In a chronic June, what Alcibiadeses
Surround the beard of Plato!
Vile! This was no place for proper names. ‘What musculatures’ perhaps? Then, like manna, ‘what heavyweights’ fell from heaven. Yes, yes; ‘what highbrow heavyweights.’ He laughed aloud. And substituting ‘wisdom’ for ‘Plato’ you got:
In a chronic June, what highbrow heavyweights
Surround the beard of wisdom!
Sebastian repeated the words with relish, two or three times. And now for the other sex.
Hark, near by,
The twangling and the flutes!
He walked on, frowning to himself. Those prancing Bacchae, those Praxitelean breasts and buttocks, those dancers on the vases — how hellishly difficult to make any kind of sense of them! Compress and express. Squeeze all the voluptuous images into a lump and, in the act, squeeze out of them a liqueur-glassful of verbal juice, at once astringent and heady, tart and aphrodisiac. It was easier said than done. His lips began to move at last.
‘Hark,’ he whispered again.
Hark, near by,
The twangling and the flutes. Before, behind,
Gyre after gyre, what orbed resiliences,
The last veil loosened, uneclipse their moons!
He sighed and shook his head. Not quite right yet; but still, it would have to do for the time being. And meanwhile here was the corner. Should he go straight home, or walk round by Bantry Place, pick up Susan and let her hear the new poem? Sebastian hesitated a moment, then decided on the second course and turned to the right. He felt in the mood for an audience and applause.
… what orbed resiliences,
The last veil loosened, uneclipse their moons!
But perhaps the whole thing was too short. It might be necessary to slip in three or four more lines between those resiliences and his final, purple explosion of Bengal lights. Something about the Parthenon, for example. Or maybe something about Aeschylus would be more amusing.
Tragical on stilts, bawling sublimities
Through a tortured mouth-hole …
But goodness! here were those Bengal lights, rocketing up irrepressibly and uninvited into his throat.
And all the time, darling upon a thousand
Islands in the hyacinthine sea,
What fierce desires …
No, no, no. Too vague, too fleshlessly abstract!
What bulls, what boys, what frenzy of swans and nipples,
What radiant lusts like a red forge panting up
From fire to brighter fire …
But ‘brighter’ had no kind of resonance, no meaning beyond itself. What he needed was a word that, while it described the growing intensity of the fire, should also convey the substance of his own passionately cherished faith — the equivalence of all the ecstasies, the poetic, the sexual, even the religious (if you went in for that sort of thing), and their superiority to all the merely humdrum and ordinary states of being.
He went back to the beginning, hoping in this way to gather enough momentum to carry him over the obstacle.
And all the while, darling upon a thousand
Islands in the hyacinthine sea,
What bulls, what boys, what frenzy of swans and nipples,
What radiant lusts, like a red forge panting up
From fire … from fire …
He hesitated; then the words came.
From fire to purer fire, to Light Itself —
The incandescent copulation of Gods.
But here was the turning into Bantry Place, and even through the closed and curtained windows of number five he could hear Susan at her piano lesson, playing that thing of Scarlatti’s she had been working on all the winter. The sort of music, it struck him, that would happen if the bubbles in a magnum of champagne were to rush up rhythmically and, as they reached the surface, burst into sounds as dry and tangy as the wine from whose depths they had arisen. The simile pleased him so much that Sebastian failed to remember that he had never tasted champagne; and his last reflection, as he rang the bell, was that the music would be even dryer and tangier if it were the harpsichord that were being played and not old Pfeiffer’s luscious Blüthner.
Over the top of the piano, Susan caught sight of him as he entered the music-room — those beautiful parted lips of his, and the soft hair she always longed to stroke and run her fingers through (but he would never let her), tousled by the wind into a delicious frenzy of pale curls. How sweet of him to have come out of his way to call for her! She gave him a quick glad smile, and as she did so, noticed all at once that there were tiny little water-drops in his hair, like the lovely dew on cabbage leaves — only here they were smaller, beaded along silk floss; and if one touched them, they would be as cold as ice. To think of it was enough to get her all tangled up in the fingering of her left hand.
Old Dr. Pfeiffer, who was pacing up and down the room like a caged animal — a small, obese bear in unpressed trousers and with the moustache of a walrus — took the much-chewed cigar stump out of the corner of his mouth and shouted in German:
‘Musik, musik!’
With an effort, Susan expelled from her mind the thought of dewdrops on silky curls, caught up the faltering sonata and played on. To her chagrin, she felt herself blushing.
Crimson cheeks, and the hair auburn almost to redness. Beetroots and carrots, Sebastian reflected without indulgence; and the way she showed her gums when she smiled — it was positively anatomical.
Susan struck the final chord and dropped her hands into her lap, waiting for the master’s verdict. It came with a roar and on a blast of cigar smoke.
‘Goot, goot, goot!’ And Dr. Pfeiffer clapped her on the shoulder, as though he were encouraging a cart-horse. Then he turned to Sebastian.
‘Und here’s der liddle Ariel! Oder, perhaps, der liddle Puck — not?’ He twinkled between his narrowed eyelids with what he felt to be the most playfully subtle, the most exquisite and cultured irony.
Little Ariel, little Puck … Twice in an afternoon, and this time without any excuse — just because the old buffoon thought he was being funny.
‘Not being a German,’ Sebastian retorted tartly, ‘I haven’t read any Shakespeare — so I really can’t say.’
‘Der Puck, der Puck!’ cried Dr. Pfeiffer, and laughed so whole-heartedly that he stirred up his chronic bronchitis and started to cough.
An expression of anxiety appeared on Susan’s face. Goodness only knew where this would end. She jumped up from the piano-stool, and when the explosions and the horribly liquid wheezings of Dr. Pfeiffer’s cough had somewhat subsided, she announced that they must leave at once; her mother was particularly anxious for her to get back early today.
Dr. Pfeiffer wiped the tears out of his eyes, bit once again on the much-chewed end of his cigar, treated Susan to two or three more of his resounding, cart-horse endearments, and told her in God’s name to remember what he had said about the trills in the right hand. Then, picking up from a table the cedar-lined silver box, which a grateful pupil had given him for his last birthday, he turned to Sebastian, laid one huge square hand on the boy’s shoulder, and with the other held the cigars under his nose.
‘Take one,’ he said cajolingly. ‘Take a nize big fat Havana. Free of charge, und guarantiert it won’t make a vomitus even to a sucking baby.’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Sebastian shouted in a fury that was on the verge of tears; and suddenly ducking down, he slipped from under his persecutor’s arm and ran out of the room. Susan stood for a moment, hesitant, then without a word hurried after him. Dr. Pfeiffer took the cigar out of his mouth and shouted after her:
‘Quick! Quick! Our liddle genius is crying.’
The door slammed. In defiance of his bronchitis, Dr. Pfeiffer started to laugh again, enormously. Two months before, the liddle genius had accepted one of his cigars and, while Susan did her best with the ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ had puffed away at it for nearly five minutes. Then there was a panic dash for the bathroom
; but he had failed to get there quite in time. Dr. Pfeiffer’s sense of humour was medievally robust; for him, that vomitus on the second-floor landing was almost the funniest thing that had happened since the jokes in Faust.
CHAPTER TWO
HE WAS WALKING so fast that Susan had to run, and even so she came up with him only under the second lamp-post. She caught his arm and squeezed it affectionately.
‘Sebastian!’
‘Let go,’ he commanded angrily, and shook himself free. He wasn’t going to be patronized and condoled with by anyone.
There! She’d done the wrong thing again. But why must he be so horribly touchy? And why on earth did he pay any attention to an old ass like Pfeiffy?
For a while they walked along, side by side, in silence. She spoke at last.
‘Did you write any poetry today?’
‘No,’ Sebastian lied. Those incandescent copulations of gods had been quenched and turned to ashes. The very thought of reciting the lines now, after what had happened, made him feel sick — like the thought of eating the cold scraps left over from yesterday’s dinner.
There was another silence. It was a half-holiday, Susan was thinking, and because it was examination-time, there wasn’t any football. Had he spent the afternoon with that awful Esdaile creature? She shot a glance at him under the next lamp; yes, there was no doubt of it, he looked dark under the eyes. The pigs! She was filled with sudden anger — anger born of a jealousy, all the more painful for being unavowable. She had no rights; there had never been any question of their being anything but cousins, almost sister and brother; besides, it was too painfully obvious that he didn’t even dream of thinking about her in that other way. And incidentally when he had asked her, that time, two years before, to let him see her without any clothes on, she had said no, in an absolute panic. Two days later she told Pamela Groves about what had happened; and Pamela, who went to one of those progressive schools and whose parents were so much younger than Susan’s, had merely roared with laughter. What a fuss about nothing at all! Why, she and her brothers and her cousins — they were always seeing one another with no clothes on. Yes, and her brothers’ friends too. So why on earth shouldn’t poor Sebastian do it, if he wanted to? All this silly Victorian prudery! Susan was made to feel ashamed of her own and her mother’s old-fashioned views. Next time Sebastian asked, she’d take off her pyjamas immediately and stand there in front of him in the attitude, she decided after some reflection, of that Roman matron, or whoever she was, in the Alma-Tadema engraving in her father’s study, smiling and with her arms up, doing her hair. For several days she rehearsed the scene in front of her looking-glass, until finally she had it all absolutely perfect. But unfortunately Sebastian never renewed his request, and she hadn’t the nerve to take the initiative. With the result that here he was, doing the most awful things with that Esdaile bitch, and she didn’t have any right or reason even to cry. Much less to slap his face, as she would have liked to do, and call him names, and pull his hair, and … and make him kiss her.
‘I suppose you spent the afternoon with your precious Mrs. Esdaile,’ she said at last, trying to sound contemptuous and superior.
Sebastian, who had been walking with bent head, looked up at her.
‘What’s that to you?’ he said after a pause.
‘Nothing at all.’ Susan shrugged her shoulders and uttered a little laugh. But inwardly she felt angry with herself and ashamed. How often she had vowed never to show any further curiosity about his beastly affair, never to listen again to those horrifying details, which he recounted so vividly and with so manifest a relish! And yet curiosity always got the better of her, and she listened greedily every time. Listened just because these accounts of his love-making with somebody else were so painful to her. Listened, too, because thus to share in his love-making, even theoretically and in imagination, was obscurely exciting to her, and itself constituted a kind of sensual bond between them, a mental embrace, horribly unsatisfying and exasperating, but none the less an embrace.
Sebastian had looked away; but now suddenly he turned back to her with a strange smile almost of triumph, as though he had just scored off somebody.
‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘You’ve asked for it. Don’t blame me if it shocks your maiden modesty.’
He broke off with a rather harsh little laugh, and walked along in silence, meditatively rubbing the bridge of his nose with the tip of his right forefinger. How well she knew the gesture! It was the infallible sign that he was composing a poem, or thinking of the best way to tell one of his stories.
Those stories, those extraordinary stories! Susan had lived in the fantastic worlds of Sebastian’s creation almost as long and quite as intensely as she had lived in the real world. More intensely perhaps; for in the real world she had to depend on her own prosaic self, whereas in the story world she found herself endowed with Sebastian’s rich imagination, moved and excited by Sebastian’s flow of words.
The first of his stories that Susan clearly remembered was the one Sebastian had told her on the beach at Tenby, that summer (it must have been the summer of 1917) when there were five candles on their joint birthday cake. They had found among the seaweed an old red rubber ball, torn almost in half. Sebastian took it to a little pool and washed out the sand with which it was filled. On the wet inner surface of the ball was a kind of wart-like excrescence. Why? Only the manufacturers could say. For a child of five, it was an inexplicable mystery. Sebastian touched the wart with a probing forefinger. That was the tummy-button, he whispered. They looked around furtively to make sure that they were out of earshot: navels were things that verged upon the unmentionable. Everybody’s tummy-button grew inwards like that, Sebastian went on. And when she asked him, ‘How do you know?’ he launched out into a circumstantial account of what he had seen Dr. Carter doing to a little girl in his consulting-room, the last time Aunt Alice had taken him there about his earache. Cutting her open — that was what Dr. Carter was doing — cutting her open with a big knife and fork, to look at her tummy-button from the inside. And when you were too tough for a knife and fork, they had to use one of those saws that butchers cut bones with. Yes, really and truly, he insisted, when she expressed her horrified incredulity, really and truly. And to prove his point, he began sawing at the ball with the side of his hand. The gashed rubber parted under the pressure; the wound gaped wider and wider as the saw cut more deeply into what, for Susan, was now no longer a ball, but a little girl’s tummy — for all practical purposes, her own. H-h-h-h, h-h-h-h, h-h-h-h, Sebastian went, trilling the aspirant far back in the throat. The sound was blood-curdlingly like the noise of a meat saw. And then, he went on, when they’d cut far enough, they opened you. Like this — and he pulled the two halves of the wounded ball apart. They opened you, and they turned your top flap inside out — so; and then they scrubbed the tummy-button with soap and water to get the dirt off. Furiously he scratched the mysterious wart, and his nails on the rubber made a small dry noise that, to Susan, was unspeakably horrifying. She uttered a scream and covered her ears with her hands. For years afterwards she had been terrified of Dr. Carter, had howled whenever he came near her; and even now when she knew it was all nonsense about the tummy-button, the sight of his little black bag, of those cabinets in his consulting-room, full of glass tubes and bottles and nickel-plated gadgets, filled her with a vague apprehension which she found it difficult, in spite of all her efforts at reasonableness, to dispel.
Uncle John Barnack was often away for months at a stretch travelling abroad and writing articles for that left-wing paper which Susan’s father wouldn’t so much as allow his fire to be lighted with. Sebastian had therefore lived a good part of his life under the care of his Aunt Alice and at closest quarters with the youngest of her children, the little girl between whom and himself there was a difference in age of only a single day. With the growth of that small body of his, that precocious and feverishly imaginative mind, the stories that he told her — or rather t
hat he related to himself in her stimulating presence — became ever more complicated and circumstantial. Sometimes they would last for weeks and months, in an interminable series of instalments, composed as they walked back and forth from school, or ate their supper in front of the gas fire in the nursery, or sat together on the roofs of wintry buses while their elders travelled prosaically inside. For example, there was the epic that ran almost uninterruptedly through the whole of 1923 — the epic of the Larnimans. Or rather the La-a-arnimans — for the name was always pronounced in a whisper and with a horribly significant prolongation of the first syllable. Those La-a-arnimans were a family of human ogres, who lived in tunnels that radiated out from a central cavern immediately under the lion house at the Zoo.
‘Listen!’ Sebastian would whisper to her each time they found themselves in front of the Siberian tiger’s cage.
‘Listen!’ And he would stamp his foot on the pavement.
‘It’s hollow. Don’t you hear?’
And, sure enough, Susan did hear and, hearing, shuddered at the thought of the La-a-arnimans sitting there fifty feet below, at the heart of a whirring complex of machinery, counting the money they had stolen from the vaults of the Bank of England, roasting the children they had kidnapped through trap-doors in basements, breeding cobras, to let loose into the drains so that suddenly, one fine morning, just as one was about to sit down, a hooded head would pop up out of the W.C. and hiss. Not that she believed any of it, of course. But even if you didn’t believe in it, it was still frightening. Those horrible La-a-arnimans with their cat’s eyes and their patent electric guns and their underground switchbacks — they didn’t really live under the lion house (even though the ground did sound hollow when you stamped on it). But that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist. The proof of their existence was the fact that she dreamed about them, that she kept a sharp look-out, each morning, for those cobras.
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 234
