Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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I answered that I was sure she wouldn’t, and said a word to Catherine, who replied, to me by a quick significant look, and to both of us together by a laughing dismissal ‘Go away and talk your stupid business if you want to,’ she said ‘I shall begin my lunch’ We walked out on to the platform. It had begun to rain, violently, as it only rains, among the mountains. The water beat on the vaulted glass roof of the station, filling all the space beneath with a dull, continuous roar, we walked as though within an enormous drum, touched by the innumerable fingers of the rain. Through the open arches at either end of the station the shapes of mountains were dimly visible through veils of white, wind-driven water. We walked up and down for a minute or two without saying a word. Never, in my presence at any rate, had Peddley preserved so long a silence. Divining what embarrassments kept him in this unnatural state of speechlessness, I felt sorry for the man. In the end, after a couple of turns up and down the platform, he made an effort, cleared his throat and diffidently began in a small voice that was quite unlike that loud, self-assured, trombone-like voice in which he told one about the Swiss banking system ‘What I wanted to talk to you about,’ he said, ‘was Grace.’
The face he turned towards me as he spoke was full of a puzzled misery. That common-placely handsome mask was strangely puckered and lined. Under lifted eyebrows, his eyes regarded me, questionmgly, helplessly, unhappily.
I nodded and said nothing, it seemed the best way of encouraging him to proceed.
‘The fact is,’ he went on, turning away from me and looking at the ground, ‘the fact is’ But it was a long time before he could make up his mind to tell me what the fact was. Knowing so very well what the fact was, I could have laughed aloud, if pity had not been stronger in me than mockery, when he wound up with the pathetically euphemistic understatement ‘The fact is that Grace well, I believe she doesn’t love me. Not in the way she did. In fact I know it.’
‘How do you know it?’ I asked, after a little pause, hoping that he might have heard of the affair only through idle gossip, which I could proceed to deny.
‘She told me,’ he answered, and my hope disappeared ‘Ah’
So Kingham had had his way, I reflected. He had bullied her into telling Peddley the quite unnecessary truth, just for the sake of making the situation a little more difficult and painful than it need have been.
‘I’d noticed for some time,’ Peddley went on, after a silence, ‘that she’d been different.’
Even Peddley could be perspicacious after the event. And besides, the signs of her waning love had been sufficiently obvious and decisive Peddley might have no sympathetic imagination, but at any rate he had desires and knew when they were satisfied and when they weren’t. He hinted at explanatory details ‘But I never imagined,’ he concluded— ‘how could I imagine? — that it was because there was somebody else. How could I?’ he repeated in a tone of ingenuous despair. You saw very clearly that it was, indeed, quite impossible for him to have imagined such a thing.
‘Quite,’ I said, affirming comfortingly I do not know exactly what proposition ‘Quite.’
‘Well then, one day,’ he pursued, ‘one day just before we had arranged to come out here into the mountains, as usual, she suddenly came and blurted it all out — quite suddenly, you know, without warning. It was dreadful. Dreadful.’
There was another pause.
‘That fellow called Kingham,’ he went on, breaking the silence, ‘you know him? he’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’
I nodded ‘Very able man, of course,’ said. Peddley, trying to be impartial and give the devil his due. ‘But, I must say, the only times I met him I found him rather unsympathetic.’ (I pictured the scene Peddley embarking on the law relating to insurance companies or, thoughtfully remembering that the chap was literary, on pianolas or modern art or the Einstein theory. And for his part, Kingham firmly and in all likelihood very rudely refusing to be made a victim of ) ‘A bit too eccentric for my taste.’
‘Queer,’ I confirmed, ‘certainly. Perhaps a little mad sometimes.’
Peddley nodded ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it was Kingham.’
I said nothing. Perhaps I ought to have ‘registered amazement,’ as they say in the world of the cinema, amazement, horror, indignation — above all amazement. But I am a poor comedian I made no grimaces, uttered no cries. In silence we walked slowly along the platform. The rain drummed on the roof overhead, through the archway at the end of the station the all but invisible ghosts of mountains loomed up behind white veils. We walked from. Italy towards France and back again from France towards. Italy ‘Who could have imagined it?’ said Peddley at last.
‘Anybody,’ I might, of course, have answered ‘Anybody who had a little imagination and who knew Grace, above all, who knew you’ But I held my tongue. For though there is something peculiarly ludicrous about the spectacle of a self-satisfaction suddenly punctured, it is shallow and unimaginative only to laugh at it. For the puncturing of self-satisfaction gives rise to a pain that can be quite as acute as that which is due to the nobler tragedies. Hurt vanity and exploded complacency may be comic as a spectacle, from the outside, but to those who feel the pain of them, who regard them from within, they are very far from ludicrous. The feelings and opinions of the actor, even in the morally lowest dramas, deserve as much consideration as the spectator’s Peddley’s astonishment that his wife could have preferred another man to himself was doubtless, from my point of view, a laughable exhibition. But the humiliating realization had genuinely hurt him, the astonishment had been mixed with a real pain. Merely to have mocked would have been a denial, in favour of the spectator, of the actor’s rights. Moreover, the pain which Peddley felt was not exclusively the product of an injured complacency. With the low and ludicrous were mingled other, more reputable emotions. His next words deprived me of whatever desire I might have had to laugh ‘What am I to do?’ Peddley went on, after another long pause, and looked at me again more miserably and bewilderedly than ever ‘What am I to do?’
‘Well,’ I said cautiously, not knowing what to advise him, ‘it surely depends how you feel about it all — about Grace in particular.’
‘How I feel about her?’ he repeated ‘Well,’ he hesitated, embarrassed, ‘I’m fond of her, of course. Very fond of her’ He paused f then, with a great effort, throwing down barriers which years of complacent silence, years of insensitive taking for granted had built up round the subject, he went on ‘I love her.’
The utterance of that decisive word seemed to make things easier for Peddley It was as though an obstruction had been removed, the stream of confidences began to flow more easily and copiously ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I don’t think I had quite realized how much I did love her till now. That’s what makes it all so specially dreadful — the thought that I ought to have loved her more, or at least more consciously when I had the opportunity, when she loved me, the thought that if I had, I shouldn’t, probably, be here now all alone, without her’ He averted his face and was silent, while we walked half the length of the platform ‘I think of her all the time, you know,’ he continued ‘I think how happy we used to be together and I wonder if we shall ever be happy again, as we were, or if it’s all over, all finished’ There was another pause ‘And then,’ he said, ‘I think of her there in England, with that man, being happy with him, happier perhaps than she ever was with me, for perhaps she never really did love me, not like that’ He shook his head ‘Oh, it’s dreadful, you know, it’s dreadful I try to get these thoughts out of my head, but I can’t I walk in the hills till I’m dead-beat, I try to distract myself by talking to people who come through on the trains. But it’s no good I can’t keep these thoughts away.’
I might have assured him, of course, that Grace was without doubt infinitely less happy with Kingham than she had ever been with him. But I doubted whether the consolation would really be very efficacious ‘Perhaps it isn’t really serious,’ I suggested, feebly. ‘Perhaps it won’t last.
She’ll come to her senses one of these days.’
Peddley sighed ‘That’s what I always hope, of course I was angry at first, when she told me that she wasn’t coming abroad and that she meant to stay with that man in England I told her that she could go to the devil, so far as I was concerned I told her that she’d only hear from me through my solicitor. But what was the good of that? I don’t want her to go to the devil, I want her to be with me I’m not angry any more, only miserable I’ve even swallowed my pride. What’s the good of being proud and not going back on your decisions, if it makes you unhappy? I’ve written and told her that I want her to come back, that I’ll be happy and grateful if she does’
‘And what has she answered?’ I asked ‘Nothing,’ said Peddley I imagined Peddley’s poor conventional letter, full of those worn phrases that make their appearance with such a mournful regularity in all the letters that are read in the divorce courts, or before coroners’ juries, when people have thrown themselves under trains for unrequited love. Miserable, cold, inadequate words! A solicitor, he had often dictated them, no doubt, to clients who desired to have their plea for the restitution of conjugal rights succinctly and decorously set down in black and white, for the benefit of the judge who was, in due course, to give it legal force. Old, blunted phrases, into which only the sympathy of the reader has power to instil a certain temporary life — he had had to write them unprofessionally this time, for himself Grace, I guessed, would have shown the letter to Kingham I imagined the derisive ferocity of his comments. A judicious analysis of its style can reduce almost any love-letter to emptiness and absurdity Kingham would have made that analysis with gusto and with a devilish skill. By his mockery he had doubtless shamed Grace out of her first spontaneous feelings, she had left the letter unanswered. But the feelings, I did not doubt, still lingered beneath the surface of her mind, pity for John Peddley and remorse for what she had done. And Kingham, I felt sure, would find some ingenious method for first encouraging, then deriding these emotions. That would agreeably complicate their relations, would render her love for him a source of even greater pain to her than ever.
Peddley broke the rain-loud silence and the train of my speculations by saying ‘And if it is serious, if she goes on refusing to answer when I write — what then?’
‘Ah, but that won’t happen,’ I said, speaking with a conviction born of my knowledge of Kingham’s character. Sooner or later he would do something that would make it impossible for even the most abject of lovers to put up with him ‘You can be sure it won’t.’
‘I only wish I could,’ said Peddley dubiously he did not know Kingham, only Grace — and very imperfectly at that ‘I can’t guess what she means to do. It was all so unexpected — from Grace — I never imagined.’
For the first time he had begun to realize his ignorance of the woman to whom he was married. The consciousness of this ignorance ‘was one of the elements of his distress ‘But if it is serious,’ he went on, after a pause, obstinately insisting on contemplating the worst of possibilities, ‘what am I to do? Let her go, like that, without a struggle? Set her free to go and be permanently and respectably happy with that man?’ (At the vision he thus conjured up of a domesticated Kingham, I inwardly smiled )— ‘That would be fairest to her, I suppose. But why should I be unfair to myself?’
Under the fingers of the drumming rain, in the presence of the ghostly, rain-blurred mountains, we prolonged the vain discussion. In the end I persuaded him to do nothing for the time being. To wait and see what the next days or weeks or months would bring. It was the only possible policy. When we returned to the station restaurant, Peddley was considerably more cheerful than when we had left it I had offered no very effectual consolation, invented no magical solution of his problems, but the mere fact that he had been able to talk and that I had been ordinarily sympathetic had been a relief and a comfort to him. He was positively rubbing his hands as he sat down beside ‘Well, Mrs Wilkes,’ he said in that professionally hearty tone which clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and all those whose business it is to talk frequently and copiously with people they do not know, so easily acquire, ‘well, Mrs Wilkes, I’m afraid we’ve shamefully neglected you I’m afraid you’ll never forgive me for having carried off your husband in this disgraceful way’ And so on.
After a little, he abandoned this vein of graceful courtesy for more serious conversation.
‘I met a most interesting man at this station a few days ago,’ he began ‘A Greek. Theotocopulos was his name. A very remarkable man. He told me a number of most illuminating things about King Constantine and the present economic situation in Greece. He assured me, for one thing, that’ And the information about King Constantine and the economic situation in Hellas came pouring out. In Mr Theotocopulos, it was evident, John Peddley had found a kindred soul. When Greek meets Greek then comes, in this case, an exchange of anecdotes about the deposed sovereigns of eastern Europe — in a word, the tug of bores. From private, Peddley had returned to public life. We were thankful when it was time to continue our journey.
Kingham lived on the second floor of a once handsome and genteel eighteenth-century house, which presented its façade of blackened brick to a decayed residential street, leading northward from. Theobald’s Road towards the easternmost of the Bloomsbury Squares. It was a slummy street in which, since the war, a colony of poor but ‘artistic’ people from another class had settled. In the windows, curtains of dirty muslin alternated with orange curtains, scarlet curtains, curtains in large bright-coloured checks. It was not hard to know where respectable slumminess ended and gay Bohemianism began.
The front door of number twenty-three was permanently open I entered and addressed myself to the stairs. Reaching the second landing, I was surprised to find the door of Kingham’s rooms ajar I pushed it open and walked in.
‘Kingham,’ I called, ‘Kingham!’
There was no answer I stepped across the dark little vestibule and tapped at the door of the main sitting-room ‘Kingham!’ I called again more loudly I did not want to intrude indiscreetly upon some scene of domestic happiness or, more probably, considering the relations existing between Grace and Kingham, of domestic strife ‘Kingham!’
The silence remained unbroken I walked in. The room was empty. Still calling discreetly as I went, I looked into the second sitting-room, the kitchen, the bedroom. A pair of suit-cases were standing, ready packed, just inside the bedroom door. Where could they be going? I wondered, hoped I should see them before they went. Meanwhile, I visited even the bathroom and the larder, the little flat was quite empty of life. They must have gone out, leaving the front door open behind them as they went. If preoccupation and absence of mind be signs of love, why then, I reflected, things must be going fairly well. It was twenty to six on my watch I decided to wait for their return. If they were not back within the hour, I would leave a note, asking them to come to see us, and go.
The two small and monstrously lofty sitting-rooms in Kingham’s flat had once been a single room of nobly classical proportions. A lath-and-plaster partition separated one room from the other, dividing into two unsymmetrical parts the gracefully moulded design which had adorned the ceiling of the original room. A single tall sash window, having no proportionable relation to the wall in which it found itself accidentally placed, illuminated either room — the larger inadequately, the smaller almost to excess. It was in the smaller and lighter of the two sitting-rooms that Kingham kept his books and his writing-table I entered it, looked round the shelves, and having selected two or three miscellaneous volumes, drew a chair up to the window and settled down to read ‘I have no patience,’ I read (and it was a volume of Kingham’s own writings that I had opened), ‘I have no patience with those silly prophets and Utopia-mongers who offer us prospects of uninterrupted happiness I have no patience with them. Are they too stupid even to realize their own stupidity? Can’t they see that if happiness were uninterrupted and well-being universal, these things would cease to be h
appiness and well-being and become merely boredom and daily bread, daily business, Daily Mail? Can’t they understand that, if everything in the world were pea-green, we shouldn’t know what pea-green was? “Asses, apes and dogs!” (Milton too, thank God for Milton didn’t suffer fools gladly — Satan — portrait of the artist ) Asses, apes and dogs. Are they too stupid to see that, in order to know happiness and virtue, men must also know misery and sin? The Utopia I offer is a world where happiness and unhappiness are more intense, where they more rapidly and violently alternate than here, with us. A world where men and women endowed with more than our modern sensitiveness, more than our acute and multifarious modern consciousness, shall know the unbridled pleasures, the cruelties and dangers of the ancient world, with all the scruples and remorses of Christianity, all its ecstasies, all its appalling fears. That is the Utopia I offer you — not a sterilized nursing home, with Swedish drill before breakfast, vegetarian cookery, classical music on the radio, chaste mixed sun-baths, and rational free love between aseptic sheets. Asses, apes and dogs!’
One thing at least, I reflected, as I turned the pages of the book in search of other attractive paragraphs, one thing at least could be said in Kingham’s favour, he was no mere academic theorist Kingham practised what he preached. He had defined Utopia, he was doing his best to realize it — in Grace’s company ‘Vows of chastity,’ the words caught my eye and I read on, ‘vows of chastity are ordinarily taken in that cold season, full of disgusts and remorses, which follows after excess. The taker of the oath believes the vow to be an unbreakable chain about his flesh. But he is wrong, the vow is no chain, only a hempen strand. When the blood is cold, it holds fast. But when, with the natural rebirth of appetite, the blood turns to flame, that fire burns through the hemp — the tindery hemp which the binder had thought to be a rope of steel — burns it, and the flesh breaks loose. With renewed satiety come coldness, disgust, remorse, more acute this time than before, and with them a repetition of the Stygian vows. And so on, round and round, like the days of the week, like summer and winter. Futile, you say, no doubt, weak-minded. But I don’t agree with you. Nothing that intensifies and quickens life is futile. These vows, these remorses and the deep-rooted feeling from which they spring — the feeling that the pleasure of the senses is somehow evil — sharpen this pleasure to the finest of points, multiply the emotions to which it gives rise by creating, parallel with the body’s delight, an anguish and tragedy of the mind.’