Island - Aldous Huxley [124]
“I’m thinking of what I did to Molly.”
“What was it that you did to Molly?”
He didn’t want to answer; but Susila was inexorable.
“Tell me what it was that you did.”
Another violent gust made the windows rattle. It was raining harder now—raining, it seemed to Will Farnaby, on purpose, raining in such a way that he would have to go on remembering what he didn’t want to remember, would be compelled to say out loud the shameful things he must at all costs keep to himself.
“Tell me.”
Reluctantly and in spite of himself, he told her.
“‘Do you really mean it, Will?’” And because of Babs—Babs, God help him! Babs, believe it or not!—he really did mean it, and she had walked out into the rain.
“The next time I saw her was in the hospital.”
“Was it still raining?” Susila asked.
“Still raining.”
“As hard as it’s raining now?”
“Very nearly.” And what Will heard was no longer this afternoon shower in the tropics but the steady drumming on the window of the little room where Molly lay dying.
“It’s me,” he was saying through the sound of the rain, “it’s Will.” Nothing happened; and then suddenly he felt the almost imperceptible movement of Molly’s hand within his own. The voluntary pressure and then, after a few seconds, the involuntary release, the total limpness.
“Tell me again, Will.”
He shook his head. It was too painful, too humiliating.
“Tell me again,” she insisted. “It’s the only way.”
Making an enormous effort, he started to tell the odious story yet once more. Did he really mean it? Yes, he really meant it—meant to hurt, meant perhaps (did one ever know what one really intended?) to kill. All for Babs, or the World Well Lost. Not his world, of course—Molly’s world and, at the center of that world, the life that had created it. Snuffed out for the sake of that delicious smell in the darkness, of those muscular reflexes, that enormity of enjoyment, those consummate and intoxicatingly shameless skills.
“Good-bye, Will.” And the door had closed behind her with a faint, dry click.
He wanted to call her back. But Babs’s lover remembered the skills, the reflexes, and within its aura of musk, a body agonizing in the extremity of pleasure. Remembered these things and, standing at the window, watched the car move away through the rain, watched and was filled, as it turned the corner, with a shameful exultation. Free at last! Even freer, as he discovered three hours later in the hospital, than he had supposed. For now he was feeling the last faint pressure of her fingers; feeling the final message of her love. And then the message was interrupted. The hand went limp and now, suddenly, appallingly, there was no sound of breathing. “Dead,” he whispered, and felt himself choking. “Dead.”
“Suppose it hadn’t been your fault,” said Susila, breaking a long silence. “Suppose that she’d suddenly died without your having had anything to do with it. Wouldn’t that have been almost as bad?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, it’s more than just feeling guilty about Molly’s death. It’s death itself, death as such, that you find so terrible.” She was thinking of Dugald now. “So senselessly evil.”
“Senselessly evil,” he repeated. “Yes, perhaps that’s why I had to be a professional execution watcher. Just because it was all so senseless, so utterly bestial. Following the smell of death from one end of the earth to the other. Like a vulture. Nice comfortable people just don’t have any idea what the world is like. Not exceptionally, as it was during the war, but all the time. All the time.” And as he spoke he was seeing, in a vision as brief and comprehensive and intensely circumstantial as a drowning man’s, all the hateful scenes he had witnessed in the course of those well-paid pilgrimages to every hellhole and abattoir revolting enough to qualify as News. Negroes in South Africa, the man in the San Quentin gas chamber, mangled bodies in an Algerian farmhouse, and everywhere mobs, everywhere policemen and paratroopers, everywhere those dark-skinned children, stick-legged, potbellied, with flies on their raw