LIMBO
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
LEDA; AND OTHER POEMS
LIMBO
BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1920
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
FARCICAL HISTORY OF RICHARD GREENOW 1
HAPPILY EVER AFTER 116
EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS 192
HAPPY FAMILIES 211
CYNTHIA 245
THE BOOKSHOP 259
THE DEATH OF LULLY 269
LIMBO
FARCICAL HISTORY OF RICHARD GREENOW
I
THE most sumptuous present that Millicent received on her seventh
birthday was a doll's house. "With love to darling little Mill from
Aunty Loo." Aunt Loo was immensely rich, and the doll's house was
almost as grandiose and massive as herself.
It was divided into four rooms, each papered in a different colour and
each furnished as was fitting: beds and washstands and wardrobes in
the upstair rooms, arm-chairs and artificial plants below. "Replete
with every modern convenience; sumptuous appointments." There was even
a cold collation ready spread on the dining-room table--two scarlet
lobsters on a dish, and a ham that had been sliced into just enough to
reveal an internal complexion of the loveliest pink and white. One
might go on talking about the doll's house for ever, it was so
beautiful. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of Millicent's brother
Dick. He would spend hours opening and shutting the front door,
peeping through the windows, arranging and rearranging the furniture.
As for Millicent, the gorgeous present left her cold. She had been
hoping--and, what is more, praying, fervently, every night for a
month--that Aunty Loo would give her a toy sewing-machine (one of the
kind that works, though) for her birthday.
She was bitterly disappointed when the doll's house came instead. But
she bore it all stoically and managed to be wonderfully polite to
Aunty Loo about the whole affair. She never looked at the doll's
house: it simply didn't interest her.
Dick had already been at a preparatory school for a couple of terms.
Mr. Killigrew, the headmaster, thought him a promising boy. "Has quite
a remarkable aptitude for mathematics," he wrote in his report. "He
has started Algebra this term and shows a"--"quite remarkable"
scratched out (the language of reports is apt to be somewhat
limited)--"a very unusual grasp of the subject." Mr. Killigrew didn't
know that his pupil also took an interest in dolls: if he had, he
would have gibed at Dick as unmercifully and in nearly the same terms
as Dick's fellow-schoolboys--for shepherds grow to resemble their
sheep and pedagogues their childish charges. But of course Dick would
never have dreamt of telling anyone at school about it. He was chary
of letting even the people at home divine his weakness, and when
anyone came into the room where the doll's house was, he would put his
hands in his pockets and stroll out, whistling the tune of, "There is
a Happy Land far, far away, where they have Ham and Eggs seven times a
day," as though he had merely stepped in to have a look at the beastly
thing--just to give it a kick.
When he wasn't playing with the doll's house, Dick spent his holiday
time in reading, largely, devouringly. No length or
incomprehensibility could put him off; he had swallowed down _Robert
Elsmere_ in the three-volume edition at the age of eight. When he
wasn't reading he used to sit and think about Things in General and
Nothing in Particular; in fact, as Millicent reproachfully put it, he
just mooned about. Millicent, on the other hand, was always busily
doing something: weeding in the garden, or hoeing, or fruit-picking
(she could be trusted not to eat more than the recognized tariff--one
in twenty raspberries or one in forty plums); helping Kate in the
kitchen; knitting mufflers for those beings known vaguely as The
Cripples, while her mother read aloud in the evenings before bedtime.
She disapproved of Dick's mooning, but Dick mooned all the same.
When Dick was twelve and a half he knew enough about mathematics and
history and the dead languages to realize that his dear parents were
profoundly ignorant and uncultured. But, what was more pleasing to the
dear parents, he knew enough to win a scholarship at Æsop College,
which is one of our Greatest Public Schools.
If this were a Public School story, I should record the fact that,
while at Æsop, Dick swore, lied, blasphemed, repeated dirty stories,
read the articles in _John Bull_ about brothels disguised as
nursing-homes and satyrs disguised as curates; that he regarded his
masters, with very few exceptions, as fools, not even always
well-meaning. And so on. All which would be quite true, but beside the
point. For this is not one of the conventional studies of those clever
young men who discover Atheism and Art at School, Socialism at the
University, and, passing through the inevitable stage of Sex and
Syphilis after taking their B.A., turn into maturely brilliant
novelists at the age of twenty-five. I prefer, therefore, to pass over
the minor incidents of a difficult pubescence, touching only on those
points which seem to throw a light on the future career of our hero.
It is possible for those who desire it--incredible as the thing may
appear--to learn something at Æsop College. Dick even learnt a great
deal. From the beginning he was the young Benjamin of his mathematical
tutor, Mr. Skewbauld, a man of great abilities in his own art, and
who, though wholly incapable of keeping a form in order, could make
his private tuition a source of much profit to a mathematically minded
boy. Mr. Skewbauld's house was the worst in Æsop: Dick described it as
a mixture between a ghetto and a home for the mentally deficient, and
when he read in Sir Thomas Browne that it was a Vulgar Error to
suppose that Jews stink, he wrote a letter to the _School Magazine_
exploding that famous doctor as a quack and a charlatan, whose
statements ran counter to the manifest facts of everyday life in Mr.
Skewbauld's house. It may seem surprising that Dick should have read
Sir Thomas Browne at all. But he was more than a mere mathematician.
He filled the ample leisure, which is Æsop's most precious gift to
those of its Alumni who know how to use it, with much and varied
reading in history, in literature, in physical science, and in more
than one foreign language. Dick was something of a prodigy.
"Greenow's an intellectual," was Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger's
contemptuous verdict. "I have the misfortune to have two or three
intellectuals in my house. They're all of them friends of his. I think
he's a Bad Influence in the School." Copthorne-Slazenger regarded
himself as the perfect example of _mens sana in corpore sano_, the
soul of an English gentleman in the body of a Greek god. Unfortunately
his legs were rather too short and his lower lip was underhung like a
salmon's.
Dick had, indeed, collected about him a band of kindred spirits. There
was Partington, who specialized in history; Gay, who had read all the
classical writings of the golden age and was engaged in the study of
mediæval Latin; Fletton, who was fantastically clever and had brought
the art of being idle to a pitch never previously reached in the
annals of Æsop. These were his chief friends, and a queer-looking
group they made--Dick, small and dark and nervous; Partington, all
roundness, and whose spectacles were two moons in a moonface; Gay,
with the stiff walk of a little old man; and Fletton, who looked like
nobody so much as Mr. Jingle, tall and thin with a twisted, comical
face.
"An ugly skulking crew," Copthorne-Slazenger, conscious of his own
Olympian splendour, would say as he saw them pass.
With these faithful friends Dick should have been--and indeed for the
most part was--very happy. Between them they mustered up a great stock
of knowledge; they could discuss every subject under the sun. They
were a liberal education and an amusement to one another. There were
times, however, when Dick was filled with a vague, but acute,
discontent. He wanted something which his friends could not give him;
but what, but what? The discontent rankled under the surface, like a
suppressed measles. It was Lord Francis Quarles who brought it out and
made the symptoms manifest.
Francis Quarles was a superb creature, with the curly forehead of a
bull and the face and limbs of a Græco-Roman statue. It was a sight
worth seeing when he looked down through half-shut eyelids, in his
usual attitude of sleepy arrogance, on the world about him. He was in
effect what Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger imagined himself to be, and he
shared that gentleman's dislike for Dick and his friends. "Yellow
little atheists," he called them. He always stood up for God and the
Church of England; they were essential adjuncts to the aristocracy.
God, indeed, was almost a member of the Family; lack of belief in Him
amounted to a personal insult to the name of Quarles.
It was half-way through the summer term, when Dick was sixteen, on one
of those days of brilliant sunshine and cloudless blue, when the sight
of beautiful and ancient buildings is peculiarly poignant. Their age
and quiet stand out in melancholy contrast against the radiant life of
the summer; and at Æsop the boys go laughing under their antique
shadow; "Little victims"--you feel how right Gray was. Dick was idly
strolling across the quadrangle, engaged in merely observing the
beauty about him--the golden-grey chapel, with its deep geometrical
shadows between the buttresses, the comely rose-coloured shapes of the
brick-built Tudor buildings, the weathercocks glittering in the sun,
the wheeling flurries of pigeons. His old discontent had seized on him
again, and to-day in the presence of all this beauty it had become
almost unbearable. All at once, out of the mouth of one of the dark
little tunnelled doors pierced in the flanks of the sleeping building,
a figure emerged into the light. It was Francis Quarles, clad in white
flannels and the radiance of the sunshine. He appeared like a
revelation, bright, beautiful, and sudden, before Dick's eyes. A
violent emotion seized him; his heart leapt, his bowels were moved
within him; he felt a little sick and faint--he had fallen in love.
Francis passed by without deigning to notice him. His head was high,
his eyes drowsy under their drooping lids. He was gone, and for Dick
all the light was out, the beloved quadrangle was a prison-yard, the
pigeons a loathsome flock of carrion eaters. Gay and Partington came
up behind him with shouts of invitation. Dick walked rudely away. God!
how he hated them and their wretched, silly talk and their yellow,
ugly faces.
The weeks that followed were full of strangeness. For the first time
in his life Dick took to writing poetry. There was one sonnet which
began:
Is it a vision or a waking dream?
Or is it truly Apollo that I see,
Come from his sylvan haunts in Arcady
{ laugh and loiter
To {
{ sing and saunter by an English stream. . . .
He kept on repeating the words to himself, "Sylvan haunts in Arcady,"
"laugh and loiter" (after much thought he had adopted that as more
liquidly melodious than "sing and saunter"). How beautiful they
sounded!--as beautiful as Keats--more beautiful, for they were his
own.
He avoided the company of Gay and Fletton and Partington; they had
become odious to him, and their conversation, when he could bring
himself to listen to it, was, somehow, almost incomprehensible. He
would sit for hours alone in his study; not working--for he could not
understand the mathematical problems on which he had been engaged
before the fateful day in the quadrangle--but reading novels and the
poetry of Mrs. Browning, and at intervals writing something rather
ecstatic of his own. After a long preparatory screwing up of his
courage, he dared at last to send a fag with a note to Francis, asking
him to tea; and when Francis rather frigidly refused, he actually
burst into tears. He had not cried like that since he was a child.
He became suddenly very religious. He would spend an hour on his knees
every night, praying, praying with frenzy. He mortified the flesh with
fasting and watching. He even went so far as to flagellate himself--or
at least tried to; for it is very difficult to flagellate yourself
adequately with a cane in a room so small that any violent gesture
imperils the bric-à-brac. He would pass half the night stark naked, in
absurd postures, trying to hurt himself. And then, after the
dolorously pleasant process of self-maceration was over, he used to
lean out of the window and listen to the murmurs of the night and fill
his spirit with the warm velvet darkness of midsummer.
Copthorne-Slazenger, coming back by the late train from town one
night, happened to see his moon-pale face hanging out of window and
was delighted to be able to give him two hundred Greek lines to remind
him that even a member of the Sixth Form requires sleep sometimes.
The fit lasted three weeks. "I can't think what's the matter with you,
Greenow," complained Mr. Skewbauld snufflingly. "You seem incapable or
unwilling to do anything at all. I suspect the cause is constipation.
If only everyone would take a little paraffin every night before going
to bed! . . ." Mr. Skewbauld's self-imposed mission in life
was the propagation of the paraffin habit. It was the universal
panacea--the cure for every ill.
His friends of before the crisis shook their heads and could only
suppose him mad. And then the fit ended as suddenly as it had begun.
It happened at a dinner-party given by the Cravisters. Dr. Cravister
was the Headmaster of Æsop--a good, gentle, learned old man, with
snow-white hair and a saintly face which the spirit of comic irony had
embellished with a nose that might, so red and bulbous it was, have
been borrowed from the properties of a music-hall funny man. And then
there was Mrs. Cravister, large and stately as a galleon with all
sails set. Those who met her for the first time might be awed by the
dignity of what an Elizabethan would have called her "swelling port."
But those who knew her well went in terror of the fantastic spirit
which lurked behind the outward majesty. They were afraid of what that
richly modulated voice of hers might utter. It was not merely that she
was malicious--and she had a gift of ever-ready irony; no, what was
alarming in all her conversation was the element of the unexpected.
With most people one feels comfortably secure that they will always
say the obvious and ordinary things; with Mrs. Cravister, never. The
best one could do was to be on guard and to try and look, when she
made a more than usually characteristic remark, less of a bewildered
fool than one felt.
Mrs. Cravister received her guests--they were all of them boys--with
stately courtesy. They found it pleasant to be taken so seriously, to
be treated as perfectly grown men; but at the same time, they always
had with Mrs. Cravister a faint uncomfortable suspicion that all her
politeness was an irony so exquisite as to be practically
undistinguishable from ingenuousness.
"Good evening, Mr. Gay," she said, holding out her hand and shutting
her eyes; it was one of her disconcerting habits, this shutting of the
eyes. "What a pleasure it will be to hear you talking to us again
about eschatology."
Gay, who had never talked about eschatology and did not know the
meaning of the word, smiled a little dimly and made a protesting
noise.
"Eschatology? What a charming subject!" The fluty voice belonged to
Henry Cravister, the Headmaster's son, a man of about forty who worked
in the British Museum. He was almost too cultured, too erudite.
"But I don't know anything about it," said Gay desperately.
"Spare us your modesty," Henry Cravister protested.
His mother shook hands with the other guests, putting some at their
ease with a charming phrase and embarrassing others by saying
something baffling and unexpected that would have dismayed even the
hardiest diner-out, much more a schoolboy tremblingly on his good
behaviour. At the tail end of the group of boys stood Dick and Francis
Quarles. Mrs. Cravister slowly raised her heavy waxen eyelids and
regarded them a moment in silence.
"The Græco-Roman and the Gothic side by side!" she exclaimed. "Lord
Francis is something in the Vatican, a rather late piece of work; and
Mr. Greenow is a little gargoyle from the roof of Notre Dame de Paris.
Two epochs of art--how clearly one sees the difference. And my
husband, I always think, is purely Malayan in design--purely Malayan,"
she repeated as she shook hands with the two boys.
Dick blushed to the roots of his hair, but Francis' impassive
arrogance remained unmoved. Dick stole a glance in his direction, and
at the sight of his calm face he felt a new wave of adoring admiration
sweeping through him.
The company was assembled and complete, Mrs. Cravister looked round
the room and remarking, "We won't wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger,"
sailed majestically in the direction of the door. She particularly
disliked this member of her husband's staff, and lost no opportunity
of being rude to him. Thus, where an ordinary hostess might have said,
"Shall we come in to dinner?" Mrs. Cravister employed the formula, "We
won't wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger"; and a guest unacquainted with
Mrs. Cravister's habits would be surprised on entering the dining-room
to find that all the seats at the table were filled, and that the meal
proceeded smoothly without a single further reference to the missing
Copthorne, who never turned up at all, for the good reason that he had
never been invited.
Dinner began a little nervously and uncomfortably. At one end of the
table the Headmaster was telling anecdotes of Æsop in the sixties, at
which the boys in his neighbourhood laughed with a violent nervous
insincerity. Henry Cravister, still talking about eschatology, was
quoting from Sidonius Apollinarius and Commodianus of Gaza. Mrs.
Cravister, who had been engaged in a long colloquy with the butler,
suddenly turned on Dick with the remark, "And so you have a deep,
passionate fondness for cats," as though they had been intimately
discussing the subject for the last hour. Dick had enough presence of
mind to say that, yes, he did like cats--all except those Manx ones
that had no tails.
"No tails," Mrs. Cravister repeated--"no tails. Like men. How
symbolical everything is!"
Francis Quarles was sitting opposite him, so that Dick had ample
opportunity to look at his idol. How perfectly he did everything, down
to eating his soup! The first lines of a new poem began to buzz in
Dick's head:
"All, all I lay at thy proud marble feet--
My heart, my love and all my future days.
Upon thy brow for ever let me gaze,
For ever touch thy hair: oh (something) sweet . . ."
Would he be able to find enough rhymes to make it into a sonnet? Mrs.
Cravister, who had been leaning back in her chair for the last few
minutes in a state of exhausted abstraction, opened her eyes and said
to nobody in particular:
"Ah, how I envy the calm of those Chinese dynasties!"
"Which Chinese dynasties?" a well-meaning youth inquired.
"Any Chinese dynasty, the more remote the better. Henry, tell us the
names of some Chinese dynasties."
In obedience to his mother, Henry delivered a brief disquisition on
the history of politics, art, and letters in the Far East.
The Headmaster continued his reminiscences.
An angel of silence passed. The boys, whose shyness had begun to wear
off, became suddenly and painfully conscious of hearing themselves
eating. Mrs. Cravister saved the situation.
"Lord Francis knows all about birds," she said in her most thrilling
voice. "Perhaps he can tell us why it is the unhappy fate of the
carrion crow to mate for life."
Conversation again became general. Dick was still thinking about his
sonnet. Oh, these rhymes!--praise, bays, roundelays, amaze: greet,
bleat, defeat, beat, paraclete. . . .
". . . to sing the praise
In anthems high and solemn roundelays
Of Holy Father, Son and Paraclete."
That was good--damned good; but it hardly seemed to fit in with the
first quatrain. It would do for one of his religious poems, though. He
had written a lot of sacred verse lately.
Then suddenly, cutting across his ecstatic thoughts, came the sound of
Henry Cravister's reedy voice.
"But I always find Pater's style so _coarse_," it said.
Something explosive took place in Dick's head. It often happens when
one blows one's nose that some passage in the labyrinth connecting
ears and nose and throat is momentarily blocked, and one becomes deaf
and strangely dizzy. Then, suddenly, the mucous bubble bursts, sound
rushes back to the brain, the head feels clear and stable once more.
It was something like this, but transposed into terms of the spirit,
that seemed now to have happened to Dick.
It was as though some mysterious obstruction in his brain, which had
dammed up and diverted his faculties from their normal course during
the past three weeks, had been on a sudden overthrown. His life seemed
to be flowing once more along familiar channels.
He was himself again.
"But I always find Pater's style so _coarse_."
These few words of solemn foolery were the spell which had somehow
performed the miracle. It was just the sort of remark he might have
made three weeks ago, before the crisis. For a moment, indeed, he
almost thought it was he himself who had spoken; his own authentic
voice, carried across the separating gulf of days, had woken him again
to life!
He looked at Francis Quarles. Why, the fellow was nothing but a great
prize ox, a monstrous animal. "There was a Lady loved a Swine. Honey,
said she . . ." It was ignoble, it was ridiculous. He could have
hidden his face in his hands for pure shame; shame tingled through his
body. Goodness, how grotesquely he had behaved!
He leaned across and began talking to Henry Cravister about Pater and
style and books in general. Cravister was amazed at the maturity of
the boy's mind; for he possessed to a remarkable degree that critical
faculty which in the vast majority of boys is--and from their lack of
experience must be--wholly lacking.
"You must come and see me some time when you're in London," Henry
Cravister said to him when the time came for the boys to get back to
their houses. Dick was flattered; he had not said that to any of the
others. He walked home with Gay, laughing and talking quite in his old
fashion. Gay marvelled at the change in his companion; strange,
inexplicable fellow! but it was pleasant to have him back again, to
repossess the lost friend. Arrived in his room, Dick sat down to
attack the last set of mathematical problems that had been set him.
Three hours ago they had appeared utterly incomprehensible; now he
understood them perfectly. His mind was like a giant refreshed,
delighting in its strength.
Next day Mr. Skewbauld congratulated him on his answers.
"You seem quite to have recovered your old form, Greenow," he said.
"Did you take my advice? Paraffin regularly . . ."
Looking back on the events of the last weeks, Dick was disquieted. Mr.
Skewbauld might be wrong in recommending paraffin, but he was surely
right in supposing that something was the matter and required a
remedy. What could it be? He felt so well; but that, of course, proved
nothing. He began doing Müller's exercises, and he bought a jar of
malt extract and a bottle of hypophosphites. After much consultation
of medical handbooks and the encyclopædia, he came to the conclusion
that he was suffering from anæmia of the brain; and for some time one
fixed idea haunted him: Suppose the blood completely ceased to flow to
his brain, suppose he were to fall down suddenly dead or, worse,
become utterly and hopelessly paralysed. . . . Happily the
distractions of Æsop in the summer term were sufficiently numerous and
delightful to divert his mind from this gloomy brooding, and he felt
so well and in such high spirits that it was impossible to go on
seriously believing that he was at death's door. Still, whenever he
thought of the events of those strange weeks he was troubled. He did
not like being confronted by problems which he could not solve. During
the rest of his stay at school he was troubled by no more than the
merest velleities of a relapse. A fit of moon-gazing and incapacity to
understand the higher mathematics had threatened him one time when he
was working rather too strenuously for a scholarship. But a couple of
days' complete rest had staved off the peril. There had been rather a
painful scene, too, at Dick's last School Concert. Oh, those Æsop
concerts! Musically speaking, of course, they are deplorable; but how
rich from all other points of view than the merely æsthetic! The
supreme moment arrives at the very end when three of the most eminent
and popular of those about to leave mount the platform together and
sing the famous "Æsop, Farewell." Greatest of school songs! The words
are not much, but the tune, which goes swooning along in three-four
time, is perhaps the masterpiece of the late organist, Dr. Pilch.
Dick was leaving, but he was not a sufficiently heroic figure to have
been asked to sing, "Æsop, Farewell." He was simply a member of the
audience, and one, moreover, who had come to the concert in a critical
and mocking spirit. For, as he had an ear for music, it was impossible
for him to take the concert very seriously. The choir had clamorously
re-crucified the Messiah; the soloists had all done their worst; and
now it was time for "Æsop, Farewell." The heroes climbed on to the
stage. They were three demi-gods, but Francis Quarles was the most
splendid of the group as he stood there with head thrown back, eyes
almost closed, calm and apparently unconscious of the crowd that
seethed, actually and metaphorically, beneath him. He was wearing an
enormous pink orchid in the buttonhole of his evening coat; his
shirt-front twinkled with diamond studs; the buttons of his waistcoat
were of fine gold. At the sight of him, Dick felt his heart beating
violently; he was not, he painfully realized, master of himself.
The music struck up--Dum, dum, dumdidi, dumdidi; dum, dum, dum, and so
on. So like the _Merry Widow._ In two days' time he would have left
Æsop for ever. The prospect had never affected him very intensely. He
had enjoyed himself at school, but he had never, like so many
Æsopians, fallen in love with the place. It remained for him an
institution; for others it was almost an adored person. But to-night
his spirit, rocked on a treacly ocean of dominant sevenths, succumbed
utterly to the sweet sorrow of parting. And there on the platform
stood Francis. Oh, how radiantly beautiful! And when he began, in his
rich tenor, the first verse of the Valedictory:
"Farewell, Mother Æsop,
Our childhood's home!
Our spirit is with thee,
Though far we roam . . ."
he found himself hysterically sobbing.
II
CANTELOUP COLLEGE is perhaps the most frightful building in
Oxford--and to those who know their Oxford well this will mean not a
little. Up till the middle of last century Canteloup possessed two
quadrangles of fifteenth-century buildings, unimpressive and petty,
like so much of College architecture, but at least quiet, unassuming,
decent. After the accession of Victoria the College began to grow in
numbers, wealth, and pride. The old buildings were too small and
unpretentious for what had now become a Great College. In the summer
of 1867 a great madness fell upon the Master and Fellows. They hired a
most distinguished architect, bred up in the school of Ruskin, who
incontinently razed all the existing buildings to the ground and
erected in their stead a vast pile in the approved Mauro-Venetian
Gothic of the period. The New Buildings contained a great number of
rooms, each served by a separate and almost perpendicular staircase;
and if nearly half of them were so dark as to make it necessary to
light them artificially for all but three hours out of the
twenty-four, this slight defect was wholly outweighed by the striking
beauty, from outside, of the Neo-Byzantine loopholes by which they
were, euphemistically, "lighted."
Prospects in Canteloup may not please; but man, on the other hand,
tends to be less vile there than in many other places. There is an
equal profusion at Canteloup of Firsts and Blues; there are Union
orators of every shade of opinion and young men so languidly well bred
as to take no interest in politics of any kind; there are drinkers of
cocoa and drinkers of champagne. Canteloup is a microcosm, a whole
world in miniature; and whatever your temperament and habits may be,
whether you wish to drink, or row, or work, or hunt, Canteloup will
provide you with congenial companions and a spiritual home.
Lack of athletic distinction had prevented Dick from being, at Æsop, a
hero or anything like one. At Canteloup, in a less barbarically
ordered state of society, things were different. His rooms in the
Venetian gazebo over the North Gate became the meeting-place of all
that was most intellectually distinguished in Canteloup and the
University at large. He had had his sitting-room austerely upholstered
and papered in grey. A large white Chinese figure of the best period
stood pedestalled in one corner, and on the walls there hung a few
uncompromisingly good drawings and lithographs by modern artists.
Fletton, who had accompanied Dick from Æsop to Canteloup, called it
the "cerebral chamber"; and with its prevailing tone of brain-coloured
grey and the rather dry intellectual taste of its decorations it
deserved the name.
To-night the cerebral chamber had been crammed. The Canteloup branch
of the Fabian Society, under Dick's presidency, had been holding a
meeting. "Art in the Socialist State" was what they had been
discussing. And now the meeting had broken up, leaving nothing but
three empty jugs that had once contained mulled claret and a general
air of untidiness to testify to its having taken place at all. Dick
stood leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece and absent-mindedly kicking,
to the great detriment of his pumps, at the expiring red embers in the
grate. From the depths of a huge and cavernous arm-chair, Fletton,
pipe in mouth, fumed like a sleepy volcano.
"I liked the way, Dick," he said, with a laugh--"the way you went for
the Arty-Crafties. You utterly destroyed them."
"I merely pointed out, what is sufficiently obvious, that crafts are
not art, nor anything like it, that's all." Dick snapped out the
words. He was nervous and excited, and his body felt as though it were
full of compressed springs ready to jump at the most imponderable
touch. He was always like that after making a speech.
"You did it very effectively," said Fletton. There was a silence
between the two young men.
A noise like the throaty yelling of savages in rut came wafting up
from the quadrangle on which the windows of the cerebral chamber
opened. Dick started; all the springs within him had gone off at
once--a thousand simultaneous Jack-in-the-boxes.
"It's only Francis Quarles' dinner-party becoming vocal," Fletton
explained. "Blind mouths, as Milton would call them."
Dick began restlessly pacing up and down the room. When Fletton spoke
to him, he did not reply or, at best, gave utterance to a monosyllable
or a grunt.
"My dear Dick," said the other at last, "you're not very good company
to-night," and heaving himself up from the arm-chair, Fletton went
shuffling in his loose, heelless slippers towards the door. "I'm going
to bed."
Dick paused in his lion-like prowling to listen to the receding sound
of feet on the stairs. All was silent now: Gott sei dank. He went into
his bedroom. It was there that he kept his piano, for it was a piece
of furniture too smugly black and polished to have a place in the
cerebral chamber. He had been thirsting after his piano all the time
Fletton was sitting there, damn him! He drew up a chair and began to
play over and over a certain series of chords. With his left hand he
struck an octave G in the base, while his right dwelt lovingly on F,
B, and E. A luscious chord, beloved by Mendelssohn--a chord in which
the native richness of the dominant seventh is made more rich, more
piercing sweet by the addition of a divine discord. G, F, B, and E--he
let the notes hang tremulously on the silence, savoured to the full
their angelic overtones; then, when the sound of the chord had almost
died away, he let it droop reluctantly through D to the simple,
triumphal beauty of C natural--the diapason closing full in what was
for Dick a wholly ineffable emotion.
He repeated that dying fall again and again, perhaps twenty times.
Then, when he was satiated with its deliciousness, he rose from the
piano and opening the lowest drawer of the wardrobe pulled out from
under his evening clothes a large portfolio. He undid the strings; it
was full of photogravure reproductions from various Old Masters. There
was an almost complete set of Greuze's works, several of the most
striking Ary Scheffers, some Alma Tadema, some Leighton, photographs
of sculpture by Torwaldsen and Canova, Boecklin's "Island of the
Dead," religious pieces by Holman Hunt, and a large packet of
miscellaneous pictures from the Paris Salons of the last forty years.
He took them into the cerebral chamber where the light was better, and
began to study them, lovingly, one by one. The Cézanne lithograph, the
three admirable etchings by Van Gogh, the little Picasso looked on,
unmoved, from the walls.
It was three o'clock before Dick got to bed. He was stiff and cold,
but full of the satisfaction of having accomplished something. And,
indeed, he had cause to be satisfied; for he had written the first
four thousand words of a novel, a chapter and a half of _Heartsease
Fitzroy: the Story of a Young Girl_.
Next morning Dick looked at what he had written overnight, and was
alarmed. He had never produced anything quite like this since the days
of the Quarles incident at Æsop. A relapse? He wondered. Not a serious
one in any case; for this morning he felt himself in full possession
of all his ordinary faculties. He must have got overtired speaking to
the Fabians in the evening. He looked at his manuscript again, and
read: "'Daddy, do the little girl angels in heaven have toys and
kittens and teddy-bears?'
"'I don't know,' said Sir Christopher gently. 'Why does my little one
ask?'
"'Because, daddy," said the child--'because I think that soon I too
may be a little angel, and I should so like to have my teddy-bear with
me in heaven.'
"Sir Christopher clasped her to his breast. How frail she was, how
ethereal, how nearly an angel already! Would she have her teddy-bear
in heaven? The childish question rang in his ears. Great, strong man
though he was, he was weeping. His tears fell in a rain upon her
auburn curls.
"'Tell me, daddy,' she insisted, 'will dearest God allow me my
teddy-bear?'
"'My child,' he sobbed, 'my child . . .'"
The blushes mounted hot to his cheeks; he turned away his head in
horror. He would really have to look after himself for a bit, go to
bed early, take exercise, not do much work. This sort of thing
couldn't be allowed to go on.
He went to bed at half-past nine that night, and woke up the following
morning to find that he had added a dozen or more closely written
pages to his original manuscript during the night. He supposed he must
have written them in his sleep. It was all very disquieting. The days
passed by; every morning a fresh instalment was added to the rapidly
growing bulk of _Heartsease Fitzroy_. It was as though some goblin,
some Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, came each night to perform the appointed
task, vanishing before the morning. In a little while Dick's alarm
wore off; during the day he was perfectly well; his mind functioned
with marvellous efficiency. It really didn't seem to matter what he
did in his sleep provided he was all right in his waking hours. He
almost forgot about _Heartsease_, and was only reminded of her
existence when by chance he opened the drawer in which the steadily
growing pile of manuscript reposed.
In five weeks _Heartsease Fitzroy_ was finished. Dick made a parcel of
the manuscript and sent it to a literary agent. He had no hopes of any
publisher taking the thing; but he was in sore straits for money at
the moment, and it seemed worth trying, on the off-chance. A fortnight
later Dick received a letter beginning: "DEAR MADAM,--Permit me to
hail in you a new authoress of real talent. _Heartsease Fitzroy_ is
GREAT,"--and signed "EBOR W. SIMS, Editor, _Hildebrand's Home
Weekly_."
Details of the circulation of _Hildebrand's Home Weekly_ were printed
at the head of the paper; its average net sale was said to exceed
three and a quarter millions. The terms offered by Mr. Sims seemed to
Dick positively fabulous. And there would be the royalties on the
thing in book form after the serial had run its course.
The letter arrived at breakfast; Dick cancelled all engagements for
the day and set out immediately for a long and solitary walk. It was
necessary to be alone, to think. He made his way along the Seven
Bridges Road, up Cumnor Hill, through the village, and down the
footpath to Bablock Hithe, thence to pursue the course of the
"stripling Thames"--haunted at every step by the Scholar Gipsy, damn
him! He drank beer and ate some bread and cheese in a little inn by a
bridge, farther up the river; and it was there, in the inn parlour,
surrounded by engravings of the late Queen, and breathing the slightly
mouldy preserved air bottled some three centuries ago into that
hermetically sealed chamber--it was there that he solved the problem,
perceived the strange truth about himself.
He was a hermaphrodite.
A hermaphrodite, not in the gross obvious sense, of course, but
spiritually. Two persons in one, male and female. Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde: or rather a new William Sharp and Fiona MacLeod--a more
intelligent William, a vulgarer Fiona. Everything was explained; the
deplorable Quarles incident was simple and obvious now. A sentimental
young lady of literary tastes writing sonnets to her Ouida guardsman.
And what an unerring flair Mr. Sims had shown by addressing him so
roundly and unhesitatingly as "madam"!
Dick was elated at this discovery. He had an orderly mind that
disliked mysteries. He had been a puzzle to himself for a long time;
now he was solved. He was not in the least distressed to discover this
abnormality in his character. As long as the two parts of him kept
well apart, as long as his male self could understand mathematics, and
as long as his lady novelist's self kept up her regular habit of
writing at night and retiring from business during the day, the
arrangement would be admirable. The more he thought about it, the more
it seemed an ideal state of affairs. His life would arrange itself so
easily and well. He would devote the day to the disinterested pursuit
of knowledge, to philosophy and mathematics, with perhaps an
occasional excursion into politics. After midnight he would write
novels with a feminine pen, earning the money that would make his
unproductive male labours possible. A kind of spiritual _souteneur_.
But the fear of poverty need haunt him no more; no need to become a
wage-slave, to sacrifice his intelligence to the needs of his belly.
Like a gentleman of the East, he would sit still and smoke his
philosophic pipe while the womenfolk did the dirty work. Could
anything be more satisfactory?
He paid for his bread and beer, and walked home, whistling as he went.
III
TWO months later the first instalment of _Heartsease Fitzroy: the
Story of a Young Girl_, by Pearl Bellairs, appeared in the pages of
_Hildebrand's Home Weekly_. Three and a quarter millions read and
approved. When the story appeared in book form, two hundred thousand
copies were sold in six weeks; and in the course of the next two years
no less than sixteen thousand female infants in London alone were
christened Heartsease. With her fourth novel and her two hundred and
fiftieth Sunday paper article, Pearl Bellairs was well on her way to
becoming a household word.
Meanwhile Dick was in receipt of an income far beyond the wildest
dreams of his avarice. He was able to realize the two great ambitions
of his life--to wear silk underclothing and to smoke good (but really
good) cigars.
IV
DICK went down from Canteloup in a blaze of glory. The most brilliant
man of his generation, exceptional mind, prospects, career. But his
head was not turned. When people congratulated him on his academic
successes, he thanked them politely and then invited them to come and
see his Memento Mori. His Memento Mori was called Mr. Glottenham and
could be found at any hour of the day in the premises of the Union, or
if it was evening, in the Senior Common Room at Canteloup. He was an
old member of the College, and the dons in pity for his age and
loneliness had made him, some years before, a member of their Common
Room. This act of charity was as bitterly regretted as any generous
impulse in the history of the world. Mr. Glottenham made the life of
the Canteloup fellows a burden to them; he dined in Hall with fiendish
regularity, never missing a night, and he was always the last to leave
the Common Room. Mr. Glottenham did not prepossess at a first glance;
the furrows of his face were covered with a short grey sordid stubble;
his clothes were disgusting with the spilth of many years of dirty
feeding; he had the shoulders and long hanging arms of an ape--an ape
with a horribly human look about it. When he spoke, it was like the
sound of a man breaking coke; he spoke incessantly and on every
subject. His knowledge was enormous; but he possessed the secret of a
strange inverted alchemy--he knew how to turn the richest gold to
lead, could make the most interesting topic so intolerably tedious
that it was impossible, when he talked, not to loathe it.
This was the death's-head to which Dick, like an ancient philosopher
at a banquet, would direct the attention of his heartiest
congratulators. Mr. Glottenham had had the most dazzling academic
career of his generation. His tutors had prophesied for him a future
far more brilliant than that of any of his contemporaries. They were
now Ministers of State, poets, philosophers, judges, millionaires. Mr.
Glottenham frequented the Union and the Canteloup Senior Common Room,
and was--well, he was just Mr. Glottenham. Which was why Dick did not
think too highly of his own laurels.
V
"WHAT shall I do? what ought I to do?" Dick walked up and down the
room smoking, furiously and without at all savouring its richness, one
of his opulent cigars.
"My dear," said Cravister--for it was in Cravister's high-ceilinged
Bloomsbury room that Dick was thus unveiling his distress of
spirit--"my dear, this isn't a revival meeting. You speak as though
there were an urgent need for your soul to be saved from hell fire.
It's not as bad as that, you know."
"But it _is_ a revival meeting," Dick shouted in exasperation--"it is.
I'm a revivalist. You don't know what it's like to have a feeling
about your soul. I'm terrifyingly earnest; you don't seem to
understand that. I have all the feelings of Bunyan without his
religion. I regard the salvation of my soul as important. How simple
everything would be if one could go out with those creatures in
bonnets and sing hymns like, 'Hip, hip for the blood of the Lamb,
hurrah!' or that exquisite one:
"'The bells of Hell ring tingalingaling
For you, but not for me.
For me the angels singalingaling;
They've got the goods for me.'
Unhappily it's impossible."
"Your ideas," said Cravister in his flutiest voice, "are somewhat
Gothic. I think I can understand them, though of course I don't
sympathize or approve. My advice to people in doubt about what course
of action they ought to pursue is always the same: do what you want
to."
"Cravister, you're hopeless," said Dick, laughing. "I suppose I am
rather Gothic, but I do feel that the question of ought as well as of
want does arise."
Dick had come to his old friend for advice about Life. What ought he
to do? The indefatigable pen of Pearl Bellairs solved for him the
financial problem. There remained only the moral problem: how could he
best expend his energies and his time? Should he devote himself to
knowing or doing, philosophy or politics? He felt in himself the
desire to search for truth and the ability--who knows?--to find it. On
the other hand, the horrors of the world about him seemed to call on
him to put forth all his strength in an effort to ameliorate what was
so patently and repulsively bad. Actually, what had to be decided was
this: Should he devote himself to the researches necessary to carry
out the plan, long ripening in his brain, of a new system of
scientific philosophy; or should he devote his powers and Pearl
Bellairs' money in propaganda that should put life into the English
revolutionary movement? Great moral principles were in the balance.
And Cravister's advice was, do what you want to!
After a month of painful indecision, Dick, who was a real Englishman,
arrived at a satisfactory compromise. He started work on his new
Synthetic Philosophy, and at the same time joined the staff of the
_Weekly International_, to which he contributed both money and
articles. The weeks slipped pleasantly and profitably along. The
secret of happiness lies in congenial work, and no one could have
worked harder than Dick, unless it was the indefatigable Pearl
Bellairs, whose nightly output of five thousand words sufficed to
support not only Dick but the _Weekly International_ as well. These
months were perhaps the happiest period of Dick's life. He had
friends, money, liberty; he knew himself to be working well; and it
was an extra, a supererogatory happiness that he began at this time to
get on much better with his sister Millicent than he had ever done
before. Millicent had come up to Oxford as a student at St. Mungo Hall
in Dick's third year. She had grown into a very efficient and very
intelligent young woman. A particularly handsome young woman as well.
She was boyishly slender, and a natural grace kept on breaking through
the somewhat rigid deportment, which she always tried to impose upon
herself, in little beautiful gestures and movements that made the
onlooker catch his breath with astonished pleasure.
"Wincing she was as is a jolly colt,
Straight as a mast and upright as a bolt:"
Chaucer had as good an eye for youthful grace as for mormals and
bristly nostrils and thick red jovial villainousness.
Millicent lost no time in making her presence at St. Mungo's felt.
Second- and third-year heroines might snort at the forwardness of a
mere fresh-girl, might resent the complete absence of veneration for
their glory exhibited by this youthful bejauna; Millicent pursued her
course unmoved. She founded new societies and put fresh life into the
institutions which already existed at St. Mungo's to take cocoa and
discuss the problems of the universe. She played hockey like a
tornado, and she worked alarmingly hard. Decidedly, Millicent was a
Force, very soon the biggest Force in the St. Mungo world. In her
fifth term she organized the famous St. Mungo general strike, which
compelled the authorities to relax a few of the more intolerably
tyrannical and anachronistic rules restricting the liberty of the
students. It was she who went, on behalf of the strikers, to interview
the redoubtable Miss Prosser, Principal of St. Mungo's. The
redoubtable Miss Prosser looked grim and invited her to sit down,
Millicent sat down and, without quailing, delivered a short but
pointed speech attacking the fundamental principles of the St. Mungo
system of discipline.
"Your whole point of view," she assured Miss Prosser, "is radically
wrong. It's an insult to the female sex; it's positively obscene. Your
root assumption is simply this: that we're all in a chronic state of
sexual excitement; leave us alone for a moment and we'll immediately
put our desires into practice. It's disgusting. It makes me blush.
After all, Miss Prosser, we are a college of intelligent women, not an
asylum of nymphomaniacs."
For the first time in her career, Miss Prosser had to admit herself
beaten. The authorities gave in--reluctantly and on only a few points;
but the principle had been shaken, and that, as Millicent pointed out,
was what really mattered.