Leda Aldous Huxley 7

Leda Aldous Huxley 7

EVENING PARTY

 

“SANS Espoir, sans Espoir . . .” sang the lady while the piano

laboriously opened its box of old sardines in treacle. One detected

ptomaine in the syrup.

 

Sans Espoir . . . I thought of the rhymes—soir, nonchaloir,

reposoir—the dying falls of a symbolism grown sadly suicidal before the

broad Flemish back of the singer, the dewlaps of her audience. Sans

Espoir. The listeners wore the frozen rapture of those who gaze upon the

uplifted Host.

 

Catching one another’s eye, we had a simultaneous vision of pews, of

hyenas and hysteria.

 

Three candles were burning. They behaved like English aristocrats in a

French novel—perfectly, impassively. I tried to imitate their

milordliness.

 

One of the candles flickered, snickered. Was it a draught or was it

laughter?

 

Flickering, snickering—candles, you betrayed me. I had to laugh too.

 

 

 

 

BEAUTY

I

 

THERE is a sea somewhere—whether in the lampless crypts of the earth,

or among sunlit islands, or that which is an unfathomable and terrifying

question between the archipelagos of stars—there is a sea (and perhaps

its tides have filled those green transparent pools that glint like eyes

in a spring storm-cloud) which is for ever troubled and in travail—a

bubbling and a heaving up of waters as though for the birth of a

fountain.

 

The sick and the crippled lie along the brims in expectation of the

miracle. And at last, at last . . .

 

A funnel of white water is twisted up and so stands, straight and still

by the very speed of its motion.

 

It drinks the light; slowly it is infused with colour, rose and

mother-of-pearl. Slowly it takes shape, a heavenly body.

 

O dazzling Anadyomene!

 

The flakes of foam break into white birds about her head, fall again in

a soft avalanche of flowers. Perpetual miracle, beauty endlessly born.

 

 

 

 

II

 

STEAMERS, in all your travelling have you trailed the meshes of your

long expiring white nets across this sea, or dipped in it your sliding

rail, or balanced your shadow far far down upon its glass-green sand?

Or, forgetting the preoccupations of commerce and the well-oiled

predestination of your machinery, did you ever put in at the real

Paphos?

 

 

 

 

III

 

IN the city of Troy, whither our Argonautical voyages had carried us,

we found Helen and that lamentable Cressid who was to Chaucer the

feminine paradox, untenably fantastic but so devastatingly actual, the

crystal ideal—flawed; and to Shakespeare the inevitable trull, flayed

to show her physiological machinery and the logical conclusion of every

the most heartrendingly ingenuous gesture of maidenhood. (But, bless

you! our gorge doesn’t rise. We are cynically well up in the damning

Theory of woman, which makes it all the more amusing to watch ourselves

in the ecstatic practice of her. Unforeseen perversity.)

 

Fabulous Helen! At her firm breasts they used to mould delicate drinking

cups which made the sourest vinegar richly poisonous.

 

The geometry of her body had utterly outwitted Euclid, and the

Philosophers were baffled by curves of a subtlety infinitely more

elusive and Eleusinian than the most oracular speculations of

Parmenides. They did their best to make a coherent system out of the

incompatible, but empirically established, facts of her. Time, for

instance, was abolished within the circle of her arms. “It is eternity

when her lips touch me,” Paris had remarked. And yet this same Paris was

manifestly and notoriously falling into a decline, had lost whatever

sense or beauty he once possessed, together with his memory and all

skill in the nine arts which are memory’s daughters. How was it then,

these perplexed philosophers wondered, that she could at one and the

same moment give eternity like a goddess, while she was vampiring away

with that divine thirsty mouth of hers the last dregs of a poor mortal

life? They sought an insufficient refuge in Heraclitus’ theory of

opposites.

 

Meanwhile Troilus was always to be found at sunset, pacing up and down

the walls by the western gate—quite mad. At dusk the Greek camp-fires

would blossom along Xanthus banks—one after another, a myriad lights

dancing in the dark.

 

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,

O’er heaven’s pure azure spreads her something light.

 

He would repeat the simile to himself, but could never remember the

correct epithets. Not that they mattered—any more than anything else.

 

 

 

 

IV

 

THERE are fine cities in the world—Manhattan, Ecbatana and

Hecatompylus—but this city of Troy is the most fabulous of them all.

Rome was seven hills of butcher’s meat, Athens an abstraction of marble,

in Alexandria the steam of kidney-puddings revolted the cœnobites,

darkness and size render London inappreciable, Paris is full of

sparrows, the snow lies gritty on Berlin, Moscow has no verisimilitude,

all the East is peopled by masks and apes and larvæ. But this city of

Troy is most of all real and fabulous with its charnel beauty.

 

“Is not Helen the end of our search—paradisal little World, symbol and

epitome of the Great? Dawn sleeps in the transparent shadow of roses

within her ear. The stainless candour of infinity—far-off peaks in

summer and the Milky Way—has taken marvellous form in her. The Little

World has its meteors, too, comets and shadowy clouds of hair, stars at

whose glance men go planet-struck. Meteors—yes, and history it has. The

past is still alive in the fragrance of her hair, and her young body

breathes forth memories as old as the beginning of life—Eros first of

gods. In her is the goal. I rest here with Helen.”

 

“Fool,” I said, “quote your Faustus. I go further.”

 

 

 

 

V

 

FURTHER—but a hundred Liliputian tethers prevent me, the white nerves

which tie soul to skin. And the whole air is aching with epidermical

magnetism.

 

Further, further. But Troy is the birthplace of my homesickness. Troy is

more than a patriotism, for it is built of my very flesh; the

remembrance of it is a fire that sticks and tears when I would pull it

off.

 

But further. One last look at Troilus where he stands by the western

gate, staring over the plain. Further. When I have learnt the truth, I

will return and build a new palace with domes less ominously like

breasts, and there I will invent a safer Helen and a less paradoxical

Cressid, and my harem will be a library for enlightenment.

 

 

 

 

VI

 

HERE are pagodas of diminishing bells. The leopard sleeps in the depth

of his rosy cavern, and when he breathes it is a smell of irresistible

sweetness; in the bestiaries he is the symbol of Christ in His

sepulchre.

 

This listening conch has collected all the rumours of pantheism; the dew

in this veined cup is the sacrament of nature, while these pale

thuribles worship in the dark with yellow lamps and incense.

 

Everywhere alchemical profusion—the golden mintage of glades and

ripples, vigils of passion enriched with silver under the fingers of the

moon; everywhere lavishness, colour, music; the smoothness of machinery,

incredible and fantastic ingenuities. God has lost his half-hunter in

the desert.

 

But we have not come to worship among these Gothic beeches, for all

their pillars and the lace-work of their green windows. We are looking

for other things than churches.

 

 

 

 

VII

 

TREES, the half-fossilised exuberances of a passionate life, petrified

fountains of intemperance—with their abolition begins the realm of

reason.

 

Geometry, lines and planes, smooth edges, the ordered horror of

perspectives. In this country there are pavements bright and sleek as

water. The walls are precipices to which giants have nailed a perpetual

cataract of marble. The fringes of the sky are scalloped with a pattern

of domes and minarets. At night, too, the down-struck lamps are pyramids

of phantom green and the perfect circle they make upon the pavement is

magical.

 

Look over the parapet of the Acropolis. The bridges go dizzily down on

their swaying catenaries, the gull’s flight chained fast. The walls drop

clear into the valley, all the millions of basalt blocks calcined into a

single red monolith, fluted with thirstily shining organ pipes, which

seem for ever wet. There are no crevices for moss and toadflax, and even

the claws of the yellow lichen slip on its polished flanks.

 

The valley is all paved and inlaid with rivers of steel. No trees, for

they have been abolished.

 

“Glorious unnature,” cries the watcher at the parapet. His voice

launches into the abyss, following the curve of the bridges. “Glorious

unnature. We have triumphed.”

 

But his laughter as it descends is like a flight of broken steps.