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

and the little thin boy I saw her standing before me. She was dressed in a stained and tattered old dress. Her grey hair escaped in wisps from under a wide straw hat. Her old face was eager, thin and sharp; the wrinkled skin was like brown parchment stretched over the bones. Leaning on her staff, she looked at me for a little in silence.

“So you’re the drowned foreigner,” she said at last.

“If he were drowned, how could he be alive?” asked the doctor. The young giant found this exquisitely witty; he laughed profoundly, out of the depths of his huge chest. “Go away now, Concetta,” the doctor went on. “He must be kept quiet. We can’t have you treating him to one of your discourses.”

Concetta paid no attention to him. She was used to this sort of thing.

“The mercy of God,” she began, shaking her head, “where should we be without it? You are young, signorino. You still have time to do much. God has preserved you. I am old. But I lean on the cross.” And straightening herself up, she lifted her staff. A crosspiece of wood had been nailed near the top of it. Affectionately she kissed it. “I love the cross,” she said. “The cross is beautiful, the cross is⁠ ⁠…” But she was interrupted by a young nurserymaid who came running up to ask for half a kilo of the best grapes. Theology could not be allowed to interfere with business. Concetta took out her little steelyard, put a bunch of grapes in the pan and moved the weight back and forth along the bar in search of equilibrium. The nurserymaid stood by. She had a round face, red cheeks, dimples, black hair and eyes like black buttons. She was as plump as a fruit. The young giant looked up at her in frank admiration. She rolled the buttons towards him⁠—for an instant, then utterly ignored him, and humming nonchalantly to herself as though she were alone on a desert island and wanted to keep her spirits up, she gazed pensively away at the picturesque beauties of nature.

“Six hundred grams,” said Concetta.

The nurserymaid paid for them, and still humming, still on her desert island, she walked off, taking very small steps, undulating rotundly, like a moon among wind-driven clouds. The young giant stopped rubbing my feet and stared after her. With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace the nurserymaid tottered along, undulating unsteadily on her high heels across the sand.

Rabear, I thought: old Skeat was perfectly right to translate the word as he did.

“Bella grassa,” said the doctor, voicing what were obviously the young giant’s sentiments. Mine too; for after all, she was alive, obeyed the laws of her nature, walked in the sun, ate grapes and rabear’d. I shut my eyes again. Pulse, pulse, pulse; the heart beat steadily under my fingers. I felt like Adam, newly created and weak like a butterfly fresh from its chrysalis⁠—the red clay still too wet and limp to allow of my standing upright. But soon, when it had dried to firmness, I should arise and scamper joyously about this span new world, and be myself a young giant, a graceful and majestic thoroughbred, a child, a wondering Bedlamite.

There are some people who contrive to pass their lives in a state of permanent convalescence. They behave at every moment as though they had been miraculously preserved from death the moment before; they live exhilaratedly for the mere sake of living and can be intoxicated with happiness just because they happen not to be dead. For those not born convalescent it may be that the secret of happiness consists in being half-drowned regularly three times a day before meals. I recommend it as a more drastic alternative to my “water-shoot-in-every-office” remedy for ennui.

“You’re alone here?” asked the doctor.

I nodded.

“No relations?”

“Not at present.”

“No friends of any kind?”

I shook my head.

“H’m,” he said.

He had a wart growing on one side of his nose where it joined the cheek. I found myself studying it intently; it was a most interesting wart, whitish, but a little flushed on its upper surface. It looked like a small unripe cherry. “Do you like cherries?” I asked.

The doctor seemed rather surprised. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s silence and with great deliberation, as though he had been carefully weighing the matter in his mind.

“So do I.” And I burst out laughing. This time, however, my breathing triumphantly stood the strain. “So do I. But not unripe ones,” I added, gasping with mirth. It seemed to me that nothing funnier had ever been said.

And then Mrs. Aldwinkle stepped definitely into my life. For, looking round, still heaving with the after-swell of my storm of laughter, I suddenly saw the Chinese lantern lady of the patino standing before me. Her flame-coloured costume, a little less radiant now that it was wet, still shone among the aquarium shadows of her green parasol, and her face looked as though it were she who had been drowned, not I.

“They tell me that you’re an Englishman,” she said in the same ill-controlled, unmusical voice I had heard, not long since, misquoting Shelley.

Still tipsy, still lightheaded with convalescence, I laughingly admitted it.

“I hear you were nearly drowned.”

“Quite right,” I said, still laughing; it was such a marvellous joke.

“I’m most sorry to hear⁠ ⁠…” She had a way of leaving her sentences unfinished. The words would tail off into a dim inarticulate blur of sound.

“Don’t mention it,” I begged her. “It isn’t at all disagreeable, you know. Afterwards, at any rate⁠ ⁠…” I stared at her affectionately and with my convalescent’s boundless curiosity. She stared back at me. Her eyes, I thought, must have the same bulge as those little red lenses one screws to the rear forks of bicycles; they collected all the light diffused around them and reflected it again with a concentrated glitter.

“I came to ask whether I could be of any assistance,”