Олдос Хаксли: Brief Candles. Four Stories

‘Miles!’

Fanning started so violently that a drop of ink was jerked from his pen on to the paper. He felt as though his heart had fallen into an awful gulf of emptiness.

‘Miles!’

He looked round. Two hands were clutching the bars of the unshuttered window and, as though desperately essaying to emerge from a subterranean captivity, the upper part of a face was peering in, over the high sill, with wide unhappy eyes.

‘But Pamela!’ There was reproach in his astonishment.

It was to the implied rebuke that she penitently answered. ‘I couldn’t help it, Miles,’ she said; and, behind the bars, he saw her reddened eyes suddenly brighten and overflow with tears. ‘I simply had to come.’ Her voice trembled on the verge of breaking. ‘ Had to.’

The tears, her words and that unhappy voice were moving. But he didn’t want to be moved, he was angry with himself for feeling the emotion, with her for inspiring it. ‘But, my dear child!’ he began, and the reproach in his voice had shrilled to a kind of exasperation—the exasperation of one who feels himself hemmed in and helpless, increasingly helpless, against circumstances. ‘But I thought we’d settled,’ he began and broke off. He rose, and walked agitatedly towards the fireplace, agitatedly back again, like a beast in a cage; he was caught, hemmed in between those tearful eyes behind the bars and his own pity, with all those dangerous feelings that have their root in pity. ‘I thought,’ he began once more.

But, ‘Oh!’ came her sharp cry, and looking again towards the window he saw that only the two small hands and a pair of straining wrists were visible. The tragical face had vanished.

‘Pamela?’

‘It’s all right.’ Her voice came rather muffled and remote. ‘I slipped. I was standing on a little kind of ledge affair. The window’s so high from the ground,’ she added plaintively.

‘My poor child!’ he said on a little laugh of amused commiseration. The reproach, the exasperation had gone out of his voice. He was conquered by the comic patheticness of her. Hanging on to the bars with those small, those rather red and childishly untended hands! And tumbling off the perch she had had to climb on, because the window was so high from the ground! A wave of sentimentality submerged him. ‘I’ll come and open the door.’ He ran into the hall.

Waiting outside in the darkness, she heard the bolts being shot back, one by one. Clank, clank! and then ‘Damn!’ came his voice from the other side of the door. ‘These things are so stiff … I’m barricaded up as though I were in a safe.’ She stood there waiting. The door shook as he tugged at the recalcitrant bolt. The waiting seemed interminable. And all at once a huge, black weariness settled on her. The energy of wrought–up despair deserted her and she was left empty of everything but a tired misery. What was the good, what was the good of coming like this to be turned away again? For he would turn her away; he didn’t want her. What was the good of renewing suffering, of once more dying?

‘Hell and Death!’ On the other side of the door Fanning was cursing like an Elizabethan.

Hell and Death. The words reverberated in Pamela’s mind. The pains of Hell, the darkness and dissolution of Death. What was the good?

Clank! Another bolt had gone back. ‘Thank goodness. We’re almost … ’ A chain rattled. At the sound Pamela turned and ran in a blind terror down the dimly lighted street.

‘At last!’ The door swung back and Fanning stepped out. But the sentimental tenderness of his outstretched hands wasted itself on empty night. Twenty yards away a pair of pale legs twinkled in the darkness. ‘Pamela!’ he called in astonishment. ‘What the devil … ?’ The wasting on emptiness of his feelings had startled him into annoyance. He felt like one who has put forth all his strength to strike something and, missing his aim, swipes the unresisting air, grotesquely. ‘Pamela!’ he called again, yet louder.

She did not turn at the sound of his voice, but ran on. These wretched high–heeled shoes! ‘Pamela!’ And then came the sound of his pursuing footsteps. She tried to run faster. But the pursuing footsteps came nearer and nearer. It was no good. Nothing was any good. She slackened her speed to a walk.

‘But what on earth?’ he asked from just behind her, almost angrily. Pursuing, he had called up within him the soul of a pursuer, angry and desirous. ‘What on earth?’ And suddenly his hand was on her shoulder. She trembled a little at the touch. ‘But why?’ he insisted. ‘Why do you suddenly run away?’

But Pamela only shook her averted head. She wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t meet his eyes. Fanning looked down at her intently, questioningly. Why? And as he looked at that weary hopeless face, he began to divine the reason. The anger of the pursuit subsided in him. Respecting her dumb, averted misery, he too was silent. He drew her comfortingly towards him. His arm round her shoulders, Pamela suffered herself to be led back towards the house.

Which would be best, he was wondering with the surface of his mind: to telephone for a taxi to take her back to the hotel, or to see if he could make up a bed for her in one of the upstairs rooms? But in the depths of his being he knew quite well that he would do neither of these things. He knew that he would be her lover. And yet, in spite of this deep knowledge, the surface mind still continued to discuss its little problem of cabs and bed–linen. Discussed it sensibly, discussed it dutifully. Because it would be a madness, he told himself, a criminal madness if he didn’t send for the taxi or prepare that upstairs room. But the dark certainty of the depths rose suddenly and exploded at the surface in a bubble of ironic laughter, in a brutal and cynical word. ‘Comedian!’ he said to himself, to the self that agitatedly thought of telephones and taxis and pillow–slips. ‘Seeing that it’s obvious I’m going to have her.’ And, rising from the depths, her nakedness presented itself to him palpably in an integral and immediate contact with his whole being. But this was shameful, shameful. He pushed the naked Anadyomene back into the depths. Very well, then (his surface mind resumed its busy efficient rattle), seeing that it was perhaps rather late to start telephoning for taxis, he’d rig up one of the rooms on the first floor. But if he couldn’t find any sheets … ? But here was the house, the open door.

Pamela stepped across the threshold. The hall was almost dark. Through a curtained doorway on the left issued a thin blade of yellow light. Passive in her tired misery, she waited. Behind her the chain rattled, as it had rattled only a few moments before, when she had fled from the ominous sound, and clank, clank! the bolts were thrust back into place.

‘There,’ said Fanning’s voice. ‘And now … ’ With a click, the darkness yielded suddenly to brilliant light.

Pamela uttered a little cry and covered her face with her hands. ‘Oh, please,’ she begged, ‘please.’ The light hurt her, was a sort of outrage. She didn’t want to see, couldn’t bear to be seen.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and the comforting darkness returned. ‘This way.’ Taking her arm he led her towards the lighted doorway on the left. ‘Shut your eyes,’ he commanded, as they approached the curtain. ‘We’ve got to go into the light again; but I’ll turn it out the moment I can get to the switch. Now!’ She shut her eyes and suddenly, as the curtain rings rattled, she saw, through her closed eyelids, the red shining of transparent blood. Still holding her arm, he led her forward into the room.

Pamela lifted her free hand to her face. ‘Please don’t look at me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want you to see me like this. I mean, I couldn’t bear … ’ Her voice faded to silence.