Олдос Хаксли: Eyeless in Gaza

One, two, three, four—counting each movement of his hand, he began to caress her. The gesture was magical, would transport him, if repeated sufficiently often, beyond the past and the future, beyond right and wrong, into the discrete, the self–sufficient, the atomic present. Particles of thought, desire, and feeling moving at random among particles of time, coming into casual contact and as casually parting. A casino, an asylum, a zoo; but also, in a corner, a library and someone thinking. Someone largely at the mercy of the croupiers, at the mercy of the idiots and the animals; but still irrepressible and indefatigable. Another two or three years and the Elements of Sociology would be finished. In spite of everything; yes, in spite of everything, he thought with a kind of defiant elation, and counted thirty–two, thirty–three, thirty–four, thirty–five …

HORNS with a frizzle of orange hair between; the pink muzzle lowered inquiringly towards a tiny cup and saucer; eyes expressive of a more than human astonishment. ‘THE OX’, it was proclaimed in six–inch lettering, ‘THE OX IN THE TEA–CUP’. The thing was supposed to be a reason for buying beef extract— was a reason.

Ox in Cup. The words, the basely comic image, spotted the Home Counties that summer and autumn like a skin disease. One of a score of nasty and discreditable infections. The train which carried Anthony Beavis into Surrey rolled through mile–long eczemas of vulgarity. Pills, soaps, cough drops and—more glaringly inflamed and scabby than all the rest—beef essence, the cupped ox.

‘Thirty–one … thirty–two,’ the boy said to himself, and wished he had begun his counting when the train started. Between Waterloo and Clapham Junction there must have been hundreds of oxen. Millions.

Opposite, leaning back in his corner, sat Anthony’s father. With his left hand he shaded his eyes. Under the drooping brown moustache his lips moved.

‘Stay for me there,’ John Beavis was saying to the person who, behind his closed lids, was sometimes still alive, sometimes the cold, immobile thing of his most recent memories:

Stay for me there; I shall not fail

To meet thee in that hollow vale.

There was no immortality, of course. After Darwin, after the Fox Sisters, after John Beavis’s own father, the surgeon, how could there be? Beyond that hollow vale there was nothing. But all the same, oh, all the same, stay for me, stay for me, stay, stay!

‘Thirty–three.’

Anthony turned away from the hurrying landscape and was confronted by the spectacle of that hand across the eyes, those moving lips. That he had ever thought of counting the oxen seemed all at once shameful, a betrayal. And Uncle James, at the other end of the seat, with his Times —and his face, as he read, twitching every few seconds in sudden spasms of nervousness. He might at least have had the decency not to read it now —now, while they were on their way to … Anthony refused to say the words; words would make it all so clear, and he didn’t want to know too clearly. Reading The Times might be shameful; but the other thing was terrible, too terrible to bear thinking about, and yet so terrible that you couldn’t help thinking about it.

Anthony looked out of the window again, through tears. The green and golden brightness of St Martin’s summer swam in an obscuring iridescence. And suddenly the wheels of the train began to chant articulately. ‘Dead–a–dead–a–dead,’ they shouted, ‘dead–a–dead–a–dead …’ For ever. The tears overflowed, were warm for an instant on his cheeks, then icy cold. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away, wiped the fog out of his eyes. Luminous under the sun, the world before him was like one vast and intricate jewel. The elms had withered to a pale gold. Huge above the fields, and motionless, they seemed to be meditating in the crystal light of the morning, seemed to be remembering, seemed, from the very brink of dissolution, to be looking back and in a last ecstasy of recollection living over again, concentrated in this shining moment of autumnal time, all the long–drawn triumph of spring and summer.

‘DEAD–A–DEAD’, in a sudden frenzy yelled the wheels, as the train crossed a bridge, ‘A–DEAD–A–DEAD!’

Anthony tried not to listen—vainly; then tried to make the wheels say something else. Why shouldn’t they say, To stop the train pull down the chain ? That was what they usually said. With a great effort of concentration he forced them to change their refrain.

‘To stop the train pull down the chain, to stop the train pull down a–dead–a–dead–a–dead … ’ It was no good.

Mr Beavis uncovered his eyes for a moment and looked out of the window. How bright the autumnal trees! Cruelly bright they would have seemed, insultingly, except for something desperate in their stillness, a certain glassy fragility that, oh! invited disaster, that prophetically announced the coming darkness and the black branches moving in torture among stars, the sleet like arrows along the screaming wind.

Uncle James turned the page of his Times . The Ritualists and the Kensitites were at it again, he saw; and was delighted. Let dog eat dog. ‘MR CHAMBERLAIN AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE SCHOOL.’ What was the old devil up to now? Unveiling a tablet to the Old Boys who had been killed in the war. ‘Over one hundred young men went to the front, and twelve of them laid down their lives for the country in South Africa (cheers).’ Deluded idiots, thought Uncle James, who had always been passionately a pro–Boer.

Painted, among the real cows in their pasture, the enormous horns, the triangular auburn frizz, the inquiring nostrils, the tea–cup. Anthony shut his eyes against the vision.

‘No, I won’t,’ he said with all the determination he had previously used against the wheels. He refused to know the horror; he refused to know the ox. But what was the good of refusing? The wheels were still shouting away. And how could he suppress the fact that this ox was the thirty–fourth, on the right, from Clapham Junction? A number is always a number, even on the way to … But counting was shameful, counting was like Uncle James’s Times . Counting was shirking, was betraying. And yet the other thing, the thing they ought to be thinking about, was really too terrible. Too unnatural , somehow.

‘Whatever we may have thought, or still think, as to the causes, the necessity, the justice of the war which is now happily at an end, I think that we must all have a feeling of profound satisfaction that when the country called its children to arms, the manhood of the nation leaped to it in response….’ His face twitching with exasperation, Uncle James put down The Times and looked at his watch.

‘Two and a half minutes late,’ he said angrily.

‘If only it were a hundred years late,’ thought his brother. ‘Or ten years early—no, twelve, thirteen. The first year of our marriage.’

James Beavis looked out of the window. ‘And we’re still at least a mile from Lollingdon,’ he went on.

As though to a sore, to an aching tooth, his fingers travelled again to the chronometer in his waistcoat pocket. Time for its own sake. Always imperiously time, categorically time—time to look at one’s watch and see the time….

The wheels spoke more and more slowly, became at last inarticulate. The brakes screamed.

‘Lollingdon, Lollingdon,’ the porter called.

But Uncle James was already on the platform. ‘Quick!’ he shouted, striding, long–legged, beside the still moving train. His hand went once more to that mystical ulcer for ever gnawing at his consciousness. ‘Quick!’