Олдос Хаксли - Antic Hay

'Well?' asked Shearwater, in his slow, ponderous way. He lifted his great round head inquiringly and looked at the doggy young man from under his bushy eyebrows.

The doggy young man smiled triumphantly. 'The young ones,' he said, emphasizing his words by striking his right fist against the extended palm of his left hand, 'the young ones are born with defective sight.'

Thoughtfully Shearwater pulled at his formidable moustache. 'H'm,' he said slowly. 'Very remarkable.'

'You realize the full significance of it?' asked the young man. 'We seem to be affecting the germ–plasm directly. We have found a way of making acquired characteristics…'

'Pardon me,' said Gumbril. He had decided that it was time to be gone. He ran down the stairs and across the tiled hall, he pushed his way firmly but politely between the talkers.

'…heritable,' continued the young man, imperturbably eager, speaking through and over and round the obstacle.

'Damn!' said Shearwater. The Complete Man had trodden on his toe. 'Sorry,' he added, absent–mindedly apologizing for the injury he had received.

Gumbril hurried off along the street. 'If we really have found out a technique for influencing the germ–plasm directly…' he heard the doggy young man saying; but he was already too far away to catch the rest of the sentence. There are many ways, he reflected, of spending an afternoon.

The doggy young man refused to come in, he had to get in his game of tennis before dinner. Shearwater climbed the stairs alone. He was taking off his hat in the little hall of his own apartment, when Rosie came out of the sitting–room with a trayful of tea–things.

'Well?' he asked, kissing her affectionately on the forehead. 'Well? People to tea?'

'Only one,' Rosie replied. 'I'll go and make you a fresh cup.'

She glided off, rustling in her pink kimono towards the kitchen.

Shearwater sat down in the sitting–room. He had brought home with him from the library the fifteenth volume of the Journal of Biochemistry . There was something in it he wanted to look up. He turned over the pages. Ah, here it was. He began reading. Rosie came back again.

'Here's your tea,' she said.

He thanked her without looking up. The tea grew cold on the little table at his side.

Lying on the sofa, Rosie pondered and remembered. Had the events of the afternoon, she asked herself, really happened? They seemed very improbable and remote, now, in this studious silence. She couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. Was it only this? So simple and obvious? She tried to work herself up into a more exalted mood. She even tried to feel guilty; but there she failed completely. She tried to feel rapturous; but without much more success. Still, he certainly had been a most extraordinary man. Such impudence, and at the same time such delicacy and tact.

It was a pity she couldn't afford to change the furniture. She saw now that it wouldn't do at all. She would go and tell Aunt Aggie about the dreadful middle–classness of her Art and Craftiness.

She ought to have an Empire chaise longue . Like Madame Récamier. She could see herself lying there, dispensing tea. 'Like a delicious pink snake.' He had called her that.

Well, really, now she came to think of it all again, it had been too queer, too queer.

'What's a hedonist?' she suddenly asked.

Shearwater looked up from the Journal of Biochemistry . 'What?' he said.

'A hedonist.'

'A man who holds that the end of life is pleasure.'

A 'conscientious hedonist'—ah, that was good.

'This tea is cold,' Shearwater remarked.

'You should have drunk it before,' she said. The silence renewed and prolonged itself.

Rosie was getting much better, Shearwater reflected, as he washed his hands before supper, about not interrupting him when he was busy. This evening she had really not disturbed him at all, or at most only once, and that not seriously. There had been times in the past when the child had really made life almost impossible. There were those months at the beginning of their married life, when she had thought she would like to study physiology herself and be a help to him. He remembered the hours he had spent trying to teach her elementary facts about the chromosomes. It had been a great relief when she abandoned the attempt. He had suggested she should go in for stencilling patterns on Government linen. Such pretty curtains and things one could make like that. But she hadn't taken very kindly to the idea. There had followed a long period when she seemed to have nothing to do but prevent him from doing anything. Ringing him up at the laboratory, invading his study, sitting on his knee, or throwing her arms round his neck, or pulling his hair, or asking ridiculous questions when he was trying to work.

Shearwater flattered himself that he had been extremely patient. He had never got cross. He had just gone on as though she weren't there. As though she weren't there.

'Hurry up,' he heard her calling. 'The soup's getting cold.'

'Coming,' he shouted back, and began to dry his large, blunt hands.

She seemed to have been improving lately. And to–night, to–night she had been a model of non–existence.

He came striding heavily into the dining–room. Rosie was sitting at the head of the table, ladling out the soup. With her left hand she held back the flowing pink sleeve of her kimono so that it should not trail in the plates or the tureen. Her bare arm showed white and pearly through the steam of lentils.

How pretty she was! He could not resist the temptation, but coming up behind her bent down and kissed her, rather clumsily, on the back of her neck.

Rosie drew away from him. 'Really, Jim,' she said, disapprovingly. 'At meal–times!' The fastidious lady had to draw the line at these ill–timed, tumbling familiarities.

'And what about work–times?' Shearwater asked laughing. 'Still, you were wonderful this evening, Rosie, quite wonderful.' He sat down and began eating his soup. 'Not a sound all the time I was reading; or, at any rate, only one sound, so far as I remember.'

The great lady said nothing, but only smiled—a little contemptuously and with a touch of pity. She pushed away the plate of soup unfinished and planted her elbows on the table. Slipping her hands under the sleeves of her kimono, she began, lightly, delicately, with the tips of her fingers, to caress her own arms.

How smooth they were, how soft and warm and how secret under the sleeves. And all her body was as smooth and warm, was as soft and secret, still more secret beneath the pink folds. Like a warm serpent hidden away, secretly, secretly.

Mr Boldero liked the idea of the Patent Small–Clothes. He liked it immensely, he said, immensely.

'There's money in it,' he said.

Mr Boldero was a small dark man of about forty–five, active as a bird and with a bird's brown, beady eyes, a bird's sharp nose. He was always busy, always had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clear–headed, never tired. He was also always unpunctual, always untidy. He had no sense of time or of order. But he got away with it, as he liked to say. He delivered the goods—or rather the goods, in the convenient form of cash, delivered themselves, almost miraculously it always seemed, to him.

He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day. Other people's ideas, other people's knowledge—they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own. All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own. And he absorbed it so rapidly and completely, he laid public claim to it so promptly that he sometimes deceived people into believing that he had really anticipated them in their ideas, that he had known for years and years the things they had just been telling him, and which he would at once airily repeat to them with the perfect assurance of one who knows—knows by instinct, as it were, by inheritance.