Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“On the other hand,” Susila went on, “(and this isn’t quite so complimentary), she might have loved you because you made her feel so damned sorry for you.”
“That’s the truth, I’m afraid. Molly was a born Sister of Mercy.”
“And a Sister of Mercy, unfortunately, isn’t the same as a Wife of Love.”
“Which I duly discovered,” he said.
“After your marriage, I suppose.”
Will hesitated for a moment. “Actually,” he said, “it was before. Not because, on her side, there had been any urgency of desire, but only because she was so eager to do anything to please me. Only because, on principle, she didn’t believe in conventions and was all for freely loving, and more surprisingly” (he remembered the outrageous things she would so casually and placidly give utterance to even in his mother’s presence) “all for freely talking about that freedom.”
“You knew it beforehand,” Susila summed up, “and yet you still married her.”
Will nodded his head without speaking.
“Because you were a gentleman, I take it, and a gentleman keeps his word.”
“Partly for that rather old-fashioned reason, but also because I was in love with her.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“Yes. No, I don’t know. But at the time I did know. At least I thought I knew. I was really convinced that I was really in love with her. And I knew, I still know, why I was convinced. I was grateful to her for having exorcised those maggots. And besides the gratitude there was respect. There was admiration. She was so much better and honester than I was. But unfortunately, you’re right: a Sister of Mercy isn’t the same as a Wife of Love. But I was ready to take Molly on her own terms, not on mine. I was ready to believe that her terms were better than mine.”
“How soon,” Susila asked, after a long silence, “did you start having affairs on the side?”
Will smiled his flayed smile. “Three months to the day after our wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office. Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a curly-headed little Jewish girl that Molly had helped with money while she was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her Studio twice a week, from five to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it.”
“And, I gather, she was upset?”
“Much more than I’d ever thought she’d be.”
“So what did you do about it?”
Will shook his head. “This is where it begins to get complicated,” he said. “I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing — what she really forced me to do — she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity,” he repeated, “not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me, and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering. Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I mean — sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time her unhappiness came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her unhappiness and to the pain her unhappiness was inflicting on me) that tenderness was always frustrated before it could come to its natural consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment — a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn’t commit myself, maybe I genuinely couldn’t. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old drama — the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contrapuntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curly-headed painter.”
“I hope at least they were enjoyable,” said Susila.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Only moderately. Rachel could never forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real enjoyment and of course the real agony — I never experienced them until Babs appeared on the scene.”
“When was that?”
“Just over a year ago. In Africa.”
“Africa?”
“I’d been sent there by Joe Aldehyde.”
“That man who owns newspapers?”
“And all the rest. He was married to Molly’s Aunt Eileen. An exemplary family man, I may add. That’s why he’s so serenely convinced of his own righteousness, even when he’s engaged in the most nefarious financial operations.”
“And you’re working for him?”
Will nodded. “That was his wedding present to Molly — a job for me on the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I’d been getting from my previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly.”
“How did he react to Babs?”
“He never knew about her — never knew that there was any reason for Molly’s accident.”
“So he goes on employing you for your dead wife’s sake?”
Will shrugged his shoulders. “The excuse,” he said, “is that I have my mother to support.”
“And of course you wouldn’t enjoy being poor.”
“I certainly wouldn’t.”
There was a silence.
“Well,” said Susila at last, “let’s get back to Africa.”
“I’d been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line for Uncle Joe. It was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to her.”
“Next to the young woman you couldn’t have liked less?”
“Couldn’t have liked less,” he repeated, “or disapproved of more. But if you’re an addict you’ve got to have your dope — the dope that you know in advance is going to destroy you.”
“It’s a funny thing,” she said reflectively, “but in Pala we have hardly any addicts.”
“Not even sex-addicts?”
“The sex-addicts are also person-addicts. In other words, they’re lovers.”
“But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love.”
“Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly — that’s part of the Art of Loving.”
As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before — the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to a higher power — Rachel squared, Rachel to the nth. And the unhappiness that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel. Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting, what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become more demanding, was claiming ev
er more and more of his time — time not only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and nightclubs, at her horrible friends’ cocktail parties, on week-ends in the country. “Just you and me, darling,” she would say, “all alone together.” All alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the craving persisted. After one of those dreadful week-ends, he was as hopelessly a Babs-addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no less hopelessly a Will Farnaby-addict. Hopelessly so far as he was concerned — for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the addiction was always and irrepressibly hopeful. She never ceased to expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind, unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her and going to live with Babs — it was only then that hope had finally given place to hopelessness. “Do you mean it, Will — do you really mean it?” “I really mean it.” It was in hopelessness that she had walked out to the car, in utter hopelessness had driven away into the rain — into her death. At the funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again. That evening, while he was sitting at his desk, trying to write an article on “What’s Wrong With Youth”, trying not to remember the hospital, the open grave and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of condolence, no doubt … He had opened, and there, instead of the telegram, was Babs — dramatically without make-up and all in black.
“My poor, poor Will!” They had sat down on the sofa in the living room, and she had stroked his hair and both of them had cried. An hour later, they were naked and in bed. Within three months, as any fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.
“Do you really mean it, Babs?”
She really meant it.
There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant later, startlingly loud and slightly out of tune, “Here and now, boys,” shouted a talking bird.
“Shut up!” Will shouted back.
“Here and now, boys,” the mynah repeated. “Here and now, boys. Here and …”
“Shut up!”
There was silence.
“I had to shut him up,” Will explained, “because of course he’s absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren’t they? What about your husband’s death, for example? Is that irrelevant?”
Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her head. “In the context of what I have to do now — yes, completely irrelevant! That’s something I had to learn.”
“Does one learn how to forget?”
“It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.” She gave him a sad little smile and added, “It isn’t easy.”
“It isn’t easy,” Will repeated. And suddenly all his defences were down, all his pride had left him. “Will you help me?” he asked.
“It’s a bargain,” she said, and held out her hand.
A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr MacPhail had entered the room.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“GOOD EVENING, MY dear. Good evening, Mr Farnaby.”
The tone was cheerful — not, Susila was quick to notice, with any kind of synthetic cheerfulness, but naturally, genuinely. And yet, before coming here, he must have stopped at the hospital, must have seen Lakshmi as Susila herself had seen her only an hour or two since, more dreadfully emaciated than ever, more skull-like and discoloured. Half a long life-time of love and loyalty and mutual forgiveness — and in another day or two it would be all over; he would be alone. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof — sufficient unto the place and the person. “One has no right,” her father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital together, “one has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic. Accept, accept …” His voice broke. Looking up at him, she saw that his face was wet with tears. Five minutes later they were sitting on a bench, at the edge of the lotus pool, in the shadow of the huge stone Buddha. With a little plop, sharp and yet liquidly voluptuous, an unseen frog dived from its round leafy platform into the water. Thrusting up from the mud, the thick green stems with their turgid buds broke through into the air, and here and there the blue or rosy symbols of enlightenment had opened their petals to the sun and the probing visitations of flies and tiny beetles and the wild bees from the jungle. Darting, pausing in mid-flight, darting again, a score of glittering blue and green dragon flies were hawking for midges.
“Tathata,” Dr Robert had whispered. “Suchness.”
For a long time they sat there in silence. Then, suddenly, he had touched her shoulder.
“Look!”
She lifted her eyes to where he was pointing. Two small parrots had perched on the Buddha’s right hand and were going through the ritual of courtship.
“Did you stop again at the lotus pool?” Susila asked aloud.
Dr Robert gave her a little smile and nodded his head.
“How was Shivapuram?” Will enquired.
“Pleasant enough in itself,” the doctor answered. “Its only defect is that it’s so close to the outside world. Up here one can ignore all those organized insanities, and get on with one’s work. Down there, with all the antennae and listening posts and channels of communication that a government has to have, the outside world is perpetually breathing down one’s neck. One hears it, feels it, smells it — yes, smells it.” He wrinkled up his face into a grimace of comic disgust.
“Has anything more than usually disastrous happened since I’ve been here?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary at your end of the world. I wish I could say the same about our end.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“The trouble is our next door neighbour, Colonel Dipa. To begin with, he’s made another deal with the Czechs.”
“More armaments?”
“Sixty million dollars’ worth. It was on the radio this morning.”
“But what on earth for?”
“The usual reasons. Glory and power. The pleasures of vanity and the pleasures of bullying. Terrorism and military parades at home; conquests and Te Deums abroad. And that brings me to the second item of unpleasant news. Last night the Colonel delivered another of his celebrated Greater Rendang speeches.”
“Greater Rendang? What’s that?”
“You may well ask,” said Dr Robert. “Greater Rendang is the territory controlled by the Sultans of Rendang-Lobo between 1447 and 1483. It included Rendang, the Nicobar Islands, about thirty per cent of Sumatra and the whole of Pala. Today, it’s Colonel Dipa’s Irredenta.”
“Seriously?”
“With a perfectly straight face. No, I’m wrong. With a purple, distorted face and at the top of a voice that he has trained, after long practice, to sound exactly like Hitler’s. Greater Rendang or death!”
“But the great powers would never allow it.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t like to see him in Sumatra. But Pala — that’s another matter.” He shook his head. “Pala, unfortunately, is in nobody’s good books. We don’t want the Communists; but neither do we want the Capitalists. Least of all do we want the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose on us — for different reasons, of course. The West wants it because our labour costs are low and investors’ dividends will be correspondingly high. And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat, open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to the setting up of yet another People’s Democracy. We say no to both of you, so we’re unpopular everywhere. Regardless of their ideologies, all the Great Powers may prefer a Rendang-controlled Pala with oil fields to an independent Pala without. If Dipa attacks us, they’ll say it’s most deplorable; but they won’t lift a finger. And when he takes us over and calls the oil-men in, they’ll be delighted.”
“What can you do about Colonel Dipa?” Will asked.
“Except for passive resistance, nothing. We have no army and no powerful friends. The Colonel has both. The most we can do, if he starts making trouble, is to appeal to the United Nations. Meanwhile we shall remonstrate with the Colonel about this latest Greater Rendang effusion. Remonstrate through our minister in Rendang-Lobo, and remonstrate with the great man in person when he pays his state visit to Pala ten days from now.”
“A state visit?”
“For the young Raja’s coming-of-age celebrations. He was asked a long time ago, but he never let us know for certain whether he was coming or not. Today it was finally settled. We’ll have a summit meeting as well as a birthday party. But let’s talk about something more rewarding. How did you get on today, Mr Farnaby?”
“Not merely well — gloriously. I had the honour of a visit from your reigning monarch.”
“Murugan?”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was your reigning monarch?”
Dr Robert laughed. “You might have asked for an interview.”