Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/aldous-huxley/page,360,480199-complete_works_of_aldous_huxley.html
“But how appalling!”
“They whisked me off to hospital, and cut me open before you could say knife. Excellent surgeon, highly efficient Sisters of Charity to nurse me — I couldn’t have been in better hands. But it was a bore being tied there by the leg for four weeks — a great bore. Still, the thing had its compensations. There was my nun, for example. Ah, here’s the food, thank Heaven!”
The mixed grill proved to be excellent. Miss Penny’s description of the pun came to me in scraps and snatches. A round, pink, pretty face in a winged coif; blue eyes and regular features; teeth altogether too perfect — false, in fact; but the general effect extremely pleasing. A youthful Teutonic twenty eight.
“She wasn’t my nurse,” Miss Penny explained. “But I used to see her quite often when she came in to have a look at the tolle Engländerin. Her name was Sister Agatha. During the war, they told me, she had converted any number of wounded soldiers to the true faith — which wasn’t surprising, considering how pretty she was.”
“Did she try and convert you?” I asked.
“She wasn’t such a fool.” Miss Penny laughed, and rattled the miniature gallows of her ears.
I amused myself for a moment with the thought of Miss Penny’s conversion — Miss Penny confronting a vast assembly of Fathers of the Church, rattling her earrings at their discourses on the Trinity, laughing her appalling laugh at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, meeting the stern look of the Grand Inquisitor with a flash of her bright, emotionless hare’s eyes. What was the secret of the woman’s formidableness?
But I was missing the story. What had happened? Ah yes, the gist of it was that Sister Agatha had appeared one morning, after two or three days absence, dressed, not as a nun, but in the overalls of a hospital charwoman, with a handkerchief instead of a winged coif on her shaven head.
“Dead,” said Miss Penny; “she looked as though she were dead. A walking corpse, that’s what she was. It was a shocking sight. I shouldn’t have thought it possible for anyone to change so much in so short a time. She walked painfully, as though she had been ill for months, and she had great burnt rings round her eyes and deep lines in her face. And the general expression of unhappiness — that was something quite appalling.”
She leaned out into the gangway between the two rows of tables, and caught the passing waiter by the end of one his coat-tails. The little Italian looked round with an expression of surprise that deepened into terror on his face.
“Half a pint of Guinness,” ordered Miss Penny. “And, after this, bring me some jam roll.”
“No jam roll to-day, madam.”
“Damn!” said Miss Penny. “Bring me what you like, then.”
She let go of the waiter’s tail and resumed her narrative.
“Where was I? Yes, I remember. She came into my room, I was telling you, with a bucket of water and a brush, dressed like a charwoman. Naturally I was rather surprised. ‘What on earth are you doing, Sister Agatha?’ I asked. No answer. She just shook her head, and began to scrub the floor. When she’d finished, she left the room without so much as looking at me again. ‘What’s happened to Sister Agatha?’ I asked my nurse when she next came in. ‘Can’t say.’— ‘Won’t say,’ I said. No answer. It took nearly a week to find out what really had happened. Nobody dared tell me; it was strengst verboten, as they used to say in the good old days. But I wormed it out in the long run. My nurse, the doctor, the charwomen — I got something out of all of them. I always get what I want in the end.” Miss Penny laughed like a horse.
“I’m sure you do,” I said politely.
“Much obliged,” acknowledged Miss Penny. “But to proceed. My information came to me in fragmentary whispers. ‘Sister Agatha ran away with a man.’ — Dear me.— ‘One of the patients.’ — You don’t say so.— ‘A criminal out of the jail.’ — The plot thickens.— ‘He ran away from her.’ — It seems to grow thinner again.— ‘They brought her back here; she’s been disgraced. There’s been a funeral service for her in the chapel — coffin and all. She had to be present at it — her own funeral. She isn’t a nun any more. She has to do charwoman’s work now, the roughest in the hospital. She’s not allowed to speak to anybody, and nobody’s allowed to speak to her. She’s regarded as dead.’” Miss Penny paused to signal to the harassed little Italian. “My small ‘Guinness,’” she called out.
“Coming, coming,” and the foreign voice cried “Guinness” down the lift, and from below another voice echoed, “Guinness.”
“I filled in the details bit by bit. There was our hero, to begin with; I had to bring him into the picture, which was rather difficult, as I had never seen him. But I got a photograph of him. The police circulated one when he got away; I don’t suppose they ever caught him.” Miss Penny opened her bag. “Here it is,” she said. “I always carry it about with me; it’s become a superstition. For years, I remember, I used to carry a little bit of heather tied up with string. Beautiful, isn’t it? There’s a sort of Renaissance look about it, don’t you think? He was half-Italian, you know.”
Italian. Ah, that explained it. I had been wondering how Bavaria could have produced this thin-faced creature with the big dark eyes, the finely modelled nose and chin, and the fleshy lips so royally and sensually curved.
“He’s certainly very superb,” I said, handing back the picture.
Miss Penny put it carefully away in her bag. “Isn’t he?” she said. “Quite marvellous. But his character and his mind were even better. I see him as one of those innocent, childlike monsters of iniquity who are simply unaware of the existence of right and wrong. And he had genius — the real Italian genius for engineering, for dominating and exploiting nature. A true son of the Roman aqueduct builders he was, and a brother of the electrical engineers. Only Kuno — that was his name — didn’t work in water; he worked in women. He knew how to harness the natural energy of passion; he made devotion drive his mills. The commercial exploitation of love-power, that was his specialty. I sometimes wonder,” Miss Penny added in a different tone, “whether I shall ever be exploited, when I get a little more middle-aged and celibate, by one of these young engineers of the passions. It would be humiliating, particularly as I’ve done so little exploiting from my side.”
She frowned and was silent for a moment. No, decidedly, Miss Penny was not beautiful; you could not even honestly say that she had charm or was attractive. That high Scotch colouring, those hare’s eyes, the voice, the terrifying laugh, and the size of her, the general formidableness of the woman. No, no, no.
“You said he had been in prison,” I said. The silence, with all its implications, was becoming embarrassing.
Miss Penny sighed, looked up, and nodded. “He was fool enough,” she said, “to leave the straight and certain road of female exploitation for the dangerous courses of burglary. We all have our occasional accesses of folly. They gave him a heavy sentence, but he succeeded in getting pneumonia, I think it was, a week after entering jail. He was transferred to the hospital. Sister Agatha, with her known talent for saving souls, was given him as his particular attendant. But it was he, I’m afraid, who did the converting.”
Miss Penny finished off the last mouthful of the ginger pudding which the waiter had brought in lieu of jam roll.
“I suppose you don’t smoke cheroots,” I said, as I opened my cigar-case.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I do,” Miss Penny replied. She looked sharply round the restaurant. “I must just see if there are any of those horrible little gossip paragraphers here to-day. One doesn’t want to figure in the social and personal column to-morrow morning: ‘A fact which is not so generally known as it ought to be is, that Miss Penny, the well-known woman journalist, always ends her luncheon with a six-inch Burma cheroot. I saw her yesterday in a restaurant — not a hundred miles from Carmelite Street — smoking like a house on fire.’ You know the touch. But the coast seems to be clear, thank goodness.”
She took a cheroot from the case, lit it a
t my proffered match, and went on talking.
“Yes, it was young Kuno who did the converting. Sister Agatha was converted back into the worldly Melpomene Fugger she had been before she became the bride of holiness.”
“Melpomene Fugger?”
“That was her name. I had her history from my old doctor. He had seen all Grauburg, living and dying and propagating for generations. Melpomene Fugger why, he had brought little Melpel into the world, little Melpchen. Her father was Professor Fugger, the great Professor Fugger, the berümter Geolog. Oh, yes, of course, I know the name. So well.... He was the man who wrote the standard work on Lemuria — you know, the hypothetical continent where the lemurs come from. I showed due respect. Liberal-minded he was, a disciple of Herder, a world-burgher, as they beautifully call it over there. Anglophile, too, and always ate porridge for breakfast — up till August 1914. Then, the radiant morning of the fifth, he renounced it for ever, solemnly and with tears in his eyes. The national food of a people who had betrayed culture and civilisation — how could he go on eating it? It would stick in his throat. In future he would have a lightly boiled egg. He sounded, I thought, altogether charming. And his daughter, Melpomene — she sounded charming, too; and such thick, yellow pig-tails when she was young! Her mother was dead, and a sister of the great Professor’s ruled the house with an iron rod. Aunt Bertha was her name. Well, Melpomene grew up, very plump and appetising. When she was seventeen, something very odious and disagreeable happened to her. Even the doctor didn’t know exactly what it was; but he wouldn’t have been surprised if it had had something to do with the then Professor of Latin, an old friend of the family’s, who combined, it seems, great erudition with a horrid fondness for very young ladies.”
Miss Penny knocked half an inch of cigar ash into her empty glass.
“If I wrote short stories,” she went on reflectively “(but it’s too much bother), I should make this anecdote into a sort of potted life history, beginning with a scene immediately after this disagreeable event in Melpomene’s life. I see the scene so clearly. Poor little Melpel is leaning over the bastions of Grauburg Castle, weeping into the June night and the mulberry trees in the garden thirty feet below. She is besieged by the memory of what happened this dreadful afternoon. Professor Engelmann, her father’s old friend, with the magnificent red Assyrian beard.... Too awful — too awful! But then, as I was saying, short stones are really too much bother; or perhaps I’m too stupid to write them. I bequeath it to you. You know how to tick these things off.”
“You’re generous.”
“Not at all,” said Miss Penny. “My terms are ten per cent commission on the American sale. Incidentally there won’t be an American sale. Poor Melpchen’s history is not for the chaste public of Those States. But let me hear what you propose to do with Melpomene now you’ve got her on the castle bastions.”
“That’s simple,” I said. “I know all about German university towns and castles on hills. I shall make her look into the June night, as you suggest; into the violet night with its points of golden flame. There will be the black silhouette of the castle, with its sharp roofs and hooded turrets, behind her. From the hanging beer-gardens in the town below the voices of the students, singing in perfect four-part harmony, will float up through the dark-blue spaces. ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot’ and ‘Das Ringlein sprang in zwei’ — the heart-rendingly sweet old songs will make her cry all the more. Her tears will patter like rain among the leaves of the mulberry trees in the garden below. Does that seem to you adequate?”
“Very nice,” said Miss Penny. “But how are you going to bring the sex problem and all of its horrors into the landscape?”
“Well, let me think.” I called to memory those distant foreign summers when I was completing my education. “I know. I shall suddenly bring a swarm of moving candles and Chinese lanterns under the mulberry trees. You imagine the rich lights and shadows, the jewel-bright leafage, the faces and moving limbs of men and women, seen for an instant and gone again. They are students and girls of the town come out to dance, this windless, blue June night, under the mulberry trees. And now they begin, thumping round and round in a ring, to the music of their own singing.
“Wir können spielen
Vio-vio-vio-lin
Wir können spielen
Vi-o-lin
“Now the rhythm changes, quickens.
“Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara,
Bumstarara, Bumstarara,
Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara,
Bumstarara-rara.
“The dance becomes a rush, an elephantine prancing on the dry lawn under the mulberry trees. And from the bastion Melpomene looks down and perceives, suddenly and apocalyptically, that everything in the world is sex, sex, sex. Men and women, male and female — always the same, and all, in the light of the horror of the afternoon, disgusting. That’s how I should do it, Miss Penny.”
“And very nice, too. But I wish you could find a place to bring in my conversation with the doctor. I shall never forget the way he cleared his throat, and coughed before embarking on the delicate subject. ‘You may know, ahem, gracious Miss,’ he began— ‘you may know that religious phenomena are often, ahem, closely connected with sexual causes.’ I replied that I had heard rumours which might justify me in believing this to be true among Roman Catholics, but that in the Church of England — and I for one was a practitioner of Anglicanismus — it was very different. ‘That might be,’ said the doctor; he had had no opportunity in the course of his long medical career of personally studying Anglicanismus. But he could vouch for the fact that among his patients, here in Grauburg, mysticismus was very often mixed up with the Geschlechtsleben. Melpomene was a case in point. After that hateful afternoon she had become extremely religious; the Professor of Latin had diverted her emotions out of their normal channels. She rebelled against the placid Agnosticismus of her father, and at night, in secret, when Aunt Bertha’s dragon eyes were closed, she would read such forbidden books as The Life of St. Theresa, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Imitation of Christ, and the horribly enthralling Book of Martyrs. Aunt Bertha confiscated, these works whenever she came upon them; she considered them more pernicious than the novels of Marcel Prévost. The character of a good potential housewife might be completely undermined by reading of this kind. It was rather a relief for Melpomene when Aunt Bertha shuffled off, in the summer of 1911, this mortal coil. She was one of those indispensables of whom one makes the discovery, when they are gone, that one can get on quite as well without them. Poor Aunt Bertha!”
“One can imagine Melpomene trying to believe she was sorry, and horribly ashamed to find that she was really, in secret, almost glad.” The suggestion seemed to me ingenious, but Miss Penny accepted it as obvious.
“Precisely,” she said; “and the emotion would only further confirm and give new force to the tendencies which her aunt’s death left her free to indulge as much as she liked. Remorse, contrition — they would lead to the idea of doing penance. And for one who was now wallowing in the martyrology, penance was the mortification of the flesh. She used to kneel for hours, at night, in the cold; she ate too little, and when her teeth ached, which they often did, — for she had a set, the doctor told me, which had given trouble from the very first, — she would not go and see the dentist, but lay awake at night, savouring to the full her excruciations, and feeling triumphantly that they must, in some strange way, be pleasing to the Mysterious Powers. She went on like that for two or three years, till she was poisoned through and through. In the end she went down with gastric ulcer. It was three months before she came out of hospital, well for the first time in a long space of years, and with a brand new set of imperishable teeth, all gold and ivory. And in mind, too, she was changed — for the better, I suppose. The nuns who nursed her had made her see that in mortifying herself she had acted supererogatively and through spiritual pride; instead of doing right, she had sinned. The only road to salvation, they told her, lay
in discipline, in the orderliness of established religion, in obedience to authority. Secretly, so as not to distress her poor father, whose Agnosticismus was extremely dogmatic, for all its unobtrusiveness, Melpomene became a Roman Catholic. She was twenty-two. Only a few months later came the war and Professor Fugger’s eternal renunciation of porridge. He did not long survive the making of that patriotic gesture. In the autumn of 1914 he caught a fatal influenza. Melpomene was alone in the world. In the spring of 1915 there was a new and very conscientious Sister of Charity at work among the wounded, in the hospital of Grauburg. Here,” explained Miss Penny, jabbing the air with her forefinger, “you put a line of asterisks or dots to signify a six years’ gulf in the narrative. And you begin again right in the middle of a dialogue between Sister Agatha and the newly convalescent Kuno.”
“What’s their dialogue to be about?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s easy enough,” said Miss Penny. “Almost anything would do. What about this, for example? You explain that the fever has just abated; for the first time for days the young man is fully conscious. He feels himself to be well, reborn, as it were, in a new world — a world so bright and novel and jolly that he can’t help laughing at the sight of it. He looks about him; the flies on the ceiling strike him as being extremely comic. How do they manage to walk upside down? They have suckers on their feet, says Sister Agatha, and wonders if her natural history is quite sound. Suckers on their feet — ha, ha! What an uproarious notion! Suckers on their feet — that’s good, that’s damned good! You can say charming, pathetic, positively tender things about the irrelevant mirth of convalescents the more so in this particular case, where the mirth is expressed by a young man who is to be taken back to jail as soon as he can stand firmly on his legs. Ha, ha! Laugh on, unhappy boy. It is the quacking of the Fates, the Parcæ, the Norns!”