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

window to window across the street might have been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the furniture of the Prisons. The place smelt, the children were shouting; the hyena-like laughter of the flappers reverberated between the close-set walls. All Gumbril’s sense of social responsibility was aroused in a moment.

Shut up in his room all day, Lypiatt had been writing⁠—writing his whole life, all his ideas and ideals, all for Myra. The pile of scribbled sheets grew higher and higher. Towards evening he made an end; he had written all that he wanted to write. He ate the remains of yesterday’s loaf of bread and drank some water; for he realized suddenly that he had been fasting the whole day. Then he composed himself to think; he stretched himself out on the brink of the well and looked down into the eyeless darkness.

He still had his Service revolver. Taking it out of the drawer in which it was kept, he loaded it, he laid it on the packing-case which served him as a table at his bed’s head, and stretched himself out on the bed. He lay quite still, his muscles all relaxed, hardly breathing. He imagined himself dead. Derision! there was still the plunge into the well.

He picked up the pistol, looked down the barrel. Black and deep as the well. The muzzle against his forehead was a cold mouth.

There was nothing new to be thought about death. There was not even the possibility of a new thought. Only the old thoughts, the horrible old questions returned.

The cold mouth to his forehead, his finger pressing on the trigger. Already he would be falling, falling. And the annihilating crash would be the same as the faraway sound of death at the bottom of the well. And after that, in the silence? The old question was still the same.

After that, he would lie bleeding. The flies would drink his blood as though it were red honey. In the end the people would come and fetch him away, and the coroner’s jury would look at him in the mortuary and pronounce him temporarily insane. Then he would be buried in a black hole, would be buried and decay.

And meanwhile, would there be anything else? There was nothing new to be thought or asked. And there was still no answer.

In the room it began to grow dark; colours vanished, forms ran together. The easel and Myra’s portrait were now a single black silhouette against the window. Near and far were fused, become one and continuous in the darkness, became a part of the darkness. Outside the window the pale twilight grew more sombre. The children shouted shrilly, playing their games under the green gas lamps. The mirthless, ferocious laughter of young girls mocked and invited. Lypiatt stretched out his hand and fingered the pistol.

Down below, at his door, he heard a sharp knocking. He lifted his head and listened, caught the sound of two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. Myra’s voice he recognized at once; the other, he supposed, was Gumbril’s.

“Hideous to think that people actually live in places like this,” Gumbril was saying. “Look at those children. It ought to be punishable by law to produce children in this street.”

“They always take me for the Pied Piper,” said Mrs. Viveash. Lypiatt got up and crept to the window. He could hear all they said.

“I wonder if Lypiatt’s in. I don’t see any sign of a light.”

“But he has heavy curtains,” said Mrs. Viveash, “and I know for a fact that he always composes his poetry in the dark. He may be composing poetry.”

Gumbril laughed.

“Knock again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Poets are always absorbed, you know. And Casimir’s always the poet.”

“Il Poeta⁠—capital P. Like d’Annunzio in the Italian papers,” said Gumbril. “Did you know that d’Annunzio has books printed on mackintosh for his bath?” He rapped again at the door. “I saw it in the Corriere della Sera the other day at the club. He reads the Little Flowers of St. Francis by preference in his bath. And he has a fountain pen with waterproof ink in the soap-dish, so that he can add a few Fioretti of his own whenever he feels like it. We might suggest that to Casimir.”

Lypiatt stood with folded arms by the window, listening. How lightly they threw his life, his heart, from hand to hand, as though it were a ball and they were playing a game! He thought suddenly of all the times he had spoken lightly and maliciously of other people. His own person had always seemed, on those occasions, sacred. One knew in theory very well that others spoke of one contemptuously⁠—as one spoke of them. In practice⁠—it was hard to believe.

“Poor Casimir!” said Mrs. Viveash. “I’m afraid his show was a failure.”

“I know it was,” said Gumbril. “Complete and absolute. I told my tame capitalist that he ought to employ Lypiatt for our advertisements. He’d be excellent for those. And it would mean some genuine money in his pocket.”

“But the worst of it is,” said Mrs. Viveash, “that he’ll only feel insulted by the suggestion.” She looked up at the window.

“I don’t know why,” she went on, “this house looks most horribly dead. I hope nothing’s happened to poor Casimir. I have a most disagreeable feeling that it may have.”

“Ah, this famous feminine intuition,” laughed Gumbril. He knocked again.

“I can’t help feeling that he may be lying there dead, or delirious, or something.”

“And I can’t help feeling that he must have gone out to dinner. We shall have to give him up, I’m afraid. It’s a pity. He’s so good with Mercaptan. Like bear and mastiff. Or rather, like bear and poodle, bear and King Charles’s spaniel⁠—or whatever those little dogs are that you see ladies in eighteenth-century French engravings taking to bed with them. Let’s go.”

“Just knock once again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “He might really be preoccupied, or asleep, or ill.” Gumbril knocked. “Now listen. Hush.”

They were