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Crome Yellow
A >> Aldous Huxley >> Crome Yellow Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 This etext was prepared by Sue Asscher
CROME YELLOW
By
ALDOUS HUXLEY
CHAPTER I.
Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed.
All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the
stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart.
Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West
Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he
always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward,
goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of England.
They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next
station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and
piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile
proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had
finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was
extremely hot.
Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life;
two hours in which he might have done so much, so much--written
the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book.
Instead of which--his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty
cushions against which he was leaning.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be
done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds
of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the
precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned himself utterly with all
his works. What right had he to sit in the sunshine, to occupy
corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive? None, none,
none.
Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was
twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.
The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last.
Denis jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile
of baggage, leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter,
seized a bag in either hand, and had to put them down again in
order to open the door. When at last he had safely bundled
himself and his baggage on to the platform, he ran up the train
towards the van.
"A bicycle, a bicycle!" he said breathlessly to the guard. He
felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but
continued methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages
labelled to Camlet. "A bicycle!" Denis repeated. "A green
machine, cross-framed, name of Stone. S-T-O-N-E."
"All in good time, sir," said the guard soothingly. He was a
large, stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home,
drinking tea, surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that
tone that he must have spoken to his children when they were
tiresome. "All in good time, sir." Denis's man of action
collapsed, punctured.
He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his
bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he went into the
country. It was part of the theory of exercise. One day one
would get up at six o'clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or
Stratford-on-Avon--anywhere. And within a radius of twenty miles
there were always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen
in the course of an afternoon's excursion. Somehow they never
did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the
bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might get
up at six.
Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet
station, he felt his spirits mounting. The world, he found, was
good. The far-away blue hills, the harvests whitening on the
slopes of the ridge along which his road led him, the treeless
sky-lines that changed as he moved--yes, they were all good. He
was overcome by the beauty of those deeply embayed combes,
scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves, curves:
he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some
term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves--
no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as
though to scoop the achieved expression out of the air, and
almost fell off his bicycle. What was the word to describe the
curves of those little valleys? They were as fine as the lines
of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety of art...
Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase
de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that
phrase didn't occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for
the use of novelists. Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau,
pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu, volupte.
But he really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little
valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman's breast;
they seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had
rested on these hills. Cumbrous locutions, these; but through
them he seemed to be getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted,
dimpled, wimpled--his mind wandered down echoing corridors of
assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the
point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.
Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on
the crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and
straight, into a considerable valley. There, on the opposite
slope, a little higher up the valley, stood Crome, his
destination. He put on his brakes; this view of Crome was
pleasant to linger over. The facade with its three projecting
towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the
garden. The house basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily
glowed. How ripe and rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at
the same time, how austere! The hill was becoming steeper and
steeper; he was gaining speed in spite of his brakes. He loosed
his grip of the levers, and in a moment was rushing headlong
down. Five minutes later he was passing through the gate of the
great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably open. He left
his bicycle leaning against the wall and walked in. He would
take them by surprise.
CHAPTER II.
He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was
quiet; Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with
pleasure at the familiar pictures and furniture, at all the
little untidy signs of life that lay scattered here and there.
He was rather glad that they were all out; it was amusing to
wander through the house as though one were exploring a dead,
deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the excavator
reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these empty
chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of
respectable and (though, of course, one couldn't publicly admit
it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its
unobtrusive, dateless furniture. There was the panelled drawing-
room, where the huge chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of
comfort among the austere flesh-mortifying antiques. There was
the morning-room, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian
chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures.
There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark, book-lined from
floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the
dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great mahogany
table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
eighteenth-century pictures--family portraits, meticulous animal
paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was
much of Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library,
something of Anne, perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all.
Among the accumulations of ten generations the living had left
but few traces.
Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of
poems. What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what
the reviewers call "a slim volume." He read at hazard:
"...But silence and the topless dark
Vault in the lights of Luna Park;
And Blackpool from the nightly gloom
Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb."
He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. "What genius I
had then!" he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly
six months since the book had been published; he was glad to
think he would never write anything of the same sort again. Who
could have been reading it, he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked
to think so. Perhaps, too, she had at last recognised herself in
the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the slim Hamadryad whose
movements were like the swaying of a young tree in the wind.
"The Woman who was a Tree" was what he had called the poem. He
had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem
would tell her what he hadn't dared to say. She had never
referred to it.
He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak,
swaying into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined
together in London--three quarters of an hour late, and he at his
table, haggard with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was
damnable!
It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her
boudoir. It was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs.
Wimbush's boudoir was in the central tower on the garden front.
A little staircase cork-screwed up to it from the hall. Denis
mounted, tapped at the door. "Come in." Ah, she was there; he
had rather hoped she wouldn't be. He opened the door.
Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested
on her knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver
pencil.
"Hullo," she said, looking up. "I'd forgotten you were coming."
"Well, here I am, I'm afraid," said Denis deprecatingly. "I'm
awfully sorry."
Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and
masculine. Everything about her was manly. She had a large,
square, middle-aged face, with a massive projecting nose and
little greenish eyes, the whole surmounted by a lofty and
elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable shade of orange.
Looking at her, Denis always thought of Wilkie Bard as the
cantatrice.
"That's why I'm going to
Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera."
Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and
a row of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so
suggestive of the Royal Family, made her look more than ever like
something on the Halls.
"What have you been doing all this time?" she asked.
"Well," said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He
had a tremendously amusing account of London and its doings all
ripe and ready in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it
utterance. "To begin with," he said...
But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush's question had been what the
grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a
little conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.
"You find me busy at my horoscopes," she said, without even being
aware that she had interrupted him.
A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more
receptive ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with
saying "Oh?" rather icily.
"Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this
year?"
"Yes," he replied, still frigid and mono-syllabic. She must have
told him at least six times.
"Wonderful, isn't it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old
Days, before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose
thousands. Now"--she paused an instant--"well, look at that four
hundred on the Grand National. That's the Stars."
Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he
was too discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been
something of a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla--not
so old then, of course, and sprightlier--had lost a great deal of
money, dropped it in handfuls and hatfuls on every race-course in
the country. She had gambled too. The number of thousands
varied in the different legends, but all put it high. Henry
Wimbush was forced to sell some of his Primitives--a Taddeo da
Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five nameless
Sienese--to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first
time in his life Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it
seemed.
Priscilla's gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end.
Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a
rather ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New
Thought and the Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed
her, and Henry, who was a kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed
her forty pounds a month betting money. Most of Priscilla's days
were spent in casting the horoscopes of horses, and she invested
her money scientifically, as the stars dictated. She betted on
football too, and had a large notebook in which she registered
the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the League.
The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one
against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match
between the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the
heavens so vast and so complicated that it was not to be wondered
at if she sometimes made a mistake about the outcome.
"Such a pity you don't believe in these things, Denis, such a
pity," said Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.
"I can't say I feel it so."
"Ah, that's because you don't know what it's like to have faith.
You've no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do
believe. All that happens means something; nothing you do is
ever insignificant. It makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I
at Crome. Dull as ditchwater, you'd think; but no, I don't find
it so. I don't regret the Old Days a bit. I have the Stars..."
She picked up the sheet of paper that was lying on the blotting-
pad. "Inman's horoscope," she explained. "(I thought I'd like
to have a little fling on the billiards championship this
autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with," she waved
her hand. "And then there's the next world and all the spirits,
and one's Aura, and Mrs. Eddy and saying you're not ill, and the
Christian Mysteries and Mrs. Besant. It's all splendid. One's
never dull for a moment. I can't think how I used to get on
before--in the Old Days. Pleasure--running about, that's all it
was; just running about. Lunch, tea, dinner, theatre, supper
every day. It was fun, of course, while it lasted. But there
wasn't much left of it afterwards. There's rather a good thing
about that in Barbecue-Smith's new book. Where is it?"
She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little
table by the head of the sofa.
"Do you know him, by the way?" she asked.
"Who?"
"Mr. Barbecue-Smith."
Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the
Sunday papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might
even be the author of "What a Young Girl Ought to Know".
"No, not personally," he said.
"I've invited him for next week-end." She turned over the pages
of the book. "Here's the passage I was thinking of. I marked
it. I always mark the things I like."
Holding the book almost at arm's length, for she was somewhat
long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand,
she began to read, slowly, dramatically.
"'What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million
incomes?'" She looked up from the page with a histrionic
movement of the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously.
Denis looked at it, fascinated. Was it the Real Thing and henna,
he wondered, or was it one of those Complete Transformations one
sees in the advertisements?
"'What are Thrones and Sceptres?'"
The orange Transformation--yes, it must be a Transformation--
bobbed up again.
"'What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the
Powerful, what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy
pleasures of High Society?'"
The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence
to sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.
"'They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind,
thin vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the
heart. Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand
times more significant. It is the unseen that counts in Life.'"
Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. "Beautiful, isn't it?" she said.
Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-
committal "H'm."
"Ah, it's a fine book this, a beautiful book," said Priscilla, as
she let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb.
"And here's the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the
Soul to a Lotus Pool, you know." She held up the book again and
read. "'A Friend of mine has a Lotus Pool in his garden. It
lies in a little dell embowered with wild roses and eglantine,
among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous descant all
the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and the
birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its
crystal waters...' Ah, and that reminds me," Priscilla
exclaimed, shutting the book with a clap and uttering her big
profound laugh--"that reminds me of the things that have been
going on in our bathing-pool since you were here last. We gave
the village people leave to come and bathe here in the evenings.
You've no idea of the things that happened."
She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now
and then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. "...mixed
bathing...saw them out of my window...sent for a pair of field-
glasses to make sure...no doubt of it..." The laughter broke out
again. Denis laughed too. Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the
floor.
It's time we went to see if tea's ready," said Priscilla. She
hoisted herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the
room, striding beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her,
faintly humming to himself:
"That's why I'm going to
Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-popera."
And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end:
"ra-ra."
CHAPTER III.
The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of
turf, bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone
balustrade. Two little summer-houses of brick stood at either
end. Below the house the ground sloped very steeply away, and
the terrace was a remarkably high one; from the balusters to the
sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty feet. Seen from below,
the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of
brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a fortification--a
castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out across airy
depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the
foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees,
lay the stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the
park, with its massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at
the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the
farther side of the stream the land rose again in a long slope,
chequered with cultivation. Looking up the valley, to the right,
one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.
The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little
summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled
about it when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry
Wimbush had begun to pour out the tea. He was one of those
ageless, unchanging men on the farther side of fifty, who might
be thirty, who might be anything. Denis had known him almost as
long as he could remember. In all those years his pale, rather
handsome face had never grown any older; it was like the pale
grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and summer--
unageing, calm, serenely without expression.
Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world
by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny
Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-
and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled
in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of her
deafness she sat apart, looking down at the world through sharply
piercing eyes. What did she think of men and women and things?
That was something that Denis had never been able to discover.
In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting. Even
now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was
smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright
round marbles.
On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary
Bracegirdle's face shone pink and childish. She was nearly
twenty-three, but one wouldn't have guessed it. Her short hair,
clipped like a page's, hung in a bell of elastic gold about her
cheeks. She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one
of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.
Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in
his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those
extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his
dark eye had the shining quickness of a robin's. But there was
nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him. The skin of his
wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the
hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the lizard's
disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin,
fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exact
contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time,
far more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with
the face like a grey bowler.
Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was
altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural
histories of the 'thirties he might have figured in a steel
engraving as a type of Homo Sapiens--an honour which at that time
commonly fell to Lord Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less
collar, Gombauld would have been completely Byronic--more than
Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provencal descent, a black-
haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous
large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He was jealous
of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld
painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld
his looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it
surprising that Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even
be something worse, Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at
Priscilla's side down the long grass terrace.
Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair
presented its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards
the tea-table. Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved
vivaciously; he smiled, he laughed, he made quick gestures with
his hands. From the depths of the chair came up a sound of soft,
lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard it. That laughter--how
well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him! He quickened
his pace.
In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting.
Her long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and
indolent grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face
had a pretty regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed
there were moments when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when
the oval face, with its long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed
nothing; when it was no more than a lazy mask of wax. She was
Henry Wimbush's own niece; that bowler-like countenance was one
of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family, appearing in its
female members as a blank doll-face. But across this dollish
mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental
bass, passed Anne's other inheritance--quick laughter, light
ironic amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods.
She was smiling now as Denis looked down at her: her cat's
smile, he called it, for no very good reason. The mouth was
compressed, and on either side of it two tiny wrinkles had formed
themselves in her cheeks. An infinity of slightly malicious
amusement lurked in those little folds, in the puckers about the
half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and laughing
between the narrowed lids.
The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair
between Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.
"How are you, Jenny?" he shouted to her.
Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the
subject of her health were a secret that could not be publicly
divulged.
"How's London been since I went away?" Anne inquired from the
depth of her chair.
The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was
waiting for utterance. "Well," said Denis, smiling happily, "to
begin with..."
"Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?" Henry
Wimbush leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.
"To begin with," said Denis desperately, "there was the
Ballet..."
"Last week," Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, "we dug
up fifty yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole
bored through the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they
were laid down by the monks in the fifteenth century, or
whether..."
Denis listened gloomily. "Extraordinary!" he said, when Mr.
Wimbush had finished; "quite extraordinary!" He helped himself
to another slice of cake. He didn't even want to tell his tale
about London now; he was damped.
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