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

the back once seemed enormous and romantic, the rocking-horse in the nursery a beast like an elephant. The house is sold now and I am glad of it. They are dangerous, these things and places inhabited by memory. It is as though, by a process of metempsychosis, the soul of dead events goes out and lodges itself in a house, a flower, a landscape, in a group of trees seen from the train against the skyline, an old snapshot, a broken penknife, a book, a perfume. In these memory-charged places, among these things haunted by the ghosts of dead days, one is tempted to brood too lovingly over the past, to live it again, more elaborately, more consciously, more beautifully and harmoniously, almost as though it were an imagined life in the future. Surrounded by these ghosts one can neglect the present in which one bodily lives. I am glad the place is sold; it was dangerous. Evviva Miss Carruthers!

Nevertheless my thoughts, as I lay on the water that morning, reverted from the Home Away to the other home from which it was so distant. I recalled the last visit I had paid to the old house, a month or two since, just before my mother finally decided herself to move out. Mounting the steps that led up to the ogival porch I had felt like an excavator on the threshold of a tomb. I tugged at the wrought-iron bell pull; joints creaked, wires wheezily rattled, and far off, as though accidentally, by an afterthought, tinkled the cracked bell. In a moment the door would open, I should walk in, and there, there in the unrifled chamber the royal mummy would be lying⁠—my own.

Nothing within those Gothic walls ever changed. Imperceptibly the furniture grew older; the wallpapers and the upholstery recalled with their noncommittal russets and sage-greens the refinements of another epoch. And my mother herself, pale and grey-haired, draped in the dateless dove-grey dresses she had always worn, my mother was still the same. Her smile was the same dim gentle smile; her voice still softly modulated, like a studied and cultured music, from key to key. Her hair was hardly greyer⁠—for it had whitened early and I was a late-born child⁠—than I always remember it to have been. Her face was hardly more deeply wrinkled. She walked erect, seemed still as active as ever, she had grown no thinner and no stouter.

And she was still surrounded by those troops of derelict dogs, so dreadfully profuse, poor beasts! in their smelly gratitude. There were still the same moth-eaten cats picked up starving at a street corner to be harboured in luxury⁠—albeit on a diet that was, on principle, strictly vegetarian⁠—in the best rooms of the house. Poor children still came for buns and tea and traditional games in the garden⁠—so traditional, very often, that nobody but my mother had ever heard of them; still came, when the season happened to be winter, for gloves and woolly stockings and traditional games indoors. And the writing-table in the drawing-room was piled high, as it had always been piled, with printed appeals for some deserving charity. And still in her beautiful calligraphy my mother addressed the envelopes that were to contain them, slowly, one after another⁠—and each a little work of art, like a page from a medieval missal, and each destined, without reprieve, to the waste-paper basket.

All was just as it had always been. Ah, but not quite, all the same! For though the summer term was in full swing and the afternoon bright, the little garden behind the house was deserted and unmelodious. Where were the morris dancers, where the mixolydian strains? And remembering that music, those dances, those distant afternoons, I could have wept.

In one corner of the lawn my mother used to sit at the little harmonium; I sat beside her to turn the pages of the music. In the opposite corner were grouped the dancers. My mother looked up over the top of the instrument; melodiously she inquired:

“Which dance shall we have next, Mr. Toft? ‘Trenchmore’? Or ‘Omnium Gatherum’? Or ‘John Come Kiss Me Now’? Or what do you say to ‘Up Tails All’? Or ‘Rub Her Down with Straw’? Or ‘An Old Man’s a Bed Full of Bones’? Such an embarras de richesse, isn’t there?”

And Mr. Toft would break away from his little company of dancers and come across the lawn wiping his face⁠—for “Hoite-cum-Toite” a moment before had been a most furious affair. It was a grey face with vague indeterminate features and a bright almost clerical smile in the middle of it. When he spoke it was in a very rich voice.

“Suppose we try ‘Fading,’ Mrs. Chelifer,” he suggested. “ ‘Fading Is a Fine Dance’⁠—you remember the immortal words of the Citizen’s Wife in the Knight of the Burning Pestle? Ha ha!” And he gave utterance to a little laugh, applausive of his own wit. For to Mr. Toft every literary allusion was a joke, and the obscurer the allusion the more exquisite the waggery. It was rarely, alas, that he found anyone to share his merriment. My mother was one of the few people who always made a point of smiling whenever Mr. Toft laughed at himself. She smiled even when she could not track the allusion to its source. Sometimes she even went so far as to laugh. But my mother had no facility for laughter; by nature she was a grave and gentle smiler.

And so “Fading” it would be. My mother touched the keys and the gay, sad mixolydian air came snoring out of the harmonium like a strangely dissipated hymn tune. “One, two, three⁠ ⁠…” called Mr. Toft richly. And then in unison all five⁠—the don, the two undergraduates, the two young ladies from North Oxford⁠—would beat the ground with their feet, would prance and stamp till the garters of little bells round the gentlemen’s grey flannel trousers (it went without saying, for some reason, that the ladies should not wear them) jingled