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

hopelessness about his misery. “It comes back on you, and then you go down with fever and you’re as weak as a child.”

Shearwater shook his head.

“Nor even of the heart?” Mrs. Viveash lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, now the inevitable word has been pronounced, the real subject of every conversation has appeared on the scene. Love, Mr. Shearwater!”

“But as I says,” recapitulated the man with the teacup, “we didn’t do so badly after all. We ’ad nothing to complain about. ’Ad we, Florrie?”

The black bundle made an affirmative movement with its upper extremity.

“That’s one of the subjects,” said Shearwater, “like the Great Wall of China and the habits of Trematodes, I don’t allow myself to be interested in.”

Mrs. Viveash laughed, breathed out a little “Good God!” of incredulity and astonishment, and asked, “Why not?”

“No time,” he explained. “You people of leisure have nothing else to do or think about. I’m busy and so naturally less interested in the subject than you; and I take care, what’s more, to limit such interest as I have.”

“I was goin’ up Ludgate ’Ill one day with a vanload of stuff for a chap in Clerkenwell. I was leadin’ Jerry up the ’ill⁠—Jerry’s the name of our ole pony.⁠ ⁠…”

“One can’t have everything,” Shearwater was explaining, “not all at the same time, in any case. I’ve arranged my life for work now. I’m quietly married, I simmer away domestically.”

“Quelle horreur!” said Mr. Mercaptan. All the Louis Quinze Abbé in him was shocked and revolted by the thought.

“But love?” questioned Mrs. Viveash. “Love?”

“Love!” Lypiatt echoed. He was looking up at the Milky Way.

“All of a sudden out jumps a copper at me. ‘ ’Ow old is that ’orse?’ ’e says. ‘It ain’t fit to drawr a load, it limps in all four feet,’ ’e says. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ I says. ‘None of your answerin’ back,’ ’e says. ‘Take it outer the shafts at once.’ ”

“But I know all about love already. I know precious little still about kidneys.”

“But, my good Shearwater, how can you know all about love before you’ve made it with all women?”

“Off we goes, me and the cop and the ’orse, up in front of the police court magistrate.⁠ ⁠…”

“Or are you one of those imbeciles,” Mrs. Viveash went on, “who speak of women with a large W and pretend we’re all the same? Poor Theodore here might possibly think so in his feebler moments.” Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance. He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate’s stuffy court. “And Mercaptan certainly does, because all the women who ever sat on his dix-huitième sofa certainly were exactly like one another. And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you’re intelligent. Surely you don’t believe anything so stupid?”

Shearwater shook his head.

“The cop, ’e gave evidence against me. ‘Limping in all four feet,’ ’e says. ‘It wasn’t,’ I says, and the police court vet, ’e bore me out. ‘The ’orse ’as been very well treated,’ ’e says. ‘But ’e’s old, ’e’s very old.’ ‘I know ’e’s old,’ I says. ‘But where am I goin’ to find the price for a young one?’ ”

“x² − y²,” Shearwater was saying, “= (x + y)(x − y). And the equation holds good whatever the values of x and y.⁠ ⁠… It’s the same with your love business, Mrs. Viveash. The relation is still fundamentally the same, whatever the value of the unknown personal quantities concerned. Little individual tics and peculiarities⁠—after all, what do they matter?”

“What indeed!” said Coleman. “Tics, mere tics. Sheep ticks, horse ticks, bed bugs, tape worms, taint worms, guinea worms, liver flukes.⁠ ⁠…”

“ ‘The ’orse must be destroyed,” says the beak. “ ’E’s too old for work.’ ‘But I’m not,’ I says. ‘I can’t get a old age pension at thirty-two, can I? ’Ow am I to earn my living if you take away what I earns my living by?’ ”

Mrs. Viveash smiled agonizingly. “Here’s a man who thinks personal peculiarities are trivial and unimportant,” she said. “You’re not even interested in people, then?”

“ ‘I don’t know what you can do,’ ’e says. ‘I’m only ’ere to administer the law.’ ‘Seems a queer sort of law,’ I says. ‘What law is it?’ ”

Shearwater scratched his head. Under his formidable black moustache he smiled at last his ingenuous, childish smile. “No,” he said. “No, I suppose I’m not. It hadn’t occurred to me, until you said it. But I suppose I’m not. No.” He laughed, quite delighted, it seemed, by this discovery about himself.

“ ‘What law is it?’ ’e says. ‘The Croolty to Animals law. That’s what it is,’ ’e says.”

The smile of mockery and suffering appeared and faded. “One of these days,” said Mrs. Viveash, “you may find them more absorbing than you do now.”

“Meanwhile,” said Shearwater.⁠ ⁠…

“I couldn’t find a job ’ere, and ’aving been workin’ on my own, my own master like, couldn’t get unemployment pay. So when we ’eard of jobs at Portsmouth, we thought we’d try to get one, even if it did mean walkin’ there.”

“Meanwhile, I have my kidneys.”

“ ‘ ’Opeless,’ ’e says to me, ‘quite ’opeless. More than two hundred come for three vacancies.’ So there was nothing for it but to walk back again. Took us four days it did, this time. She was very bad on the way, very bad. Being nearly six months gone. Our first it is. Things will be ’arder still, when it comes.”

From the black bundle there issued a sound of quiet sobbing.

“Look here,” said Gumbril, making a sudden irruption into the conversation. “This is really too awful.” He was consumed with indignation and pity; he felt like a prophet in Nineveh.

“There are two wretched people here,” and Gumbril told them breathlessly, what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. “All the way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot; without proper food; and the woman’s with child.”

Coleman exploded with delight. “Gravid,” he kept repeating, “gravid, gravid. The laws of gravidy, first formulated by Newton, now recodified by the immortal Einstein. God said, Let Newstein be, and there was light. And God