Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Walking on Grape Nuts and imagination,
Among recollected crucifixions and these jewels
Of horizontal sunlight …
Suddenly, from between two cypresses, twenty or thirty yards ahead of him, a small black figure came running out into the drive. With a start and a horrible sinking of the stomach, Sebastian recognized the little girl with the weeding basket, recognized the incarnation of his own disregarded guilty conscience, the harbinger of that reality which, in his somnambulistic detachment, he had forgotten. Catching sight of him, the child halted and stood there staring with round black eyes. Her face, Sebastian noticed, was paler than usual, and she had evidently been crying. Oh, God…. He smiled at her, called ‘Hullo’ and waved a friendly hand. But before he had taken five more steps the child turned and, like a frightened animal, rushed away along the path by which she had come.
‘Stop!’ he shouted.
But of course she didn’t stop; and when he came to the opening between the trees, the child was nowhere to be seen. And even if he were to follow and find her, he reflected, it wouldn’t be any good. She understood no English, he spoke no Italian. Gloomily Sebastian turned and walked on towards the house.
No servants were about when he entered, and he could hear no sound from the drawing-room. Thank God, the coast was clear. He tiptoed across the hall and started to climb the stairs. On the last step he halted. A sound had caught his ear. Somewhere, behind one of those closed doors, people were talking. Should he run the invisible blockade and go on, or beat a retreat? Sebastian was still hesitating, when the door of what had been poor Uncle Eustace’s room was thrown open and out walked old Mrs. Gamble, hugging that dog of hers in one arm while Mrs. Ockham held the other. They were followed by a pale, cow-like creature, whom Sebastian recognized as the medium. Then came Mrs. Thwale and, close behind Mrs. Thwale — of all horrors! — Gabriel Weyl and Mme Weyl.
‘So different from the occidental art,’ Weyl was saying. ‘For example, you would not desire to feel a Gothic madonna — would you, madame?’
He dodged past Mrs. Thwale and the medium, and caught Mrs. Ockham by the sleeve.
‘Would you?’ he insisted, as she halted and turned towards him.
‘Well, really …’ said Mrs. Ockham uncertainly.
‘What’s that he’s saying?’ the Queen Mother questioned sharply. ‘I can’t understand a word of it.’
‘Those folds of trecento drapery,’ M. Weyl went on. ‘So harsh, so emphatic!’ He made a grimace of agony and with his left hand tenderly clasped the fingers of his right, as though they had just been caught in a mouse-trap. ‘Qué barbaridad!’
Still keeping his eyes fixed on the menace at the other end of the corridor, Sebastian stepped noiselessly down from the highest stair to the one below the highest.
‘Whereas a Chinese object,’ M. Weyl went on; and, from agonized, his large expressive face became suddenly rapturous. ‘Un petit bodhisattva, par exemple…’
Another step down.
‘… With his draperies in liquefaction. Like butter in the month of August. No violence, no Gothic folds — simply quelques volutes savantes et peu profondes.
Voluptuously the thick, white, hairy hands caressed the air.
‘What deliciousness for the ends of the fingers! What sublime sensuality! What …’
Another step. But this time the movement was too abrupt. Foxy VIII turned a sharp nose towards the staircase and, wriggling frantically in Mrs. Gamble’s clasp, began to bark.
‘Why, it’s Sebastian!’ cried Mrs. Ockham delightedly. ‘Come along and be introduced to Monsieur and Madame Weyl.’
Feeling like a criminal on his way to execution, Sebastian slowly mounted the last three stairs of the scaffold and walked towards the drop. The barking grew more hysterical.
‘Be quiet, Foxy,’ rasped the Queen Mother. Then, tempering command by argument, ‘After all,’ she added, ‘he’s a perfectly harmless boy. Perfectly harmless.’
‘Sebastian Barnack, my stepfather’s nephew,’ Mrs. Ockham explained.
Sebastian looked up, expecting to meet a smile of ironic recognition, a voluble declaration that the Weyls had met him before. But, instead, the wife merely inclined her head politely, while the man held out a hand and said:
‘Enchanted to make your acquaintance, sir.’
‘Enchanted,’ Sebastian mumbled back, trying to look and behave as though this were the usual kind of ordinary unimportant introduction.
‘Without doubt,’ said M. Weyl, ‘you share your uncle’s love of the arts?’
‘Oh, rather … I mean, I …’
‘The Chinese collection alone!’ M. Weyl clasped his hands and looked up to heaven. ‘And the fact that he kept most of it in his bedroom,’ he went on, turning back to Mrs. Ockham, ‘for no other eyes than his own! What delicacy, what sensibility!’
‘I’d sell the whole lot if I were you, Daisy,’ put in the Queen Mother. ‘Sell ’em for cash and buy yourself a Rolls. It’s an economy in the end.’
‘How true!’ breathed M. Weyl in the tone of one who comments reverently on an utterance by Rabindranath Tagore.
‘Well, I don’t know about the Rolls,’ said Mrs. Ockham, who had been thinking of how she could use the money to help her poor girls. Then, to avoid further discussion with her grandmother, she hastily changed the subject. ‘I wanted to talk to Monsieur Weyl about the drawing,’ she continued, turning to Sebastian. ‘So Veronica rang him up after luncheon, and he very kindly offered to come up here immediately.’
‘No kindness at all,’ protested M. Weyl. ‘A pleasure and at the same time a sacred duty to the memory of our dear defunct.’ He laid his hand on his heart.
‘Monsieur Weyl is very optimistic,’ Mrs. Ockham went on. ‘He doesn’t think it was stolen. In fact, he’s absolutely certain we shall find it again.’
‘Daisy, you’re talking nonsense,’ barked the Queen Mother. ‘Nobody can be certain about that drawing except Eustace. That’s why I sent for Mrs. Byfleet again — and the quicker we get to our séance, the better.’
There was a silence, and Sebastian knew that the moment had come for him to keep his promise. If he failed to act now, if he didn’t immediately hand over the drawing and explain what had happened, it might be too late. But to confess in public, before that awful man and the Queen Mother and Mrs. Thwale — the prospect was appalling. And yet he had promised, he had promised. Sebastian swallowed hard and passed the tip of his tongue over his dry lips. But it was Mrs. Gamble who broke the silence.
‘Nothing will convince me that it wasn’t stolen,’ she went on emphatically. ‘Nothing except an assurance from Eustace’s own lips.’
‘Not even the fact that it has been already found?’ said M. Weyl.
His eyes twinkled, his tone and expression were those of a man on the verge of delighted laughter.
‘Already found?’ Mrs. Ockham repeated questioningly.
Like a conjurer materializing rabbits, M. Weyl reached out and twitched the thin, flat parcel from under Sebastian’s left arm.
‘In its original wrapping,’ he said, as he broke the string. ‘I recognize my paper of emballage.’ And with a flourish, as though it were not rabbits this time, but infant unicorns, he pulled out the drawing and handed it to Mrs. Ockham. ‘And as for our jeune farceur,’ he went on, ‘who holds himself there saying nothing with a funebrial face as if he was at an interment …’ He exploded in a great guffaw and clapped Sebastian on the shoulder.
‘What’s that, what’s that?’ cried the Queen Mother, darting blind glances from one face to another. ‘The boy’s found it, has he?’
‘“Elle est retrouvée”’ M. Weyl declaimed,
‘Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi? L’éternite.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.
But seriously, my friend, seriously … Where? Not by chance in the place where I always said it must be? Not in …?’ He paused, then leaned forward and wh
ispered in Sebastian’s ear, ‘… In the place where even the king goes on foot — enfin, the toilet cabinet?’
Sebastian hesitated for a moment, then nodded his head.
‘There’s a little space between the medicine cupboard and the wall,’ he whispered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PAIN AND THE howling of laughter. Nightmares of cruelty and cold lust, and this irrepressible derision tearing relentlessly at the very substance of his being. Without end; and the durations grew longer and progressively longer with each repetition of the ever-increasing agony.
After an eternity deliverance came with a kind of jerk, as though by miracle. Came with the sudden lapse out of mere incoherent succession into the familiar orderliness of time. Came with the multitudinous twittering of sensation, the fluttering consciousness of having a body. And out there lay space; and in the space there were bodies — the sensed evidence of other kindred minds.
‘We have two old friends of yours with us this evening,’ he heard the Queen Mother saying in her ghostly petty officer’s voice. ‘Monsieur and Madame — what’s the name, by the way?’
‘Weyl,’ and ‘Gabriel Weyl,’ a masculine and a feminine voice answered simultaneously.
And sure enough, it was the Flemish Venus and her preposterous Vulcan.
“‘Where every prospect pleases,”’ he chanted, ‘“and only man is WEYL FRÈRES, Bruxelles, Paris, Florence….”’
But, as usual, the imbecile interpreter got it all wrong. Meanwhile the dealer had begun to talk to him about the Chinese bronzes. What taste in the collector of such treasures, what connoisseurship, what sensibility! Then, with a solemn earnestness that was in ludicrous contrast with her naughty-naughty French accent, Mme Weyl brought out something about their calligraphic polyphony.
Delicious absurdity!
‘He thinks you’re funny,’ the interpreter squeaked, and broke into a shrill giggle.
But these Weyls, Eustace suddenly perceived, were much more than funny. In some way or other they were enormously significant and important. In some way and for some mysterious reason they were epoch-making — yes, there was no other word for it. They were absolutely epoch-making.
He seemed on the verge of discovering just how and why they were epoch-making, when the Queen Mother suddenly broke in.
‘I suppose you’re beginning to feel quite at home now, on the other side,’ she rasped.
‘At home!’ he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.
But it was as a rather gushing statement of fact that the imbecile brought out the words.
‘Sure, he feels quite at home,’ she squeaked.
Then the Queen Mother suggested that it might be nice for those who had never attended a séance before if he gave them something evidential; and she began to fire off a string of the most idiotic questions. How much had he paid for those drawings he had bought from M. Weyl? What was the name of the hotel he had stayed at in Paris? What books had he been reading the day he passed on? And then Mrs. Thwale piped up, and both the Weyls; and the conversation became so incoherent, so senselessly trivial, that he grew confused, found it difficult to think straight or even remember the most familiar facts. In self-protection he turned his attention away from the significance of what was being said to him, concentrating instead on the mere sound of the words, on the pitch and timbre and volume of the different voices. And contrapuntal to these noises from without there were the muffled rhythms of blood and breathing, the uninterrupted stream of messages from this temporary body of his. Warmths and pressures, moistures and titillations, a score of little aches and stiffnesses, of obscure visceral discontents and satisfactions. Treasures of physiological reality, directly experienced and so intrinsically fascinating that there was no need to bother about other people, no point in thinking or trying to communicate. It was enough just to have this feeling of space and time and the processes of life. Nothing else was required. This alone was paradise.
And then, through the dark twittering aviary of his sensations, Eustace was aware, once again, of that blue shining stillness. Delicate, unutterably beautiful, like the essence of all skies and flowers, like the silent principle and potentiality of all music. And tender, yearning, supplicatory.
But meanwhile the air slowly came and went in the nostrils, cool on the intake, warm to the point of being all but imperceptible as it was breathed out; and as the chest expanded and contracted, effort was succeeded by a delicious effortlessness, tension by relaxation, again and again. And what pleasure to listen to the waves of blood as they beat against the ear-drums, to feel them throbbing under the skin of the temples! How fascinating to analyse the mingled savours of garlic and chocolate, red wine and — yes — kidneys, haunting the tongue and palate! And then, all at once, by a kind of exquisitely harmonious and co-ordinated earthquake of all the muscles of the mouth and gullet, the accumulations of saliva were swallowed; and a moment later a faint bubbling trill from below the diaphragm announced that the processes of digestion were sleeplessly going forward. That seemed to bring the ultimate reassurance, to perfect and consummate his sense of paradisal cosiness. And suddenly he found himself remembering St. Sebastian and the stuffed humming-birds, remembering the taste of cigar smoke on a palate warmed by old brandy, remembering Mimi and the Young Man of Peoria and his collection of facts about the ludicrous or disastrous consequences of idealism — remembering them not with shame or self-condemnation but with downright relish or, at the very worst, an amused indulgence. The light persisted, ubiquitously present; but this feeling of being in a body was an effective barrier against its encroachments. Behind his sensations he was safe from any compulsion to know himself as he was known. And these Weyls, he now perceived, this Venus with her swarthy Vulcan, could become the instruments of his permanent deliverance from that atrocious knowledge. There was a living uterine darkness awaiting him there, a vegetative heaven. Providence was ready for him, a providence of living flesh, hungry to engulf him into itself, yearning to hold and cradle him, to nourish with the very substance of its deliciously carnal and sanguine being.
Imploringly, the light intensified its shining silence. But he knew what it was up to, he was forearmed against its tricks. And besides, it was possible to make the best of Mozart and the Casino, of Mimi and the evening star between cypresses. Perfectly possible, provided always one owned a physiology to protect one against the stratagems of the light. And that protection could be had for the asking; or rather was being offered, greedily, with a kind of mindless frenzy….
Suddenly the squeaking of the imbecile ceased to be nothing but a sensation, and modulated into significance.
‘Good-bye, folks, good-bye.’
And from out there in the darkness came an answering chorus of farewells that grew momently dimmer, vaguer, more confused. And all the delicious messages from this body of his — they too were fading. The aviary fell silent and motionless. And suddenly there was a kind of wrench, and once again he was out of the comfortable world where time is a regular succession and place is fixed and solid — out in the chaos and delirium of unfettered mind. In the vague flux of masterless images, of thoughts and words and memories all but autonomous and independent, two things preserved their stability, the tender ubiquity of the light and the knowledge that there was a fostering darkness of flesh and blood in which, if he chose, he could find deliverance from the light.
But here once more was the lattice of relationships, and he was in the midst of it, moving from node to node, from one patterned figure to its strangely distorted projection in another pattern. Moving, moving, until all of a sudden there he was, carefully putting down his cigar on the onyx ashtray and turning to open the medicine cupboard.
There was a kind of side-slip, a falling, as it were, through the intricacies of the lattice — and he knew himself remembering events that had not yet taken place. Remembering a day towards the end of summer, hot and cloudless, with aeroplanes roaring across the sky — across the luminous silence. Fo
r the silence was still there, shining, ubiquitously tender; still there in spite of what was happening on this long straight road between its poplar trees. Thousands of people, all moving one way, all haunted by the same fear. People on foot, carrying bundles on their backs, carrying children; or perched high on overloaded carts; or wheeling bicycles with suitcases strapped to the handle-bars.
And here was Weyl, paunchy and bald-headed, pushing a green perambulator packed full of unframed canvases and Dutch silver and Chinese jade, with a painted madonna standing drunkenly at an angle where the baby should have been. Heavy now with the approach of middle age, the Flemish Venus limped after him under the burden of a blue morocco dressing-case and her sealskin coat. ‘Je n’en peux plus,’ she kept whispering, ‘je n’en peux plus.’ And sometimes, despairingly, ‘Suicidons-nous, Gabriel.’ Bent over the perambulator, Weyl did not answer or even look round, but the little spindly boy who walked beside her, preposterous in baggy plus-fours, would squeeze his mother’s hand, and when she turned her tear-stained face towards him would smile up at her encouragingly.
To the left, across a tawny expanse of stubble and some market gardens, a whole town was burning, and the smoke of it, billowing up from behind the towers of that sunlit church in the suburbs, spread out as it mounted through the luminous silence into a huge inverted cone of brown darkness. A noise of distant gunfire bumped against the summer air. Near by, from an abandoned farm, came the frantic lowing of unmilked cows and, overhead, suddenly there were the planes again. The planes — and almost in the same instant another roaring made itself heard on the road behind them. Dimly at first. But the convoy was travelling at full speed and, second by second, the noise swelled up, terrifyingly. There were shouts and screaming and a panic rush towards the ditch — the frenzy and blind violence of fear. And suddenly here was Weyl howling like a madman beside his overturned perambulator. A horse took fright, whinnied, reared up in the shafts; the cart moved back with a sudden jerk, striking Mme Weyl a glancing blow on the shoulder. She staggered forward a step or two, trying to recover her balance, then caught one of her high heels against a stone and fell face downwards into the roadway. ‘Maman!’ screamed the little boy. But before he could pull her back the first of the huge lorries had rolled across the struggling body. For a second there was a gap in the nightmare, a glimpse between the trees of that distant church, bright against the billowing smoke, like a carved jewel in the sunshine. Then, identical with the first, the second lorry passed. The body was quite still.