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

Mrs. Viveash did not venture another laugh; she contented herself with smiling agonizingly.

“That would have been a just retribution,” Gumbril went on, “after what you’ve done to me.”

“What have I done to you?” Mrs. Viveash asked, opening wide her pale-blue eyes.

“Merely wrecked my existence.”

“But you’re being childish, Theodore. Say what you mean without these grand, silly phrases.” The dying voice spoke with impatience.

“Well, what I mean,” said Gumbril, “is merely this. You prevented me from going to see the only person I ever really wanted to see in my life. And yesterday, when I tried to see her, she was gone. Vanished. And here am I left in the vacuum.”

Mrs. Viveash shut her eyes. “We’re all in the vacuum,” she said. “You’ll still have plenty of company, you know.” She was silent for a moment. “Still, I’m sorry,” she added. “Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you just pay no attention to me and go all the same?”

“I didn’t tell you,” Gumbril answered, “because, then, I didn’t know. And I didn’t go because I didn’t want to quarrel with you.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Viveash, and patted his hand, “But what are you going to do about it now? Not quarrelling with me is only a rather negative satisfaction, I’m afraid.”

“I propose to leave the country tomorrow morning,” said Gumbril.

“Ah, the classical remedy.⁠ ⁠… But not to shoot big game, I hope?” She thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis and the tsetses. He was a charming creature; charming, but⁠ ⁠… but what?

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Gumbril. “What do you take me for? Big game!” He leaned back in his chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first time since he had returned from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening. He had felt then as though he would never laugh again. “Do you see me in a pith helmet, with an elephant gun?”

Mrs. Viveash put her hand to her forehead. “I see you, Theodore,” she said, “but I try to think you would look quite normal; because of my head.”

“I go to Paris first,” said Gumbril. “After that, I don’t know. I shall go wherever I think people will buy pneumatic trousers. I’m travelling on business.”

This time, in spite of her head, Mrs. Viveash laughed.

“I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,” Gumbril went on. “We’ll go round before dinner, if you’re feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and drink. And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England.”

“We’ll do it,” said Mrs. Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa that was almost genuinely a deathbed. “And, meanwhile, we’ll have a second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.”

The tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled down to talk and Mrs. Viveash to listen⁠—to listen and from time to time to dab her brows with eau de cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn.

Gumbril talked. He talked of the marriage ceremonies of octopuses, of the rites intricately consummated in the submarine green grottos of the Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many permutations and combinations of caresses? And in the middle of each bunch of arms a mouth like the beak of a macaw.

On the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to assure him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders⁠—like so much swelled sago⁠—are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze one another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the exoteric world this squeezing on the moon’s backside is known, erroneously, as hell. And as for the constellation, Scorpio⁠—he was the first of all constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an effort of the will he ingurgitated his external armour, he compressed and rebuilt it within his body and so became the first vertebrate. This, you may well believe, was a notable day in cosmic history.

The rents in these new buildings in Regent Street and Piccadilly run to as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty imagined by Nash has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign supreme, even in Regent Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior stalked across the room.

Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time. “I can tell you all about heroin,” said Mrs. Viveash.

Lady Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed. How Rubens would have admired those silk cushions, those gigantic cabbage roses, those round pink pearls of hers, vaster than those that Captain Nemo discovered in the immemorial oyster! And the warm dry rustle of flesh over flesh as she walks, moving first one leg, then advancing the other.

Talking of octopuses, the swim-bladders of deep-sea fishes are filled with almost absolutely pure oxygen. C’est la vie⁠—Gumbril shrugged his shoulders.

In Alpine pastures the grasshoppers start their flight, whizzing like clockwork grasshoppers. And these brown invisible ones reveal themselves suddenly as they skim above the flowers⁠—a streak of blue lightning, a trailing curve of scarlet. Then the overwing shuts down over the coloured wing below and they are once more invisible fiddlers rubbing their thighs, like Lady Capricorn, at the foot of the towering flowers.

Forgers give patina to their medieval ivories by lending them to stout young Jewesses to wear for a few months hanging, like an amulet, between their breasts.

In Italian cemeteries the family vaults are made of glass and iron, like greenhouses.

Sir Henry Griddle has finally married the hog-faced gentlewoman.

Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the Resurrection at San Sepolcro is the most beautiful picture in the world, and the hotel there is far from bad. Scriabine = le Tschaikovsky de nos jours. The dullest landscape painter is Marchand. The best poet.⁠ ⁠…

“You bore