Олдос Хаксли - Those Barren Leaves

Meanwhile, she had learned to talk with an airy familiarity of many things concerning which young girls are supposed to be ignorant, and of which, indeed, she herself knew, except intellectually and at second hand, nothing. She had learned to be knowing and worldly wise, in the void, so to speak, and with no personal knowledge of the world. Gravely, ingenuously, she would say things that could only be uttered out of the depths of the profoundest innocence, amplifying and making embarrassingly explicit in public things that Mrs. Aldwinkle had only fragmentarily hinted at in the confidential small hours. She regarded herself as immensely mature.

To–night Mrs. Aldwinkle was in a rather gloomy, complaining mood.

‘I’m getting old,’ she said, sighing, and opening her eyes for a moment to look at her image in the glass that confronted her. The image did not deny the statement. ‘And yet I always feel so young.’

‘That’s what really matters,’ Irene declared. ‘And besides, it’s nonsense; you’re not old; you don’t look old.’ In Irene’s eyes, moreover, she really didn’t look old.

‘People don’t like one any more when one gets old,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle continued. ‘Friends are terribly faithless. They fall away.’ She sighed. ‘When I think of all the friends … ’ She left the sentence unfinished.

All her life long Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a peculiar genius for breaking with her friends and lovers. Mr. Cardan was almost the sole survivor from an earlier generation of friends. From all the rest she had parted, and she had parted with a light heart. It had seemed easy to her, when she was younger, to make new friends in place of the old. Potential friends, she thought, were to be found everywhere, every day. But now she was beginning to doubt whether the supply was, after all, so inexhaustible as she had once supposed. People of her own age, she found, were already set fast in the little social worlds they had made for themselves. And people of the younger generation seemed to find it hard to believe that she felt, in her heart, just as young as they did. They mostly treated her with the rather distant politeness which one accords to a stranger and an elder person.

‘I think people are horrid,’ said Irene, giving a particularly violent sweep with the hair–brush to emphasize her indignation.

‘You won’t be faithless?’ asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.

Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs. Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling, as she did so, that siren smile that, for Irene, was still as fascinating as it had ever been.

‘If only everybody were like my little Irene!’ Mrs. Aldwinkle let her head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence. ‘What are you sighing about in that heart–breaking way?’ she suddenly asked.

Irene’s blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the copper–coloured fringe. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, with an off–handedness that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut.

But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect the truth. ‘Nothing, indeed!’ she echoed incredulously. ‘Why, it was the noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never heard such a sigh.’ She looked at the reflection of Irene’s face in the mirror. ‘And you’re blushing like a peony. What is it?’

‘But it’s nothing, I tell you,’ Irene declared, speaking almost in a tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject.

But Mrs. Aldwinkle was implacable in her tactlessness. ‘I never heard anything that sounded so love–sick,’ she said, smiling archly into the looking–glass. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s humorous sallies had a way of falling ponderously, like bludgeon strokes, on the objects of her raillery. One never knew, when she was being sprightly, whether to feel sorrier for the victim or for Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. For though the victim might get hard knocks, the spectacle of Mrs. Aldwinkle laboriously exerting herself to deliver them was sadly ludicrous; one wished, for her sake, for the sake of the whole human race, that she would desist. But she never did. Mrs. Aldwinkle always carried all her jokes to the foreseen end, and generally far further than was foreseeable by any one less ponderously minded than herself. ‘It was like a whale sighing!’ she went on with a frightful playfulness. ‘It must be a grand passion of the largest size. Who is it? Who is it?’ She raised her eyebrows, she smiled with what seemed to her, as she studied it in the glass, a most wickedly sly but charming smile—like a smile in a comedy by Congreve, it occurred to her.

‘But, Aunt Lilian,’ protested Irene, almost in despair, almost in tears, ‘it was nothing, I tell you.’ At moments like this she could almost find it in her to hate Aunt Lilian. ‘As a matter of fact, I was only … ’ She was going to blurt it out courageously; she was just going to tell Aunt Lilian—at the risk of a teasing or an almost equally unwelcome solicitude: either were better than this—that she had been merely yawning. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, still relentlessly pursuing her fun, interrupted her.

‘But I guess who it is,’ she said, wagging a forefinger at the glass. ‘I guess. I’m not such a blind stupid old auntie as you think. You imagine I haven’t noticed. Silly child! Did she think I didn’t see that he was very assiduous and that she rather liked it? Did she think her stupid old auntie was blind?’

Irene blushed again; the tears came into her eyes. ‘But who are you talking about?’ she said in a voice that she had to make a great effort to keep from breaking and trembling out of control.

‘What an innocent!’ mocked Mrs. Aldwinkle, still very Congreve. And at this point—earlier than was usual with her on these occasions—she had mercy and consented to put poor Irene out of her agony. ‘Why, Hovenden,’ she said. ‘Who else should it be?’

‘Hovenden?’ Irene repeated with genuine surprise.

‘Injured innocence!’ Mrs. Aldwinkle momentarily renewed her trampling fun. ‘But it’s sufficiently obvious,’ she went on in a more natural voice. ‘The poor boy follows you like a dog.’

‘Me?’ Irene had been too much preoccupied in following her Aunt Lilian to notice that she in her turn was being followed.

‘Now don’t pretend,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘It’s so stupid pretending. Much better to be frank and straightforward. Admit, now, that you like him.’

Irene admitted. ‘Yes, of course I like him. But not … not in any special way. I’d really not thought of him like that.’

A shade contemptuously, benevolently amused, Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled. She forgot her depression, forgot her causes of personal complaint against the universal order of things. Absorbed in the uniquely interesting subject, in the sole and proper study of mankind, she was once more happy. Love—it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly existed. Mrs. Aldwinkle was almost as much interested in other people’s love as in her own. She wanted every one to love, constantly and complicatedly. She liked to bring people together, to foster tender feelings, to watch the development of passion, to assist—when it happened; and Mrs. Aldwinkle was always rather disappointed when it did not—at the tragic catastrophe. And then, when the first love, growing old, had lingeringly or violently died, there was the new love to think of, to arrange, to foster, to watch; and then the third, the fourth…. One must always follow the spontaneous motions of the heart; it is the divine within us that stirs in the heart. And one must worship Eros so reverently that one can never be content with anything but the most poignant, most passionate manifestations of his power. To be content with a love that has turned in the course of time to mere affection, kindliness and quiet comprehension is almost to blaspheme against the name of Eros. Your true lover, thought Mrs. Aldwinkle, leaves the old, paralytic love and turns whole–heartedly to the young passion.