the discovery of himself at Paestum in the dusk of a windy autumn twilight, to a memory of the Vale of the White Horse as the July sunshine poured down with a kind of desperate intensity out of a blue gulf between mountainous continents of thunder-cloud. And here was the Maize God from Copan, and the ‘Last Communion of St. Jerome.’ And that thing of Constable’s at the Victoria and Albert, and — yes!— ‘Susanna and the Elders.’
But this wasn’t Tintoret’s pale silhouette of a marbly and majestic nakedness. This was Mimi. Mimi as she squatted on the divan, short-legged, opaquely white against the garish cushions.
And suddenly he was participating once more in that relentless knowledge of an absence so hideous that there could be nothing but self-abhorrence, nothing but shame, judgment, condemnation.
To escape from the pain he turned once more towards the parting of the dressing-gown, towards the fondlings and the dandlings, the cigar and the laughter. But this time the light refused to be eclipsed. Instead, it grew brighter, impossibly; grew unendurably more beautiful.
Terror modulated into resentment, into a passion of rage and hatred. And as though by magic he had, at one stroke, repossessed himself of all his four vocabularies of obscenity — the native English, the painstakingly acquired German and French and Italian.
The uprush of his anger, the torrent of those words, brought him immediate relief. The urgency of the light diminished, and there was no more participation in the knowledge, by which he was compelled to judge himself shameful. Nothing remained but that beauty, far off in the background, like the sky after sunset. But now he had seen through its loveliness, knew it was only a bait to lure one on into some horrible kind of suicide.
Suicide, suicide — they were all trying to persuade one to commit suicide. And here was the fragment of himself represented by Bruno in the bookshop, Bruno on the way to the station. Looking at one with those eyes of his, talking so gently about the need of allowing oneself to be forgiven, even trying to hypnotize one. To hypnotize one into self-destruction.
Slipping sideways, as it were, on to another plane of the lattice, he found himself all of a sudden in contact with a knowledge which he knew immediately as Bruno’s. The knowledge, dim and irrelevant, of a bare hotel bedroom and, at the same time, overpoweringly, of the light. Tenderly blue, this time. Blue and somehow musical. A systole and diastole of radiance, singing voicelessly within the whorls of an unseen shell.
Beauty and peace and tenderness — immediately recognized and immediately rejected. Known, only to be hated, only to be defiled, idiomatically, in four languages.
St. Willibald saying his prayers in the bedroom of a fourth-rate hotel. St. Wunnibald staring at his navel. It was asinine. It was contemptible. And if the fool imagined that, by playing these tricks, he could shame one into wanting to commit suicide, he was entirely mistaken. Who did he think he was, fooling about with that damned light? But whatever he might think, the fact remained that he was just old man Bruno, just a scrubby little bookseller with a half-baked intelligence and a gift of the gab.
And then he was aware that Bruno was not alone, that Bruno’s knowledge of the light was not the only knowledge. There was a whole galaxy of awarenesses. Bright by participation, made one with the light that gave them their being. Made one and yet recognizable, within the Universal Possibility, as possibilities that had actually been realized.
In the hotel bedroom the knowledge of that tender and musical radiance was growing more complete. And as it did so, the blueness brightened up towards a purer incandescence, the music modulated from significance through heightened significance into the ultimate perfection of silence.
‘Willibald, Wunnibald. In a fourth-rate hotel. And let’s hope there’s a couple of German honeymooners in the next room.’ Showing off what he could do with the light! But that didn’t prevent him from being a silly little rag-and-bone merchant, a pedlar of mouldy rubbish. ‘And if he seriously imagines he can browbeat one into feeling ashamed …’
Abruptly, Eustace was aware of what the other knew. Was aware by acquaintance, not from the outside only, but in an act of identification. And in the same instant he became aware again of the unutterable ugliness of his own opaque and fragmentary being.
Shameful, shameful…. But he refused to feel ashamed. He’d be damned if he’d let himself be dragooned into suicide. Yes, he’d be damned, he’d be damned!…
In the brightness and the silence his thoughts were like lumps of excrement, like the noise of vomiting. And the more repulsive they seemed, the more frantic became his anger and hatred.
Damned light! Bloody little rag-and-bone man! But now there was no longer any rest or respite to be found in being angry. His hatred blazed, but blazed in the face of an unobscured radiance. The four vocabularies of obscenity vomited themselves out in a silence with which in some sort he was identified, a silence that merely emphasized the hideousness of that which interrupted it.
All the elation of anger and hatred, all the distracting excitement, died away, and he was left with nothing but the naked, negative experience of revulsion. Painful intrinsically and at the same time a cause of further pain. For the unobscured light and the uninterruptible silence, which were the objects of his loathing, compelled him once again to know himself to sit in judgment, to condemn.
Other fragments of himself made their appearance. Ten pages of Proust, and a trot round the Bargello; St. Sebastian among the Victorian ornaments, and the Young Man of Peoria. Fascinatio nugacitatis. But all the trifling which had once enchanted him was now not only profoundly wearisome, but also, in some negative way, profoundly evil. And yet it had to be persisted in; for
the alternative was a total self-knowledge and self-abandonment, a total attention and exposure to the light.
So now it was Mimi again. And in the brightness, with which he was now unescapably identified, those too had to be persisted in — those long afternoons in the little flat behind Santa Croce. Interminable cold frictions; the strigil rasping and rasping, but without titillation. Adesso comincia la tortura. And it never stopped, because he couldn’t allow it to stop, for fear of what might happen if he did. There was no escape, except along this path which led him yet further into captivity.
Suddenly Bruno Rontini stirred a little and coughed. Eustace was aware, at one remove, of a heightened awareness of the bleak little bedroom and the noise of the traffic climbing in low gear up the steep approaches to Perugia. Then this irrelevant knowledge was quietly put aside, and there was only silence again and brightness.
Or was there perhaps another path? A way that would lead one around these excremental clots of old experience and the condemnation they imposed? The silence and the brightness were pregnant with the unequivocal answer: there was no way round, there was only the way through. And of course he knew all about it, he knew exactly where it led.
But if that way were followed, what would happen to Eustace Barnack? Eustace Barnack would be dead. Stone dead, extinct, annihilated. There’d be nothing but this damned light, this fiendish brightness in the silence. His hatred flared up again; and then, almost instantly, the delightful and exhilarating heat was quenched. Nothing was left him but a frigid and frightened revulsion and, along with the revulsion, the excruciating knowledge that his hatred and his revulsion were equally disgusting.
But better this pain than its alternative; better this knowledge of his own hatefulness than the extinction of all knowledge whatsoever. Anything rather than that! Even these eternities of empty foolery, these eternities of a lust devoid of all pleasure. Ten pages of Proust, and the juxtaposition of wax flowers and St. Sebastian. Again and again. And after that the repetitions of those corpse-cold sensualities, the fondlings, the dandlings, the endless obligatory fumblings, to the accompaniment of ‘Probably Constip’ and ‘The Young Man of Peoria.’ Thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times. And the little joke about St. Willibald, the little joke about St. Wunnibald. And Mr. Cheeryble with his thurible, Mr. Chatterjee with his Mr. Chatterjee with his Mr. Chatterjee with … And again the same ten pages of Proust, the same wax flowers and St. Sebastian, the same blind brown breast-eyes and the torture of compulsory lust, while the Young Man of Peoria kept on murmuring the Credo, murmuring the Sanctus, murmuring a string of flawlessly idiomatic obscenities in a luminous silence which made each one of their million repetitions seem yet more senseless than the last, yet more drearily disgusting.