Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

‘I shall have the object embalmed,’ she was concluding in a mock–serious tone, pregnant with subdued laughter. Embalmed and … ’

But like a suddenly opened ginger–beer bottle, bubbling, ‘I’ll give you an address for the embalming,’ put in Beppo Bowles. He smiled, he blinked his eyes, he wriggled. His whole plump and florid person seemed to participate in what he said; he talked with every organ of his body. ‘From the Mortician’s Journal .’ He waved a hand and declaimed, ‘Embalmers! do your results have that unpleasant putty look? If so …’

Mrs Amberley had laughed—a little perfunctorily, perhaps; for she did not like to be interrupted in the middle of a story, Beppo was a darling, of course. So boyish, in spite of his tummy and the bald patch on the top of his head. (So girlish, even, on occasion.) But still … She cut him short with a ‘Too perfect.’ Then, turning back to the rest of the table, ‘Well, as I was saying,’ she continued, ‘I shall have it embalmed and put under one of those glass domes … ’

‘Like life,’ Beppo could not refrain from ginger–beerily interjecting. But nobody caught the reference to Adonais , and he giggled alone.

‘Those domes,’ repeated Mrs Amberley without looking at the interrupter, ‘one finds in lodging–houses. With birds under them. Stuffed birds .’ She lingered over the monosyllable, as though she were a German prolonging a modified o; and the birds, the Teutonic bö–öds, became, for some obscure reason, extraordinarily funny.

The voice, Anthony decided, was better than ever. There was a faint hoarseness now, like the bloom on a fruit, like the haze through which, on a summer’s day, one sees St Paul’s from Waterloo Bridge. The interposition of that curtain of husky gauze seemed to deepen, as it were, and enrich the beauties of the vocal landscape lying behind it. Listening more attentively than ever, he tried to fix the cadences of her speech upon his memory, to analyse them into their component sounds. In his projected Elements of Sociology there was to be a chapter on Mass Suggestion and Propaganda. One of the sections would be devoted to the subject of Fascinating Noises. The fascinatingly excitingly exciting noise, for example, of Savonarola, or Lloyd George. The fascinatingly sedative noise of intoning priests; the fascinatingly hilarious noise of Robey and Little Tich; the fascinatingly aphrodisiac noise of certain actors and actresses, certain singers, certain sirens and Don Juans of private life. Mary’s gift, he decided, was for making a noise that was simultaneously aphrodisiac and comic. She could emit sounds that touched the springs of laughter and desire, but never those of sorrow, of pity, of indignation. In moments of emotional stress (and he recalled those horrible scenes she used to make) her voice passed out of control into a chaos of raucous shrillness. The sound of her words of complaint, reproach, or grief evoked in the hearer only a certain physical discomfort. Whereas with Mrs Foxe, he now went on to think, the noise alone of what she said had been enough to compel your acquiescence and sympathy. Hers was the mysterious gift that hoisted Robespierre into power, that enabled Whitefield, by the mere repetition, two or three times, of some pious exclamation, to reduce the most hardened sceptic to tears. There are fascinating noises capable of convincing a listener of the existence of God.

Those bö–öds ! They all laughed, all simply had to laugh, at them. Even Colin Egerton, even Hugh Ledwidge. And yet ever since that man Beavis had come into the drawing–room, Hugh had been in a prickle of uneasiness. Beavis whom he always did his best to avoid … Why hadn’t Mary told him? For a moment he imagined it was a plot. Mary had invited Beavis on purpose to put him to shame—because she knew that the man had been a witness of his humiliations at Bulstrode. There were to be two of them: Staithes (for Staithes, he knew, was expected after dinner) and Beavis. Hugh had grown accustomed to meeting Staithes in his house, didn’t mind meeting him. Staithes, there could be no doubt, had forgotten. But Beavis—whenever he met Beavis, it always seemed to Hugh that the man looked at him in a queer way. And now Mary had invited him, on purpose, so that he could remind Staithes; and then the two of them would bait him with their reminiscences—their reminiscences of how he had funked at football; of how he had cried when it was his turn at fire–drill to slide down the rope; of how he had sneaked to Jimbug and had then been made to run the gauntlet between two lines of them, armed with wet towels rolled up into truncheons; of how they had looked over the partition … He shuddered. But of course, on second, saner thoughts, it couldn’t possibly be a plot. Not conceivably. All the same, he was glad when they went down to dinner and he found himself separated from Beavis. Across Helen, conversation would be difficult. And after dinner he would do his best to keep at a distance …

As for Colin, he had sat all through the meal in a bewilderment that, as it grew, as he felt himself more and more hopelessly out of it all, was mingled to an ever–increasing extent with exasperation and disapproval, until at last he was saying to himself (what he intended to say aloud to Joyce at the first opportunity), was saying: ‘I may be stupid and all that’—and this confession was uttered by his inward voice in a tone of firm contempt, as though it were a confession of strength, not weakness—‘I may be stupid and all that, but at least—well, at least I do know what’s within the pale and what’s without.’ He would say all that to Joyce, and much more; and Joyce (he had glanced at her in the middle of one of Beppo’s outrageous stories and caught an eye that was humble, anxious, pleadingly apologetic), Joyce would agree with every word he said. For the poor child was like a kind of changeling—a County changeling left by some inexplicable mistake in the arms of a mad, impossible mother who forced her, against her real nature, to associate with these … these … (He couldn’t find the mentionable word for Beppo.) And he, Colin Egerton, he was the St George who would rescue her. The fact that—like some pure young girl fallen among white slavers—she needed rescuing was one of the reasons why he felt so strongly attracted to her. He loved her, among other reasons, because he so violently loathed that ghastly degenerate ( that was the word), Beppo Bowles; and his approval of all that Joyce was and did was proportionate to his disapproval (a disapproval strengthened by a certain terror) of Joyce’s mother. And yet, now, in spite of the disapproval, in spite of his fear of that sharp tongue of hers, those piercingly ironic glances, he could not help laughing with the rest. Those long–drawn bö–öds under their glass domes were irresistible.

For Mrs Amberley the laughter was like champagne—warming, stimulating. ‘And I shall have an inscription carved on the base,’ she went on, raising her voice against the din: ‘“This kidney was stolen by Helen Amberley, at the risk of life and … ”’

‘Oh, do shut up, Mummy!’ Helen was blushing with a mixture of pleasure and annoyance. ‘Please!’ It was certainly nice to be the heroine of a story that everybody was listening to—but then the heroine was also a bit of an ass. She felt angry with her mother for exploiting the assishness.

‘…and in spite of a lifelong and conscientious objection to butchery,’ Mrs Amberley went on. Then, ‘Poor darling,’ she added in another tone. ‘Smells always were her weak point. Butchers, fishmongers,—and shall I ever forget the one and only time I took her to church!’

(‘One and only time,’ thought Colin. ‘No wonder she goes and does things like this!’)