Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“‘So they sailed away for a yeerr and a day To the lund where the bong-tree grows....’”
“What’s a bongtrygroze, mummy?”
Mrs Escobar slightly raised her voice so as to cover the childish interruption and went on with her recitation.
‘“And there (pause) in a wood (pause) a Pig-gywig stood, With a rring...”
‘But, mummy..
“‘With a rring (Mrs Escobar repeated still more loudly, describing in the air, as she did so, a flashing circle) at the end of his nose, his nose....’”
“Mummy!” The child was furious with impatience; he shook his mother’s arm. “Why don’t you say? What is a bongtrygroze?”
“You must wait, my pet.’
Susan put her finger to her lips. “Sh-sh!” Oh, how she wished that he would be good! What would Mrs Escobar think? And her reading was so beautiful.
““With a rring (Mrs Escobar described a still larger circle) at the end of his nose’”
“It’s a kind of tree,” whispered Ruth.
“‘Deerr peeg, arre you willing to sell for one shilling Your rring? Said the Peeggy, I will.
So they took it a-way and were murried next day By the turrkey who lives on the hill (the dreamy note in Mrs Escobar’s voice made the turkey’s hill sound wonderfully blue, romantic and remote), By the turrkey who lived on the hill.
“‘They dined on mince and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon, And...’”
“What’s runcible?”
“Hush, darling.”
“‘... hand in hand (the voice became cooingly tender, bloomy like a peach with velvety sentiment) by the edge...’”
“But why do you say sh-sh, like that?” the little boy shouted. He was so angry, that he began to hit his mother with his fists.
The interruption was so scandalous, that Mrs Escobar was forced to take notice of it. She contented herself with frowning and laying her finger on her lips.
“‘... by the edge of the sand (all the ocean was in Mrs Escobar’s voice), They danced (how gay and yet how exquisitely, how nuptially tender!) by the light (she spoke very slowly; she allowed her hand, which she had lifted, to come gradually down, like a tired bird, on to her knee) of the moo-oon.’”
If any one could have heard those final words, he would have heard interstellar space, and the mystery of planetary motion, and Don Juan’s serenade, and Juliet’s balcony. If any one could have heard them. But the scream which Baby uttered was so piercingly loud, that they were quite inaudible.
III
“I think you ought to talk to Ruth seriously one day,” said Mrs Escobar, on the way back from Purlieu Villas, “about Baby.
I don’t think she really brings him up at all well. He’s spoiled.”
The accusation was couched in general terms. But Susan began at once to apologize for what she felt sure was Baby’s particular offence.
“Of course,” she said, “the trouble was that there were so many words in the poem he didn’t understand.”
Mrs Escobar was annoyed at having been too well understood.
“The poem?” she repeated, as though she didn’t understand what Susan was talking about. “Oh, I didn’t mean that. I thought he was so good, considering, while I was reading. Didn’t you?”
Susan blushed, guiltily. “I thought he interrupted rather a lot,” she said.
Mrs Escobar laughed indulgently. “But what can you expect of a little child like that?” she said. “No, no; I was thinking of his behaviour in general. At tea, for example.... You really ought to talk to Ruth about it.”
Susan promised that she would.
Changing the subject, Mrs Escobar began to talk about Sydney Fell, who was coming to dinner that evening. Such a darling creature! She liked him more and more. He had a most beautiful mouth; so refined and sensitive, and yet at the same time so strong, so sensual. And he was so witty and such an accomplished amorist. Susan listened in misery and silence.
“Don’t you think so?” Mrs Escobar kept asking insistently. “Don’t you think he’s delightful?”
Susan suddenly burst out. “I hate him,” she said, and began to cry.
“You hate him?” said Mrs Escobar. “But why? Why? You’re not jealous, are you?” She laughed.
Susan shook her head.
“You are!” Mrs Escobar insisted. “You are!”
Susan continued obstinately to shake her head. But Mrs Escobar knew that she had got her revenge.
“You silly, silly child,” she said in a voice in which there were treasures of affection. She put her arm round the girl’s shoulders, drew her gently and tenderly towards her and began to kiss her wet face. Susan abandoned herself to her happiness.
Brief Candles
CONTENTS
Chawdron
The Rest Cure
The Claxtons
After the Fireworks
The first edition
Chawdron
FROM BEHIND THE outspread Times I broke a silence. “Your friend Chawdron’s dead, I see.”
“Dead?” repeated Tilney, half incredulously. “Chawdron dead?”
“‘Suddenly, of heart failure,’” I went on, reading from the obituary, “‘at his residence in St James’s Square.’”
“Yes, his heart...” He spoke meditatively. “How old was he? Sixty?”
“Fifty-nine. I didn’t realize the ruffian had been rich for so long. ‘... the extraordinary business instinct, coupled with a truly Scottish doggedness and determination, which raised him, before he was thirty-five, from obscurity and comparative poverty to the height of opulence.’ Don’t you wish you could write like that? My father lost a quarter of a century’s savings in one of his companies.”
“Served him right for saving!” said Tilney with a sudden savagery. Surprised, I looked at him over the top of my paper. On his gnarled and ruddy face was an expression of angry gloom. The news had evidently depressed him. Besides, he was always ill-tempered at breakfast. My poor father was paying. “What sort of jam is that by you?” he asked fiercely.
“Strawberry.”
“Then I’ll have some marmalade.”
I passed him the marmalade and, ignoring his bad temper, “When the Old Man,” I continued, “and along with him, of course, most of the other shareholders, had sold out at about eighty per cent, dead loss, Chawdron did a little quiet conjuring and the price whizzed up again. But by that time he was the owner of practically all the stock.”
“I’m always on the side of the ruffians,” said Tilney. “On principle.”
“Oh, so am I. All the same, I do regret those twelve thousand pounds.”
Tilney said nothing. I returned to the obituary.
“What do they say about the New Guinea Oil Company scandal?” he asked after a silence.
“Very little; and the touch is beautifully light. ‘The findings of the Royal Commission were on the whole favourable, though it was generally considered at the time that Mr Chawdron had acted somewhat inconsiderately.’”
Tilney laughed. “‘Inconsiderately’ is good. I wish I made fourteen hundred thousand pounds each time I was inconsiderate.”
“Was that what he made out of the New Guinea Oil business?”
“So he told me, and I don’t think he exaggerated. He never lied for pleasure. Out of business hours he was remarkably honest.”
“You must have known him very well.”
“Intimately,” said Tilney, and, pushing away his plate, he began to fill his pipe.
“I envy you. What a specimen for one’s collection! But didn’t you get rather bored with living inside the museum, so to speak, behind the menagerie bars? Being intimate with a specimen — it must be trying.”
“Not if the specimen’s immensely rich,” Tilney answered. “You see, I’m partial to Napoleon brandy and Corona Coronas; parasitism has its rewards. And if you’re skilful, it needn’t have too many penalties. It’s possible to be a high-souled louse, an independent
tapeworm. But Napoleon brandy and Coronas weren’t the only attractions Chawdron possessed for me. I have a disinterested, scientific curiosity about the enormously wealthy. A man with an income of more than fifty thousand a year is such a fantastic and improbable being. Chawdron was specially interesting because he’d made all his money — mainly dishonestly; that was the fascinating thing. He was a large-scale, Napoleonic crook. And, by God, he looked it! Did you know him by sight?”
I shook my head.
“Like an illustration to Lombroso. A criminal type. But intelligently criminal, not brutally. He wasn’t brutal.”
“I thought he was supposed to look like a chimpanzee,” I put in.
“He did,” said Tilney. “But, after all, a chimpanzee isn’t brutal-looking. What you’re struck by in a chimpanzee is its all-but-human appearance. So very intelligent, so nearly a man.
Chawdron’s face had just that look. But with a difference. The chimpanzee looks gentle and virtuous and quite without humour. Whereas Chawdron’s intelligent all-but-humanity was sly and, underneath the twinkling jocularity, quite ruthless. Oh, a strange, interesting creature! I got a lot of fun out of my study of him. But in the end, of course, he did bore me. Bored me to death. He was so drearily uneducated. Didn’t know the most obvious things, couldn’t understand a generalization. And then quite disgustingly without taste, without aesthetic sense or understanding. Metaphysically and artistically a cretin.”
“The obituarist doesn’t seem to be of your opinion.” I turned again to The Times. “Where is it now? Ah! ‘A remarkable writer was lost when Chawdron took up finance. Not entirely lost, however; for the brilliant Autobiography, published in 1921, remains as a lasting memorial to his talents as a stylist and narrator.’ What do you say to that?” I asked, looking up at Tilney.
He smiled enigmatically. “It’s quite true.”
“I never read the book, I confess. Is it any good?”
“It’s damned good.” His smile mocked, incomprehensibly. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, it was really and genuinely good.”
“Then he can hardly have been such an artistic cretin as you make out.”
“Can’t he?” Tilney echoed and, after a little pause, suddenly laughed aloud. “But he was a cretin,” he continued on a little gush of confidingness that seemed to sweep away the barriers of his willed discretion, “and the book was good. For the excellent reason that he didn’t write it. I wrote it.”
“You?” I looked at him, wondering if he were joking. But his face, after the quick illumination of laughter, had gone serious, almost gloomy. A curious face, I reflected. Handsome in its way, intelligent, aware, yet with something rather sinister about it, almost repulsive. The superficial charm and good humour of the man seemed to overlie a fundamental hardness, an uncaringness, a hostility even. Too much good living, moreover, had left its marks on that face. It was patchily red and lumpy. The fine features had become rather gross. There was a coarseness mingled with the native refinement. Did I like Tilney or did I not? I never rightly knew. And perhaps the question was irrelevant. Perhaps Tilney was one of those men who are not meant to be liked or disliked as men — only as performers. I liked his conversation, I was amused, interested, instructed by what he said. To ask myself if I also liked what he was — this was, no doubt, beside the point.
Tilney got up from the table and began to walk up and down the room, his pipe between his teeth, smoking. “Poor Chawdron’s dead now, so there’s no reason...” He left the sentence unfinished, and for a few seconds was silent. Standing by the window, he looked out through the rain-blurred glass on to the greens and wet greys of the Kentish landscape. “England looks like the vegetables at a Bloomsbury boarding-house dinner,” he said slowly. “Horrible! Why do we live in this horrible country? Ugh!” He shuddered and turned away. There was another silence. The door opened and the maid came in to clear the breakfast table. I say “the maid”; but the brief impersonal term is inaccurate. Inaccurate, because wholly inadequate to describe Hawtrey. What came in, when the door opened, was personified efficiency, was a dragon, was stony ugliness, was a pillar of society, was the Ten Commandments on legs. Tilney, who did not know her, did not share my terror of the domestic monster. Unaware of the intense disapproval which I could feel her silently radiating (it was after ten; Tilney’s slug-a-bed habits had thrown out of gear the whole of her morning’s routine) he continued to walk up and down, while Hawtrey busied herself round the table. Suddenly he laughed. “Chawdron’s Autobiography was the only one of my books I ever made any money out of,” he said. I listened apprehensively, lest he should say anything which might shock or offend the dragon. “He turned over all the royalties to me,” Tilney went on. “I made the best part of three thousand pounds out of his Autobiography. Not to mention the five hundred he gave me for writing it.” (Was it quite delicate, I wondered, to talk of such large sums of money in front of one so incomparably more virtuous than ourselves and so much poorer? Fortunately, Tilney changed the subject.) “You ought to read it,” he said. “I’m really quite offended that you haven’t. All that lower middle-class childhood in Peebles — it’s really masterly.” (“Lower middle-class” — I shuddered. Hawtrey’s father had owned a shop; but he had had misfortunes.) “It’s Clayhanger and L’Education Sentimentale and David Copperfield all rolled into one.
Really superb. And the first adventurings into the world of finance were pure Balzac — magnificent.” He laughed again, this time without bitterness, amusedly; he was warming to his subject. “I even put in a Rastignac soliloquy from the top of the dome of St Paul’s, made him shake his fist at the City. Poor old Chawdron! he was thrilled. ‘If only I’d known what an interesting life I’d had,’ he used to say to me. ‘Known while the life was going on.’”(I looked at Hawtrey to see if she was resenting the references to an interesting life. But her face was closed; she worked as though she were deaf.) “‘You wouldn’t have lived it,’ I told him. ‘You must leave the discovery of the excitingness to the artists.’”He was silent again. Hawtrey laid the last spoon on the tray and moved towards the door. Thank heaven! “Yes, the artist,” Tilney went on in a tone that had gone melancholy again. “I really was one, you know.” (The departing Hawtrey must have heard that damning confession. But then, I reflected, she always did know that I and my friends were a bad lot.) “Really am one,” he insisted. “Qualis artifex! But pereo, pereo. Somehow, I’ve never done anything but perish all my life. Perish, perish, perish. Out of laziness and because there always seemed so much time. But I’m going to be forty-eight next June. Forty-eight! There isn’t any time. And the laziness is such a habit. So’s the talking. It’s so easy to talk. And so amusing. At any rate for oneself.”
“For other people too,” I said; and the compliment was sincere. I might be uncertain whether or no I liked Tilney. But I genuinely liked his performance as a talker. Sometimes, perhaps, that performance was a little too professional. But, after all, an artist must be a professional.
“It’s what comes of being mostly Irish,” Tilney went on. “Talking’s the national vice. Like opium-smoking with the Chinese!” (Hawtrey re-entered silently to sweep up the crumbs and fold the table-cloth.) “If you only knew the number of masterpieces I’ve allowed to evaporate at dinner tables, over the cigars and the whisky!” (Two things of which, I knew, the Pillar of Society virtuously disapproved.) “A whole library. I might have been — what? Well, I suppose I might have been a frightful old bore,” he answered himself with a forced selfmockery. “‘The Complete Works of Edmund Tilney, in Thirty-Eight Volumes, post octavo.’ I dare say the world ought to be grateful to me for sparing it that. All the same, I get a bit depressed when I look over the back numbers of the Thursday Review and read those measly little weekly articles of mine. Parturiunt montes..
“But they’re good articles,” I protested. If I had been more truthful, I would have said that they were sometimes good — when he took the trouble to make them good. Somet
imes, on the contrary...
“Merci, cher maître!” he answered ironically. “But hardly more perennial than brass, you must admit. Monuments of wood pulp. It’s depressing being a failure. Particularly if it’s your fault, if you might have been something else.”
I mumbled something. But what was there to say? Except as a professional talker, Tilney had been a failure. He had great talents and he was a literary journalist who sometimes wrote a good article. He had reason to feel depressed.
“And the absurd, ironical thing,” he continued, “is that the one really good piece of work I ever did is another man’s autobiography. I could never prove my authorship even if I wanted to. Old Chawdron was very careful to destroy all the evidences of the crime. The business arrangements were all verbal. No documents of any kind. And the manuscript, my manuscript — he bought it off me. It’s burnt.”
I laughed. “He took no risks with you.” Thank heaven! The dragon was preparing to leave the room for good.
“None whatever,” said Tilney. “He was going to be quite sure of wearing his laurel wreath. There was to be no other claimant. And at the time, of course, I didn’t care two pins. I took the high line about reputation. Good art — and Chawdron’s Autobiography was good art, a really first-rate novel — good art is its own reward.” (Hawtrey’s comment on this was almost to slam the door as she departed.) “You know the style of thing? And in this case it was more than its own reward. There was money in it. Five hundred down and all the royalties. And I was horribly short of money at the moment. If I hadn’t been, I’d never have written the book. Perhaps that’s been one of my disadvantages — a small independent income and not very extravagant tastes. I happened to be in love with a very expensive young woman at the time when Chawdron made his offer. You can’t go dancing and drinking champagne on five hundred a year. Chawdron’s cheque was timely. And there I was, committed to writing his memoirs for him. A bore, of course. But luckily the young woman jilted me soon afterwards; so I had time to waste. And Chawdron was a ruthless taskmaster. And besides, I really enjoyed it once I got started. It really was its own reward. But now — now that the book’s written and the money’s spent and I’m soon going to be fifty, instead of forty as it was then — now, I must say, I’d rather like to have at least one good book to my credit. I’d like to be known as the author of that admirable novel, The Autobiography of Benjamin Chawdron, but, alas, I shan’t be.” He sighed. “It’s Benjamin Chawdron, not Edmund Tilney, who’ll have his little niche in the literary histories. Not that I care much for literary history. But I do rather care, I must confess, for the present anticipations of the niche. The drawing-room reputation, the mentions in the newspapers, the deference of the young, the sympathetic curiosity of the women. All the by-products of successful authorship. But there, I sold them to Chawdron. For a good price. I can’t complain. Still, I do complain. Have you got any pipe tobacco? I’ve run out of mine.”