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

Gumbril performed the introduction in more commonplace style.

“You don’t seem to take much interest in us, Mr. Shearwater,” Myra called expiringly. Shearwater looked up; Mrs. Viveash regarded him intently through pale, unwavering eyes, smiling as she looked that queer, downward-turning smile which gave to her face, through its mask of laughter, a peculiar expression of agony. “You don’t seem to take much interest in us,” she repeated.

Shearwater shook his heavy head. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I do.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Why should I? There’s not time to be interested in everything. One can only be interested in what’s worth while.”

“And we’re not worth while?”

“Not to me personally,” replied Shearwater with candour. “The Great Wall of China, the political situation in Italy, the habits of Trematodes⁠—all these are most interesting in themselves. But they aren’t interesting to me; I don’t permit them to be. I haven’t the leisure.”

“And what do you allow yourself to be interested in?”

“Shall we go?” said Bruin impatiently; he had succeeded in swallowing the last fragment of his hard-boiled egg. Mrs. Viveash did not answer, did not even look at him.

Shearwater, who had hesitated before replying, was about to speak. But Coleman answered for him. “Be respectful,” he said to Mrs. Viveash. “This is a great man. He reads no papers, not even those in which our Mercaptan so beautifully writes. He does not know what a beaver is. And he lives for nothing but the kidneys.”

Mrs. Viveash smiled her smile of agony. “Kidneys? But what a memento mori. There are other portions of the anatomy.” She threw back her cloak revealing an arm, a bare shoulder, a slant of pectoral muscle. She was wearing a white dress that, leaving her back and shoulders bare, came up, under either arm, to a point in front and was held there by a golden thread about the neck. “For example,” she said, and twisted her hand several times over and over, making the slender arm turn at the elbow, as though to demonstrate the movement of the articulations and the muscular play.

“Memento vivere,” Mr. Mercaptan aptly commented. “Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.”

Mrs. Viveash dropped her arm and pulled the cloak back into place. She looked at Shearwater, who had followed all her movements with conscientious attention, and who now nodded with an expression of interrogation on his face, as though to ask: what next?

“We all know that you’ve got beautiful arms,” said Bruin angrily. “There’s no need for you to make an exhibition of them in the street, at midnight. Let’s get out of this.” He laid his hand on her shoulder and made as if to draw her away. “We’d better be going. Goodness knows what’s happening behind us.” He indicated with a little movement of the head the loiterers round the coffee-stall. “Some disturbance among the canaille.”

Mrs. Viveash looked round. The cabdrivers and the other consumers of midnight coffee had gathered in an interested circle, curious and sympathetic, round the figure of a woman who was sitting, like a limp bundle tied up in black cotton and mackintosh, on the stall-keeper’s high stool, leaning wearily against the wall of the booth. A man stood beside her drinking tea out of a thick white cup. Everyone was talking at once.

“Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?” asked Mrs. Viveash, turning back to Bruin. “I never knew anyone who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.”

“I loathe them,” said Bruin. “I hate everyone poor, or ill, or old. Can’t abide them; they make me positively sick.”

“Quelle âme bien-née,” piped Mr. Mercaptan. “And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the courage to say.”

Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter.

“I remember when I was a little boy,” Bruin went on, “my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his childhood. He told me that when he was about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ’thirty-two, there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus that went like this: ‘Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower Classes.’ I wish I knew the rest of the words and the tune. It must have been a good song.”

Coleman was enraptured with the song. He shouldered his walking-stick and began marching round and round the nearest lamppost chanting the words to a stirring march tune. “Rot the People, blast the People.⁠ ⁠…” He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet.

“Ah, if only they’d invent servants with internal combustion engines,” said Bruin, almost pathetically. “However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.”

“How tedious is a guilty conscience!” Gumbril murmured the quotation.

“But Mr. Shearwater,” said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, “hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.”

“Nothing at all,” said Shearwater. “I’m occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.”

“But is it true what he says, Theodore?” She appealed to Gumbril.

“I should think so.” Gumbril’s answer was rather dim and remote. He was straining to hear the talk of Bruin’s canaille, and Mrs. Viveash’s question seemed a little irrelevant.

“I used to do cartin’ jobs,” the man with the teacup was saying. “ ’Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn’t do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and ’eavy weights about the place. Because I ’ad malaria out in India, in the war.⁠ ⁠…”

“Nor even⁠—you compel me to violate the laws of modesty⁠—nor even,” Mrs. Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, “of legs?”

A spring of blasphemy was touched in Coleman’s brain. “Neither delighteth He in any man’s legs,” he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it.

“It comes back on you when you get tired like, malaria does.” The man’s face was sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and