Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Gregory shook his head once more. “Alas,” he said, “alas!”
“And what’s more,” insisted Spiller, “you’d be a benefactor of society.”
“Impossible.” Gregory was firm; he planted his feet like a donkey and would not be moved. Money was the one thing he never had a difficulty in being firm about.
“But come,” said Spiller, “come. What’s a thousand pounds to a millionaire like you? You’ve got — how much have you got?”
Gregory stared him glassily in the eyes.
“Twelve hundred a year,” he said. “Say fourteen hundred.” He could see that Spiller didn’t believe him. Damn the man! Not that he really expected him to believe; but still... “And then there are one’s taxes,” he added plaintively, “and one’s contributions to charities.” He remembered that fiver he was going to send to the London Hospital. “The London Hospital, for example — always short of money.” He shook his head sadly. “Quite impossible, I’m afraid.” He thought of all the unemployed; ten Derby crowds, half starved, with banners and brass bands. He felt himself blushing. Damn the man! He was furious with Spiller.
Two voices sounded simultaneously in his ears: the professional drunkard’s and another, a woman’s — Molly’s.
“The succubus!” groaned the professional drunkard. ‘Il ne manquait que ça!”
“Impossible?” said Molly’s voice, unexpectedly repeating his latest word. “What’s impossible?”
“Well—” said Gregory, embarrassed, and hesitated.
It was Spiller who explained.
“Why, of course Gregory can put up a thousand pounds,” said Molly, when she had learned what was the subject at issue. She looked at him indignantly, contemptuously, as though reproaching him for his avarice.
“You know better than I, then,” said Gregory, trying to take the airy jocular line about the matter. He remembered what the enviably successful friend had told him about compliments. “How lovely you look in that white dress, Molly!” he added, and tempered the jocularity of his smile with a glance that was meant to be at once insolent and tender. “Too lovely,” he repeated, and put up his monocle to look at her.
“Thank you,” she said, looking back at him unwaveringly. Her eyes were calm and bright. Against that firm and penetrating regard his jocularity, his attempt at insolent tenderness, punctured and crumpled up. He averted his eyes, he let fall his eyeglass. It was a weapon he did not dare or know how to use — it made him look ridiculous. He was like horse-faced Mrs Labadie flirting coquettishly with her fan.
“I’d like to discuss the question in any case,” he said to Spiller, glad of any excuse to escape from those eyes. “But I assure you I really can’t.... Not the whole thousand, at any rate,” he added, feeling despairingly that he had been forced against his will to surrender.
“Molly!” shouted the professional drunkard.
Obediently she went and sat down beside him on the sofa.
“Well, Tom,” she said, and laid her hand on his knee. “How are you?”
“As I always am, when you’re anywhere about,” answered the professional drunkard tragically: “insane.” He put his arm round her shoulders and leaned towards her. “Utterly insane.”
“I’d rather we didn’t sit like this, you know.” She smiled at him; they looked at one another closely. Then Paxton withdrew his arm and leaned back in his corner of the sofa.
Looking at them, Gregory was suddenly convinced that they were lovers. We needs must love the lowest when we see it. All Molly’s lovers were like that: ruffians.
He turned to Spiller. “Shouldn’t we go back to my rooms?” he suggested, interrupting him in the midst of a long explanatory discourse about the projected paper. “It’ll be quieter there and less stuffy.” Molly and Paxton, Molly and that drunken brute. Was it possible? It was certain: he had no doubts. “Let’s get out of this beastly place quickly,” he added.
“All right,” Spiller agreed. “One last lashing of whisky to support us on the way.” He reached for the bottle.
Gregory drank nearly half a tumbler, undiluted. A few yards down the street, he realized that he was rather tipsy.
“I think I must have a very feebly developed herd instinct,” he said. “How I hate these crowds!” Molly and Silenus-Paxtoni He imagined their loves. And he had thought that she had been glad to see him, when first he caught her eye.
They emerged into Bedford Square. The gardens were as darkly mysterious as a piece of country woodland. Woodland without, whisky within, combined to make Gregory’s melancholy vocal. Che fard senz’ Euridice? he softly sang.
“You can do without her very well,” said Spiller, replying to the quotation. “That’s the swindle and stupidity of love. Each time you feel convinced that it’s something immensely significant and everlasting: you feel infinitely. Each time. Three weeks later you’re beginning to find her boring; or somebody else rolls the eye and the infinite emotions are transferred and you’re off on another eternal week-end. It’s a sort of practical joke. Very stupid and disagreeable. But then nature’s humour isn’t ours.”
“You think it’s a joke, that infinite feeling?” asked Gregory indignantly. “I don’t. I believe that it represents something real, outside ourselves, something in the structure of the universe.”
“A different universe with every mistress, eh?”
“But if it occurs only once in a lifetime?” asked Gregory in a maudlin voice. He longed to tell his companion how unhappy he felt about Molly, how much unhappier than anybody had ever felt before.
“It doesn’t,” said Spiller.
“But if I say it does?” Gregory hiccoughed.
“That’s only due to lack of opportunities, Spiller replied in his most decisively scientific, ex cathedra manner.
“I don’t agree with you,” was all that Gregory could say, feebly. He decided not to mention his unhappiness. Spiller might not be a sympathetic listener. Coarse old devil!
“Personally,” Spiller continued, “I’ve long ago ceased trying to make sense of it. I just accept these infinite emotions for what they are — very stimulating and exciting while they last — and don’t attempt to rationalize or explain them. It’s the only sane and scientific way of treating the facts.”
There was a silence. They had emerged into the brilliance of the Tottenham Court Road. The polished roadway reflected the arc lamps. The entrances to the cinema palaces were caverns of glaring yellow light. A pair of buses roared past.
“They’re dangerous, those infinite emotions,” Spiller went on, “very dangerous. I once came within an inch of getting married on the strength of one of them. It began on a steamer. You know what steamers are. The extraordinary aphrodisiac effects sea voyaging has on people who aren’t used to it, especially women! They really ought to be studied by some competent physiologist. Of course, it may be simply the result of idleness, high feeding and constant proximity — though I doubt if you’d get the same results in similar circumstances on land. Perhaps the total change of environment, from earth to water, undermines the usual terrestrial prejudices. Perhaps the very shortness of the voyage helps — the sense that it’s so soon coming to an end that rosebuds must be gathered and hay made while the sun shines. Who knows?” He shrugged his shoulders. “But in any case, it’s most extraordinary. Well, it began, as I say, on a steamer.”
Gregory listened. A few minutes since the trees of Bedford Square had waved in the darkness of his boozily maudlin soul. The lights, the noise, the movement of the Tottenham Court Road were now behind his eyes as well as before them. He listened, grinning. The story lasted well into the Charing Gross Road.
By the time it had come to an end, Gregory was feeling in an entirely jolly and jaunty mood. He had associated himself with Spiller; Spiller’s adventures were his. He guffawed with laughter, he readjusted his monocle, which had been dangling all this time at the end of its string, which had been tinkling at every step against the buttons of his waistcoat. (A broken hea
rt, it must be obvious to any one who has the slightest sensibility, cannot possibly wear an eyeglass.) He too was a bit of a dog, now. He hiccoughed; a certain suspicion of queasiness tempered his jollity, but it was no more than the faintest suspicion. Yes, yes; he too knew all about life on steamers, even though the longest of his sea voyages had only been from Newhaven to Dieppe.
When they reached Cambridge Circus, the theatres were just disgorging their audiences. The pavements were crowded; the air was full of noise and the perfume of women. Overhead, the sky-signs winced and twitched. The theatre vestibules brightly glared. It was an inaristocratic and vulgar luxury, to which Gregory had no difficulty in feeling himself superior. Through his Cyclopean monocle, he gazed inquiringly at every woman they passed. He felt wonderfully reckless (the queasiness was the merest suspicion of an unpleasant sensation), wonderfully jolly and — yes, that was curious — large: larger than life. As for Molly Voles, he’d teach her.
“Lovely creature, that,” he said, indicating a cloak of pink silk and gold, a close-cropped golden head.
Spiller nodded, indifferently. “About that paper of ours,” he said thoughtfully. “I was thinking that we might start off with a series of articles on the metaphysical basis of science, the reasons, historical and philosophical, that we have for assuming that scientific truth is true.”
“H’m,” said Gregory.
“And concurrently a series on the meaning and point of art. Start right from the beginning in both cases. Quite a good idea, don’t you think?”
“Quite,” said Gregory. One of his monocular glances had been received with a smile of invitation; she was ugly, unfortunately, and obviously professional. Haughtily he glared past her, as though she were not there.
“But whether Tolstoy was right,” Spiller was meditatively saying, “I never feel sure. Is it true, what he says, that the function of art is the conveyance of emotion? In part, I should say, but not exclusively, not exclusively.” He shook his large head.
“I seem to be getting tipsier,” said Gregory, more to himself than to his companion. He still walked correctly, but he was conscious, too conscious, of the fact. And the suspicion of queasiness was becoming well founded.
Spiller did not hear or, hearing, ignored the remark. “For me,” he continued, “the main function of art is to impart knowledge. The artist knows more than the rest of us. He is born knowing more about his soul than we know of ours, and more about the relations existing between his soul and the cosmos. He anticipates what will be common knowledge in a higher state of development. Most of our modems are primitives compared with the most advanced of the dead.”
“Quite,” said Gregory, not listening. His thoughts were elsewhere, with his eyes.
“Moreover,” Spiller went on, “he can say what he knows, and say it in such a way that our own rudimentary, incoherent, unrealized knowledge of what he talks about falls into a kind of pattern — like iron filings under the influence of the magnet.”
There were three of them — ravishingly, provocatively young — standing in a group at the pavement’s edge. They chattered, they stared with bright derisive eyes at the passers-by, they commented in audible whispers, they burst into irrepressible shrill laughter. Spiller and Gregory approached, were spied by one of the three, who nudged her fellows.
“Oh, Lord!”
They giggled, they laughed aloud, they were contorted with mockery.
“Look at old Golliwog!” That was for Spiller, who walked bareheaded, his large grey hat in his hand.
“And the nut!” Another yell for the monocle.
“It’s that magnetic power,” said Spiller, quite unaware of the lovely derision of which he was the object, “that power of organizing mental chaos into a pattern, which makes a truth uttered poetically, in art, more valuable than a truth uttered scientifically, in prose.”
Playfully reproving, Gregory wagged a finger at the mockers. There was a yet more piercing yell. The two men passed; smilingly Gregory looked back. He felt jauntier and jollier than ever; but the suspicion was ripening to a certainty.
“For instance,” said Spiller, “I may know well enough that all men are mortal. But this knowledge is organized and given aform, it is even actually increased and deepened, when Shakespeare talks about all our yesterdays having lighted fools the way to dusty death.”
Gregory was trying to think of an excuse for giving his companion the slip and turning back to dally with the three. He would love them all, simultaneously.
La touffe échevelée De baisers que les dieux gardaient si bien melée.
The Mallarméan phrase came back to him, imposing on his vague desires (old man Spiller was quite right, old imbecile!) the most elegant of forms. Spiller’s words came to him as though from a great distance.
“And the Coriolan overture is a piece of new knowledge, as well as a composer of existing chaotic knowledge.”
He would suggest dropping in at the Monico, pretext a call of nature, slip out and never return. Old imbecile, maundering on like that! Not but what it mightn’t have been quite interesting, at the right moment. But now... And he thought, no doubt, that he was going to tap him, Gregory, for a thousand pounds! Gregory could have laughed aloud. But his derision was tinged with an uneasy consciousness that his tipsiness had definitely taken a new and disquieting form.
“Some of Cézanne’s landscapes,” he heard Spiller saying.
Suddenly, from a shadowed doorway a few yards down the street in front of them, there emerged, slowly, tremulously, a thing: a bundle of black tatters that moved on a pair of old squashed boots, that was topped by a broken, dog’s-eared hat. It had a face, day-coloured and emaciated. It had hands, in one of which it held a little tray with match-boxes. It opened its mouth, from which two or three of the discoloured teeth were missing; it sang, all but inaudibly. Gregory thought he recognized “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” They approached.
“Certain frescoes of Giotto, certain early Greek sculptures,” Spiller went on with his interminable catalogue.
The thing looked at them, Gregory looked at the thing. Their eyes met. Gregory expanded his left eye-socket. The monocle dropped to the end of its silken tether. He felt in his right-hand trouser pocket, the pocket where he kept his silver, for a sixpence, a shilling even. The pocket contained only four half-crowns. Half a crown? He hesitated, drew one of the coins half-way to the surface, then let it fall again with a chink. He dipped his left hand into his other trouser pocket, he withdrew it, full. Into the proffered tray he dropped three pennies and a halfpenny.
“No, I don’t want any matches,” he said.
Gratitude interrupted the hymn. Gregory had never felt so much ashamed in his life. His monode tinkled against the buttons of his waistcoat. Deliberately, he placed one foot before the other, walking with correctness, but as though on a tight-rope. Yet another insult to the thing. He wished to God he were sober. He wished to God he hadn’t desired with such precision that “dishevelled tuft of kisses”. Threepence-halfpenny! But he could still run back and give half a crown, two half-crowns. He could still run back. Step by step, as though on the tight-rope, he advanced, keeping step with Spiller. Four steps, five steps... eleven steps, twelve steps, thirteen steps. Oh, the unluckiness! Eighteen steps, nineteen.... Too late; it would be ridiculous to turn back now, it would be too conspicuously silly. Twenty-three, twenty-four steps. The suspicion was a certainty of queasiness, a growing certainty.
“At the same time,” Spiller was saying, “I really don’t see how the vast majority of scientific truths and hypotheses can ever become the subject of art. I don’t see how they can be given poetic, emotive significance without losing their precision. How could you render the electro-magnetic theory of light, for example, in a moving literary form? It simply can’t be done.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” shouted Gregory with a sudden outburst of fury, “for God’s sake, shut up! How can you go on talking and talking away like this?” He hiccoughed again, more profo
undly and menacingly than before.
“But why on earth not?” asked Spiller with a mild astonishment.
“Talking about art and science and poetry,” said Gregory tragically, almost with tears in his eyes, “when there are two million people in England on the brink of starvation. Two million.” He meant the repetition to be impressive, but he hiccoughed yet once more; he was feeling definitely rather sick. “Living in stinking hovels,” he went on, decrescendo, “promiscuously, herded together, like animals. Worse than animals.”
They had halted; they confronted one another.
“How can you?” repeated Gregory, trying to reproduce the generous indignation of a moment since. But anticipations of nausea were creeping up from his stomach, like a miasma from a marsh, filling his mind, driving out from it every thought, every emotion except the horrid apprehension of being sick.
Spiller’s large face suddenly lost its monumental, Victorian celebrity’s appearance; it seemed to fall to pieces. The mouth opened, the eyes puckered up, the forehead broke into wrinkles and the deep lines running from either side of the nose to the corners of the mouth expanded and contracted wildly, like a pair of demented glove-stretchers. An immense sound came out of him. His great body was shaken with gigantic laughter.
Patiently — patience was all that was left him, patience and a fading hope — Gregory waited for the paroxysm to subside. He had made a fool of himself; he was being derided. But he was past caring.
Spiller so far recovered as to be able to speak. “You’re wonderful, my dear Gregory,” he said, gasping. The tears stood in his eyes. “Really superb.” He took him affectionately by the arm and, still laughing, walked on. Gregory perforce walked too; he had no choice.
“If you don’t mind,” he said after a few steps, “I think we’ll take a taxi.”
“What, to Jermyn Street?” said Spiller.
“I think we’d better,” Gregory insisted.
Climbing into the vehicle, he managed to entangle his monocle in the handle of the door. The string snapped: the glass dropped on the floor of the cab. Spiller picked it up and returned it to him.