Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘You great big beautiful bastard,’ they whisper in husky unison.
For a moment Dr. Poole hesitates between the inhibitory recollection of his Mother, the fidelity to Loola prescribed by all the poets and novelists, and the warm, elastic Facts of Life. After about four seconds of moral conflict, he chooses, as we might expect, the Facts of Life. He smiles, he returns the kisses, he murmurs words which it would startle Miss Hook and almost kill his Mother to hear, he encircles either body with an arm, caresses either bosom with hands that have never done anything of the kind except in unavowable imaginings. The noises of mating swell to a brief climax, then diminish. For a little while there is complete silence.
Accompanied by a strain of Archimandrites, Familiars, Presbyters and Postulants, the Arch-Vicar and the Patriarch of Pasadena come pacing majestically into the shot. At the sight of Dr. Poole and the mulattoes they come to a halt. Making a grimace of disgusted abhorrence, the Patriarch spits on the ground. More tolerant, the Arch-Vicar only smiles ironically.
‘Dr. Poole!’ he flutes in his odd falsetto.
Guiltily, as though he had heard his Mother calling, Dr. Poole drops those busy hands of his and, turning towards the Arch-Vicar, tries to assume an expression of airy innocence. ‘These girls,’ his smile is meant to imply, ‘who are these girls? Why, I don’t even know their names. We were just having a little chat about the higher Cryptogams, that’s all.’
‘You great big beautiful ...’ begins a husky voice.
Dr. Poole coughs loudly and fends off the embrace that accompanies the words.
‘Don’t mind us,’ says the Arch-Vicar pleasantly. ‘After all, Belial Day comes but once a year.’
Approaching, he touches the gilded horns of his tiara, then lays his hands on Dr. Poole’s head.
‘Yours,’ he says with a suddenly professional unctuousness, ‘has been an almost miraculously sudden conversion. Yes, almost miraculously.’ Then, changing his tone, ‘By the way,’ he adds, ‘we’ve had a bit of trouble with your friends from New Zealand. This afternoon somebody spotted a group of them in Beverly Hills. I guess they were looking for you.’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘But they’re not going to find you,’ says the Arch-Vicar genially. ‘One of our Inquisitors went out with a posse of Familiars to deal with them.’
‘What happened?’ Dr. Poole anxiously inquires.
‘Our men laid an ambush, let fly with arrows. One was killed, and the others made off with the wounded. I don’t think we shall be bothered again. But just to make certain ...’ He beckons to two of his attendants. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘There isn’t going to be a rescue and there isn’t going to be an escape. I make you responsible, do you understand?’
The two Postulants bow their heads.
‘And now,’ says the Arch-Vicar, turning back to Dr. Poole, ‘we’ll leave you to beget all the little monsters you can.’
He winks, pats Dr. Poole on the cheek, then takes the Patriarch’s arm and, followed by his retinue, moves away.
Dr. Poole stares after the retreating figures, then glances uneasily at the two Postulants who have been appointed to guard him.
Brown arms are thrown around his neck.
‘You great big beautiful ...’
‘No, really. Not in public. Not with those men around!’
‘What difference does that make?’
And before he has time to answer, husky, musky, dusky, the Facts of Life close in on him again, and in a complicated embrace, like some half reluctant, half blissfully consenting Laocoon, he is ravished away into the shadows. With an expression of disgust, the two Postulants simultaneously spit.
NARRATOR
L’ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solennelle
He is interrupted by a burst of frenzied caterwauling.
NARRATOR
When I look into the fishponds in my garden,
(And not mine only, for every garden is riddled
With eel-holes and reflected moons), methinks
I see a Thing armed with a rake that seems,
Out of the ooze, out of the immanence
Among the eels of heaven, to strike at me —
At Me the holy, Me divine! And yet
How tedious is a guilty conscience! How
Tedious, for that matter, an unguilty one!
What wonder if the horror of the fishponds
Draws us towards the rake? And the Thing strikes,
And I, the uneasy Person, in the mud,
Or in the liquid moonlight, thankfully
Find others than myself to have that blind
Or radiant being.
Dissolve to a medium shot of Dr. Poole asleep on the drifted sand at the foot of a towering wall of concrete. Twenty feet away one of his guards is also sleeping. The other is absorbed in an ancient copy of Forever Amber. The sun is already high in the heavens and a close shot reveals a small green lizard crawling over one of Dr. Poole’s outstretched hands. He does not stir, but lies as though dead.
NARRATOR
And this, too, is the beatific being of somebody who most certainly isn’t Alfred Poole, D.Sc. For sleep is one of the pre-conditions of the Incarnation, the primary instrument of divine immanence. Sleeping, we cease to live that we may be lived (how blessedly!) by some nameless Other who takes this opportunity to restore the mind to sanity and bring healing to the abused and self-tormented body.
From breakfast to bed-time you may be doing everything in your power to outrage Nature and deny the fact of your Glassy Essence. But even the angriest ape at last grows weary of his tricks and has to sleep. And, while he sleeps, the indwelling Compassion preserves him, willynilly, from the suicide which, in his waking hours, he has tried so frantically hard to commit. Then the sun rises again, and our ape wakes up once more to his own self and the freedom of his personal will — to yet another day of trick-playing or, if he chooses, to the beginnings of self-knowledge, to the first steps towards his liberation.
A peal of excited feminine laughter cuts short the Narrator’s speech. The sleeper stirs and, at a second, louder outburst, starts into full wakefulness and sits up, looking around him in bewilderment, not knowing where he is. Again that laughter. He turns his head in the direction of the sound. In a long shot from his viewpoint we see his two brown-skinned friends of the previous night emerging at full speed from behind a sand dune and darting into the ruins of the County Museum. At their heels, in concentrated silence, runs the Chief. All three disappear from view.
The sleeping Postulant wakes up and turns to his companion.
‘What’s that?’ he asks.
‘The usual thing,’ the other answers, without looking up from Forever Amber.
As he speaks, shrill squeals reverberate through the cavernous halls of the Museum. The Postulants look at one another in silence, then simultaneously spit.
Cut back to Dr. Poole.
‘My God!’ he says aloud. ‘My God!’
He covers his face with his hands.
NARRATOR
Into the satiety of this morning-after let loose a rodent conscience and the principles learned at a Mother’s knee — or not infrequently across it (head downwards and with shirt tails well tucked up), in condign spankings, sadly and prayerfully administered, but remembered, ironically enough, as the pretext and accompaniment of innumerable erotic day-dreams, each duly followed by its remorse, and each remorse bringing with it the idea of punishment and all its attendant sensualities. And so on, indefinitely. Well, as I say, let those loose into this, and the result may easily be a religious conversion. But a conversion to what? Most ignorant of what he is most assured, our poor friend doesn’t know. And here comes almost the last person he would expect to help him to discover.
As the Narrator speaks this last sentence, Loola enters the shot.
‘Alfie!’ she cries happily. ‘I was looking for you.’
Cut briefly to the two Postulants, who look at her for a moment with all the distaste
of enforced continence, then turn away and expectorate.
Meanwhile, after one brief glance at those ‘lineaments of satisfied desire,’ Dr. Poole guiltily averts his eyes.
‘Good morning,’ he says in a tone of formal politeness. ‘I hope you ... you slept well?’
Loola sits down beside him, opens the leather bag which she carries slung over her shoulder and extracts half a loaf of bread and five or six large oranges.
‘Nobody can think of doing much cooking these days,’ she explains. ‘It’s just one long picnic until the cold season begins again.’
‘Quite, quite,’ says Dr. Poole.
‘You must be awfully hungry,’ she goes on. ‘After last night.’
Her dimples come out of hiding as she smiles at him.
Hot and blushing with embarrassment, Dr. Poole hastily tries to change the subject of conversation.
‘Those are beautiful oranges,’ he remarks. ‘In New Zealand they don’t do really well except in the extreme ...’
‘There!’ says Loola, interrupting him.
She hands him a thick hunk of bread, breaks off another for herself and bites into it with strong white teeth.
‘It’s good,’ she says with her mouth full. ‘Why don’t you eat?’
Dr. Poole, who realizes that, in effect, he is ravenously hungry, but who is unwilling, for the sake of decorum, to admit the fact too openly, nibbles daintily at his crust.
Loola snuggles against him and leans her head on his shoulder.
‘It was fun, Alfie, wasn’t it?’ She takes another bite of bread, and without waiting for him to answer continues: ‘More fun with you than with any of the others. Did you think that too?’
She looks up at him tenderly.
Close shot from her viewpoint of Dr. Poole’s expression of agonizing moral discomfort.
‘Alfie!’ she cries, ‘what’s the matter?’
‘Perhaps it would be better,’ he manages at last to say, ‘if we talked about something else.’
Loola straightens herself up and looks at him for a few seconds intently and in silence.
‘You think too much,’ she says at last. ‘You mustn’t think. If you think, it stops being fun.’ The light suddenly goes out of her face. ‘If you think,’ she goes on in a low voice, ‘it’s terrible, terrible. It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living Evil. When I remember what they did to Polly and her baby ...’
She shudders, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.
NARRATOR
Those tears again, those symptoms of personality — the sight of them evokes a sympathy that is stronger than the sense of guilt.
Forgetting the Postulants, Dr. Poole draws Loola towards him and with whispered words, with the caresses one uses to quiet a crying child, tries to comfort her. He is so successful that, in a minute or two, she is lying quite still in the crook of his arm. Sighing happily, she opens her eyes, looks up at him and smiles with an expression of tenderness, to which the dimples add a ravishingly incongruous hint of mischief.
‘This is what I’ve always dreamed of.’
‘Is it?’
‘But it never happened — it never could happen. Not till you came....’ She strokes his cheek. ‘I wish your beard didn’t have to grow,’ she adds. ‘You’ll look like the other fellows then. But you aren’t like them, you’re quite different.’
‘Not so different as all that,’ says Dr. Poole.
He bends down and kisses her on the eyelids, on the throat, on the mouth — then draws back and looks down at her with an expression of triumphant masculinity.
‘Not different in that way,’ she qualifies. ‘But different in this way.’ She pats his cheek again. ‘You and I sitting together and talking and being happy because you’re you and I’m me. It doesn’t happen here. Except ... except ...’ She breaks off. Her face darkens. ‘Do you know what happens to people who are Hots?’ she whispers.
This time it is Dr. Poole’s turn to protest against thinking too much. He backs up his words with action.
Close shot of the embrace. Then cut to the two Postulants, staring disgustedly at the spectacle. As they spit, another Postulant enters the shot.
‘Orders from His Eminence,’ he says, making the sign of the horns. ‘This assignment’s over. You’re to report back to Headquarters.’
Dissolve to the Canterbury. A wounded seaman, with an arrow still sticking in his shoulder, is being hoisted in a sling from the whaleboat to the deck of the schooner. On the deck lie two other victims of the Californians’ archery — Dr. Cudworth with a wound in his left leg and Miss Hook. The latter has an arrow imbedded deeply in her right side. The doctor, as he bends over her, looks grave.
‘Morphine,’ he says to his orderly. ‘Then we’ll get her down to the surgery as quickly as we can....’
Meanwhile there has been a shouting of orders and suddenly we hear the noise of the donkey engine and the clanking of the anchor chain as it is wound round the capstan.
Ethel Hook opens her eyes and looks around her. An expression of distress appears on her pale face.
‘You’re not going to sail away and leave him?’ she says. ‘But you can’t, you can’t!’ She makes an effort to raise herself from the stretcher; but the movement causes so much pain that she falls back again, with a groan.
‘Quiet, quiet,’ says the doctor soothingly, as he swabs her arm with alcohol.
‘But he may still be alive,’ she feebly protests. ‘They can’t desert him; they can’t just wash their hands of him.’
‘Hold still,’ says the doctor, and, taking the syringe from his orderly, he drives the needle into the flesh.
The clanking of the anchor chain rises to a crescendo as we dissolve to Loola and Dr. Poole.
‘I’m hungry,’ says Loola, sitting up.
Reaching for her knapsack, she takes out what is left of the bread, breaks it in two, hands the larger fragment to Dr. Poole and sinks her teeth into the other. She finishes her mouthful and is about to start on another, when she changes her mind. Turning to her companion, she takes his hand and kisses it.
‘What’s that for?’ he asks.
Loola shrugs her shoulders.
‘I don’t know. I just suddenly felt like that.’ She eats some more bread, then, after a ruminative silence, turns to him with the air of one who has just made an important and unexpected discovery.
‘Alfie,’ she announces, ‘I believe I shall never want to say Yes to anyone except you.’
Greatly moved, Dr. Poole leans forward, and takes her hand and presses it to his heart.
‘I feel I’ve only just discovered what life’s all about,’ he says.
‘Me too.’
She leans against him, and like a miser irresistibly drawn to count his treasure yet once more, Dr. Poole runs his fingers through her hair, separating lock from thick lock, lifting a curl and letting it fall back noiselessly into its place.
NARRATOR
And so, by the dialectic of sentiment, these two have re-discovered for themselves that synthesis of the chemical and the personal to which we give the names of monogamy and romantic love. In her case it was the hormone that excluded the person; in his, the person that could not come to terms with the hormone. But now there is the beginning of a larger wholeness.
Dr. Poole reaches into his pocket and pulls out the little volume which he rescued yesterday from the furnace. He opens it, turns the pages and begins to read aloud:
‘Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress
And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress
The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And in the soul a wild odour is felt
Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt
Into the bosom of a frozen bud.’
‘What’s that?’ Loola asks.
‘You!’ He bends down and kisses her hair. ‘“And in the soul,”’ he whispers, �
�“a wild odour is felt beyond the sense.”’ ‘In the soul,’ he repeats.
‘What’s the soul?’ Loola asks.
‘Well ...’ He hesitates; then, deciding to let Shelley give the answer, he resumes his reading:
‘See where she stands, a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,
And motion which may change, but never die,
An image of some bright Eternity,
A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour
Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender
Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love ...’
‘But I don’t understand a word of it,’ Loola complains.
‘And until today,’ says Dr. Poole, smiling down at her, ‘until today, neither did I.’
We dissolve to the exterior of the Unholy of Unholies, two weeks later. Several hundreds of bearded men and slatternly women are queued up, in double file, awaiting their turn to enter the shrine. The Camera passes down the long line of dull and dirty faces, then holds on Loola and Dr. Poole, who are in the act of passing through the sliding doors.
Within all is gloom and silence. Two by two the nymphs and prancing satyrs of a few short days ago shuffle despondently past an altar, whose mighty candle is now eclipsed by a tin extinguisher. At the foot of the Arch-Vicar’s empty throne lies the heap of discarded Seventh Commandments. As the procession slowly passes, the Archimandrite in charge of Public Morals hands out to every male an apron and to every female an apron and four round patches.
‘Out through the side door,’ he repeats to each recipient.
And out through the side door, when their turn comes, Loola and Dr. Poole duly go. There, in the sunshine, a score of Postulants are busily at work, with thread and needle, stitching aprons to waist-bands, patches to trouser seats and shirt fronts.