Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Do you remember what she was like when she arrived?” said Judith one day to her husband.
He nodded, comparing in his mind the sullen little savage of nine months before with the gravely, earnestly radiant child who had just led the room.
“I feel like a lion-tamer,”Judith went on with a little laugh that covered a great love and a great pride. “But what does one do, Jack, when the lion takes to High Anglicanism? Dolly Carter’s being prepared for confirmation and Sylvia’s caught the infection.” Judith sighed. “I suppose she’s already thinking we’re both damned.”
“She’d be damned herself, if she didn’t,” Jack answered philosophically. “Much more seriously damned, what’s more, because she’d be damned in this world. It would be a terrible flaw in her character if she didn’t believe in some sort of rigmarole at this age.”
“But suppose,” said Judith, “she were to go on believing in it?”
Martha, meanwhile, had not been liking Switzerland, perhaps because it suited her, physically, too well. There was something, she felt, rather indecent about enjoying such perfect health as she enjoyed at Leysin. It was difficult, when one was feeling so full of animal spirits, to think very solicitously about suffering humanity and God, about Buddha and the higher life, and what not She resented the genial care-free selfishness of her own healthy body. Waking periodically to conscience-stricken realizations that she had been thinking of nothing for hours and even days together but the pleasure of sitting in the sun, of breathing the aromatic air beneath the pines, of walking in the high meadows picking flowers and looking at the view, she would launch a campaign of intensive spirituality; but after a little while the sun and the bright eager air were too much for her, and she would relapse once more into a shamefully irresponsible state of mere wellbeing.
“I shall be glad,” she kept saying, “when Paul is quite well again and we can go back to England.”
And Herbert would agree with her, partly on principle, because, being resigned to his economic and moral inferiority, he always agreed with her, and partly because he too, though unprecedentedly healthy, found Switzerland spiritually unsatisfying. In a country where everybody wore knickerbockers, an open shirt, and a rucksack there was no superiority, no distinction in being so attired. The scandal of the top-hat would have been the equivalent at Leysin of the scandal of the cross; he felt himself undistinguishedly orthodox.
Fifteen months after their departure the Claxtons were back again in the house on the common. Martha had a cold and a touch of lumbago; deprived of mountain exercise, Herbert was already succumbing to the attacks of his old enemy, chronic constipation. They overflowed with spirituality.
Sylvia also returned to the house on the common, and, for the first weeks, it was Aunt Judith here and Aunt Judith there, at Aunt Judith’s we did this, Aunt Judith never made me do that. Beautifully smiling, but with unacknowledged resentment at her heart, “Dearest,” Martha would say, “I’m not Aunt Judith.” She really hated her sister for having succeeded where she herself had failed. “You’ve done wonders with Sylvia,” she wrote to Judith, “and Herbert and I can never be sufficiently grateful.” And she would say the same in conversation to friends. “We can never be grateful enough to her, can we, Herbert?” And Herbert would punctually agree that they could never be grateful enough. But the more grateful to her sister she dutifully and even supererogatively was, the more Martha hated her, the more she resented Judith’s success and her influence over the child. True, the influence had been unequivocally good; but it was precisely because it had been so good that Martha resented it. It was unbearable to her that frivolous, unspiritual Judith should have been able to influence the child more happily than she had ever done. She had left Sylvia sullenly ill-mannered and disobedient, full of rebellious hatred for all the things which her parents admired; she returned to find her well behaved, obliging, passionately interested in music and poetry, earnestly preoccupied with the newly discovered problems of religion. It was unbearable. Patiently Martha set to work to undermine her sister’s influence on the child. Judith’s own work had made the task more easy for her. For thanks to Judith, Sylvia was now malleable. Contact with children of her own age had wanned and softened and sensitized her, had mitigated her savage egotism and opened her up towards external influences. The appeal to her better feelings could now be made with the certainty of evoking a positive, instead of a rebelliously negative, response. Martha made the appeal constantly and with skill. She harped (with a beautiful resignation, of course) on the family’s poverty. If Aunt Judith did and permitted many things which were not done and permitted in the house on the common, that was because Aunt Judith was so much better off. She could afford many luxuries which the Claxtons had to do without. “Not that your father and I mind doing without,” Martha insisted. “On the contrary. It’s really rather a blessing not to be rich. You remember what Jesus said about rich people.” Sylvia remembered and was thoughtful. Martha would develop her theme; being able to afford luxuries and actually indulging in them had a certain coarsening, despiritualizing effect. It was so easy to become worldly. The implication, of course, was that Aunt Judith and Uncle Jack had been tainted by worldliness. Poverty had happily preserved the Claxtons from the danger — poverty, and also, Martha insisted, their own meritorious wish. For of course they could have afforded to keep at least one servant, even in these difficult times; but they had preferred to do without, “because, you see, serving is better than being served.” Jesus had said that the way of Mary was better than the way of Martha. “But I’m a Martha,” said Martha Claxton, “who tries her best to be a Mary too. Martha and Mary — that’s the best way of all. Practical service and contemplation. Your father isn’t one of those artists who selfishly detach themselves from all contact with the humble facts of life. He is a creator, but he is not too proud to do the humblest service.” Poor Herbert! he couldn’t have refused to do the humblest service, if Martha had commanded. Some artists, Martha continued, only thought of immediate success, only worked with an eye to profits and applause. But Sylvia’s father, on the contrary, was one who worked without thought of the public, only for the sake of creating truth and beauty.
On Sylvia’s mind these and similar discourses, constantly repeated with variations and in every emotional key, had a profound effect. With all the earnestness of puberty she desired to be good and spiritual and disinterested, she longed to sacrifice herself, it hardly mattered to what so long as the cause was noble. Her mother had now provided her with the cause. She gave herself up to it with all the stubborn energy of her nature. How fiercely she practised her piano! With what determination she read through even the dreariest books! She kept a notebook in which she copied out the most inspiring passages of her daily reading; and another in which she recorded her good resolutions, and with them, in an agonized and chronically remorseful diary, her failures to abide by the resolutions, her lapses from grace. “Greed. Promised I’d eat only one greengage. Took four at lunch. None to-morrow. O.G.H.M.T.B.G.”
“What does O.G.H.M.T.B.G. mean?” asked Paul maliciously one day.
Sylvia flushed darkly. “You’ve been reading my diary!” she said. “Oh, you beast, you little beast.” And suddenly she threw herself on her brother like a fury. His nose was bleeding when he got away from her. “If you ever look at it again, I’ll kill you.” And standing there with her clenched teeth and quivering nostrils, her hair flying loose round her pale face, she looked as though she meant it. “I’ll kill you,” she repeated. Her rage was justified; O.G.H.M.T.B.G. meant “O God, help me to be good.”
That evening she came to Paul and asked his pardon.
Aunt Judith and Uncle Jack had been in America for the best part of a year.
“Yes, go; go by all means,” Martha had said when Judith’s letter came, inviting Sylvia to spend a few days with them in London. “You mustn’t miss such a chance of going to the opera and all those lovely concerts.”
“But is it quit
e fair, mother?” said Sylvia hesitatingly. “I mean, I don’t want to go and enjoy myself all alone. It seems somehow...”
“But you ought to go,” Martha interrupted her. She felt so certain of Sylvia now that she had no fears of Judith. “For a musician like you it’s a necessity to hear Parsifal and the Magic Flute. I was meaning to take you myself next year; but now the opportunity has turned up this year, you must take it. Gratefully,” she added, with a sweetening of her smile.
Sylvia went. Parsifal was like going to church, but much more so. Sylvia listened with a reverent excitement that was, however, interrupted from time to time by the consciousness, irrelevant, ignoble even, but oh, how painful that her frock, her stockings, her shoes were dreadfully different from those worn by that young girl of her own age, whom she had noticed in the row behind as she came in. And the girl, it had seemed to her, had returned her gaze derisively. Round the Holy Grail there was an explosion of bells and harmonious roaring. She felt ashamed of herself for thinking of such unworthy things in the presence of the mystery. And when, in the entr’acte, Aunt Judith offered her an ice, she refused almost indignantly.
Aunt Judith was surprised. “But you used to love ices so much.”
“But not now, Aunt Judith. Not now.” An ice in church — what sacrilege! She tried to think about the Grail. A vision of green satin shoes and a lovely mauve artificial flower floated up before her inward eye.
Next day they went shopping. It was a bright cloudless morning of early summer. The windows of the drapers’ shops in Oxford Street had blossomed with bright pale colours. The waxen dummies were all preparing to go to Ascot, to Henley, were already thinking of the Eton and Harrow match. The pavements were crowded; an immense blurred noise filled the air like a mist. The scarlet and golden buses looked regal and the sunlight glittered with a rich and oily radiance on the polished flanks of the passing limousines. A little procession of unemployed slouched past with a brass band at their head making joyful music, as though they were only too happy to be unemployed, as though it were a real pleasure to be hungry.
Sylvia had not been in London for nearly two years, and these crowds, this noise, this innumerable wealth of curious and lovely things in every shining window went to her head. She felt even more excited than she had felt at Parsifal.
For an hour they wandered through Selfridge’s. “And now, Sylvia,” said Aunt Judith, when at last she had ticked off every item on her long list, “now you can choose whichever of these frocks you like best.” She waved her hand. A display of Summer Modes for Misses surrounded them on every side. Lilac and lavender, primrose and pink and green, blue and mauve, white, flowery, spotted — a sort of herbaceous border of young frocks. “Whichever you like,” Aunt Judith repeated. “Or if you’d prefer a frock for the evening...”
Green satin shoes and a big mauve flower. The girl had looked derisively. It was unworthy, unworthy.
“No, really, Aunt Judith.” She blushed, she stammered. “Really, I don’t need a frock. Really.”..
“All the more reason for having it if you don’t need it. Which one?”
“No, really. I don’t, I can’t...” And suddenly, to Aunt Judith’s uncomprehending astonishment, she burst into tears.
The year was 1924. The house on the common basked in the soft late-April sunshine. Through the open windows of the drawing-room came the sound of Sylvia’s practising. Stubbornly, with a kind of fixed determined fury, she was trying to master Chopin’s Valse in D flat. Under her conscientious and insensitive fingers the lilt and languor of the dance rhythm was laboriously sentimental, like the rendering on the piano of a cornet solo outside a public house; and the quick flutter of semiquavers in the contrasting passages was a flutter, when Sylvia played, of mechanical butterflies, a beating of nickel-plated wings. Again and again she played, again and again. In the little copse on the other side of the stream at the bottom of the garden the birds went about their business undisturbed. On the trees the new small leaves were like the spirits of leaves, almost immaterial, but vivid like little flames at the tip of every twig. Herbert was sitting on a tree stump in the middle of the wood doing those yoga breathing exercises, accompanied by auto-suggestion, which he found so good for his constipation. Closing his right nostril with a long forefinger, he breathed in deeply through his left — in, in, deeply, while he counted four heart-beats. Then through sixteen beats he held his breath and between each beat he said to himself very quickly, “I’m not constipated, I’m not constipated.” When he had made the affirmation sixteen times, he closed his left nostril and breathed out, while he counted eight, through his right After which he began again. The left nostril was the more favoured; for it breathed in with the air a faint cool sweetness of primroses and leaves and damp earth. Near him, on a camp stool, Paul was making a drawing of an oak tree. Art at all costs; beautiful, uplifting, disinterested Art. Paul was bored. Rotten old tree — what was the point of drawing it? All round him the sharp green spikes of the wild hyacinths came thrusting out of the dark mould. One had pierced through a dead leaf and lifted it, transfixed, into the air. A few more days of sunshine and every spike would break out into a blue flower. Next time his mother sent him into Godaiming on his bicycle, Paul was thinking, he’d see if he couldn’t overcharge her two shillings on the shopping instead of one, as he had done last time. Then he’d be able to buy some chocolate as well as go to the cinema; and perhaps even some cigarettes, though that might be dangerous....
“Well, Paul,” said his father, who had taken a sufficient dose of his mystical equivalent of Cascara, “how are you getting on?” He got up from the tree stump and walked across the glade to where the boy was sitting. The passage of time had altered Herbert very little; his explosive beard was still as blond as it had always been, he was as thin as ever, his head showed no signs of going bald. Only his teeth had visibly aged; his smile was discoloured and broken.
“But he really ought to go to a dentist,” Judith had insistently urged on her sister, the last time they met.
“He doesn’t want to,” Martha had replied. “He doesn’t really believe in them.” But perhaps her own reluctance to part with the necessary number of guineas had something to do with Herbert’s lack of faith in dentists. “Besides,” she went on, “Herbert hardly notices such merely material, physical things. He lives so much in the noumenal world that he’s hardly aware of the phenomenal. Really not aware.”
“Well, he jolly well ought to be aware,” Judith answered, “that’s all I can say.” She was indignant.
“How are you getting on?” Herbert repeated, and laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“The bark’s most horribly difficult to get right,” Paul answered in a complainingly angry voice.
“That makes it all the more worth while to get right,” said Herbert. “Patience and work — they’re the only things. Do you know how a great man once defined genius?” Paul knew very well how a great man had once defined genius; but the definition seemed to him so stupid and such a personal insult to himself, that he did not answer, only grunted. His father bored him, maddeningly. “Genius,” Herbert went on, answering his own question, “genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.” At that moment Paul detested his father.
“One two-and three-and One-and two-and three-and...” Under Sylvia’s fingers the mechanical butterflies continued to flap their metal wings. Her face was set, determined, angry; Herbert’s great man would have found genius in her. Behind her stiff determined back her mother came and went with a feather brush in her hand, dusting. Time had thickened and coarsened her; she walked heavily. Her hair had begun to go grey. When she had finished dusting, or rather when she was tired of it, she sat down. Sylvia was laboriously cornet-soloing through the dance rhythm. Martha closed her eyes. “Beautiful, beautiful!” she said, and smiled her most beautiful smile. “You play it beautifully, my darling.” She was proud of her daughter. Not merely as a musician; as a human being too. When she thought what trouble
she had had with Sylvia in the old days... “Beautifully.” She rose at last and went upstairs to her bedroom. Unlocking a cupboard, she took out a box of candied fruits and ate several cherries, a plum, and three apricots. Herbert had gone back to his studio and his unfinished picture of “Europe and America at the feet of Mother India.” Paul pulled a catapult out of his pocket, fitted a buckshot into the leather pouch and let fly at a nuthatch that was running like a mouse up the oak tree on the other side of the glade. “Hell!” he said as the bird flew away unharmed. But the next shot was more fortunate. There was a spurt of flying feathers, there were two or three little squeaks. Running up Paul found a hen chaffinch lying in the grass. There was blood on the feathers. Thrilling with a kind of disgusted excitement Paul picked up the little body. How warm. It was the first time he had ever killed anything. What a good shot! But there was nobody he could talk to about it. Sylvia was no good: she was almost worse than mother about some things. With a fallen branch he scratched a hole and buried the little corpse, for fear somebody might find it and wonder how it had been killed. They’d be furious if they knew! He went into lunch feeling tremendously pleased with himself. But his face fell as he looked round the table. “Only this beastly cold stuff?”