Олдос Хаксли - Those Barren Leaves

‘And what about me?’ said Calamy, thinking of his freedom. ‘Haven’t I a right to hate too?’

‘No. Because you don’t love so much.’

‘But that’s not the question,’ said Calamy, neglecting to record his protest against this damning impeachment. ‘One doesn’t resent love for its own sake, but for the sake of what it interferes with.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Mary bitterly. She was too deeply wounded even to desire to pull his hair. She turned her back on him. ‘I’m sorry I should have got in the way of your important occupations,’ she said in her most sarcastic voice. ‘Such as thinking about your hand.’ She laughed derisively. There was a long silence. Calamy made no attempt to break it; he was piqued by this derisive treatment of a subject which, for him, was serious, was in some sort sacred. It was Mary who first spoke.

‘Will you tell me, then, what you were thinking?’ she asked submissively, turning back towards him. When one loves, one swallows one’s pride and surrenders. ‘Will you tell me?’ she repeated, leaning over him. She took one of his hands and began to kiss it, then suddenly bit one of his fingers so hard that Calamy cried out in pain.

‘Why do you make me so unhappy?’ she asked between clenched teeth. She saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed, desperately sobbing. It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy.

‘Make you unhappy?’ echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still smarting with the pain of that bite. ‘But I don’t. I make you uncommonly happy.’

‘You make me miserable,’ she answered.

‘Well, in that case,’ said Calamy, ‘I’d better go away and leave you in peace.’ He slipped his arm from under her shoulders, as though he were really preparing to go.

But Mary enfolded him in her arms. ‘No, no,’ she implored. ‘Don’t go. You mustn’t be cross with me. I’m sorry. I behaved abominably. Tell me, please, what you were thinking about your hand. I really am interested. Really, really.’ She spoke eagerly, childishly, like the little girl at the Royal Institution lecture.

Calamy couldn’t help laughing. ‘You’ve succeeded in rather damping my enthusiasm for that subject,’ he said. ‘I’d find it difficult to begin now, in cold blood.’

‘Please, please,’ Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon, she who cajoled. When one loves …

‘You’ve made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,’ Calamy objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. Embarrassed, rather awkwardly—for the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath—he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was somehow conscious.

‘Well, you see,’ he started hesitatingly, ‘it’s like this. I was thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist—my hand, for example.’

‘I see,’ said Mary Thriplow sympathetically and intelligently. She was almost too anxious to prove that she was listening, that she was understanding everything; she saw before there was anything to see.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Calamy went on, ‘what a lot of different modes of existence a thing has, when you come to think about it. And the more you think, the more obscure and mysterious everything becomes. What seemed solid vanishes; what was obvious and comprehensible becomes utterly mysterious. Gulfs begin opening all around you—more and more abysses, as though the ground were splitting in an earthquake. It gives one a strange sense of insecurity, of being in the dark. But I still believe that, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might somehow come through, get out on the other side of the obscurity. But into what, precisely into what? That’s the question.’ He was silent for a moment. If one were free, he thought, one could go exploring into that darkness. But the flesh was weak; under the threat of that delicious torture it turned coward and traitor.

‘Well?’ said Mary at last. She moved closer to him, lightly, her lips brushed across his cheek. She ran her hand softly over his shoulder and along his arm. ‘Go on.’

‘Very well,’ he said in a business–like voice, moving a little away from her as he spoke. He held up his hand once more against the window. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s just a shape that interrupts the light. To a child who has not yet learned to interpret what he sees, that’s all it would be, just a shaped blotch of colour, no more significant than one of those coloured targets representing a man’s head and shoulders that one learns shooting on. But now, suppose I try to consider the thing as a physicist.’

‘Quite,’ said Mary Thriplow; and from the movement of a floating tress of her hair which brushed against his shoulder he knew that she was nodding her head.

‘Well then,’ Calamy went on, ‘I have to imagine an almost inconceivable number of atoms, each consisting of a greater or lesser number of units of negative electricity whirling several million times a minute round a nucleus of positive electricity. The vibrations of the atoms lying near the surface sift out, so to speak, the electro–magnetic radiations which fall upon them, permitting only those waves to reach our eyes which give us the sensation of a brownish–pink colour. In passing it may be remarked that the behaviour of light is satisfactorily explained according to one theory of electro–dynamics, while the behaviour of the electrons in the atom can only be explained on a theory that is entirely inconsistent with it. Inside the atom, they tell us now, electrons move from one orbit to another without taking any time to accomplish their journey and without covering any space. Indeed, within the atom there is neither space nor time. And so on and so on. I have to take most of this on trust, I’m afraid, for I understand next to nothing about these things. Only enough to make me feel rather dizzy when I begin to think about them.’

‘Yes, dizzy,’ said Mary, ‘that’s the word. Dizzy.’ She made a prolonged buzzing over the z’s.

‘Well then, here are two ways already in which my hand exists,’ Calamy went on. ‘Then there’s the chemical way. These atoms consisting of more or fewer electrons whizzing round a nucleus of greater or lesser charge are atoms of different elements that build themselves up in certain architectural patterns into complicated molecules.’

Sympathetic and intelligent, Mary echoed: ‘Molecules.’

‘Now if, like Cranmer, I were to put my right hand into the fire, to punish it for having done something evil or unworthy (words, by the way, which haven’t much in common with chemistry), if I were to put my hand in the fire, these molecules would uncombine themselves into their constituent atoms, which would then proceed to build themselves up again into other molecules. But this leads me on at once to a set of entirely different realities. For if I were to put my hand in the fire, I should feel pain; and unless, like Cranmer, I made an enormous effort of will to keep it there, I should withdraw it; or rather it would withdraw itself almost without my knowledge and before I was aware. For I am alive, and this hand is part of a living being, the first law of whose existence is to preserve its life. Being alive, this hand of mine, if it were burnt, would set about trying to repair itself. Seen by a biologist, it reveals itself as a collection of cells, having each its appointed function, and existing harmoniously together, never trespassing upon one another, never proliferating into wild adventures of growth, but living, dying and growing to one end—that the whole which they compose may fulfil its purpose—and as though in accordance with a preordained plan. Say that the hand is burnt. From all round the burn the healthy cells would breed out of themselves new cells to fill in and cover the damaged places.’