Олдос Хаксли - Those Barren Leaves

And now, if she wasn’t careful, she’d have another floater rankling and suppurating in her memory. ‘How could I have been so stupid?’ she thought, ‘how could I?’ For it was obvious now that the dashing manner, the fashionable disguise were entirely inappropriate to the occasion. Calamy, it was clear, didn’t appreciate that sort of thing at all; he might have once, but he didn’t now. If she went on like this she’d have him putting her down as merely frivolous, worldly, a snob; and it would need time and enormous efforts to obliterate the disastrous first impression.

Surreptitiously Miss Thriplow slipped the opal ring from off the little finger of her right hand, held it for a moment, clenched out of sight in her left; then, when Calamy wasn’t looking, pushed it down into the crevice between the padded seat and the back of her chintz–covered arm–chair.

‘Terrifying!’ she echoed. ‘Yes, that’s exactly the word. Those things are terrifying. The size of the footmen!’ She held up one hand above her head. ‘The diameter of the strawberries!’ She brought both hands (still far too glittering, she regretfully noticed, with their freight of rings) to within a foot of one another in front of her. ‘The inanity of the lion hunters! The roaring of the lions!’ It was unnecessary to do anything with her hands now; she dropped them back into her lap and took the opportunity to rid herself of the scarab and the brilliants. And like the conjuror who makes patter to divert attention from the workings of his trick, she leaned forward and began to talk very rapidly and earnestly. ‘And seriously,’ she went on, putting seriousness into her voice and smoothing the laughter out of her face, so that it was wonderfully round, earnest and ingenuous, ‘what rot the lions do roar! I suppose it’s awfully innocent of me; but I always imagined that celebrated people must be more interesting than other people. They’re not!’ She let herself fall back, rather dramatically, into her chair. In the process, one hand seemed to have got accidentally stuck behind her back. She disengaged it, but not before the scarab and the brilliants had been slipped into the cache. There was nothing left now but the emerald; that could stay. It was very chaste and austere. But she would never be able to take off her pearls without his noticing. Never—even though men are so inconceivably unobservant. Rings were easy enough to get rid of; but a necklace…. And they weren’t even real pearls.

Calamy, meanwhile, was laughing. ‘I remember making the same discovery myself,’ he said. ‘It’s rather painful at first. One feels as though one has been somehow swindled and done in. You remember what Beethoven said: “that he seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect.” One has a right to expect celebrated people to live up to their reputations; they ought to be interesting.’

Miss Thriplow leaned forward again, nodding her assent with a child–like eagerness. ‘I know lots of obscure little people,’ she said, ‘who are much more interesting and much more genuine, one somehow feels, than the celebrated ones. It’s genuineness that counts, isn’t it?’

Calamy agreed.

‘I think it’s difficult to be genuine,’ Miss Thriplow went on, ‘if one’s a celebrity or a public figure, or anything of that sort.’ She became very confidential indeed. ‘I get quite frightened when I see my name in the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.’ How little and obscure she was! How poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s, those boring lion huntresses … they had no hope of passing through the needle’s eye.

‘I’m delighted to hear you saying all this,’ said Calamy. ‘If only all writers felt as you do!’

Miss Thriplow shook her head, modestly declining the implied compliment. ‘I’m like Jehovah,’ she said; ‘I just am that I am. That’s all. Why should I make believe that I’m somebody else? Though I confess,’ she added, with a greatly daring candour, ‘that I was intimidated by your reputation into pretending that I was more mondaine than I really am. I imagined you as being so tremendously worldly and smart. It’s a great relief to find you’re not.’

‘Smart?’ repeated Calamy, making a grimace.

‘You sounded so dazzlingly social from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s accounts.’ And as she spoke the words she felt herself becoming correspondingly obscurer and littler.

Calamy laughed. ‘Perhaps I was that sort of imbecile once,’ he said. ‘But now—well, I hope all that’s over now.’

‘I pictured you,’ Miss Thriplow went on, straining, in spite of her obscurity, to be brilliant, ‘I pictured you as one of those people in the Sketch —“walking in the Park with a friend,” you know; a friend who would turn out at the least to be a duchess or a distinguished novelist. Can you wonder that I was nervous?’ She dropped back into the depths of her chair. Poor little thing! But the pearls, though not marine, were still rather an embarrassment.

Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned, found them on the upper terrace, looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza at their feet was already eclipsed by the shadow of the great bluff which projected, on the further side of the westernmost of the two valleys, into the plain. But, beyond, the plain was still bright. It lay, stretched out beneath them like a map of itself—the roads marked in white, the pinewoods dark green, the streams as threads of silver, ploughland and meadowland in chequers of emerald and brown, the railway a dark brown line ruled along it. And beyond its furthest fringes of pinewoods and sand, darkly, opaquely blue, the sea. Towards this wide picture, framed between the projecting hills, of which the eastern was still rosily flushed with the light, the western profoundly dark, a great flight of steps descended, past a lower terrace, down, between columnar cypresses, to a grand sculptured gateway half–way down the hill.

They stood there in silence, leaning their elbows on the balustrade. Ever since she had jettisoned the Guardswoman they had got on, Miss Thriplow thought, most awfully well. She could see that he liked her combination of moral ingenuousness and mental sophistication, of cleverness and genuineness. Why she had ever thought of pretending she was anything but simple and natural she couldn’t now imagine. After all, that was what she really was—or at least what she had determined that she ought to be.

From the entrance court on the west flank of the palace came the hoot of a motor horn and the sound of voices.

‘There they are,’ said Miss Thriplow.

‘I rather wish they weren’t,’ he said, and sighing he straightened himself up and turned round, with his back to the view, towards the house. ‘It’s like heaving a great stone into a calm pool—all this noise, I mean.’

Mentally cataloguing herself among the tranquil charms of evening, Miss Thriplow took the remark to be complimentary to herself. ‘What smashings of crystal one has to put up with,’ she said. ‘Every other moment, if one’s at all sensitive.’

Through the huge echoing saloons of the palace the sound of an approaching voice could be heard. ‘Calamy,’ it called, ‘Calamy!’ mounting through the syllables of the name from a low to a much higher note, not, however, through any intervals known to music, but in a succession of uncertain and quite unrelated tones. ‘Calamy!’ It was as vague and tuneless as the call of an articulate wind. There were hurrying footsteps, a rustling of draperies. In the huge pompous doorway at the head of the steps leading down from the house to the terrace appeared the figure of Mrs. Aldwinkle.