Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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There was a silence.
“Well?” he questioned at last.
“Don’t you see?”
Will shook his head.
“What happens when you’re ill, when you’ve been hurt? Who does the repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? DO you?”
“Who else?”
“You?” she insisted. “You? The person that feels the pain and does the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you capable of doing what has to be done?”
“Oh, I see what you’re driving at.”
“At last!” she mocked.
“Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?”
“Don’t ask me,” she answered. “That’s a question for a neurotheologian.”
“Meaning what?” he asked.
“Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology.”
“And the children?”
“The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups.”
“And so must be told to run along and play.”
“Exactly.”
“Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?” he asked.
“Standard procedure,” she assured him. “In your part of the world doctors get rid of the children by poisoning them with barbiturates. We do it by talking to them about cathedrals and jackdaws.” Her voice had modulated into a chant. “About white clouds floating in the sky, white swans floating on the dark, smooth, irresistible river of life …”
“Now, now,” he protested. “None of that!”
A smile lit up the grave dark face, and she began to laugh. Will looked at her with astonishment. Here, suddenly, was a different person, another Susila MacPhail, gay, mischievous, ironical.
“I know your tricks,” he added, joining in the laughter.
“Tricks?” Still laughing, she shook her head. “I was just explaining how I did it.”
“I know exactly how you did it. And I also know that it works. What’s more, I give you leave to do it again — whenever it’s necessary.”
“If you like,” she said more seriously, “I’ll show you how to press your own buttons. We teach it in all our elementary schools. The three R’s plus rudimentary S.D.”
“What’s that?”
“Self-Determination. Alias Destiny Control.”
“Destiny Control?” He raised his eyebrows.
“No, no,” she assured him, “we’re not quite such fools as you seem to think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable.”
“And you control it by pressing your own buttons?”
“Pressing our own buttons and then visualizing what we’d like to happen.”
“But does it happen?”
“In many cases it does.”
“Simple!” There was a note of irony in his voice.
“Wonderfully simple,” she agreed. “And yet, so far as I know, we’re the only people who systematically teach DC to their children. you just tell them what they’re supposed to do and leave it at that. Behave well, you say. But how? You never tell them. All you do is give them pep talks and punishments. Pure idiocy.”
“Pure unadulterated idiocy,” he agreed, remembering Mr Crabbe, his housemaster, on the subject of masturbation, remembering the canings and the weekly sermons and the Commination Service on Ash Wednesday. “Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbour’s wife. Amen.”
“If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don’t take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they’re apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have all those thousands of jails and churches and Communist cells.”
“Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few.”
Susila shook her head.
“No Alcatrazes here,” she said. “No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas of Fatima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other home-made imaginary universe. And it really isn’t your fault. You’re almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behaviour.”
“‘For the good that I would,’” he quoted, “‘I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.’”
“Who said that?”
“The man who invented Christianity — St Paul.”
“You see,” she said, “the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them.”
“Except the supernatural method of having them realized by Somebody Else.”
Throwing back his head, Will Farnaby burst into song.
“There is a fountain fill’d with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Are cleansed of all their stains.”
Susila had covered her ears. “It’s really obscene,” she said.
“My housemaster’s favourite hymn,” Will explained. “We used to sing it about once a week, all the time I was at school.”
“Thank goodness,” she said, “there was never any blood in Buddhism! Gautama lived till eighty and died from being too courteous to refuse bad food. Violent death always seems to call for more violent death. ‘If you won’t believe that you’re redeemed by my redeemer’s blood, I’ll drown you in your own.’ Last year I took a course at Shivapuram in the history of Christianity.” Susila shuddered at the memory. “What a horror! And all because that poor ignorant man didn’t know how to implement his good intentions.”
“And most of us,” said Will, “are still in the same old boat. The evil that we would not, that we do. And how!”
Reacting unforgivably to the unforgivable, Will Farnaby laughed derisively. Laughed because he had seen the goodness of Molly and then, with open eyes, had chosen the pink alcove and, with it, Molly’s unhappiness, Molly’s death, his own gnawing sense of guilt and then the pain, out of all proportion to its low and essentially farcical cause, the agonizing pain that he had felt when Babs in due course did what any fool must have known she inevitably would do — turned him out of her infernal gin-illumined paradise, and took another lover.
“What’s the matter?” Susila asked.
“Nothing. Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re not very good at hiding your feelings. You were thinking of something that made you unhappy.”
“You’ve got sharp eyes,” he said, and looked away.
There was a long silence. Should he tell her? Tell her about Babs, about poor Molly, about himself, tell her all the dismal and senseless things he had never, even when he was drunk, told even his oldest friends? Old friends knew too much about one, too much about the other parties involved, too much about the grotesque and complicated game which (as an English gentleman who was also a Bohemian, also a would-be poet, also — in mere despair, because he knew he could never be a good poet — a hard boiled journalist, and the private agent, very well paid, of a rich man whom he despised) he was always so elaborately playing. No, old friends would never do. But from this dark little outsider, this stranger to whom he already owed so much and with whom, though he knew nothing about her, he was already so intimate, there would come no foregone conclusions, no ex parte judgments — would come perhaps, he found himself hoping (he who had trained himself never to hope!) some unexpected enlightenment, some positive and practical help. (And, God knew, he needed help — though God also knew, only too well, that he would
never say so, never sink so low as to ask for it.)
Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, “Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys.”
Will decided to take the plunge — but to take it indirectly, by talking first, not about his problems, but hers. Without looking at Susila (for that, he felt, would be indecent), he began to speak.
“Dr MacPhail told me something about … about what happened to your husband.”
The words turned a sword in her heart; but that was to be expected, that was right and inevitable. “It’ll be four months next Wednesday,” she said. And then, meditatively, “Two people,” she went on after a little silence, “two separate individuals — but they add up to something like a new creation. And then suddenly half of this new creature is amputated; but the other half doesn’t die — can’t die, mustn’t die.”
“Mustn’t die?”
“For so many reasons — the children, oneself, the whole nature of things. But needless to say,” she added with a little smile that only accentuated the sadness in her eyes, “needless to say the reasons don’t lessen the shock of the amputation or make the aftermath any more bearable. The only thing that helps is what we were talking about just now — Destiny Control. And even that …” She shook her head. “DC can give you a completely painless childbirth. But a completely painless bereavement — no. And of course that’s as it should be. It wouldn’t be right if you could take away all the pain of a bereavement; you’d be less than human.”
“Less than human,” he repeated. “Less than human …” Three short words; but how completely they summed him up! “The really terrible thing,” he said aloud, “is when you know it’s your fault that the other person died.”
“Were you married?” she asked.
“For twelve years. Until last spring …”
“And now she’s dead?”
“She died in an accident.”
“In an accident? Then how was it your fault?”
“The accident happened because … well, because the evil that I didn’t want to do, I did. And that day it came to a head. The hurt of it confused and distracted her, and I let her drive away in the car — let her drive away into a head-on collision.”
“Did you love her?”
He hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
“Was there somebody else — somebody you cared for more?”
“Somebody I couldn’t have cared for less.” He made a grimace of sardonic self-mockery.
“And that was the evil you didn’t want to do, but did?”
“Did and went on doing until I’d killed the woman I ought to have loved, but didn’t. Went on doing it even after I’d killed her, even though I hated myself for doing it — yes, and really hated the person who made me do it.”
“Made you do it, I suppose, by having the right kind of body?”
Will nodded, and there was a silence.
“Do you know what it’s like,” he asked at length, “to feel that nothing is quite real — including yourself?”
Susila nodded. “It sometimes happens when one’s just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It’s like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high.”
“Or low,” said Will. “In my case, the shift wasn’t up, it was down. No, not even down; it was into reverse. The first time it happened I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the centre of the universe. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible click, they were all maggots.”
“Maggots?”
“You know, those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people’s faces were the same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not even real maggots — just the ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that maggot-world for months. Lived in it, worked in it, went out to lunch and dinner in it — all without the least interest in what I was doing. Without the least enjoyment or relish, completely desireless and, as I discovered when I tried to make love to a young woman I’d had occasional fun with in the past, completely impotent.”
“What did you expect?”
“Precisely that.”
“Then why on earth …?”
Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. “As a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex-life of the phantom maggot.”
“After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal.”
“Even more,” he agreed, “if that was possible.”
“But what brought on the maggots in the first place?”
“Well, to begin with,” he answered, “I was my parents’ son. By Bully Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents’ son,” he went on after a little pause, “I was my Aunt Mary’s nephew.”
“What did your Aunt Mary have to do with it?”
“She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And after that nine months of X-rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the liver, and that was the end. I was there from start to finish. For a boy in his teens it was a liberal education — but liberal.”
“In what?” Susila asked.
“In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after the close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course. World War II. Followed by the non-stop refresher course of Cold War I. And all this time I’d been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I simply don’t have what it takes. And then, after the War, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but try to write something decent — good prose at least, seeing that it couldn’t be good poetry. But I’d reckoned without those darling parents of mine. By the time he died, in January forty-six, my father had got rid of all the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be supported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a success that were completely humiliating.”
“Why humiliating?”
“Wouldn’t you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success because I was so irremediably second-rate.”
“And the net result of it all was maggots?”
He nodded. “Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here’s where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot-party in Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane conversation about non-objective painting. Not wanting to see any more maggots, I didn’t look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly had very pale grey-blue eyes,” he added parenthetically, “eyes that saw everything — she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it, just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me why I was so sad. I’d had a couple of drinks and there was nothing impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her about the maggots. ‘And you’re one of them,’ I finished up, and for the first time I looked at her. ‘A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion’.”
“Was she flattered?”
“I think so. She’d stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain weakness for crucifixions and holy women. Anyhow, next morning she called me at breakfast time
. Would I like to drive down into the country with her? It was Sunday and, by a miracle, fine. I accepted. We spent an hour in a hazel copse, picking primroses and looking at the little white windflowers. One doesn’t pick the windflowers,” he explained, “because in an hour they’re withered. I did a lot of looking in that hazel copse — looking at flowers with the naked eye and then looking into them through the magnifying glass that Molly had brought with her. I don’t know why, but it was extraordinarily therapeutic — just looking into the hearts of primroses and anemones. For the rest of the day I saw no maggots. But Fleet Street was still there, waiting for me, and by lunch time on Monday the whole place was crawling with them as thickly as ever. Millions of maggots. But now I knew what to do about them. That evening I went to Molly’s studio.”
“Was she a painter?”
“Not a real painter, and she knew it. Knew it and didn’t resent it, just made the best of having no talent. She didn’t paint for art’s sake; she painted because she liked looking at things, liked the process of trying meticulously to reproduce what she saw. That evening she gave me a canvas and a palette, and told me to do likewise.”
“And did it work?”
“It worked so well that when a couple of months later, I cut open a rotten apple, the worm at its centre wasn’t a maggot — not subjectively, I mean. Objectively, yes; it was all that a maggot should be, and that’s how I portrayed it, how we both portrayed it — for we always painted the same things at the same time.”
“What about the other maggots, the phantom maggots outside the apple?”
“Well, I still had relapses, especially in Fleet Street and at cocktail parties; but the maggots were definitely fewer, definitely less haunting. And meanwhile something new was happening in the studio. I was falling in love — falling in love because love is catching and Molly was so obviously in love with me — why, God only knows.”
“I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you because …” Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled, “Well, because you’re quite an attractive kind of queer fish.”
He laughed. “Thank you for a handsome compliment.”