Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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She did her best, as Catherine had said, to be very ‘modern’ about it I saw her a few days later at one of Rodney’s parties, she was smoking a great many cigarettes, drinking glass after glass of white wine and talking more wildly than ever. Her dress was a close-fitting sheath of silver tissue, designed so as to make the wearer look almost naked. Fatigued with sleeplessness, her eyes were circled with dark, bruise-coloured rings, seen in conjunction with the bright, unnatural red of her rouged cheeks and lips, these dark circles looked as though they had been painted on with a fard, to heighten the brilliance of the eyes, to hint provocatively at voluptuous fatigues and amorous vigils. She was having a great success and her admirers had never been more numerous. She flirted outrageously with all of them. Even when she was talking with me, she seemed to find it necessary to shoot languorous sidelong glances, to lean towards me, as though offering her whole person to my desires. But looking at her, I could see, under the fard, only the face of the nice but rather ugly little girl, it seemed, I thought, more than usually pathetic.
Rodney sat down at the table to do his usual non-stop drawing ‘What shall it be?’ he asked.
‘Draw Jupiter and all his mistresses,’ cried Grace, who was beginning to be rather tipsy ‘Europa and Leda and Semele and Danae,’ she dapped her hands at each name, ‘and Io and Clio and Dio and Scio and Fi-fio and O-my-Eyeo.
The jest was not a very good one. But as most of Rodney’s guests had drunk a good deal of wine and all were more or less intoxicated by the convivial atmosphere of a successful party, there was a general laugh Grace began to laugh too, almost hysterically. It was a long time before she could control herself.
Rodney, who had made no preparations for improvising a picture of Jove’s mistresses, found an excuse for rejecting the suggestion. He ended by drawing Mrs Eddy pursued by a satyr.
Deserted by Rodney, Grace tried to pretend that it was she who was the deserter. The role of the capricious wanton seemed to her more in harmony with the Rodneyan conception of the eternal feminine as well as less humiliating than that of the victim. Provocatively, promiscuously, she flirted. In those first days of her despair she would, I believe, have accepted the advances of almost any tolerably presentable man. Masterman, for example, or Gane the journalist, or Levitski — it was one of those three, I surmised, judging by what I saw at the party, who would succeed to Rodney’s felicity, and that very soon.
The day after the party, Grace paid another visit to Catherine. She brought a small powder-puff as a present. In return, she asked, though not in so many words, for comfort, advice, and above all for approval. In a crisis, on the spur of the moment, Grace could be rashly and unreflectingly impulsive, but when there was time to think, when it was a question of deliberately planning she was timorous, she hated to stand alone and take responsibilities. She liked to know that the part in which she saw herself was approved of by some trustworthy judge. The powder-puff was a bribe and an argument, an argument in favour of the eternal feminine, with all that that connoted, a bribe for the judge, an appeal to her affection, that she might approve of Grace’s sentiments and conduct Grace put her case ‘The mistake people make,’ she said, ’is getting involved, like the man on the music-halls who does that turn with the fly-paper I refuse to be involved, that’s my principle I think one ought to be heartless and just amuse oneself, that’s all. Not worry about anything else.’
‘But do you think one can really be amused if one doesn’t worry and takes things heartlessly?’ asked Catherine. ‘Really amused, I mean. Happy, if you’ll permit me to use an old-fashioned word. Can one be happy?’ She thought of Levitski, of Gane and Masterman.
Grace was silent, perhaps she too was thinking of them. Then, making an effort, ‘Yes, yes,’ she said with a kind of obstinate, determined gaiety, ‘one can, of course one can.’
I was at the Queen’s Hall that afternoon. Coming out, when the concert was over, I caught sight of Kingham in the issuing crowd.
‘Come home for a late cup of tea and stay to dinner.’
‘All right,’ he said.
We climbed on to a bus and rode westward. The sun had just set. Low down in the sky in front of us there were streaks of black and orange cloud, and above them a pale, watery-green expanse, limpid and calm up to the zenith. We rode for some time in silence, watching the lovely death of yet another of our days.
‘It’s all very well,’ said Kingham at last, indicating these western serenities with a gesture of his fine, expressive hand, ‘it’s all very well, no doubt, for tired business men. Gives them comfort, I dare say, makes them feel agreeably repentant for the swindles they’ve committed during the day, and all that. Oh, it’s full of uplift, I’ve no doubt. But I don’t happen to be a tired business man. It just makes me sick.’
‘Come, come,’ I protested. He wouldn’t listen to me ‘I won’t have Gray’s ‘Elegy’ rammed down my throat,’ he said ‘What I feel like is. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, or Zarathustra, or the Chants de Maldoror.’
‘Well, all that I can suggest’ (I suggested it mildly) ’is that you should travel inside the bus and not look at the sunset.’
‘Ass!’ he said contemptuously. We came in, to find Grace still sitting there, over the tea-cups, with Catherine I was annoyed, still, there was nothing to be done about it I introduced Kingham All unconsciously, I was playing Pandarus for the second time.
My sources for the history of Grace’s second love affair are tolerably copious. To begin with, I had opportunities of personally observing it, during a considerable part of its duration I heard much, too, from Kingham himself. For Kingham was not at all a discreet lover. He was as little capable of being secretive about this class of experiences as about any other. He simply had to talk. Talking renewed and multiplied the emotions which he described. Talk even created new emotions — emotions which he had not felt at the time but which it occurred to him, when he was describing the scene, to think that he ought to have felt. He had no scruples about projecting these sentiments d’ escalier backwards, anachronistically, into his past experience, falsifying history for the sake of future drama. To his memories of a scene with Grace he would add emotional complications, so that the next scene might be livelier. It was in the heat of talk that his finest emendations of history occurred to him. The genuine, or at any rate the on the whole more genuine, story came to me through Catherine from Grace. It was to Catherine that, in moments of crisis (and this particular love affair was almost uninterruptedly a crisis) Grace came for solace and counsel.
The affair began with a misunderstanding. No sooner had Kingham entered the room than Grace, who had been talking quite simply and naturally with Catherine, put on her brazen ‘modern’ manner of the party and began with a kind of desperate recklessness to demand the attention and provoke the desires of the newcomer. She knew Kingham’s name, of course, and all about him. In Rodney’s circle it was admitted, albeit with some reluctance, that the man had talent, but he was deplored as a barbarian.
‘He’s one of those tiresome people.’ I once heard Rodney complain, ‘who will talk about their soul — and your soul, which is almost worse. Terribly Salvation Army. One wouldn’t be surprised to see him on Sundays in Hyde Park telling people what they ought to do to be saved.’
At the sight of him, Grace had felt, no doubt, that it would be amusing to bring this curious wild animal to heel and make it do tricks (It did not occur to her that it might be she who would be doing the tricks ) Kingham was a quarry worthy of any huntswoman. Still, I believe that she would have flirted as outrageously with almost any stranger. This provocative attitude of hers — an attitude which might be described as one of chronic and universal unfaithfulness — was her retort to unkind fate and unfaithful Rodney. She wanted to capture a new lover — several lovers, even — in order to prove to Rodney, to the world at large and above all, surely, to herself, that she was modern, knew how to take love lightly and gaily, as the most exquisite of entertainments, and that, in a
word, she didn’t care a pin. In another woman, this promiscuous flirtatiousness might have been distasteful, detestable even. But there was, in Grace, a certain fundamental innocence that rendered what ought, by all the rules, to have been the most reprehensible of actions entirely harmless. Text-book moralists would have called her bad, when in fact she was merely pathetic and a trifle comic. The text-books assign to every action its place in the moral hierarchy, the text-book moralists judge men exclusively by their actions. The method is crude and unscientific. For in reality certain characters have power to sterilize a dirty action, certain others infect and gangrene actions which, according to the book, should be regarded as clean. The harshest judges are those who have been so deeply hypnotized by the spell of the text-book’ words, that they have become quite insensitive to reality. They can think only of words —
‘purity,’ ‘vice,’ ‘depravity,’ ‘duty’, the existence of men and women escapes their notice.
Grace, as I have said, possessed an innocence which made nonsense of all the words which might have been used to describe her actions. To any one but a text-book theorist it was obvious that the actions hardly mattered, her innocence remained intact. It was this same innocence which enabled her to give utterance — with perfect unconcern and a complete absence of daring affectation — to those scabrous sentiments, those more than scientific expressions which were almost de rigueur in the conversation of Rodney’s circle. In a foreign language one can talk of subjects, one can unconcernedly use words, the uttering, the mention of which in one’s native idiom would horribly embarrass. For Grace, all these words, the most genuinely. Old English, all these themes, however intimately connected by gossip with the names of known men and women, were foreign and remote. Even the universal language of coquettish gestures was foreign to her, she acted its provocations and innuendoes with a frankness which would have been shameless, if she had really known what they meant Kingham entered the room, she turned on him at once all her batteries of looks and smiles — a bombardment of provocations I knew Grace so well that, in my eyes, the performance seemed merely absurd. These smiles, these sidelong glances and flutteringly dropped eyelids, this teasing mockery by which she!nitated Kingham into paying attention to her, struck me as wholly uncharacteristic of Grace and therefore ridiculous — above all, unconvincing. Yes, unconvincing I could not believe that any one could fail to see what Grace was really like. Was it possible that Kingham didn’t realize just as well as I did that she was, in spirit, as in features, just a nice little girl, pretending without much success — particularly in this rôle — to be grown up?
It seemed to me incredible. But Kingham was certainly taken in. He accepted her at her face value of this particular moment — as an aristocratically reckless hedonist in wanton search of amusement, pleasure, excitement, and power. To the dangerous siren he took her to be, Kingham reacted with a mixed emotion that was half angry contempt, half amorous curiosity. On principle, Kingham violently disapproved of professional femmes fatales, sirens, vampires — all women, in fact, who make love and the subjugation of lovers the principal occupation of their lives. He thought it outrageous that self-respecting and useful men should suddenly find themselves at the mercy of these dangerous and irresponsible beings. What perhaps increased his moral indignation was the fact that he himself was constantly falling a victim to them. Youth, vitality, strong personality, frank and unbridled vice had irresistible attractions for him. He was drawn sometimes to the vulgarest possessors of these characteristics. He felt it an indignity, a humiliation (and yet, who knows? perhaps with Kingham this sense of humiliation was only another attraction), but he was none the less unfailingly drawn. He resisted, but never quite firmly enough (that, after all, would have spoiled all the fun) He resisted, succumbed and was subjected. But it must be admitted that his love, however abject it might be in the first moment of his surrender, was generally a vengeance in itself Kingham might suffer, but he contrived in most cases to inflict as much suffering as he received. And while he, with a part of his spirit at any rate, actually enjoyed pain, however acutely and genuinely felt, the tormentors whom he in his turn tormented were mostly quite normal young women with no taste for the pleasures of suffering. He got the best of it, but he regarded himself, none the less, as the victim, and was consequently in a chronic state of moral indignation.
This first meeting convinced Kingham that Grace was the sort of woman she wanted to persuade him (not to mention herself) that she was — a vampire. — Like many persons of weak character and lacking in self-reliance, Grace was often extraordinarily reckless. Passive generally and acquiescent, she sometimes committed herself wildly to the most extravagant courses of action — not from any principle of decision, but because, precisely, she did not know what decision was, because she lacked the sense of responsibility, and was incapable of realizing the irrevocable nature of an act. She imagined that she could do things irresponsibly and without committing herself, and feeling no inward sense of commitment, she would embark on courses of action which — externalized and become a part of the great machine of the world — dragged her, sometimes reluctant, sometimes willing, but always ingenuously surprised, into situations the most bewilderingly unexpected. It was this irresponsible impulsiveness of a character lacking the power of making deliberate decisions (this coupled with her fatal capacity for seeing herself in any rôle that seemed, at the moment, attractive) that had made her at one moment a socialist canvasser at the municipal elections, at another, an occasional opium smoker in that sordid and dangerous den near the Commercial Docks which Tim Masterman used to frequent, at another, though she was terrified of horses, a rider to hounds, and at yet another — to her infinite distress, but having light-heartedly insisted that she didn’t know what modesty was, she couldn’t draw back — the model for one of Levitski’s nudes. And if she now threw herself at Kingham’s head (just as, a few nights before, she had thrown herself at Masterman’s, at Gane’s, at Levitski’s), it was irresponsibly, without considering what might be the results of her action, without even fully realizing that there would be any results at all. True, she saw herself as a ‘modern’ young woman, and her abandonment by Rodney had made her anxious, for the mere saving of her face, to capture a new lover, quickly. And yet it would be wrong to say that she had decided to employ coquettish provocations in order to get what she wanted. She had not decided anything, for decision is deliberate and the fruit of calculation. She was just wildly indulging in action, in precisely the same way as she indulged in random speech, without thinking of what the deeds or the words committed her to. But whereas logical inconsistencies matter extremely little and false intellectual positions can easily be abandoned, the effects of action or of words leading to action are not so negligible. For action commits what is much more important than the intellect — the body. To get the bodily self out of a false position is a difficult and often painful business Grace, the indecisive, the all too easily and lightly moved to action, had often found it so to her cost. But that did not prevent her from repeating her mistake. Experience never does Kingham, as I have said, took her for what she irresponsibly wanted him to believe she was. He was duly provoked by what had been meant to be provocative. To this sort of amorous teasing he was extraordinarily susceptible. So much so, indeed, that his interest in Grace was no great tribute to her style. It was enough that a woman should exhibit a certain lively, vampirish interest in him, Kingham was almost certain to succumb to the attack I remember one occasion in Paris when he was positively swept off his feet by the shrill, metallic sallies of an American chorus-girl from the Folies Bergères.
This first impression of Grace — as a ‘modern,’ dangerously provocative, actively wanton vampire — persisted in Kingham’s mind and no evidence to the contrary could obliterate it. In the course of their first meeting, he had taken up his emotional attitude towards her, and the attitude once taken, he would not shift his ground, however palpable the proofs that he was wrong. Whether
he ceased to be able to use his intelligence and became incapable of recognizing the facts that would have upset his prejudices, or whether he deliberately shut his eyes to what he did not wish to see, I do not exactly know. A powerful emotion had the double effect, I surmise, of rendering him at one and the same time stupid and most ingeniously perverse.
‘I think there’s something really devilish about the women of this generation,’ he said to me, in his intense, emphatic way, some two or three days later ‘Something devilish,’ he repeated, ‘really devilish.’ It was a trick of his, in writing as well as in speech, to get hold of a word and, if he liked the sound of it, work it to death I laughed ‘Oh, come,’ I protested ‘Do you find Catherine, for example, so specially diabolic?’
‘She isn’t of this generation,’ Kingham answered ‘Spiritually, she doesn’t belong to it.’
I laughed again, it was always difficult arguing with Kingham You might think you had him cornered you raised your logical cudgel to smash him. But while you were bringing it down, he darted out from beneath the stroke through some little trap door of his own discovery, clean out of the argument. It was impossible to prove him in the wrong, for the simple reason that he never remained long enough in any one intellectual position to be proved anything.
‘No, not Catherine,’ he went on, after a little pause ‘I was thinking of that Peddley woman.’
‘Grace?’ I asked in some astonishment ‘Grace devilish?’
He nodded ‘Devilish,’ he repeated with conviction. The word, I could see, had acquired an enormous significance for him. It was the core round which, at the moment, all his thoughts and feelings were crystallizing. All his universe was arranging itself in patterns round the word ‘devilish,’ round the idea of devilishness in general, and Grace’s devilishness in particular.