Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Which Katy, I gather, wasn’t pecked by?”
“And resolutely refused to talk about,” Rivers added.
“But you must have talked about them.”
“I did my best. But it takes two to make a conversation. Whenever I tried to tell her something of what was going on in my heart and mind, she either changed the subject or else, with a little laugh, with a little indulgent pat on the back of the hand, gently but very decidedly shut me up. Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entrails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep. One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things — in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses — a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalysed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously. Katy kept our traps firmly shut. She had the instinctive wisdom that taboos the four-letter words (and a fortiori the scientific polysyllables), while tacitly taking for granted the daily and nightly four-letter acts to which they refer. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem, a casus belli, the source of a neurosis. If Katy had talked, where, I ask you, should we have been? In a labyrinth of intercommunicating guilts and anguishes. Some people, of course, enjoy that sort of thing. Others detest it, but feel, remorsefully, that they deserve to suffer. Katy (God bless her!) was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess, and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-four carat silence all the way through. The Olympian’s trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there’s really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There’s no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence. What I needed most at that time was a dose of justificatory good language to counteract the effect of all that vile-base-foul. But Katy wouldn’t give it me. Good or bad, language was entirely beside the point. The point, so far as she was concerned, was her experience of the creative otherness of love and sleep. The point was finding herself once again in a state of grace. The point, finally, was her renewed ability to do something for Henry. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the cook book. Pleasure received and given, virtue restored, Lazarus raised from the dead — the eating in this case was self-evidently good. So help yourself to the pudding and don’t talk with your mouth full — it’s bad manners and it prevents you from appreciating the ambrosial flavour. It was a piece of advice too good for me to be able to take. True, I didn’t talk to her; she wouldn’t let me. But I went on talking to myself — talking and talking till the ambrosia turned into wormwood or was contaminated by the horrible gamey taste of forbidden pleasure, of sin recognized and knowingly indulged in. And meanwhile the miracle was duly proceeding. Steadily, rapidly, without a single setback, Henry was getting better.”
“Didn’t that make you feel happier about things?” I asked.
Rivers nodded his head.
“In one way, yes. Because, of course, I realized even then, even in my state of imbecile innocence, that I was indirectly responsible for the miracle. I had betrayed my master; but if I hadn’t, my master would probably be dead. Evil had been done; but good, an enormous good, had come of it. It was a kind of justification. On the other hand how horrible it seemed that grace for Katy and life for her husband should be dependent on something so intrinsically low, so utterly vile-base-foul, as bodies and their sexual satisfaction! All my idealism revolted against the notion. And yet it was obviously true.”
“And Henry?” I asked. “How much did he know or suspect about the origins of the miracle?”
“Nothing,” Rivers answered emphatically. “No, less than nothing. He was in a mood, as he emerged from the sepulchre, in which suspicion was unthinkable. ‘Rivers,’ he said to me one day when he was well enough to have me come and read to him, ‘I want to talk to you. About Katy,’ he added after a little pause. My heart stopped beating. This was the moment I had dreaded. ‘You remember that night just before I got ill?’ he went on. ‘I wasn’t in my right mind. I said all kinds of things that I oughtn’t to have said, things that weren’t true, things, for example, about Katy and that doctor from Johns Hopkins.’ But the doctor from Johns Hopkins, as he had now discovered, was a cripple. And even if the man hadn’t had infantile paralysis as a boy, Katy was utterly incapable of even thinking anything of the kind. And in a voice that trembled with feeling he proceeded to tell me how wonderful Katy was, how unspeakably fortunate he had been to win and hold a wife at once so good, so beautiful, so sensible and yet so sensitive, so strong and faithful and devoted. Without her, he would have gone mad, broken down, fizzled out. And now she had saved his life, and the thought that he had said those wild, bad, senseless things about her tormented him. So would I please forget them or, if I remembered, remember them only as the ravings of a sick man. It was a relief, of course, not to have been found out, and yet, in some ways, this was worse — worse because the display of so much trust, such abysmal ignorance, made me feel ashamed of myself — and not only of myself, of Katy too. We were a pair of cheats, conspiring against a simpleton — a simpleton who, for sentimental reasons which did him nothing but credit, was doing his best to make himself even more innocent than he was by nature.
“That evening I managed to say a little of what was on my mind. At first she tried to stop my mouth with kisses. Then, when I pushed her away, she grew angry and threatened to go back to her room. I had the sacrilegious courage to restrain her by brute force. ‘You’ve got to listen,’ I said as she struggled to free herself. And holding her at arm’s length, as one holds a dangerous animal, I poured out my tale of moral anguish. Katy heard me out; then, when it was all over, she laughed. Not sarcastically, not with the intention of wounding me, but from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement. ‘You can’t bear it,’ she teased. ‘You’re too noble to be a party to a deception! Can’t you ever think of anything but your own precious self? Think of me, for a change, think of Henry! A sick genius and the poor woman whose job it’s been to keep the sick genius alive and tolerably sane. His huge, crazy intellect against my instincts, his inhuman denial of life against the flow of life in me. It wasn’t easy, I’ve had to fight with every weapon that came to hand. And now here I have to listen to you — talking the most nauseous kind of Sunday School twaddle, daring to tell me — me! — you cannot live a lie — like George Washington and the cherry tree. You make me tired. I’m going to sleep.’ She yawned and, rolling over on her side, turned her back on me — the back,” Rivers added with a little snort of laughter, “the infinitely eloquent back (if you perused it in the dark, like Braille, with your fingertips), of Aphrodite Callipyge. And that, my friend, that was as near as Katy ever got to an explanation or an apologia. It left me no wiser than I was before. Indeed it left me considerably less wise; for her words prompted me to ask myself a lot of questions, to which she never vouchsafed any answers. Had she implied, for example, that this sort of thing was inevitable — at least in the circumstances of her own marriage? Had it, in actual fact, happened before? And if so, when, how often, with whom?”
“Did you ever find out?” I asked.
Rivers shook his head.
“I never got further than wondering and imagining — my God, how vividly! Which was enough, of course, to make me more miserable than I�
�d ever been. More miserable, and at the same time more frenziedly amorous. Why is it that, when you suspect a woman you love of having made love to somebody else, you should feel such a heightening of desire? I had loved Katy to the limit. Now I found myself loving her beyond the limit, loving her desperately and insatiably, loving her with a vengeance, if you know what I mean. Katy herself soon noticed it. ‘You’ve been looking at me,’ she complained two evenings later, ‘as though you were on a desert island and I were a beef steak. Don’t do it. People will notice. Besides, I’m not a beef steak, I’m an uncooked human being. And anyhow Henry’s almost well again, and the children will be coming home tomorrow. Things will have to go back to what they were before. We’ve got to be sensible.’ To be sensible … I promised — for tomorrow. Meanwhile — put out the light! — there was this love with a vengeance, this desire which, even in the frenzy of its consummation, retained a quality of despair. The hours passed and in due course it was tomorrow — dawn between the curtains, birds in the garden, the anguish of the final embrace, the reiterated promises that I would be sensible. And how faithfully I kept the promise! After breakfast I went up to Henry’s room and read him Rutherford’s article in the latest issue of Nature. And when Katy came in from her marketing, I called her ‘Mrs Maartens’ and did my best to look as radiantly serene as she did. Which in my case, of course, was hypocrisy. In hers it was just a manifestation of the Olympian nature. A little before lunch, the children came home, bag and baggage, in a cab. Katy was always the all-seeing mother; but her all-seeingness was tempered generally, by an easy tolerance of childish failings. This time, for some reason, it was different. Perhaps it was the miracle of Henry’s recovery that had gone to her head, that had given her not only a sense of power but also a desire to exercise that power in other ways. Perhaps, too, she had been intoxicated by her sudden restoration, after all those nightmare weeks, to a state of animal grace through satisfied desire. Anyhow, whatever the cause may have been, whatever the attenuating circumstances, the fact remained that, on that particular day, Katy was too all-seeing by half. She loved her children and their return filled her with joy; and yet she was under a kind of compulsion, as soon as she saw them, to criticize, to find fault, to throw her maternal weight around. Within two minutes of their arrival she had pounced on Timmy for having dirty ears; within three, she had made Ruth confess that she was constipated; and, within four, had inferred, from the fact that the child didn’t want anyone to unpack for her, that she must be hiding some guilty secret. And there — when, at Katy’s orders, Beulah had opened the suitcase — there the poor little guilty secret lay revealed: a boxful of cosmetics and the half empty bottle of synthetic violets. At the best of times Katy would have disapproved — but would have disapproved with sympathy, with an understanding chuckle. On this occasion, her disapproval was loud and sarcastic. She had the make-up kit thrown into the garbage can and herself, with an expression of nauseated disgust, poured the perfume into the toilet and pulled the plug. By the time we sat down to our meal, the poetess, red-faced and her eyes still swollen with crying, hated everybody — hated her mother for having humiliated her, hated Beulah for having been such a good prophet, hated poor Mrs Hanbury for being dead and therefore in no further need of Katy’s ministrations, hated Henry for being well enough to have permitted this disastrous home-coming, and hated me because I had treated her as a child, had said her love poem was lousy and had shown, still more unforgivably, that I preferred her mother’s company to her own.
“Did she suspect anything?” I asked.
“She probably suspected everything,” Rivers answered.
“But I thought you were being sensible.”
“We were. But Ruth had always been jealous of her mother. And now her mother had hurt her, and at the same time she knew — theoretically, of course, but in terms of the most violent and overblown language — the sort of things that happen when men and women like one another. Ache of purple pulses; lips intertwisted and bitten. Etcetera. Even if nothing had ever happened between Katy and me, she’d have believed that it had, and hated us accordingly, hated us with this new, more implacable kind of hate. In the past her hates had never lasted for more than a day or two. This time it was different. The hatred was unrelenting. For days on end she refused to talk to us, but sat there through every meal, in a black silence, pregnant with unspoken criticisms and condemnations. Poor little Ruth! Dolores-Salome was, of course, a fiction, but a fiction founded on the solid facts of puberty. In outraging the fiction Katy and I, in our different ways, had outraged something real, something that was a living part of the child’s personality. She had come home with her perfume and her make-up, with her brand new breasts and her brand new vocabulary, with Algernon’s notions and Oscar’s sentiments — had come home full of vaguely wonderful expectations, vaguely horrifying apprehensions; and what had happened to her? The insult of being treated as what, in fact, she still was: an irresponsible child. The outrage of not being taken seriously. The hurt and humiliation of finding herself rejected by the man she had chosen as her victim and Bluebeard, in favour of another woman — and, to make matters worse, the other woman was her own mother. Was it any wonder that all my efforts to laugh or cajole her out of her black mood were unavailing? ‘Leave her alone,’ was Katy’s advice. ‘Let her stew in her own juice, until she gets sick of it.’ But the days passed and Ruth showed no signs of getting sick of it. On the contrary, she seemed to be enjoying the bitter tastes of wounded pride, of jealousy and suspicion. And then, about a week after the children’s return, something happened that turned chronic grievance into the acutest, the most ferocious animosity.
“Henry was now well enough to sit up, to walk about his room. A few days more and he would be fully convalescent. ‘Let him spend a few weeks in the country,’ the doctor advised. But what with the bad weather in early spring, what with Katy’s absence in Chicago, the weekend farm house had been closed since Christmas. Before it could be lived in again, it would have to be aired and dusted and provisioned. ‘Let’s go and do the job tomorrow,’ Katy suggested to me one morning at breakfast. Startlingly, like a prairie dog popping out of its burrow, Ruth emerged from the depths of her malevolent silence. Tomorrow, she muttered angrily, she’d be at school. And that, Katy answered, was why tomorrow would be such a good day for doing the necessary chores. No work-shy poetesses mooning around and getting in the way. ‘But I must come,’ Ruth insisted with a strange kind of muffled violence. ‘Must?’ Katy echoed. ‘Why must?’ Ruth looked at her mother for a moment, then dropped her eyes. ‘Because …’ she began, thought better of it and broke off. ‘Because I want to,’ she concluded lamely. Katy laughed and told her not to be silly. ‘We’ll get off early,’ she said, turning back to me, ‘and take a picnic basket.’ The child turned very pale, tried to eat her toast but couldn’t swallow, asked to be excused and, without waiting for an answer, got up and ran out of the room. When I saw her again that afternoon, her face was a mask, blank but somehow menacing, of controlled hostility.”
From outside, in the hall, I had heard the creak of the front door being opened, then the bang of its closing. And now there was the sound of footsteps and low voices. Rivers broke off and looked at his watch.
“Only ten after eleven,” he said, and shook his head. Then, raising his voice, “Molly!” he called. “Is that you?”
Open on a square of smooth white skin, on pearls and the bodice of a scarlet evening gown, a mink coat appeared in the doorway. Above it was a young face that would have been beautiful, if its expression had been less bitterly sullen.
“Was it a nice party?” Rivers asked.
“Stinking,” said the young woman. “That’s why we’re home so early. Isn’t it, Fred?” she added, turning to a dark-haired young man who had followed her into the room. The young man gave her a look of cold distaste, and turned away. “Isn’t it?” she repeated more loudly, with a note in her voice almost of anguish.
A faint smile appeared
on the averted face and there was a shrug of the broad shoulders, but no answer.
Rivers turned to me.
“You’ve met my little Molly, haven’t you?”
“When she was so high.”
“And this,” he waved his hand in the direction of the dark young man, “is my son-in-law, Fred Shaughnessy.”
I said I was pleased to meet him; but the young man didn’t even look at me. There was a silence.
Molly drew a jewelled hand across her eyes.
“I’ve got a splitting headache,” she muttered. “Guess I’ll go to bed.”
She started to walk away; then halted and, with what was evidently an enormous effort, brought herself to say, “Good night.”
“Good night,” we said in chorus. But she was already gone. Without a word, as though he were a gunman on her trail, the young man turned and followed her. Rivers sighed profoundly.
“They’ve got to the point,” he said, “where sex seems pretty dull unless it’s the consummation of a quarrel. And that, if you please, is little Bimbo’s destiny. Either life as the child of a divorced mother with a succession, until she loses her looks, of lovers or husbands. Or else life as the the child of two parents who ought to be divorced but can never separate because they share an unavowable taste for torturing and being tortured. And there’s nothing in either eventuality that I can do about it. Whatever happens, the child has got to go through hell. Maybe he’ll emerge all the better and stronger for it. Maybe he’ll be utterly destroyed. Who knows? Certainly not these boys!” He pointed with the stem of his pipe at a long shelf of Freudians and Jungians. “Psychology-fiction! It makes pleasant reading, it’s even rather instructive. But how much does it explain? Everything except the essentials, everything except the two things that finally determine the course of our lives, Predestination and Grace. Look at Molly, for example. She had a mother who knew how to love without wanting to possess. She had a father who at least had sense enough to try to follow his wife’s example. She had two sisters who were happy as children and grew up to be successful wives and mothers. There were no quarrels in the household, no chronic tensions, no tragedies or explosions. By all the rules of psychology-fiction, Molly ought to be thoroughly sane and contented. Instead of which …” He left the sentence unfinished. “And then there’s the other kind of Predestination. Not the inner Predestination of temperament and character, but the Predestination of events — the kind of Predestination that lay in wait for me and Ruth and Katy. Even through the wrong end of the opera glasses one doesn’t like to look at it.”