Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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He ran up to his room and came down again with his dispatch-case. The drawing-room was empty, and the old persistent whiff of Uncle Eustace’s cigars had so far faded that it smelt only of potpourri. A long pencil of sunlight crossed the room and, as though with some mysterious purpose, lit up the three pelicans in the background of Piero’s picture.
The drawings were lying on the marble-topped table that stood in the embrasure of the central window. Sebastian walked over, unfolded the brown paper, and from between the two protecting sheets of cardboard withdrew his legacy. Two buttocks and a pendulous bub. He placed the drawing in his dispatch-case and closed the lid. Then, very carefully, he folded the paper as it had been before. Degas and dinner jacket — now that poor old Uncle Eustace was dead, they were nobody’s business but his own.
A thin little noise of treble singing made him start. He looked out through the open window. There, almost immediately below him, squatted the child from whom he had just fled. Her small grubby hands moved delicately among the hyacinths, pulling up here a groundsel, there a couple of blades of grass, so that all might be perfect and in order for the signori.
‘Gobbo rotondo,’ she sang to herself, ‘che fai in questo mondo?’
Then, becoming somehow aware of the alien presence above her, she looked up and saw Sebastian. An expression of guilt and terror came into her eyes; the almost colourless cheeks flushed crimson.
‘Scusi, signore,’ she muttered in a trembling voice. ‘Scusi.’
Sebastian, who was almost as much embarrassed as the little girl, withdrew his head abruptly and, moving away from the window, bent down to pick up his dispatch-case.
‘What are you doing?’ a low clear voice enquired behind him.
He started and turned. But without waiting for his answer, Mrs. Thwale had gone over to the window and was looking out.
‘Cosa fai?’ she asked.
From the terrace outside, the frightened voice made some incomprehensible answer.
Mrs. Thwale shrugged her shoulders and came back into the room.
‘What were you talking to the child about?’
‘I wasn’t,’ Sebastian stammered. ‘I was just … well, she was singing.’
‘So you listened, and now you’re going to sit down and do a slight Wordsworth about it?’
He laughed uncomfortably.
‘And those are your manuscripts, I suppose?’
She indicated the dispatch-case.
Only too grateful for the suggestion, Sebastian nodded.
‘Well, put them down and come out into the garden.’
Obediently he followed her across the hall and through the front door.
‘And how did you enjoy the séance?’ she asked, as he came up with her on the terrace.
‘Oh, it was interesting,’ he answered non-committally.
‘Interesting?’ she repeated. ‘Only that?’
Sebastian blushed and averted his eyes. She was giving him an opportunity to say something about what had happened last night — to ask her what it had meant, to tell her about Mary Esdaile. But the words wouldn’t come. They simply wouldn’t come.
Mrs. Thwale glanced at the red, agonized face beside her, and almost laughed aloud. What exquisitely comic situations could arise with a person too timid to speak! The most outrageous actions, and not a word uttered, no reference ever made to them. Officially nothing would have happened; for there wouldn’t be any communiqué. But actually, actually …
‘What a Punch and Judy show!’ she said at last, breaking the long silence.
‘You mean the séance?’
Mrs. Thwale nodded.
‘All the same, it seemed genuine, didn’t it? I mean, sometimes,’ Sebastian added, hedging a little for fear of finding himself compelled to defend a too explicit opinion.
But the precaution was unnecessary.
‘Perfectly genuine,’ she agreed. ‘Death cocking snooks at reverence and piety in exactly the same way as life does.’
They had reached the head of the steps, and she halted to look down, between the cypresses, at the roofs of Florence. Shamelessness at the core; but on the surface Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, good manners and Lanvin clothes, art and science and religion. And the charm of life consisted precisely in the inconsistency between essence and appearance, and the art of living in a delicate acrobacy of sauts périlleux from one world to the other, in a prestidigitation that could always discover the obscenity of rabbits at the bottom of even the glossiest high hat and, conversely, the elegant decency of a hat to conceal even the most pregnant and lascivious of rodents.
‘Well, we can’t stand here for ever,’ Mrs. Thwale said at last. They moved on. As though casually and unreflectingly, she laid a hand on Sebastian’s shoulder.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
‘A DRAWING TO sell?’
M. Weyl put on the bored, contemptuous expression he always assumed on these occasions. But when the boy opened his case and revealed the Degas that had been sold to ce pauvre Monsieur Eustache only four days before, he could not restrain a start of surprise.
‘From where have you got this drawing?’ he asked.
‘It was given to me,’ Sebastian answered.
‘Given?’
‘Tout est possible,’ M. Weyl said to himself. But there had never been any suggestion that the old man was a homosexual.
Conscious that he had become an object of suspicion, Sebastian blushed.
‘By my uncle,’ he said. ‘You probably knew him. Mr. Barnack.’
‘Your uncle?’
M. Weyl’s expression changed. He smiled; he seized Sebastian’s hand in both of his and shook it.
One of his most valued clients. One of his truest friends, he ventured to say. He had been bouleversé by the tragic news. An irreparable loss to art. He could only offer his sincerest condolences.
Sebastian stammered his thanks.
‘And the good uncle, he gave you this drawing?’
The other nodded.
‘Just a few hours before …’
‘Before the supreme adieu,’ said Gabriel Weyl poetically. ‘What a sentimental value it must possess for you!’
Sebastian blushed a deeper crimson. To justify himself, he mumbled something about his having no place to hang the drawing. Besides, there was a sum of money which had to be paid out immediately — almost a debt of honour, he added as a picturesque afterthought. Otherwise he wouldn’t have dreamt of parting with his uncle’s present.
M. Weyl nodded sympathetically; but his eyes were bright with calculation.
‘Tell me,’ he asked, ‘for what reason did you address yourself to me in this affair?’
‘For no reason,’ Sebastian answered. M. Weyl’s happened to be the first art dealer’s shop he had seen as he walked up the Via Tornabuoni.
That meant that he didn’t know where the drawing had been bought. M. Weyl laughed gaily and patted Sebastian on the shoulder.
‘The hazard,’ he said sententiously, ’is often our surest guide.’
He looked down at the drawing, screwed up his eyelids and critically cocked his head.
‘Pretty,’ he said, ‘pretty. Though hardly the master’s best work.’ He laid his finger on the buttocks. ‘One remarks the effects of failing sight, hein?’
‘Well, I didn’t think so,’ said Sebastian, in a manful effort to defend his property from disparagement.
There was a little pause.
‘If your good uncle gave you other things,’ said M. Weyl in a casual tone, without looking up, ‘I would be more than happy to make an offer. Last time I had the honour of visiting his collection, I recall that I was struck by some of the Chinese bronzes.’ His thick, agile hands came together at the level of his face, as though he were clasping and cherishing some almost sacred object. ‘What volumes!’ he cried enthusiastically. ‘What rhythmic sensuality! But small, quite small. One could almost carry them in the pockets.’
Turning to Sebastian, he smiled ingratiatingly.
‘I could make you a very good offer for the bronzes,’ he said.
‘But they’re not mine. I mean … he only gave me this.’
‘Only this?’ the other repeated in a tone of incredulity.
Sebastian dropped his eyes. That smile, that insistent bright regard, made him feel uncomfortable. What was the fellow trying to suggest?
‘Nothing except this,’ he insisted, wishing to God that he had picked on another dealer. ‘But of course, if you’re not interested …’
He started to put the drawing away again.
‘But no, but no!’ cried M. Weyl, laying a restraining hand on his sleeve. ‘On the contrary. I interest myself in everything that Degas ever did — even in the smallest things, the most unimportant.’
Ten minutes later it was all over.
‘… Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and twenty-two. Correct, hein?’
‘Thank you,’ said Sebastian. He took the thick wad of hundred-lire notes and crammed them into his wallet. His face was flushed; his eyes shone with excitement and irrepressible triumph. The man had begun by offering only a thousand. Greatly daring, he had demanded three. They had compromised at last on two thousand two hundred. Ten per cent, above the figure that would have split the difference between demand and offer. Feeling that he had a right to be proud of himself, Sebastian put the wallet back into his pocket and looked up, to find the dealer smiling at him with almost paternal benevolence.
‘A young man who knows how to sell his article of commerce,’ said M. Weyl, patting him once more. ‘In business you will have the most brilliant career.’
‘No business for me,’ Sebastian said. And when the other questioningly raised his eyebrows, ‘You see,’ he added, ‘I’m a poet.’
A poet? But that had been M. Weyl’s own youthful ambition. To express the lyricism of a heart which suffers …
Les chants désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.
‘De purs sanglots,’ he repeated. ‘Mais, hélas, the duty led me otherwhere.’
He sighed, and went on to question Sebastian about his family. Doubtless, in so cultivated a milieu, there was a tradition of poetry and the fine arts? And when the boy answered that his father was a barrister, he insisted on Mr. Barnack’s being one of those legal luminaries who devote their leisures to the Muses.
The idea of his father ever having any leisures or, if he had, devoting them to anything but Blue books, was so funny that Sebastian laughed aloud. But M. Weyl looked offended; and he hastily broke off in order to offer an explanation for his merriment.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘my father’s rather peculiar.’
‘Peculiar?’
Sebastian nodded, and in his broken incoherent style embarked upon an account of John Barnack’s career. And somehow, in his present mood, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make the picture heroic — to harp on his father’s successes as an advocate, to magnify his political importance, to stress the greatness of his self-sacrifice.
‘But what generosity!’ cried M. Weyl.
Sebastian responded to the words as if they had been a compliment addressed to himself. A tingling warmth ran up his spine.
‘He has lots of money,’ he went on. ‘But he gives it all away. To political refugees and that kind of thing.’
The pleasure of vicariously boasting had made him momentarily forget his hatred of those bloodsuckers who took what rightfully should have been his and left him without even a dinner jacket.
‘There’s a chap called Cacciaguida, for example …’
‘You mean the Professor?’
Sebastian nodded. M. Weyl cast a quick glance round the shop and, though it was empty, resumed the conversation in a lower tone.
‘Is he a friend of your father’s?’
‘He came to dinner with us,’ Sebastian answered importantly, ‘just before we started for Florence.’
‘Personally,’ M. Weyl whispered, after taking another look round the shop, ‘I find him a great man. But permit me to give you a good advice.’
He winked expressively, raised a forefinger to his floridly sculptured lips, and shook his head. ‘The silence is of gold,’ he pronounced oracularly.
The sudden jangling of the door-bell made them turn with a start, like a pair of conspirators. Two ladies in the early forties, one rather plump and dark, the other fair, sunburnt and athletic, were entering the shop. An expression of rapturous delight appeared on M. Weyl’s face.
‘Gnädige Baronin!’ he cried, ‘y la reina de Buenos Aires!’
Pushing Sebastian aside, he jumped over a cassettone, ducked under the right arm of a life-sized crucified Christ and, rushing up to the two ladies, ecstatically kissed their hands.
Unobtrusively, Sebastian slipped out of the shop and, whistling, walked jauntily up the Via Tornabuoni in the direction of the cathedral and Uncle Eustace’s tailor.
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS, COPULATING soldiers; and all those wars, those holy wars, while echo answers, ‘Whores, whores, whores!’ The God of Battles is always the God of Brothels, always and inevitably the God of Brothels….
For Eustace Barnack, there was no longer any need to force the laughter. It pealed now of its own accord, shattering what remained of that detestable silence, darkening and dissipating the last far gleams of the light.
The whole universe quivered with amusement, rumbled with enormous hilarities. And through the laughter echo kept answering, ‘Whores and Brothels, Whores and Brothels.’
A whole section of his intellectual being was suddenly restored to him. He remembered his collection of Historical Jokes. A million casualties and the Gettysburg Address, and then those abject, frightened negroes one sees in the little towns of Georgia and Louisiana. The crusade for liberty, quality, fraternity, and then the rise of Napoleon; the crusade against Napoleon, and then the rise of German nationalism; the crusade against German nationalism, and now those unemployed men, standing, like half-animated corpses, at the corners of mean streets in the rain.
And this was John’s voice that he now remembered — vibrant with repressed enthusiasm, talking about the end of laissez-faire and production for use and the Russian Revolution. In other words, two and a half times the population of London exterminated, in order that political power might be taken from one set of ruffians and given to another set; in order that a process of industrialization might be made a little more rapid and a great deal more ruthless than it otherwise would have been. ‘Downwards and backwards, Anti-Christian soldiers!’ Laughter swelled to a crescendo. He was filled with an enormous elation, with the glory of universal derision, the ecstasy of contempt for everyone.
Silliness and murder, stupidity and destruction! He found the phrases waiting for him. And the motive was always idealism, the instruments were always courage and loyalty — the heroic courage and loyalty without which men and women would never be able to persevere in their long-drawn suicides and assassinations.
And all those treasures of knowledge placed so unhesitatingly at the service of passion! All the genius and intelligence dedicated to the attempt to achieve ends either impossible or diabolic! All the problems inherited from the last crusade and solved by methods that automatically created a hundred new problems. And each new problem would require a new crusade, and each new crusade would leave fresh problems for yet further crusades to solve and multiply in the good old way.
And then there were the Triumphs of Religion and Science. Reforming Protestantism — sponsor of capitalistic exploitation. Francis of Assisi miraculously upholding a Mystical Body that was also a political machine and a business concern. Faraday and Clerk Maxwell working indefatigably that the ether might at last become a vehicle for lies and imbecility.
And then the Triumph of Education — that deity to which his poor father had offered fifty thousand pounds and a Polytechnic Institute in yellow brick. Education, compu
lsory and gratuitous. Everybody had been taught to read, and the result was Northcliffe and advertisements for cigarettes and laxatives and whisky. Everybody went to school, and everywhere the years of schooling had been made a prelude to military conscription. And what fine courses in false history and self-congratulation! What a thorough grounding in the religions of nationalism! No God any more; but forty-odd infallible Foreign Offices.
Once again, the whole universe shook with laughter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IT WAS TO be a small, informal dinner; and Eustace, after all, was only a relation by marriage, not blood. The Queen Mother had therefore seen no reason for cancelling her acceptance of Lady Worplesden’s invitation. And as for staying at home to be with Daisy when she arrived that evening — why, the idea simply didn’t occur to her.
‘You’ll have to entertain my granddaughter single-handed,’ she announced to Sebastian at tea-time.
‘Single-handed? But I thought Mrs. Thwale …?’
‘I’m taking Veronica with me, of course.’
Mrs. Thwale put in a word of reassurance.
‘You won’t find her in the least formidable.’
‘Formidable!’ The Queen Mother’s tone was contemptuous. ‘She’s like blancmange.’
‘So there’ll be no excuse for mumbling. Or for not saying anything at all,’ Mrs. Thwale added casually, reaching out for a lump of sugar as she spoke. ‘Which is a slight defect of yours that I seem to have noticed.’
‘That reminds me,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘How’s he getting on with his mumbling lessons?’
‘I’m hoping he’ll give you a demonstration one of these days,’ Mrs. Thwale answered gravely.