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

part of it. The physiologists are penetrating into the secrets of life, psychologists into the mind. And we artists are trying to say what is revealed to us about the moral nature, the personality of that reality, which is the universe.”

Mr. Mercaptan threw up his hands in affected horror. “Oh, barbaridad, barbaridad!” Nothing less than the pure Castilian would relieve his feelings. “But all this is meaningless.”

“Quite right about the chemists and physicists,” said Shearwater. “They’re always trying to pretend that they’re nearer the truth than we are. They take their crude theories as facts and try to make us accept them when we’re dealing with life. Oh, they are sacred, their theories. Laws of Nature they call them; and they talk about their known truths and our romantic biological fancies. What a fuss they make when we talk about life! Bloody fools!” said Shearwater, mild and crushing. “Nobody but a fool could talk of mechanism in face of the kidneys. And there are actually imbeciles who talk about the mechanism of heredity and reproduction.”

“All the same,” began Mr. Mercaptan very earnestly, anxious to deny his own life, “there are eminent authorities. I can only quote what they say, of course. I can’t pretend to know anything about it myself. But⁠—”

“Reproduction, reproduction,” Coleman murmured the word to himself ecstatically. “Delightful and horrifying to think they all come to that, even the most virginal; that they were all made for that, little she-dogs, in spite of their china blue eyes. What sort of a mandrake shall we produce, Zoe and I?” he asked, turning to Shearwater. “How I should like to have a child,” he went on without waiting for an answer. “I shouldn’t teach it anything; no language, nothing at all. Just a child of nature. I believe it would really be the devil. And then what fun it would be if it suddenly started to say ‘Bekkos,’ like the children in Herodotus. And Buonarotti here would paint an allegorical picture of it and write an epic called ‘The Ignoble Savage.’ And Castor Fiber would come and sound its kidneys and investigate its sexual instincts. And Mercaptan would write one of his inimitable middle articles about it. And Gumbril would make it a pair of patent trousers. And Zoe and I would look parentally on and fairly swell with pride. Shouldn’t we, Zoe?” Zoe preserved her expression of sullen, unchanging contempt and did not deign to answer. “Ah, how delightful it would be! I long for posterity. I live in hopes. I stope against Stopes. I⁠—”

Zoe threw a piece of bread, which caught him on the cheek, a little below the eye. Coleman leaned back and laughed and laughed till the tears rolled down his face.

V

One after another, they engaged themselves in the revolving doors of the restaurant, trotted round in the moving cage of glass and ejected themselves into the coolness and darkness of the street. Shearwater lifted up his large face and took two or three deep breaths. “Too much carbon dioxide and ammonia in there,” he said.

“It is unfortunate that when two or three are gathered together in God’s name, or even in the more civilized name of Mercaptan of the delicious middle,” Mercaptan dexterously parried the prod which Coleman aimed at him, “it is altogether deplorable that they should necessarily empest the air.”

Lypiatt had turned his eyes heavenwards. “What stars,” he said, “and what prodigious gaps between the stars!”

“A real light opera summer night.” And Mercaptan began to sing, in fragmentary German, the “Barcarolle” from the Tales of Hoffmann. “Liebe Nacht, du schöne Nacht, oh stille mein tumpty-tum. Te, tum, Te tum.⁠ ⁠… Delicious Offenbach. Ah, if only we could have a third Empire! Another comic Napoleon! That would make Paris look like Paris again. Tiddy, tumpty-ti-tum.”

They walked along without any particular destination, but simply for the sake of walking through this soft cool night. Coleman led the way, tapping the pavement at every step with the ferrule of his stick. “The blind leading the blind,” he explained. “Ah, if only there were a ditch, a crevasse, a great hole full of stinging centipedes and dung. How gleefully I should lead you all into it!”

“I think you would do well,” said Shearwater gravely, “to go and see a doctor.”

Coleman gave vent to a howl of delight.

“Does it occur to you,” he went on, “that at this moment we are walking through the midst of seven million distinct and separate individuals, each with distinct and separate lives and all completely indifferent to our existence? Seven million people, each one of whom thinks himself quite as important as each of us does. Millions of them are now sleeping in an empested atmosphere. Hundreds of thousands of couples are at this moment engaged in mutually caressing one another in a manner too hideous to be thought of, but in no way differing from the manner in which each of us performs, delightfully, passionately and beautifully, his similar work of love. Thousands of women are now in the throes of parturition, and of both sexes thousands are dying of the most diverse and appalling diseases, or simply because they have lived too long. Thousands are drunk, thousands have over-eaten, thousands have not had enough to eat. And they are all alive, all unique and separate and sensitive, like you and me. It’s a horrible thought. Ah, if I could lead them all into that great hole of centipedes.”

He tapped and tapped on the pavement in front of him, as though searching for the crevasse. At the top of his voice he began to chant: “O all ye Beasts and Cattle, curse ye the Lord: curse him and vilify him forever.”

“All this religion,” sighed Mercaptan. “What with Lypiatt on one side, being a muscular Christian artist, and Coleman on the other, howling the black mass.⁠ ⁠… Really!” He elaborated an Italianate gesture, and turned to Zoe. “What do you think of it all?” he