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

man!” she screams through her laughter, as soon as she has breath enough to be articulate. And picking up her bread, she makes as though she were going to throw it across the table in Mr. Brimstone’s face.

Mr. Brimstone holds up a finger. “Now you be careful,” he admonishes. “If you don’t behave, you’ll be put in the corner and sent to bed without your supper.”

There is a renewal of laughter.

Miss Carruthers intervenes. “Now don’t tease her, Mr. Brimstone.”

“Tease?” says Mr. Brimstone, in the tone of one who has been misjudged. “But I was only applying moral suasion, Miss Carruthers.”

Inimitable Brimstone! He is the life and soul of Miss Carruthers’s establishment. So serious, so clever, such an alert young city man⁠—but withal so exquisitely waggish, so gallant! To see him with Fluffy⁠—it’s as good as a play.

“There!” says Miss Carruthers, putting down her carving tools with a clatter. Loudly, energetically, she addresses herself to her duties as a hostess. “I went to Buszard’s this afternoon,” she proclaims, not without pride. We old county families have always bought our chocolate at the best shops. “But it isn’t what it used to be.” She shakes her head; the high old feudal times are past. “It isn’t the same. Not since the A.B.C. took it over.”

“Do you see,” asks Mr. Brimstone, becoming once more his serious self, “that the new Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly Circus will be able to serve fourteen million meals a year?” Mr. Brimstone is always a mine of interesting statistics.

“No, really?” Mrs. Cloudesley is astonished.

But old Mr. Fox, who happens to have read the same evening paper as Mr. Brimstone, takes almost the whole credit of Mr. Brimstone’s erudition to himself by adding, before the other has time to say it: “Yes, and that’s just twice as many meals as any American restaurant can serve.”

“Good old England!” cried Miss Carruthers patriotically. “These Yanks haven’t got us beaten in everything yet.”

“So naice, I always think, these Corner Houses,” says Mrs. Cloudesley. “And the music they play is really quite classical, you know, sometimes.”

“Quite,” says Mr. Chelifer, savouring voluptuously the pleasure of dropping steeply from the edge of the convivial board into interstellar space.

“And so sumptuously decorated,” Mrs. Cloudesley continues.

But Mr. Brimstone knowingly lets her know that the marble on the walls is less than a quarter of an inch thick.

And the conversation proceeds. “The Huns,” says Miss Carruthers, “are only shamming dead.” Mr. Fox is in favour of a business government. Mr. Brimstone would like to see a few strikers shot, to encourage the rest; Miss Carruthers agrees. From below the salt Miss Monad puts in a word for the working classes, but her remark is treated with the contempt it deserves. Mrs. Cloudesley finds Charlie Chaplin so vulgar, but likes Mary Pickford. Miss Fluffy thinks that the Prince of Wales ought to marry a nice simple English girl. Mr. Brimstone says something rather cutting about Mrs. Asquith and Lady Diana Manners. Mrs. Cloudesley, who has a profound knowledge of the Royal Family, mentions the Princess Alice. Contrapuntally to this, Miss Webber and Mr. Quinn have been discussing the latest plays and Mr. Chelifer has engaged Miss Fluffy in a conversation which soon occupies the attention of all the persons sitting at the upper end of the table⁠—a conversation about flappers. Mrs. Cloudesley, Miss Carruthers and Mr. Brimstone agree that the modern girl is too laxly brought up. Miss Fluffy adheres in piercing tones to the opposite opinion. Mr. Brimstone makes some splendid jokes at the expense of coeducation, and all concur in deploring cranks of every variety. Miss Carruthers, who has a short way with dissenters, would like to see them tarred and feathered⁠—all except pacifists, who, like strikers, could do with a little shooting. Lymphatic Mrs. Cloudesley, with sudden and surprising ferocity, wants to treat the Irish in the same way. (Lamented Cloudesley had connections with Belfast.) But at this moment a deplorable incident occurs. Mr. Dutt, the Indian, who ought never, from his lower sphere, even to have listened to the conversation going on in the higher, leans forward and speaking loudly across the intervening gulf ardently espouses the Irish cause. His eloquence rolls up the table between two hedges of horrified silence. For a moment nothing can be heard but ardent nationalistic sentiments and the polite regurgitation of prune stones. In the presence of this shocking and unfamiliar phenomenon nobody knows exactly what to do. But Miss Carruthers rises, after the first moment, to the occasion.

“Ah, but then, Mr. Dutt,” she says, interrupting his tirade about oppressed nationalities, “you must remember that Mrs. Cloudesley Shove is English. You can hardly expect to understand what she feels. Can you?”

We all feel inclined to clap. Without waiting to hear Mr. Dutt’s reply, and leaving three prunes uneaten on her plate, Miss Carruthers gets up and sweeps with dignity towards the door. Loudly, in the corridor, she comments on the insolence of black men. And what ingratitude, too!

“After I had made a special exception in his case to my rule against taking coloured people!”

We all sympathize. In the drawing-room the conversation proceeds. Headlong the trolley plunges.

A home away from home⁠—that was how Miss Carruthers described her establishment in the prospectus. It was the awayness of it that first attracted me to the place. The vast awayness from what I had called home up till the time I first stayed there⁠—that was what made me decide to settle for good at Miss Carruthers’s. From the house where I was born Miss Carruthers’s seemed about as remote as any place one could conveniently find.

“I remember, I remember⁠ ⁠…” It is a pointless and futile occupation, difficult none the less not to indulge in. I remember. Our house at Oxford was dark, spiky and tall. Ruskin himself, it was said, had planned it. The front windows looked out on to the Banbury Road. On rainy days, when I was a child, I used to spend whole mornings staring down into the thoroughfare. Every twenty minutes a tramcar drawn by two old horses, trotting in their sleep, passed with an undulating motion more slowly than a man could walk. The little garden at