Those Barren Leaves, Aldous Huxley [best ereader for textbooks .txt] 📗

And Irene, sitting at her feet, leaning against her knee, couldn’t help agreeing. Mrs. Aldwinkle stroked the girl’s soft hair, or with combing fingers disordered its sleek surface. Irene shut her eyes; happily, drowsily, she listened. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s talk came to her in gusts⁠—here a phrase, there a phrase.

“Disinterested,” she was saying, “disinterested⁠ ⁠…” Mrs. Aldwinkle had a way, when she wanted to insist on an idea, of repeating the same word several times. “Disinterested⁠ ⁠…” It saved her the trouble of looking for phrases which she could never find, of making explanations which always turned out, at the best, rather incoherent. “Joy in the work for its own sake.⁠ ⁠… Flaubert spent days over a single sentence.⁠ ⁠… Wonderful.⁠ ⁠…”

“Wonderful!” Irene echoed.

A little breeze stirred among the bay trees. Their stiff leaves rattled dryly together, like scales of metal. Irene shivered a little; it was downright cold.

“It’s the only really creative⁠ ⁠…” Mrs. Aldwinkle couldn’t think of the word “activity” and had to content herself with making a gesture with her free hand. “Through art man comes nearest to being a god⁠ ⁠… a god.⁠ ⁠…”

The night wind rattled more loudly among the bay leaves. Irene crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself to keep warm. Unfortunately, this boa of flesh and blood was itself sensitive. Her frock was sleeveless. The warmth of her bare arms drifted off along the wind; the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere rose by a hundred-billionth of a degree.

“It’s the highest life,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s the only life.”

Tenderly she rumpled Irene’s hair. And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was meditating, at this very moment, on tramcars in the Argentine, among Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton, in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea⁠—at this very moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they⁠—albeit unconscious of the privilege⁠—for art in her.

Young Lord Hovenden sighed. If only it were he whose fingers were playing in the smooth thick tresses of Irene’s hair! It seemed an awful waste that she should be so fond of her Aunt Lilian. Somehow, the more he liked Irene the less he liked Aunt Lilian.

“Haven’t you sometimes longed to be an artist yourself, Hovenden?” Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly asked. She leaned forward, her eyes glittering with the reflected light of two or three hundred million remote suns. She was going to suggest that he might try his hand at poetical rhapsodies about political injustice and the condition of the lower classes. Something halfway between Shelley and Walt Whitman.

“Me!” said Hovenden in astonishment. Then he laughed aloud: Ha, ha, ha! It was a jarring note.

Mrs. Aldwinkle drew back, pained. “I don’t know why you should think the idea so impossibly comic,” she said.

“Perhaps he has other work to do,” said Mr. Falx out of the darkness. “More important work.” And at the sound of that thrilling, deep, prophetical voice Lord Hovenden felt that, indeed, he had.

“More important?” queried Mrs. Aldwinkle. “But can anything be more important? When one thinks of Flaubert⁠ ⁠…” One thought of Flaubert⁠—working through all a fifty-four hour week at a relative clause. But Mrs. Aldwinkle was too enthusiastic to be able to say what followed when one had thought of Flaubert.

“Think of coal-miners for a change,” said Mr. Falx in answer. “That’s what I suggest.”

“Yes,” Lord Hovenden agreed, gravely nodding. A lot of his money came from coal. He felt particularly responsible for miners when he had time to think of them.

“Think,” said Mr. Falx in his deep voice; and he relapsed into a silence more eloquently prophetical than any speech.

For a long time nobody spoke. The wind came draughtily and in ever chillier gusts. Irene clasped her arms still tightlier over her breast; she shivered, she yawned with cold. Mrs. Aldwinkle felt the shaking of the young body that leaned against her knees. She herself was cold too; but after what she had said to Cardan and the others it was impossible for her to go indoors yet awhile. She felt, in consequence, annoyed with Irene for shivering. “Do stop,” she said crossly. “It’s only a stupid habit. Like a little dog that shivers even in front of the fire.”

“All ve same,” said Lord Hovenden, coming to Irene’s defence, “it is getting raver cold.”

“Well, if you find it so,” retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle, with overwhelming sarcasm, “you’d better go in and ask them to light a fire.”

It was nearly midnight before Mrs. Aldwinkle finally gave the word to go indoors.

To say good night definitely and for the last time was a thing which Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words she pronounced sentence of death on yet another day (on yet another, and the days were so few now, so agonizingly brief); she pronounced it also, temporarily at least, on herself. For, the formula once finally uttered, there was nothing for her to do but creep away out of the light and bury herself in the black unconsciousness of sleep. Six hours, eight hours would be stolen from her and never given back. And what marvellous things might not be happening while she was lying dead between the sheets! Extraordinary happinesses might present themselves and, finding her asleep and deaf to their calling, pass on. Or someone, perhaps, would be saying the one supremely important, revealing, apocalyptic thing that she had been waiting all her life to hear. “There!” she could imagine somebody winding up, “that’s the secret of the Universe. What a pity poor Lilian should have gone to bed. She would have loved to hear it.” Good night⁠—it was like parting with a shy lover who had