Read Ebook: Antic Hay by Huxley Aldous

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Ebook has 1691 lines and 92650 words, and 34 pages

When he spoke to women--how easily and insolently he spoke now!--they listened and laughed and looked at him sideways and dropped their eyelids over the admission, the invitation, of their glance. With Phyllis once he had sat, for how long? in a warm and moonless darkness, saying nothing, risking no gesture. And in the end they had parted, reluctantly and still in silence. Phyllis now was with him once again in the summer night; but this time he spoke, now softly, now in the angry breathless whisper of desire, he reached out and took her, and she was naked in his arms. All chance encounters, all plotted opportunities recurred; he knew, now, how to live, how to take advantage of them.

Over the empty plains towards Mantua, towards Mantua, he slid along at ease, free and alone. He explored the horrors of Roman society; visited Athens and Seville. To Unamuno and Papini he conversed familiarly in their own tongues. He understood perfectly and without effort the quantum theory. To his friend Shearwater he gave half a million for physiological research. He visited Schoenberg and persuaded him to write still better music. He exhibited to the politicians the full extent of their stupidity and their wickedness; he set them working for the salvation, not the destruction, of humanity. Once in the past when he had been called upon to make a public speech, he had felt so nervous that he was sick; the thousands who listened to him now bent like wheat under the wind of his eloquence. But it was only by the way and occasionally that he troubled himself to move them. He found it easy now to come to terms with every one he met, to understand all points of view, to identify himself with even the most unfamiliar spirit. And he knew how everybody lived, and what it was like to be a mill girl, a dustman, an engine-driver, a Jew, an Anglican bishop, a confidence-trickster. Accustomed as he was to being swindled and imposed upon without protest, he now knew the art of being brutal. He was just dressing down that insolent porter at the Continental, who had complained that ten francs wasn't enough , when his landlady gave a knock, opened the door and said: "Dinner's ready, Mr. Gumbril."

Feeling a little ashamed at having been interrupted in what was, after all, one of the ignobler and more trivial occupations of his new life, Gumbril went down to his fatty chop and green peas. It was the first meal to be eaten under the new dispensation; he ate it, for all that it was unhappily indistinguishable from the meals of the past, with elation and a certain solemnity, as though he were partaking of a sacrament. He felt buoyant with the thought that at last, at last, he was doing something about life.

When the chop was eaten, he went upstairs and, after filling two suit-cases and a Gladstone bag with the most valued of his possessions, addressed himself to the task of writing to the Headmaster. He might have gone away, of course, without writing. But it would be nobler, more in keeping, he felt, with his new life, to leave a justification behind--or rather not a justification, a denouncement. He picked up his pen and denounced.

Gumbril senior occupied a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure square not far from Paddington. There were five floors, and a basement with beetles, and nearly a hundred stairs, which shook when any one ran too rudely down them. It was a prematurely old and decaying house in a decaying quarter. The square in which it stood was steadily coming down in the world. The houses which a few years ago had all been occupied by respectable families, were now split up into squalid little maisonnettes, and from the neighbouring slums, which along with most other unpleasant things the old bourgeois families had been able to ignore, invading bands of children came to sport on the once sacred pavements.

Mr. Gumbril was almost the last survivor of the old inhabitants. He liked his house, and he liked his square. Social decadence had not affected the fourteen plane trees which adorned its little garden, and the gambols of the dirty children did not disturb the starlings who came, evening by evening in summer-time, to roost in their branches.

On fine evenings he used to sit out on his balcony waiting for the coming of the birds. And just at sunset, when the sky was most golden, there would be a twittering overhead, and the black, innumerable flocks of starlings would come sweeping across on the way from their daily haunts to their roosting-places, chosen so capriciously among the tree-planted squares and gardens of the city and so tenaciously retained, year after year, to the exclusion of every other place. Why his fourteen plane trees should have been chosen, Mr. Gumbril could never imagine. There were plenty of larger and more umbrageous gardens all round; but they remained birdless, while every evening, from the larger flocks, a faithful legion detached itself to settle clamorously among his trees. They sat and chattered till the sun went down and twilight was past, with intervals every now and then of silence that fell suddenly and inexplicably on all the birds at once, lasted through a few seconds of thrilling suspense, to end as suddenly and senselessly in an outburst of the same loud and simultaneous conversation.

The starlings were Mr. Gumbril's most affectionately cherished friends; sitting out on his balcony to watch and listen to them, he had caught at the shut of treacherous evenings many colds and chills on the liver, he had laid up for himself many painful hours of rheumatism. These little accidents did nothing, however, to damp his affection for the birds; and still on every evening that could possibly be called fine, he was always to be seen in the twilight, sitting on the balcony, gazing up, round-spectacled and rapt, at the fourteen plane trees. The breezes stirred in his grey hair, tossing it up in long, light wisps that fell across his forehead and over his spectacles; and then he would shake his head impatiently, and the bony hand would be freed for a moment from its unceasing combing and clutching of the sparse grey beard to push back the strayed tendrils, to smooth and reduce to order the whole ruffled head. The birds chattered on, the hand went back to its clutching and combing; once more the wind blew; darkness came down, and the gas lamps round the square lit up the outer leaves of the plane trees, touched the privet bushes inside the railings with an emerald light; behind them was impenetrable night; instead of shorn grass and bedded geraniums there was mystery, there were endless depths. And the birds at last were silent.

Mr. Gumbril would get up from his iron chair, stretch his arms and his stiff cold legs and go in through the French window to work. The birds were his diversion; when they were silent, it was time to think of serious matters.

To-night, however, he was not working; for always on Sunday evenings his old friend Porteous came to dine and talk. Breaking in unexpectedly at midnight, Gumbril Junior found them sitting in front of the gas fire in his father's study.

"My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?" Gumbril Senior jumped up excitedly at his son's entrance. The light silky hair floated up with the movement, turned for a moment into a silver aureole, then subsided again. Mr. Porteous stayed where he was, calm, solid and undishevelled as a seated pillar-box. He wore a monocle on a black ribbon, a black stock tie that revealed above its double folds a quarter of an inch of stiff white collar, a double-breasted black coat, a pair of pale checked trousers and patent leather boots with cloth tops. Mr. Porteous was very particular about his appearance. Meeting him casually for the first time, one would not have guessed that Mr. Porteous was an expert on Late Latin poetry; and he did not mean that you should guess. Thin-limbed, bent and agile in his loose, crumpled clothes, Gumbril Senior had the air, beside Mr. Porteous, of a strangely animated scarecrow.

"What on earth?" the old gentleman repeated his question.

Gumbril Junior shrugged his shoulders. "I was bored, I decided to cease being a schoolmaster." He spoke with a fine airy assumption of carelessness. "How are you, Mr. Porteous?"

"Thank you, invariably well."

"Well, well," said Gumbril Senior, sitting down again, "I must say I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that you stood it, not being a born pedagogue, for as long as you did. What ever induced you to think of turning usher, I can't imagine." He looked at his son first through his spectacles, then over the top of them; the motives of the boy's conduct revealed themselves to neither vision.

"What else was there for me to do?" asked Gumbril Junior, pulling up a chair towards the fire. "You gave me a pedagogue's education and washed your hands of me. No opportunities, no openings. I had no alternative. And now you reproach me."

"I am interested in everything," interrupted Gumbril Junior.

"Which comes to the same thing," said his father parenthetically, "as being interested in nothing." And he went on from the point at which he had been interrupted. "You weren't sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it. That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds with classical educations, you became a schoolmaster."

"Come, come," said Mr. Porteous. "I do a little teaching myself; I must stand up for the profession."

Gumbril Senior let go his beard and brushed back the hair that the wind of his own vehemence had brought tumbling into his eyes. "I don't denigrate the profession," he said. "Not at all. It would be an excellent profession if every one who went into it were as much interested in teaching as you are in your job, Porteous, or I in mine. It's these undecided creatures like Theodore, who ruin it by drifting in. Until all teachers are geniuses and enthusiasts, nobody will learn anything, except what they teach themselves."

"Still," said Mr. Porteous, "I wish I hadn't had to learn so much by myself. I wasted a lot of time finding out how to set to work and where to discover what I wanted."

Gumbril Junior was lighting his pipe. "I have come to the conclusion," he said, speaking in little jerks between each suck of the flame into the bowl, "that most people ... ought never ... to be taught anything at all." He threw away the match. "Lord have mercy upon us, they're dogs. What's the use of teaching them anything except to behave well, to work and obey. Facts, theories, the truth about the universe--what good are those to them? Teach them to understand--why, it only confuses them; makes them lose hold of the simple real appearance. Not more than one in a hundred can get any good out of a scientific or literary education."

"And you're one of the ones?" asked his father.

"That goes without saying," Gumbril Junior replied.

"I think you mayn't be so far wrong," said Mr. Porteous. "When I think of my own children, for example...." he sighed, "I thought they'd be interested in the things that interested me; they don't seem to be interested in anything but behaving like little apes--not very anthropoid ones either, for that matter. At my eldest boy's age I used to sit up most of the night reading Latin texts. He sits up--or rather stands, reels, trots up--dancing and drinking. Do you remember St. Bernard? 'Vigilet tota nocte luxuriosus non solum patienter' ; 'sed et libenter, ut suam expleat voluptatem.' What the wise man does out of a sense of duty, the fool does for fun. And I've tried very hard to make him like Latin."

"Well in any case," said Gumbril Junior, "you didn't try to feed him on history. That's the real unforgivable sin. And that's what I've been doing, up till this evening--encouraging boys of fifteen and sixteen to specialize in history, hours and hours a week, making them read bad writers' generalizations about subjects on which only our ignorance allows us to generalize; teaching them to reproduce these generalizations in horrid little 'Essays' of their own; rotting their minds, in fact, with a diet of soft vagueness; scandalous it was. If these creatures are to be taught anything, it should be something hard and definite. Latin--that's excellent. Mathematics, physical science. Let them read history for amusement, certainly. But for Heaven's sake don't make it the staple of education!" Gumbril Junior spoke with the greatest earnestness, as though he were an inspector of schools, making a report. It was a subject on which, at the moment, he felt very profoundly; he felt profoundly on all subjects while he was talking about them. "I wrote a long letter to the Headmaster about the teaching of history this evening," he added. "It's most important." He shook his head thoughtfully, "Most important."

"Hora novissima, tempora pessimma sunt, vigilemus," said Mr. Porteous, in the words of St. Peter Damianus.

"Very true," Gumbril Senior applauded. "And talking about bad times, Theodore, what do you propose to do now, may I ask?"

"I mean to begin by making some money."

Gumbril Senior put his hands on his knees, bent forward and laughed, "Ha, ha, ha!" He had a profound bell-like laugh that was like the croaking of a very large and melodious frog. "You won't," he said, and shook his head till the hair fell into his eyes. "You won't," and he laughed again.

"To make money," said Mr. Porteous, "one must be really interested in money."

"And he's not," said Gumbril Senior. "None of us are."

"When I was still uncommonly hard up," Mr. Porteous continued, "we used to lodge in the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm, an ideal. He could have led a comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his old age. But for his high abstract ideal of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn't want to do anything, doesn't know what one does do with it. He desires neither power nor pleasure. His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning's 'Grammarian.' I have a great admiration for him."

Gumbril Senior turned once more towards his son. "And how do you propose," he asked, "to make this money?"

Gumbril Junior explained. He had thought it all out in the cab on the way from the station. "It came to me this morning," he said, "in chapel, during service."

"Monstrous," put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, "monstrous these mediaeval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!"

"It came," Gumbril Junior went on, "like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me--the idea of Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes."

"And what are Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes?"

"A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary"; Gumbril Junior had already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: "a comfort to all travellers, civilization's substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers' friend, the...."

"Lectulus Dei floridus," intoned Mr. Porteous.

"Gazophylacium Ecclesiae, Cithara benesonans Dei, Cymbalum jubilationis Christi, Promptuarium mysteriorum fidei, ora pro nobis.

Your small-clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore."

"Scientifically, then," said Gumbril Junior, "my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth."

"I must say," said Gumbril Senior on a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, "I have heard of worse inventions. You are too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot."

"When I have taken out a patent for my invention," his son went on, very business-like and cool, "I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall exploit it commercially myself. In either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any other Gumbril have ever done."

"Quite right," said Gumbril Senior, "quite right"; and he laughed very cheerfully. "And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You'll need it. But if you really want a capitalist," he went on, "I have exactly the man for you. He's a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more Tudor than they are. I've pulled half a dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently for him."

"He doesn't sound much good to me," said his son.

"Ah, but that's only his vice. Only his amusement. His business," Gumbril Senior hesitated.

"Well, what is his business?"

"Well, it seems to be everything. Patent medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist's stock--he's talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search of honey, or rather money."

"And he makes it?"

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