Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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But there was no alternative, no alternative except giving in to the light, except dying out into the silence. But anything rather than that, anything, anything….
And then suddenly there was salvation. A knowledge, first of all, that there were other knowledges. Not like Bruno’s beastly conspiracy with the light. Not like that galaxy of awarenesses within the knowledge of all possibility. No, no. These other awarenesses were cosily similar to his own. And all of them were concerned with himself, with his own beloved and opaque identity. And their concern was like the fluttering shadow of a host of wings, like the cry and chatter of innumerable agitated little birds, shutting out that insupportable light, shattering that accursed silence, bringing respite and relief, bringing the blessed right to be himself and not ashamed of the fact.
He rested there in the delicious, twittering confusion, of which he had become the centre, and would have been happy so to rest for ever. But better things were reserved for him. Suddenly and without warning there dawned a new, more blissful phase of his salvation. He was in possession of something infinitely precious, something of which, as he now realized, he had been deprived throughout the whole duration of these horrible eternities — a set of bodily sensations. There was an experience, thrillingly direct and immediate, of the warm, living darkness behind closed eyelids; of faint voices, not remembered, but actually heard out there in front; of a touch of lumbago in the small of the back; of a thousand obscure little aches and pressures and tensions from within and from without. And what an odd kind of heaviness in the lower inwards! What curiously unfamiliar sensations of weight and constriction out there in front of the chest!
‘I think she’s gone under,’ said the Queen Mother in a harsh stage whisper.
‘She certainly seems to be breathing very stertorously,’ Paul De Vries agreed. ‘Snoring is always indicative of relaxation,’ he added instructively. ‘That’s why thin nervous people so seldom …’
Mrs. Gamble cut him short.
‘Kindly let go of my hand,’ she said. ‘I want to blow my nose.’
Her bracelets tinkled in the darkness. There was a rustling and a snort.
‘Now, where are you?’ she asked, clawing for his hand. ‘Ah, here! I hope everybody’s holding tight.’
‘I certainly am,’ said the young man.
He spoke gaily; but the squeeze he administered to the soft hand on his right was lingeringly tender. To his delight the pressure was faintly, but quite perceptibly, returned.
Ambushed in the darkness, Mrs. Thwale was thinking of the shameless essence of love.
‘And what about you, Sebastian?’ she asked, turning her head.
‘I’m all right,’ he answered with a nervous giggle. ‘I’m still holding on.’
But so was that stinking De Vries! Holding on and being held on to. Whereas if he were to squeeze her hand, she’d probably announce the fact to the rest of the company, and they’d all simply howl with laughter. All the same, he had a good mind to do it in spite of everything. As an outrage — just as she had said. De Vries was in love with her and, for all he knew, she was in love with De Vries. Very well, then; the biggest non sequitur possible in the circumstances would be for him to say or do something to show that he was in love with her. But when it came to actually committing the outrage of squeezing her hand, Sebastian found himself hesitant. Did he have the nerve or didn’t he? Was it really worth it, or wasn’t it?
‘They say that holding hands does something to the vibrations,’ announced the Queen Mother from her end of the row.
‘Well, it’s not impossible,’ said Paul De Vries judicially. ‘In the light of the most recent researches into the electric potentials of the various muscle groups …’
In five seconds, Sebastian was saying to himself, with the imaginary pistol barrel pressed once again to his temple, in five seconds the world would have come to an end. Nothing mattered any more. But still he didn’t act. Nothing mattered, nothing mattered, he was still despairingly repeating, when all at once he felt her hand coming to life within his own. Then, startlingly, her finger-tips began to trace little circles on his palm. Again, again, deliciously, electrically. Then without warning she dug her pointed nails into his flesh. For a second only, after which the fingers straightened out and relaxed, and he found himself holding a hand as limp and passive and inert as it had been before.
‘And then,’ Paul De Vries was saying, ‘one has to consider the possibility of mitotic radiations as a factor in the phenom …’
‘Sh-sh! She’s saying something.’
Out of the darkness in front of them came a squeaky childish voice.
‘This is Bettina,’ it said. ‘This is Bettina.’
‘Good-evening, Bettina,’ cried the Queen Mother, in a tone that was intended to be gay and ingratiating. ‘How are things over on the other side?’
‘Fine!’ said the squeak, which belonged, as Mrs. Byfleet had explained before the lights were turned out, to a little girl who had passed on in the San Francisco earthquake. ‘Everything’s fine. Everyone’s feeling good. But poor old Gladys here — she’s quite sick.’
‘Yes, we’re all so sorry that Mrs. Byfleet shouldn’t be feeling well.’
‘Not feeling good at all.’
‘Most unfortunate!’ replied the Queen Mother with hardly disguised impatience. It was she who had insisted on Mrs. Byfleet’s giving the séance in spite of her indisposition. ‘But I hope it won’t interfere with the communications.’
The squeak said something about ‘doing our best,’ and tailed off into incoherence. Then the medium sighed profoundly and snored a little. There was a silence.
What did it mean, Sebastian was wondering. What on earth could it mean? His heart was beating like a sledge-hammer. Once again the barrel of the revolver was pressed against his forehead. In five seconds the world would come to an end. One, two, three … He squeezed her hand. Waited a second. Squeezed it again. But there was no responsive pressure, no indication of any kind that she had even noticed what he had done. Sebastian felt himself overcome by the most excruciating embarrassment.
‘I always like to have my first séance as soon after the funeral as possible,’ the Queen Mother remarked. ‘Even before it, if the thing can be arranged. Nothing like striking the iron while it’s hot.’
There was a pause. Then, eager but monotonously flat, Paul De Vries’s voice broke in.
‘I keep thinking,’ he said, ‘of Mr. Pewsey’s address at the graveside this afternoon. Most touching, didn’t you think? And so felicitously worded. “Friend of the arts and artist in friendship.” He couldn’t have phrased it better.’
‘Which doesn’t prevent him,’ rasped the Queen Mother, ‘from having the most disgusting habits. If it weren’t for Veronica and that boy, I’d tell you a few of the things I happen to know about Tom Pewsey.’
‘There’s somebody here,’ the squeak startlingly announced. ‘He’s very anxious to get in touch with you folks.’
‘Tell him we’re waiting,’ said the Queen Mother in the tone of one who gives orders to the footman.
‘Only just come over,’ the squeak went on. ‘Seems he doesn’t rightly know he’s passed on.’
For Paul De Vries the words were like the fresh scent of a rabbit to a nosing dog; he was off in a flash.
‘Isn’t that interesting!’ he exclaimed. ‘He doesn’t know he’s passed on. But they all say that, from the Mahayana Buddhists down to …’
But the squeak had begun to mutter something.
‘Can’t you stop interrupting?’ said the Queen Mother.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.
In the darkness Mrs. Thwale sympathetically pressed his right hand and, in the same instant, disinterested and platonic, crooked a delicate forefinger and across the centre of Sebastian’s left palm traced out the four letters, L, O, V, E, and then another, unavowable combination, and another. An effervescence of soundless laughter bubbled up within her.
‘He’s
so glad you folks are all here,’ said the squeak, becoming suddenly articulate. ‘He can’t say how happy it makes him.’
‘Not that one would have expressed it with quite so much pathetic emphasis,’ Eustace was thinking. ‘But substantially it’s the truth.’
That damned light was now definitively out; and with these newly recovered sensations hopping and twittering like twenty thousand sparrows, there was no question any more of silence. And how delightful even lumbago could be, even this obscure and unfamiliar belly-ache! And the Queen Mother’s nutmeg-grater voice — no Mozart had ever sounded sweeter! Of course, it was unfortunate that, for some reason, everything had to pass through the filter of this intermediate knowledge. Or rather this intermediate ignorance; for it was just a lump of organized imbecility, that was all. You gave it the choicest of your little jokes, and four times out of five it came out with unadulterated nonsense. What a hash, for example, it made of the things he said when that American fellow started talking about psychic factors, or whatever it was! And when he wanted to quote Sebastian’s line about two buttocks and a pendulous bub, it kept on talking in a bewildered way about pendulums — bucks and pendulums. Too idiotic! However, he did at least manage to get in one good dig at the Queen Mother, to get it in almost verbatim; for even a half-wit couldn’t make a mistake about the word ‘claws.’
And then something very curious happened.
‘Is it true,’ Mrs. Thwale suddenly enquired in a tone of excessive and altogether improbable innocence, ’is it true that, where you are, there isn’t any marrying or giving in marriage?’
The words seemed to touch a trigger; there was a kind of mental jerk, an almost violent displacement of consciousness — and Eustace found himself aware, as though in vivid memory, of events which had not happened to himself, events which, he somehow knew, had not as yet happened at all. Wearing a broad-shouldered fur coat and a preposterous hat like something out of a Winterhalter portrait of the Empress Eugenie, Mrs. Thwale was sitting on a platform with a lot of naval officers, while a man with tousled hair and a Middle Western accent bellowed into a microphone. ‘Liberty Ship,’ he kept saying, ‘four hundred and fifty-ninth Liberty Ship.’ And, sure enough, that enormous precipice of iron out there to the left was a ship’s prow. And now Mrs. Thwale was on her feet swinging a champagne bottle on the end of a string. And then the precipice began to move away, and there was a lot of cheering. And while she was smiling up at an Admiral and some Captains, De Vries came running up and began to talk to them about the exciting new developments in ballistics …
‘I’m not the one who’s thinking about marriage,’ he said jocularly.
But what the imbecile actually uttered was, ‘We don’t think about marriage over here.’
Eustace began to protest, but was distracted from his irritation by the emergence of another of those clear memories of what had not yet happened. Little Thwale on a sofa with a very young officer, like those beardless children one used to see during the war. And really, really, the things she permitted herself! And always with that faintly ironical smile, that expression of detached curiosity in the bright dark eyes, which always remained wide open and observant, whatever might be happening. Whereas the boy, in his effort to hold the pleasure in, to shut the shame and the embarrassment out, kept his eyes tightly closed.
The moving images faded into nothingness and, at the thought of De Vries’s horns and the inevitable connection between war and lust, between the holiest crusades and the most promiscuous copulations, Eustace started to laugh. ‘Backwards and downwards, Christian soldiers,’ he said in the interval between two paroxysms of amusement.
‘He says we’re all Christian soldiers,’ pronounced the squeak; and then, almost immediately, ‘Good-bye, folks,’ it called, ‘good-bye, good-bye.’
Laughter, a crescendo of laughter. Then, all of a sudden, Eustace realized that the blissful experience of sensation was beginning to ebb away from him. The voices from outside grew dimmer and more confused; the small obscure awarenesses of pressure, touch and tension faded away. And at last there was nothing left, not even the lumbago, not even the idiot interpreter. Nothing but the hunger for what he had lost and, emerging again from its long eclipse behind the opacity and the delicious noise, that pure, shining silence of the light. Brighter, ever more urgently, ever more austerely and menacingly beautiful. Perceiving his danger, Eustace directed all his attention to little Thwale and her uniformed adolescent, to the enormous, cosmic joke of crusades and copulation. ‘Downwards and backwards, Christian soldiers,’ he repeated. Making a deliberate effort, he laughed more heartily than ever.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IT WAS ONLY a little after seven when Sebastian came down next morning for another solitary stroll in the garden — another wandering through Lycidas in the direction of his own as yet unnamed and unwritten poem. It would begin, he had decided, with the Venus of the balustrade — shaped by a mind out of the shapelessness of stone. Order born of a chaos that itself was composed of innumerable lesser orders. And the statue would be the emblem of an individual life in its possible and ideal excellence, just as the garden as a whole would stand for the ideally excellent life of a society. From the ideally excellent he would pass to the actualities of ugliness, cruelty, ineptitude, death. After which, in a third part, ecstasy and intelligence would build the bridges leading from the actual to the ideal — from the blue tart and his father’s severities to Mrs. Thwale and Mary Esdaile, from the corpse in the lavatory to Theocritus and Marvell.
Precisely how all this would be put across without becoming a bore he wouldn’t know until he had actually got to work among the words in which it was to be expressed. Hitherto the only words that had come to him were connected with poor old Uncle Eustace and last night’s séance, and would take their place somewhere in the second part.
‘This Thing was once a man,’ he repeated to himself, as he walked up and down the terrace in the early sunshine.
This Thing was once a man —
Take it for all in all,
Like the old piano …
No, no, that was wrong: make it ‘old Bechstein.’
Like the old Bechstein, auctioned off for nothing;
And men in aprons come for it with a van,
Shuffling across the hall.
Of the lines that followed, he still felt a bit uncertain.
But somebody in the empty drawing-room,
Strumming the non-existent keys …
He shook his head. ‘Non-existent’ was journalistic. The word to aim at was ‘absence.’ ‘Strumming the absence of its keys.’ Or, better perhaps, ‘strumming an absence of departed keys.’
But somebody in the empty drawing-room,
Strumming an absence of departed keys,
Still plays the old Chaconne and Für Elise
And Yes, sir, she’s my baby, yes, sir, she’s
My baby, yes, sir, till the crack of doom.
Which was certainly what it had seemed like at the séance, with that idiotic squeak quoting Uncle Eustace’s smallest jokes, and even misquoting, as Sebastian had finally realized, his own little effort about Degas. But meanwhile there was that ‘crack of doom’ to be considered. Did circumstances justify the cliché? Or mightn’t it be better to protract the sentence a little to lead it on, winding and serpentine, through ‘tomb,’ perhaps, or alternatively through an interrogatory ‘whom?’ into further recesses of the subject?
Sebastian was still debating the question, when something happened to interrupt the flow of his thoughts. The small girl he had seen that dreadful morning in the hall suddenly appeared at the top of the steps carrying, not a baby this time or a chicken, but a large basket. Startled by his unexpected presence, she halted and looked at him for a few seconds with an expression of uncertainty, almost of fear. Sebastian gave her a smile. Reassured by this display of benevolence on the part of one of the terrifying signori, the little girl smiled back and, walking in an excess of deference on the ve
ry tips of her clumsy boots, crossed the terrace and began to weed the flower-bed which ran in a narrow strip of colour and perfume at the foot of the villa’s long façade.
Sebastian continued his promenading. But the presence of the child was an insurmountable obstacle to further composition. It was not that she made any noise, or indulged in any violence of movement. No, the trouble lay deeper. What distracted him was the fact that she was working messily in the earth, while he strolled up and down with his hands in his pockets. The proximity of the poor always made him feel uncomfortable, and to discomfort was added, when they worked and he apparently did nothing, a sense of shame. These were feelings which ought, he supposed, to have made him want to follow in his father’s footsteps. But politics always seemed so futile and unimportant. His ordinary reaction from the shame and discomfort was a flight from the situation which had occasioned them. And today the situation was even worse than usual. For the worker was a child, who ought to have been playing; and the poverty, contrasted with this surrounding magnificence, seemed peculiarly outrageous. Sebastian glanced at his watch and, in case she might be looking at him (which she wasn’t), overacted the part of one who suddenly realizes that he is late for an important business appointment and hurried away. Half-way to the front door he suddenly remembered that he actually had a reason to hurry. He was going down into the town after lunch. Nominally to do some sight-seeing. But really, he had already decided, to get himself measured for his evening clothes — that was to say, if he could first sell the Degas.