Олдос Хаксли - Brief Candles. Four Stories

‘But the foot?’ I asked. ‘The stabbing pain at exactly half past 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 echoed, moving towards his place. He sat down and opened his napkin. ‘One meal after another, punctually, day after day, day after day. Such is 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.

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 hers! She was full of caprices and obsessions. For example, when she leased the villa on the slopes of Bellosguardo, she wanted to be allowed to cut down the cypresses at the end of the garden. ‘So terribly like a cemetery,’ she kept repeating to old Signor 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 Tarwinné? ’ questioned Signora Bargioni when her husband came home.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘ Una donnina 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 ingenuousnesses 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 Athenaeum. 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.