Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

‘Not here,’ she said.

Gerry pretended not to understand her. ‘Sorry. I thought you didn’t mind people smoking here.’

‘Fool!’ Her anger broke out with sudden violence. Then, catching him by the sleeve, ‘Come!’ she commanded, and almost dragged him to the door.

Running upstairs, Helen was in time to see her mother and Gerry mounting from the drawing–room landing towards the higher floors of the tall house. ‘I shall have to find somebody else to dance with,’ was all she thought; and a moment later she had found little Peter Quinn and was gliding away once more into paradise.

‘Talk of floaters!’ said Anthony as their hostess left the room with Gerry Watchett. ‘I didn’t realize that Gerry was the present incumbent….’

Beppo nodded. ‘Poor Mary!’ he sighed.

‘On the contrary,’ said Staithes, ‘rich Mary! She’ll be poor later.’

‘And nothing can be done about it?’ asked Anthony.

‘She’d hate you if you tried.’

Anthony shook her head. ‘These dismal compulsions! Like cuckoos in August. Like stags in October.’

‘She showed symptoms of having a compulsion about me,’ said Staithes. ‘Just after I first met her, it was. But I soon cured her of that. And then that ruffian Watchett turned up.’

‘Fascinating, the way these aristocrats can behave!’ Anthony’s tone was one of scientific enthusiasm.

Staithes’s flayed face twisted itself into a grimace of contempt. ‘Just a coarse, vulgar gangster,’ he said. ‘How on earth you ever put up with him at Oxford, I simply cannot imagine.’ In fact, of course, he was busily imagining that Anthony had done it out of mere ignoble toadyism.

‘Just snobbery,’ said Anthony, depriving the other of half his pleasure by the easy confession. ‘But, then, I insist, people like Gerry are an essential part of any liberal education. There was something really rather magnificent about him when he was rich. A certain detached and disinterested recklessness. Now … ’ He raised his hand and let it fall again. ‘Just a gangster—you’re quite right. But that’s the fascinating thing—the ease with which aristocrats turn into gangsters. Very comprehensible, when you come to think of it. Here’s a man brought up to believe that he has a divine right to the best of everything. And so long as he gets his rights it’s all noblesse oblige and honour and all the rest of it. Inextricably mixed up with insolence, of course; but genuinely there. Now, take away his income; the oddest things are liable to happen. Providence intended you to have the best of everything; therefore intended you to have the means for procuring the best of everything; therefore, when the means don’t come to you legitimately, justifies you in getting them illegitimately. In the past, our Gerry could have gone in for banditry or simony. He’d have made an admirable condottiere , an almost perfect cardinal. But nowadays the church and the army are too respectable, too professional. They’ve no place for amateurs. The impoverished nobleman finds himself driven into business. Selling cars. Touting stocks and shares. Promoting dubious companies. To the accompaniment, of course, if he’s presentable, of a judicious prostitution of his body. If he has the luck to be born with a gift of the gab, he can make a good living out of the politer forms of blackmail and sycophancy—as a gossip writer. Noblesse oblige ; but so does poverty. And when they both oblige simultaneously—well, we of the middle classes had better start counting the silver. Instead of which …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Poor Mary!’

*

Upstairs, in the bedroom, the torrent of Mary’s reproaches and abuse streamed on, unceasingly. Gerry did not even look at her. Averted, he seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the Pascin hanging over the mantelpiece. The painting showed two women lying foreshortened on a bed, naked.

‘I like this picture,’ he said with deliberate irrelevance, when Mrs Amberley had paused for breath. ‘You can see that the man who painted it had just finished making love to those girls. Both of them. At the same time,’ he added.

Mary Amberley went very pale; her lips trembled, her nostrils fluttered as though with a separate and uncontrollable life of their own.

‘You haven’t even been listening to me,’ she cried. ‘Oh, you’re awful, you’re horrible!’ The torrent began to flow again, more vehemently than ever.

Still turning his back to her, Gerry went on looking at the Pascin nudes; then at last, blowing out a final cloud of tobacco–smoke, he threw the stump of his cigarette into the fireplace and turned round.

‘When you’ve quite done,’ he said in a tired voice, ‘we may as well go to bed.’ And after a little pause, while, unable to speak, she glared furiously in his face, ‘Seeing that that’s what you really want,’ he added, and, smiling ironically, advanced across the room towards her. When he was quite near her, he halted and held out his hands invitingly. They were large hands, immaculately kept, but coarse, insensitive, brutal. ‘Hideous hands,’ Mary thought as she looked at them, ‘odious hands!’ All the more odious now, because it was by their very ugliness and brutality that she had first been attracted, was even at this very moment being attracted, shamefully, in spite of all the reasons she had for hating him. ‘Well, aren’t you coming?’ he asked in the same bored, derisive tone.

For an answer, she hit out at his face. But he was too quick for her, caught the flying hand in mid–air and, when she tried to bring the other into play, caught that too. She was helpless in his grasp.

Still smiling down at her, and without a word, he pushed her backwards, step by step, towards the bed.

‘Beast!’ she kept repeating, ‘beast!’ and struggled, vainly, and found an obscure pleasure in her helplessness. He pushed her against the end of the low divan, further and further, inexorably, and at last she lost her balance and fell back across the counterpane—(fell back, while, with one knee on the edge of the bed, he bent over her, still smiling the same derisive smile). ‘Beast, beast!’ But in fact, as she secretly admitted to herself—and the consciousness was intoxicating in its shamefulness—in fact, she really wanted to be treated as he was treating her—like a prostitute, like an animal; and in her own house, what was more, with her guests all waiting for her, and the door unlocked, and her daughters wondering where she was, perhaps at this very moment coming up the stairs to look for her. Yes, she really wanted it. Still struggling, she gave herself up to the knowledge, to the direct physical intuition that this intolerable degradation was the accomplishment of an old desire, was a revelation marvellous as well as horrible, was the Apocalypse, the Apocalypse at once angel and beast, plague, lamb and whore in a single divine, revolting, overwhelming experience….

*

‘Civilization and sexuality,’ Anthony was saying: ‘there’s a definite correlation. The higher the one, the intenser the other.’

‘My word,’ said Beppo, fizzling with pleasure, ‘we must be civilized!’

‘Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First–class proteins for the body, fourth–class love–stories for the spirit. And this in a safe urban world, where there are no risks, no physical fatigues. In a town like this, for example, one can live for years at a time without being made aware that there’s such a thing as nature. Everything’s man–made and punctual and convenient. But people can have too much of convenience; they want excitement, they want risks and surprises. Where are they going to find them under our dispensation? In money–making, in politics, in occasional war, in sport, and finally in sex. But most people can’t be speculators or active politicians; and war’s getting to be too much of a good thing; and the more elaborate and dangerous sports are only for the rich. So that sex is all that’s left. As material civilization rises, the intensity and importance of sexuality also rises. Must rise, inevitably. And since at the same time food and literature have increased the amount of available appetite … ’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, you see!’