Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley [read along books txt] 📗

by some nameless mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.

“Hullo!” he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say something.

Mary looked up. “Hullo!” she answered in a melancholy, uninterested tone.

In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.

At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a façade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the moment, however, Mary’s mind was not moved by these considerations.

On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor’s bold, large hand, a single quatrain.

“Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!
Like bright plumes moulted in an angel’s flight,
There sleep within my heart’s most mystic cell
Memories of morning, memories of the night.”

There followed a postscript of three lines: “Would you mind asking one of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left in the drawer of my washstand. Thanks.⁠—Ivor.”

Seated under the Venus’s immemorial gesture, Mary considered life and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor⁠ ⁠… She couldn’t do without him now. It was evident, on the other hand, from the poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at Gobley now, so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last verse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.

“Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage
Aurait donné moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
A Lisette donnait pour rien.”

Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her life before.

It was Denis who first broke the silence. “The individual,” he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, “is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes besides himself.”

He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminary to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that was to lead up to Jenny’s caricatures.

“True,” said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added, “When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she⁠—or he, of course, as the case may be⁠—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”

“One is apt,” Denis went on, “to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one’s own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents itself to other people as well as to oneself.”

Mary was not listening. “The difficulty,” she said, “makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict suffering. If on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As you see, it’s a dilemma.”

“When I think of my own case,” said Denis, making a more decided move in the desired direction, “I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people’s mentality in general, and above all and in particular, of their opinions about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to the outside world.” He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of the drawing off of a rubber band.

“It’s an awful problem,” said Mary thoughtfully. “One has to have had personal experience to realise quite how awful it is.”

“Exactly.” Denis nodded. “One has to have had firsthand experience.” He leaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. “This very morning, for example⁠ ⁠…” he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deep voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house. It was lunchtime. Mechanically Mary rose to her feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without speaking.

XXV

“I hope you all realise,” said Henry Wimbush during dinner, “that next Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in the Fair.”

“Heavens!” cried Anne. “The Fair⁠—I had forgotten all about it. What a nightmare! Couldn’t you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?”

Mr. Wimbush sighed and shook his head. “Alas,” he said, “I fear I cannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but the claims of Charity are strong.”

“It’s not charity we want,” Anne murmured rebelliously; “it’s justice.”

“Besides,” Mr. Wimbush went on, “the Fair has become an institution. Let me see, it must be twenty-two years since we started it. It was a modest affair then. Now⁠ ⁠…” he made a sweeping movement with his hand and was silent.

It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush’s public spirit that he still continued to tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort of glorified church bazaar, Crome’s yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy thing of merry-go-rounds, coconut shies, and miscellaneous side shows⁠—a real genuine fair on the grand scale. It was the local St. Bartholomew, and the people of all the neighbouring villages, with even a contingent from the county town, flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement. The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which prevented Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and never-diminishing agony, from