Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley [whitelam books .txt] 📗

their rightful position among the great moral forces. They have been amusements, they have been mere games for too long. I am giving my life for that. My life.” His voice trembled a little. “People mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me. But I go on, I go on. For I know I’m right. And in the end they too will recognize that I’ve been right.” It was a loud soliloquy. One could fancy that Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself.

“All the same,” said Gumbril with a cheerful stubbornness, “I persist that the word ‘dreams’ is inadmissible.”

“Inadmissible,” repeated Mr. Mercaptan, imparting to the word an additional significance by giving it its French pronunciation. “In the age of Rostand, well and good. But now.⁠ ⁠…”

“Now,” said Gumbril, “the word merely connotes Freud.”

“It’s a matter of literary tact,” explained Mr. Mercaptan. “Have you no literary tact?”

“No,” said Lypiatt, with emphasis, “thank God, I haven’t. I have no tact of any kind. I do things straightforwardly, frankly, as the spirit moves me. I don’t like compromises.”

He struck the table. The gesture startlingly let loose a peal of cracked and diabolic laughter. Gumbril and Lypiatt and Mr. Mercaptan looked quickly up; even Shearwater lifted his great spherical head and turned towards the sound the large disk of his face. A young man with a blond, fan-shaped beard stood by the table, looking down at them through a pair of bright blue eyes and smiling equivocally and disquietingly as though his mind were full of some nameless and fantastic malice.

“Come sta la Sua Terribiltà?” he asked; and, taking off his preposterous bowler hat, he bowed profoundly to Lypiatt. “How I recognize my Buonarotti!” he added affectionately.

Lypiatt laughed, rather uncomfortably, and no longer on the Titanic scale. “How I recognize my Coleman!” he echoed, rather feebly.

“On the contrary,” Gumbril corrected, “how almost completely I fail to recognize. This beard”⁠—he pointed to the blond fan⁠—“why, may I ask?”

“More Russianism,” said Mr. Mercaptan, and shook his head.

“Ah, why indeed?” Coleman lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “For religious reasons,” he said, and made the sign of the cross.

“Christlike in my behaviour,
Like every good believer,
I imitate the Saviour,
And cultivate a beaver.

There be beavers which have made themselves beavers for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. But there are some beavers, on the other hand, which were so born from their mother’s womb.” He burst into a fit of outrageous laughter which stopped as suddenly and as voluntarily as it had begun.

Lypiatt shook his head. “Hideous,” he said, “hideous.”

“Moreover,” Coleman went on, without paying any attention, “I have other and, alas! less holy reasons for this change of face. It enables one to make such delightful acquaintances in the street. You hear someone saying, ‘Beaver,’ as you pass, and you immediately have the right to rush up and get into conversation. I owe to this dear symbol,” and he caressed the golden beard tenderly with the palm of his hand, “the most admirably dangerous relations.”

“Magnificent,” said Gumbril, drinking his own health. “I shall stop shaving at once.”

Shearwater looked round the table with raised eyebrows and a wrinkled forehead. “This conversation is rather beyond me,” he said gravely. Under the formidable moustache, under the thick, tufted eyebrows, the mouth was small and ingenuous, the mild grey eyes full of an almost childish inquiry. “What does the word ‘beaver’ signify in this context? You don’t refer, I suppose, to the rodent, Castor fiber?”

“But this is a very great man,” said Coleman, raising his bowler. “Tell me who he is?”

“Our friend Shearwater,” said Gumbril, “the physiologist.”

Coleman bowed. “Physiological Shearwater,” he said. “Accept my homage. To one who doesn’t know what a beaver is, I resign all my claims to superiority. There’s nothing else but beavers in all the papers. Tell me, do you never read the Daily Express?”

“No.”

“Nor the Daily Mail?”

Shearwater shook his head.

“Nor the Mirror? nor the Sketch? nor the Graphic? nor even (for I was forgetting that physiologists must surely have Liberal opinions)⁠—even the Daily News?”

Shearwater continued to shake his large spherical head.

“Nor any of the evening papers?”

“No.”

Coleman once more lifted his hat. “O eloquent, just and mighty Death!” he exclaimed, and replaced it on his head. “You never read any papers at all⁠—not even our friend Mercaptan’s delicious little middles in the weeklies? How is your delicious little middle, by the way?” Coleman turned to Mr. Mercaptan and with the point of his huge stick gave him a little prod in the stomach. “Ça marche⁠—les tripes? Hein?” He turned back to Shearwater. “Not even those?” he asked.

“Never,” said Shearwater. “I have more serious things to think about than newspapers.”

“And what serious thing, may I ask?”

“Well, at the present moment,” said Shearwater, “I am chiefly preoccupied with the kidneys.”

“The kidneys!” In an ecstasy of delight, Coleman thumped the floor with the ferrule of his stick. “The kidneys! Tell me all about kidneys. This is of the first importance. This is really life. And I shall sit down at your table without asking permission of Buonarotti here, and in the teeth of Mercaptan, and without so much as thinking about this species of Gumbril, who might as well not be there at all. I shall sit down and⁠—”

“Talking of sitting,” said Gumbril, “I wish I could persuade you to order a pair of my patent pneumatic trousers. They will⁠—”

Coleman waved him away. “Not now, not now,” he said. “I shall sit down and listen to the physiologue talking about runions, while I myself actually eat them⁠—sautés. Sautés, mark my words.”

Laying his hat and stick on the floor beside him, he sat down at the end of the table, between Lypiatt and Shearwater.

“Two believers,” he said, laying his hand for a moment on Lypiatt’s arm, “and three black-hearted unbelievers⁠—confronted. Eh, Buonarotti? You and I are both croyants et pratiquants, as Mercaptan would say. I believe in one devil, father quasi-almighty, Samael and his wife, the Woman of Whoredom. Ha,