Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

The surgeon had been called in time, and Helen now was out of all danger. Reassured, Mme Bonifay had resumed the motherly and Rabelaisian good humour that was natural to her.

It was almost with a wink that she now talked of the operation that had saved Helen’s life. ‘ Ton petit curetage ,’ she would say with a kind of jovial archness, as though she were talking of some illicit pleasure. For Helen, every tone of that fat, jolly voice was yet another insult, yet a further humiliation. The fever had left her; her present weakness was lucid; she inhabited the real world once more. Turning her head, she could see herself reflected in the wardrobe mirror. It gave her a certain satisfaction to see how thin she was, how pale, what blue transparent shadows there were under the eyes, and the eyes themselves, how lifelessly without lustre. She could have powdered herself now, painted her lips a little, and rouged her cheeks, brushed back the gloss into her dull untidy hair; but, perversely, she preferred her sick pallor and dishevelment. ‘Like the kitten,’ she kept thinking. Reduced to a dirty little rag of limp flesh, transformed from the bright living creature into something repellent, into the likeness of kidneys, of that unspeakable thing that Mme Bonifay … She shuddered. And now ton petit curetage —in the same tone as ton petit amoureux . It was horrible, the final humiliation. She loathed the beastly woman, but at the same time was glad that she was so awful. That cheerful gross vulgarity was somehow appropriate—in keeping with all the rest. But when Mme Bonifay had left the room she would start crying, silently, in an agony of self–pity.

Returning unexpectedly, Mme Bonifay found her, that second morning after the petit curetage , with the tears streaming down her face. Genuinely distressed, she offered comfort. But the comfort smelt, as usual, of onions. Physically disgusted as well as resentful of the intrusion upon the privacy of her unhappiness, Helen turned aside, and when Mme Bonifay tried to force consolation upon her, she shook her head and told her to go away. Mme Bonifay hesitated for a moment, then obeyed, but with a Parthian insult in the form of a tenderly suggestive remark about the letter she had brought and which she now laid on Helen’s pillow. From him , without a doubt. A good heart, in spite of everything …

The letter, it turned out, was from Hugh. ‘A holiday in Paris!’ he wrote. ‘From my dingy little kennel among the bric–à–brac, how I envy you, Helen! Paris in high summer. Gaily beautiful, as this place of hazy distances can never be. London’s always mournful, even in the sunshine. One pines for the clear, unequivocal brilliance of the Paris summer. How I wish I were there! Selfishly, first of all, for the pleasure of being with you and out of London and the Museum. And then unselfishly, for your sake—because it worries me, the thought of your being all alone in Paris. Theoretically, with all my head, I know that nothing is likely to happen to you. But all the same—I’d like to be there, protective, but invisible, so that you wouldn’t be aware of me, never feel my devotion as an importunity, but so that you should always have the confidence that comes from being two instead of one. Not, alas, that I should be a very good second in a tight corner. (How I hate myself sometimes for my shameful inadequacy!) But better, perhaps, than nobody. And I’d never encroach, never trespass or interfere. I’d be non–existent; except when you needed me. My reward would be just being in your neighbourhood, just seeing and hearing you—the reward of someone who comes out of a dusty place into a garden, and looks at the flowering trees, and listens to the fountains.

‘I’ve never told you before (was afraid you’d laugh—and you may laugh; I don’t mind: for after all it’s your laughter), but the truth is that I sit sometimes, spinning stories to myself—stories in which I’m always with you, as I’ve told you I’d like to be with you now in Paris. Watching over you, keeping you from harm, and in return being refreshed by your loveliness, and warmed by your fire, and dazzled by your bright purity … ’

Angrily, as though the irony in it had been intentional, Helen threw the letter aside. But an hour later she had picked it up again and was re–reading it from the beginning. After all, it was comforting to know that there was somebody who cared.

WITH Miller to see a show of scientific films. Development of the sea urchin. Fertilization, cell division, growth. A renewal of last year’s almost nightmarish vision of a more–than–Bergsonian life force, of an ultimate Dark God, much darker, stranger, and more violent than any that Lawrence imagined. Raw material that, on its own inhuman plane, is already a perfectly finished product. A picture of earthworms followed. Week–long hermaphroditic love–making, worm to worm, within a tube of slime. Then an incredibly beautiful film showing the life–history of the blow–fly. The eggs. The grubs on their piece of decaying meat. Snow–white, like a flock of sheep on a meadow. Hurrying away from light. Then, after five days of growth, descending to the earth, burrowing, making a cocoon. In twelve more days, the fly emerges. Fantastic process of resurrection! An organ in the head is inflated like a balloon. Blown up so large, that the walls of the cocoon are split. The fly wriggles out. Positively now, instead of negatively phototropic, as it was as a grub. (Minor and incidental miracle!) Burrowing upwards, towards the light. At the surface, you see it literally pumping up its soft, wet body with air, smoothing out its crumpled wings by forcing blood into the veins. Astonishing and moving spectacle.

I put the question to Miller: what will be the influence of the spread of knowledge such as this? Knowledge of a world incomparably more improbable and more beautiful than the imaginings of any myth–maker. A world, only a few years ago, completely unknown to all but a handful of people. What the effects of its general discovery by all? Miller laughed. ‘It will have exactly as much or as little effect as people want it to have. Those who prefer to think about sex and money will go on thinking about sex and money. However loudly the movies proclaim the glory of God.’ Persistence of the ingenuous notion that the response to favourable circumstances is inevitably and automatically good. Raw material, once again, to be worked up. One goes on believing in automatic progress, because one wants to cherish this stupidity: it’s so consoling. Consoling, because it puts the whole responsibility for everything you do or fail to do on somebody or something other than yourself.

AT Colon they drove in a cab, at evening, along an esplanade. Whitish, like a vast fish’s eye, the sea lay as though dead. Against a picture postcard sunset the immoderately tall thin palms were the emblems of a resigned hopelessness, and in the nostrils the hot air was like a vapour of wool. They swam for a little in the warm fish–eye, then returned through the deepening night to the town.

For the rich there were, after dinner, cabaret shows with expensive drinks and genuinely white prostitutes at ten dollars. For the poor, in the back streets, the mulatto women sat at doors that opened directly on to lighted bedrooms.

‘If one were really conscientious,’ said Anthony, as they walked back late that night to the hotel, ‘I suppose one would have to go and infect oneself with syphilis.’

The smell of sweat, the smell of alcohol, the smells of sewage and decay and cheap perfumes; then, next morning, the Canal, the great locks, the ship climbing up from one ocean and down again to the other. A more than human achievement that made it possible, Mark explained, smiling anatomically, to transport whores and whisky by water instead of overland from Colon to Panama.