Island - Aldous Huxley [1]
For the hundredth time the articulate oboe called him to attention.
Yes, had he ever really loved her?
“Good-bye, Will,” came her remembered whisper as she turned back on the threshold. And then it was she who had said it—in a whisper, from the depths of her heart. “I still love you, Will—in spite of everything.”
A moment later the door of the flat closed behind her almost without a sound. The little dry click of the latch, and she was gone.
He had jumped up, had run to the front door and opened it, had listened to the retreating footsteps on the stairs. Like a ghost at cockcrow, a faint familiar perfume lingered vanishingly on the air. He closed the door again, walked into his gray-and-yellow bedroom and looked out the widow. A few seconds passed, then he saw her crossing the pavement and getting into the car. He heard the shrill grinding of the starter, once, twice, and after that the drumming of the motor. Should he open the window? “Wait, Molly, wait,” he heard himself shouting in imagination. The window remained unopened; the car began to move, turned the corner and the street was empty. It was too late. Too late, thank God! said a gross derisive voice. Yes, thank God! And yet the guilt was there at the pit of his stomach. The guilt, the gnawing of his remorse—but through the remorse he could feel a horrible rejoicing. Somebody low and lewd and brutal, somebody alien and odious who was yet himself was gleefully thinking that now there was nothing to prevent him from having what he wanted. And what he wanted was a different perfume, was the warmth and resilience of a younger body. “Attention,” said the oboe. Yes, attention. Attention to Babs’s musky bedroom, with its strawberry-pink alcove and the two windows that looked onto the Charing Cross Road and were looked into, all night long, by the winking glare of the big sky sign for Porter’s Gin on the opposite side of the street. Gin in royal crimson—and for ten seconds the alcove was the Sacred Heart, for ten miraculous seconds the flushed face so close to his own glowed like a seraph’s, transfigured as though by an inner fire of love. Then came the yet profounder transfiguration of darkness. One, two, three, four…Ah God, make it go on forever! But punctually at the count of ten the electric clock would turn on another revelation—but of death, of the Essential Horror; for the lights, this time, were green, and for ten hideous seconds Babs’s rosy alcove became a womb of mud and, on the bed, Babs herself was corpse-colored, a cadaver galvanized into posthumous epilepsy. When Porter’s Gin proclaimed itself in green, it was hard to forget what had happened and who one was. The only thing to do was to shut one’s eyes and plunge, if one could, more deeply into the Other World of sensuality, plunge violently, plunge deliberately into those alienating frenzies to which poor Molly—Molly (“Attention”) in her bandages, Molly in her wet grave at Highgate, and Highgate, of course, was why one had to shut one’s eyes each time when the green light made a corpse of Babs’s nakedness—had always and so utterly been a stranger. And not only Molly. Behind his closed eyelids, Will saw his mother, pale like a cameo, her face spiritualized by accepted suffering, her hands made monstrous and subhuman by arthritis. His mother and, standing behind her wheelchair, already running to fat and quivering like calf’s-foot jelly with all the feelings that had never found their proper expression in consummated love, was his sister Maud.
“How can you, Will?”
“Yes, how can you?” Maud echoed tearfully in her vibrating contralto.
There was no answer. No answer, that was to say, in any words that could be uttered in their presence, that, uttered, those two martyrs—the mother to her unhappy marriage, the daughter to filial piety—could possibly understand. No answer except in words of the most obscenely scientific