Олдос Хаксли - Those Barren Leaves

‘What a goose you are!’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ she went on, ‘whether you’re capable of being in love at all, you’re so uncomprehending, so cold.’

Irene protested with all the energy of which she was capable. One could not have lived as long as she had in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s company without regarding the imputation of coldness, of insensitiveness to passion, as the most damning of all possible impeachments. It was better to be accused of being a murderess—particularly if it were a case of crime passionnel . ‘I don’t know how you say that,’ she said indignantly. ‘I’m always in love.’ Had there not been Peter, and Jacques, and Mario?

‘You may think you have,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle contemptuously, forgetting that it was she herself who had persuaded Irene that she was in love. ‘But it was more imagination than the real thing. Some women are born like that.’ She shook her head. ‘And they die like that.’ One might have inferred from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s words and the tone of her voice that Irene was a superannuated spinster of forty, proved conclusively, after twenty years of accumulated evidence, to be incapable of anything remotely resembling an amorous passion.

Irene made no answer, but went on brushing her aunt’s hair. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s aspersions were particularly wounding to her. She wished that she could do something startling to prove their baselessness. Something spectacular.

‘And I’ve always thought Hovenden an extremely nice boy,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle continued, with the air of pursuing an argument. She talked on. Irene listened and went on brushing.

In the silence and solitude of her room, Miss Thriplow sat up for a long time, pen in hand, in front of an open note–book. ‘Darling Jim,’ she wrote, ‘darling Jim. To–day you came back to me so suddenly and unexpectedly that I could almost have cried aloud in front of all those people. Was it an accident that I picked that stiff leaf from Apollo’s tree and crushed it to fragrance between my fingers? Or were you there? was it you who secretly whispered to the unconscious part of me, telling me to pick that leaf? I wonder; oh, I wonder and wonder. Sometimes I believe that there are no accidents, that we do nothing by chance. To–night I felt sure of it.

‘But I wonder what made you want to remind me of Mr. Chigwell’s little shop at Weltringham. Why did you want to make me see you sitting in the barber’s chair, so stiff and grown–up, with the wheel of the mechanical brush still turning overhead and Mr. Chigwell saying, “Hair’s very dry, Mr. Thriplow”? And the rubber driving band used always to remind me …’ Miss Thriplow recorded the simile of the wounded snake which had first occurred to her this evening. There was no particular reason why she should have antedated the conceit and attributed its invention to her childhood. It was just a question of literary tact; it seemed more interesting if one said that it had been made up when one was a child; that was all. ‘I ask myself whether there is any particular significance in this reminder. Or perhaps it’s just that you find me neglectful and unremembering—poor darling, darling Jim—and take whatever opportunity offers of reminding me that you existed, that you still exist. Forgive me, Jim. Everybody forgets. We should all be kind and good and unselfish if we always remembered—remembered that other people are just as much alive and individual and complicated as we are, remembered that everybody can be just as easily hurt, that everybody needs love just as much, that the only visible reason why we exist in the world is to love and be loved. But that’s no excuse for me. It’s no excuse for any one to say that other people are just as bad. I ought to remember more. I oughtn’t to let my mind be choked with weeds. It’s not only the memory of you that the weeds choke; it’s everything that’s best and most delicate and finest. Perhaps you reminded me of Mr. Chigwell and the bay rum in order to remind me at the same time to love more, and admire more, and sympathize more, and be more aware. Darling Jim.’

She put down her pen, and looking out through the open window at the starry sky she tried to think of him, tried to think of death. But it was difficult to think of death. It was difficult, she found, to keep the mind uninterruptedly on the idea of extinction, of non–life instead of life, of nothingness. In books one reads about sages meditating. She herself had often tried to meditate. But somehow it never seemed to come to much. All sorts of little irrelevant thoughts kept coming into her head. There was no focussing death, no keeping it steadily under the mind’s eye. In the end she found herself reading through what she had written putting in a stop here and there, correcting slips in the style, where it seemed to be too formal, too made–up, insufficiently spontaneous and unsuitable to the secret diary.

At the end of the last paragraph she added another ‘darling Jim,’ and she repeated the words to herself, aloud, again and again. The exercise produced its usual effect; she felt the tears coming into her eyes.

The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshippers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels.

‘Darling Jim, darling Jim.’ Miss Thriplow had found the form of words for her worship. ‘Darling Jim.’ The tears did her good; she felt better, kinder, softer. And then, suddenly, she seemed to be listening to herself from outside. ‘Darling Jim.’ But did she really care at all? Wasn’t it all a comedy, all a pretence? He had died so long ago; he had nothing to do with her now. Why should she care or remember? And all this systematic thinking about him, this writing of things in a secret diary devoted to his memory—wasn’t all that merely for the sake of keeping her emotions in training? Wasn’t she deliberately scratching her heart to make it bleed, and then writing stories with the red fluid?

Miss Thriplow put away the thoughts as soon as they occurred to her: put them aside indignantly. They were monstrous thoughts, lying thoughts.

She picked up her pen again and wrote, very quickly, as though she were writing an exorcizing spell and the sooner it had been put on paper the sooner the evil thoughts would vanish.

‘Do you remember, Jim, that time we went out in the canoe together and nearly got drowned? … ’

Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on me, turning the drops on my face and chest to salt. My head was pillowed in the unruffled water; my limbs and body dimpled the surface of a pellucid mattress thirty feet thick and cherishingly resilient through all its thickness, down to the sandy bed on which it was spread. One might lie paralysed here for a life–time and never get a bedsore.

The sky above me was filmy with the noonday heat. The mountains, when I turned towards the land to look for them, had almost vanished behind a veil of gauze. But the Grand Hotel, on the other hand, though not perhaps quite so grand as it appeared in its illustrated prospectus—for there the front door was forty feet high and four tall acrobats standing on one another’s shoulders could not have reached to the sills of the ground–floor windows—the Grand Hotel made no attempt to conceal itself; the white villas glared out unashamedly from their groves of pines; and in front of them, along the tawny beach, I could see the bathing huts, the striped umbrellas, the digging children, the bathers splashing and wallowing in the hot shallows—half–naked men like statues of copper, girls in bright tunics, little boiled shrimps instead of little boys, and sleek ponderous walruses with red heads, who were the matrons in their rubber caps and their wet black bathing garments. Here and there over the surface of the sea moved what the natives called patini —catamarans made of a pair of boxed–in pontoons joined together near the ends and with a high seat for the rower in the middle. Slowly, trailing behind them as they went loud wafts of Italian gallantry, giggles and song, they crawled across the flat blueness. Sometimes, at the head of its white wake, its noise and its stink, a motor boat would pass, and suddenly my transparent mattress would rock beneath me, as the waves of its passage lifted me and let me drop and lifted me up again, more and ever more languidly, till all was once more smooth.