Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘I’m so sorry to interrupt you,’ she said to Mrs. Ockham. ‘But your grandmother …’
She left the sentence unfinished, and smiled.
‘Does Granny want me again?’
‘She has something more to say about that lost drawing.’
‘Oh dear!’ Mrs. Ockham sighed profoundly. ‘Well, I’d better go, I suppose. Would you like me to turn the light out?’ she added, addressing herself again to Sebastian.
He nodded. Mrs. Ockham turned the switch, then laid her hand for a moment against his cheek, whispered ‘Good-night,’ and hurried out into the corridor. Mrs. Thwale closed the door.
Alone in the darkness, Sebastian wondered uneasily what it was that the Queen Mother wanted so urgently to say about the drawing. Of course, if he’d had time to tell Mrs. Ockham about it, it wouldn’t matter what she said. But as it was … He shook his head. As it was, whatever the old she-devil said or did was sure to complicate matters, was bound to make it more difficult for himself. Meanwhile such an opportunity as he had had just now might not come again; and to go and tell Mrs. Ockham in cold blood would be the most horrible ordeal. So horrible that he began to wonder whether it mightn’t be better, after all, to try to get the drawing back from Weyl. He was in the middle of an imaginary interview with the dealer, when he heard behind him the sound of the door being quietly opened. On the wall at which he was looking a bar of light widened, then grew narrower and, as the latch clicked, there was darkness again. Sebastian turned in his bed towards the unseen rustle of silk. She’d come back, and now he could tell her everything. He felt enormously relieved.
‘Mrs. Ockham!’ he said. ‘Oh, I’m so glad …’
Through the covers a hand touched his knee, travelled up to his shoulder, and with a sharp movement pulled back the bedclothes and threw them aside. The silk rustled again in the darkness, and a wave of perfume came to his nostrils — that sweet hot scent that was a mingling of flowers and sweat, spring freshness and a musky animality.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Sebastian began in a startled whisper.
But even as he spoke an unseen face bent over him; a mouth touched his chin, then found his lips; and fingers on his throat moved down and began to undo the buttons of his pyjama jacket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DIVINELY INNOCENT, A sensuality panting up through incandescence into pure ecstasy; in the intervals, the tender and yet wittily cultured lasciviousness of Mary Esdaile — that was what Sebastian had imagined it would be, what he had looked forward to. Certainly not those hands, deliberate in the darkness, that almost surgical research of the essential shamelessness. Nor yet the delicate gluttony of those soft lips that would suddenly give place to teeth and pointed nails. And not those imperiously whispered commands; not those spells of silent, introverted frenzy, those long-drawn agonies, under his timid and almost horrified caresses, of a despairing insatiability.
In his fancy, love had been a kind of gay, ethereal intoxication; but last night’s reality was more like madness. Yes, sheer madness; a maniac struggling in the musky darkness with another maniac.
‘Twin cannibals in bedlam …’ The phrase came to him as he was examining the red and livid mark of teeth on his arm. Twin cannibals, devouring their own identity and one another’s; ravening up reason and decency; obliterating the most rudimentary conventions of civilization. And yet it was precisely there, in that frenzy of the cannibals, that the real attraction had lain. Beyond the physical pleasure lay the yet more rapturous experience of being totally out of bounds, the ecstasy of an absolute alienation.
Mrs. Thwale had put on her dove-grey dress and was wearing round her neck the little gold and ruby cross which her mother had given her on the day she was confirmed.
‘Good-morning, Sebastian,’ she said, as he came into the dining-room. ‘We seem to have the breakfast table to ourselves.’
Sebastian looked with panic at the empty chairs and the unfolded napkins. For some reason he had taken it for granted that Mrs. Ockham would be there to chaperone this dreadfully embarrassing encounter.
‘Yes, I thought … I mean, the journey … They must have been pretty tired….’
From her private box at the comedy Mrs. Thwale looked at him with bright ironic eyes.
‘Mumbling again!’ she said. ‘I shall really have to buy that birch!’
To cover his confusion, Sebastian went over to the sideboard and started to look at what was under the lids of the silver dishes on the hot-plate. Of course, what he ought to have done, he realized as he was helping himself to porridge, what he ought to have done, when he saw that she was alone, was to go and kiss her on the nape of the neck and whisper something about last night. And perhaps it wasn’t too late even now. Press the muzzle of the revolver against the right temple, count ten, and then rush in and do it. One, two, three, four … Porridge plate in hand, he advanced towards the table. Four, five, six …
‘I hope you slept well,’ said Mrs. Thwale in her low clear voice.
He looked at her in dismay, then dropped his eyes.
‘Oh, yes,’ he muttered, ‘yes … very well, thanks.’
There was no question any more of that kiss.
‘You did?’ Mrs. Thwale insisted with an air of astonishment. ‘In spite of the owls?’
‘The owls?’
‘You don’t mean to say,’ she cried, ‘that you didn’t hear the owls? Lucky boy! I wish I slept as soundly as you do. I was awake half the night!’
She took a sip of coffee, delicately wiped her mouth, bit off a morsel of her toast and butter and, when she had swallowed it, wiped her mouth again.
‘If I were you,’ she said, ‘I’d make it a point today to go to San Marco and look at the Fra Angelicos.’
The door opened and Mr. Tendring entered and, a moment later, Mrs. Ockham. They too had failed to hear the owls — even though Mrs. Ockham hadn’t been able to go to sleep for hours, because of worrying about that wretched drawing.
Yes, that wretched drawing, that stinking drawing. In his impotence, Sebastian indulged in a childish outburst of bad language as he ate his buttered eggs. But calling names brought him no nearer to the resolution of his difficulties, and instead of clearing the mental atmosphere, blasphemy and obscenity merely intensified his mood of oppression by making him feel ashamed of himself.
‘Are you going to send for the police?’ Mrs. Thwale enquired.
Sebastian’s heart seemed to miss a beat. Keeping his eyes fixed upon his plate, he stopped chewing so as to be able to listen with undivided attention.
‘That’s what Granny wants to do,’ said Mrs. Ockham. ‘But I won’t have it yet. Not till we’ve made a really thorough search.’
Sebastian renewed his mastication — too soon, as it turned out; for Mrs. Thwale was all for having the little girl brought up to the house for cross-questioning.
‘No, I’ll go and talk to the parents first,’ said Mrs. Ockham.
‘Thank God!’ Sebastian said to himself.
That meant that he probably had the whole of the day before him. Which was something. But how on earth was he going to set to work?
A touch on the elbow startled him out of his abstraction; the footman was bending over him, and on the proffered salver were two letters. Sebastian took them. The first was from Susan. Impatiently he put it in his pocket, unopened, and looked at the second. The envelope was addressed in an unfamiliar hand, and the stamp was Italian. Who on earth …? And then a hope was born, grew and, in an instant of time, was transformed into a conviction, a positive certainty that the letter was from that man at the art gallery; explaining that it had all been a mistake; apologizing profusely; enclosing a cheque…. Eagerly he tore open the envelope, unfolded the single sheet of cheap commercial paper and looked for the signature. ‘Bruno Rontini,’ he read. His disappointment found vent in sudden anger. That fool who believed in Gaseous Vertebrates, that creeping Jesus who tried to convert people to his own idiocies! Sebastian started to put the letter
away in his pocket, then decided after all to see what the man had to say.
‘Dear Sebastian,’ he read, ‘Returning yesterday, I heard the news, distressing on more than one account, of poor Eustace’s death. I don’t know if your plans have been modified by what has happened; but if you are staying on in Florence, remember that I am one of the oldest inhabitants as well as some sort of a cousin, and that I shall be very happy to help you find your way about. You will generally find me at my apartment in the mornings, in the afternoon at the shop.’
‘At the shop,’ Sebastian repeated to himself ironically. ‘And he can damned well stay there.’ And then all at once it occurred to him that, after all, this fool might be of some use to him. A dealer in books, a dealer in pictures — the chances were that they knew one another. Weyl might be ready to do the other fellow a favour; and Uncle Eustace had said that old man Bruno was pretty decent in spite of his silliness. Pensively Sebastian folded up the letter and put it in his pocket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
YES, THE WHOLE universe was laughing with him. Laughing cosmically at the cosmic joke of its own self-frustration, guffawing from pole to pole at the world-wide, age-old slapstick of disaster following on the heels of good intention. A counterpoint of innumerable hilarities — Voltairean voices, yelping in sharp shrill triumph over the bewildered agonies of stupidity and silliness; vast Rabelaisian voices, like bassoons and double basses, rejoicing in guts and excrement and copulation, rumbling delightedly at the spectacle of grossness, of inescapable animality.
Shaking in unison with the universal merriment, he laughed through long durations of increasing pleasure, durations of mounting exhilaration and glory. And meanwhile here was that light again, here was that crystal of luminous silence — still and shining in all the interstices of the jagged laughter. Not at all formidable, this time, but softly, tenderly blue, as it had been when he caught old Bruno at his tricks with it. A blue caressing silence, ubiquitously present, in spite of the yelping and the bassoons, but present without urgency; beautiful, not with that austere, unbearable intensity, but imploringly, as though it were humbly begging to be taken notice of. And there was no participation in its knowledge, no self-compulsion to shame and condemnation. Only this tenderness. But Eustace was not to be caught so easily, Eustace was forearmed against all its little stratagems. To the entreaty of that blue crystal of silence he returned only the explosions of his derision, more and more strident as the light became more tenderly beautiful, as the silence ever more humbly, ever more gently and caressingly solicited his attention. No, no, none of that! He thought again of the Triumphs of Education, the Triumphs of Science, Religion, Politics, and his merriment mounted to a kind of frenzy. Paroxysm after cosmic paroxysm. What pleasure, what power and glory! But suddenly he was aware that the laughter had passed beyond his control, had become a huge, autonomous hysteria, persisting against his will and in spite of the pain it was causing him, persisting with a life of its own that was alien to his life, with a purpose of its own that was entirely incompatible with his well-being.
Out there, in here, the silence shone with a blue, imploring tenderness. But none of that, none of that! The light was always his enemy. Always, whether it was blue or white, pink or pea-green. He was shaken by another long, harrowing convulsion of derision.
Then, abruptly, there was a displacement of awareness. Once again he was remembering something that had not yet happened to somebody else.
Shuddering in the universal epilepsy, an open window presented itself; and there was poor old John, standing beside it, looking down into the street. And what confusion down there, what a yelling in that golden haze of dust! Dark faces, open-mouthed and distorted, dark hands, clenched or clawing. Thousands and thousands of them. And from the bright sunlit square on the right, from the narrow side-street immediately opposite the window, squads of turbaned and black-bearded policemen were shoving their way into the crowd, swinging their long bamboo staves. On heads and shoulders, on the bone of thin wrists upraised to protect the frightened, screaming faces — blow after blow, methodically. There was another convulsion. The figures wavered and broke, like images in a ruffled pool, then came together again as the laughing frenzy died down. Overhead, the blue tenderness was not mere sky, but the bright crystal of living silence. Methodically, the policemen hammered on. The thought of those sharp or cushioned impacts was nauseatingly distinct.
‘Horrible!’ John was saying between his teeth. ‘Horrible!’
‘It would be a damned sight worse if the Japs were to get to Calcutta,’ another voice remarked.
Slowly, reluctantly, John nodded his head.
The professional Liberal condoning a lathi charge! There was another convulsive seizure, and another. Derision kept on tearing at him, like the gusts of a hurricane among tattered sails; kept on carding the very substance of his being, as though with combs and iron claws. But through the torment Eustace was unsteadily aware that, immediately below the window, a boy had dropped unconscious, felled by a blow on the temple. Two other young men were bending over him. Suddenly, through the yelping and the bassoons, there was as it were a memory of wild shrill cries and the frightened repetition of one incomprehensible phrase. A line of steel helmets was moving forward across the square. There was a panic movement of the crowd, away from the approaching danger. Jostled and staggering, the two young men succeeded none the less in raising their companion from the ground. As though in some mysterious rite, the boy’s limp body was lifted shoulder-high towards the blue, imploring tenderness of the silence. For a few seconds only. Then the rush of the frightened mob toppled them down. Rescuers and rescued, they were gone, engulfed in the trampling and the suffocation. Blindly, in terror, the crowd moved on. A gale of mirthless lacerating laughter blew them into oblivion. Only the luminous silence remained, tender, beseeching. But Eustace was up to all its tricks.
And suddenly there was another bleeding face. Not the face of the nameless Indian boy; but, of all people, Jim Poulshot’s face. Yes, Jim Poulshot! That vacant pigeon-hole which was so obviously destined to contain the moderately successful stockbroker of 1949. But Jim was in uniform and lying at the foot of a clump of bamboos, and three or four little yellow men with guns in their hands were standing over him.
‘Wounded,’ Jim kept saying in a thin cracked voice. ‘Bring doctor quick! Wounded, wounded …’
The three little yellow men broke out simultaneously into loud, almost good-humoured guffaws. And as though moved by a kind of secret sympathy, the whole universe shook and howled in chorus.
Then suddenly one of the men raised his foot and stamped on Jim’s face. There was a scream. The heel of the heavy rubber-soled boot came down again and, with yet more force, a third time. Blood was streaming from the mangled mouth and nose. The face was hardly recognizable.
Horror, pity, indignation — but in the same instant a blast of frantic laughter clawed at his being. ‘The empty pigeon-hole,’ his memories kept howling, and then, with irrepressible glee: ‘The stockbroker of 1949, the moderately successful stockbroker.’
Under the bamboos the stockbroker of 1949 lay still, moaning.
Under the bamboo,
Under the bamboo,
Probably constipaysh …
The barrel-organ outside the Kensington Registry Office, and Timmy’s explanation of what had happened on the cricket field.
Probably constip,
Probably constip …
Among the little yellow men there had been a short, gloating silence. Then one of them said something and, as though to illustrate his meaning, drove his long bayonet into Jim Poulshot’s chest. Grinning, the others followed suit — in the face, in the belly, in the throat and the genitals — again and again, until at last the screaming stopped.
The screaming stopped. But the laughter persisted — the howling, the epilepsy, the uncontrollable lacerating derision.
And meanwhile the scene had repeated itself. The bleeding face, the horror of
the bayonets, but all somehow mixed up with Mimi in her claret-coloured dressing-gown. Adesso comincia la tortura — and then the dandling, the fumbling, the fondling. And at the same time the stamping, the stabbing. With St. Sebastian among the Victorian flowers, and poor dear Amy, tremulous before the Kensington Registrar, and Laurina at Monte Carlo. Ave verum corpus, the true body, the prim Victorian mouth, the brown, blind breast-eyes. And while the bayonets stabbed and stabbed, there was the shameful irrelevance of a pleasure that died at last into a cold reiterated friction, automatic and compulsory. And all the time the yelping and the bassoons, the iron teeth, combing and carding the very substance of his being. For ever and ever, excruciatingly. But he knew what the light was up to. He knew what that blue tenderness of silence was beseeching him to do. No, no, none of that! Deliberately he turned yet again towards the parting of the dressing-gown, towards the mangled and unrecognizable face, towards the intolerable pain of derision and lust, compulsorily, self-imposed, for ever and ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THERE WERE ALMOST as many stairs as at Glanvil Terrace, but the fifth-floor landing was reached at last. Sebastian paused before ringing the bell, to recover his breath and to remind himself that, on this occasion, the nausea on the threshold was entirely unjustified. Who was Bruno Rontini anyhow? Just an amiable old ass, too decent, by all accounts, to be sarcastic or censorious, and too completely a stranger, for all his vague cousinship, to have the right to say unpleasant things, even if he wanted to. Besides, it wasn’t as if he, Sebastian, were going to confess his sins, or anything like that. No, no, he wouldn’t ask for help on that basis. It would be a matter of just casually introducing the subject, as though it weren’t really so very important after all. ‘By the way, do you happen to know a fellow called Weyl?’ And so on, lightly, airily; and as Bruno wasn’t his father, there wouldn’t be any unpleasant interruptions, everything would go through according to plan. So that there was really no possible excuse for feeling sick like this. Sebastian drew three deep breaths, then pushed the button.