Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

… from her light dress And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress The air of her own speed has disentwined….

(The figure was running now, in square–toed pumps cross–gartered with black ribbon over the white cotton stockings.)

The half–opened rose gave place to Mark Staithes’s strangely twisted face. Those things he had told her the other night about perfumes. Musk, ambergris … And Henri Quatre with his bromidrosis of the feet. Bien vous en prend d’être roi; sans cela on ne vous pourrait souffrir. Vous puez comme charogne. She made a grimace. Hugh’s smell was like sour milk.

A clock struck. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve! She felt guilty; then defiantly decided that she would stay in bed for lunch. A remembered voice—it was Cynthia’s—sounded reproachfully in her memory. ‘You ought to go out more, see more people.’ But people, Cynthia’s people, were such bores. Behind closed eyelids, she saw her mother rapping the top of her skull: ‘Solid ivory, my dear!’ Hopelessly stupid, ignorant, tasteless, slow. ‘I was brought up above my mental station,’ was what she had said to Anthony the other night. ‘So that now, if ever I have to be with people as silly and uneducated as myself, it’s torture, absolute torture!’

Cynthia was sweet, of course; always had been, ever since they were at school together. But Cynthia’s husband—that retriever! And her young men, and the young men’s young women! ‘My boy friend. My girl friend.’ How she loathed the words and, still more, the awful way they spoke them! So coy, such saucy implications of sleeping together! When, in fact, most of them were utterly respectable. In the few cases where they weren’t respectable, it seemed even worse—a double hypocrisy. Really sleeping together, and pretending to be only archly pretending to do it. The dreary, upper–class Englishness of it all! And then they were always playing games. ‘Ga–ames,’ Mrs Amberley drawled out of a pre–morphia past. ‘A Dear Old School in every home.’ See more of those people, do more of the things they did … She shook her head.

Was it all nonsense? Or did it mean something—something marvellous she had never experienced? But, yes, she had experienced it.

It was humiliating, now, to admit it; but the fact remained that, with Gerry, she had known exactly what those lines signified. A divine presence in a place divine. And it had been the presence in bed of a swindler who was also a virtuoso in the art of love–making. She found a perverse pleasure in insisting, as brutally as she could, upon the grotesque disparity between the facts and what had then been her feelings.

Noiselessly, Helen laughed. The sound of the clock chiming the quarter made her think again of Cynthia’s advice. There were also the other people—the people they met when Hugh and she dined with the Museum or the University. ‘Those god–fearing people’ (her mother spoke again), ‘who still go on fearing God even though they’ve pitched him overboard.’ Fearing God on committees. Fearing him in W.E.A. lecture–rooms. Fearing him through interminable discussions of the Planned Society. But Gerry’s good looks, Gerry’s technique as a lover—how could those be planned out of existence? Or the foetus irrepressibly growing and growing in the womb? ‘A coordinated housing scheme for the whole country.’ She remembered Frank Ditchling’s eager, persuasive voice. He had a turned–up nose, and the large nostrils stared at one like a second pair of eyes, insistently. ‘Redistribution of the population … Satellite towns …Green belts … Lifts even in working–class flats … ’ She had listened, she had succumbed to the spell of his hypnotic nostrils, and at a time it had seemed splendid, worth dying for. But afterwards … Well, lifts were very convenient—she wished there were one to her own flat. Parks were nice to walk in. But how would Frank Ditchling’s crusade affect any of the serious issues? Coordinated housing wouldn’t make her mother any less dirty, any less hopelessly at the mercy of an intoxicated body. And Hugh—would Hugh be any different in a satellite town and with a lift from what he was now, when he walked up four flights of stairs in London? Hugh! She thought, derisively, of his letters—all the delicate, beautiful things he had written—and then of the man as he had been in everyday reality, as a husband. ‘Show me how I can help you, Hugh.’ Arranging his papers, typing his notes, looking up references for him in the library. But always, his eyes glassy behind glass, he had shaken his head: either he didn’t need help, or else she wasn’t capable of giving it. ‘I want to be a good wife, Hugh.’ With her mother’s laughter loud in her imagination, it had been difficult to pronounce those words. But she had meant them; she did want to be a good wife. Darning socks, making hot milk for him before he went to bed, reading up his subject, being sérieuse , in a word, for the first time and profoundly. But Hugh didn’t want her to be a good wife, didn’t want her, so far as she could see, to be anything. A divine presence in a place divine. But the place was his letters; she was present, so far as he was concerned, only at the other end of the postal system. He didn’t even want her in bed—or at any rate not much, not in any ordinary way. Green belts, indeed!

It was all beside the point. For the point was those silences in which Hugh enclosed himself at meals. The point was that martyred expression he put on if ever she came into his study while he was working. The point was the furtive squalor of those approaches in the darkness, the revolting detachment and gentleness of a sensuality, in which the part assigned to her was purely ideal. The point was that expression of dismay, almost of horror and disgust, which she had detected that time, within the first few weeks of their marriage, when she was laid up with the flu. He had shown himself solicitous; and at first she had been touched, had felt grateful. But when she discovered how heroic an effort it cost him to attend upon her sick body, the gratitude had evaporated. In itself, no doubt, the effort was admirable. What she resented, what she couldn’t forgive was the fact that an effort had had to be made. She wanted to be accepted as she was, even in fever, even vomiting bile. In that book on mysticism she had read, there was an account of Mme Guyon picking up from the floor a horrible gob of phlegm and spittle and putting it in her mouth—as a test of will. Sick, she had been Hugh’s test of will; and, since then, each month had renewed his secret horror of her body. It was an intolerable insult—and would be no less intolerable in one of Ditchling’s satellite towns in the planned world those god–fearing atheists were always talking about.

But there was also Fanny Carling. ‘The mouse’ was Helen’s name for her—she was so small, so grey, so silently quick. But a mystical mouse. A mouse with enormous blue eyes that seemed perpetually astonished by what they saw behind the appearances of things. Astonished, but bright at the same time with an inexplicable happiness—a happiness that to Helen seemed almost indecent, but which she envied. ‘How does one believe in the things that are obviously false?’ she had asked, half in malice, half genuinely desirous of learning a valuable secret. ‘By living,’ the mouse answered. ‘If you live in the right way, all these things turn out to be obviously true.’ And she went on to talk incomprehensible stuff about the love of God and the love of things and people for the sake of God. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Only because you don’t want to, Helen.’ Stupid, maddening answer! ‘How do you know what I want?’ Sighing, Helen returned to her book.