Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley [whitelam books .txt] 📗

nothing at all, engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies. That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. For the light strawy hair (not a lock left), the brown face, the red-brown hands and the smooth boy’s body, milk-white, milk-warm, are nothing at all, nothing, now, at all⁠—nil these five years⁠—and the shining blue eyes as much nil as the rest.

“Always the same people,” complained Mrs. Viveash, looking round the room. “The old familiar faces. Never anyone new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?”

“I’m not responsible for them,” said Gumbril. “I’m not even responsible for myself.” He imagined a cottagey room, under the roof, with a window near the floor and a sloping ceiling where you were always bumping your head; and in the candlelight Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and happy mouth; in the darkness, the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.

“Why don’t they come and sing for their supper?” Mrs. Viveash went on petulantly. “It’s their business to amuse us.”

“They’re probably thinking of amusing themselves,” Gumbril suggested.

“Well, then, they should do it where we can see them.”

“What’s he to Hecuba?”

“Nothing at all,” Gumbril clownishly sang. The room, in the cottage, had nothing to do with him. He breathed Mrs. Viveash’s memories of Italian jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth hair. “Nothing at all.” Happy clown!

Way down in old Bengal, under the green Paradisiac palms, among the ecstatic mystagogues and the saints who scream beneath the divine caresses, the music came to an end. The four negroes wiped their glistening faces. The couples fell apart. Gumbril and Mrs. Viveash sat down and smoked a cigarette.

XVI

The blackamoors had left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room⁠—“making two worlds,” Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, “where only one grew before⁠—and one of them a better world,” he added too philosophically, “because unreal.” There was the theatrical silence, the suspense. The curtains parted again.

On a narrow bed⁠—on a bier perhaps⁠—the corpse of a woman. The husband kneels beside it. At the foot stands the doctor, putting away his instruments. In a beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby.

The Husband

Margaret! Margaret!

The Doctor

She is dead.

The Husband

Margaret!

The Doctor

Of septicæmia, I tell you.

The Husband

I wish that I too were dead!

The Doctor

But you won’t tomorrow.

The Husband

Tomorrow! But I don’t want to live to see tomorrow.

The Doctor

You will tomorrow.

The Husband

Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale.

The Doctor

You will not be slow to survive her.

The Husband

Christ have mercy upon us!

The Doctor

You would do better to think of the child.

The Husband

Rising and standing menacingly over the cradle. Is that the monster?

The Doctor

No worse than others.

The Husband

Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity!

The Doctor

Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!

The Husband

Murderer, slowly die all your life long!

The Doctor

The child must be fed.

The Husband

Fed? With what?

The Doctor

With milk.

The Husband

Her milk is cold in her breasts.

The Doctor

There are still cows.

The Husband

Tubercular shorthorns. Calling. Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought!

Voices (off)

Short-i’-the-horn! Short-i’-the-horn! Fadingly. Short-i’-the.⁠ ⁠…

The Doctor

In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.

The Husband

But none of them belonged to my harem.

The Doctor

Each of them was somebody’s wife.

The Husband

Doubtless. But the people we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.

The Doctor

Not in the spectator’s eyes.

The Husband

Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret!⁠ ⁠…

The Doctor

The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.

The Husband

The only one!

The Doctor

But here comes the cow.

Short-i’-the-horn is led in by a Yokel.

The Husband

Ah, good Short-i’-the-horn! He pats the animal. She was tested last week, was she not?

The Yokel

Ay, sir.

The Husband

And found tubercular. No?

The Yokel

Even in the udders, may it please you.

The Husband

Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.

The Yokel

I will, sir. He milks the cow.

The Husband

Her milk⁠—her milk is cold already. All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts. Ah, Jesus! what miraculous galactagogue will make it flow again?

The Yokel

The wash-pot is full, sir.

The Husband

Then take the cow away.

The Yokel

Come, Short-i’-the-horn; come up, good Short-i’-the-horn. He goes out with the cow.

The Husband

Pouring the milk into a long-tubed feeding-bottle. Here’s for you, monster, to drink your own health in. He gives the bottle to the child.

Curtain.

“A little ponderous, perhaps,” said Gumbril, as the curtain came down.

“But I liked the cow.” Mrs. Viveash opened her cigarette-case and found it empty. Gumbril offered her one of his. She shook her head. “I don’t want it in the least,” she said.

“Yes, the cow was in the best pantomime tradition,” Gumbril agreed. Ah! but it was a long time since he had been to a Christmas pantomime. Not since Dan Leno’s days. All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them⁠—every year they filled the best part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grownups drank tea. And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage. Hours and hours; and the grownups always wanted to go away before the harlequinade. And the children felt sick from eating too much chocolate, or wanted with such extreme urgency to go to the w.c. that they had to be led out,