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

’erd. It’s important for ’is interests that he should be recognized easily. See a baby reaching out of a bath and you immediately think of Pears’ Soap; see the white ’air waving out behind and think of Lloyd George. That’s the secret. But in my opinion, Mr. Gumbril, the old system was much more sensible, give them regular uniforms and badges, I say; make Cabinet Ministers wear feathers in their ’air. Then the people will be looking to a real fixed symbol of leadership, not to the peculiarities of the mere individuals. Beards and ’air and funny collars change; but a good uniform is always the same. Give them feathers, that’s what I say, Mr. Gumbril. Feathers will increase the dignity of the State and lessen the importance of the individual. And that,” concluded Mr. Bojanus with emphasis, “that, Mr. Gumbril, will be all to the good.”

“But you don’t mean to tell me,” said Gumbril, “that if I chose to show myself to the multitude in my inflated trousers, I could become a leader⁠—do you?”

“Ah, no,” said Mr. Bojanus. “You’d ’ave to ’ave the talent for talking and ordering people about, to begin with. Feathers wouldn’t give the genius, but they’d magnify the effect of what there was.”

Gumbril got up and began to divest himself of the Small-Clothes. He unscrewed the valve and the air whistled out, dyingly. He too sighed. “Curious,” he said pensively, “that I’ve never felt the need for a leader. I’ve never met anyone I felt I could wholeheartedly admire or believe in, never anyone I wanted to follow. It must be pleasant, I should think, to hand oneself over to somebody else. It must give you a warm, splendid, comfortable feeling.”

Mr. Bojanus smiled and shook his head. “You and I, Mr. Gumbril,” he said, “we’re not the sort of people to be impressed with feathers or even by talking and ordering about. We may not be leaders ourselves. But at any rate we aren’t the ’erd.”

“Not the main herd, perhaps.”

“Not any ’erd,” Mr. Bojanus insisted proudly.

Gumbril shook his head dubiously and buttoned up his trousers. He was not sure, now he came to think of it, that he didn’t belong to all the herds⁠—by a sort of honorary membership and temporarily, as occasion offered, as one belongs to the Union at the sister university or to the Naval and Military Club while one’s own is having its annual clean-out. Shearwater’s herd, Lypiatt’s herd, Mr. Mercaptan’s herd, Mrs. Viveash’s herd, the architectural herd of his father, the educational herd (but that, thank God! was now bleating on distant pastures), the herd of Mr. Bojanus⁠—he belonged to them all a little, to none of them completely. Nobody belonged to his herd. How could they? No chameleon can live with comfort on a tartan. He put on his coat.

“I’ll send the garments this evening,” said Mr. Bojanus. Gumbril left the shop. At the theatrical wig-maker’s in Leicester Square he ordered a blond fan-shaped beard to match his own hair and moustache. He would, at any rate, be his own leader; he would wear a badge, a symbol of authority. And Coleman had said that there were dangerous relations to be entered into by the symbol’s aid.

Ah, now he was provisionally a member of Coleman’s herd. It was all very depressing.

IX

Fan-shaped, blond, mounted on gauze and guaranteed undetectable, it arrived from the wig-maker, preciously packed in a stout cardboard box six times too large for it and accompanied by a quarter of a pint of the choicest spirit gum. In the privacy of his bedroom Gumbril uncoffined it, held it out for his own admiration, caressed its silkiness and finally tried it on, holding it provisionally to his chin, in front of the looking-glass. The effect, he decided immediately, was stunning, was grandiose. From melancholy and all too mild he saw himself transformed on the instant into a sort of jovial Henry the Eighth, into a massive Rabelaisian man, broad and powerful and exuberant with vitality and hair.

The proportions of his face were startlingly altered. The podium, below the mouth, had been insufficiently massive to carry the stately order of the nose; and the ratiocinative attic of the forehead, noble enough, no doubt, in itself, had been disproportionately high. The beard now supplied the deficiencies in the stylobate, and planted now on a firm basement of will, the order of the senses, the aerial attic of ideas, reared themselves with a more classical harmoniousness of proportion. It only remained for him to order from Mr. Bojanus an American coat, padded out at the shoulders as squarely and heroically as a doublet of the Cinquecento, and he would look the complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. Fitted out with coat and beard, he could qualify for the next vacancy among the cœnobites of Thelema.

He removed his beard⁠—“put his beaver up,” as they used to say in the fine old days of chivalry; he would have to remember that little joke for Coleman’s benefit. He put his beaver up⁠—ha, ha!⁠—and stared ruefully at the far from Rabelaisian figure which now confronted him. The moustache⁠—that was genuine enough⁠—which had looked, in conjunction with the splendid work of art below, so fierce and manly, served by itself, he now perceived, only droopily to emphasize his native mildness and melancholy.

It was a dismal affair, which might have belonged to Maurice Barrès in youth; a slanting, flagging, sagging thing, such as could only grow on the lip of an assiduous Cultivator of the Me, and would become, as one grew older, ludicrously out of place on the visage of a roaring Nationalist. If it weren’t that it fitted in so splendidly with the beard, if it weren’t that it became so marvellously different in the new context he had now discovered for it, he would have shaved it off then and there.

Mournful appendage. But now he would transform it, he would add to it