Those Barren Leaves, Aldous Huxley [best ereader for textbooks .txt] 📗

a female dancer, dressed in what looked rather like a Persian costume, was dancing a shawl dance for the diversion of the diners.

“They seem to have had simple tastes,” said Mr. Cardan. “There’s nothing very sophisticated or fin de siècle here⁠—no bull-baiting by naked female acrobats, as at Cnossos; no gladiatorial fights, no wholesale butchering of animals, no boring matches with brass knuckle-dusters, as in the Roman arenas. A nice school-boyish sort of people, it looks to me. Not quite civilized enough to be exigeant about their pleasures.”

“And not yet quite civilized enough,” added Chelifer, “to be really vulgar. In that respect they fall a long way behind the later Romans. Do you know that huge mosaic in the Lateran museum? It comes from one of the Imperial baths, I forget which, and consists of portraits of the principal sporting heroes of the epoch⁠—boxers and wrestlers⁠—with their trainers and backers. These last are treated very respectfully by the mosaic-maker, who represents them wearing togas and standing in the noblest attitudes. One sees at a glance that they are the gens bien, the sportsmen, the amateurs⁠—in a word, the monied interest. The athletes are portrayed in a state of nature, and are indeed so excessively natural that one could easily mistake the heavyweight boxers for gorillas peeled of their superfluous hair. Under each portrait is a caption with the name of the hero represented. The whole thing reminds one very much of the sporting page in a picture paper⁠—only it is a page that is forty feet long by thirty wide, and made, not of wood-pulp, but of the most durable materials ever devised by the ingenuity of man for the embodiment and visible eternization of his thoughts. And it is, I think, precisely the size and everlastingness of the frightful thing that makes it so much worse than the similar page from our picture papers. To make ephemeral heroes of professional sportsmen and prizefighters is bad enough; but that a people should desire to immortalize their fame is surely indicative of a profounder vulgarity and abjection. Like the Roman mob, the mobs of our modern capitals delight in sports and exercises which they themselves do not practise; but at any rate, the fame of our professionals lasts only a day after their triumph. We do not print their effigies on marble pavements made to live down a hundred generations of men. We print them on wood-pulp, which is much the same as printing them on water. It is comforting to think that by the year two thousand one hundred the whole of contemporary journalism, literature and thought will have crumbled to dust. The mosaic, however, will still be in its present state of perfect preservation. Nothing short of dynamite or an earthquake will ever totally destroy the effigies of those Imperial boxers. And a very good thing, too, for the future historians of Rome. For no man can claim that he has really understood the Roman empire till he has studied that mosaic. That pavement is a vessel filled with the quintessence of Roman reality. A drop of that reality is enough to shrivel up all the retrospective Utopias that historians have ever made or ever can make out of the chronicles of ancient Rome. After looking at that mosaic a man can have no more generous illusions about the people who admired it or the age in which it was made. He will realize that Roman civilization was not merely just as sordid as ours, but if anything more sordid. But in these Etruscan vaults,” Chelifer added, looking round at the frescoed walls, “one gets no such impression of organized and efficient beastliness as one gets from the Roman mosaic. There’s a freshness, as you say, Mr. Cardan, a certain jolly schoolboyishness about all the fun they represent. But I have no doubt, of course, that the impression is entirely fallacious. Their art has a certain archaic charm; but the artists were probably quite as sophisticated and quite as repulsive as their Roman successors.”

“Come, come,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget that they called Bacchus Fufluns. Give them at least the credit that is due to them.”

“But the Romans too had a fine language,” Chelifer objected. “And yet they laid down immense enlargements of the sporting page of the Daily Sketch in marble tesserae on a foundation of cement.”

They climbed again towards the light. The steps were so high and her legs so short that Miss Elver had to be helped up. The tomb resounded with her laughter and shrill whooping. They emerged at last out of the ground.

On the top of a high barrow some two or three hundred yards away stood the figure of a man, distinct against the sky. He was shading his eyes with his hand and seemed to be looking for something. Irene suddenly became very red.

“Why, I believe it’s Hovenden,” she said in a voice that was as casual as she could make it.

Almost simultaneously the man turned his face in their direction. The shading hand went up in a gesture of greeting. A glad “Hullo!” sounded across the tombs; the man skipped down from his barrow and came running across the down towards them. And Hovenden it was; Irene had seen aright.

“Been looking for you all over ve place,” he explained breathlessly as he came up. With the greatest heartiness he shook the hands of all present except⁠—diplomatically⁠—Irene’s. “Vey told me in ve town vat a party of foreigners was out here looking at ve cemetery or somefing. So I buzzed after you till I saw old Ernest wiv ve car at ve side of ve road. Been underground, have you?” He looked into the dark entrance of the tomb. “No wonder I couldn’t⁠ ⁠…”

Mrs. Aldwinkle cut him short. “But why aren’t you in Rome with Mr. Falx?” she asked.

Lord Hovenden’s boyish, freckled face became all at once exceedingly red. “Ve fact is,” he said, looking at the ground, “vat I didn’t feel very