Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Aldous Huxley
Title Page
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
The History of Vintage
Copyright
Crome Yellow
Point Counter Point
Antic Hay
Those Barren Leaves
Brave New World
Eyeless in Gaza
Time Must Have a Stop
Ape and Essence
The Genius and the Goddess
Island
Limbo
Mortal Coils
Little Mexican
Two or Three Graces
Brief Candles
The Gioconda Smile (Collected Short Stories)
Grey Eminence
The Devils of Loudun
Along the Roada
Jesting Pilate
Beyond the Mexique Bay
The Burning Wheel
Jonah
The Defeat of Youth
Leda
Verses and a Comedy
The Gioconda Smile
On the Margin
Proper Studies
Do What You Will
Music at Night
Texts and Pretexts
The Olive Tree
Ends and Means
The Art of Seeing
The Perennial Philosophy
Science, Liberty and Peace
Themes and Variations
The Doors of Perception
Adonis and the Alphabet
Heaven and Hell
Brave New World Revisited
Literature and Science
The Human Situation
Moksha
The Crows of Pearblossom
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Epub ISBN: 9781473521766
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Vintage Classics, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
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Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Aldous Huxley 1939
Aldous Huxley has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Vintage Classics in 2015
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784870355
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
TENNYSON
IT HAD ALL been arranged by telegram; Jeremy Pordage was to look out for a coloured chauffeur in a grey uniform with a carnation in his button-hole; and the coloured chauffeur was to look out for a middle-aged Englishman carrying the Poetical Works of Wordsworth. In spite of the crowds at the station, they found one another without difficulty.
‘Mr. Stoyte’s chauffeur?’
‘Mr. Pordage, sah?’
Jeremy nodded and, his Wordsworth in one hand, his umbrella in the other, half extended his arms in the gesture of a self-deprecatory mannequin exhibiting, with a full and humorous consciousness of their defects, a deplorable figure accentuated by the most ridiculous clothes. ‘A poor thing,’ he seemed to be implying, ‘but myself.’ A defensive and, so to say, prophylactic disparagement had become a habit with him. He resorted to it on every sort of occasion. Suddenly a new idea came into his head. Anxiously he began to wonder whether, in this democratic Far West of theirs, one shook hands with the chauffeur—particularly if he happened to be a blackamoor, just to demonstrate that one wasn’t a pukka sahib even if one’s country did happen to be bearing the White Man’s burden. In the end he decided to do nothing. Or, to be more accurate, the decision was forced upon him—as usual, he said to himself, deriving a curious wry pleasure from the recognition of his own shortcomings. While he was hesitating what to do, the chauffeur took off his cap and, slightly over-acting the part of an old-world negro retainer, bowed, smiled toothily and said, ‘Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Pordage, sah!’ Then, changing the tone of his chanting drawl from the dramatic to the confidential, ‘I should have knowed you by your voice, Mr. Pordage,’ he went on, ‘even without the book.’
Jeremy laughed a little uncomfortably. A week in America had made him self-conscious about that voice of his. A product of Trinity College, Cambridge, ten years before the War, it was a small, fluty voice, suggestive of evensong in an English cathedral. At home, when he used it, nobody paid any particular attention. He had never had to make jokes about it, as he had done, in self-protection, about his appearance for example, or his age. Here, in America, things were different. He had only to order a cup of coffee or ask the way to the lavatory (which anyhow wasn’t called the lavatory in this disconcerting country) for people to stare at him with an amused and attentive curiosity, as though he were a freak on show in an amusement park. It had not been at all agreeable.
‘Where’s my porter?’ he said fussily in order to change the subject.
A few minutes later they were on their way. Cradled in the back seat of the car, out of range, he hoped, of the chauffeur’s conversation, Jeremy Pordage abandoned himself to the pleasure of merely looking. Southern California rolled past the windows; all he had to do was to keep his eyes open.
The first thing to present itself was a slum of Africans and Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. And what permutations and combinations of black, yellow and brown! What complex bastardies! And the girls—how beautiful in their artificial silk! ‘And negro ladies in white muslin gowns.’ His favourite line in The Prelude. He smiled to himself. And meanwhile the slum had given place to the tall buildings of a business district.
The population took on a more Caucasian tinge. At every corner there was a drug-store. The newspaper boys were selling headlines about Franco’s drive on Barcelona. Most of the girls, as they walked along, seemed to be absorbed in silent prayer; but he supposed, on second thoughts, it was only gum that they were thus incessantly ruminating. Gum, not God. Then suddenly the car plunged into a tunnel and emerged into another world, a vast, untidy, suburban world of filling-stations and billboards, of low houses in gardens, of vacant lots and waste-paper, of occasional shops and office buildings and churches—Primitive Methodist churches built, surprisingly enough, in the style of the Cartuja at Granada, Catholic churches like Canterbury Cathedral, synagogues disguised as Hagia Sophia, Christian Science churches with pillars and pediments, like banks. It was a winter day and early in the morning; but the sun shone brilliantly, the sky was without a cloud. The car was travelling westwards, and the sunshine, slanting from behind them as they advanced, lit up each building, each sky-sign and billboard, as though with a spot-light, as though on purpose to show the new arrival all the sights.
EATS. COCKTAILS. OPEN NITES.
JUMBO MALTS.
DO THINGS, GO PLACES WITH CONSOL SUPER GAS!
AT BEVERLY PANTHEON FINE FUNERALS ARE NOT EXPENSIVE.
The car sped onwards, and here in the middle of a vacant lot was a restaurant in the form of a seated bulldog, the entrance between the front paws, the eyes illuminated.
‘Zoomorph,’ Jeremy Pordage murmured to himself, and again, ‘zoomorph.’ He had the scholar’s taste for words. The bulldog shot back into the past.
ASTROLOGY, NUMEROLOGY, PSYCHIC READINGS.
DRIVE IN FOR NUTBERGERS—whatever they were. He resolved at the earliest opportunity to have one. A nutberger and a jumbo malt.
STOP HERE FOR CONSOL SUPER GAS.
Surprisingly, the chauffeur stopped. ‘Ten gallons of Super-Super,’ he ordered; then, turning back to Jeremy, ‘This is our company,’ he added. ‘Mr. Stoyte, he’s the president.’ He pointed to a billboard across the street. CASH LOANS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, Jeremy read; CONSULT COMMUNITY SERVICE FINANCE CORPORATION. ‘That’s another of ours,’ said the chauffeur proudly.
They drove on. The face of a beautiful young woman, distorted, like a Magdalene’s, with grief, stared out of a giant billboard. BROKEN ROMANCE, proclaimed the caption. SCIENCE PROVES THAT 73 PER CENT. OF ALL ADULTS HAVE HALITOSIS.
IN TIME OF SORROW LET BEVERLY PANTHEON BE YOUR FRIEND.
FACIALS, PERMANENTS, MANICURES.
BETTY’S BEAUTY SHOPPE.
Next door to the beauty shoppe was a Western Union office. That cable to his mother … Heavens, he had almost forgotten! Jeremy leaned forward and, in the apologetic tone he always used when speaking to servants, asked the chauffeur to stop for a moment. The car came to a halt. With a preoccupied expression on his mild, rabbit-like face, Jeremy got out and hurried across the pavement, into the office.
‘Mrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England,’ he wrote, smiling a little as he did so. The exquisite absurdity of that address was a standing source of amusement. ‘The Araucarias, Woking.’ His mother, when she bought the house, had wanted to change the name, as being too ingenuously middle-class, too much like a joke by Hilaire Belloc. ‘But that’s the beauty of it,’ he had protested. ‘That’s the charm.’ And he had tried to make her see how utterly right it would be for them to live at such an address. The deliciously comic incongruity between the name of the house and the nature of its occupants! And what a beautiful, topsy-turvy appositeness in the fact that Oscar Wilde’s old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage, should write her sparkling letters from The Araucarias, and that from these same Araucarias, these Araucarias, mark you, at Woking, should come the works of mingled scholarship and curiously rarefied wit for which her son had gained his reputation. Mrs. Pordage had almost instantly seen what he was driving at. No need, thank goodness, to labour your points where she was concerned. You could talk entirely in hints and anacoluthons; she could be relied on to understand. The Araucarias had remained The Araucarias.
Having written the address, Jeremy paused, pensively frowned and initiated the familiar gesture of biting his pencil—only to find, disconcertingly, that this particular pencil was tipped with brass and fastened to a chain. ‘Mrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England,’ he read out aloud, in the hope that the worlds would inspire him to compose the right, the perfect message—the message his mother expected of him, at once tender and witty, charged with a genuine devotion ironically worded, acknowledging her maternal domination, but at the same time making fun of it, so that the old lady could salve her conscience by pretending that her son was entirely free, and herself the least tyrannical of mothers. It wasn’t easy—particularly with this pencil on a chain. After several abortive essays he decided, though it was definitely unsatisfactory, on: ‘Climate being subtropical shall break vow re underclothes stop Wish you were here my sake not yours as you would scarcely appreciate this unfinished Bournemouth indefinitely magnified stop.’
‘Unfinished what?’ questioned the young woman on the further side of the counter.
‘B-o-u-r-n-e-m-o-u-t-h,’ Jeremy spelled out. He smiled; behind the bi-focal lenses of his spectacles his blue eyes twinkled, and, with a gesture of which he was quite unconscious, but which he always, automatically, made when he was about to utter one of his little jokes, he stroked the smooth bald spot on the top of his head. ‘You know,’ he said, in a particularly fluty tone, ‘the bourne to which no traveller goes, if he can possibly help it.’
The girl looked at him blankly; then, inferring from his expression that something funny had been said, and remembering that courteous Service was Western Union’s slogan, gave the bright smile for which the poor old chump was evidently asking, and went on reading: ‘Hope you have fun at Grasse stop Tendresses Jeremy.’
It was an expensive message; but luckily, he reflected, as he took out his pocket-book, luckily Mr. Stoyte was grossly overpaying him. Three months’ work, six thousand dollars. So damn the expense.
He returned to the car and they drove on. Mile after mile they went, and the suburban houses, the gas-stations, the vacant lots, the churches, the shops went along with them, interminably. To right and left, between palms, or pepper trees, or acacias, the streets of the enormous residential quarter receded to the vanishing point.
CLASSY EATS. MILE HIGH CONES.
JESUS SAVES.
HAMBURGERS.
Yet once more the traffic lights turned red. A paperboy came to the window. ‘Franco claims gains in Catalonia.’ Jeremy read, and turned away. The frightfulness of the world had reached a point at which it had become for him merely boring. From the halted car in front of them, two elderly ladies, both with permanently waved white hair and both wearing crimson trousers, descended, each carrying a Yorkshire terrier. The dogs were set down at the foot of the traffic signal. Before the animals could make up their minds to use the convenience, the lights had changed. The negro shifted into first, and the car swerved forward, into the future. Jeremy was thinking of his mother. Disquietingly enough, she too had a Yorkshire terrier.
FINE LIQUORS.
TURKEY SANDWICHES.
GO TO CHURCH AND FEEL BETTER ALL THE WEEK.
WHAT IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS IS GOOD FOR YOU.
Another zoomorph presented itself, this time a real estate agent’s office in the form of an Egyptian sphinx.
JESUS IS COMING SOON.
YOU TOO CAN HAVE ABIDING YOUTH WITH THRILL-PHORM BRASSIERES.
BEVERLY PANTHEON, THE CEMETERY THAT IS DIFFERENT.
With the triumphant expression of Puss-in-Boots enumerating the possessions of the Marquis of Carabas, the negro shot a glance over his shoulder at Jeremy, waved his hand towards the billboard and said, ‘That’s ours too.’
‘You mean, the Beverly Pantheon?’
The man nodded. ‘Finest cemetery in the world, I guess,’ he said: and added, after a moment’s pause, ‘Maybe you’s like to see it. It wouldn’t hardly be out of our way.’
‘That would be very nice,’ said Jeremy with upper-class English graciousness. Then, feeling that he ought to express his acceptance rather more warmly and democratically, he cleared his throat and, with a conscious effort to reproduce the local vernacular, added that it would be swell. Pronounced in his Trinity-College-Cambridge voice, the word sounded so unnatural that he began to blush with embarrassment. Fortunately, the chauffeur was too busy with the traffic to notice.
They turned to the right, sped past a Rosicrucian Temple, past two cat-and-dog hospitals, past a School for Drum-Majorettes and two more advertisements of the Beverly Pantheon. As they turned to the left on Sunset Boulevard, Jeremy had a glimpse of a young woman who was doing her shopping in a hydrangea-blue strapless bathing-suit, platinum curls and a black fur jacket. Then she too was whirled back into the past.
The present was a road at the foot of a line of steep hills, a road flanked by small, expensive-looking shops, by restaurants, by night-clubs shuttered against the sunlight, by offices and apartment houses. Then they too had taken their places in the irrevocable. A sign proclaimed that they were crossing the city limits of Beverly Hills. The surroundings changed. The road was flanked by the gardens of a rich residential quarter. Through trees, Jeremy saw the façades of houses, all new, almost all in good taste—elegant and witty pastiches of Lutyens manor houses, of Little Trianons, of Monticellos; lighthearted parodies of Le Corbusier’s solemn machines-for-living-in; fantastic Mexican adaptations of Mexican haciendas and New England farms.
They turned to the right. Enormous palm trees lined the road. In the sunlight, masses of mesembryanthemums blazed with an intense magenta glare. The houses succeeded one another, like the pavilions at some endless international exhibition. Gloucestershire followed Andalusia and gave place in turn to Touraine and Oaxaca, Düsseldorf and Massachusetts.
‘That’s Harold Lloyd’s place,’ said the chauffeur, indicating a kind of Boboli. ‘And that’s Charlie Chaplin’s. And that’s Pickfair.’
The road began to mount, vertiginously. The chauffeur pointed across an intervening gulf of shadow at what seemed a Tibetan lamasery on the opposite hill, ‘That’s where Ginger Rogers lives. Yes, sir,’ he nodded triumphantly, as he twirled the steering-wheel.
Five or six more turns brought the car to the top of the hill. Below and behind lay the plain, with the city like a map extending indefinitely into a pink haze.
Before and to either hand were mountains—ridge after ridge as far as the eye could reach, a desiccated Scotland, empty under the blue desert sky.
The car turned a shoulder of orange rock, and there all at once, on a summit hitherto concealed from view, was a huge sky sign, with the words, BEVERLY PANTHEON, THE PERSONALITY CEMETERY, in six-foot neon tubes and, above it, on the very crest, a full-scale reproduction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—only this one didn’t lean.
‘See that?’ said the negro impressively. ‘That’s the Tower of Resurrection. Two hundred thousand dollars, that’s what it cost. Yes, sir.’ He spoke with an emphatic solemnity. One was made to feel that the money had all come out of his own pocket.
AN HOUR LATER, they were on their way again, having seen everything. Everything. The sloping lawns, like a green oasis in the mountain desolation. The groves of trees. The tombstones in the grass. The Pets’ Cemetery, with its marble group after Landseer’s ‘Dignity and Impudence.’ The tiny Church of the Poet—a miniature reproduction of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon complete with Shakespeare’s tomb and a twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual Wurlitzer and broadcast by concealed loudspeakers all over the cemetery.
Then, leading out of the vestry, the Bride’s Apartment (for one was married at the Tiny Church as well as buried from it)—the Bride’s Apartment that had just been redecorated, said the chauffeur, in the style of Norma Shearer’s boudoir in Marie Antoinette. And, next to the Bride’s Apartment, the exquisite black marble Vestibule of Ashes, leading to the Crematorium, where three super-modern oil-burning mortuary furnaces were always under heat and ready for any emergency.
Accompanied wherever they went by the tremolos of the Perpetual Wurlitzer, they had driven next to look at the Tower of Resurrection—from the outside only; for it housed the executive offices of the West Coast Cemeteries Corporation. Then the Children’s Corner with its statues of Peter Pan and the Infant Jesus, its groups of alabaster babies playing with bronze rabbits, its lily pool and an apparatus labelled The Fountain of Rainbow Music, from which there spouted simultaneously water, coloured lights and the inescapable strains of the Perpetual Wurlitzer. Then, in rapid succession, the Garden of Quiet, the Tiny Taj Mahal, the Old World Mortuary. And, reserved by the chauffeur to the last, as the final and crowning proof of his employer’s glory, the Pantheon itself.
Was it possible, Jeremy asked himself, that such an object existed? It was certainly not probable. The Beverly Pantheon lacked all verisimilitude, was something entirely beyond his powers to invent. The fact that the idea of it was now in his mind proved, therefore, that he must really have seen it. He shut his eyes against the landscape and recalled to his memory the details of that incredible reality. The external architecture, modelled on that of Boecklin’s ‘Toteninsel.’ The circular vestibule. The replica of Rodin’s ‘Le Baiser,’ illuminated by concealed pink floodlights. With its flights of black marble stairs. The seven-story columbarium, the endless galleries, its tiers on tiers of slab-sealed tombs. The bronze and silver urns of the cremated, like athletic trophies. The stained-glass windows after Burne-Jones. The texts inscribed on marble scrolls. The Perpetual Wurlitzer crooning on every floor. The sculpture …
That was the hardest to believe, Jeremy reflected, behind closed eyelids. Sculpture almost as ubiquitous as the Wurlitzer. Statues wherever you turned your eyes. Hundreds of them, bought wholesale, one would guess, from some monumental masonry concern at Carrara or Pietrasanta. All nudes, all female, all exuberantly nubile. The sort of statues one would expect to see in the reception-room of a high-class brothel in Rio de Janeiro. ‘Oh, Death,’ demanded a marble scroll at the entrance to every gallery, ‘where is thy sting?’ Mutely, but eloquently, the statues gave their reassuring reply. Statues of young ladies in nothing but a very tight belt imbedded, with Bernini-like realism, in the Parian flesh. Statues of young ladies crouching; young ladies using both hands to be modest; young ladies stretching, writhing, callipygously stooping to tie their sandals, reclining. Young ladies with doves, with panthers, with other young ladies, with upturned eyes expressive of the soul’s awakening. ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ proclaimed the scrolls. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; therefore shall I want nothing.’ Nothing, not even Wurlitzer, not even girls in tightly buckled belts. ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’—the victory no longer of the spirit but of the body, the well-fed body, for ever youthful, immortally athletic, indefatigably sexy. The Moslem paradise had had copulations six centuries long. In this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would have stepped up the period to a millennium and added the joys of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming.
All at once the car began to descend. Jeremy opened his eyes again, and saw that they had reached the further edge of the range of hills, among which the Pantheon was built.
Below lay a great tawny plain, chequered with patches of green and dotted with white houses. On its further side, fifteen or twenty miles away, ranges of pinkish mountains fretted the horizon.
‘What’s this?’ Jeremy asked.
‘The San Fernando Valley,” said the chauffeur. He pointed into the middle distance. ‘That’s where Groucho Marx has his place,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir.’
At the bottom of the hill the car turned to the left along a wide road that ran, a ribbon of concrete and suburban buildings, through the plain. The chauffeur put on speed; sign succeeded sign with bewildering rapidity. MALTS CABIN DINE AND DANCE AT THE CHATEAU HONOLULU SPIRITUAL HEALING AND COLONIC IRRIGATION BLOCKLONG HOT DOGS BUY YOUR DREAM HOME NOW. And behind the signs the mathematically planted rows of apricot and walnut trees flicked past—a succession of glimpsed perspectives preceded and followed every time by fan-like approaches and retirements.
Dark-green and gold, enormous orange orchards manœuvred, each one a mile-square regiment glittering in the sunlight. Far off, the mountains traced their uninterpretable graph of boom and slump.
‘Tarzana,’ said the chauffeur startlingly; there, sure enough, was the name suspended, in white letters, across the road. ‘There’s Tarzana College,’ the man went on, pointing to a group of Spanish-Colonial palaces clustering round a Romanesque basilica. ‘Mr. Stoyte, he’s just given them an auditorium.’
They turned to the right along a less important road. The orange groves gave place for a few miles to huge fields of alfalfa and fusty grass, then returned again more luxuriant than ever. Meanwhile the mountains on the northern edge of the valley were approaching and, slanting in from the west, another range was looming up to the left. They drove on. The road took a sudden turn, aiming, it seemed, at the point where the two ranges must come together. All at once, through a gap between two orchards, Jeremy Pordage saw a most surprising sight. About half a mile from the foot of the mountains, like an island off a cliff-bound coast, a rocky hill rose abruptly, in places almost precipitously, from the plain. On the summit of the bluff and as though growing out of it in a kind of efflorescence, stood a castle. But what a castle! The donjon was like a skyscraper, the bastions plunged headlong with the effortless swoop of concrete dams. The thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic with a Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century. For this … this Object, as Jeremy was reduced to calling it, was mediaeval, not out of vulgar historical necessity, like Coucy, say, or Alnwick, but out of pure fun and wantonness, platonically, one might say. It was mediaeval as only a witty and irresponsible modern architect would wish to be mediaeval, as only the most competent modern engineers are technically equipped to be.
Jeremy was startled into speech. ‘What on earth is that?.’ he asked, pointing at the nightmare on the hill-top.
‘Why, that’s Mr. Stoyte’s place,’ said the retainer; and smiling yet once more with the pride of vicarious ownership, he added: ‘It’s a pretty fine home, I guess.’
The orange groves closed in again; leaning back in his seat, Jeremy Pordage began to wonder, rather apprehensively, what he had let himself in for when he accepted Mr. Stoyte’s offer. The pay was princely; the work, which was to catalogue the almost legendary Hauberk Papers, would be delightful. But that cemetery, this … Object—Jeremy shook his head. He had known, of course, that Mr. Stoyte was rich, collected pictures, owned a show-place in California. But no one had ever led him to expect this. The humorous puritanism of his good taste was shocked; he was appalled at the prospect of meeting the person capable of committing such an enormity. Between that person and oneself, what contact, what community of thought or feeling could possibly exist? Why had he sent for one? For it was obvious that he couldn’t conceivably like one’s books. But had he even read one’s books? Did he have the faintest idea of what one was like? Would he be capable, for example, of understanding why one had insisted on the name of The Araucarias remaining unchanged? Would he appreciate one’s point of view about …?
These anxious questionings were interrupted by the noise of the horn, which the chauffeur was sounding with a loud and offensive insistence. Jeremy looked up. Fifty yards ahead, an ancient Ford was creeping tremulously along the road. It carried lashed insecurely to roof and running-boards and luggage-rack, a squalid cargo of household goods—rolls of bedding, an old iron stove, a crate of pots and pans, a folded tent, a tin bath. As they flashed past, Jeremy had a glimpse of three dull-eyed, anaemic children, of a woman with a piece of sacking wrapped around her shoulders, of a haggard, unshaved man.
‘Transients,’ the chauffeur explained in a tone of contempt.
‘What’s that?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Why, transients,’ the negro repeated, as though the emphasis were an explanation. ‘Guess that lot’s from the dust bowl. Kansas licence plate. Come to pick our navels.’
‘Come to pick your navels?’ Jeremy echoed incredulously.
‘Navel oranges,’ said the chauffeur. ‘It’s the season. Pretty good year for navels, I guess.”
They emerged once more into the open, and there once more was the Object, larger than ever. Jeremy had time to study the details of its construction. A wall with towers encircled the base of the hills, and there was a second line of defence, in the most approved post-Crusades manner, half-way up. On the summit stood the square keep, surrounded by subsidiary buildings.
From the donjon, Jeremy’s eyes travelled down to a group of buildings in the plain, not far from the foot of the hill. Across the façade of the largest of them the words, ‘Stoyte Home for Sick Children,’ were written in gilded letters. Two flags, one the stars and stripes, the other a white banner with the letter S in scarlet, fluttered in the breeze. Then a grove of leafless walnut trees shut out the view once again. Almost at the same moment the chauffeur threw his engine out of gear and put on the brakes. The car came gently to a halt beside a man who was walking at a brisk pace along the grassy verge of the road.
‘Want a ride, Mr. Propter?’ the negro called.
The stranger turned his head, gave the man a smile of recognition and came to the window of the car. He was a large man, broad-shouldered, but rather stooping, with brown hair turning grey and a face, Jeremy thought, like the face of one of those statues which Gothic sculptors carved for a place high up on a West front—a face of sudden prominences and deeply shadowed folds and hollows, emphatically rough-hewn so as to be expressive even at a distance. But this particular face, he went on to notice, was not merely emphatic, not only for the distance; it was a face also for the near point, also for intimacy, a subtle face, in which there were the signs of sensibility and intelligence as well as of power, of a gentle and humorous serenity no less than of energy and strength.
‘Hullo, George,’ the stranger said, addressing the chauffeur; ‘nice of you to stop for me.’
‘Well, I’m sure glad to see you, Mr. Propter,’ said the negro cordially. Then he half-turned in his seat, waved a hand towards Jeremy, and with a florid formality of tone and manner said, ‘I’d like to have you meet Mr. Pordage of England. Mr. Pordage, this is Mr. Propter.’
The two men shook hands, and, after an exchange of courtesies, Mr. Propter got into the car.
‘You’re visiting with Mr. Stoyte?’ he asked, as the chauffeur drove on.
Jeremy shook his head. He was here on business; had come to look at some manuscripts—the Hauberk Papers, to be precise.
Mr. Propter listened attentively, nodded from time to time and, when Jeremy had finished, sat for a moment in silence.
‘Take a decayed Christian,’ he said at last in a meditative tone, ‘and the remains of a Stoic; mix thoroughly with good manners, a bit of money and an old-fashioned education; simmer for several years in a university. Result: a scholar and a gentleman. Well, there were worse types of human being.’ He uttered a little laugh. ‘I might almost claim to have been one myself, once, long ago.’
Jeremy looked at him enquiringly. ‘You’re not William Propter, are you?’ he asked. ‘Not Short Studies in the Counter Reformation, by any chance?’
The other inclined his head.
Jeremy looked at him in amazement and delight. Was it possible? he asked himself. Those Short Studies had been one of his favourite books—a model, he had always thought, of their kind.
‘Well, I’m jiggered!’ he said aloud, using the school-boyish locution deliberately and as though between inverted commas. He had found that, both in writing and in conversation, there were exquisite effects to be obtained by the judicious employment, in a solemn or cultural context, of a phrase of slang, a piece of childish profanity or obscenity. ‘I’ll be damned!’ he exploded again, and his consciousness of the intentional silliness of the words made him stroke his bald head and cough.
There was another moment of silence. Then, instead of talking, as Jeremy had expected, about the Short Studies, Mr. Propter merely shook his head and said, ‘We mostly are.’
‘Mostly are what?’ asked Jeremy.
‘Jiggered,’ Mr. Propter answered. ‘Damned. In the psychological sense of the word,’ he added.
The walnut trees came to an end, and there once more, on the starboard bow, was the Object. Mr. Propter pointed in its direction. ‘Poor Jo Stoyte!’ he said. ‘Think of having that millstone round one’s neck. Not to mention, of course, all the other millstones that go with it. What luck we’ve had, don’t you think?—we who’ve never been given the opportunity of being anything much worse than scholars and gentlemen!’ After another little silence, ‘Poor Jo,’ he went on with a smile, ‘he isn’t either of them. You’ll find him a bit trying. Because of course he’ll want to bully you, just because tradition says that your type is superior to his type. Not to mention the fact,’ he added, looking into Jeremy’s face with an expression of mingled amusement and sympathy, ‘that you’re probably the sort of person that invites persecution. A bit of a murderee, I’m afraid, as well as a scholar and gentleman.’
Feeling simultaneously annoyed by the man’s indiscretion and touched by his friendliness, Jeremy smiled rather nervously and nodded his head.
‘Maybe,’ Mr. Propter went on, ‘maybe it would help you to be less of a murderee towards Jo Stoyte if you knew what gave him the original impulsion to get damned in just that way’—and he pointed again towards the Object. ‘We were at school together, Jo and I—only nobody called him Jo in those days. We called him Slob, or Jelly-Belly. Because, you see, poor Jo was the local fat-boy, the only fat-boy in the school during those years.’ He paused for a moment; then went on in another tone, ‘I’ve often wondered why people have always made fun of fatness. Perhaps there’s something intrinsically wrong with fat. For example, there isn’t a single fat saint—except, of course, old Thomas Aquinas; and I cannot see any reason to suppose that he was a real saint, a saint in the popular sense of the word, which happens to be the true sense. If Thomas is a saint, then Vincent de Paul isn’t. And if Vincent’s a saint, which he obviously is, then Thomas isn’t. And perhaps that enormous belly of his had something to do with it. Who knows? But anyhow, that’s by the way. We’re talking about Jo Stoyte. And poor Jo, as I say, was a fat-boy and, being fat, was fair game for the rest of us. God, how we punished him for his glandular deficiencies! And how disastrously he reacted to that punishment! Over-compensation.… But here I am at home,’ he added, looking out of the window as the car slackened speed and came to a halt in front of a small white bungalow set in the midst of a clump of eucalyptus trees. ‘We’ll go on with this another time. But remember, if poor Jo gets too offensive, think of what he was at school and be sorry for him—and don’t be sorry for yourself.’ He got out of the car, closed the door behind him and, waving a hand to the chauffeur, walked quickly up the path and entered the little house.
The car rolled on again. At once bewildered and reassured by his encounter with the author of the Short Studies, Jeremy sat, inertly looking out of the window. They were very near the Object now; and suddenly he noticed, for the first time, that the castle hill was surrounded by a moat. Some few hundred yards from the water’s edge, the car passed between two pillars, topped by heraldic lions. Its passage, it was evident, interrupted a beam of invisible light directed on a photo-electric cell; for no sooner were they past the lions than a drawbridge began to descend. Five seconds before they reached the moat, it was in place; the car rolled smoothly across and came to a halt in front of the main gateway of the castle’s outer walls. The chauffeur got out and, speaking into a telephone-receiver concealed in a convenient loophole, announced his presence. The chromium-plated portcullis rose noiselessly, the double doors of stainless steel swung back. They drove in. The car began to climb. The second line of walls was pierced by another gate, which opened automatically as they approached. Between the inner side of this second wall and the slope of the hill a ferro-concrete bridge had been constructed, large enough to accommodate a tennis-court. In the shadowy space beneath, Jeremy caught sight of something familiar. An instant later he had recognized it as a replica of the grotto of Lourdes.
‘Miss Maunciple, she’s a Catholic,’ remarked the chauffeur, jerking his thumb in the direction of the grotto. ‘That’s why he had it made for her. We’s Presbyterians in our family,’ he added.
‘And who is Miss Maunciple?’
The chauffeur hesitated for a moment. ‘Well, she’s a young lady Mr. Stoyte’s kind of friendly with,’ he explained at last; then changed the subject.
The car climbed on. Beyond the grotto all the hillside was a cactus garden. Then the road swung round to the northern slope of the bluff, and the cactuses gave place to grass and shrubs. On a little terrace, over-elegant like a fashion-plate from some mythological Vogue for goddesses, a bronze nymph by Giambologna spouted two streams of water from her deliciously polished breasts. A little further on, behind wire netting, a group of baboons squatted among the rocks or paraded the obscenity of their hairless rumps.
Still climbing, the car turned again and finally drew up on a circular concrete platform, carried out on cantilevers over a precipice. Once more the old-fashioned retainer, the chauffeur taking off his cap, did a final impersonation of himself welcoming the young master home to the plantation, then set to work to unload the luggage.
Jeremy Pordage walked to the balustrade and looked over. The ground fell almost sheer for about a hundred feet, then sloped steeply to the inner circle of walls and, below them, to the outer fortifications. Beyond lay the moat, and on the further side of the moat stretched the orange orchards. ‘Im dunklen Laub die goldn’ Orangen glühen,’ he murmured to himself; and then: ‘He hangs in shades the orange bright. Like golden lamps in a green night.’ Marvell’s rendering, he decided, was better than Goethe’s. And, meanwhile, the oranges seemed to have become brighter and more significant. For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book. The oranges were beautifully pigeon-holed; but what about the castle? He turned round and, leaning back against the parapet, looked up. The Object impended, insolently enormous. Nobody had dealt poetically with that. Not Childe Roland, not the King of Thule, not Marmion, not the Lady of Shalott, not Sir Leoline. Sir Leoline, he repeated to himself with a connoisseur’s appreciation of romantic absurdity, Sir Leoline, the baron rich who had—what? A toothless mastiff bitch. But Mr. Stoyte had baboons and a sacred grotto, Mr. Stoyte had a chromium portcullis and the Hauberk Papers, Mr. Stoyte had a cemetery like an amusement park and a donjon like …
There was a sudden rumbling sound; the great nail-studded doors of the Early English entrance porch rolled back, and from between them, as though propelled by a hurricane, a small, thick-set man, with a red face and a mass of snow-white hair, darted out on to the terrace and bore down upon Jeremy. His expression, as he advanced, did not change. The face wore that shut, unsmiling mask which American workmen tend to put on in their dealing with strangers—in order to prove, by not making the ingratiating grimaces of courtesy, that theirs is a free country and you’re not going to come it over them.
Not having been brought up in a free country, Jeremy had automatically begun to smile as this person, whom he guessed to be his host and employer, came hurrying towards him. Confronted by the unwavering grimness of the other’s face, he suddenly became conscious of this smile—conscious that it was out of place, that it must be making him look a fool. Profoundly embarrassed, he tried to readjust his face.
‘Mr. Pordage?’ said the stranger in a harsh, barking voice. ‘Pleased to meet you. My name’s Stoyte.’ As they shook hands, he peered, still unsmiling, into Jeremy’s face. ‘You’re older than I thought,’ he added.
For the second time that morning Jeremy made his mannequin’s gesture of apologetic self-exhibition.
‘The sere and withered leaf,’ he said. ‘One’s sinking into senility. One’s …’
Mr. Stoyte cut him short. ‘What’s your age?’ he asked in a loud peremptory tone, like that of a police sergeant interrogating a captured thief.
‘Fifty-four.’
‘Only fifty-four?’ Mr. Stoyte shook his head. ‘Ought to be full of pep at fifty-four. How’s your sex-life?’ he added disconcertingly.
Jeremy tried to laugh off his embarrassment. He twinkled; he patted his bald head. ‘Mon beau printemps et mon été ont fait le sault par la fenêtre,’ he quoted.
‘What’s that?’ said Mr. Stoyte, frowning. ‘No use talking foreign languages to me. I never had any education.’ He broke into sudden braying of laughter. ‘I’m head of an oil company here,’ he said. ‘Got two thousand filling-stations in California alone. And not one man in any of those filling-stations that isn’t a college graduate!’ He brayed again, triumphantly. ‘Go and talk foreign languages to them.’ He was silent for a moment; then, pursuing an unexplicit association of ideas, ‘My agent in London,’ he went on, ‘the man who picks up things for me there—he gave me your name. Told me you were the right man for those—what do you call them? You know, those papers I bought this summer. Roebuck? Hobuck?’
‘Hauberk,’ said Jeremy, and with a gloomy satisfaction noted that he had been quite right. The man had never read one’s books, never even heard of one’s existence. Still, one had to remember that he had been called Jelly-Belly when he was young.
‘Hauberk,’ Mr. Stoyte repeated with a contemptuous impatience. ‘Anyhow, he said you were the man.’ Then, without pause or transition, ‘What was it you were saying, about your sex-life, when you started that foreign stuff on me?’
Jeremy laughed uncomfortably. ‘One was implying that it was normal for one’s age.’
‘What do you know about what’s normal at your age?’ said Mr. Stoyte. ‘Go and talk to Dr. Obispo about it. It won’t cost you anything. Obispo’s on salary. He’s the house physician.’ Abruptly changing the subject, ‘Would you like to see the castle?’ he asked. ‘I’ll take you round.’
‘Oh, that’s very kind of you,’ said Jeremy effusively. And, for the sake of making a little polite conversation, he added: ‘I’ve already seen your burial-ground.”
‘Seen my burial-ground?’ Mr. Stoyte repeated in a tone of suspicion: suspicion turned suddenly to anger. ‘What the hell do you mean?’ he shouted.
Quailing before his fury, Jeremy stammered something about the Beverly Pantheon and that he had understood from the chauffeur that Mr. Stoyte had a financial interest in the company.
‘I see,’ said the other, somewhat mollified, but still frowning. ‘I thought you meant …’ Stoyte broke off in the middle of the sentence, leaving the bewildered Jeremy to guess what he had thought. ‘Come on,’ he barked; and, bursting into movement, he hurried towards the entrance to the house.
THERE WAS SILENCE in Ward Sixteen of the Stoyte Home for Sick Children; silence and the luminous twilight of drawn venetian blinds. It was the mid-morning rest period. Three of the five small convalescents were asleep. A fourth lay staring at the ceiling, pensively picking his nose. The fifth, a little girl, was whispering to a doll as curly and Aryan as herself. Seated by one of the windows, a young nurse was absorbed in the latest issue of True Confessions.
‘His heart gave a lurch,’ she read. ‘With a strangled cry he pressed me closer. For months we’d been fighting against just this; but the magnet of our passion was too strong for us. The clamorous pressure of his lips had struck an answering spark within my melting body.
‘“Germaine,” he whispered. “Don’t make me wait. Won’t you be good to me now, darling?”
‘He was so gentle, but so ruthless too—as a girl in love wants a man to be ruthless. I felt myself swept away by the rising tide of …’
There was a noise outside in the corridor. The door of the ward flew open, as though before the blast of a hurricane, and someone came rushing into the room.
The nurse looked up with a start of surprise which the completeness of her absorption in ‘The Price of a Thrill’ rendered positively agonizing. Her almost immediate reaction to the shock was one of anger.
‘What’s the idea?’ she began indignantly; then she recognized the intruder and her expression changed. ‘Why, Mr. Stoyte!’
Disturbed by the noise, the young nose-picker dropped his eyes from the ceiling, the little girl turned away from her doll.
‘Uncle Jo!’ they shouted simultaneously. ‘Uncle Jo!’
Starting out of sleep, the others took up the cry.
‘Uncle Jo! Uncle Jo!’
Mr. Stoyte was touched by the warmth of his reception. The face which Jeremy had found so disquietingly grim relaxed into a smile. In mock protest he covered his ears with his hands. ‘You’ll make me deaf,’ he cried. Then, in an aside to the nurse, ‘Poor kids!’ he murmured. ‘Makes me feel I’d kind of like to cry.’ His voice became husky with sentiment. ‘And when one thinks how sick they’ve been …’ He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished; then, in another tone, ‘By the way,’ he added, waving a large square hand in the direction of Jeremy Pordage, who had followed him into the ward and was standing near the door, wearing an expression of bewildered embarrassment, ‘this is Mr.… Mr.… Hell! I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘Pordage,’ said Jeremy, and reminded himself that Mr. Stoyte’s name had once been Slob.
‘Pordage, that’s it. Ask him about history and literature,’ he added derisively to the nurse. ‘He knows it all.’
Jeremy was modestly protesting that his period was only from the invention of Ossian to the death of Keats, when Mr. Stoyte turned back to the children and in a voice that drowned the other’s faintly fluted disclaimers, shouted: ‘Guess what Uncle Jo’s brought you!’
They guessed. Candies, bubble gum, balloons, guineapigs. Mr. Stoyte continued triumphantly to shake his head. Finally, when the children had exhausted their power of imagination, he dipped into the pocket of his old tweed jacket and produced, first a whistle, then a mouth-organ, then a small musical box, then a trumpet, then a wooden rattle, then an automatic pistol. This, however, he hastily put back.