Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Three weeks after the Claxtons’ return to their little house on the common, the War broke out.
“It’s changed most people,” Judith remarked in the third year, “it’s altered some out of all recognition. Not Herbert and Martha, though. It’s just made them more so — more like themselves than they were before. Curious.” She shook her head. “Very curious.”
But it wasn’t really curious at all; it was inevitable. The War could not help intensifying all that was characteristically Herbertian and Martha-ish in Herbert and Martha. It heightened their sense of remote superiority by separating them still further from the ordinary herd. For while ordinary people believed in the War, fought and worked to win, Herbert and Martha utterly disapproved and, on grounds that were partly Buddhistic, partly Socialist-International, partly Tolstoyan, refused to have anything to do with the accursed thing. In the midst of universal madness they almost alone were sane. And their superiority was proved and divinely hallowed by persecution. Unofficial disapproval was succeeded, after the passing of the Conscription Act, by official repression. Herbert pleaded a conscientious objection. He was sent to work on the land in Dorset, a martyr, a different and spiritually higher being. The act of a brutal War Office had definitely promoted him out of the ranks of common humanity. In this promotion Martha vicariously participated. But what most powerfully stimulated her spirituality was not War-time persecution so much as War-time financial instability, War-time increase in prices. In the first weeks of confusion she had been panic-stricken; she imagined that all her money was lost, she saw herself with Herbert and the children, hungry and houseless, begging from door to door. She immediately dismissed her two servants, she reduced the family food supply to a prison ration. Time passed and her money came in very much as usual. But Martha was so much delighted with the economies she had made that she would not revert to the old mode of life.
“After all,” she argued, “it’s really not pleasant to have strangers in the house to serve you. And then, why should they serve us? They who are just as good as we are.” It was a hypocritical tribute to Christian doctrine; they were really immeasurably inferior. “Just because we happen to be able to pay them — that’s why they have to serve us. It’s always made me feel uncomfortable and ashamed. Hasn’t it you, Herbert?”
“Always,” said Herbert, who always agreed with his wife.
“Besides,” she went on, “I think one ought to do one’s own work. One oughtn’t to get out of touch with the humble small realities of life. I’ve felt really happier since I’ve been doing the housework, haven’t you?”
Herbert nodded.
“And it’s so good for the children. It teaches them humility and service....”
Doing without servants saved a clear hundred and fifty a year. But the economies she made on food were soon counterbalanced by the results of scarcity and inflation. With every rise in prices Martha’s enthusiasm for ascetic spirituality became more than ever fervid and profound. So too did her conviction that the children would be spoilt and turned into worldlings if she sent them to an expensive boarding-school. “Herbert and I believe very strongly in home education, don’t we, Herbert?” And Herbert would agree that they believed in it very strongly indeed. Home education without a governess, insisted Martha. Why should one let one’s children be influenced by strangers? Perhaps badly influenced. Anyhow, not influenced in exactly the way one would influence them oneself. People hired governesses because they dreaded the hard work of educating their children. And of course it was hard work — the harder, the higher your ideals. But wasn’t it worth while making sacrifices for one’s children? With the uplifting question, Martha’s smile curved itself into a crescent of more than ordinary soulfulness. Of course it was worth it. The work was an incessant delight — wasn’t it, Herbert? For what could be more delightful, more profoundly soul-satisfying than to help your own children to grow up beautifully, to guide them, to mould their characters into ideal forms, to lead their thoughts and desires into the noblest channels? Not by any system of compulsion, of course; children must never be compelled; the art of education was persuading children to mould themselves in the most ideal forms, was showing them how to be the makers of their own higher selves, was firing them with enthusiasm for what Martha felicitously described as “self-sculpture”.
On Sylvia, her mother had to admit to herself, this art of education was hard to practise. Sylvia didn’t want to sculpture herself, at any rate into the forms which Martha and Herbert found most beautiful. She was quite discouragingly without that sense of moral beauty on which the Claxtons relied as a means of education. It was ugly, they told her, to be rough, to disobey, to say rude things and tell lies. It was beautiful to be gentle and polite, obedient and truthful. “But I don’t mind being ugly,” Sylvia would retort. There was no possible answer except a spanking; and spanking was against the Claxtons’ principles.
Aesthetic and intellectual beauty seemed to mean as little to Sylvia as moral beauty. What difficulties they had to make her take an interest in the piano! Thu was the more extraordinary, her mother considered, as Sylvia was obviously musical; when she was two and a half she had already been able to sing “Three Blind Mice” in tune. But she didn’t want to learn her scales. Her mother talked to her about a wonderful little boy called Mozart. Sylvia hated Mozart. “No, no!” she would shout, whenever her mother mentioned the abhorred name. “I don’t want to hear.” And to make sure of not hearing, she would put her fingers in her ears. Nevertheless, by the time she was nine she could play “The Merry Peasant” from beginning to end without a mistake. Martha still had hopes of turning her into the musician of the family. Paul, meanwhile, was the future Giotto; it had been decided that he inherited his father’s talents. He accepted his career as docilely as he had consented to learn his letters. Sylvia, on the other hand, simply refused to read.
“But think,” said Martha ecstatically, “how wonderful it will be when you can open any book and read all the beautiful things people have written!” Her coaxing was ineffective.
“I like playing better,” said Sylvia obstinately, with that expression of sullen bad temper which was threatening to become as chronic as her mother’s smile. True to their principles, Herbert and Martha let her play; but it was a grief to them.
“You make your daddy and mummy so sad,” they said, trying to appeal to her better feelings. “So sad. Won’t you try to read to make your daddy and mummy happy?” The child confronted them with an expression of sullen, stubborn wretchedness, and shook her head. “Just to please us,” they wheedled. “You make us so sad.” Sylvia looked from one mournfully forgiving face to the other and burst into tears.
“Naughty,” she sobbed incoherently. “Naughty. Go away.” She hated them for being sad, for making her sad. “No, go away, go away,” she screamed when they tried to comfort her. She cried inconsolably; but still she wouldn’t read.
Paul, on the other hand, was beautifully teachable and plastic. Slowly (for, with his adenoids, he was not a very intelligent boy) but with all the docility that could be desired, he learned to read about the lass on the ass in the grass and other such matters. “Hear how beautifully Paul reads,” Martha would say, in the hope of rousing Sylvia to emulation. But Sylvia would only make a contemptuous face and walk out of the room. In the end she taught herself to read secretly, in a couple of weeks. Her parents’ pride in the achievement was tempered when they discovered her motives for making the extraordinary effort.
“But what is this dreadful little book?” asked Martha, holding up the copy of “Nick Carter and the Michigan Boulevard Murderers” which she had discovered carefully hidden under Sylvia’s winter underclothing. On the cover was a picture of a man being thrown off the roof of a skyscraper by a gorilla.
The child snatched it from her. “It’s a lovely book,” she retorted, flushing darkly with an anger that was intensified by her sense of guilt.
“Darling,” said Martha, beautifully smiling on
the surface of her annoyance, “you mustn’t snatch like-that. Snatching’s ugly.”
“Don’t care.”
“Let me look at it, please.” Martha held out her Hand. She smiled, but her pale face was heavily determined, her eyes commanded.
Sylvia confronted her, stubbornly she shook her head. “No, I don’t want you to.”
“Please,” begged her mother, more forgivingly and more commandingly than ever, “please”. And in the end, with a sudden outburst of tearful rage, Sylvia handed over the book and ran off into the garden. “Sylvia, Sylvia!” her mother called. But the child would not come back. To have stood by while her mother violated the secrets of her private world would have been unbearable.
Owing to his adenoids Paul looked and almost was an imbecile. Without being a Christian Scientist, Martha disbelieved in doctors; more particularly she disliked surgeons, perhaps because they were so expensive. She left Paul’s adenoids unextirpated; they grew and festered in his throat. From November to May he was never without a cold, a quinsy, an earache. The winter of 1921 was a particularly bad one for Paul. He began by getting influenza which turned into pneumonia, caught measles during his convalescence and developed at the New Year an infection of the middle ear which threatened to leave him permanently deaf. The doctor peremptorily advised an operation, treatment, a convalescence in Switzerland, at an altitude and in the sun. Martha hesitated to follow his advice. She had come to be so firmly convinced of her poverty that she did not see how she could possibly afford to do what the doctor ordered. In her perplexity she wrote to Judith. Two days later Judith arrived in person.
“But do you want to kill the boy?” she asked her sister fiercely. “Why didn’t you get him out of this filthy dank hole weeks ago?”
In a few hours she had arranged everything. Herbert and Martha were to start at once with the boy. They were to travel direct to Lausanne by sleeper. “But surely a sleeper’s hardly necessary,” objected Martha. “You forget” (she beautifully smiled), “we’re simple folk.”
“I only remember you’ve got a sick child with you,” said Judith, and the sleeper was booked. At Lausanne he was to be operated on. (Expensive reply-paid telegram to the clinic; poor Martha suffered.) And when he was well enough he was to go to a sanatorium at Leysin. (Another telegram, for which Judith paid, however. Martha forgot to give the money back.) Martha and Herbert, meanwhile, were to find a good hotel, where Paul would join them as soon as his treatment was over. And they were to stay at least six months, and preferably a year. Sylvia, meanwhile, was to stay with her aunt in England; that would save Martha a lot of money. Judith would try to find a tenant for the house on the common.
“Talk of savages!” said Judith to her husband. “I’ve never seen such a little cannibal as Sylvia.”
“It’s what comes of having vegetarian parents, I suppose.”
“Poor little creature!” Judith went on with an indignant pity. “There are times when I’d like to drown Martha, she’s such a criminal fool. Bringing those children up without ever letting them go near another child of their own age! It’s scandalous! And then talking to them about spirituality and Jesus and ahimsa and beauty and goodness knows what! And not wanting them to play stupid games, but be artistic! And always being sweet, even when she’s furious! It’s dreadful, really dreadful! And so silly. Can’t she see that the best way of turning a child into a devil is to try to bring it up as an angel? Ah well...” She sighed and was silent, pensively; she herself had had no children and, if the doctors were right, never would have children.
The weeks passed and gradually the little savage was civilized. Her first lessons were lessons in the art of moderation. The food, which at the Bamboroughs’ house was good and plentiful, was at the beginning a terrible temptation to a child accustomed to the austerities of the spiritual life.
“There’ll be more to-morrow,” Judith would say, when the child asked for yet another helping of pudding. “You’re not a snake, you know; you can’t store up to-day’s overeating for next week’s dinners. The only thing you can do with too much food is to be sick with it.”
At first Sylvia would insist, would wheedle and whine for more. But luckily, as Judith remarked to her husband, luckily she had a delicate liver. Her aunt’s prophecies were only too punctually realized. After three or four bilious attacks Sylvia learned to control her greed. Her next lesson was in obedience. The obedience she was accustomed to give her parents was slow and grudging. Herbert and Martha never, on principle, commanded, but only suggested. It was a system that had almost forced upon the child a habit of saying no, automatically, to whatever proposition was made to her. “No, no, no!” she regularly began, and then gradually suffered herself to be persuaded, reasoned, or moved by the expression of her parents’ sadness into a belated and generally grudging acquiescence. Obeying at long last, she felt an obscure resentment against those who had not compelled her to obey at once. Like most children, she would have liked to be relieved compulsorily of responsibility for her own actions; she was angry with her father and mother for forcing her to expend so much will in resisting them, such a quantity of painful emotion in finally letting her will be overcome. It would have been so much simpler if they had insisted from the first, had compelled her to obey at once, and so spared her all her spiritual effort and pain. Darkly and bitterly did she resent the incessant appeal they made to her better feelings. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. They had no right to smile and forgive and make her feel a beast, to fill her with sadness by being sad themselves. She felt that they were somehow taking a cruel advantage of her. And perversely, just because she hated their being sad, she deliberately went out of her way to say and do the things that would most sorely distress them. One of her favourite tricks was to threaten to “go and walk across the plank over the sluice.” Between the smooth pond and the shallow rippling of the stream, the gentle water became for a moment terrible. Pent in a narrow channel of oozy brickwork six feet of cataract tumbled with unceasing clamour into a black and heaving pool. It was a horrible place. How often her parents had begged her not to play near the sluice! Her threat would make them repeat their recommendations; they would implore her to be reasonable. “No, I won’t be reasonable,” Sylvia would shout and run off towards the sluice. If, in fact, she never ventured within five yards of the roaring gulf, that was because she was much more terrified for herself than her parents were for her. But she would go as near as she dared for the pleasure (the pleasure which she hated) of hearing her mother mournfully express her sadness at having a little girl so disobedient, so selfishly reckless of danger. She tried the same trick with her Aunt Judith. “I shall go into the woods by myself,” she menaced one day, scowling. To her great surprise, instead of begging her to be reasonable and not to distress the grown-ups by disobediently running into danger, Judith only shrugged her shoulders. “Trot along, then, if you want to be a little fool,” she said without looking up from her letter. Indignantly, Sylvia trotted; but she was frightened of being alone in the huge wood. Only pride kept her from returning at once. Damp, dirty, tear-stained, and scratched, she was brought back two hours later by a gamekeeper.
“What luck,” said Judith to her husband, “what enormous luck that the little idiot should have gone and got herself lost.”
The scheme of things was marshalled against the child’s delinquency. But Judith did not rely exclusively on the scheme of things to enforce her code; she provided her own sanctions. Obedience had to be prompt, or else there were prompt reprisals. Once Sylvia succeeded in provoking her aunt to real anger. The scene made a profound impression on her. An hour later she crept diffidently and humbly to where her aunt was sitting. “I’m sorry, Aunt Judith,” she said, “I’m sorry,” and burst into tears. It was the first time she had ever spontaneously asked for forgiveness.
The lessons which profited Sylvia most were those which she learned from other children. After a certain number of rather unsuccessful and occasionally painful exper
iments she learned to play, to behave as an equal among equals. Hitherto she had lived almost exclusively as a chronological inferior among grown-ups, in a state of unceasing rebellion and guerilla warfare. Her life had been one long risorgimento against forgiving Austrians and all too gentle, beautifully smiling Bourbons. With the little Carters from down the road, the little Holmeses from over the way, she was now suddenly required to adapt herself to democracy and parliamentary government. There were difficulties at first; but when in the end the little bandit had acquired the arts of civility, she was unprecedentedly happy. The grown-ups exploited the childish sociability for their own educational ends. Judith got up amateur theatricals; there was a juvenile performance of the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mrs Holmes, who was musical, organized the children’s enthusiasm for making a noise into part-singing. Mrs Carter taught them country dances. In a few months Sylvia had acquired all that passion for the higher life which her mother had been trying to cultivate for years, always in vain. She loved poetry, she loved music, she loved dancing — rather platonically, it was true; for Sylvia was one of those congenitally clumsy and aesthetically insensitive natures whose earnest passion for the arts is always destined to remain unconsummated. She loved ardently, but hopelessly; yet not unhappily, for she was not yet, perhaps, conscious of the hopelessness of her passion. She even loved the arithmetic and geography, the English history and French grammar, which Judith had arranged that she should imbibe, along with the little Carters, from the little Carters’ formidable governess.