Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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There was a long silence, which I did not presume to break.
“Well,” he said at last, “let’s get back to Ruth, let’s get back to that afternoon of the day before the picnic. I came home from the laboratory, and there was Ruth in the living-room, reading. She didn’t look up as I came in, so I put on my breeziest bedside manner and said, ‘Hullo, kiddums!’ She turned and gave me a long, unsmiling, balefully blank look, then went back to her book. This time I tried a literary gambit. ‘Have you been writing any more poetry?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said emphatically, and there was a little smile on her face more baleful even than the previous blankness. ‘May I see it?’ To my great surprise, she said yes. The thing wasn’t quite finished; but tomorrow without fail. I forgot all about the promise; but the next morning, sure enough, as she was leaving for school, Ruth handed me one of her mauve envelopes. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’ And giving me another menacing smile, she hurried after Timmy. I was too busy to read the poem immediately, so I slipped the envelope into my pocket and went on with the job of loading the car. Bedding, cutlery, kerosene — I piled the stuff in. Half an hour later we were off. Beulah shouted goodbye from the front steps, Henry waved at us from an upstairs window. Katy waved back and blew a kiss. ‘I feel like John Gilpin,’ she said happily as we turned out of the driveway. ‘All agog to dash through thick and thin.’ It was one of those lyrical days in early May, one of those positively Shakespearean mornings. There had been rain in the night, and now all the trees were curtseying to a fresh wind; the young leaves glittered like jewels in the sunlight; the great marbly clouds on the horizons were something Michelangelo had dreamed in a moment of ecstatic happiness and superhuman power. And then there were the flowers. Flowers in the suburban gardens, flowers in the woods and fields beyond; and every flower had the conscious beauty of a beloved face, and its fragrance was a secret from the Other World, its petals had the smoothness, under the fingers of my imagination, the silky coolness and resilience of living skin. It goes without saying, of course, that we were still being sensible. But the world was tipsy with its own perfections, crazy with excess of life. We did our work, we ate our picnic lunch, we smoked our cigarettes on deck-chairs in the sun. But the sunwas too hot and we decided to finish our nap indoors; and then what anybody could have told us would happen duly happened … Happened, as I suddenly discovered between two ecstasies, under the eyes of a three-quarter length portrait of Henry Maartens, commissioned and presented to him by the directors of some big electrical company that had profited by his professional advice, and so monstrous in its photographic realism that it had been relegated to the spare bedroom at the farm. It was one of those portraits that are always looking at you, like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. I turned my head, and there it was in its black cutaway coat, solemnly glaring — the very embodiment of public opinion, the painted symbol and projection of my own guilty conscience. And next to the portrait was a Victorian wardrobe with a looking-glass door that reflected the tree outside the window and, within the room, part of the bed, part of two bodies dappled with sunlight and the moving shadows of oak leaves. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ But here, what with the portrait and the mirror, there was no possibility of ignorance. And the knowledge of what we had done became even more disquieting when, half an hour later, as I put on my jacket, I heard the crackle of stiff paper in a side pocket, and remembered Ruth’s mauve envelope. The poem, this time, was a narrative, in four-line stanzas, a kind of ballad about two adulterers, a faithless wife and her lover, before the bar of God at the Last Judgment. Standing there in the huge, accusing silence, they feel themselves being stripped by invisible hands of all their disguises, garment after garment, until at last they’re stark naked. More than stark naked, indeed; for their resurrected bodies are transparent. Lights and liver, bladder and guts, every organ, with its specific excrement — all, all are revoltingly visible. And suddenly they find that they are not alone, but on a stage, under spotlights, in the midst of millions of spectators, tier on tier of them, retching with uncontrollable disgust as they look, or jeering, denouncing, calling for vengeance, howling for the whip and the branding iron. There was a kind of Early Christian malignity about the piece, which was all the more terrifying because Ruth had been brought up completely outside the pale of that hideous kind of fundamentalism. Judgment, hell, eternal punishment — these weren’t things she’d been taught to believe in. They were notions she had adopted for her own special purposes, in order to express what she felt about her mother and myself. Jealousy, to begin with; jealousy and rebuffed love, hurt vanity, angry resentment. And the resentment had to be given a respectable motive, the anger transformed into righteous indignation. She suspected the worst of us so that she might be justified in feeling the worst. And she suspected the worst so vehemently that, in next to no time, she wasn’t guessing any more, she knew that we were guilty. And, knowing it, the child in her was outraged, the woman felt more bitterly, vengefully jealous than before. With a horrible sinking of the heart, a mounting terror in the face of an incalculable future, I read the thing to the end, read it again, then turned to where Katy was sitting before the mirror on the dressing-table, pinning up her hair, smiling at the radiantly smiling image of a goddess, and humming a tune out of ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’ Dove sono i bei momenti Di dolcezza e di piacer? I had always admired that divine unconcern of hers, that Olympian je m’en foutisme. Now, suddenly, it enraged me. She had no right not to be feeling what the reading of Ruth’s poem had made me feel. ‘Do you want to know,’ I said, ‘why our little Ruthy has been acting the way she has? Do you want to know what she really thinks of us?’ And crossing the room, I handed her the two sheets of purple notepaper on which the child had copied out her poem. Katy started to read. Studying her face I saw the original look of amusement (for Ruth’s poetry was a standing joke in the family) give place to an expression of serious, concentrated attention. Then a vertical wrinkle appeared on the forehead between the eyes. The frown deepened and, as she turned to the second page, she bit her lip. The goddess, after all, was vulnerable … I had scored my point; but it was a poor sort of triumph that ended with there being two bewildered rabbits in the trap instead of one. And it was the kind of trap that Katy was totally unequipped to get out of. Most uncomfortable situations she just ignored, just sailed through as though they didn’t exist. And in effect, if she went on ignoring them long enough and serenely enough, they stopped existing. The people she had offended forgave her, because she was so beautiful and good-humoured; the people who had worried themselves sick, or made complications for others, succumbed to the contagion of her god-like indifference and momentarily forgot to be neurotic or malignant. And when the technique of being serenely unaware didn’t work, there was her other gambit — the technique of rushing in where angels fear to tread; the technique of being gaily tactless, of making enormous bloomers in all innocence and simplicity, of uttering the most unmentionable truths with the most irresistible of smiles. But this was a case where neither of these methods would work. If she said nothing, Ruth would go on acting as she had acted up till now. And if she rushed in and said everything, God only knew what a disturbed adolescent might do. And meanwhile there was Henry to think of, there was her own future as the sole and, we were all convinced, the utterly indispensable support of a sick genius and his children. Ruth was in the position, and might even now be in the mood, to pull down the whole temple of their lives for the sake of spiting her mother. And there was nothing that a woman who had the temperament of a goddess, without the goddess’s omnipotence, could do about it. There was, however, something that I could do; and as we discussed our situation — for the first time, remember, since there had been a situation to discuss! — it became more and more clear what that something was. I could do what I had felt I ought to do after that first apocalyptic night — clear out.
“Katy wouldn’t hear of it at first, and I had to argue with h
er all the way home — argue against myself, against my own happiness. In the end she was convinced. It was the only way out of the trap.
“Ruth eyed us, when we got home, like a detective searching for clues. Then she asked me if I had liked her poem. I told her — which was strictly true — that it was the best thing she had ever written. She was pleased, but did her best not to show it. The smile which lit up her face was almost instantly repressed and she asked me, in an intently meaningful way, what I had thought of the poem’s subject. I was prepared for the question and answered with an indulgent chuckle. It reminded me, I said, of the sermons my poor dear father used to preach in Lent. Then I looked at my watch, said something about urgent work and left her, as I could see by the expression on her face, discomfited. She had looked forward, I suppose, to a scene in which she would play the coldly implacable judge, while I, the culprit, gave an exhibition of cringing evasion, or broke down and confessed. But, instead, the culprit had laughed and the judge had been treated to an irrelevant joke about clergymen. I had won a skirmish; but the war still raged and could be ended, it was plain enough, only by my retreat.
“Two days later it was Friday and, as happened every Friday, the postman had brought my mother’s weekly letter and Beulah, when she set the table for breakfast, had propped it conspicuously (for she was all for mothers) against my coffee cup. I opened, read, looked grave, read again, then lapsed into preoccupied silence. Katy took the cue and asked solicitously if I had had bad news. To which I answered, of course, that it wasn’t too good. My mother’s health … The alibi had been prepared. By that evening it was all settled. Officially, as the head of the laboratory, Henry gave me two weeks’ leave of absence. I would take the ten-thirty on Sunday morning and, in the interval, on Saturday, we would all escort the convalescent to the farm and have a farewell picnic.
“There were too many of us for one car; so Katy and the children went ahead in the family Overland. Henry and Beulah, with most of their luggage, followed in the Maxwell with me. The others had a good start of us; for when we were half a mile from home, Henry discovered, as usual, that he had forgotten some absolutely indispensable book, and we had to drive back and look for it. Ten minutes later we were on our way again. On our way, as it turned out, to that meeting with Predestination.”
Rivers finished his whisky and knocked out his pipe.
“Even through the wrong end of the opera glasses, even in another universe, inhabited by different people …” He shook his head. “There are certain things that are simply inadmissible.” There was a pause. “Well, let’s get it over with,” he said at last. “About two miles this side of the farm there was a cross-road where you had to turn left. It was in a wood and the leaves were so thick you couldn’t see what was coming from either side. When we got there, I slowed down, I honked my horn, I put the car into low and turned. And suddenly, as I rounded the bend, there was the Overland roadster in the ditch, upside down, and near it a big truck with its radiator smashed in. And between the two cars was a young man in blue denims kneeling by a child, who was screaming. Ten or fifteen feet away there were two things that looked like bundles of old clothes, like garbage — garbage with blood on it.”
There was another silence.
“Were they dead?” I finally asked.
“Katy died a few minutes after we came on the scene, and Ruth died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Timmy was being reserved for a worse death at Okinawa; he got off with some cuts and a couple of broken ribs. He was sitting at the back, he told us, with Katy driving, and Ruth beside her on the front seat. The two of them had been having an argument, and Ruth was mad about something — he didn’t know what, because he wasn’t listening; he was thinking of a way of electrifying his clockwork train and anyhow he never paid much attention to what Ruth said when she was mad. If you paid attention to her, it just made things worse. But his mother had paid attention. He remembered her saying, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and then, ‘I forbid you to say those things.’ And then they turned the corner, and they were going too fast and she didn’t honk the horn and that huge truck hit them broadside on. So you see,” Rivers concluded, “it was really both kinds of Predestination. The Predestination of events, and at the same time the Predestination of two temperaments, Ruth’s and Katy’s — the temperament of an outraged child, who was also a jealous woman; and the temperament of a goddess, cornered by circumstances and suddenly realizing that, objectively, she was only a human being, for whom the Olympian temperament might actually be a handicap. And the discovery was so disturbing that it made her careless, left her incapable of dealing adequately with the events by which she was predestined to be destroyed — and destroyed (but this was for my benefit, of course, this was an item in my psychological Predestination) with every refinement of physical outrage — an eye put out by a splinter of glass, the nose and lips and chin almost obliterated, rubbed out on the bloody macadam of the road. And there was a crushed right hand and the jagged ends of a broken shin-bone showing through the stocking. It was something I dreamed about almost every night. Katy with her back to me; and she was either on the bed in the farmhouse, or else standing by the window in my room, throwing the shawl over her shoulders. Then she’d turn and look at me, and there was no face, only that expanse of scraped flesh, and I’d wake up screaming. I got to the point where I didn’t dare to go to sleep at night.”
Listening to him, I remembered that young John Rivers whom, to my great surprise, I had found at Beirut, in twenty-four, teaching physics at the American University.
“Was that why you looked so horribly ill?” I asked.
He nodded his head.
“Too little sleep and too much memory,” he said. “I was afraid of going mad, and rather than go mad, I’d decided to kill myself. Then, just in the nick of time, Predestination got to work and came up with the only brand of saving Grace that could do me any good. I met Helen.”
“At the same cocktail party,” I put in, “where I met her. Do you remember?”
“Sorry, I don’t. I don’t remember anybody on that occasion except Helen. If you’ve been saved from drowning, you remember the life-guard, but not the spectators on the pier.”
“No wonder I never had a chance!” I said. “At the time I used to think, rather bitterly, that it was because women, even the best of them, even the rare extraordinary Helens, prefer good looks to artistic sensibility, prefer brawn with brains (for I was forced to admit that you had some brains!) to brains with that exquisite je ne sais quoi which was my specialty. Now I see what your irresistible attraction was. You were unhappy.”
He nodded his agreement, and there was a long silence. A clock struck twelve.
“Merry Christmas,” I said and, finishing off my whisky, I got up to go. “You haven’t told me what happened to poor old Henry after the accident.”
“Well, he began, of course, by having a relapse. Not a very bad one. He had nothing to gain, this time, by going to death’s door. Just a mild affair. Katy’s sister came down for the funeral and stayed on to look after him. She was like a caricature of Katy. Fat, florid, loud. Not a goddess disguised as a peasant — a barmaid imagining she was a goddess. She was a widow. Four months later Henry married her. I’d gone to Beirut by that time; so I never witnessed their connubial bliss. But from all accounts it was considerable. But the poor woman couldn’t keep her weight down. She died in thirty-five. Henry quickly found himself a young redhead, called Alicia. Alicia wanted to be admired for her thirty-eight inch bust, but still more for her two-hundred inch intellect. ‘What do you think of Schroedinger?’ you’d ask him; but it would be Alicia who answered. She saw him through to the end.”
“When did you see him last?” I asked.
“Just a few months before he died. Eighty-seven and still amazingly active, still chock-full of what his biographer likes to call ‘the undiminished blaze of intellectual power.’ To me he seemed like an overwound clockwork monkey. Cl
ockwork ratiocination; clockwork gestures, clockwork smiles and grimaces. And then there was the conversation. What amazingly realistic tape recordings of the old anecdotes about Planck and Rutherford and J. J. Thompson! Of his celebrated soliloquies about Logical Positivism and Cybernetics! Of reminiscences about those exciting war years when he was working on the A-Bomb! Of his gaily apocalyptic speculations about the bigger and better Infernal Machines of the future! You could have sworn that it was a real human being who was talking. But gradually, as you went on listening, you began to realize that there was nobody at home. The tapes were being reeled off automatically, it was vox et praeterea nihil — the voice of Henry Maartens without his presence.”