Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

‘There’s Mark Staithes,’ said Mrs Amberley, interrupting him, and waved to a shortish, broad–shouldered man who had just entered the drawing–room. ‘I forget,’ she said, turning to Anthony, ‘whether you know him.’

‘Only for the last thirty years,’ he answered, finding once again a certain malicious pleasure in insisting, to the point of exaggeration, on his vanished youth. If he were no longer young, then Mary had ceased to be young nine years ago.

‘But with long gaps,’ he qualified. ‘During the war and then afterwards, for all that time he was in Mexico. And I’ve hardly had more than a glimpse of him since he came back. I’m delighted to have this chance …’

‘He’s a queer fish,’ said Mary Amberley, thinking of the time, just after his return from Mexico, some eighteen months before, when he had first come to her house. His appearance, his manner, as of some savage and fanatical hermit, had violently attracted her. She had tried all her seductions upon him—without the smallest effect. He had ignored them—but so completely and absolutely that she felt no ill–will towards him for the rebuff, convinced, as she was, that in fact there hadn’t been any rebuff, merely a display of symptoms, either, she diagnosed judicially, of impotence, or else, less probably (though of course one never knew, one never knew), of homosexuality. ‘A queer fish,’ she repeated, and decided that she’d take the next opportunity of asking Beppo about the homosexuality. He would be sure to know. They always did know about one another. Then, waving again, ‘Come and sit with us, Mark,’ she called through the noise of the gramophone.

Staithes crossed the room, drew up a chair and sat down. His hair had retreated from his forehead, and above the ears was already grey. The brown face—that fanatical hermit’s face which Mary Amberley had found so strangely attractive—was deeply lined. No smooth obliterating layer of fat obscured its inner structure. Under the skin each strip of muscle in the cheek and jaw seemed to stand out distinct and separate like the muscles in those lime–wood statues of flayed human beings that were made for Renaissance anatomy rooms. When he smiled—and each time that happened it was as though the flayed statue had come to life and were expressing its agony—one could follow the whole mechanism of the excruciating grimace; the upward and outward pull of the zygomaticus major, the sideways tug of the risorius, the contraction of the great sphincters round the eyelids.

‘Am I interrupting?’ he asked, looking with sharp, inquisitorial movements from one to the other.

‘Beppo was telling us about Berlin,’ said Mrs Amberley.

‘I popped over to get away from the General Strike,’ Beppo explained.

‘Naturally,’ said Staithes, and his face twitched in the anguish of amused contempt.

‘Such a heavenly place!’ Beppo exploded irrepressibly.

‘You feel like Lord Haldane about it? Your spiritual home?’

‘Carnal,’ Anthony amended.

Only too happy to plead guilty, Beppo giggled. ‘Yes, those transvestists!’ he had to admit rapturously.

‘I was over there this winter,’ said Staithes. ‘On business. But of course one has to pay one’s tribute to pleasure too. That night life …’

‘Didn’t you find it amusing?’

‘Oh, passionately.’

‘You see!’ Beppo was triumphant.

‘One of the creatures came and sat at my table,’ Staithes went on. ‘I danced with it. It looked like a woman.’

‘You simply can’t tell them apart,’ Beppo cried excitedly, as though he were taking personal credit for the fact.

‘When we’d finished dancing, it painted its face a bit and we drank a little beer. Then it showed me some indecent photographs. That rather surgical, anti–aphrodisiac kind—you know. Damping. Perhaps that was why the conversation flagged. Anyhow, there were uncomfortable silences. Neither it nor I seemed to know what to say next. We were becalmed.’ He threw out his two thin and knotted hands horizontally, as though sliding them across an absolutely flat surface. ‘Utterly becalmed. Until, suddenly, the creature did a most remarkable thing. One of its regular gambits, no doubt; but never having had it played on me before, I was impressed. ‘Would you like to see something?’ it said. I said yes, and immediately it began to poke and pull at something under its blouse. ‘Now, look!’ it said at last. I looked. It smiled triumphantly, like a man playing the ace of trumps—or rather playing two aces of trumps; for what it plunked down on the table was a pair. A pair of superb artificial breasts, made of pink rubber sponge.’

‘But how revolting!’ cried Mrs Amberley, while Anthony laughed and Beppo’s round face took on an expression of pained distress. ‘How revolting!’ she repeated.

‘Yes, but how satisfactory!’ Staithes insisted, making that crooked and agonized grimace that passed with him for a smile. ‘It’s so good when things happen as they ought to happen—artistically, symbolically. Two rubber breasts between the beer mugs—that’s what vice ought to be. And when that was what it actually was —well, it felt as though something had clicked into place. Inevitably, beautifully. Yes, beautifully ,’ he repeated. ‘Beautifully revolting.’

‘All the same,’ Beppo insisted, ‘you must admit there’s a lot to be said for a town where that sort of thing can happen. In public,’ he added earnestly, ‘in public , mind you. It’s the most tolerant in the world, the German Government. You’ve got to admit that.’

‘Oh, I do,’ said Staithes. ‘It tolerates everybody. Not only girls in boiled shirts and boys with rubber breasts, but also monarchists, fascists, Junkers, Krupps. Communists too, I’m thankful to say. All its enemies of every colour.’

‘I think that’s rather fine,’ said Mrs Amberley.

‘Very fine indeed, until its enemies rise up and destroy it. I only hope the communists will get in first.’

‘But seeing that they’re tolerated, why should its enemies want to destroy it?’

‘Why not? They don’t believe in tolerance. Quite rightly,’ he added.

‘You’re barbarous,’ Beppo protested.

‘As one should be if one lives in the Dark Ages. You people—you’re survivors from the Age of the Antonines.’ He looked from one to the other, smiling his flayed smile, and shook his head. ‘Imagining you’re still in the first volume of Gibbon. Whereas we’re well on in the third.’

‘Do you mean to say … ? But, good heavens,’ Mrs Amberley interrupted herself, ‘there’s Gerry!’

At her words, at the sight of Gerry Watchett himself, fox–trotting in from the back drawing–room with Helen, Anthony took out his pocket–book and quickly examined its contents. ‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘Only two pounds.’ Gerry had caught him with ten the previous month and, on the strength of a most improbably distressing story, borrowed them all. He ought to have disbelieved the story, of course, ought to have withheld the loan. Ten pounds were more than he could afford. He had said so, but had lacked the firmness to persist in his refusal. It had taken more than a fortnight of strict economy to make up that lost money. Economizing was an unpleasant process; but to say no and to go on saying it in the teeth of Gerry’s importunities and reproaches would have been still more unpleasant. He was always ready to sacrifice his rights to his conveniences. People thought him disinterested, and he would have liked, he did his best, to accept their diagnosis of his character. But awareness of the real state of affairs kept breaking through. When it did, he accepted self–knowledge with a laugh. He was laughing now. ‘Only two,’ he repeated. ‘Luckily I can afford … ’