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

she would desist. But she never did. Mrs. Aldwinkle always carried all her jokes to the foreseen end, and generally far further than was foreseeable by anyone less ponderously minded than herself. “It was like a whale sighing!” she went on with a frightful playfulness. “It must be a grand passion of the largest size. Who is it? Who is it?” She raised her eyebrows, she smiled with what seemed to her, as she studied it in the glass, a most wickedly sly but charming smile⁠—like a smile in a comedy by Congreve, it occurred to her.

“But, Aunt Lilian,” protested Irene, almost in despair, almost in tears, “it was nothing, I tell you.” At moments like this she could almost find it in her to hate Aunt Lilian. “As a matter of fact, I was only⁠ ⁠…” She was going to blurt it out courageously; she was just going to tell Aunt Lilian⁠—at the risk of a teasing or an almost equally unwelcome solicitude: either were better than this⁠—that she had been merely yawning. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, still relentlessly pursuing her fun, interrupted her.

“But I guess who it is,” she said, wagging a forefinger at the glass. “I guess. I’m not such a blind stupid old auntie as you think. You imagine I haven’t noticed. Silly child! Did she think I didn’t see that he was very assiduous and that she rather liked it? Did she think her stupid old auntie was blind?”

Irene blushed again; the tears came into her eyes. “But who are you talking about?” she said in a voice that she had to make a great effort to keep from breaking and trembling out of control.

“What an innocent!” mocked Mrs. Aldwinkle, still very Congreve. And at this point⁠—earlier than was usual with her on these occasions⁠—she had mercy and consented to put poor Irene out of her agony. “Why, Hovenden,” she said. “Who else should it be?”

“Hovenden?” Irene repeated with genuine surprise.

“Injured innocence!” Mrs. Aldwinkle momentarily renewed her trampling fun. “But it’s sufficiently obvious,” she went on in a more natural voice. “The poor boy follows you like a dog.”

“Me?” Irene had been too much preoccupied in following her Aunt Lilian to notice that she in her turn was being followed.

“Now don’t pretend,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “It’s so stupid pretending. Much better to be frank and straightforward. Admit, now, that you like him.”

Irene admitted. “Yes, of course I like him. But not⁠ ⁠… not in any special way. I’d really not thought of him like that.”

A shade contemptuously, benevolently amused, Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled. She forgot her depression, forgot her causes of personal complaint against the universal order of things. Absorbed in the uniquely interesting subject, in the sole and proper study of mankind, she was once more happy. Love⁠—it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly existed. Mrs. Aldwinkle was almost as much interested in other people’s love as in her own. She wanted everyone to love, constantly and complicatedly. She liked to bring people together, to foster tender feelings, to watch the development of passion, to assist⁠—when it happened; and Mrs. Aldwinkle was always rather disappointed when it did not⁠—at the tragic catastrophe. And then, when the first love, growing old, had lingeringly or violently died, there was the new love to think of, to arrange, to foster, to watch; and then the third, the fourth.⁠ ⁠… One must always follow the spontaneous motions of the heart; it is the divine within us that stirs in the heart. And one must worship Eros so reverently that one can never be content with anything but the most poignant, most passionate manifestations of his power. To be content with a love that has turned in the course of time to mere affection, kindliness and quiet comprehension is almost to blaspheme against the name of Eros. Your true lover, thought Mrs. Aldwinkle, leaves the old, paralytic love and turns wholeheartedly to the young passion.

“What a goose you are!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I sometimes wonder,” she went on, “whether you’re capable of being in love at all, you’re so uncomprehending, so cold.”

Irene protested with all the energy of which she was capable. One could not have lived as long as she had in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s company without regarding the imputation of coldness, of insensitiveness to passion, as the most damning of all possible impeachments. It was better to be accused of being a murderess⁠—particularly if it were a case of crime passionnel. “I don’t know how you say that,” she said indignantly. “I’m always in love.” Had there not been Peter, and Jacques, and Mario?

“You may think you have,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle contemptuously, forgetting that it was she herself who had persuaded Irene that she was in love. “But it was more imagination than the real thing. Some women are born like that.” She shook her head. “And they die like that.” One might have inferred from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s words and the tone of her voice that Irene was a superannuated spinster of forty, proved conclusively, after twenty years of accumulated evidence, to be incapable of anything remotely resembling an amorous passion.

Irene made no answer, but went on brushing her aunt’s hair. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s aspersions were particularly wounding to her. She wished that she could do something startling to prove their baselessness. Something spectacular.

“And I’ve always thought Hovenden an extremely nice boy,” Mrs. Aldwinkle continued, with the air of pursuing an argument. She talked on. Irene listened and went on brushing.

IX

In the silence and solitude of her room, Miss Thriplow sat up for a long time, pen in hand, in front of an open notebook. “Darling Jim,” she wrote, “darling Jim. Today you came back to me so suddenly and unexpectedly that I could almost have cried aloud in front of all those people. Was it an accident that I picked that stiff leaf from Apollo’s tree and crushed it to fragrance between my fingers? Or were you there? was it you who secretly whispered to the unconscious part of me, telling me to pick that leaf? I wonder;