Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Rivers leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
“I’m not much good at visualizing,” he said after a little silence. “But the wallpaper, I’m pretty sure, was a dusty kind of pink. And the lampshade was certainly red. It must have been red, because there was always that rich flush on her face, as she sat there darning our socks or sewing on the children’s buttons. A flush on the face, but never on the hands. The hands moved in the brightness of the unscreened light. What strong hands!” he added, smiling to himself. “What efficient hands! None of your spiritual, Blessed-Damozellish appendages! Honest to God hands that were good with screw-drivers; hands that could fix things when they went wrong; hands that could give a massage, or when necessary, a spanking; hands that had a genius for pastry and didn’t mind emptying slops. And the rest of her matched the hands. Her body — it was the body of a strong young matron. A matron with the face of a healthy, peasant girl. No, that’s not quite right. It was the face of a goddess disguised as a healthy peasant girl. Demeter, perhaps. No, Demeter was too sad. And it wasn’t Aphrodite either; there was nothing fatal or obsessive about Katy’s femininity, nothing self-consciously sexy. If there was a goddess involved, it must have been Hera. Hera playing the part of a milkmaid — but a milkmaid with a mind, a milkmaid who had gone to college.” Rivers opened his eyes and replaced the pipe between his teeth. He was still smiling. “I remember some of the things she said about the books I used to read aloud in the evenings. H. G. Wells, for example. He reminded her of the rice paddies in her native California. Acres and acres of shiny water, but never more than two inches deep. And those ladies and gentlemen in Henry James’s novels — could they ever bring themselves, she wondered, to go to the bathroom? And D. H. Lawrence. How she loved those early books of his! All scientists ought to be compelled to take a post-graduate course in Lawrence. She said that to the Chancellor when he came to dinner. He was a most distinguished chemist; and whether it was post hoc or propter hoc, I don’t know; but his wife looked as if all her secretions were pure acetic acid. Katy’s remarks weren’t at all well received.” Rivers chuckled. “And sometimes,” he went on, “we didn’t read; we just talked. Katy told me about her childhood in San Francisco. About the balls and parties after she came out. About the three young men who were in love with her — each one richer and, if possible, stupider than the last. At nineteen she got engaged to the richest and the dumbest. The trousseau was bought, the wedding presents had begun to arrive. And then Henry Maartens came out to Berkeley as a visiting professor. She heard him lecture on the philosophy of science, and after the lecture she went to an evening party given in his honour. They were introduced. He had a nose like an eagle’s, he had pale eyes like a Siamese cat’s, he looked like the portraits of Pascal and when he laughed, the noise was like a ton of coke going down a chute. As for what he saw — it must have passed description. I knew Katy at thirty-six, when she was Hera. At nineteen she must have been Hebe and the three Graces and all the nymphs of Diana rolled into one. And Henry, remember, had just been divorced by his first wife. Poor woman! she simply wasn’t strong enough to play the parts assigned to her — mistress to an indefatigable lover, business manager to an absentee half-wit, secretary to a man of genius, and womb, placenta and circulatory system to the psychological equivalent of a foetus. After two miscarriages and a nervous breakdown she had packed up and gone home to her mother. Henry was on the loose, all four of him — foetus, genius, half-wit and hungry lover — in search of some woman capable of meeting the demands of a symbiotic relationship, in which all the giving would be on her side, all the ravenous and infantile taking on his. The search had been going on for the best part of a year. Henry was growing desperate. And now, suddenly, providentially, here was Katy. It was love at first sight. He took her into a corner and, ignoring everyone else in the room, started to talk to her. Needless to say, it never occurred to him that she might have her own interests and problems, it never entered his head that it might perhaps be a good thing to draw the girl out. He just let fly at her with what happened, for the moment, to be on his mind. On this occasion, it was recent developments in logic. Katy, of course, didn’t understand a word of it; but he was so manifestly a genius, it was all so unspeakably wonderful, that there and then, before the evening was over, she made her mother ask him to dinner. He came, he finished off what he had to say and, while Mrs Hanbury and her other guests played bridge he plunged with Katy into semiotics. Three days later there was some sort of a picnic organized by the Audubon Society, and the two of them managed to get separated from the rest of the party in an arroyo. And finally there was the evening when they went to hear Traviata. Rum-tum-tum-TUM-te-tum.” Rivers hummed the theme of the prelude to the third act. “It was irresistible — it always is. On the way home in the cab he kissed her — kissed her with an intensity of passion and at the same time a tact, an adeptness, for which the semiotics and the absent-mindedness had left her entirely unprepared. After that it became only too evident that her engagement to poor dear Randolph had been a mistake. But what a hue and cry, when she announced her intention of becoming Mrs Henry Maartens! A half-mad professor, with nothing but his salary, divorced by his first wife and old enough, into the bargain, to be her father! But all they could say was entirely irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the fact that Henry belonged to another species; and that, not Randolph’s — Homo sapiens and not Homo moronicus — was the species she now was interested in. Three weeks after the earthquake they got married. Had she ever regretted her millionaire? Regretted Randolph? To this inconceivably ridiculous question the answer was a peal of laughter. But his horses, she added as she wiped the tears from her eyes, his horses were another matter. His horses were Arabians, and the cattle on his ranch were pure-bred Herefords, and he had a big pond behind the ranch house, with all kinds of the most heavenly ducks and geese. The worst of being a poor professor’s wife in a big town was that you never had a chance of getting away from people. Sure, there were plenty of good people, intelligent people. But the soul cannot live by people alone; it needs horses, it needs pigs and waterfowl. Randolph could have provided her with all the animals her heart could desire — but at a price: himself. She had sacrificed the animals and chosen genius — genius with all its drawbacks. And frankly (she admitted it with a laugh, she talked about it with humorous detachment), frankly there were drawbacks. In his own way, albeit for entirely different reasons, Henry could be almost as dumb as Randolph himself. An idiot where human relations were concerned, a prize ass in all the practical affairs of life. But what an unboring ass, what a luminous idiot! Henry could be utterly insupportable; but he was always worth it. Always! And maybe, she paid me the compliment of adding, maybe when I got married, my wife would feel the same way about me. Insupportable, but worth it.”
“I thought you said she wasn’t consciously sexy,” I commented.
“And it’s true,” he said. “You think she was baiting her hook with flattery. She wasn’t. She was just stating a fact. I had my points; but I was also unbearable. Twenty years of formal education and a lifetime of my poor mother had produced a real monster.” On the outspread fingers of his left hand he itemized the monster’s components. “I was a learned bumpkin; I was an athlete who couldn’t say Bo to a girl; I was a pharisee with a sense of inferiority, I was a prig who secretly envied the people he disapproved of. And yet, in spite of everything, it was worth while to put up with me. I was enormously well meaning.”
“And in this case, I imagine, you did more than mean well. Were you in love with her?” I asked.
There was a little pause; then Rivers slowly nodded.
“Overwhelmingly,” he said.
“But you couldn’t say Bo to a girl.”
“This wasn’t a girl,” he answered. “This was Henry’s wife. Bo was unthinkable. Besides, I was an honorary Maartens, and that made her my honorary mother. And it wasn’t just a question of morality. I never wanted to say Bo. I loved her metaphysicall
y, almost theologically — the way Dante loved Beatrice, the way Petrarch loved Laura. With one slight difference, however. In my case it happened to be sincere. I actually lived my idealism. No little illegitimate Petrarchs on the side. No Mrs Alighieri, and none of those whores that Dante found it necessary to resort to. It was passion, but it was also chastity; and both at white heat. Passion and chastity,” he repeated, and shook his head. “At sixty one forgets what the words stand for. Today I only know the meaning of the word that has replaced them — indifference. Io son Beatrice,” he declaimed. “And all is dross that is not Helena. So what? Old age has something else to think about.”
Rivers was silent; and suddenly, as though to elucidate what he had been saying, there was only the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, and the whispers of flames among the logs.
“How can anyone seriously believe in his own identity?” he went on. “In logic, A equals A. Not in fact. Me-now is one kettle of fish; me-then is another. I look at the John Rivers who felt that way about Katy. It’s like a puppet play, it’s like Romeo and Juliet through the wrong end of the opera glasses. No, it’s not even that; it’s like looking through the wrong end of the opera glasses at the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet. And Romeo once called himself John Rivers, and was in love, and had at least ten times more life and energy than at ordinary times. And the world he was living in — how totally transfigured!
“I remember how he looked at landscapes; and the colours were incomparably brighter, the patterns that things made in space unbelievably beautiful. I remember how he glanced around him in the streets, and St Louis, believe it of not, was the most splendid city ever built. People, houses, trees, T-model Fords, dogs at lamp-posts — everything was more significant. Significant, you may ask, of what? And the answer is: themselves. These were realities, not symbols. Goethe was absolutely wrong. Alles vergängliche is NOT a Gleichnis. At every instant every transience is eternally that transience. What it signifies is its own being, and that being (as one sees so clearly when one’s in love) is the same as Being with the biggest possible B. Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself: I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to the mere representatives of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance. Could it ever stay transfigured? Maybe it could. Maybe it’s just a question of being in love with God. But that,” Rivers added, “is neither here nor there. Or rather it’s the only thing that’s either here, there or anywhere; but if we said so, we’d be cut by all our respectable friends and might even end up in the asylum. So let’s get back as quickly as possible to something a little less dangerous. Back to Katy, back to the late lamented …”
He broke off.
“Did you hear something?”
This time I distinctly did. It was the sound, muffled by distance and a heroic self-restraint, of a child’s sobbing.
Rivers got up and, thrusting his pipe into his pocket, walked to the door and opened it.
“Bimbo?” he called questioningly, and then to himself: “How the devil did he get out of his crib?”
For all answer there was a louder sob.
He moved out into the hall and a moment later there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Bimbo,” I heard him saying, “good old Bimbo! Come to see if you could catch Santa Claus red-handed — was that it?”
The sobbing mounted to a tragic crescendo. I got up and followed my host upstairs. Rivers was sitting on the top step, his arms, gigantic in their rough tweed, around a tiny figure in blue pyjamas.
“It’s grandpa,” he kept repeating. “Funny old grandpa. Bimbo’s all right with grandpa.” The sobbing gradually died down. “What made Bimbo wake up?” Rivers asked. “What made him climb out of his crib?”
“Dog,” said the child, and at the memory of his dream he began to cry again. “Big dog.”
“Dogs are funny,” Rivers assured him. “Dogs are so dumb they can’t say anything but bow-wow. Think of all the things Bimbo can say. Mummy. Weewee. Daddy. Pussycat. Dogs aren’t smart. They can’t say any of those things. Just bow-wow-wow.” He put on an imitation of a bloodhound. “Or else bow-wow-wow.” This time it was a toy Pomeranian. “Or else Wo-o-o-ow.” He howled lugubriously and grotesquely. Uncertainly, between sobs, the child began to laugh. “That’s right,” said Rivers. “Bimbo just laughs at those dumb dogs. Every time he sees one, every time he hears that silly barking, he laughs and laughs and laughs.” This time the child laughed whole-heartedly. “And now,” said Rivers, “grandpa and Bimbo are going to take a walk.” Still holding the child in his arms, he got up and made his way along the corridor. “This is grandpa’s room,” he said, opening the first door. “Nothing of great interest here, I’m afraid.” The next door stood ajar; he walked in. “And this is Mummy’s and Daddy’s room. And here’s the closet with all Mummy’s clothes. Don’t they smell good?” He sniffed loudly. The child followed suit. “Le Shocking de Schiaparelli,” Rivers went on. “Or is it Femme? Anyhow, it serves the same purpose; for it’s sex, sex, sex that makes the world go round — as, I’m sorry to say, you’ll find out, my poor Bimbo, in a very few years from now.” Tenderly he brushed his cheek against the pale floss of the child’s hair, then walked over to the full length mirror set in the door of the bathroom. “Look at us,” he called to me. “Just look at us!”
I came and stood beside him. There we were in the glass — a pair of bent and sagging elders and, in the arms of one of them, a small, exquisite Christ-child.
“And to think,” said Rivers, “to think that once we were all like that. You start as a lump of protoplasm, a machine for eating and excreting. You grow into this sort of thing. Something almost supernaturally pure and beautiful.” He laid his cheek once more against the child’s head. “Then comes a bad time with pimples and puberty. After which you have a year or two, in your twenties, of being Praxiteles. But Praxiteles soon puts on weight and starts to lose his hair and for the next forty years you degenerate into one or other of the varieties of the human gorilla. The spindly gorilla — that’s you. Or the leather-faced variety — that’s me. Or else it’s the successful business-man type of gorilla — you know, the kind that looks like a baby’s bottom with false teeth. As for the female gorillas, the poor old things with paint on their cheeks and orchids at the prow … No, let’s not talk about them, let’s not even think.”
The child in his arms yawned at our reflections, then turned, pillowed his head on the man’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “I think we can take him back to his crib,” Rivers whispered and started towards the door.
“One feels,” he said slowly, as we stood looking down, a few minutes later, at that small face, which sleep had transfigured into the image of an unearthly serenity, “one feels so desperately sorry for them. They don’t know what they’re in for. Seventy years of ambushes and betrayals, of booby traps and deceptions.”
“And of fun,” I put in. “Fun to the pitch, sometimes, of ecstasy.”
“Of course,” Rivers agreed, as he turned away from the crib. “That’s what baits the booby traps.” He switched off the light, softly closed the door and followed me down the stairs. “Fun — every kind of fun. Sex fun, eating fun, power fun, comfort fun, possession fun, cruelty fun. But there’s either a hook in the bait, or else when you grab it, it pulls a trigger and down come the bricks or the bucket of bird lime or whatever it is that the cosmic joker has prepared for you.” We resumed our seats on either side of the fire in the library. “What sort of traps are waiting for that poor little shining creature up there in the crib? One can hardly bear to think of it. The only comfort is that there’s ignorance before the event and, after it, forgetting, or a
t the very least indifference. Every balcony scene turns into an affair of midgets in another universe! And in the end, of course, there’s always death. And while there is death, there is hope.” He refilled our glasses and relit his pipe. “Where was I?”
“In heaven,” I answered, “with Mrs Maartens.”
“In heaven,” Rivers repeated. And then, after a little pause, “It lasted,” he went on, “about fifteen months. From December to the second spring, with a break of ten weeks in the summer, while the family was away in Maine. Ten weeks of what was supposed to be my vacation at home, but was actually, in spite of the familiar house, in spite of my poor mother, the most desolate kind of exile. And it wasn’t only Katy that I missed. I was homesick for all of them — for Beulah in the kitchen, for Timmy on the floor with his trains, for Ruth and her preposterous poems, for Henry’s asthma and the laboratory and those extraordinary monologues of his about everything. What bliss it was, in September, to regain my paradise! Eden in autumn, with the leaves turning, the sky still blue, the light changing from gold to silver. Then Eden in winter, Eden with the lamps lighted and rain outside the windows, the bare trees like hieroglyphs against the sunset. And then, at the beginning of that second spring, there was a telegram from Chicago. Katy’s mother was ill. Nephritis — and those were the days before the sulfas, before penicillin. Katy packed her bags and was at the station in time to catch the next train. The two children — the three children, if you counted Henry — were left in charge of Beulah and myself. Timmy gave us no trouble at all. But the others, I assure you, the others more than made up for Timmy’s reasonableness. The poetess refused to eat her prunes at breakfast, couldn’t be bothered to brush her hair, neglected her home work. The Nobel Prize winner wouldn’t get up in the morning, cut his lectures, was late for every appointment. And there were other, graver delinquencies. Ruth broke her piggy bank and squandered a year’s accumulated savings on a make-up kit and a bottle of cheap perfume. The day after Katy left, she looked and smelt like the Whore of Babylon.”