Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

Bonneted, in black, like a pair of Queen Victorias, two fat and tiny old ladies passed slowly, looking for a compartment where they would not have their throats cut or be compelled to listen to bad language. Mr Beavis looked very respectable indeed. They paused, held a consultation; but, leaning out of the window, Anthony made such a face at them that they moved away again. He smiled triumphantly. Keeping the compartment to oneself was one of the objects of the sacred game of travelling—was the equivalent, more or less, of a Royal Marriage at bezique; you scored forty, so to speak, each time you left a station without a stranger in your carriage. Having lunch in the dining–car counted as much as a Sequence—two hundred and fifty. And Double Bezique—but this, as yet, Anthony had never scored—was being in a slip carriage.

The guard whistled, the train began to move.

‘Hurrah!’ Anthony shouted.

The game had begun well: a Royal Marriage in the very first round. But a few minutes later he was regretting those two old ladies. For, rousing himself suddenly from his abstracted silence, John Beavis leaned forward and, touching his son’s knee, ‘Do you remember what day of the month it is?’ he asked in a low and, to Anthony, inexplicably significant tone.

Anthony looked at him doubtfully; then started to overact the part of the Calculator, frowning over a difficult problem. There was something about his father that seemed to make such overacting inevitable.

‘Let me see,’ he said unnaturally, ‘we broke up on the thirty–first—or was it the thirtieth? That was Saturday, and today’s Monday … ’

‘Today’s the second,’ said his father in the same slow voice.

Anthony felt apprehensive. If his father knew the date, why had he asked?

‘It’s exactly five months today,’ Mr Beavis went on.

Five months? And then, with a sudden sickening drop of the heart, Anthony realized what his father was talking about. The Second of November, the Second of April. It was five months since she had died.

‘Each second of the month—one tried to keep the day sacred.’

Anthony nodded and turned his eyes away with a sense of guilty discomfort.

‘Bound each to each by natural piety,’ said Mr Beavis.

What on earth was he talking about now? And, oh, why, why did he have to say these things? So awful; so indecent—yes, indecent; one didn’t know where to look. Like the times when Granny’s stomach made those awful bubbling noises after meals …

Looking into his son’s averted face, Mr Beavis perceived signs of resistance and was hurt, was saddened, and felt the sadness turn into an obscure resentment that Anthony should not suffer as acutely as he did. Of course the child was still very young, not yet able to realize the full extent of his loss; but all the same, all the same …

To Anthony’s unspeakable relief the train slowed down for its first stop. The suburbs of Slough passed slowly and ever slowlier before his eyes. Against all the rules of the sacred game, he prayed that somebody might get into their compartment. And, thank heaven, somebody did get in—a gross, purple–faced man whom on any other occasion Anthony would have hated. Today he loved him.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Mr Beavis retired again into a private world of silence.

In the carriage, on the way from Twyford station, his father added insult to injury.

‘You must always be on your very best behaviour,’ he recommended.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony curtly.

‘And always be punctual,’ Mr Beavis continued. ‘And don’t be greedy at meal–times.’ He hesitated, smiled in anticipation of what he was about to say, then launched his colloquialism: ‘however excellent the “grub” may be.’ There was a little silence. ‘And be polite to the Abigails,’ he added.

They turned off the road into a drive that wound between tall shrubberies of rhododendrons. Then, across an expanse of tree–islanded grass, appeared a façade of Georgian stucco. The house was not large, but solid, comfortable and at the same time elegant. Built, you divined, by someone who could quote Horace, aptly, on every occasion. Rachel Foxe’s father, Mr Beavis reflected, as he looked at it, must have left quite a lot of money. Naval architecture—and didn’t the old boy invent something that the Admiralty took up? Foxe, too, had been well off: something to do with coal. (How charming those daffodils looked in the grass there, under the tree!) But a dour, silent, humourless man who had not, Mr Beavis remembered, understood his little philological joke about the word ‘pencil’. Though if he’d known at the time that the poor fellow had a duodenal ulcer, he certainly wouldn’t have risked it.

Mrs Foxe and Brian came to meet them as the carriage drew up. The boys went off together. Mr Beavis followed his hostess into the drawing–room. She was a tall woman, slender and very upright, with something so majestic in her carriage, so nobly austere in the lines and expression of her face, that Mr Beavis always felt himself slightly intimidated and ill at ease in her presence.

‘It was so very good of you to ask us,’ he said. ‘And I can’t tell you how much it will mean for … ’ he hesitated for an instant; then (since it was the second of the month), with a little shake of the head and in a lower tone, ‘for this poor motherless little fellow of mine,’ he went on, ‘to spend his holidays here with you.’

Her clear brown eyes had darkened, as he spoke, with a sympathetic distress. Always firm, always serious, the coming together of her full, almost floridly sculptured lips expressed more than ordinary gravity. ‘But I’m so delighted to have him,’ she said in a voice that was warm and musically vibrant with feeling. ‘Selfishly glad—for Brian’s sake.’ She smiled, and he noticed that even when she smiled her mouth seemed somehow to preserve, through all its sensibility, its profound capacity for suffering and enjoyment, that seriousness, that determined purity which characterized it in repose. ‘Yes, selfishly,’ she repeated. ‘Because, when he’s happy, I am.’

Mr Beavis nodded; then, sighing, ‘One’s thankful,’ he said, ‘to have as much left to one as that—the reflection of someone else’s happiness.’ Magnanimously, he was giving Anthony the right not to suffer—though of course when the boy was a little older, when he could realize more fully …

Mrs Foxe did not continue the conversation. There was something rather distasteful to her in his words and manner, something that jarred upon her sensibilities. But she hastened to banish the disagreeable impression from her mind. After all, the important, the essential fact was that the poor man had suffered, was still suffering. The false note, if falsity there were, was after the fact—in the mere expression of the suffering.

She proposed a stroll before tea, and they walked through the garden and out into the domesticated wilderness of grass and trees beyond. In a glade of the little copse that bounded the property to the north, three crippled children were picking primroses. With a gruesome agility they swung themselves on their crutches from clump to clump of the pale golden flowers, yelling as they went in shrill discordant rapture.

They were staying, Mrs Foxe explained, in one of her cottages. ‘Three of my cripples,’ she called them.

At the sound of her voice the children looked up, and at once came hopping across the open space towards her.

‘Look, Miss, look what I found!’

‘Look here, Miss!’

‘What’s this called, Miss?’

She answered their questions, asked others in return, promised to come that evening to see them.

Feeling that he too ought to do something for the cripples, Mr Beavis began to tell them about the etymology of the word ‘primrose’. ‘ Primerole in Middle English,’ he explained. ‘The “rose” crept in by mistake.’ They stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘A mere popular blunder,’ he went on; then, twinkling, ‘a “howler,”’ he added. ‘Like our old friend,’ he smiled at them knowingly, ‘our old friend “causeway”.’