Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

Pauline meanwhile had refused a second helping of the chocolate soufflé.

‘But, my dear, you must ,’ John Beavis insisted.

Pauline heaved the conscious imitation of a sigh of repletion. ‘I couldn’t.’

‘Not even the favourite chocolatl ?’ Mr Beavis always spoke of chocolate in the original Aztec.

Playfully, Pauline eyed the dish askance. ‘I shouldn’t ,’ she said, implicitly admitting that the repletion was not complete.

‘Yes, you should,’ he wheedled.

‘Now he’s trying to make me fat!’ she wailed with mock reproach. ‘He’s leading me into temptation!’

‘Well, be led.’

This time, Pauline’s sigh was a martyr’s. ‘All right, then,’ she said submissively. The maid, who had been waiting impassively for the outcome of the controversy, presented the dish once again. Pauline helped herself.

‘There’s a good child,’ said Mr Beavis, in a tone and with a twinkle that expressed a sportive mock–fatherliness. ‘And now, James, I hope you’ll follow the good example.’

James’s disgust and anger were so intense that he could not trust himself to speak, for fear of saying something outrageous. He contented himself with curtly shaking his head.

‘No chocolatl for you?’ Mr Beavis turned to Anthony. ‘But I’m sure you’ll take pity on the pudding!’ And when Anthony did. ‘Ah that’s good!’ he said. ‘That’s the way … ’—he hesitated for a fraction of second—‘…the way to tuck in!’

ANTHONY’S fluency, as they walked to the station, was a symptom of his inward sense of guilt. By the profusion of his talk, by the brightness of his attention, he was making up to Brian for what he had done the previous evening. It was not as though Brian had uttered any reproaches; he seemed, on the contrary, to be taking special pains not to hint at yesterday’s offence. His silence served Anthony as an excuse for postponing all mention of the disagreeable subject of Mark Staithes. Some time, of course, he would have to talk about the whole wretched affair (what a bore people were, with their complicated squabbles!); but, for the moment, he assured himself, it would be best to wait … to wait until Brian himself referred to it. Meanwhile, his uneasy conscience constrained him to display towards Brian a more than ordinary friendliness, to make a special effort to be interesting and to show himself interested. Interested in the poetry of Edward Thomas as they walked down Beaumont Street; in Bergson opposite Worcester; crossing Hythe Bridge, in the nationalization of coal mines; and finally, under the viaduct and up the long approach to the station, in Joan Thursley.

‘It’s ext–traordinary,’ said Brian, breaking, with what was manifestly an effort, a rather long preparatory silence, ‘that you sh–shouldn’t ever have met her.’

‘ Dis aliter visum ’, Anthony answered in his father’s best classical style. Though, of course, if he had accepted Mrs Foxe’s invitations to stay at Twyford, the gods, he reflected, would have changed their minds.

‘I w–want you to l–like one another,’ Brian was saying.

‘I’m sure we shall.’

‘She’s not frightfully c–c–c … ’ Patiently he began again: ‘frightfully c–clever. N–not on the s–surface. You’d th–think she was o–only interested in c–c–c … ’ But ‘country life’ wouldn’t allow itself to be uttered; Brian was forced into a seemingly affected circumlocution: ‘in rural m–matters,’ he brought out at last. ‘D–dogs and b–birds and all that.’

Anthony nodded and, suddenly remembering those spew–tits and piddle–warblers of the Bulstrode days, imperceptibly smiled.

‘But w–when you g–get to kn–know her better,’ Brian went on laboriously, ‘you f–find there’s a lot m–more in her than you th–thought. She’s g–got ext–traordinary feeling for p–p–p … for v–verse. W–wordsworth and M–meredith, for example. I’m always ast–tonished how g–good her j–judgements are.’

Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically. Yes, it would be Meredith!

The other was silent, wondering how he should explain, whether he should even try to explain. Everything was against him—his own physical disability, the difficulty of putting what he had to say into words, the possibility that Anthony wouldn’t even want to understand what he said, that he would produce his alibi of cynicism and just pretended not to be there at all.

Brian thought of their first meeting. The embarrassing discovery of two strangers in the drawing–room when he came in, flushed and his hair still wet with the rain, to tea. His mother pronounced a name: ‘Mrs Thursley’. The new vicar’s wife, he realized, as he shook hands with the thin dowdy woman. Her manners were so ingratiating that she lisped as she spoke; her smile was deliberately bright.

‘And this is Joan.’

The girl held out her hand, and as he took it, her slender body swayed away from his alien presence in a movement of shyness that was yet adorably graceful, like the yielding of a young tree before the wind. That movement was the most beautiful and at the same time the most touching thing he had ever seen.

‘We’ve been hearing you’re keen on birds,’ said Mrs Thursley, with an oppressive politeness and intensifying that all too bright, professionally Christian smile of hers. ‘So’s Joan. A regular ornithologist.’

Blushing, the girl muttered a protest.

‘She will be pleased to have someone to talk to about her precious birds. Won’t you, Joanie?’

Joan’s embarrassment was so great that she simply couldn’t speak.

Looking at her flushed, averted face, Brian was filled with compassionate tenderness. His heart began to beat very hard. With a mixture of fear and exultation he realized that something extraordinary, something irrevocable had happened.

And then, he went on to think, there was that time, some four or five months later, when they were staying together at her uncle’s house in East Sussex. Away from her parents, she was as though transformed—not into another person; into her own fundamental self, into the happy, expansive girl that it was impossible for her to be at home. For at home she lived under constraint. Her father’s chronic grumblings and occasional outbursts of bad temper oppressed her with fear. And though she loved her, she felt herself the prisoner of her mother’s affection, was dimly conscious of being somehow exploited by means of it. And finally there was the cold numbing atmosphere of the genteel poverty in which they lived, the unremitting tension of the struggle to keep up appearances, to preserve social superiority. At home, it was impossible for Joan to be fully herself; but there, in that spacious house at Iden, among its quiet, easy–going inhabitants, she was liberated into a transfiguring happiness. Dazzled, Brian fell in love with her all over again.

He thought of the day when they had gone walking in Winchelsea marshes. The hawthorn was in bloom; dotted here and there on the wide, flat expanse of grass, the sheep and their lambs were like white constellations; overhead, the sky was alive with white clouds gliding in the wind. Unspeakably beautiful! And suddenly it seemed to him that they were walking through the image of their love. The world was their love, and their love the world; and the world was significant, charged with depth beyond depth of mysterious meaning. The proof of God’s goodness floated in those clouds, crept in those grazing sheep, shone from every burning bush of incandescent blossom—and, in himself and Joan, walked hand in hand across the grass and was manifest in their happiness. His love, it seemed to him, in that apocalyptic moment, was more than merely his ; it was in some mysterious way the equivalent of this wind and sunshine, these white gleams against the green and blue of spring. His feeling for Joan was somehow implicit in the world, had a divine and universal significance. He loved her infinitely, and for that reason was able to love everything in the world as much as he loved her.