Олдос Хаксли: Brief Candles. Four Stories

‘The stigmata?’ I echoed. ‘A pious lie, then.’

‘Pious.’ He nodded. ‘That was how she justified it to herself. Though, of course, in her eyes, all her lies were pious lies. Pious, because they served her purposes and she was a saint; her cause was sacred. And afterwards, of course, when she’d treated the lies to her process of imaginative disinfection, they ceased to be lies and fluttered away as snow–white pious truths. But to start with they were undoubtedly pious lies, even for her. The Affair of the Stigmata made that quite clear. I caught her in the act. It all began with a boil that developed on Chawdron’s foot.’

‘Curious place to have a boil.’

‘Not common,’ he agreed. ‘I once had one there myself, when I was a boy. Most unpleasant, I can assure you. Well, the same thing happened to Chawdron. He and I were down at his country place, playing golf and in the intervals concocting the Autobiography . We’d settle down with brandy and cigars and I’d gently question him. Left to himself, he was apt to wander and become incoherent and unchronological. I had to canalize his narrative, so to speak. Remarkably frank he was. I learned some curious things about the business world, I can tell you. Needless to say, they’re not in the Autobiography . I’m reserving them for the Life . Which means, alas, that nobody will ever know them. Well, as I say, we were down there in the country for a long weekend, Friday to Tuesday. The Fairy had stayed in London. Periodically she took her librarianship very seriously and protested that she simply had to get on with the catalogue. “I have my duties,” she said when Chawdron suggested that she should come down to the country with us. “You must let me get on with my duties. I don’t think one ought to be just frivolous; do you, Uncle Benny? Besides, I really love my work.” God, how she enraged me with that whiny–piny talk! But Chawdron, of course, was touched and enchanted. “What an extraordinary little person she is!” he said to me as we left the house together. Even more extraordinary than you suppose, I thought. He went on rhapsodizing as far as Watford. But in a way, I could see, when we arrived, in a way he was quite pleased she hadn’t come. It was a relief to him to be having a little masculine holiday. She had the wit to see that he needed these refreshments from time to time. Well, we duly played our golf, with the result that by Sunday morning poor Chawdron’s boil, which had been a negligible little spot on the Friday, had swollen up with the chafing and the exercise into a massive red hemisphere that made walking an agony. Unpleasant, no doubt; but nothing, for any ordinary person, to get seriously upset about. Chawdron, however, wasn’t an ordinary person where boils were concerned. He had a carbuncle–complex, a boilophobia. Excusably, perhaps; for it seems that his brother had died of some awful kind of gangrene that had started, to all appearances harmlessly, in a spot on his cheek. Chawdron couldn’t develop a pimple without imagining that he’d caught his brother’s disease. This affair on his foot scared him out of his wits. He saw the bone infected, the whole leg rotting away, amputations, death. I offered what comfort and encouragement I could and sent for the local doctor. He came at once and turned out to be a young man, very determined and efficient and confidence–inspiring. The boil was anaesthetized, lanced, cleaned out, tied up. Chawdron was promised there’d be no complications. And there weren’t. The thing healed up quite normally. Chawdron decided to go back to town on the Tuesday, as he’d arranged. “I wouldn’t like to disappoint Fairy,” he explained. “She’d be so sad if I didn’t come back when I’d promised. Besides, she might be nervous. You’ve no idea what an intuition that little girl has—almost uncanny, like second sight. She’d guess something was wrong and be upset; and you know how bad it is for her to be upset.” I did indeed; those mystic headaches of hers were the bane of my life. No, no, I agreed. She mustn’t be upset. So it was decided that the Fairy should be kept in blissful ignorance of the boil until Chawdron had actually arrived. But the question then arose: how should he arrive? We had gone down into the country in Chawdron’s Bugatti. He had a weakness for speed. But it wasn’t the car for an invalid. It was arranged that the chauffeur should drive the Bugatti up to town and come back with the Rolls. In the unlikely event of his seeing Miss Spindell, he was not to tell her why he had been sent to town. Those were his orders. The man went and duly returned with the Rolls. Chawdron was installed, almost as though he were in an ambulance, and we rolled majestically up to London. What a homecoming! In anticipation of the sympathy he would get from the Fairy, Chawdron began to have a slight relapse as we approached the house. “I feel it throbbing,” he assured me; and when he got out of the car, what a limp! As though he’d lost a leg at Gallipoli. Really heroic. The butler had to support him up to the drawing–room. He was lowered on to the sofa. “Is Miss Spindell in her room?” The butler thought so. “Then ask her to come down here at once.” The man went out; Chawdron closed his eyes—wearily, like a very sick man. He was preparing to get all the sympathy he could and, I could see, luxuriously relishing it in advance. “Still throbbing?” I asked, rather irreverently. He nodded, without opening his eyes. “Still throbbing.” The manner was grave and sepulchral. I had to make an effort not to laugh. There was a silence; we waited. And then the door opened. The Fairy appeared. But a maimed Fairy. One foot in a high–heeled shoe, the other in a slipper. Such a limp! “Another leg lost at Gallipoli,” thought I. When he heard the door open, Chawdron shut his eyes tighter than ever and turned his face to the wall, or at any rate the back of the sofa. I could see that this rather embarrassed the Fairy. Her entrance had been dramatic; she had meant him to see her disablement at once; hadn’t counted on finding a death–bed scene. She had hastily to improvise another piece of stage business, a new set of lines; the scene she had prepared wouldn’t do. Which was the more embarrassing for her as I was there, looking on—a very cool spectator, as she knew; not in the least a Maggie Spindell fan. She hesitated a second near the door, hoping Chawdron would look round; but he kept his eyes resolutely shut and his face averted. He’d evidently decided to play the moribund part for all it was worth. So, after one rather nervous glance at me, she limped across the room to the sofa. “Uncle Benny?” He gave a great start, as though he hadn’t known she was there. “Is that you, Fairy?” This was pianissimo, con espressione . Then, molto agitato from the Fairy: “What is it, Nunky Benny? What is it? Oh, tell me.” She was close enough now to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Tell me.” He turned his face towards her—the tenderly transfigured burglar. His heart overflowed—“Fairy!”—a slop of hog–wash. “But what’s the matter, Nunky Benny?” “Nothing, Fairy.” The tone implied that it was a heroic understatement in the manner of Sir Philip Sidney. “Only my foot.” “Your foot!” The fairy registered such astonishment that we both fairly jumped. “Something wrong with your foot?” “Yes, why not?” Chawdron was rather annoyed; he wasn’t getting the kind of sympathy he’d looked forward to. She turned to me. “But when did it happen, Mr Tilney?” I was breezy. “A nasty boil,” I explained. “Walking round the course did it no good. It had to be lanced on Sunday.” “At about half past eleven on Sunday morning?” “Yes, I suppose it was about half past eleven,” I said, thinking the question was an odd one. “It was just half past eleven when this happened,” she said dramatically, pointing to her slippered foot. “What’s ‘this’?” asked Chawdron crossly. He was thoroughly annoyed at being swindled out of sympathy. I took pity on the Fairy; things seemed to be going so badly for her. I could see that she had prepared a coup and that it hadn’t come off. “Miss Spindell also seems to have hurt her foot,” I explained. “You didn’t see how she limped.” “How did you hurt it?” asked Chawdron. He was still very grumpy. “I was sitting quietly in the library, working at the catalogue,” she began: and I guessed, by the way the phrases came rolling out, that she was at last being able to make use of the material she had prepared, “when suddenly, almost exactly at half past eleven (I remember looking at the clock), I felt a terrible pain in my foot. As though someone were driving a sharp, sharp knife into it. It was so intense that I nearly fainted.” She paused for a moment, expecting appropriate comment. But Chawdron wouldn’t make it. So I put in a polite “Dear me, most extraordinary!” with which she had to be content. “When I got up,” she continued, “I could hardly stand, my foot hurt me so; and I’ve been limping ever since. And the most extraordinary thing is that there’s a red mark on my foot, like a scar.” Another expectant pause. But still no word from Chawdron. He sat there with his mouth tight shut, and the lines that divided his cheeks from that wide simian upper lip of his were as though engraved in stone. The Fairy looked at him and saw that she had taken hopelessly the wrong line. Was it too late to remedy the mistake? She put the new plan of campaign into immediate execution. “But you poor Nunky Benny!” she began, in the sort of tone in which you’d talk to a sick dog. “How selfish of me to talk about my ailments, when you’re lying there with your poor foot bandaged up!” The dog began to wag his tail at once. The beatific look returned to his face. He took her hand. I couldn’t stand it. “I think I’d better be going,” I said; and I went.’