But such an affair, you will object, is a typical piece of reality. True; but at that time I was not quite such a believer in the real and earnest side of life as I am now. And even now I should regard it as something of a work of supererogation to associate with realities of so exceptionally penetrative a nature. A sober man, if he is logical and courageous, is bound to pass his life between Gog’s Court and Miss Carruthers’s. But he is not bound to make love to Miss Carruthers or to provoke the clinging affections of Fluffy. That would be too much — so it seems to me, at any rate at present; though perhaps the time may come when I shall feel strong enough to take my reality in these stiff doses. There is an electric machine used by masseurs for driving iodine into stiffened joints. Love acts like this machine; it serves to drive the lover’s personality into the mind of the beloved. I am strong enough at present to be able to bathe in the personalities of ordinary human animals; but I should be suffocated, I should faint away, if the muddy swill were to be pumped into my spiritual system by the penetrating electricity of love.
Miss Masson stood one Galtonian class higher than Miss Carruthers or Fluffy. One out of every four people is a Fluffy; only one out of every six is a Dorothy Masson. It makes a slight but perceptible difference. None the less, how much I suffered! When I brought her a few orchids as a present, remarking as I gave them to her that they looked so delightfully like artificial flowers, she would thank me and say she adored orchids, adding after a moment’s pause for thought that she liked them because they looked so like artificial flowers. And she laughed softly to herself, she looked up at me for confirmatory applause. For that little habit alone I sometimes felt that I could have murdered her. But her solicitude, her reproaches, expressed or more often mute (for she rarely made scenes, but only looked at me with those sad brown eyes), her incessant desire to be close to me, to touch me, to kiss and be kissed — these were almost enough to drive me to suicide. It lasted for more than a year, an eternity. And technically it still lasts; for I never broke with her, never dramatically quitted her, but only quietly and gradually faded out of her life like the Cheshire Cat. Sometimes, even, we still meet. And still, as though nothing had happened, I take her in my arms and kiss her, till that strange expression of abject terror comes again into her eyes, till she implores me, in a voice made faint with excessive desire, to spare her well-disciplined everyday soul and not deliver it into the power of the fearful thing that is waking darkly within her. And still as she speaks she presses me closer, she offers her stretched throat to my kisses. And before and after, we talk about politics and common friends. And still as of old she echoes the last phrase I have spoken, still softly laughs and still expects me to admire her original thoughts. Finally I take my leave.
‘You’ll come again soon?’ she asks, looking up into my face with eyes that are full of sadness and apprehension, of questions unuttered, of unexpressed reproaches. I kiss her hand. ‘Of course,’ I say. And I go away, taking pains as I walk down the street not to speculate on the subject of her thoughts.
But Providence seems to have thought my connection with Dorothy inadequately instructive. Dorothy, after all, was only twenty-six when the episode began. Hers was that vernal and flowery season during which, even in Italy, warblers are not shot. It would be another twenty years before she reached her First of October; thirty, perhaps, before the man-eating season should begin. And it was I who had made the first advances. But for my exhibition of Bosheit und Pläsier the boring history would never have unrolled itself. But Providence, anxious, for some inscrutable reason, to teach me a yet more memorable lesson, went so far as almost to drown me, so determined was it that I should fall into the hands of the suitable schoolmistress. I was to learn how ludicrously dreadful, as well as how boring, love can be.
I made no advances on this occasion. From the first I did nothing but retreat. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s blue danger signals bore down on me; like an agile pedestrian in the London traffic, I stepped aside. When she asked what women had inspired me, I answered that nothing inspired me but the London slums and the vulgarity of Lady Giblet. When she said that one could see by my face that I had been unhappy, I said that that was odd; I had always been perfectly happy. When she talked about experience, meaning, as women generally do when they use that word, merely love, I replied with a discussion of experience in relation to the Theory of Knowledge. When she accused me of wearing a mask, I protested that I paraded my naked soul for every one to see. When she asked if I had ever been in love, I shrugged my shoulders and smiled: not to speak of. And when she asked, at very close range, if I had ever been loved, I answered quite truthfully that I had, but that it bored me.
But still, indomitably, she renewed the attack. There might have been something grand about her unwavering determination — something grand, if it had not been grotesque. Providence was teaching me yet once more that the unsapient life is a dreary and hopeless business, and that it is, for all practical purposes, the only life — lived everywhere by all but a negligibly few exceptions. At least I presume that that is what Providence was trying to impress on me. But in the process it was using Mrs. Aldwinkle, I thought, rather hardly. I felt sorry for the poor lady. Some hidden irrational force within herself was compelling her to cut these capers, throw herself into these ludicrous postures, say these stupid words and contort her face into these grimaces; she was helpless. She just obeyed orders and did her best; but her best was ludicrous. And not merely ludicrous but appalling. She was like a buffoon carrying a skull.
Unflaggingly she played the deplorable part assigned to her. Every day she brought me flowers. ‘I want them to blossom in your verses,’ she said. I assured her that the only scent which provoked me to write was that of the butchers’ shops on a winter’s evening along the Harrow Road. She smiled at me. ‘Don’t think I can’t understand you,’ she said. ‘I do. I do.’ She leaned forward; her eyes shone, her perfume enveloped me, she breathed heliotrope in my face. I could see with extraordinary distinctness the little wrinkles round her eyes, the careless smear of rouge at the corners of the mouth. ‘I do understand you,’ she repeated.
She did understand me. . . . One night (it was at Montefiascone, on our way back from Rome), when I was reading in bed, I heard a sound; I looked up, and saw Mrs. Aldwinkle carefully closing the door behind her. She was wearing a dressing-gown of sea-green silk. Her hair hung in two thick plaits over her shoulders. When she turned round, I saw that her face had been coloured and powdered with more than ordinary care. In silence she advanced across the room, she sat down on the edge of my bed. An aura of ambergris and heliotrope surrounded her.
I smiled politely, closed my book (keeping a finger, however, between the pages to mark my place) and slightly raised my eyebrows in interrogation. To what, I made my face inquire, do I owe the honour? . . .
I owed it, it seemed, to my hostess’s urgently felt need to tell me yet once more that she understood me.
‘I couldn’t bear,’ she said breathlessly, ‘couldn’t bear to think of you here alone. With your secret misery.’ And when I made as though to protest, she held up her hand. ‘Oh, don’t think I haven’t seen through your mask. Alone with your secret misery . . .’
‘No, really . . .’ I managed to put in. But Mrs. Aldwinkle would not suffer herself to be interrupted.
‘I couldn’t bear to think of your terrible loneliness,’ she went on. ‘I wanted you to know there was at least one person who understood.’ She leaned towards me, smiling, but with lips that trembled. All at once her eyes filled with tears, her face contorted itself into the terrible grimace of misery. She made a little moaning noise and, letting herself fall forward, she hid her face against my knees. ‘I love you, I love you,’ she repeated in a muffled voice. Her body was shaken by recurrent spasms of sobbing. I was left wondering what to do. This was not in the programme. When one goes out man-eating or pheasant-shooting, one has no business to weep over the victim. But the trouble is, of course, that the man-eater sees herself
as the victim. Hinc illae lacrimae. It is impossible for two human beings to agree completely about anything. Quot homines, for now that the Dictionary of Familiar Quotations has been opened I may as well continue to make use of it, quot homines, tot disputandum est. There is no agreement even about the truths of science. One man is a geometrician; the other can only understand analysis. One is incapable of believing in anything of which he cannot make a working model; the other wants his truth as abstract as it is possible to make it. But when it comes to deciding which of two people is the victim and which the man-eater, there is nothing to be done but abandon the attempt. Let each party stick to his own opinion. The most successful men are those who never admit the validity of other people’s opinions, who even deny their existence.
‘My dear Lilian,’ I said (she had insisted on my calling her Lilian within a day or two of my arrival), ‘my dear Lilian . . .’ I could find nothing more to say. A successful man, I suppose, would have said something frankly brutal, something that would have made it clear to Mrs. Aldwinkle which of the two, in his opinion, was the victim and which the carnivore. I lacked the force. Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.
‘I love you. Couldn’t you love me a little? A little only? I would be your slave. Your slave; I’d be your slave,’ she kept repeating.
What things she said! I listened to her, feeling pity — yes, pity no doubt — but still more, a profound embarrassment, and with it anger against the person who had thrust me into this untenable position.
‘It’s no good,’ I protested. ‘It’s impossible.’
She only began again, desperately.
How much further the scene might have prolonged itself and what might have happened if it had been protracted, I do not know. Luckily, however, an extraordinary commotion suddenly broke loose in the hotel. Doors slammed, voices were raised, there was the noise of feet along the corridors and on the stairs. Startled and alarmed, Mrs. Aldwinkle got up, went to the door, opened it a crack and looked into the passage. Some one hurried past; hastily she closed it again. When the coast was clear, she slipped out into the passage and tip-toed away, leaving me alone.
The commotion was caused by the beginning of Miss Elver’s death-agony. Providence, having decided that my education had gone far enough, had broken off the lesson. The means it employed were, I must say, rather violent. A vain man might have been gratified by the reflection that one woman had been made miserable in order that he might be taught a lesson, while another had died — like King John, of a surfeit of lampreys — in order that the lesson might be interrupted before it was carried too disagreeably far. But as it happens, I am not particularly vain.
CHAPTER VIII
FROM THE FIRST nobody put very much faith in the local doctor; the mere look of him was enough to inspire mistrust. But when across the patient’s prostrate and comatose body he chattily confided that he had taken his degree at the University of Siena, Mr. Cardan decided that it was time to send for somebody else.
‘Siena’s notorious,’ he whispered. ‘It’s the place where the imbeciles who can’t get their degrees at Bologna, or Rome, or Pisa go and have themselves made doctors.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle, who in the middle of the tumult had suddenly reappeared (Irene did not know from where), expressed her horror. Doctors were one of her specialities; she was very particular about doctors. Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a number of interesting maladies in the course of her life — three nervous break-downs, an appendicitis, gout and various influenzas, pneumonias and the like, but all of them aristocratic and avowable diseases; for Mrs. Aldwinkle distinguished sharply between complaints that are vulgar and complaints of a gentlemanly sort. Chronic constipation, hernia, varicose veins (‘bad legs’ as the poor so gruesomely call them) — these, obviously, were vulgar diseases which no decent person could suffer from, or at any rate, suffering, talk about. Her illnesses had all been extremely refined and correspondingly expensive. What she did not know about doctors, English, French, Swiss, German, Swedish and even Japanese, was not worth knowing. Mr. Cardan’s remarks about the University of Siena impressed her profoundly.
‘The only thing to do,’ she said decisively, ’is for Hovenden to drive straight back to Rome and bring back a specialist. At once.’ She spoke peremptorily. It was a comfort for her, in her present distress of mind, to be able to do something, to make arrangements, to order people about, even herself to carry and fetch. ‘The Principessa gave me the name of a wonderful man. I’ve got it written down somewhere. Come.’ And she darted off to her room.
Obediently Lord Hovenden followed her, wrote down the talismanic name and took himself off. Chelifer was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
‘I may as well come with you, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I think I should only be in the way here.’
It was nearly half-past five when they started. The sun had not yet risen, but it was already light. The sky was pale grey with dark clouds low down on the horizon. There were mists in the valleys and the Lake of Bolsena was hidden from view under what seemed the waters of a milky sea. The air was cold. Driving out of the town, they met a train of pack mules climbing slowly, in the midst of a jingle of bells, up the steep street towards the market-place.
Viterbo was still asleep when they drove through. From the crest of the Ciminian mountains they first saw the sun. By seven o’clock they were in Rome. The sun-tipped obelisks, the gilded roofs and cupolas reached up out of shadow into the pale blue sky. They drove up the Corso. In the Piazza di Venezia they stopped at a café, ordered some coffee, and while it was being brought looked up in a directory the address of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s doctor. He lived, they found, in the new quarter near the station.
‘I leave all ve talking to you,’ said Hovenden, as they sipped their coffee. ‘I’m no good at ve language.’
‘How did you manage the other day when you had to see the doctor yourself?’ Chelifer inquired.
Lord Hovenden blushed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact, ve doctor I saw was English. But he’s gone away now,’ he added hastily, for fear that Chelifer might suggest their bringing the English doctor along too; ‘gone to Naples,’ he further specified, hoping by the accumulation of circumstantial details to give greater verisimilitude to his story, ‘for an operation.’
‘He was a surgeon, then?’ Chelifer raised his eyebrows.
Hovenden nodded. ‘A surgeon,’ he echoed, and buried his face in his coffee-cup.
They drove on. As they turned out of the Piazza into Trajan’s Forum, Chelifer noticed a little crowd, mostly of street boys, pressing against the railings on the further side of the forum. At its centre stood a pale thin woman in dove-grey clothes whom even at this distance one could not fail to recognize as English, or at any rate definitely not Italian. The lady in grey was leaning over the railings, lowering very carefully at the end of a string, to which it was ingeniously attached by four subsidiary strings passed through holes bored in the rim, a large aluminium pannikin filled with milk. Slowly revolving as it went down, the pannikin was lowered to the floor of the sunken forum. Hardly had it touched the ground when, with simultaneous mewings and purrings, half a dozen thirsty cats came running up to it and began to lap at the white milk. Others followed; every cranny gave up its cat. Lean toms jumped down from their marble pedestals and trotted across the open with the undulating, bounding gait of a running leopard. Month-old kittens staggered up on tottering legs. In a few seconds the pannikin was besieged by a horde of cats. The street boys whooped with delight.
‘Well, I’m blowed,’ said Lord Hovenden, who had slowed up to watch the curious scene. ‘I believe it’s your mover.’
‘I think it is,’ said Chelifer, who had recognized her long ago.
‘Would you like me to stop?’ asked Hovenden.
Chelifer shook his head. ‘I think we’d better get to the doctor as quickly as possible,’ he said.
Looking back as they drove out of the forum, Chelifer saw that his mother, faithful t
o her vegetarian principles, was throwing down into the den of cats bread and cold potatoes. In the evening he imagined she would come again. She had not taken long to find her Roman occupation.
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 79
