Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

THE guard whistled, and obediently the train began to move—past Keating, at a crawl; past Branson; past Pickwick, Owl and Waverley; past Beecham, Owbridge, Carter, Pears, in accelerated succession; past Humphrey’s Iron Buildings, past Lollingdon for Choate; past Eno’s almost at twenty miles an hour; past Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears—and suddenly the platform and its palings dipped and were lost, swallowed in the green country. Anthony leaned back in his corner and sighed thankfully. It was escape at last; he had climbed out of that black well into which they had pushed him, and he was free again. The wheels sang cheerfully in his ears. ‘To stop the train pull down the chain penálty for impróper use five póunds five pounds FIVE POUNDS FIVE POUNDS … ’ But how perfectly awful luncheon at Granny’s had been!

‘Work,’ James Beavis was saying. ‘It’s the only thing at a time like this.’

His brother nodded. ‘The only thing,’ he agreed. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘One’s had a pretty bad knock,’ he added self–consciously, in that queer jargon which he imagined to be colloquial English. John Beavis’s colloquialisms mostly came out of books. That ‘bad knock’ was a metaphor drawn from the boxing contests he had never witnessed. ‘Luckily,’ he went on, ‘one’s got a great deal of work on hand at the moment.’ He thought of his lectures. He thought of his contributions to the Oxford Dictionary. The mountains of books, the slips, his huge card index, the letters from fellow philologists. And the exhaustive essay on Jacobean slang. ‘Not that one wants to “shirk” anything,’ he added, putting the colloquial word between the audible equivalents of inverted commas. James mustn’t think that he was going to drown his grief in work. He groped for a phrase. ‘It’s … it’s a sacred music that one’s facing!’ he brought out at last.

James kept nodding with quick jerks of the head, as though he knew in advance everything his brother would or possibly could say. His face twitched with sudden involuntary tics. He was wasted by nervous impatience as though by a consumption, eaten away by it to the very bone. ‘Quite,’ he said, ‘quite.’ And gave one last nod. There was a long silence.

‘Tomorrow,’ Anthony was thinking, ‘there’ll be algebra with old Jimbug.’ The prospect was disagreeable; he wasn’t good at maths, and, even at the best of times, even when he was only joking, Mr Jameson was a formidable teacher. ‘If Jimbug gets baity with me, like that time last week … ’ Remembering the scene, Anthony frowned; the blood came up into his cheeks. Jimbug made sarcastic remarks at him and pulled his hair. He had begun to blub. (Who wouldn’t have blubbed?) A tear had fallen on to the equation he was trying to work out and made a huge round blot. That beast Staithes had ragged him about it afterwards. Luckily Foxe had come to his rescue. One laughed at Foxe because he stammered; but he was really extraordinarily decent.

At Waterloo, Anthony and his father took a hansom. Uncle James preferred to walk. ‘I can get to the Club in eleven minutes,’ he told them. His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. He looked at his watch; then turned and without saying another word went striding away down the hill.

‘Euston!’ John Beavis called up to the cabman.

Stepping cautiously on the smooth slope, the horse moved forward; the cab heaved like a ship. Inaudibly, Anthony hummed the ‘Washington Post’. Riding in a hansom always made him feel extraordinarily happy. At the bottom of the hill, the cabby whipped his horse into a trot. They passed a smell of beer, a smell of fried fish; drove through ‘Good–bye, Dolly Gray’ on a cornet and swung into the Waterloo Road. The traffic roared and rattled all about them. If his father had not been there, Anthony would have sung out aloud.

The end of the afternoon was still smokily bright above the house–tops. And, all at once, here was the river, shining, with the black barges, and a tug, and St Paul’s like a balloon in the sky, and the mysterious Shot Tower.

On the bridge, a man was throwing bread to the sea–gulls. Dim, almost invisible, they came sliding through the air; turned, with a tilt of grey wings, leaning against their speed, and suddenly flashed into brilliance, like snow against the dark fringes of the sky; then wheeled away again out of the light, towards invisibility. Anthony looked and stopped humming. Swerving towards you on the ice a skater will lean like that.

And suddenly, as though, disquietingly, he too had understood the inner significance of those swooping birds, ‘Dear boy,’ Mr Beavis began, breaking a long silence. He pressed Anthony’s arm. ‘Dear boy!’

With a sinking of the heart Anthony waited for what he would say next.

‘We must stand together now,’ said Mr Beavis.

The boy made a vague noise of acquiescence.

‘Close together. Because we both … ’ he hesitated, ‘we both loved her.’

There was another silence. ‘Oh, if only he’d stop!’ Anthony prayed. Vainly. His father went on.

‘We’ll always be true to her,’ he said. ‘Never … never let her down?—will we?’

Anthony nodded.

‘Never!’ John Beavis repeated emphatically. ‘Never!’ And to himself he recited yet once more those lines that had haunted him all these days:

Till age, or grief, or sickness must

Marry my body to that dust

It so much loves; and fill the room

My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.

Stay for me there!

Then aloud and in a tone almost of defiance, ‘She’ll never be dead for us,’ he said. ‘We’ll keep her living in our hearts—won’t we?’

‘Living for us,’ his father continued, ‘so that we can live for her—live finely, nobly, as she would want us to live.’ He paused on the brink of a colloquialism—the sort of colloquialism, he intended it to be, that a schoolboy would understand and appreciate. ‘Live … well, like a pair of regular “bricks”,’ he brought out unnaturally. ‘And bricks,’ he continued, extemporizing an improvement on the locution, ‘bricks that are also “pals”. Real “chums”. We’re going to be “chums” now, Anthony, aren’t we?’

Anthony nodded again. He was in an agony of shame and embarrassment. ‘Chums.’ It was a school–story word. The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s. You laughed when you read it, you howled derisively. Chums! And with his father! He felt himself blushing. Looking out of the side window, to hide his discomfort, he saw one of the grey birds come swooping down, out of the sky, towards the bridge; nearer, nearer; then it leaned, it swerved away to the left, gleamed for a moment, transfigured, and was gone.

At school everyone was frightfully decent. Too decent, indeed. The boys were so tactfully anxious not to intrude on his emotional privacy, not to insult him with the display of their own high spirits, that, after having made a few constrained and unnatural demonstrations of friendliness, they left him alone. It was almost, Anthony found, like being sent to Coventry. They could hardly have made it worse for him if he had been caught stealing or sneaking. Never, since the first days of his first term, had he felt so hopelessly out of it all as he felt that evening.

‘Pity you missed the match this afternoon,’ said Thompson as they sat down to supper; he spoke in the tone he would have used to a visiting uncle.

‘Was it a good game?’ Anthony asked with the same unnatural politeness.

‘Oh, jolly good. They won, though. Three–two.’ The conversation languished. Uncomfortably, Thompson wondered what he should say next. That limerick of Butterworth’s, about the young lady of Ealing? No, he couldn’t possibly repeat that; not today, when Beavis’s mother … Then what? A loud diversion at the other end of the table providentially solved his problem. He had an excuse to turn away. ‘What’s that?’ he shouted with unnecessary eagerness. ‘What’s that?’ Soon they were all talking and laughing together. From beyond an invisible gulf Anthony listened and looked on.