Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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I protested ‘Of all the un-devilish people I’ve ever known,’ I said, ‘Grace seems to me the most superlatively so.’
‘You don’t know her,’ he retorted.
‘But I’ve known her for years’
‘Not really known,’ insisted Kingham, diving through another of his little trap doors out of the argument— ‘You’ve never inspired her with one of her devilish concupiscences.’ (I thought of Grace and could not help smiling, the smile exasperated Kingham ) ‘Grin away,’ he said ‘Imagine you’re omniscient, if it gives you any pleasure. All I say is this she’s never tried to hunt you down.’
‘I suppose you mean that she was rather stupidly flirtatious the other evening,’ I said Kingham nodded ‘It was devilish,’ he said softly, more for himself than for me ‘Devilish concupiscence.’
‘But I assure you,’ I went on, ‘that business the other night was all mere silliness. She’s childish, not devilish. She still sees herself in terms of Rodney Clegg, that’s all. And she wants to pretend, now that he’s deserted her, that she doesn’t care I’m not sure, indeed, that she doesn’t want to make us believe that it was she who deserted him. That’s why she wants to get hold of another lover quickly — for the sake of her prestige. But as for devilishness — why, the idea’s simply absurd. She isn’t definite enough to be a devil. She’s just what circumstances and her imagination and other people happen to make her. A child, that’s all.’
‘You may think you know her,’ Kingham persisted obstinately, ‘but you don’t. How can you, if you’ve never been hunted by her?’ ( Bosh!’ I said impatiently ‘I tell you she’s devilish,’ he insisted.
‘Then why on earth did you accept her invitation to lunch with such alacrity?’
‘There are things that are unescapable, he answered oracularly.’
‘I give you up,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. The man exasperated me ‘The best thing you can do, I added, ’is to go to your devil and be damned as quickly as possible’
‘That’s exactly where I am going,’ he said. And as though I had reminded him of an appointment, Kingham looked at his watch ‘And by God,’ he added, in a different voice, ‘I shall have to take a taxi, if I’m to get there in time.’
Kingham looked deeply put out, for he hated parting with money unnecessarily. He was tolerably well off now, but he still preserved the habits of prudence, almost of avarice, which he had acquired, painfully, in the days of his lower middle class boyhood and his poverty-stricken literary novitiate. He had asked Grace to dine with him in Soho, that had already cost him an effort. And now he was going to be compelled to take a taxi, so as to be in time to pay for the dinner. The thought of it made him suffer. And suffering for her sake, suffering a mean, unavowable pain for which he could not hope to get any sympathy, even his own, he found the ultimate cause of it, Grace, all the more devilish ‘Unescapable,’ he repeated, still frowning, as he put on his hat to go. There was an expression positively of ferocity on his face ‘‘Unescapable’ He turned and left me ‘Poor Grace’.
‘I was thinking, as I closed the front door and walked back to my study. It was just as unescapable for her as for Kingham And I knew Kingham, my sympathies were all with Grace.
I was quite right, as it turned out, in according my sympathies as I did. For if any one ever needed, ever deserved sympathy, it was poor Grace, during those deplorable months of 1922 She fell in love with Kingham — fell in love, though it was the third time she had given herself, for the first, the very first time in her life, painfully, desperately, insanely. She had proposed to herself a repetition of her affair with Rodney. It was to be all charmingly perverse dalliances, with champagne and sandwiches and lightly tender conversation in the intervals, and exquisite little letters in the dix-huiîème manner, and evening parties, and amusing escapades. That was what it had been with Rodney. He made this kind of love, it must be admitted, with real style, it was charming Grace imagined that she would make it in just the same way with Rodney’s successor. And so she might have, more or less, if the successor had been Levitski, or Masterman, or Gane. But the successor was Kingham The choice was fatal, but the worst results of it might have been avoided if she had not loved him. Unloving, she might simply have left him when he made things too insupportable. But she did love him and, in love, she was utterly at his mercy Kingham had said that the thing was unescapable, and if for him it was so, that was due to the need he perversely felt of giving himself over periodically to strong emotions, the need of being humiliated and humiliating, of suffering and making other people suffer. What he had always loved was the passion itself, not the women who were the cause or excuse of it. These occasional orgies of passion were necessary to him, just as the periodical drinking bout is necessary to the dipsomaniac. After a certain amount of indulgence, the need was satisfied and he felt quite free to detach himself from the lover who had been dear to him only as the stimulator of his emotions, not for her own sake Kingham could satisfy his craving, it was an appetite that could be quenched by indulgence. But Grace’s desire was one of those desperate, hopeless desires that can only be assuaged by a kind of miracle. What she desired was nothing less than to unite herself wholly with another being, to know him through and through and to be made free of all his secrets. Only the all but miraculous meeting of two equal loves, two equally confiding temperaments can bring fulfilment to that longing. There was no such meeting here.
Kingham made a habit of telling all his acquaintances, sooner or later, what he thought of them — which was invariably disagreeable. He called this process a ‘clearing of the atmosphere’ But in point of fact, it never cleared anything, it obscured and made turbid, it created thunder in clear skies Kingham might not admit the fact, but this was, none the less, precisely what he intended should happen. Clear skies bored him, he enjoyed storms. But always, when he had succeeded in provoking a storm, he expressed a genuine astonishment at the inability of the world at large to tolerate frankness, however sincere, however manifestly for its own good. Hurt by his brutally plain speaking, his old friends were reproached for being hurt. Few of Kingham’s loves or friendships had long survived the effects of his frankness. The affair with Grace was one of the exceptions. From the very beginning, Kingham had found it necessary to ‘clear the atmosphere ‘Even at their first meeting, in our house, he was rather rude. Later on, he developed into a kind of Timon of Athens. Her frivolity, her voluptuary’s philosophy of life, her heartlessness, her ‘devilish concupiscence’ — these were the characteristics about which he told her, with all the concentrated passion of which he was capable, what he indignantly thought I met him again, at the Queen’s Hall, on the day after his dinner in Soho.
‘I told her what I thought of her,’ he let me know.
‘ And what did she think about what you thought?’ I asked Kingham frowned ‘She seemed to be rather pleased than otherwise,’ he answered ‘That’s the devilish strength of these women. They simply glory in the things they ought to be ashamed of. It makes them impervious to anything decent. Impervious, and therefore utterly ruthless and unscrupulous.’
‘How incorrigibly romantic you are!’ I mocked at him.
Told — and very mildly, after all — what I thought of him, Kingham winced like a stung house. Other people’s frankness hurt him just as much as his hurt other people, perhaps more. The only difference was that he enjoyed being hurt.
‘What nonsense!’ he began indignantly. His retort lasted as long as the interval and was only drowned by the first blaring chords of the Meistersinger overture. Bottled up within compulsory silence, what were his emotions? It amused me to speculate. Various, emphatic, tirelessly unflagging and working themselves up into ever more and more clotted complications — were they not the spiritual counterpart of this music to which we were now listening? When the Wagnerian tumult was over, Kingham continued his interrupted protest ‘She seemed to be rather pleased’ That, according to Kingham, had been Grace’s reaction to his home truths I
felt sure, on reflection, that he had observed her rightly. For Grace still saw herself in terms of Rodneyism — as ‘modern’ and ‘eighteenth-century’ (curious how these terms have come to be largely interchangeable) and what Rodney imagined to be ‘eternally feminine’ Of course she would be pleased at finding that Kingham had accepted her at her own valuation — and not only accepted her valuation but even voluntarily outbidden it by adding devilishness to the modernity, eighteenth-centuriness, and eternal femininity which she had modestly — too modestly, as she now perceived — attributed to herself. She took Kingham’s denunciations as compliments and smiled with unaffected pleasure when he talked to her of her vampire’s ruthlessness, when he reproached her with her devilish concupiscence for the shuddering souls as well as the less reluctant flesh of her victims. In Rodney’s circle a temperament was as much de rigueur as a train and ostrich feathers at Court Grace saw herself as a prodigy of temperament, but she liked to have this vision of herself confirmed by outside testimony Kingham’s home truths convinced her that she had seen herself correctly. The more abusive Kingham became, the better pleased she was and the more she liked him. She felt that he was really taking her seriously as a frivolous woman, that he was appreciating her as she deserved. His appreciation heightened her confidence and, under the ram of his anathemas, she played her part with an easier grace, a more stylish perfection. The spectacle of Grace impertinently blossoming under what had been meant to blast exasperated Kingham. He abused her more violently, and the greater his violence, the more serenely airy her eternal, modern, eighteenth-century femininity. Underneath, meanwhile, and almost unconsciously, Grace was falling in love with him I have seen Kingham in his relations with many men and women. To none of them was he merely indifferent. Either they detested him — and I have never known a man who had more and bitterer enemies — or else they loved him (Many of the lovers, I may add, turned subsequently into haters ) When I analyse my own feelings towards him, I am forced to the conclusion that I myself was in some manner in love with him. For why should I, who knew him so well and how insufferable he could be and, indeed, generally was, why should I have put up with him, in spite of everything? And why should I always have made such efforts to patch up all our incessant quarrels? Why shouldn’t I have allowed him to go to the devil, so far as I was concerned, a dozen times? or at least thankfully accepted the estrangement which followed our most violent squabble — the squabble over poor loutish Herbert — and allowed the separation to lengthen into permanency? The only explanation is that, like all those who did not loathe him, I was somehow in love with Kingham. He was in some way important for me, deeply significant and necessary. In his presence I felt that my being expanded. There was suddenly, so to speak, a high tide within me, along dry, sand-silted, desolate channels of my being life strongly, sparklingly flowed. And Kingham was the moon that drew it up across the desert. All those whom we find sympathetic exercise, in a greater or less degree, this moon-like influence upon us, drawing up the tides of life till they cover what had been, in an antipathetic environment, parched and dead. But there are certain individuals who, by their proximity, raise a higher tide, and in a vastly greater number of souls, than the ordinary man or woman. Kingham was one of these exceptional beings. To those who found him sympathetic he was more sympathetic than other and much more obviously amiable acquaintances. There was a glow, a vividness, a brilliance about the man. He could charm you even when he was saying things with which you disagreed, or doing things which you disapproved. Even his enemies admitted the existence and the power of this brilliant charm Catherine, who was not exactly an enemy, but who profoundly disliked his way of life and habits of mind, had to confess that, whenever he wanted and took the trouble to do so, he could silence, for the moment at any rate, all her prejudices and compel her, so long as he was actually there, in the room with her, to like him Grace started with no prejudices against him — no prejudices, beyond the opinion, inherited from Rodney, that the man was a savage, and savages, after all, are more attractive than repellant. She was suggestible and easily swayed by stronger and more definite personalities than her own. It was not surprising that she should succumb to his charm to the extent of first liking the man and soon wildly loving him.
It was some little time, however, before Grace discovered that she loved him. In the first days of their intimacy, she was too busy playing the modern part to realize that she felt so un-Rodneyan an emotion. Love, the real insane thing, was out of harmony with the character she had assumed. It needed a sudden, startling shock to make her understand what she felt for him, to make her, in the same moment, forget to be ‘modern’ and ‘feminine’ in Rodney’s sense of the terms, and become — what? I had meant to say ‘herself’ But after all, can one be said to be ‘oneself’ when one is being transfigured or dolorously distorted by love? In love, nobody is himself, or if you prefer, romantically, to put it the other way round, nobody is really himself when he is not in love. It comes to very much the same thing. The difference between Grace in love and Grace out of it seemed all the wider, because it was the difference between a Rodneyan eternal female and a woman, and a Kinghamized woman at that. For even in love, Grace saw herself in the part and saw herself, inevitably, in terms of her lover. Her Rodneyisms disappeared and were replaced by Kinghamisms. She saw herself no longer as a modern young aristocrat, but as the primevally ‘passional’ incarnation (‘passional’ was one of Kingham’s too favourite words) of her new lover’s feminine ideal. Their intimacy had lasted more than a month before Grace discovered the true nature of her feelings Kingham’s courtship had been unremitting Denunciations of her devilishness had alternated with appeals to her to become his mistress Grace took the denunciations as compliments and laughingly replied to them at random with any nonsense that came into her head. These airy irrelevant retorts of hers, which Rodney would have applauded as the height of modern wit, seemed to Kingham the very height of diabolism ‘She’s like Nero,’ he said to me one day, ‘fiddling over Rome’
He was Rome — the centre of the universe — in flames Grace, having kindled, watched him burn and, in the face of his destruction, talked nonsense. What was more, she would not quench his conflagration. In spite of the ‘devilish concupiscence,’ which Kingham had attributed to her, she refused, during the first five or six weeks of their acquaintance, to become his mistress. She had captivated Kingham, that was sufficient to restore her self-confidence and that fantastic image of herself, as a successful, modern siren, which Rodney’s desertion had temporarily shattered. To have tumbled into his arms at once might, perhaps, have been in the dix-huttième part, but a certain native modesty prevented Grace from being perfectly consistent Kingham regarded her refusal to capitulate immediately as yet another piece of devilishness, according to his theory, she was exercising an unnatural self-control merely in order to torment him. A perverse taste for cruelty was added to his list of accusations Grace was charmed by this soft impeachment Kingham’s attacks had seemed to her, so far, more amusing than painful, more complimentary than insulting. She was still protected by the armour of her indifference. The realization that she loved him was soon to strip her of that armour, and with every increase of that love, her naked spirit was to grow more tremulously sensitive to Kingham’s assaults upon it. The critical, the apocalyptic event took place in Kingham’s rooms. It was a damp, hot afternoon of early summer. The sky was overcast when Grace arrived, and there was thunder in the air. She was wearing — the fact came out in her account to Catherine of the afternoon’s events — she was wearing, for the first time, a brand new frock from Paris, mouse-coloured, with two subtly harmonious, almost discordant, tones of red about the collar, and a repetition of the same colours at the cuffs and in a panel let into the skirt Poiret, I think, was the inventor, and it was very modern and rather eccentrically elegant. In a word, it was a dress created for Rodney’s mistress.
Grace, who was very much aware of herself in her clothes, had felt the incongruity mo
st painfully, afterwards. The more so since, when she came in, she was feeling so happy about her dress. She was thinking what a success it was and how elegant, how original the people who saw her in the street must find her. And she was wondering what effect the dress would have on Kingham. She hoped, she thought that he would like it.
In his way, Kingham was nearly as observant in the matter of clothes as Rodney — True, he had not Rodney’s almost professional eye for style and cut and smartness Rodney was a great couturier manqué. The fashionable dressmaker was visible in every picture he painted, he had mistaken his profession Kingham’s way of looking at clothes was different. His was the moralist’s eye, not the couturier’s. For him, clothes were symbols, the visible expressions of states of soul. Thus, Grace’s slightly eccentric, very dashing elegance seemed to him the expressive symbol of her devilishness. He regarded her clothes as an efflorescence of her spirit. They were part of her, and she was directly and wholly responsible for them. It never seemed to strike him that tailors, dressmakers and advisory friends might share the responsibility. He took in Grace’s frock at a glance ‘You’ve got a new dress on,’ he said accusingly ‘Do you like it?’ she asked ‘No,’ said Kingham ‘Why not?’
‘Why not?’ he repeated. ‘Well, I suppose it’s because the thing’s so expressive of you, because it suits you so devilishly well’
‘ I should have thought that would be a reason for liking it’
‘Oh, it would be, no doubt,’ said Kingham, ‘it would be, if I could just regard you as a spectacle, as something indifferent, to be looked at — that’s all — like a picture. But you’re not indifferent to me, and you know it and you deliberately torture me. How can I be expected to like what makes you seem more devilishly desirable and so increases my torture?’