Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Your foot!’ The Fairy registered such astonishment that we both fairly jumped. ‘Something wrong with your foot?’
‘Yes, why not?’ Chawdron was rather annoyed; he wasn’t getting the kind of sympathy he’d looked forward to. She turned to me. ‘But when did it happen, Mr Tilney?’ I was breezy. ‘A nasty boil,’ I explained. ‘Walking round the course did it no good. It had to be lanced on Sunday.” At about half-past eleven on Sunday morning?’
‘Yes, I suppose it was about half-past eleven,’ I said, thinking the question was an odd one. ‘It was just half-past eleven when this happened,’ she said dramatically, pointing to her slippered foot. ‘What’s “this”?’ asked Chawdron crossly. He was thoroughly annoyed at being swindled out of sympathy. I took pity on the Fairy; things seemed to be going so badly for her. I could see that she had prepared a coup and that it hadn’t come off. ‘Miss Spindell also seems to have hurt her foot,’ I explained. ‘You didn’t see how she limped.’ ‘How did you hurt it?’ asked Chawdron. He was still very grumpy. ‘I was sitting quietly in the library, working at the catalogue,’ she began: and I guessed, by the way the phrases came rolling out, that she was at last being able to make use of the material she had prepared, ‘when suddenly, almost exactly at half-past eleven (I remember looking at the clock), I felt a terrible pain in my foot. As though some one were driving a sharp, sharp knife into it. It was so intense that I nearly fainted.’ She paused for a moment, expecting appropriate comment. But Chawdron wouldn’t make it. So I put in a polite ‘Dear me, most extraordinary!’ with which she had to be content. ‘When I got up,’ she continued, ‘I could hardly stand, my foot hurt me so; and I’ve been limping ever since. And the most extraordinary thing is that there’s a red mark on my foot, like a scar.’ Another expectant pause. But still no word from Chawdron. He sat there with his mouth tight shut, and the lines that divided his cheeks from that wide simian upper lip of his were as though engraved in stone. The Fairy looked at him and saw that he had taken hopelessly the wrong line. Was it too late to remedy the mistake? She put the new plan of campaign into immediate execution. ‘But you poor Nunky Benny!’ she began, in the sort of tone in which you’d talk to a sick dog. ‘How selfish of me to talk about my ailments, when you’re lying there with your poor foot bandaged up!’ The dog began to wag his tail at once. The beatific look returned to his face. He took her hand. I couldn’t stand it. T think I’d better be going,’ I said; and I went.”
“But the foot?” I asked. “The stabbing pain at exactly halfpast eleven?”
“You may well ask. As Chawdron himself remarked, when next I saw him, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” Tilney laughed. “The Fairy had triumphed. After he’d had his dose of mother love and Christian charity and kittenish sympathy, he’d been ready, I suppose, to listen to her story. The stabbing pain at eleven-thirty, the red scar. Strange, mysterious, unaccountable. He discussed it all with me, very gravely and judiciously. We talked of spiritualism and telepathy. We distinguished carefully between the miraculous and the super-normal. ‘As you know,’ he told me, ‘I’ve been a good Presbyterian all my life, and as such have been inclined to dismiss as mere fabrications all the stories of the Romish saints. I never believed in the story of St Francis’s stigmata, for example. But now I accept it!’ Solemn and tremendous pause. ‘Now I know it’s true.’ I just bowed my head in silence. But the next time I saw M’Crae, the chauffeur, I asked a few questions. Yes, he had seen Miss Spindell that day he drove the Bugatti up to London and came back with the Rolls. He’d gone into the secretaries’ office to see if there were any letters to take down for Mr Chawdron, and Miss Spindell had run into him as he came out. She’d asked him what he was doing in London and he hadn’t been able to think of anything to answer, in spite of Mr Chawdron’s orders, except the truth. It had been on his conscience ever since; he hoped it hadn’t done any harm. ‘On the contrary,’ I assured him, and that I certainly wouldn’t tell Mr Chawdron. Which I never did. I thought... But good heavens!” he interrupted himself; “what’s this?” It was Hawtrey, who had come in to lay the table for lunch. She ignored us, actively. It was not only as though we didn’t exist; it was as though we also had no right to exist. Tilney took out his watch. “Twenty past one. God almighty! Do you mean to say I’ve been talking here the whole morning since breakfast?”
“So it appears,” I answered.
He groaned. “You see,” he said, “you see what it is to have a gift of the gab. A whole precious morning utterly wasted.”
“Not for me,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps not. But then for you the story was new and curious. Whereas for me it’s known, it’s stale.”
“But for Shakespeare so was the story of Othello, even before he started to write it.”
“Yes, but he wrote, he didn’t talk. There was something to show for the time he’d spent. His Othello didn’t just disappear into thin air, like my poor Chawdron.” He sighed and was silent. Stone-faced and grim, Hawtrey went rustling starchily round the table; there was a clinking of steel and silver as she laid the places. I waited till she had left the room before I spoke again. When one’s servants are more respectable than one is oneself (and nowadays they generally are), one cannot be too careful.
“And how did it end?” I asked.
“How did it end?” he repeated in a voice that had suddenly gone flat and dull; he was bored with his story, wanted to think of something else. “It ended, so far as I was concerned, with my finishing the Autobiography and getting tired of its subject. I gradually faded out of Chawdron’s existence. Like the Cheshire Cat.”
“And the Fairy?”
“Faded out of life about a year after the Affair of the Stigmata. She retired to her mystic death-bed once too often. Her pretending came true at last; it was always the risk with her. She really did die.”
The door opened; Hawtrey re-entered the room, carrying a dish.
“And Chawdron, I suppose, was inconsolable?” Inconsolability is, happily, a respectable subject.
Tilney nodded. “Took to spiritualism, of course. Nemesis again.”
Hawtrey raised the lid of the dish; a smell of fried soles escaped into the air. “Luncheon is served,” she said, with what seemed to me an ill-concealed contempt and disapproval.
“Luncheon is served,” Tilney echoes, moving towards his place. He sat down and opened his napkin. “One meal after another, punctuality, day after day, day after day. Such a life. Which would be tolerable enough if something ever got done between meals. But in my case nothing does. Meal after meal, and between meals a vacuum, a kind of...” Hawtrey, who had been offering him the sauce tartare for the past several seconds, here gave him the discreetest nudge. Tilney turned his head. “Ah, thank you,” he said, and helped himself.
The Rest Cure
SHE WAS A tiny woman, dark-haired and with grey-blue eyes, very large and arresting in a small pale face. A little girl’s face, with small, delicate features, but worn — prematurely; for Mrs Tarwin was only twenty-eight; and the big, wide-open eyes were restless and unquietly bright. “Moira’s got nerves,” her husband would explain when people inquired why she wasn’t with him. Nerves that couldn’t stand the strain of London or New York. She had to take things quietly in Florence. A sort of rest cure. “Poor darling!” he would add in a voice that had suddenly become furry with sentiment; and he would illuminate his ordinarily rather blankly intelligent face with one of those lightning smiles of his — so wistful and tender and charming. Almost too charming, one felt uncomfortably. He turned on the charm and the wistfulness like electricity. Click! his face was briefly illumined. And then, click! the light went out again and he was once more the blankly intelligent research student. Cancer was his subject.
Poor Moira! Those nerves of her! She was full of caprices and obsessions. For example, when she leased the villa on the slopes of Bello Sguardo, she wanted to be allowed t
o cut down the cypresses at the end of the garden. “So terribly like a cemetery,” she kept repeating to old Signori Bargioni. Old Bargioni was charming, but firm. He had no intention of sacrificing his cypresses. They gave the finishing touch of perfection to the loveliest view in all Florence; from the best bedroom window you saw the dome and Giotto’s tower framed between their dark columns. Inexhaustibly loquacious, he tried to persuade her that cypresses weren’t really at all funereal. For the Etruscans, on the contrary (he invented this little piece of archaeology on the spur of the moment), the cypress was a symbol of joy; the feasts of the vernal equinox concluded with dances round the sacred tree. Boecklin, it was true, had planted cypresses on his Island of the Dead. But then Boecklin, after all... And if she really found the trees depressing, she could plant nasturtiums to climb up them. Or roses. Roses, which the Greeks...
“All right, all right,” said Moira Tarwin hastily. “Let’s leave the cypresses.”
That voice, that endless flow of culture and foreign English! Old Bargioni was really terrible. She would have screamed if she had had to listen a moment longer. She yielded in mere self-defence.
“E la Tanvinni?” questioned Signora Bargioni when her husband came home.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Una domina piuttosto sciocca,” was his verdict.
Rather silly. Old Bargioni was not the only man who had thought so. But he was one of the not so many who regarded her silliness as a fault. Most of the men who knew her were charmed by it; they adored while they smiled. In conjunction with that tiny stature, those eyes, that delicate childish face, her silliness inspired avuncular devotions and protective loves. She had a faculty for making men feel, by contrast, agreeably large, superior and intelligent. And as luck, or perhaps as ill luck, would have it, Moira had passed her life among men who were really intelligent and what is called superior. Old Sir Watney Croker, her grandfather, with whom she had lived ever since she was five (for her father and mother had both died young), was one of the most eminent physicians of his day. His early monograph on duodenal ulcers remains even now the classical work on the subject. Between one duodenal ulcer and another Sir Watney found leisure to adore and indulge and spoil his little granddaughter. Along with fly-fishing and metaphysics she was his hobby. Time passed; Moira grew up, chronologically; but Sir Watney went on treating her as a spoilt child, went on being enchanted by her birdy chirrupings and ingenuousness and impertinent enfant-terrible-isms. He encouraged, he almost compelled her to preserve her childishness. Keeping her a baby in spite of her age amused him. He loved her babyish and could only love her so. All those duodenal ulcers — perhaps they had done something to his sensibility, warped it a little, kept it somehow stunted and un-adult, like Moira herself. In the depths of his unspecialized, unprofessional being Sir Watney was a bit of a baby himself. Too much preoccupation with the duodenum had prevented this neglected instinctive part of him from fully growing up. Like gravitates to like; old baby Watney loved the baby in Moira and wanted to keep the young woman permanently childish. Most of his friends shared Sir Watney’s tastes. Doctors, judges, professors, civil servants — every member of Sir Watney’s circle was professionally eminent, a veteran specialist. To be asked to one of his dinner parties was a privilege. On these august occasions Moira had always, from the age of seventeen, been present, the only woman at the table. Not really a woman, Sir Watney explained; a child. The veteran specialists were all her indulgent uncles. The more childish she was, the better they liked her. Moira gave them pet names. Professor Stagg, for example, the neo-Hegelian, was Uncle Bonzo; Mr Justice Gidley was Giddy Goat. And so on. When they teased, she answered back impertinently. How they laughed! When they started to discuss the Absolute or Britain’s Industrial Future, she interjected some deliciously irrelevant remark that made them laugh even more heartily. Exquisite! And the next day the story would be told to colleagues in the law-courts or the hospital, to cronies at the Athenæum. In learned and professional circles Moira enjoyed a real celebrity. In the end she had ceased not only to be a woman; she had almost ceased to be a child. She was hardly more than their mascot.
At half-past nine she left the dining-room, and the talk would come back to ulcers and Reality and Emergent Evolution.
“One would like to keep her as a pet,” John Tarwin had said as the door closed behind her on that first occasion he dined at Sir Watney’s.
Professor Broadwater agreed. There was a little silence. It was Tarwin who broke it.
“What’s your feeling,” he asked, leaning forward with that expression of blank intelligence on his eager, sharp-featured face, “what’s your feeling about the validity of experiments with artificially grafted tumours as opposed to natural tumours?”
Tarwin was only thirty-three and looked even younger among Sir Watney’s veterans. He had already done good work, Sir Watney explained to his assembled guests before the young man’s arrival, and might be expected to do much more. An interesting fellow too. Had been all over the place — tropical Africa, India, North and South America. Well off. Not tied to an academic job to earn his living. Had worked here in London, in Germany, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, in Japan. Enviable opportunities. A great deal to be said for a private income. “Ah, here you are, Tarwin. Good evening. No, not at all late. This is Mr Justice Gidley, Professor Broadwater, Professor Stagg and — bless me! I hadn’t noticed you, Moira; you’re really too ultra microscopic — my granddaughter.” Tarwin smiled down at her. She was really ravishing.
Well, now they had been married five years, Moira was thinking, as she powdered her face in front of the looking-glass. Tonino was coming to tea; she had been changing her frock. Through the window behind the mirror one looked down between the cypress trees onto Florence — a jumble of brown roofs, and above them, in the midst, the marble tower and the huge, up-leaping, airy dome. Five years. It was John’s photograph in the leather travelling-frame that made her think of their marriage. Why did she keep it there on the dressing-table? Force of habit, she supposed. It wasn’t as though the photograph reminded her of days that had been particularly happy. On the contrary. There was something, she now felt, slightly dishonest about keeping it there. Pretending to love him when she didn’t.... She looked at it again. The profile was sharp and eager. The keen young research student intently focused on a tumour. She really liked him better as a research student than when he was having a soul, or being a poet or a lover. It seemed a dreadful thing to say — but there it was: the research student was of better quality than the human being.