Олдос Хаксли: Brief Candles. Four Stories

‘The prices they ask for fish in Florence!’ said Tonino, after a silence, when he had exhausted the subject of white roses. ‘When I think how little we pay for octopus at Naples! It’s scandalous.’

‘Scandalous!’ echoed Moira with an indignation as genuine as his own. They talked, interminably.

Next day the sky was no longer blue, but opaquely white. There was no sunshine, only a diffused glare that threw no shadows. The landscape lay utterly lifeless under the dead and fishy stare of heaven. It was very hot, there was no wind, the air was hardly breathable and as though woolly. Moira woke up with a headache, and her nerves seemed to have an uneasy life of their own, apart from hers. Like caged birds they were, fluttering and starting and twittering at every alarm; and her aching, tired body was their aviary. Quite against her own wish and intention she found herself in a temper with the maid and saying the unkindest things. She had to give her a pair of stockings to make up for it. When she was dressed, she wanted to write some letters; but her fountain–pen made a stain on her fingers and she was so furious that she threw the beastly thing out of the window. It broke to pieces on the flagstones below. She had nothing to write with; it was too exasperating. She washed the ink off her hands and took out her embroidery frame. But her fingers were all thumbs. And then she pricked herself with the needle. Oh, so painfully! The tears came into her eyes; she began to cry. And having begun, she couldn’t stop. Assunta came in five minutes later and found her sobbing. ‘But what is it, signora?’ she asked, made most affectionately solicitous by the gift of the stockings. Moira shook her head. ‘Go away,’ she said brokenly. The girl was insistent. ‘Go away,’ Moira repeated. How could she explain what was the matter when the only thing that had happened was that she had pricked her finger? Nothing was the matter. And yet everything was the matter, everything.

The everything that was the matter resolved itself finally into the weather. Even in the best of health Moira had always been painfully conscious of the approach of thunder. Her jangled nerves were more than ordinarily sensitive. The tears and furies and despairs of this horrible day had a purely meteorological cause. But they were none the less violent and agonizing for that. The hours passed dismally. Thickened by huge black clouds, the twilight came on in a sultry and expectant silence, and it was prematurely night. The reflection of distant lightnings, flashing far away below the horizon, illuminated the eastern sky. The peaks and ridges of the Apennines stood out black against the momentary pale expanses of silvered vapour and disappeared again in silence; the attentive hush was still unbroken. With a kind of sinking apprehension—for she was terrified of storms—Moira sat at her window, watching the black hills leap out against the silver and die again, leap out and die. The flashes brightened; and then, for the first time, she heard the approaching thunder, far off and faint like the whisper of the sea in a shell. Moira shuddered. The clock in the hall struck nine, and, as though the sound were a signal prearranged, a gust of wind suddenly shook the magnolia tree that stood at the crossing of the paths in the garden below. Its long stiff leaves rattled together like scales of horn. There was another flash. In the brief white glare she could see the two funereal cypresses writhing and tossing as though in the desperate agitation of pain. And then all at once the storm burst catastrophically, it seemed directly overhead. At the savage violence of that icy downpour Moira shrank back and shut the window. A streak of white fire zigzagged fearfully just behind the cypresses. The immediate thunder was like the splitting and fall of a solid vault. Moira rushed away from the window and threw herself on the bed. She covered her face with her hands. Through the continuous roaring of the rain the thunder crashed and reverberated, crashed again and sent the fragments of sound rolling unevenly in all directions through the night. The whole house trembled. In the window–frames the shaken glasses rattled like the panes of an old omnibus rolling across the cobbles.

‘Oh God, oh God,’ Moira kept repeating. In the enormous tumult her voice was small and, as it were, naked, utterly abject.

‘But it’s too stupid to be frightened.’ She remembered John’s voice, his brightly encouraging, superior manner. ‘The chances are thousands to one against your being struck. And anyhow, hiding your head won’t prevent the lightning from….’

How she hated him for being so reasonable and right! ‘Oh God!’ There was another. ‘God, God, God….’

And then suddenly a terrible thing happened; the light went out. Through her closed eyelids she saw no longer the red of translucent blood, but utter blackness. Uncovering her face, she opened her eyes and anxiously looked round—on blackness again. She fumbled for the switch by her bed, found it, turned and turned; the darkness remained impenetrable.

‘Assunta!’ she called.

And all at once the square of the window was a suddenly uncovered picture of the garden, seen against a background of mauve–white sky and shining, down–pouring rain.

‘Assunta!’ Her voice was drowned in a crash that seemed to have exploded in the very roof. ‘Assunta, Assunta!’ In a panic she stumbled across the grave–dark room to the door. Another flash revealed the handle. She opened. ‘Assunta!’

Her voice was hollow above the black gulf of the stairs. The thunder exploded again above her. With a crash and a tinkle of broken glass one of the windows in her room burst open. A blast of cold wind lifted her hair. A flight of papers rose from her writing–table and whirled with crackling wings through the darkness. One touched her cheek like a living thing and was gone. She screamed aloud. The door slammed behind her. She ran down the stairs in terror, as though the fiend were at her heels. In the hall she met Assunta and the cook coming towards her, lighting matches as they came.

‘Assunta, the lights!’ She clutched the girl’s arm.

Only the thunder answered. When the noise subsided, Assunta explained that the fuses had all blown out and that there wasn’t a candle in the house. Not a single candle, and only one more box of matches.

‘But then we shall be left in the dark,’ said Moira hysterically.

Through the three blackly reflecting windows of the hall three separate pictures of the streaming garden revealed themselves and vanished. The old Venetian mirrors on the walls blinked for an instant into life, like dead eyes briefly opened.

‘In the dark,’ she repeated with an almost mad insistence.

‘Aie!’ cried Assunta, and dropped the match that had begun to burn her fingers. The thunder fell on them out of a darkness made denser and more hopeless by the loss of light.

When the telephone bell rang, Tonino was sitting in the managerial room of his hotel, playing cards with the proprietor’s two sons and another friend. ‘Someone to speak to you, Signor Tonino,’ said the underporter, looking in. ‘A lady.’ He grinned significantly.

Tonino put on a dignified air and left the room. When he returned a few minutes later, he held his hat in one hand and was buttoning up his rain–coat with the other.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go out.’

‘Go out?’ exclaimed the others incredulously. Beyond the shuttered windows the storm roared like a cataract and savagely exploded. ‘But where?’ they asked. ‘Why? Are you mad?’

Tonino shrugged his shoulders, as though it were nothing to go out into a tornado, as though he were used to it. The signora forestiera , he explained, hating them for their inquisitiveness; the Tarwin—she had asked him to go up to Bellosguardo at once. The fuses … not a candle in the house … utterly in the dark … very agitated … nerves….