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

And there was no remedy, no spiritual prophylaxis. One might do one’s best to invent triumphantly right and tactful alternatives to the floater⁠—imagine oneself, for example, whispering to sister Fanny the mollifying instead of the bitter, wounding phrase; might walk in fancy with the airiest dignity out of Bardolph’s studio into the dirty little street, past the house with the canary hanging in the window (an exquisite touch the canary), away, away⁠—when in fact (oh Lord, what a fool one had been, and how miserable, afterwards!), in actual fact one had stayed. One could do one’s best; but one could never really persuade oneself that the floater hadn’t happened. Imagination might struggle to annihilate the odious memory; but it never had power to win a decisive victory.

And now, if she wasn’t careful, she’d have another floater rankling and suppurating in her memory. “How could I have been so stupid?” she thought, “how could I?” For it was obvious now that the dashing manner, the fashionable disguise were entirely inappropriate to the occasion. Calamy, it was clear, didn’t appreciate that sort of thing at all; he might have once, but he didn’t now. If she went on like this she’d have him putting her down as merely frivolous, worldly, a snob; and it would need time and enormous efforts to obliterate the disastrous first impression.

Surreptitiously Miss Thriplow slipped the opal ring from off the little finger of her right hand, held it for a moment, clenched out of sight in her left; then, when Calamy wasn’t looking, pushed it down into the crevice between the padded seat and the back of her chintz-covered armchair.

“Terrifying!” she echoed. “Yes, that’s exactly the word. Those things are terrifying. The size of the footmen!” She held up one hand above her head. “The diameter of the strawberries!” She brought both hands (still far too glittering, she regretfully noticed, with their freight of rings) to within a foot of one another in front of her. “The inanity of the lion hunters! The roaring of the lions!” It was unnecessary to do anything with her hands now; she dropped them back into her lap and took the opportunity to rid herself of the scarab and the brilliants. And like the conjuror who makes patter to divert attention from the workings of his trick, she leaned forward and began to talk very rapidly and earnestly. “And seriously,” she went on, putting seriousness into her voice and smoothing the laughter out of her face, so that it was wonderfully round, earnest and ingenuous, “what rot the lions do roar! I suppose it’s awfully innocent of me; but I always imagined that celebrated people must be more interesting than other people. They’re not!” She let herself fall back, rather dramatically, into her chair. In the process, one hand seemed to have got accidentally stuck behind her back. She disengaged it, but not before the scarab and the brilliants had been slipped into the cache. There was nothing left now but the emerald; that could stay. It was very chaste and austere. But she would never be able to take off her pearls without his noticing. Never⁠—even though men are so inconceivably unobservant. Rings were easy enough to get rid of; but a necklace.⁠ ⁠… And they weren’t even real pearls.

Calamy, meanwhile, was laughing. “I remember making the same discovery myself,” he said. “It’s rather painful at first. One feels as though one has been somehow swindled and done in. You remember what Beethoven said: ‘that he seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect.’ One has a right to expect celebrated people to live up to their reputations; they ought to be interesting.”

Miss Thriplow leaned forward again, nodding her assent with a childlike eagerness. “I know lots of obscure little people,” she said, “who are much more interesting and much more genuine, one somehow feels, than the celebrated ones. It’s genuineness that counts, isn’t it?”

Calamy agreed.

“I think it’s difficult to be genuine,” Miss Thriplow went on, “if one’s a celebrity or a public figure, or anything of that sort.” She became very confidential indeed. “I get quite frightened when I see my name in the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.” How little and obscure she was! How poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s, those boring lion huntresses⁠ ⁠… they had no hope of passing through the needle’s eye.

“I’m delighted to hear you saying all this,” said Calamy. “If only all writers felt as you do!”

Miss Thriplow shook her head, modestly declining the implied compliment. “I’m like Jehovah,” she said; “I just am that I am. That’s all. Why should I make believe that I’m somebody else? Though I confess,” she added, with a greatly daring candour, “that I was intimidated by your reputation into pretending that I was more mondaine than I really am. I imagined you as being so tremendously worldly and smart. It’s a great relief to find you’re not.”

“Smart?” repeated Calamy, making a grimace.

“You sounded so dazzlingly social from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s accounts.” And as she spoke the words she felt herself becoming correspondingly obscurer and littler.

Calamy laughed. “Perhaps I was that sort of imbecile once,” he said. “But now⁠—well, I hope all that’s over now.”

“I pictured you,” Miss Thriplow went on, straining, in spite of her obscurity, to be brilliant, “I pictured you as one of those people in the Sketch⁠—‘walking in the Park with a friend,’ you know; a friend who would turn out at the least to be a duchess or a distinguished novelist. Can you wonder that I was nervous?” She dropped back into the depths of her chair. Poor little thing! But the pearls, though not marine, were still rather an embarrassment.

II

Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned,