Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“My darling!” His voice was furry and tremulous. He leaned towards her; stiffening, Moira suffered herself to be kissed. His nails, she noticed disgustedly, were dirty.
The prospect of a meal alone with John had appalled her; she had asked Tonino to dinner. Besides, she wanted John to meet him. To have kept Tonino’s existence a secret from John would have been to admit that there was something wrong in her relations with him. And there wasn’t. She wanted John to meet him just like that, naturally, as a matter of course. Whether he’d like Tonino when he’d met him was another question. Moira had her doubts. They were justified by the event. John had begun by protesting when he heard that she had invited a guest. Their first evening — how could she? The voice trembled — fur in a breeze. She had to listen to outpourings of sentiment. But finally, when dinner-time arrived, he switched off the pathos and became once more the research student. Brightly inquiring, blankly intelligent, John cross-questioned his guest about all the interesting and important things that were happening in Italy. What was the real political situation? How did the new educational system work? What did people think of the reformed penal code? On all these matters Tonino was, of course, far less well-informed than his interrogator. The Italy he knew was the Italy of his friends and his family, of shops and cafés and girls and the daily fight for money. All that historical, impersonal Italy, of which John so intelligently read in the high-class reviews, was utterly unknown to him. His answers to John’s questions were childishly silly. Moira sat listening, dumb with misery.
“What do you find in that fellow?” her husband asked, when Tonino had taken his leave. “He struck me as quite particularly uninteresting.”
Moira did not answer. There was a silence. John suddenly switched on his tenderly, protectively, yearningly marital smile. “Time to go to bed, my sweetheart,” he said. Moira looked up at him and saw in his eyes that expression she knew so well and dreaded. “My sweetheart,” he repeated, and the Landseer dog was also amorous. He put his arms round her and bent to kiss her face. Moira shuddered — but helplessly, dumbly, not knowing how to escape. He led her away.
When John had left her, she lay awake far into the night, remembering his ardours and his sentimentalities with a horror that the passage of time seemed actually to increase. Sleep came at last to deliver her.
Being an archaeologist, old Signor Bargioni was decidedly “interesting.”
“But he bores me to death,” said Moira when, next day, her husband suggested that they should go and see him. “That voice! And the way he goes on and on! And that beard! And his wife!”
John flushed with anger. “Don’t be childish,” he snapped out, forgetting how much he enjoyed her childishness when it didn’t interfere with his amusements or his business. “After all,” he insisted, “there’s probably no man living who knows more about Tuscany in the Dark Ages.”
Nevertheless, in spite of darkest Tuscany, John had to pay his call without her. He spent a most improving hour, chatting about Romanesque architecture and the Lombard kings. But just before he left, the conversation somehow took another turn; casually, as though by chance, Tonino’s name was mentioned. It was the signora who had insisted that it should be mentioned. Ignorance, her husband protested, is bliss. But Signora Bargioni loved scandal, and being middle-aged, ugly, envious, and malicious, was full of righteous indignation against the young wife and of hypocritical sympathy for the possibly injured husband. Poor Tarwin, she insisted — he ought to be warned. And so, tactfully, without seeming to say anything in particular, the old man dropped his hints.
Walking back to Bello Sguardo, John was uneasily pensive. It was not that he imagined that Moira had been, or was likely to prove, unfaithful. Such things really didn’t happen to oneself. Moira obviously liked the uninteresting young man; but, after all and in spite of her childishness, Moira was a civilized human being, She had been too well brought up to do anything stupid. Besides, he reflected, remembering the previous evening, remembering all the years of their marriage, she had no temperament; she didn’t know what passion was, she was utterly without sensuality. Her native childishness would reinforce her principles. Infants may be relied on to be pure; but not (and this was what troubled John Tarwin) worldly-wise. Moira wouldn’t allow herself to be made love to; but she might easily let herself be swindled. Old Bargioni had been very discreet and non-committal; but it was obvious that he regarded this young fellow as an adventurer, out for what he could get. John frowned as he walked, and bit his Up.
He came home to find Moira and Tonino superintending the fitting of the new cretonne covers for the drawing-room chairs.
“Carefully, carefully,” Moira was saying to the upholsterer as he came in. She turned at the sound of his footsteps. A cloud seemed to obscure the brightness of her face when she saw him; but she made an effort to keep up her gaiety. “Come and look, John,” she called. “It’s like getting a very fat old lady into a very tight dress. Too ridiculous!”
But John did not smile with her; his face was a mask of stony gravity. He stalked up to the chair, nodded curtly to Tonino, curtly to the upholsterer, and stood there watching the work as though he were a stranger, a hostile stranger at that. The sight of Moira and Tonino laughing and talking together had roused in him a sudden and violent fury. “Disgusting little adventurer,” he said to himself ferociously behind his mask.
“It’s a pretty stuff, don’t you think?” said Moira. He only grunted.
“Very modern too,” added Tonino. “The shops are very modern here,” he went on, speaking with all the rather touchy insistence on up-to-dateness which characterizes the inhabitants of an under-bathroomed and over-monumented country.
“Indeed?” said John sarcastically.
Moira frowned. “You’ve no idea how helpful Tonino has been,” she said with a certain warmth.
Effusively Tonino began to deny that she had any obligation towards him. John Tarwin interrupted him. “Oh, I’ve no doubt he was helpful,” he said in the same sarcastic tone and with a little smile of contempt.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Then Tonino took his leave. The moment he was gone, Moira turned on her husband. Her face was pale, her lips trembled. “How dare you speak to one of my friends like that?” she asked in a voice unsteady with anger.
John flared up. “Because I wanted to get rid of the fellow,” he answered; and the mask was off, his face was nakedly furious. “It’s disgusting to see a man like that hanging round the home. An adventurer. Exploiting your silliness. Sponging on you.”
“Tonino doesn’t sponge on me. And anyhow, what do you know about it?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “One hears things.”
“Oh, it’s those old beasts, is it?” She hated the Bargionis, hated them. “Instead of being grateful to Tonino for helping me! Which is more than you’ve ever done, John. You, with your beastly tumours and your rotten old FaustV’ The contempt in her voice was blasting. “Just leaving me to sink or swim. And when somebody comes along and is just humanly decent to me, you insult him. And you fly into a rage of jealousy became I’m normally grateful to him.”
John had had time to readjust his mask. “I don’t fly into any sort of rage,” he said, bottling his anger and speaking slowly and coldly. “I just don’t want you to be preyed upon by handsome, black-haired young pimps from the slums of Naples.”
“John!”
“Even if the preying is done platonically,” he went on. “Which I’m sure it is. But I don’t want to have even a platonic pimp about.” He spoke coldly, slowly, with the deliberate intention of hurting her as much as he could. “How much has he got out of you so far?”
Moira did not answer, but turned and hurried from the room.
Tonino had just got to the bottom of the hill, when a loud insistent hooting made him turn round. A big yellow car was close at his heels.
“Moira!” he called in astonishment. The car came to a halt beside him.
“Get in,” sh
e commanded almost fiercely, as though she were angry with him. He did as he was told.
“But where did you think of going?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Anywhere. Let’s take the Bologna road, into the mountains.”
“But you’ve got no hat,” he objected, “no coat.”
She only laughed and, throwing the car into gear, drove off at full speed. John spent his evening in solitude. He began by reproaching himself. “I oughtn’t to have spoken so brutally,” he thought, when he heard of Moira’s precipitate departure. What tender, charming things he would say, when she came back, to make up for his hard words! And then, when she’d made peace, he would talk to her gently, paternally about the dangers of having bad friends. Even the anticipation of what he would say to her caused his face to light up with a beautiful smile. But when, three-quarters of an hour after dinner-time, he sat down to a lonely and overcooked meal, his mood had changed. “If she wants to sulk,” he said to himself, “why, let her sulk.” And as the hours passed, his heart grew harder. Midnight struck. His anger began to be tempered by a certain apprehension. Could anything have happened to her? He was anxious. But all the same he went to bed, on principle, firmly. Twenty minutes later he heard Moira’s step on the stairs and then the closing of her door. She was back; nothing had happened; perversely, he felt all the more exasperated with her for being safe. Would she come and say good-night? He waited.
Absently, meanwhile, mechanically, Moira had undressed. She was thinking of all that had happened in the eternity since she had left the house. That marvellous sunset in the mountains! Every westward slope was rosily gilded; below them lay a gulf of blue shadow. They had stood in silence, gazing. “Kiss me, Tonino,” she had suddenly whispered, and the touch of his lips had sent a kind of delicious apprehension fluttering under her skin. She pressed herself against him; his body was firm and solid with her clasp. She could feel the throb of his heart against her cheek, like something separately alive. Beat, beat, beat — and the throbbing life was not the life of the Tonino she knew, the Tonino who laughed and paid compliments and brought flowers; it was the life of some mysterious and separate power. A power with which the familiar individual Tonino happened to be connected, but almost irrelevantly. She shuddered a little. Mysterious and terrifying. But the terror was somehow attractive, like a dark precipice that allures. “Kiss me, Tonino, kiss me.” The light faded; the hills died away into featureless flat shapes against the sky. “I’m cold,” she said at last, shivering. “Let’s go.” They dined at a little inn, high up between the two passes. When they drove away, it was night. He put his arm round her and kissed her neck, at the nape, where the cropped hair was harsh against his mouth. “You’ll make me drive into the ditch,” she laughed. But there was no laughter for Tonino. “Moira, Moira,” he repeated; and there was something like agony in his voice. “Moira.” And finally, at his suffering entreaty, she stopped the car. They got out. Under the chestnut trees, what utter darkness!
Moira slipped off her last garment and, naked before the mirror, looked at her image. It seemed the same as ever, her pale body; but in reality it was different, it was new, it had only just been born.
John still waited, but his wife did not come. “All right, then,” he said to himself, with a spiteful little anger that disguised itself as a god-like and impersonal serenity of justice; “let her sulk if she wants to. She only punishes herself.” He turned out the light and composed himself to sleep. Next morning he left for Rome and the Cytological Congress without saying good-bye; that would teach her. But “thank goodness!” was Moira’s first reflection when she heard that he had gone. And then, suddenly, she felt rather sorry for him. Poor John! Like a dead frog, galvanized; twitching, but never alive. He was pathetic really. She was so rich in happiness, that she could afford to be sorry for him. And in a way she was even grateful to him. If he hadn’t come, if he hadn’t behaved so unforgivably, nothing would have happened between Tonino and herself. Poor John! But all the same he was hopeless.
Day followed bright serene day. But Moira’s life no longer flowed like the clear and shallow stream it had been before John’s coming. It was turbulent now, there were depths and darknesses. And love was no longer a game with a pleasant companion; it was violent, all-absorbing, even rather terrible. Tonino became for her a kind of obsession. She was haunted by him — by his face, by his white teeth and his dark hair, by his hands and limbs and body. She wanted to be with him, to fed his nearness, to touch him. She would spend whole hours stroking his hair, ruffling it up, rearranging it fantastically, on end, like a golliwog’s, or with hanging fringes, or with the locks twisted up into horns. And when she had contrived some specially ludicrous effect, she dapped her hands and laughed, laughed, till the tears ran down her cheeks. “If you could see yourself now!” she cried. Offended by her laughter, “You play with me as though I were a doll,” Tonino would protest with a rather ludicrous expression of angry dignity. The laughter would go out of Moira’s face and, with a seriousness that was fierce, almost cruel, she would lean forward and kiss him, silently, violently, again and again.
Absent, he was still unescapably with her, like a guilty conscience. Her solitudes were endless meditations on the theme of him. Sometimes the longing for his tangible presence was too achingly painful to be borne. Disobeying all his injunctions, breaking all her promises, she would telephone for him to come to her, she would drive off in search of him. Once, at about midnight, Tonino was called down from his room at the hotel by a message that a lady wanted to speak to him. He found her sitting in the car. “But I couldn’t help it, I simply couldn’t help it,” she cried, to excuse herself and mollify his anger. Tonino refused to be propitiated. Coming like this in the middle of the night! It was madness, it was scandalous! She sat there, listening, pale and with trembling lips and the tears in her eyes. He was silent at last. “But if you knew, Tonino,” she whispered, “if you only knew...” She took his hand and kissed it, humbly.
Berto, when he heard the good news (for Tonino proudly told him at once), was curious to know whether the signora forestier a was as cold as Northern ladies were proverbially supposed to be.
“Macche!” Tonino protested vigorously. On the contrary. For a long time the two young sportsmen discussed the question of amorous temperatures, discussed it technically, professionally.
Tonino’s raptures were not so extravagant as Moira’s. So far as he was concerned, this sort of thing had happened before. Passion with Moira was not diminished by satisfaction, but rather, since the satisfaction was for her so novel, so intrinsically apocalyptic, increased. But that which caused her passion to increase produced in his a waning. He had got what he wanted; his night-begotten, touch-born longing for her (dulled in the interval and diminished by all the sporting love-hunts undertaken with Berto) had been fulfilled. She was no longer the desired and unobtainable, but the possessed, the known. By her surrender she had lowered herself to the level of all the other women he had ever made love to; she was just another item in the sportsman’s grand total.
His attitude towards her underwent a change. Familiarity began to blunt his courtesy; his manner became offhandedly marital. When he saw her after an absence, “Ebbene, tesoro he would say in a genially unromantic tone, and pat her once or twice on the back or shoulder, as one might pat a horse. He permitted her to run her own errands and even his. Moira was happy to be his servant. Her love for him was, in one at least of its aspects, almost abject. She was dog-like in her devotion. Tonino found her adoration very agreeable so long as it expressed itself in fetching and carrying, in falling in with his suggestions, and in making him presents. “But you mustn’t, my darling, you shouldn’t,” he protested each time she gave him something. Nevertheless, he accepted a pearl tie-pin, a pair of diamond and enamel links, a half-hunter on a gold and platinum chain. But Moira’s devotion expressed itself also in other ways. Love demands as much as it gives. She wanted so much — his heart, his physical presence, his
caresses, his confidences, his time, his fidelity. She was tyrannous in her adoring abjection. She pestered him with devotion, Tonino was bored and irritated by her excessive love. The omniscient Berto, to whom he carried his troubles, advised him to take a strong line. Women, he pronounced, must be kept in their places, firmly. They love one all the better if they are a little maltreated.
Tonino followed his advice and, pretexting work and social engagements, reduced the number of his visits. What a relief to be free of her importunity! Disquieted, Moira presented him with an amber cigar-holder. He protested, accepted it, but gave her no more of Ids company in return. A set of diamond studs produced no better effect. He talked vaguely and magniloquently about his career and the necessity for unremitting labour; that was his excuse for not coming more often to see her. It was on the tip of her tongue, one afternoon, to say that she would be his career, would give him anything he wanted, if only... But the memory of John’s hateful words made her check herself. She was terrified lest he might make no difficulties about accepting her offer. “Stay with me this evening,” she begged, throwing her arms round his neck. He suffered himself to be kissed.
“I wish I could stay,” he said hypocritically. “But I have some important business this evening.” The important business was playing billiards with Berto.
Moira looked at him for a moment in silence; then, dropping her hands from his shoulders, turned away. She had seen in his eyes a weariness that was almost a horror.
Summer drew on; but in Moira’s soul there was no inward brightness to match the sunshine. She passed her days in a misery that was alternately restless and apathetic. Her nerves began once more to lead their own irresponsible life apart from hers. For no sufficient cause and against her will, she would find herself uncontrollably in a fury, or crying, or laughing. When Tonino came to see her, she was almost always, in spite of all her resolutions, bitterly angry or hysterically tearful. “But why do I behave like this?” she would ask herself despairingly. “Why do I say such things? I’m making him hate me.” But the next time he came, she would act in precisely the same way. It was as though she were possessed by a devil. And it was not her mind only that was sick. When she ran too quickly upstairs, her heart seemed to stop beating for a moment and there was a whirling darkness before her eyes. She had an almost daily headache, lost appetite, could not digest what she ate. In her thin sallow face her eyes became enormous. Looking into the glass, she found herself hideous, old, repulsive. “No wonder he hates me,” she thought, and she would brood, brood for hours over the idea that she had become physically disgusting to him, disgusting to look at, to touch, tainting the air with her breath. The idea became an obsession, indescribably painful and humiliating.