Island - Aldous Huxley [132]
“Give ear to our afflictions,” the old man piped.
The king cocked his head and listened.
“I hear the groans of dying men,” he said. “I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication.”
“Supplication!” said the deity in the clouds. “That’s the spirit.” He patted himself on the chest.
“They had some kind of a virus,” Mary Sarojini explained in a whisper. “Like Asian flu, only a lot worse.”
“We repeat the appropriate litanies,” the old priest querulously piped, “we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us.”
“Only a god can help.”
“Hear, hear!” shouted the presiding deity.
“But by what means?”
“Only a god can say.”
“Correct,” said the god in his basso profundo, “absolutely correct.”
“Creon, my wife’s brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns—as very soon he must—we shall know what heaven advises.”
“What heaven bloody well commands!” the basso profoundo emended.
“Were people really so silly?” Mary Sarojini asked, as the audience laughed.
“Really and truly,” Will assured her.
A phonograph started to play the Dead March in Saul.
From left to right a black-robed procession of mourners carrying sheeted biers passed slowly across the front of the stage. Puppet after puppet—and as soon as the group had disappeared on the right it would be brought in again from the left. The procession seemed endless, the corpses innumerable.
“Dead,” said Oedipus as he watched them pass. “And another dead. And yet another, another.”
“That’ll teach them!” the basso profundo broke in. “I’ll learn you to be a toad!”
Oedipus continued:
“The soldier’s bier, the whore’s; the babe stone-cold
Pressed to the ache of unsucked breasts; the youth in horror
Turning away from the black swollen face
That from his moonlit pillow once looked up,
Eager for kisses. Dead, all dead,
Mourned by the soon to die and by the doomed
Borne with reluctant footing to the abhorred
Garden of cypresses where one huge pit
Yawns to receive them, stinking to the moon.”
While he was speaking, two new puppets, a boy and a girl in the gayest of Palanese finery, entered from the right and, moving in the opposite direction to the black-robed mourners, took their stand, arm in arm, downstage and a little left of center.
“But we, meanwhile,” said the boy when Oedipus had finished:
“Are bound for rosier gardens and the absurd
Apocalyptic rite that in the mind
Calls forth from the touched skin and melting flesh
The immanent Infinite.”
“What about Me?” the basso profundo rumbled from the welkin. “You seem to forget that I’m Wholly Other.”
Endlessly the black procession to the cemetery still shuffled on. But now the Dead March was interrupted in mid-phrase. Music gave place to a single deep note—tuba and double bass—prolonged interminably. The boy in the foreground held up his hand.
“Listen! The drone, the everlasting burden.”
In unison with the unseen instruments the mourners began to chant. “Death, death, death, death…”
“But life knows more than one note,” said the boy.
“Life,” the girl chimed in, “can sing both high and low.”
“And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music.”
“A richer music,” the girl repeated.
And with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass.
The drone and the singing diminished gradually into silence; the last of the mourners disappeared and the boy and girl in the foreground retired to a corner where they could go on with their kissing undisturbed.
There was another flourish of trumpets and, obese in a purple tunic, in came Creon, fresh from Delphi