Олдос Хаксли: Brief Candles. Four Stories

‘And did you accept the challenge?’ I asked, laughing.

Tilney shook his head. ‘I just helped myself to another nip of his 1820 brandy; it was the only retort a rational man could make.’

‘And did the Fairy share Chawdron’s opinion about her mind?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ said Tilney, ‘I think so. She had a great conceit of herself. Like all these spiritual people. An inordinate conceit. She played the superior role very badly and inconsistently. But all the same she was convinced of her superiority. Inevitably; for, you see, she had an enormous capacity for autosuggestion. What she told herself three times became true. For example, I used at first to think there was some hocus–pocus about her asceticism. She ate so absurdly little in public and at meals that I fancied she must do a little tucking–in privately in between whiles. But later I came to the conclusion that I’d maligned her. By dint of constantly telling herself and other people that eating was unspiritual and gross, not to mention impolite and lower–class, she’d genuinely succeeded, I believe, in making food disgust her. She’d got to a point where she really couldn’t eat more than a very little. Which was one of the causes of her sickliness. She was just under–nourished. But under–nourishment was only one of the causes. She was also diplomatically sick. She threatened to die as statesmen threaten to mobilize, in order to get what she wanted. Blackmail, in fact. Not for money; she was curiously disinterested in many ways. What she wanted was his interest, was power over him, was self–assertion. She had headaches for the same reason as a baby howls. If you give in to the baby and do what it wants, it’ll howl again, it’ll make a habit of howling. Chawdron was one of the weak–minded sort of parents. When the Fairy had one of her famous headaches, he was terribly disturbed. The way he fluttered round the sick–room with ice and hot–water bottles and eau–de–Cologne! The Times obituarist would have wept to see him; such a touching exhibition of the heart of gold! The result was that the Fairy use to have a headache every three or four days. It was absolutely intolerable.’

‘But were they purely imaginary, these headaches?’

Tilney shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes and no. There was certainly a physiological basis. The woman did have pains in her head from time to time. It was only to be expected; she was run down, through not eating enough; she didn’t take sufficient exercise, so she had chronic constipation; chronic constipation probably set up a slight chronic inflammation of the ovaries; and she certainly suffered from eye–strain—you could tell that from the beautifully vague, spiritual look in her eyes, the look that comes from uncorrected myopia. There were, as you see, plenty of physiological reasons for her headaches. Her body made her a present, so to speak, of the pain. Her mind then proceeded to work up this raw material. Into what remarkable forms! Touched by her imagination, the headaches became mystic, transcendental. It was infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an intestinal stasis. Regularly every Tuesday and Friday she died—died with a beautiful Christian resignation, a martyr’s fortitude. Chawdron used to come down from the sick–room with tears in his eyes. He’d never seen such patience, such courage, such grit. There were few men she wouldn’t put to shame. She was a wonderful example. And so on. And I dare say it was all quite true. She started by malingering a little, by pretending that the headaches were worse than they were. But her imagination was too lively for her; it got beyond her control. Her pretendings gradually came true and she really did suffer martyrdom each time; she really did very nearly die. And then she got into the habit of being a martyr, and the attacks came on regularly; imagination stimulated the normal activities of inflamed ovaries and poisoned intestines; the pain made its appearance and at once became the raw material of a mystic, spiritual martyrdom taking place on a higher plane. Anyhow, it was all very complicated and obscure. And, obviously, if the Fairy herself had given you an account of her existence at this time, it would have sounded like St Lawrence’s reminiscences of life on the grill. Or rather it would have sounded like the insincere fabrication of such reminiscences. For the Fairy, as I’ve said before, was without talent, and sincerity and saintliness are matters of talent. Hypocrisy and insincerity are the products of native incompetence. Those who are guilty of them are people without skill in the arts of behaviour and self–expression. The Fairy’s talk would have sounded utterly false to you. But for her it was all genuine. She really suffered, really died, really was good and resigned and courageous. Just as the paranoiac is really Napoleon Bonaparte and the young man with dementia praecox is really being spied on and persecuted by a gang of fiendishly ingenious enemies. If I were to tell the story from her point of view, it would sound really beautiful—not be–yütiful, mind you; but truly and genuinely beautiful; for the good reason that I have a gift of expression, which the poor Fairy hadn’t. So that, for all but emotional cretins like Chawdron, she was obviously a hypocrite and liar. Also a bit of a pathological case. For that capacity for autosuggestion really was rather pathological. She could make things come too true. Not merely diseases and martyrdoms and saintliness, but also historical facts, or rather historical not–facts. She authenticated the not–facts by simply repeating that they had happened. For example, she wanted people to believe—she wanted to believe herself—that she had been intimate with Chawdron for years and years, from childhood, from the time of her birth. The fact that he had known her since she was “so high” would explain and justify her present relationship with him. The scandalmongers would have no excuse for talking. So she proceeded bit by bit to fabricate a lifelong intimacy, even a bit of an actual kinship, with her Uncle Benny. I told you that that was what she called him, didn’t I? That nickname had its significance; it planted him at once in the table of consanguinity and so disinfected their relations, so to speak, automatically made them innocent.’

‘Or incestuous,’ I added.

‘Or incestuous. Quite. But she didn’t consider the D’Annunzioesque refinements. When she gave him that name, she promoted Chawdron to the rank of a dear old kinsman, or at least a dear old family friend. Sometimes she even called him “Nunky Benny,” so as to show that she had known him from the cradle—had lisped of nunkies, for the nunkies came. But that wasn’t enough. The evidence had to be fuller, more circumstantial. So she invented it—romps with Nunky in the hay, visits to the pantomime with him, a whole outfit of childish memories.’

‘But what about Chawdron?’ I asked. ‘Did he share the invented memories?’

Tilney nodded. ‘But for him, of course, they were invented. Other people, however, accepted them as facts. Her reminiscences were so detailed and circumstantial that, unless you knew she was a liar, you simply had to accept them. With Chawdron himself she couldn’t, of course, pretend that she’d known him, literally and historically, all those years. Not at first, in any case. The lifelong intimacy started by being figurative and spiritual. “I feel as though I’d known my Uncle Benny ever since I was a tiny baby,” she said to me in his presence, quite soon after she’d first got to know him; and as always, on such occasions, she made her voice even more whiningly babyish than usual. Dreadful that voice was—so whiny–piny, so falsely sweet. “Ever since I was a teeny, tiny baby. Don’t you feel like that, Uncle Benny?” And Chawdron heartily agreed; of course he felt like that. From that time forward she began to expatiate on the incidents which ought to have occurred in that far–off childhood with darling Nunky. They were the same incidents, of course, as those which she actually remembered when she was talking to strangers and he wasn’t there. She made him give her old photographs of himself—visions of him in high collars and frock–coats, in queer–looking Norfolk jackets, in a top–hat sitting in a victoria. They helped her to make her fancies real. With their aid and the aid of his reminiscences she constructed a whole life in common with him. “Do you remember, Uncle Benny, the time we went to Cowes on your yacht and I fell into the sea?” she’d ask. And Chawdron, who thoroughly entered into the game, would answer: “Of course I remember. And when we’d fished you out, we had to wrap you in hot blankets and give you warm rum and milk. And you got quite drunk.” “Was I funny when I was drunk, Uncle Benny?” And Chawdron would rather lamely and ponderously invent a few quaintnesses which were then incorporated in the history. So that on a future occasion the Fairy could begin: “Nunky Benny, do you remember those ridiculous things I said when you made me drunk with rum and hot milk that time I fell into the sea at Cowes?” And so on. Chawdron loved the game, thought it simply too sweet and whimsical and touching—positively like something out of Barrie or A. A. Milne—and was never tired of playing it. As for the Fairy—for her it wasn’t a game at all. The not–facts had been repeated till they became facts. “But, come, Miss Spindell,” I said to her once, when she’d been telling me— me! —about some adventure she’d had with Uncle Benny when she was a toddler, “come, come, Miss Spindell” (I always called her that, though she longed to be my Fairy as well as Chawdron’s, and would have called me Uncle Ted if I’d given her the smallest encouragement; but I took a firm line; she was always Miss Spindell for me), “come,” I said, “you seem to forget that it’s only just over a year since you saw Mr Chawdron for the first time.” She looked at me quite blankly for a moment without saying anything. “You can’t seriously expect me to forget too,” I added. Poor Fairy! The blankness suddenly gave place to a painful, blushing embarrassment. “Oh, of course,” she began, and laughed nervously. “It’s as though I’d known him for ever. My imagination … ” She tailed off into silence, and a minute later made an excuse to leave me. I could see she was upset, physically upset, as though she’d been woken up too suddenly out of a sound sleep, jolted out of one world into another moving in a different direction. But when I saw her the next day, she seemed to be quite herself again. She had suggested herself back into the dream world; from the other end of the table, at lunch, I heard her talking to an American business acquaintance of Chawdron’s about the fun she and Uncle Benny used to have on his grouse moor in Scotland. But from that time forth, I noticed, she never talked to me about her apocryphal childhood again. A curious incident; it made me look at her hypocrisy in another light. It was then I began to realize that the lie in her soul was mainly an unconscious lie, the product of pathology and a lack of talent. Mainly; but sometimes, on the contrary, the lie was only too conscious and deliberate. The most extraordinary of them was the lie at the bottom of the great Affair of the Stigmata.’