Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“I never knew that Charlotte had been reaped by Chawdron,”
I put in. “The harvesting must have been done with extraordinary discretion. Charlotte’s usually so fond of publicity, even in these matters. I should never have expected her...”
“But the reaping was very brief and partial,” Tilney explained.
That surprised me even more. “Charlotte who’s always so determined and clinging! And with Chawdron’s millions to cling to...”
“Oh, it wasn’t her fault that it went no further. She had every intention of being reaped and permanently garnered. But she had arranged to go to America for two months on a concert tour. It would have been troublesome to break the contract; Chawdron seemed thoroughly infatuated; two months are soon passed. So she went. Full of confidence. But when she came back, Chawdron was otherwise occupied.”
“Another kitten?”
“A kitten? Poor Charlotte was a grey-whiskered old tigress by comparison. She even came to me in her despair. No enigmatic subtleties this time; she’d forgotten she was the Sphinx. T think you ought to warn Mr Chawdron against that woman,’ she told me. ‘He ought to be made to realize that she’s exploiting him. It’s outrageous.’ She was full of righteous indignation. Not unnaturally. Even got angry with me because I wouldn’t do anything. ‘But he wants to be exploited,’ I told her. ‘It’s his only joy in life.’ Which was perfectly true. But I couldn’t resist being a little malicious. ‘What makes you want to spoil his fun?’ I asked. She got quite red in the face. ‘Because I think it’s disgusting.’” Tilney made his voice indignantly shrill. “‘It really shocks me to see a man like Mr Chawdron being made a fool of in that way.’ Poor Charlotte! Her feelings did her credit. But they were quite unavailing. Chawdron went on being made a fool of, in spite of her moral indignation. Charlotte had to retreat. The enemy was impregnably entrenched.”
“But who was she — the enemy?”
“The unlikeliest femme fatale you ever saw. Little; rather ugly; sickly — yes, genuinely sickly, I think, though she did a good deal of pathetic malingering too; altogether too much the lady — refined; you know the type. A governess; not the modern breezy, athletic sort of governess — the genteel, Jane Eyre, daughter-of-clergyman kind. Her only visible merit was that she was young. About twenty-five, I suppose.”
‘But how on earth did they meet? Millionaires and governesses...”
“A pure miracle,” said Tilney. “Chawdron himself detected the hand of Providence. That was the deep religious sense coming in. ‘If it hadn’t been for both my secretaries falling ill on the same day,’ he said to me solemnly (and you’ve no idea how ridiculous he looked when he was being solemn — the saintly forger, the burglar in the pulpit), ‘if it hadn’t been for that — and after all, how unlikely it is that both one’s secretaries should fall ill at the same moment; what a fateful thing to happen! — I should never have got to know my little Fairy.’ And you must imagine the last words pronounced with a reverent and beautiful smile — indescribably incongruous on that crook’s mug of his. ‘My little Fairy’ (her real name, incidentally, was Maggie Spindell), ‘my little Fairy!’” Tilney seraphically smiled and rolled up his eyes. “You can’t imagine the expression. St Charles Borromeo in the act of breaking into the till.”
“Painted by Carlo Dold,” I suggested.
“With the assistance of Rowlandson. Do you begin to get it?”
I nodded. “But the secretaries?” I was anxious to hear the story.
“They had orders to deal summarily with all begging letters, all communications from madmen, inventors, misunderstood genuises, and, finally, women. The job was a heavy one, I can tell you. You’ve no idea what a rich man’s post-bag is like. Fantastic. Well, as I say, Providence had given both private secretaries the ‘flu. Chawdron happened to have nothing better to do that morning (Providence again); so he started opening his own correspondence. The third letter he opened was from the Fairy. It bowled him over.”
“What was in it?”
Tilney shrugged his shoulders. “He never showed it me. But from what I gathered, she wrote about God and the Universe in general and her soul in particular, not to mention his soul. Having no taste, and being wholly without education, Chawdron was tremendously impressed by her philosophical rigmarole. It appealed to that deep religious sense! Indeed, he was so much impressed that he immediately wrote giving her an appointment. She came, saw, and conquered. ‘Providential, my dear boy, providential.’ And of course he was right. Only I’d have dechristened the power and called it Nemesis. Miss Spindell was the instrument of Nemesis; she was Ate in the fancy dress that Chawdron’s way of life had caused him to find irresistible. She was the finally ripened fruit of sowings in New Guinea Oil and the like.”
“But if your account’s correct,” I put in, “delicious fruit — that is, his taste. Being exploited by kittens was his only joy; you said it yourself. Nemesis was rewarding him for his offences, not punishing.”
Tilney paused in his striding up and down the room, meditatively knitted his brows and, taking his pipe out of his mouth, rubbed the side of his nose with the hot bowl. “Yes,” he said slowly, “that’s an important point. I’ve had it vaguely in my head before now; but now you’ve put it clearly. From the point of view of the offender, the punishments of Nemesis may actually look like rewards. Yes, it’s quite true.”
“In which case your Nemesis isn’t much use as a policewoman.” He held up his hand. “But Nemesis isn’t a policewoman. Nemesis isn’t moral. At least she’s only incidentally moral, more or less by accident. Nemesis is something like gravitation, indifferent. All that she does is to guarantee that you shall reap what you sow. And if you sow self-stultification, as Chawdron did with his excessive interest in money, you reap grotesque humiliation. But as you’re already reduced by your offences to a sub-human condition, you won’t notice that the grotesque humiliation is a humiliation. There’s your explanation why Nemesis sometimes seems to reward. What she brings is a humiliation only in the absolute sense — for the ideal and complete human being; or at any rate, in practice, for the nearly complete, the approaching-the-ideal human being. For the sub-human specimen it may seem a triumph, a consummation, a fulfilment of the heart’s desire. But then, you must remember, the desiring heart is a heart of hog-wash....”
“Moral,” I concluded: “Live sub-humanly and Nemesis may bring you happiness.”
“Precisely. But what happiness!”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“But after all, for the relativist, one sort of happiness is as good as another. You’re taking the God’s-eye view.”
“The Greek’s-eye view,” he corrected.
“As you like. But anyhow, from the Chawdron’s-eye view the happiness is perfect. Therefore we ought to make ourselves like Chawdron.”
Tilney nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you need to be a bit of a platonist to see that the punishments are punishments. And of course if there were another life... Or better still, metempsychosis: there are some unbelievably disgusting insects.... But even from the merely utilitarian point of view Chawdronism is dangerous. Socially dangerous. A society constructed by and for men can’t work if all its components are emotionally sub-men. When the majority of hearts have turned to hog-wash, something catastrophic must happen. So that Nemesis turns out to be a policewoman after all. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Perfectly.”
“You always did have a very discreditable respect for law and order and morality,” he complained.
“They must exist...”
“I don’t know why,” he interrupted me.
“In order that you and I may be immoral in comfort,” I explained. “Law and order exist to make the world safe for lawless and disorderly individualists.”
“Not to mention ruffians like Chawdron. From whom, by the way, we seem to have wandered. Where was I?”
“You’d just got to his providential introduction to the Fairy.”
&nbs
p; “Yes, yes. Well, as I said, she came, saw, conquered. Three days later she was installed in the house. He made her his librarian.”
“And his mistress, I suppose.”
Tilney raised his shoulders and threw out his hands in a questioning gesture. “Ah,” he said, “that’s the question. There you’re touching the heart of the mystery.”
“But you don’t mean to tell me...”
“I don’t mean to tell you anything, for the good reason that I don’t know. I only guess.”
“And what do you guess?”
“Sometimes one thing and sometimes another. The Fairy was genuinely enigmatic. None of poor Charlotte’s fabricated sphinxishness; a real mystery. With the Fairy anything was possible.”
“But not with Chawdron surely. In these matters, wasn’t he... well, all too human?”
“No, only sub-human. Which is rather different. The Fairy roused in him all his sub-human spirituality and religiosity. Whereas with Charlotte it was the no less sub-human passion for the détournement de mineurs that came to the surface.”
I objected. “That’s too crude and schematic to be good psychology. Emotional states aren’t so definite and clear-cut as that. There isn’t one compartment for spirituality and another, watertight, for the détournement de mineurs. There’s an overlapping, a fusion, a mixture.”
“You’re probably right,” said Tilney. “And, indeed, one of my conjectures was precisely of such a fusion. You know the sort of thing: discourses insensibly giving place to amorous action — though ‘action’ seems too strong a word to describe what I have in mind. Something ever so softly senile and girlish. Positively spiritual contacts. The loves of the angels — so angelic that, when it was all over, one wouldn’t be quite sure whether there had been any interruption in the mystical conversation or not Which would justify the Fairy in her righteous indignation when she heard of any one’s venturing to suppose that she was anything more than Chawdron’s librarian. She could almost honestly believe she wasn’t. ‘I think people are too horrid,’ she used to say to me on these occasions. T think they’re simply disgusting. Can’t they even believe in the possibility of purity?’ Angry she was, outraged, hurt. And the emotion seemed absolutely real. Which was such a rare occurrence in the Fairy’s life — at any rate, so it seemed to me — that I was forced to believe it had a genuine cause.”
“Aren’t we all genuinely angry when we hear that our acquaintances say the same sort of things about us as we say about them?”
“Of course; and the truer the gossip, the angrier we are. But the Fairy was angry because the gossip was untrue. She insisted on that — and insisted so genuinely (this is the point I was trying to make) that I couldn’t help believing she had some justification. Either nothing had happened, or else something so softly and slimily angelic that it slipped past the attention, escaped notice, counted for nothing.”
“But after all,” I protested, “it’s not because one looks truthful that one’s telling the truth.”
“No. But then you didn’t know the Fairy. She hardly ever looked or sounded truthful. There was hardly anything she said that didn’t strike me as being in one way or another a manifest lie. So that when she did seem to be telling the truth (and it was incredible how rarely that happened), I was always impressed. I couldn’t help thinking there must be a reason. That’s why I attach such importance to the really heart-felt way she got angry when doubts were cast on the purity of her relations with Chawdron. I believe that they really were pure, or else, more probably, that the impurity was such a little one, so to speak, that she could honestly regard it as non-existent. You’d have had the same impression too, if you’d heard her. The genuineness of the anger, the outraged protest, was obvious. And then suddenly she remembered that she was a Christian, practically a saint; she’d start forgiving her enemies. ‘One’s sorry for them,’ she’d say, ‘because they don’t know any better. Poor people! ignorant of all the finer feelings, all the more beautiful relationships.’ I can’t tell you how awful the word ‘beautiful’ was in her mouth! Really blood-curdling. Be-yütiful. Very long-drawn-out, with the oo sound thinned and refined into German u-modified. Be-yütiful. Ugh!” He shuddered. “It made one want to kill her. But then the whole tone of these Christian sentiments made one want to kill her. When she forgave the poor misguided people who couldn’t see the be-yüty of her relations with Chawdron you were horrified, you felt sick, you went cold all over. For the whole thing was such a lie, so utterly and bottomlessly false. After the genuine anger against the scandalmongers, the fakeness rang even faker than usual. Obvious, unmistakable, painful — like an untuned piano, like a cuckoo in June. Chawdron was deaf to it, of course; just didn’t hear the fakeness. If you have a deep religious sense, I suppose you don’t notice those things. T think she has the most beautiful character I’ve ever met with in a human being,’ he used to tell me. (‘Beautiful’ again, you notice. Chawdron caught the trick from her. But in his mouth it was merely funny, not gruesome.) ‘The most beautiful character’ — and then his beatific smile. Grotesque! It was just the same as with Charlotte; he swallowed her whole. Charlotte played the jolly kitten and he accepted her as the jolly kitten. The Fairy’s ambition was to be regarded as a sanctified Christian kitten; and duly, as a Christian kitten, a confirmed, communicant, Catholic, canonized Kitten, he did regard her. Incredible; but, there! if you spend all your wits and energies knowing about oil, you can’t be expected to know much about anything else. You can’t be expected to know the difference between tarantulas and kittens, for example; nor the difference between St Catherine of Siena and a little liar like Maggie Spindell.”
“But did she know she was lying?” I asked. “Was she consciously a hypocrite?”
Tilney repeated his gesture of uncertainty. “Chi lo sa?” he said. “That’s the finally unanswerable question. It takes us back to where we were just now with Chawdron — to the borderland between biography and autobiography. Which is more real: you as you see yourself, or you as others see you? you in your intentions and motives, or you in the product of your intentions? you in your actions, or you in the results of your actions? And anyhow, what are your intentions and motives? And who is the ‘you’ who has intentions? So that when you ask if the Fairy was a conscious liar and hypocrite, I just have to say that I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even the Fairy herself. For, after all, there were several Fairies. There was one that wanted to be fed and looked after and given money and perhaps married one day, if Chawdron’s wife happened to die.”
“I didn’t know he had a wife,” I interrupted in some astonishment.
“Mad,” Tilney telegraphically explained. “Been in an asylum for the last twenty-five years. I’d have gone mad too, if I’d been married to Chawdron. But that didn’t prevent the Fairy from aspiring to be the second Mrs C. Money is always money. Well, there was that Fairy — the adventuress, the Darwinian specimen struggling for existence. But there was also a Fairy that genuinely wanted to be Christian and saintly. A spiritual Fairy. And if the spirituality happened to pay with tired business men like Chawdron — well, obviously, tant mieux.”
“But the falseness you spoke of, the lying, the hypocrisy?”
“Mere inefficiency,” Tilney answered. “Just bad acting. For, when all’s said and done, what is hypocrisy but bad acting? It differs from saintliness as a performance by Lucien Guitry differed from a performance by his son. One’s artistically good and the other isn’t.”
I laughed. “You forget I’m a moralist; at least, you said I was. These aesthetic heresies...”
“Not heresies; just obvious statements of the facts. For what is the practice of morality? It’s just pretending to be somebody that by nature you aren’t. It’s acting the part of a saint, or a hero, or a respectable citizen. What’s the highest ethical ideal in Christianity? It’s expressed in A Kempis’s formula— ‘The Imitation of Christ’ So that the organized Churches turn out to be nothing but vast and elaborate Academies of Dra
matic Art. And every school’s a school of acting. Every family’s a family of Crummleses. Every human being is brought up as a mummer. All education, aside from merely intellectual education, is just a series of rehearsals for the part of Jesus or Podsnap or Alexander the Great, or whoever the local favourite may be. A virtuous man is one who’s learned his part thoroughly and acts it competently and convincingly. The saint and the hero are great actors; they’re Kembles and Siddonses — people with a genius for representing heroic characters not their own; or people with the luck to be born so like the heroic ideal that they can just step straight into the part without rehearsal. The wicked are those who either can’t or won’t learn to act. Imagine a scene-shifter, slightly drunk, dressed in his overalls and smoking a pipe; he comes reeling on to the stage in the middle of the trial scene in the Merchant of Venice, shouts down Portia, gives Antonio a kick in the stem, knocks over a few Magnificos and pulls off Shylock’s false beard. That’s a criminal. As for a hypocrite — he’s either a criminal interrupter disguised, temporarily and for his own purposes, as an actor (that’s Tartuffe); or else (and I think this is the commoner type) he’s just a bad actor. By nature, like all the rest of us, he’s a criminal interrupter; but he accepts the teaching of the local Academies of Dramatic Art and admits that man’s highest duty is to act star parts to applauding houses. But he is wholly without talent. When he’s thinking of his noble part, he mouths and rants and gesticulates, till you feel really ashamed as you watch him — ashamed for yourself, for him, for the human species. ‘Methinks the lady, or gentleman, doth protest too much,’ is what you say. And these protestations seem even more excessive when, a few moments later, you observe that the protester has forgotten altogether that he’s playing a part and is behaving like the interrupting criminal that it’s his nature to be. But he himself is so little the mummer, so utterly without a talent for convincing representation, that he simply doesn’t notice his own interruptions; or if he notices them, does so only slightly and with the conviction that nobody else will notice them. In other words, most hypocrites are more or less unconscious hypocrites. The Fairy, I’m sure, was one of them. She was simply not aware of being an adventuress with an eye on Chawdron’s millions. What she was conscious of was her rôle — the rôle of St Catherine of Siena. She believed in her acting; she was ambitious to be a high-class West-End artiste. But, unfortunately, she was without talent. She played her part so unnaturally, with such grotesque exaggerations, that a normally sensitive person could only shudder at the shameful spectacle. It was a performance that only the spiritually deaf and blind could be convinced by. And, thanks to his preoccupations with New Guinea Oil, Chawdron was spiritually deaf and blind. His deep religious sense was the deep religious sense of a sub-man. When she paraded the canonized kitten, I felt sea-sick; but Chawdron thought she had the most be-yütiful character he’d ever met with in a human being. And not only did he think she had the most beautiful character; he also, which was almost funnier, thought she had the finest mind. It was her metaphysical conversation that impressed him. She’d read a few snippets from Spinoza and Plato and some little book on the Christian mystics and a fair amount of that flabby theosophical literature that’s so popular in Garden Suburbs and among retired colonels and ladies of a certain age; so she could talk about the cosmos very profoundly. And, by God, she was profound! I used to lose my temper sometimes, it was such drivel, so dreadfully illiterate. But Chawdron listened reverently, fairly goggling with rapture and faith and admiration. He believed every word. When you’re totally, uneducated and have amassed an enormous fortune by legal swindling, you can afford to believe in the illusoriness of matter, the non-existence of evil, the oneness of all diversity and the spirituality of everything. All his life he’d kept up his childhood’s Presbyterianism-most piously. And now he grafted the Fairy’s rigmarole on to the Catechism, or whatever it is that Presbyterians learn in infancy. He didn’t see that there was any contradiction between the two metaphysics, just as he’d never seen that there was any incongruity in his being both a good Presbyterian and a consummate swindler. He had acted the Presbyterian part only on Sundays and when he was ill, never in business hours. Religion had never been permitted to invade the sanctities of private life. But with the advance of middle age his mind grew flabbier; the effects of a misspent life began to make themselves felt. And at the same time his retirement from business removed almost all the external distractions. His deep religious sense had more chance to express itself. He could wallow in sentimentality and silliness undisturbed. The Fairy made her providential appearance and showed him which were the softest emotional and intellectual muck-heaps to wallow on. He was grateful — loyally, but a little ludicrously. I shall never forget, for example, the time he talked about the Fairy’s genius. We’d been dining at his house, he and I and the Fairy. A terrible dinner, with the Fairy, as a mixture between St Catherine of Siena and Mahatma Gandhi, explaining why she was a vegetarian and an ascetic. She had that awful genteel middle-class food complex which makes table manners at Lyons’ Comer Houses so appallingly good — that haunting fear of being low or vulgar which causes people to eat as though they weren’t eating. They never take a large mouthful, and only masticate with their front teeth, like rabbits. And they never touch anything with their fingers. I’ve actually seen a woman eating cherries with a knife and fork at one of those places. Most extraordinary and most repulsive. Well, the Fairy had that complex — a matter of class — but it was rationalized, with her, in terms of ahimsa and ascetic Christianity. Well, she’d been chattering the whole evening about the spirit of love and its incompatibility with a meat diet, and the necessity of mortifying the body for the sake of the soul, and about Buddha and St Francis and mystical ecstasies and, above all, herself. Drove me almost crazy with irritation, not to mention the fact that she really began putting me off my food with her rhapsodies of pious horror and disgust I was thankful when at last she left us in peace to our brandy and cigars. But Chawdron leaned across the table towards me, spiritually beaming from every inch of that forger’s face of his. ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ he said. ‘Isn’t she simply wonderful” Wonderful,’ I agreed. And then, very solemnly, wagging his finger at me, ‘I’ve known three great intellects in my time,’ he said, ‘three minds of genius — Lord Northcliffe, Mr John Morley, and this little girl. Those three.’ And he leant back in his chair and nodded at me almost fiercely, as though challenging me to deny it.”