Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

He sat in silence, his face averted from her, his head bent. ‘Blurt it out,’ a voice was crying within him. ‘Anyhow, at any price!’ But if it had been difficult before, now it was impossible. Saying she wanted him to take Brian’s place! It was she who had made it impossible. He was shaken by the gust of futile anger. If only she’d leave him in peace, let him go away and be alone! Suddenly his throat contracted, the tears came into his eyes, the muscles of his chest tightened in spasm after violent spasm; he was sobbing. Mrs Foxe crossed the room, and bending over him, laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘Poor Anthony,’ she whispered.

He was pinned irrevocably to his lie.

That evening he wrote to Joan. This horrible accident. So unnecessary. So stupid in its tragedy. It had happened, as a matter of fact, before he had had an opportunity for telling Brian about those events in London. And, by the way, had she written to Brian? An envelope addressed in her handwriting had been delivered at midday, when the poor fellow had already started out. He was keeping it for her and would return it personally, when he saw her next. Meanwhile, Mrs Foxe was bearing it wonderfully; and they must all be brave; and he was always hers affectionately.

HELEN came into the sitting–room, holding a frying–pan in which the bacon was still spluttering from the fire.

‘Breakfast!’ she called.

‘ Komme gleich ’ came back from the bedroom, and a moment later Ekki showed himself at the open door in shirt–sleeves, razor in hand, his fair ruddy face covered with soap–suds.

‘Almost finished,’ he said in English, and disappeared again.

Helen smiled to herself as she sat down. Loving him as she did, she found an extraordinary pleasure in this close and incessant physical intimacy with him—the intimacy that their poverty had perforce imposed on them. Why do people want large houses, separate rooms, all the private hiding–places that the rich find indispensable? She couldn’t imagine, now. Humming to herself, out of tune, Helen poured out the tea, helped herself to bacon, then began to sort the morning’s letters. Helen Amberley. No Mrs. Communist frankness and informality. She opened the envelope. The letter was from Newcastle. Would it be possible for her or Giesebrecht to speak to a group of young comrades on conditions in Germany some time in March? Well, one would have to see. Mr E. Giesebrecht. From Switzerland; and surely that thin spiky writing was Holtzmann’s. Ekki would be pleased.

‘Something from Holtzmann,’ she said as he came in. ‘I wonder what news he’ll have this time?’

Ekki took the letter, and, with that methodical deliberation that characterized all his actions, opened it; then, laid it down beside his plate and cut off a piece of bacon. He poked the bacon into his mouth, picked up the letter again, and, slowly chewing, began to read. An expression of intent and focused gravity came into his face; he could never do anything except thoroughly and whole–heartedly. When he had finished, he turned back to the first page and started reading all over again.

Helen’s impatience got the better of her at last. ‘Anything interesting?’ she asked. Holtzmann was the best informed of the exiled journalists; he always had something to communicate. ‘Tell me what he says.’

Ekki did not answer at once, but read on in silence for a few seconds, then folded up the letter and put it away in his pocket. ‘Mach is in Basel,’ he answered at last, looking up at her.

‘Mach?’ she repeated. ‘Do you mean Ludwig Mach?’

In the course of these last months, the name of this most resourceful and courageous of all the German comrades engaged in the dissemination of Communist propaganda and censored news had become, for Helen, at once familiar and fabulous, like the name of a personage in literature or mythology. That Ludwig Mach should be at Basel seemed almost as improbable as that Odysseus should be there, or Odin, or the Scarlet Pimpernel. ‘Ludwig Mach from Stuttgart?’ she insisted incredulously.

Ekki nodded. ‘I shall have to go and see him. Tomorrow.’

Spoken in that slow, emphatic, foreign way of his, the words had a strange quality of absolute irrevocableness. Even his most casual statements always sounded, when uttered in English, as though he had made them on oath.

‘I shall have to go,’ he repeated.

Carefully, conscientiously pronounced, each syllable had the same value. Two heavy spondees and the first half of a third. Whereas an Englishman, however irrevocably he had made up his mind, would have spoken the phrase as a kind of gobbled anapaest—I–shall–have–to–go. In another man, this way of speaking—so ponderous, so Jehovah–like, as she herself had teasingly called it—would have seemed to Helen intolerably grotesque. But, in Ekki, it was an added attraction. It seemed somehow right and fitting that this man, whom (quite apart from loving) she admired and respected beyond anyone she had ever known, should be thus touchingly absurd.

‘If I couldn’t laugh at him sometimes,’ she explained to herself, ‘it might all go putrid. A pool of stagnant adoration. Like religion. Like one of Landseer’s dogs. The laughter keeps it aired and moving.’

Listening, looking into his face (at once so absurdly ingenuous in its fresh and candid gravity and so heroically determined), Helen felt, as she had so often felt before, that she would like to burst out laughing and then go down on her knees and kiss his hands.

‘I shall have to go too,’ she said aloud, parodying his way of speaking. He thought at first that she was joking; then, when he realized that she was in earnest, grew serious and began to raise objections. The fatigue—for they would be travelling third–class. The expense. But Helen was suddenly like her mother—a spoilt woman whose caprices had to be satisfied.

‘It’ll be such fun,’ she cried excitedly. ‘Such an adventure!’ And when he persisted in being negatively reasonable, she grew angry. ‘But I will come with you,’ she repeated obstinately. ‘I will .’

Holtzmann met them at the station, and, instead of being the tall, stiff, distinguished personage of Helen’s anticipatory fancy, turned out to be short and squat, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and, between little pig’s eyes, a soft shapeless nose like a potato. His hand, when she shook it, was so coldly sweaty that she felt her own defiled; surreptitiously, when he wasn’t looking, she wiped it on her skirt. But worse than even his appearance and his sweaty hands was the man’s behaviour. Her presence, she could see, had taken him aback.

‘I had not expected … ’ he stammered, when Ekki presented her; and his face, for a moment, seemed to disintegrate in agitation. Then, recovering himself, he became effusively polite and cordial. It was gnädige Frau, lieber Ekki, unbeschreiblich froh all the way down the platform. As though he were meeting them on the stage, Helen thought. And acting badly, what was more, like someone in a third–rate touring company. And how detestable that nervousness was! A man had no business to giggle like that and gesticulate and make grimaces. Mopping and mowing, she said under her breath. Walking beside him, she felt herself surrounded by a bristling aura of dislike. This horrible creature had suddenly spoilt all the fun of the journey. She found herself almost wishing that she hadn’t come.

‘What a loathsome man!’ she managed to whisper to Ekki, while Holtzmann was engaged in extravagantly overacting the part of one who tells the porter to be careful with the typewriter.

‘You find him so?’ Ekki asked with genuine surprise. ‘I had not thought …’ He left the sentence unfinished and shook his head. A little frown of perplexity wrinkled his smooth forehead. But a moment later, interrupting Holtzmann’s renewed protestations of affection and delight, he was asking what Mach thought of the present situation in Germany; and when Holtzmann replied, he listened, absorbed.