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

she had even made up her mind what Toto would say to her. And when the scene was over they would go and dine at the Café Royal⁠—upstairs, where she had never been. And she would make him rather jealous by telling him how much she had liked Mr. Mercaptan; but not too jealous. Silence is golden, as her father used to say when she used to fly into tempers and wanted to say nasty things to everybody within range. Silence, about some things, is certainly golden.

In the rather gloomy little turning off Lupus Street to which she had been directed, Rosie found the number, found, in the row of bells and cards, the name. Quickly and decidedly she mounted the stairs.

“Well,” she was going to say as soon as she saw him, “I thought you were a civilized being.” Mr. Mercaptan had dropped a hint that Coleman wasn’t really civilized; a hint was enough for Rosie. “But I see,” she would go on, “that I was mistaken. I don’t like to associate with boors.” The fastidious lady had selected him as a young poet, not as a ploughboy.

Well rehearsed, Rosie rang the bell. And then the door had opened on this huge bearded Cossack of a man, who smiled, who looked at her with bright, dangerous eyes, who quoted the Bible and who was bleeding like a pig. There was blood on his shirt, blood on his trousers, blood on his hands, bloody fingermarks on his face; even the blond fringe of his beard, she noticed, was dabbled here and there with blood. It was too much, at first, even for her aristocratic equanimity.

In the end, however, she followed him across a little vestibule into a bright, whitewashed room empty of all furniture but a table, a few chairs and a large box-spring and mattress, which stood like an island in the middle of the floor and served as bed or sofa as occasion required. Over the mantelpiece was pinned a large photographic reproduction of Leonardo’s study of the anatomy of love. There were no other pictures on the walls.

“All the apparatus is here,” said Coleman, and he pointed to the table. “Lint, bandages, cotton-wool, iodine, gauze, oiled silk. I have them all ready in preparation for these little accidents.”

“But do you often manage to cut yourself in the arm?” asked Rosie. She took off her gloves and began to undo a fresh packet of lint.

“One gets cut,” Coleman explained. “Little differences of opinion, you know. If your eye offend you, pluck it out; love your neighbour as yourself. Argal: if his eye offend you⁠—you see? We live on Christian principles here.”

“But who are ‘we’?” asked Rosie, giving the cut a last dressing of iodine and laying a big square of lint over it.

“Merely myself and⁠—how shall I put it?⁠—my helpmate,” Coleman answered. “Ah! you’re wonderfully skilful at this business,” he went on. “You’re the real hospital nurse type; all maternal instincts. When pain and anguish wring the brow, an interesting mangle thou, as we used to say in the good old days when the pun and the Spoonerismus were in fashion.”

Rosie laughed. “Oh, I don’t spend all my time tying up wounds,” she said, and turned her eyes for an instant from the bandage. After the first surprise she was feeling her cool self again.

“Brava!” cried Coleman. “You make them too, do you? Make them first and cure them afterwards in the grand old homœopathic way. Delightful! You see what Leonardo has to say about it.” With his free hand he pointed to the photograph over the mantelpiece.

Rosie, who had noticed the picture when she came into the room, preferred not to look at it too closely a second time. “I think it’s rather revolting,” she said, and was very busy with the bandage.

“Ah! but that’s the point, that’s the whole point,” said Coleman, and his clear blue eyes were alive with dancing lights. “That’s the beauty of the grand passion. It is revolting. You read what the Fathers of the Church have to say about love. They’re the men. It was Odo of Cluny, wasn’t it, who called woman a saccus stercoris, a bag of muck. Si quis enim considerat quæ intra nares et quæ intra fauces et quæ intra ventrem lateant, sordes ubique reperiet.” The Latin rumbled like eloquent thunder in Coleman’s mouth. “Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus.” He smacked his lips. “Magnificent!” he said.

“I don’t understand Latin,” said Rosie, “and I’m glad of it. And your bandage is finished. Look.”

“Interesting mangle!” Coleman smiled his thanks. “But Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good works. Still less for your good looks, which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the visceral secrets which they conceal.”

“Really,” Rosie protested. She would have liked to get up and go away, but the Cossack’s blue eyes glittered at her with such a strange expression and he smiled so enigmatically, that she found herself still sitting where she was, listening with a disgusted pleasure to his quick talk, his screams of deliberate and appalling laughter.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, “what sensualists these old fellows were! What a real voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and all the horrors of vice. They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes⁠—what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?” And he threw back his head and laughed; the blood-dabbled tips of his blond beard shook. Rosie looked at them, fascinated with disgust.

“There’s blood on your beard,” she felt compelled to say.

“What of it? Why shouldn’t