Ape and Essence

by Aldous Huxley

  "But what is the right thing?" she asks.

  For a second or two he smiles at her without speaking.

  "Here and now," he says at last, "the right thing is this."

  He slips an arm about her shoulders and draws her toward him.

  "No, Alfie, no!"

  Panic-stricken, she tries to free herself; but he holds her tight.

  "This is the right thing," he repeats. 'It mightn't always and everywhere be the right thing. But here and now it is -- definitely."

  He speaks with the force and authority of complete conviction. Never in all his uncertain and divided life has he thought so clearly or acted so decisively.

  Loola suddenly ceases to struggle.

  "Alfie, are you sure it's all right? Are you absolutely sure?"

  "Absolutely sure," he replies from the depths of his new, self-validating experience. Very gently he strokes her hair.

  "'A mortal shape,'" he whispers, "'indued with love and life and light and deity. A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning, a Vision like incar­nate April.'"

  "Go on," she whispers.

  Her eyelids are closed, her face wears that look of supernatural serenity which one sees upon the faces of the dead.

  Dr. Poole begins again.

  " 'And we will talk, until thought's melody

  Become too sweet for utterance, and it die

  In words, to live again in looks, which dart

  With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,

  Harmonising silence without a sound.

  Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound

  And our veins beat together, and our lips

  With other eloquence than words, eclipse

  The soul that burns between them, and the wells

  Which boil under our being's inmost cells,

  The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

  Confused in Passion's golden purity;

  As mountain springs under the morning sun,

  We shall become the same, we shall be one

  Spirit within two frames, oh! Wherefore two?' "

  There is a long silence. Suddenly Loola opens her eyes, looks at him intently for a few seconds, then throws her arms round his neck and kisses him passionately on the mouth. But even as he clasps her more closely, she breaks away from him and retreats to her end of the seat.

  He tries to approach, but she holds him at arm's length.

  "It can't be right," she says.

  "But it is right."

  She shakes her head.

  "It's too good to be right, I should be too happy if it were. He doesn't want us to be happy." There is a pause. "Why do you say He can't hurt us?"

  "Because there's something stronger than He is."

  "Something stronger?" She shakes her head. "That was what He was always fighting against -- and He won."

  "Only because people helped Him to win. But they don't have to help Him. And, remember, He can never win for good."

  "Why not?"

  "Because He can never resist the temptation of carrying evil to the limit. And whenever evil is carried to the limit, it always destroys itself. After which the Order of Things comes to the surface again."

  "But that's far away in the future."

  "For the whole world, yes. But not for single in­dividuals, not for you or me, for example. Whatever Belial may have done with the rest of the world, you and I can always work with the Order of Things not against it."

  There is another silence.

  "I don't think I understand what you mean," she says at last, "and I don't care." She moves back toward him and leans her head against his shoulder. "I don't care about anything," she goes on. "He can kill me if He wants to. It doesn't matter. Not now."

  She raises her face towards his and, as he bends down to kiss her, the image on the screen fades into the darkness of a moonless night.

  NARRATOR

  L'ombre etait nuptiale, auguste et solennelle. But this time it is a nuptial darkness whose solemnity is marred by no caterwaulings, no Liebestods, no saxophones pleading for detumescence. The music with which this night is charged is clear, but undescriptive; precise and definite, but about realities that have no name; all-embracingly liquid, but never viscous, with­out the slightest tendency to stick possessively to what it touches and comprehends. A music with the spirit of Mozart's, delicately gay among the constant im­plications of tragedy; a music akin to Weber's, aris­tocratic and refined, and yet capable of the most reckless joy and the completest realisation of the world's agony. And is there perhaps a hint of that which, in the Ave Verum Corpus, in the G-minor Quintet, lies beyond the world of Don Giovanni? Is there a hint already of what (in Bach, sometimes, and in Beethoven, in that final wholeness of art which is analogous to holiness) transcends the Romantic inte­gration of the tragic and the joyful, the human and the daemonic? And when, in the darkness, the lover's voice whispers again of

  a mortal form indued

  With love and life and light and deity,

  is there already the beginning of an understanding that beyond Epipsychidion there is Adonais and be­yond Adonais, the wordless doctrine of the Pure in Heart?

  Dissolve to Dr. Poole's laboratory. Sunlight pours through the tall windows, and is dazzlingly reflected from the stainless steel barrel of the microscope on the work table. The room is empty.

  Suddenly the silence is broken by the sound of approaching footsteps; the door is opened and, still a butler on moccasins, the Director of Food Produc­tion looks in.

  "Poole," he begins, "His Eminence has come to. . ."

  He breaks off and an expression of astonishment appears on his face.

  "He isn't here," he says to the Arch-Vicar who now follows him into the room.

  The great man turns to the two Familiars in at­tendance on him.

  "Go and see if Dr. Poole is in the experimental garden," he orders.

  The Familiars bow, squeak, "Yes, Your Eminence," in unison, and go out.

  The Arch-Vicar sits down and graciously motions to the Director to follow his example.

  "I don't think I told you," he says; "I'm trying to persuade our friend here to enter religion."

  "I hope Your Eminence doesn't mean to deprive us of his invaluable help in the field of food production," says the Director anxiously.

  The Arch-Vicar reassures him.

  "I'll see that he always has time to give you the advice you need. But meanwhile I want to make sure that the Church shall benefit by his talents and. . ."

  The Familiars re-enter the room and bow.

  "Well?"

  "He isn't in the gardens, Your Eminence."

  The Arch-Vicar frowns angrily at the Director, who quails under his look.

  "I thought you said this was the day he worked in the laboratory?"

  "It is, Your Eminence."

  "Then why is he out?"

  "I can't imagine, Your Eminence. I've never known him to change his schedule without telling me."

  There is a silence.

  "I don't like it," the Arch-Vicar says at last. "I don't like it at all." He turns to his Familiars. "Run back to Headquarters and have half a dozen men ride out on horseback to find him."

  The Familiars bow, squeak simultaneously, and vanish.

  "And as for you," says the Arch-Vicar, turning on the pale and abject figure of the Director, "if anything should have happened, you'll have to answer for it."

  He rises in majestic wrath and stalks toward the door.

  Dissolve to a series of montage shots.

  Loola with her leather knapsack and Dr. Poole, with a pre-Thing army pack on his back, are climbing over a landslide that blocks one of those superbly engineered highways, whose remains still scar the flanks of the San Gabriel mountains.

  We cut to a windswept crest. The two fugitives are looking down over the enormous expanse of the Mojave desert.

  Next we find ourselves
in a pine forest on the north­ern slope of the range. It is night. In a patch of moon­light between the trees, Dr. Poole and Loola lie sleeping under the same homespun blanket.

  Cut to a rocky canyon, at the bottom of which flows a stream. The lovers have halted to drink and fill their water bottles.

  And now we are in the foothills above the floor of the desert. Between the clumps of sage brush, the yuccas and the juniper bushes the walking is easy. Dr. Poole and Loola enter the shot, and the Camera trucks with them as they come striding down the slope.

  "Feet sore?" he asks solicitously.

  "Not too bad."

  She gives him a brave smile, and shakes her head.

  "I think we'd better stop pretty soon and eat some­thing."

  "Just as you think best, Alfie."

  He pulls an antique map out of his pocket and studies it as he walks along.

  "We're still a good thirty miles from Lancaster," he says. "Eight hours of walking. We've got to keep up our strength."

  "And how far shall we get tomorrow?" Loola asks.

  "A little beyond Mojave. And after that I reckon it'll take us at least two days to cross the Tehachapis and get to Bakersfield." He returns the map to his pocket. "I managed to get quite a lot of information out of the Director," he goes on. "He says those people up north are very friendly to runaways from Southern California. Won't give them back even when the government officially asks for them."

  "Thank Bel. . . I mean, thank God," says Loola.

  There is another silence. Suddenly Loola comes to a halt.

  "Look! What's that?"

  She points and from their viewpoint we see at the foot of a very tall Joshua tree, a slab of weathered concrete, standing crookedly at the head of an ancient grave, overgrown with bunch grass and buckwheat.

  "Somebody must have been buried here," says Dr. Poole.

  They approach and, in a close shot of the slab, we see, while Dr. Poole's voice reads aloud the following inscription:

  William Tallis

  1882-1948

  Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

  Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here

  They have departed, thou shouldst now depart!

  Cut back to the two lovers.

  "He must have been a very sad man," says Loola.

  "Perhaps not quite so sad as you imagine," says Dr. Poole, as he slips off his heavy pack and sits down beside the grave.

  And while Loola opens her knapsack and takes out bread and fruit and eggs and strips of dried meat, he turns over the pages of his duodecimo Shelley.

  "Here we are," he says at last. "It's the very next stanza after the one that's quoted here.

  "'That Light whose smile kindles the Universe

  That Beauty in which all things work and move

  That Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse

  Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love,

  Which through the web of being blindly wove

  By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

  Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

  The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me

  Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.'"

  There is a silence. Then Loola hands him a hard boiled egg. He cracks it on the headstone and, as he peels it, scatters the white fragments of the shell over the grave.