Олдос Хаксли - Eyeless in Gaza

‘ Usted me disprecia ,’ he shouted.

His movement, the violence of his tone, startled Anthony into a kind of panic alarm. He scrambled to his feet and, edging behind his chair, began to explain in a voice that he had meant to be calmly conciliatory, but which, in spite of all his efforts to keep it grave and steady, trembled into a breadiless shrillness, that he hadn’t dreamed of despising anyone, that it was merely a question of—he fumbled for the medical explanation and could find nothing better than a pain in the stomach—merely a question of un dolar en mi estómago .

For some reason the word estómago seemed to the young man the final, most outrageous insult. He bellowed something incomprehensible, but evidently abusive; his hand went back to his hip–pocket and, as the proprietress screamed for help, came forward again, holding a revolver.

‘Don’t, don’t!’ Anthony cried out, without knowing what he was saying; then, with extraordinary agility, darted out of his corner to take shelter behind the massive pillar at the centre of the room.

For a second the young man was out of sight. But suppose he were to creep up on tiptoe. Anthony imagined the revolver suddenly coming round the pillar into his face; or else from behind—he would feel the muzzle pressed against his back, would hear the ghastly explosion, and then …A fear so intense that it was like the most excruciating physical pain possessed him entirely; his heart beat more violently than ever, he felt as though he were going to be sick. Overcoming terror by a greater terror, he stuck out his head to the left. The young man was standing only two yards away, staring with a ferocious fixity at the pillar. Anthony saw him jerk into movement, and with a despairing shout for help jumped to the right, looked out again and jumped back to the left; then once more to the right.

‘I can’t go on,’ he was thinking. ‘I can’t do it much longer.’ The thought of that pistol coming unexpectedly round the pillar forced him to look out yet again.

The young man moved, and he darted precipitately to the left.

The noise of the revolver going off—that was what he dreaded most. The horrible noise, sudden and annihilating like the noise of that other explosion years before. His eyelids had stiffened and were irrepressibly trembling, ready to blink, in anticipation of the horrifying event. The lashes flickered before his eyes, and it was through a kind of mist that, peering out, he saw the door open and Mark moving swiftly across the room, Mark catching the young man by the wrist … The pistol went off; reverberated from the walls and ceiling, the report was catastrophically loud. Anthony uttered a great cry, as though he had been wounded, and, shutting his eyes, flattened himself against the pillar. Conscious only of nausea and that pain in the genitals, those gripings of the bowels, he waited, reduced to a mere quivering embodiment of fearful anticipation, for the next explosion. Waited for what seemed hours. Dim voices parleyed incomprehensibly. Then a touch on his shoulder made him start. He shouted, ‘No, don’t,’ and lifting eyelids that still twitched with the desirable blink, saw Mark Staithes, demonstrating muscle by muscle a smile of friendly amusement.

‘All clear,’ he said, ‘you can come out.’

Feeling profoundly ashamed and humiliated, Anthony followed him into the open. The young Mexican was at the bar again and already drinking. As they approached, he turned and with outstretched arms came to meet them. ‘ Hombre ,’ he said to Anthony, as he took him affectionately by the hand, ‘ hombre ’!

Anthony felt more abjectly humiliated than ever.

HAVE built up during the last few days a meditation on a phrase of William Penn’s. ‘Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he who forgives first wins the laurel.’

‘Force may subdue.’ I visualize men using force. First, hand to hand. With fists, knives, truncheons, whips. Weals, red or livid across flesh. Lacerations, bruises, the broken bone sticking in jags through the skin, faces horribly swollen and bleeding. Then try to imagine, in my own body, the pain of a crushed finger, of blows with a stick or lash across the face, the searing touch of red–hot iron. All the short–range brutalities and tortures. Then, force from a distance. Machine–gun bullets, high explosive, gases, choking or blistering fire.

Force, finally, in the shape of economic coercion. Starved children, pot–bellied and with arms and legs like sticks. Women old at thirty. And those living corpses, standing in silence at the street corners in Durham or South Wales, shuffling in silence through the mud.

Yes, force may subdue. Subdue in death, subdue by wounds, subdue through starvation and terror. Vision of frightened faces, of abject gestures of servility. The manager at his desk, hectoring. The clerk cringing under the threat of dismissal. Force—the act of violently denying man’s ultimate unity with man.

‘Force may subdue, but Love gains.’ I rehearse the history of Penn himself among the Redskins. Remember how Miller used to allay the suspicious hostility of the Indians in the mountain villages. Think of Pennell on the North–West Frontier; of the Quakers during the Russian famine; of Elizabeth Fry and Damien.

Next I consider the translations of love into terms of politics. Campbell–Bannerman’s insistence that reparation should be made in South Africa—in the teeth of the protests, the Cassandra–like prophesyings of such ‘sane and practical men’ as Arthur Balfour. Love gains even in the clumsy, distorted form of a good political constitution. ‘He who forgives first wins the laurel.’ In South Africa, the English forgave those whom they had wronged—which is only less difficult than forgiving those by whom one has been wronged—and so secured a prize which they couldn’t have won by continued coercion. No prize has been won since the last war, because no combatant has yet forgiven those by whom he has been wronged or those he has wronged.

Consistently applied to any situation, love always gains. It is an empirically determined fact. Love is the best policy. The best not only in regard to those loved, but also in regard to the one who loves. For love is self–energizing. Produces the means whereby its policy can be carried out. In order to go on loving, one needs patience, courage, endurance. But the process of loving generates these means to its own continuance. Love gains because, for the sake of that which is loved, the lover is patient and brave.

And what is loved? Goodness and the potentialities for goodness in all human beings—even those most busily engaged in refusing to actualize those potentialities for goodness in relation to the lover himself. If sufficiently great, love can cast out the fear even of malevolently active enemies.

I end by holding the thought of goodness, still, as it were, before the eyes of my mind. Goodness, immanent in its potentialities, transcendent as a realized ideal; conceivable in its perfections, but also susceptible of being realized in practice, of being embodied at least partially in any situation in which we may find ourselves. ‘The thought of goodness’—it is the wrong phrase. For in reality it is a whole system of thoughts and sentiments. It is this whole system that I hold, quite still, perceived simultaneously in its entirety—hold it without words, without images, undiscursively, as a single, simple entity. Hold it—then at last must retreat again, back into words, back at last (but refreshed, but made more conscious, but replenished, as it were) into ordinary life.

September 17th 1934

Was called in by Helen to help entertain her sister and brother–in–law, back on leave from India. Had to put on evening clothes—the first time this year—because Colin could not allow himself to be seen in a theatre or at the Savoy Grill in anything but a white tie. A depressing evening. Joyce sickly and gaunt before her time. Colin furtively interested in plumper, fresher bodies. She, jealous and nagging; he resentful at being tied to her and the children, blaming her for the strictness of his own code, which doesn’t allow him to be the libertine he would like to be. Each chronically impatient with the other. Every now and then an outburst of bad temper, an exchange of angry or spiteful words. Colin had other grievances as well. England, it seemed, didn’t show sufficient respect to the officer and gent. Cabmen were impertinent, the lower classes jostled him in the streets. ‘They call this a white man’s country.’ (This, after the second ‘quick one’ in the bar of the theatre, between the acts.) ‘It isn’t. Give me Poona every time.’