Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“We don’t think it right, darling,” Mrs Claxton went on, ignoring the interruption. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t either, if you realized. Think, my pet; to make that bacon, a poor little pig had to be killed. To be killed, Sylvia. Think of that. A poor innocent little pig that hadn’t done anybody any harm.”
“But I hate pigs,” cried Sylvia. Her sullenness flared up into sudden ferocity; her eyes, that had been fixed and glassy with a dull resentment, darkly flashed. “I hate them, hate them, hate them.”
“Quite right,” said Aunt Judith, who had come in most inopportunely in the middle of the lecture. “Quite right. Pigs are disgusting. That’s why people called them pigs.”
Martha was glad to get back to the little house on the common and their beautiful life, happy to escape from Judith’s irreverent laughter and the standing reproach of Jack’s success. On the common she ruled, she was the mistress of the family destinies. To the friends who came to visit them there she was fond of saying, with that smile of hers, “I feel that, in our way and on a tiny scale, we’ve built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.”
It was Martha’s great-grandfather who started the brewery business. Postgate’s Entire was a household word in Cheshire and Derbyshire. Martha’s share of the family fortune was about seven hundred a year. The Claxton’s spirituality and disinterestedness were the flowers of an economic plant whose roots were bathed in beer. But for the thirst of British workmen, Herbert would have had to spend his time and energies profitably doing instead of beautifully being. Beer and the fact that he had married Martha permitted him to cultivate the arts and the religions, to distinguish himself in a gross world as an apostle of idealism.
“It’s what’s called the division of labour,” Judith would laughingly say. “Other people drink. Martha and I think. Or at any rate we think we think.”
Herbert was one of those men who are never without a knapsack on their backs. Even in Bond Street, on the rare occasions when he went to London, Herbert looked as though he were just about to ascend Mont Blanc. The rucksack is a badge of spirituality. For the modern high-thinking, pure-hearted Teuton or Anglo-Saxon the scandal of the rucksack is what the scandal of the cross was to the Franciscans. When Herbert passed, long-legged and knickerbockered, his fair beard like a windy explosion round his face, his rucksack overflowing with the leeks and cabbages required in such profusion to support a purely graminivorous family, the street-boys yelled, the flappers whooped with laughter. Herbert ignored them, or else smiled through his beard forgivingly and with a rather studied humorousness. We all have our little rucksack to bear. Herbert bore his not merely with resignation, but boldly, provocatively, flauntingly in the faces of men; and along with the rucksack the other symbols of difference, of separation from ordinary, gross humanity — the concealing beard, the knickerbockers, the Byronic shirt. He was proud of his difference.
“Oh, I know you think us ridiculous,” he would say to his friends of the crass materialistic world, “I know you laugh at us for a set of cranks.”
“But we don’t, we don’t,” the friends would answer, politely lying.
“And yet, if it hadn’t been for the cranks,” Herbert pursued, “where would you be now, what would you be doing? You’d be beating children and torturing animals and hanging people for stealing a shilling, and doing all the other horrible things they did in the good old days.”
He was proud, proud; he knew himself superior. So did Martha. In spite of her beautiful Christian smile, she too was certain of her superiority. That smile of hers — it was the hall-mark of her spirituality. A more benevolent version of Monna Lisa’s smile, it kept her rather thin, bloodless lips almost chronically curved into a crescent of sweet and forgiving charitableness, it surcharged the natural sullenness of her face with a kind of irrelevant sweetness. It was the product of long years of wilful self-denial, of stubborn aspirations towards the highest, of conscious and determined love for humanity and her enemies. (And for Martha the terms were really identical; humanity, though she didn’t of course admit it, was her enemy. She felt it hostile and therefore loved it, consciously and conscientiously; loved it because she really hated it.)
In the end habit had fixed the smile undetachably to her face. It remained there permanently shining, like the head-lamps of a motor-car inadvertently turned on and left to burn, unnecessarily, in the daylight Even when she was put out or downright angry, even when she was stubbornly, mulishly fighting to have her own will, the smile persisted. Framed between its pre-Raphaelitic loops of mouse-coloured hair the heavy, sullen-featured, rather unwholesomely pallid face continued to shine incongruously with forgiving love for the whole of hateful, hostile humanity; only in the grey eyes was there any trace of the emotions which Martha so carefully repressed.
It was her great-grandfather and her grandfather who had made the money. Her father was already by birth and upbringing the landed gentleman. Brewing was only the dim but profitable background to more distinguished activities as a sportsman, an agriculturist, a breeder of horses and rhododendrons, a member of parliament and the best London clubs.
The fourth generation was obviously ripe for Art and Higher Thought. And duly, punctually, the adolescent Martha discovered William Morris and Mrs Besant, discovered Tolstoy and Rodin and Folk Dancing and Lao-tzse. Stubbornly, with all the force of her heavy will, she addressed herself to the conquest of spirituality, to the siege and capture of the Highest. And no less punctually than her sister, the adolescent Judith discovered French literature and was lightly enthusiastic (for it was in her nature to be light and gay) about Manet and Daumier, even, in due course, about Matisse and Cézanne. In the long run brewing almost infallibly leads to impressionism or theosophy or communism. But there are other roads to the spiritual heights; it was by one of these other roads that Herbert had travelled. There were no brewers among Herbert’s ancestors. He came from a lower, at any rate a poorer, stratum of society. His father kept a drapery shop at Nantwich. Mr Claxton was a thin, feeble man with a taste for argumentation and pickled onions. Indigestion had spoilt his temper and the chronic consciousness of inferiority had made him a revolutionary and a domestic bully. In the intervals of work he read the literature of socialism and unbelief and nagged at his wife, who took refuge in non-conformist piety. Herbert was a clever boy with a knack for passing examinations. He did well at school. They were very proud of him at home, for he was an only child:
“You mark my words,” his father would say, prophetically glowing in that quarter of an hour of beatitude which intervened between the eating of his dinner and the beginning of his dyspepsia, “that boy’ll do something remarkable.”
A few minutes later, with the first rumblings and convulsions of indigestion, he would be shouting at him in fury, cuffing him, sending him out of the room.
Being no good at games Herbert revenged himself on his more athletic rivals by reading. Those afternoons in the public library instead of on the football field, or at home with one of his father’s revolutionary volumes, were the beginning of his difference and superiority. It was, when Martha first knew him, a political difference, an anti-Christian superiority. Her superiority was mainly artistic and spiritual. Martha’s was the stronger character; in a little while Herbert’s interest in socialism was entirely secondary to his interest in art, his anti-clericalism was tinctured by Oriental religiosity. It was only to be expected.
What was not to be expected was that they should have married at all, that they should ever even have met. It is not easy for the children of land-owning brewers and shop-owning drapers to meet and marry.
Morris-dancing accomplished the miracle. They came together in a certain garden in the suburbs of Nantwich where Mr Winslow, the Extension Lecturer, presided over the rather solemn stampings and prancings of all that was earnestly best among the youth of eastern Cheshire. To that suburban garden Martha drove in from the country, Herbert cycled out from the High Street. They met; love did the rest.
Martha was at that time twenty-four and, in her heavy, pallid style, not unhandsome. Herbert was a year older, a tall, disproportionately narrow young man, with a face strong-featured and aquiline, yet singularly mild (“a sheep in eagle’s clothing” was how Judith had once described him), and very fair hair. Beard at that time he had none. Economic necessity still prevented him from advertising the fact of his difference and superiority. In the auctioneer’s office, where Herbert worked as a clerk, a beard would have been as utterly inadmissible as knickerbockers, an open shirt, and that outward and visible symbol of inward grace, the rucksack. For Herbert these things only became possible when marriage and Martha’s seven hundred yearly pounds had lifted him clear of the ineluctable workings of economic law. In those Nantwich days the most he could permit himself was a red tie and some private opinions.
It was Martha who did most of the loving. Dumbly, with a passion that was almost grim in its stubborn intensity, she adored him — his frail body, his long-fingered, delicate hands, the aquiline face with its, for other eyes, rather spurious air of distinction and intelligence, all of him, all. “He has read William Morris and Tolstoy,” she wrote in her diary, “he’s one of the very few people I’ve met who feel responsible about things. Every one else is so terribly frivolous and self-centred and indifferent. Like Nero fiddling while Rome was burning. He isn’t like that. He’s conscious, he’s aware, he accepts the burden. That’s why I like him.” That was why, at any rate, she thought she liked him. But her passion was really for the physical Herbert Claxton. Heavily, like a dark cloud charged with thunder, she hung over him with a kind of menace, ready to break out on him with the lightnings of passion and domineering will. Herbert was charged with some of the electricity of passion which he had called out of her. Because she loved, he loved her in return. His vanity, too, was flattered; it was only theoretically that he despised class-distinctions and wealth.
The land-owning brewers were horrified when they heard from Martha that she was proposing to marry the son of a shopkeeper. Their objections only intensified Martha’s stubborn determination to have her own way. Even if she hadn’t loved him, she would have married him on principle, just because his father was a draper and because all this class business was an irrelevant nonsense. Besides, Herbert had talents. What sort of talents it was rather hard to specify. But whatever the talents might be, they were being smothered in the auctioneer’s office. Her seven hundred a year would give them scope. It was practically a duty to marry him.
“A man’s a man for all that,” she said to her father, quoting, in the hope of persuading him, from his favourite poet; she herself found Bums too gross and unspiritual.
“And a sheep’s a sheep,” retorted Mr Postgate, “and a woodlouse is a woodlouse — for all that and all that.”
Martha flushed darkly and turned away without saying anything more. Three weeks later she and the almost passive Herbert were married.
Well, now Sylvia was six years old and a handful, and little Paul, who was whiny and had adenoids, was just on five, and Herbert, under his wife’s influence, had discovered unexpectedly enough that his talents were really artistic and was by this time a painter with an established reputation for lifeless ineptitude. With every reaffirmation of his lack of success he flaunted more defiantly than ever the scandal of the rucksack, the scandals of the knickerbockers and beard. Martha, meanwhile, talked about the inwardness of Herbert’s art. They were able to persuade themselves that it was their superiority which prevented them from getting the recognition they deserved. Herbert’s lack of success was even a proof (though not perhaps the most satisfactory kind of proof) of that superiority.
“But Herbert’s time will come,” Martha would affirm prophetically. “It’s bound to come.”
Meanwhile the little house on the Surrey common was overflowing with unsold pictures. Allegorical they were, painted very flatly in a style that was Early Indian tempered, wherever the Oriental originals ran too luxuriantly to breasts and wasp-waists and moonlike haunches, by the dreary respectability of Pu vis de Chavannes.
“And let me beg you, Herbert” — those had been Judith’s parting words of advice as they stood on the platform waiting for the train to take them back again to their house on the common— “let me implore you: try to be a little more indecent in your paintings. Not so shockingly pure. You don’t know how happy you’d make me if you could really be obscene for once. Really obscene.”
It was a comfort, thought Martha, to be getting away from that sort of thing. Judith was really too... Her lips smiled, her hand waved good-bye.
“Isn’t it lovely to come back to our own dear little house!” she cried, as the station taxi drove them bumpily over the track that led across the common to the garden gate. “Isn’t it lovely?”
“Lovely!” said Herbert, dutifully echoing her rather forced rapture.
“Lovely!” repeated little Paul, rather thickly through his adenoids. He was a sweet child, when he wasn’t whining, and always did and said what was expected of him.
Through the window of the cab Sylvia looked critically at the long low house among the trees. “I think Aunt Judith’s house is nicer,” she concluded with decision.
Martha turned upon her the sweet illumination of her smile. “Aunt Judith’s house is bigger,” she said, “and much grander. But this is Home, my sweet. Our very own Home.”
“All the same,” persisted Sylvia, “I like Aunt Judith’s house better.”
Martha smiled at her forgivingly and shook her head. “You’ll understand what I mean when you’re older,” she said. A strange child, she was thinking, a difficult child. Not like Paul, who was so easy. Too easy. Paul fell in with suggestions, did what he was told, took his colour from the spiritual environment. Not Sylvia. She had her own will. Paul was like his father. In the girl Martha saw something of her own stubbornness and passion and determination. If the will could be well directed... But the trouble was that it was so often hostile, resistant, contrary. Martha thought of that deplorable occasion, only a few months before, when Sylvia, in a fit of rage at not being allowed to do something she wanted to do, had spat in her father’s face. Herbert and Martha had agreed that she ought to be punished. But how? Not smacked, of course; smacking was out of the question. The important thing was to make the child realize the heinousness of what she had done. In the end they decided that the best thing would be for Herbert to talk to her very seriously (but very gently, of course), and then leave her to choose her own punishment. Let her conscience decide. It seemed an excellent idea.
“I want to tell you a story, Sylvia,” said Herbert that evening, taking the child on to his knees. “About a little girl, who had a daddy who loved her so much, so much.” Sylvia looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing. “And one day that little girl, who was sometimes rather a thoughtless little girl, though I don’t believe she was really naughty, was doing something that it wasn’t right or good for her to do. And her daddy told her not to. And what do you think that little girl did? She spat in her daddy’s face. And her daddy was very very sad. Because what his little girl did was wrong, wasn’t it?” Sylvia nodded a brief defiant assent. “And when one has done something wrong, one must be punished, mustn’t one?” The child nodded again. Herbert was pleased; his words had had their effect; her conscience was being touched. Over the child’s head he exchanged a glance with Martha. “If you had been that daddy,” he went on, “and the little girl you loved so much had spat in your face, what would you have done, Sylvia?”
“Spat back,” Sylvia answered fiercely and without hesitation.
At the recollection of the scene Martha sighed. Sylvia was difficult, Sylvia was decidedly a problem. The cab drew up at the gate; the Claxtons unpacked themselves and their luggage. Inadequately tipped, the driver made his usual scene. Bearing his rucksack, Herbert turned away with a dignified patience. He was used to this sort of thing; it was a chronic martyrdom. The unpleasant duty of paying was alw
ays his. Martha only provided the cash. With what extreme and yearly growing reluctance! He was always between the devil of the undertipped and the deep sea of Martha’s avarice.
“Four miles’ drive and a tuppenny tip!” shouted the cab-driver at Herbert’s receding and rucksacked back.
Martha grudged him even the twopence. But convention demanded that something should be given. Conventions are stupid things; but even the Children of the Spirit must make some compromise with the World. In this case Martha was ready to compromise with the World to the extent of twopence. But no more. Herbert knew that she would have been very angry if he had given more. Not openly, of course; not explicitly. She never visibly lost her temper or her smile. But her forgiving disapproval would have weighed heavily on him for days. And for days she would have found excuses for economizing in order to make up for the wanton extravagance of a sixpenny instead of a twopenny tip. Her economies were mostly on the food, and their justification was always spiritual. Eating was gross; high living was incompatible with high thinking; it was dreadful to think of the poor going hungry while you yourself were living in luxurious gluttony. There would be a cutting down of butter and Brazil nuts, of the more palatable vegetables and the choicer fruits. Meals would come to consist more and more exclusively of porridge, potatoes, cabbages, bread. Only when the original extravagance had been made up several hundred times would Martha begin to relax her asceticism. Herbert never ventured to complain. After one of these bouts of plain living he would for a long time be very careful to avoid other extravagances, even when, as in this case, his economies brought him into painful and humiliating conflict with those on whom they were practised.
“Next time,” the taxi-driver was shouting, “I’ll charge extra for the whiskers.”
Herbert passed over the threshold and closed the door behind him. Safe! He took off his rucksack and deposited it carefully on a chair. Gross, vulgar brute! But anyhow he had taken himself off with the twopence. Martha would have no cause to complain or cut down the supply of peas and beans. In a mild and spiritual way Herbert was very fond of his food. So was Martha — darkly and violently fond of it. That was why she had become a vegetarian, why her economies were always at the expense of the stomach — precisely because she liked food so much. She suffered when she deprived herself of some delicious morsel. But there was a sense in which she loved her suffering more than the morsel. Denying herself, she felt her whole being irradiated by a glow of power; suffering, she was strengthened, her will was wound up, her energy enhanced. The damned-up instincts rose and rose behind the wall of voluntary mortification, deep and heavy with potentialities of force. In the struggle between the instincts Martha’s love of power was generally strong enough to overcome her greed; among the hierarchy of pleasures, the joy of exerting the personal conscious will was more intense than the joy of eating even Turkish Delight or strawberries and cream. Not always, however; for there were occasions when, overcome by a sudden irresistible desire, Martha would buy and, in a single day, secretly consume a whole pound of chocolate creams, throwing herself upon the sweets with the same heavy violence as had characterized her first passion for Herbert. With the passage of time and the waning, after the birth of her two children, of her physical passion for her husband, Martha’s orgies among the chocolates became more frequent. It was as though her vital energies were being forced, by the closing of the sexual channel, to find explosive outlet in gluttony. After one of these orgies Martha always tended to become more than ordinarily strict in her ascetic spirituality.