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

likely your laughter was justified, your judgment was true. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Perhaps I am a charlatan. Perhaps I’m insincere; boasting to others, deceiving myself. I don’t know, I tell you. Everything is confusion in my mind now. The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos. I can make no order within myself. Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? have I something in me, or nothing? have I ever achieved anything of worth, anything that rhymed with my conceptions, my dreams (for those were fine; of that, I am certain)? I look into the chaos that is my soul and, I tell you, I don’t know, I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ve spent nearly twenty years now playing the charlatan at whom you all laugh. That I’ve suffered, in mind and in body too⁠—almost from hunger, sometimes⁠—in order to play it. That I’ve struggled, that I’ve exultantly climbed to the attack, that I’ve been thrown down⁠—ah, many times!⁠—that I’ve picked myself up and started again. Well, I suppose all that’s ludicrous, if you like to think of it that way. It is ludicrous that a man should put himself to prolonged inconvenience for the sake of something which doesn’t really exist at all. It’s exquisitely comic, I can see. I can see it in the abstract, so to speak. But in this particular case, you must remember I’m not a dispassionate observer. And if I am overcome now, it is not with laughter. It is with an indescribable unhappiness, with the bitterness of death itself. Death, death, death. I repeat the word to myself, again and again. I think of death, I try to imagine it, I hang over it, looking down, where the stones fall and fall and there is one horrible noise, and then silence again; looking down into the well of death. It is so deep that there is no glittering eye of water to be seen at the bottom. I have no candle to send down. It is horrible, but I do not want to go on living. Living would be worse than.⁠ ⁠…”

Lypiatt was reaching out for another sheet of paper when he was startled to hear the sound of feet on the stairs. He turned towards the door. His heart beat with violence. He was filled with a strange sense of apprehension. In terror he awaited the approach of some unknown and terrible being. The feet of the angel of death were on the stairs. Up, up, up. Lypiatt felt himself trembling as the sound came nearer. He knew for certain that in a few seconds he was going to die. The hangmen had already pinioned him; the soldiers of the firing squad had already raised their rifles. One, two,⁠ ⁠… he thought of Mrs. Viveash standing, bareheaded, the wind blowing in her hair, at the foot of the flagstaff from the site of which Queen Victoria had admired the distant view of Selborne; he thought of her dolorously smiling; he remembered that once she had taken his head between her two hands and kissed him: “Because you’re such a golden ass,” she had said, laughing. Three.⁠ ⁠… There was a little tap at the door. Lypiatt pressed his hand over his heart. The door opened.

A small, birdlike man with a long, sharp nose and eyes as round and black and shining as buttons stepped into the room.

“Mr. Lydgate, I presume?” he began. Then looked at a card on which a name and address were evidently written. “Lypiatt, I mean. A thousand pardons. Mr. Lypiatt, I presume?”

Lypiatt leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. His face was as white as paper. He breathed hard and his temples were wet with sweat, as though he had been running.

“I found the door down below open, so I came straight up. I hope you’ll excuse.⁠ ⁠…” The stranger smiled apologetically.

“Who are you?” Lypiatt asked, reopening his eyes. His heart was still beating hard; after the storm it calmed itself slowly. He drew back from the brink of the fearful well; the time had not yet come to plunge.

“My name,” said the stranger, “is Boldero, Herbert Boldero. Our mutual friend Mr. Gumbril, Mr. Theodore Gumbril, junior,” he made it more precise, “suggested that I might come and see you about a little matter in which he and I are interested and in which perhaps you, too, might be interested.”

Lypiatt nodded, without saying anything.

Mr. Boldero, meanwhile, was turning his bright, birdlike eyes about the studio. Mrs. Viveash’s portrait, all but finished now, was clamped to the easel. He approached it, a connoisseur.

“It reminds me very much,” he said, “of Bacosso. Very much indeed, if I may say so. Also a little of⁠ ⁠…” he hesitated, trying to think of the name of that other fellow Gumbril had talked about. But being unable to remember the unimpressive syllables of Derain he played for safety and said⁠—“of Orpen.” Mr. Boldero looked inquiringly at Lypiatt to see if that was right.

Lypiatt still spoke no word and seemed, indeed, not to have heard what had been said.

Mr. Boldero saw that it wasn’t much good talking about modern art. This chap, he thought, looked as though something were wrong with him. He hoped he hadn’t got influenza. There was a lot of the disease about. “This little affair I was speaking of,” he pursued, in another tone, “is a little business proposition that Mr. Gumbril and I have gone into together. A matter of pneumatic trousers,” he waved his hand airily.

Lypiatt suddenly burst out laughing, an embittered Titan. Where do flies go? Where do souls go? The barrel-organ, and now pneumatic trousers! Then, as suddenly, he was silent again. More literature? Another piece of acting? “Go on,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Mr. Boldero indulgently. “I know the idea does seem a little humorous, if I may say so, at first. But I assure