Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Herbert Comfrey was above all a sticking bore. He attached himself to any one who had the misfortune to come in contact with him; attached himself and could not be shaken off. A burr-bore, vegetable and passive; not actively penetrating. For Herbert, providentially, was not particularly talkative; he was too lazy and lymphatic for that. He was just exceedingly sociable, like a large sentimental dog that cannot bear to be left alone. Like a dog, he followed people about; he lay, metaphorically speaking, at their feet in front of the fire. And like a dog, he did not talk. It was just your company that made him happy; he was quite content if he might trot at your side or doze under your chair. He did not demand that you should pay much attention to him; all that he asked was to be permitted to enjoy the light of your countenance and bask in the warmth of your presence. If once a week he got the equivalent of a pat on the head and a ‘Good dog, Herbert,’ he wagged his spirit’s tail and was perfectly happy.
To some of my friends — the quick, the impatient, the highly strung — poor vegetable Herbert was exasperating to the point of madness. His very virtues — that good nature of his, that placidity, that unshakable fidelity — infuriated them. Even his appearance drove them wild. The sight of his broad smiling face, of his big, lazy, dubberly body and limbs was alone sufficient to set their nerves twittering and jumping like a frightened avary. I have known people who, after living in the same house with Herbert for three days, have secretly packed their trunks, caught the first convenient train, and, leaving no address, nave travelled hundreds of miles in order to escape from him.
To me, poor Herbert was boring indeed, but not exasperatingly or intolerably so. Mine is a patient temper, my nerves are not easily set twittering. I even liked him in a way; he was such a good, faithful, kind old dog. And I soon acquired, in his dumb presence, a knack of quite ignoring him, of regarding him simply as a piece of furniture — so much so, that I sometimes caught myself on the point of carelessly setting down my emptied coffee-cup on his head as he sat on the floor beside me (he always sat on the floor whenever it was possible), or of flicking my cigarette ash into the inviting cranny between his neck and his coat collar.
As boys, Herbert and I had been at the same public school. But as we were in different houses and he was two years older than I (two years, at that age, is an enormous seniority), we had hardly ever spoken to one another. But none the less, it was on the strength of our old school that Herbert reintroduced himself into my life. His return was doubly disastrous. A bore entered my existence and, in the entering, drove out, temporarily at least, a being who, whatever his other qualities, was the very antithesis of boredom.
It was in a café of the Passage du Panorama in Paris that the thing happened. We had been sitting there for an hour, Kingham and. I, talking and drinking vermouth. It was characteristic of Kingham that he did most of both — drinking as well as talking. Characteristic, too, that he should have been abusing me, among many other things, for wasting my time and spirit in precisely these two occupations.
‘You sit about,’ he said, ‘letting every thought in your head trickle out uselessly in talk. Not that there are many thoughts, of course, because you daren’t think. You do anything not to think. You create futile business, you rush about seeing people you don’t like and don’t take the slightest interest in, you drift from bar to bar, you swill till you’re stupefied — all because you daren’t think and can’t bring yourself to make the effort to do something serious and decent. It’s the result partly of laziness, partly of lack of faith — faith in anything. Garçon!’ He ordered another vermouth. ‘It’s the great modern vice,’ he went on, ‘the great temptation of every young man or woman who’s intelligent and acutely conscious. Everything that’s easy and momentarily diverting and anaesthetic tempts — people, chatter, drink, fornication. Everything that’s difficult and big, everything that needs thought and effort, repels. It’s the war that did it. Not to mention the peace. But it would have come gradually in any case. Modern life was making it inevitable. Look at the young people who had nothing to do with the war — were only children when it happened — they’re the worst of all. It’s time to stop, it’s time to do something. Can’t you see that you can’t go on like this? Can’t you see?’
He leaned across the table at me, angrily. He hated these vices which he had attributed to me, hated them with a special fury because they happened really to be his. He was confessing the weakness he hated in himself — hated and could not eradicate.
Kingham looked handsome in anger. He had dark eyes, beautiful and very bright; his hair was dark brown, fine and plentiful: a close-cut beard, redder than his hair, disguised the lower part of his face, with whose pale, young smoothness it seemed curiously incongruous. There was a brilliancy, a vividness about him. If I were less slow to kindle, I should have burned responsively with his every ardour being what I am, I could always remain cool, critical, and cautious, however passionately he might burn. My uninflammableness, I believe, had somehow fascinated him. I exasperated him, but he continued to frequent my company — chiefly to abuse me, to tell me passionately how hopeless I was. I winced under these dissections; for though he often talked, as far as I was concerned, wildly at random (accusing me, as he-had done on this particular occasion, of the weakness which he felt and resented in himself), his analysis was often painfully exact and penetrating. I winced, but all the same I delighted in his company. We irritated one another profoundly; but we were friends.
I suppose I must have smiled at Kingham’s question. Goodness knows, I am no teetotaller, I am not averse to wasting my time over agreeable futilities. But compared with Kingham — particularly the Kingham of 1920 — I am a monument of industry, dutiful steadiness, sobriety. I take no credit to myself for it; I happen to be one of nature’s burgesses, that is all. I am as little capable of leading a perfectly disorderly life as I am of, shall we say, writing a good book. Kingham was born with both talents. Hence the absurdity, so far as I was concerned, of his hortatory question. I did not mean to smile, but some trace of my amusement must have appeared on my face, for Kingham suddenly became most passionately angry, ‘You think it’s a joke?’ he cried, and thumped the marble table. ‘I tell you, it’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. It’s unforgivable. It’s burying your talent. Damn this blasted Bible,’ he added with parenthetic fury. ‘Why is it that one can never talk about anything serious without getting mixed up in it?’
‘It happens to be quite a serious book.’ I suggested.
‘A lot you understand about it,’ said Kingham. ‘I tell you,’ he went on impressively.... But at this moment Herbert made his second entry into my life, I felt a hand laid on my shoulder, looked up, and saw a stranger, ‘Hullo, Wilkes,’ said the stranger. ‘You don’t remember me.’
I looked more attentively, and had to admit that I didn’t.
‘I am Comfrey,’ he explained, ‘Herbert Comfrey. I was at Dunhill’s, don’t you remember? You were at Struthers’, weren’t you? Or was it Lane’s?’
At the names of these pedagogues, who had figured so largely in my boyhood, recesses in my mind, long closed, suddenly burst open, as though before a magical word. Visions of inky schoolrooms, football fields, cricket fields, fives courts, the school chapel, rose up confusedly; and from the midst of this educational chaos there disengaged itself the loutish figure of Comfrey of Dunhill’s.
‘Of course,’ I said, and took him by the hand. Through the corner of my eye, I saw Kingham angrily frowning. ‘How did you remember me?’
‘Oh, I remember every one,’ he answered. It was no vain boast, as I afterwards discovered; he — did remember. He remembered every one he had ever met, and all the trivial incidents of his past life. He had the enormous memory of royal personages and family retainers — the memory of those who never read, or reason, or reflect, and whose minds are therefore wholly free to indulge in retrospect. ‘I never forget a face,’ he added, and without being invited, sat down at our table. indignantly, Kingham threw him
self back in his chair. He kicked me under the table. I looked at him and made a little grimace, signifying my helplessness.
I mumbled a perfunctory introduction. Kingham said nothing, only frowned more blackly, as he shook hands with Herbert. And for his part, Herbert was hardly more cordial. True, he smiled his amiable dim smile; but he said nothing, he hardly even looked at Kingham. He was in too much of a hurry to turn back to me and talk about the dear old school. The dear old school — it was the only subject that ever made Herbert really loquacious. It metamorphosed him from a merely vegetable burr-bore into an active, piercing dentist’s drill of tediousness. He had a passion for the school, and thought that all ex-members of it ought to be in constant and friendly communication with one another. I have noticed that, as a general rule, people of decided individuality very rarely continue their schoolboy acquaintanceships into later life. It is only to be expected. The chances that they will have found in the tiny microcosm of school the sort of friends they will like when they are grown up — grown out of recognition — are obviously very small. Coteries whose bond of union consists in the fact that their component members happened to be at the same school at the same time are generally the dreariest of assemblages. It could scarcely be otherwise; men who have no better reasons for associating with one another must be colourless indeed, and insipid. Poor Herbert, who regarded the accident of our having worn similarly striped caps and blazers at a certain period of our boyhood as being a sufficient reason for our entering into a bosom friendship, was only an extreme specimen of the type.
I put on my chilliest and most repellant manner. But in vain. Herbert talked and talked. Did I remember the exciting match against Winchester in 1910? And how poor old Mr. Cutler had been ragged? And that memorable occasion when Pye had climbed on to the roof of the school chapel, at night, and hung a chamber-pot on one of the Gothic pinnacles? Anxiously, I looked towards Kingham. He had exchanged his expression of anger for one of contempt, and was leaning back, his eyes shut, tilting his chair.
Kingham had never been to a public school. He had not had the luck (or the misfortune) to be born a hereditary, professional gentleman. He was proud of the fact, he sometimes even boasted of it. But that did not prevent him from being morbidly sensitive to anything that might be interpreted as a reference to his origin. He was always on the look-out for insults from ‘gentlemen,’ Veiled insults, insults offered unconsciously even, unintentionally, in perfect ignorance — any sort of insult was enough to set him quivering with pain and fury. More than once I had seen him take violent offence at words that were entirely well-intentioned. Would he regard Herbert’s dreary recollections of the dear old school as an insult? He was quite capable of it. I looked forward nervously to an outburst and a violent exit. But the scene, this time, was not to be acted in public. After listening for a few minutes to Herbert’s anecdotage, Kingham got up, excused himself with ironical politeness, and bade us good evening I laid my hand on his arm.
‘Do stay.’
‘A thousand regrets ‘; he laid his hand on his heart, smiled, bowed, and was gone, leaving me (I may add parenthetically that it was his habit) to pay for his drinks.
We public school men were left to ourselves.
The next morning I lay late in bed. At about eleven o’clock Kingham burst into my room. The scene which I had been spared the night before was enacted for me now with redoubled passion. Another man would have slept on the supposed insult and, waking, have found it negligible. Not so Kingham. He had brooded over his wrongs, till what was originally small had grown enormous. The truth was that Kingham liked scenes. He loved to flounder in emotion — his own and other people’s. He was exhilarated by these baths of passion; he felt that he really lived, that he was more than a man, while he splashed about in them. And the intoxication was so delicious that he indulged in it without considering the consequences — or perhaps it would be truer to say that he considered the consequences (for intellectually no man could be clearer-sighted than Kingham) but deliberately ignored them.
When I say that he had a great facility for making scenes, I do not mean to imply that he ever simulated an emotion. He felt genuinely about things — genuinely and strongly, but too easily. And he took pleasure in cultivating and working up his emotions. For instance, what in other men would have been a passing irritation, held in check by self-control, to be modified very likely by subsequent impressions, was converted by Kingham, almost deliberately, into a wild fury which no second thoughts were allowed to assuage. Often these passions were the result of mere mistakes on the part of those who had provoked them. But once emotionally committed, Kingham would never admit a mistake — unless, of course, his passion for self-humiliation happened at the moment to be stronger than his passion for self-assertion. Often, too, he would take up unchanging emotional attitudes towards people. A single powerful impression would be allowed to dominate all other impressions. His intellect was put into blinkers, the most manifest facts were ignored; and until further orders the individual in question produced in Kingham only one particular set of reactions.
As he approached my bed. I could see from the expression on his white face that I was in for a bad quarter of an hour.
‘Well?’ I said, with an affectation of careless cordiality., ‘I always knew you were an intellectual snob,’ Kingham began in a low, intense voice, drawing up a chair to my bedside as he spoke. ‘But really, I thought you were above being an ordinary, suburban, lower middle-class social snob.’
I made the grimace which in French novels is represented by the sign ‘ — ?’
‘I know that my father was a plumber,’ he went on, ‘and that I was educated at the expense of the State and by scholarships for the encouragement of clever paupers. I know I speak Cockney, and not Eton and Oxford. I know that my manners are bad and that I eat dirtily, and that I don’t wash my teeth enough.’ (None of these things were true; but it suited Kingham, at the moment, to believe that they were. He wanted to feel abased, in order that he might react with greater violence. He insulted himself in order that he might attribute the insults, under which he genuinely winced, to me, and so have an excuse for being angry with me.) ‘I know I’m a cad and a little bounder.’ He spoke the words with an extraordinary gusto, as though he enjoyed the pain he was inflicting on himself. ‘I know I’m an outsider, only tolerated for my cleverness. A sort of buffoon or tame monkey for the amusement of cultured gentlemen. I know all this, and I know you knew it. But I really thought you didn’t mind, that we met as human beings, not as specimens of upper and lower classes. I was fool enough to imagine that you liked me in spite of it all. I thought you even preferred me to the people in your own herd. It only shows what an innocent I am. No sooner does a gentleman come along, an old school chum, what?’ (derisively he assumed the public school accent as rendered on the music hall stage) ‘than you fling your arms round his neck and leave the dirty little outsider very definitely outside.’ He laughed ferociously.
‘My good Kingham,’ I began, ‘why will you make a bloody fool of yourself?’
But Kingham, who doubtless knew as well as I did that he was making a fool of himself, only went on with the process more vehemently. He was committed to making a fool of himself, and he liked it. Shifting his ground a little, he began telling me home truths — real home truths this time. In the end, I too began to get angry.
‘I’ll trouble you to get out,’ I said.
‘Oh, I’ve not finished yet.’
‘And stay out till you’ve got over your fit of hysterics. You’re behaving like a girl who needs a husband.’
‘As I was saying,’ Kingham went on in a voice that had become softer, more sinisterly quiet, more poisonously honied in proportion as mine had grown louder and harsher, ‘your great defect is spiritual impotence. Your morality, your art — they’re just impotence organized into systems. Your whole view of life — impotence again. Your very strength, such as it is — your horrible passive resistance — that’s
based in impotence too.’
‘Which won’t prevent me from throwing you downstairs if you don’t clear out at once.’ It is one thing to know the truth about oneself; it is quite another thing to have it told one by somebody else. I knew myself a natural bourgeois; but when Kingham told me so — and in his words — it seemed to me that I was learning a new and horribly unpleasant truth.
‘Wait,’ Kingham drawled out with exasperating calm, ‘wait one moment. One more word before I go.’
‘Get out,’ I said. ‘Get out at once.’
There was a knock at the door. It opened. The large, ruddy face of Herbert Comfrey looked round it into the room.
‘ I hope I don’t disturb,’ said Herbert, grinning at us.
‘Oh, not a bit, not a bit,’ cried Kingham. He jumped up, and with an excessive politeness proffered his vacant chair. ‘I was just going. Do sit down. Wilkes was impatiently expecting you. Sit down, do sit down.’ He propelled Herbert towards the chair.
‘Really,’ Herbert began, politely protesting. But Kingham cut him short. ‘And now I leave you two old friends together,’ he said. ‘Good-bye. Good-bye. I’m only sorry I shan’t have an opportunity for saying that last word I wanted to say.’
Cumbrously, Herbert made as though to get up. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I had no idea.... I’m so sorry.’
But Kingham put his hands on his shoulders and forced him back into the chair. ‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘Stay where you are. I’m off.’ And picking up his hat, he ran out of the room.
‘Queer fellow,’ said Herbert. ‘Who is he?’ ‘Oh, a friend of mine,’ I answered. My anger had dropped, and I wondered, sadly, whether in calling him a friend I was telling the truth. And to think that, if he were no longer my friend, it was because of this lumpish imbecile sitting by my bed! I looked at Herbert pensively. He smiled at me — a smile that was all good nature. One could not bear a grudge against such a man.