Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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The door was opened almost immediately, and there stood old man Bruno, strangely cadaverous and beaky, in a grey sweater, with crimson carpet slippers on his feet.
His face lit up with a smile of welcome.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘good!’
Sebastian took the extended hand, mumbled something about its being so awfully kind of him to write, and then averted his face in an excess of that paralysing embarrassment which always assailed him when he spoke to strangers. But meanwhile, inside his skull, the observer and the phrase-maker were busily at work. By daylight, he had noticed, the eyes were blue and very bright. Blue fires in bone-cups, vivid not simply with awareness and certainly not with the detached, inhuman curiosity which had shone in Mrs. Thwale’s dark eyes when, last night, she had suddenly turned on the light and he had found her, on hands and knees, spanning him like an arch of white flesh. For a long half-minute she had looked at him, wordlessly smiling. Microscopic, in the black bright pupils, he could see his own pale reflection. ‘“Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love,”’ she said at last. Then the pure mask crumpled into a grimace, she uttered her tiny stertorous grunt of laughter, reached out a slender arm towards the lamp and once more plunged the room into darkness. With an effort, Sebastian exorcized his memories. He looked up again into those bright, serene and extraordinarily friendly eyes.
‘You know,’ said Bruno, ‘I was almost expecting you.’
‘Expecting me?’
Bruno nodded, then turned and led the way across an obscure cupboard of a hall into a small bed-sitting-room, in which the only articles of luxury were the view of far-away mountains across the house-tops and a square of sunlight, glowing like a huge ruby, on the tiled floor.
‘Sit down.’ Bruno indicated the more comfortable of the two chairs, and when they were settled, ‘Poor Eustace!’ he went on reflectively, after a pause. He had a way, Sebastian noticed, of leaving spaces between his sentences, so that everything he said was framed, as it were, in a setting of silence. ‘Tell me how it happened.’
Breathless and somewhat incoherent with shyness, Sebastian began to tell the story.
An expression of distress appeared on Bruno’s face.
‘So suddenly!’ he said, when Sebastian had finished. ‘So utterly without preparation!’
The words caused Sebastian to feel delightfully superior. Inwardly he smiled an ironic smile. It was almost incredible, but the old idiot seemed actually to believe in hell-fire and Holy Dying. With a studiously straight face, but still chuckling to himself, he looked up, to find the blue eyes fixed upon his face.
‘You think it sounds pretty funny?’ Bruno said, after the usual second of deliberate silence.
Startled, Sebastian blushed and stammered.
‘But I never … I mean, really …’
‘You mean what everybody means nowadays,’ the other interposed in his quiet voice. ‘Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?’
Sebastian hesitated. He didn’t want to be rude, because, after all, he wanted the old ass to help him. Besides, he shrank from embarking on a controversy in which he was foredoomed by his shyness to make a fool of himself. At the same time, nonsense was nonsense.
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with it,’ he said cautiously, but with a faint undertone almost of truculence.
He sat there, sullenly averted, waiting for the other’s argumentative retort. But it never came. Prepared for attack, his resistance found itself confronted by a friendly silence and became somehow absurd and irrelevant.
Bruno spoke at last.
‘I suppose Mrs. Gamble will be holding one of her séances pretty soon.’
‘She has already,’ said Sebastian.
‘Poor old thing! What a greed for reassurance!’
‘But I must say … well, it’s pretty convincing, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, something happens all right, if that’s what you mean.’
Remembering Mrs. Thwale’s comment, Sebastian giggled knowingly.
‘Something pretty shameless,’ he said.
‘Shameless?’ Bruno repeated, looking up at him in surprise. ‘That’s an odd word. What makes you use it?’
Sebastian smiled uncomfortably and dropped his eyes.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It just seemed the right word, that’s all.’
There was another silence. Through the sleeve of his jacket Sebastian felt for the place where she had left the mark of her teeth. It was still painful to the touch. Twin cannibals in bedlam…. And then he remembered that damned drawing, and that time was passing, passing. How the devil was he to broach the subject?
‘Shameless,’ Bruno said again pensively. ‘Shameless…. And yet you can’t see why there should be any preparation for dying?’
‘Well, he seemed perfectly happy,’ Sebastian answered defensively. ‘You know — jolly and amusing, like when he was alive. That is, if it really was Uncle Eustace.’
‘If,’ Bruno repeated. ‘If.’
‘You don’t believe …?’ Sebastian questioned in some surprise.
Bruno leaned forward and laid his hand on the boy’s knee.
‘Let’s try to get this business quite clear in our minds,’ he said. ‘Eustace’s body plus some unknown, non-bodily x equals Eustace. And for the sake of argument let’s admit that poor Eustace was as happy and jolly as you seem to think he was. All right. A moment comes when Eustace’s body is abolished; but in view of what happens at old Mrs. Gamble’s séance we’re forced to believe that x persists. But before we go any further, let’s ask ourselves what it really was that we learned at the séance. We learned that x plus the medium’s body equals a temporary pseudo-Eustace. That’s an empirical fact. But meanwhile what exactly is x? And what’s happening to x when it isn’t connected with the medium’s body? What happens to it?’ he insisted.
‘Goodness knows.’
‘Precisely. So don’t let’s pretend that we know. And don’t let’s commit the fallacy of thinking that, because x plus the medium’s body is happy and jolly, x by itself must also be happy and jolly.’ He withdrew his hand from Sebastian’s knee and leaned back in his chair. ‘Most of the consolations of spiritualism,’ he went on after a little pause, ‘seem to depend on bad logic — on drawing faulty inferences from the facts observed at séances. When old Mrs. Gamble hears about Summerland and reads Sir Oliver Lodge, she feels reassured; she’s convinced that the next world will be just like this one. But actually Summerland and Lodge are perfectly compatible with Catherine of Genoa and …’ he hesitated, ‘yes, even the Inferno.’
‘The Inferno?’ Sebastian repeated. ‘But surely you don’t imagine …?’ And making a last desperate effort to assure himself that Bruno was just an old ass, he laughed aloud.
His sniggering dropped into a gulf of benevolent silence.
‘No,’ said Bruno at last, ‘I don’t believe in eternal damnation. But not for any reasons that I can discover from going to séances. And still less for any reasons that I can discover from living in the world. For other reasons. Reasons connected with what I know about the nature …’
He paused, and with an anticipatory smile Sebastian waited for him to trot out the word ‘God.’
‘… of the Gaseous Vertebrate,’ Bruno concluded. He smiled sadly. ‘Poor Eustace! It made him feel so much safer to call it that. As though the fact were modified by the name. And yet he was always laughing at other people for using intemperate language.’
‘Now he’s going to start on his conversion campaign,’ Sebastian said to himself.
But, instead, Bruno got up, crossed over to the window and, without a word, deftly caught the big blue-bottle fly that was buzzing against the glass and tossed it out into freedom. Still standing by the window, he turned and spoke.
‘You’ve got something on your mind, Sebastian,’ he said. �
��What is it?’
Startled into a kind of panic suspicion, Sebastian shook his head.
‘Nothing,’ he insisted; but an instant later he was cursing himself for having missed his opportunity.
‘And yet that’s what you came here to talk about.’
The smile with which the words were accompanied was without a trace of irony or patronage. Sebastian was reassured.
‘Well, as a matter of fact …’ He hesitated for a second or two, then forced a rather theatrical little laugh. ‘You see,’ he said with an attempt at gaiety, ‘I’ve been swindled. Swindled,’ he repeated emphatically; for all at once he had seen how the story could be told without any reference to Mr. Tendring’s discovery or his own humiliating failures to tell the truth — simply as the story of trustful inexperience and (yes, he’d admit it) childish silliness shamefully victimized and now appealing for help. Gathering confidence as he proceeded, he told his revised version of what had happened.
‘Offering me a thousand, when he’d sold it to Uncle Eustace for seven!’ he concluded indignantly. ‘It’s just plain swindling.’
‘Well,’ said Bruno slowly, ‘they have peculiar standards, these dealers.’ None more so, he might have added, on the strength of an earlier encounter with the man, than Gabriel Weyl. But nothing would be gained, and perhaps some positive harm might be done, if he were to tell Sebastian what he knew. ‘But meanwhile,’ he went on, ‘what do your people up at the villa think about it all? Surely they must be wondering.’
Sebastian felt himself blushing.
‘Wondering?’ he questioned, hoping and pretending that he didn’t understand what was being implied.
‘Wondering how the drawing disappeared like that. And you must be pretty worried about it, aren’t you?’
There was a pause. Then, without speaking, the boy nodded his head.
‘It’s difficult to come to any decision,’ said Bruno mildly, ‘unless one knows all the relevant facts.’
Sebastian felt profoundly ashamed of himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I ought to have explained….’
Sheepishly, he began to supply the details he had previously omitted.
Bruno listened without comment until the end.
‘And you were really intending to tell Mrs. Ockham all about it?’ he questioned.
‘I was just beginning,’ Sebastian insisted. ‘And then she was sent for.’
‘You didn’t think of telling Mrs. Thwale instead?’
‘Mrs. Thwale? Oh, goodness, no!’
‘Why goodness, no?’
‘Well …’ Embarrassed, Sebastian groped for an avowable answer. ‘I don’t know. I mean, the drawing didn’t belong to her. She had nothing to do with it.’
‘And yet you say it was she who suspected the little girl.’
‘I know, but …’ Twin cannibals in bedlam — and when the light went on, the eyes were bright with the look of one who enjoys a comedy from between the curtains of the most private of boxes.
‘Well, somehow it never occurred to me.’
‘I see,’ said Bruno, and was silent for a few seconds. ‘If I can get the drawing back for you,’ he went on at last, ‘will you promise to take it straight to Mrs. Ockham and tell her the whole story?’
‘Oh, I promise,’ Sebastian cried eagerly.
The other held up a bony hand.
‘Not so quick, not so quick! Promises are serious. Are you sure you’ll be able to keep this one, if you make it?’
‘Certain!’
‘So was Simon Peter. But cocks have a habit of crowing at the most inconvenient moments….’
Bruno smiled, humorously, but at the same time with a kind of compassionate tenderness.
‘As though I were ill,’ Sebastian thought, as he looked into the other’s face, and was simultaneously touched and annoyed — touched by so much solicitude on his behalf, but annoyed by what it implied: namely, that he was sick (mortally sick, to judge by the look in those bright blue eyes), of the inability to keep a promise. But really that was a bit thick….
‘Well,’ Bruno went on, ‘the quicker we get to work the better, eh?’
He peeled off his sweater and, opening the wardrobe, took out an old brown jacket. Then he sat down to change his shoes. Bending over the laces, he began to talk again.
‘When I do something wrong,’ he said, ‘or merely stupid, I find it very useful to draw up — not exactly a balance sheet; no, it’s more like a genealogy, if you see what I mean, a family tree of the offence. Who or what were its parents, ancestors, collaterals? What are likely to be its descendants — in my own life and other people’s? It’s surprising how far a little honest research will take one. Down into the rat-holes of one’s own character. Back into past history. Out into the world around one. Forward into possible consequences. It makes one realize that nothing one does is unimportant and nothing wholly private.’ The last knot was tied; Bruno got up. ‘Well, I think that’s everything,’ he said, as he put on his jacket.
‘There’s the money,’ Sebastian mumbled uncomfortably. He pulled out his wallet. ‘I’ve only got about a thousand lire left. If you could lend me the rest … I’ll return it as soon as I possibly …’
Bruno took the wad of notes and handed one of them back to the boy.
‘You’re not a Franciscan,’ he said. ‘At any rate, not yet — though one day, perhaps, in mere self-defence against yourself …’ He smiled almost mischievously and, cramming the rest of the money in a trouser pocket, picked up his hat.
‘I don’t suppose I shall be very long,’ he said, looking back from the door. ‘You’ll find plenty of books to amuse you — that is, if you want an opiate, which I hope you don’t. Yes, I hope you don’t,’ he repeated with a sudden, insistent earnestness; then he turned and went out.
Left to himself, Sebastian sat down again.
It had gone off quite differently, of course, from what he had imagined, but very well. Better, in fact, than he had ever dared to hope — except that he did wish he hadn’t started by telling that revised version of what had happened. Hoping to cut a better figure, and then having to admit, abjectly, humiliatingly, that it wasn’t true. Anyone else would have seized the opportunity to deliver the most frightful pi-jaw. Not Bruno, however. He felt profoundly grateful for the man’s forbearance. To have had the decency to help without first taking it out of him in a sermon — that was really extraordinary. And he wasn’t a fool either. What he had said about the genealogy of an offence, for example …
‘The genealogy of an offence,’ he whispered in the silence, ‘the family tree….’
He began to think of the lies he had told and of all their ramifying antecedents and accompaniments and consequences. He oughtn’t to have told them, of course; but, on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for his father’s idiotic principles he wouldn’t have had to tell them. And if it hadn’t been for the slums and rich men with cigars, like poor Uncle Eustace, his father wouldn’t have had those idiotic principles. And yet Uncle Eustace had been thoroughly kind and decent. Whereas that anti-fascist professor — one wouldn’t trust him an inch. And how boring most of his father’s left-wing, lower-class friends were! How unutterably dreary! But dreary and boring, he remembered, to him; and that was probably his fault. Just as it was his fault that those evening clothes should have seemed so indispensable — because other boys had them, because there would be those girls at Tom Boveney’s party. But one oughtn’t to consider what other people did or thought; and the girls would turn out to be just another excuse for sensual day-dreamings that were destined henceforward to be haunted by memories of last night’s reality of unimaginable shamelessness and alienation. Cannibals in bedlam — and the door of the madhouse had been locked against the last chance of telling the truth. Meanwhile, in some crowded peasant’s cottage at the remote, unvisited end of the garden, a child in tears was perhaps even now protesting her innocence under an angry cross-examination. And when blows and threats ha
d failed to elicit the information she didn’t possess, that old she-devil of a Mrs. Gamble would insist on sending for the police; and then everybody would be questioned, everybody — himself included. But would he be able to stick to his story? And if they took it into their heads to go and talk to Weyl, what reason would he have for withholding the truth? And then … Sebastian shuddered. But now, thank God, old man Bruno had come to the rescue. The drawing would be bought back; he’d make a clean breast of the whole business to Mrs. Ockham — irresistibly, so that she’d start crying and say he was just like Frankie — and everything would be all right. The children of his lie would either remain unborn or else be smothered in their cradles, and the lie itself would be as though it had never been uttered. Indeed, for all practical purposes, one could now say that it never had been uttered.
‘Never,’ Sebastian said to himself emphatically, ‘never.’
His spirits rose, he began to whistle, and suddenly, in a flash of intensely pleasurable illumination, he perceived how well this notion of the genealogy of offences would fit into the scheme of his new poem. Patterns of atoms; but chaos of the molecules assembled in the stone. Patterns of living cells and organs and physiological functioning, but chaos of men’s behaviour in time. And yet even in that chaos there was law and logic; there was a geometry even of disintegration. The square on lust is equal, so to speak, to the sum of the squares on vanity and idleness. The shortest distance between two cravings is violence. And what about the lies he had been telling? What about broken promises and betrayals? Phrases began to form themselves in his mind.
Belial his blubber lips and Avarice
Pouting a trap-tight sphincter, voluptuously
Administer the lingering Judas kiss …
He pulled out his pencil and scribbling-pad, and started to write. ‘… the lingering Judas kiss.’ And, after Judas, the crucifixion. But death had many ancestors besides greed and falsehood, many other forms than voluntary martyrdom. He recalled an article he had read somewhere about the character of the next war. ‘And the dead children,’ he wrote,