Island - Aldous Huxley [148]
And all the while—fiddle, flute and harpsichord—the final Presto of the Fourth Brandenburg kept trotting timelessly forward. What a jolly little rococo death march! Left, right; left, right…But what was the word of command for hexapods? And suddenly they weren’t hexapods any longer; they were bipeds. The endless column of insects had turned abruptly into an endless column of soldiers. Marching as he had seen the Brown Shirts marching through Berlin, a year before the war. Thousands upon thousands of them, their banners fluttering, their uniforms glowing in the infernal brightness like floodlit excrement. Numberless as insects, and each of them moving with the precision of a machine, the perfect docility of a performing dog. And the faces, the faces! He had seen the close-ups on the German newsreel, and here they were again, preternaturally real and three-dimensional and alive. The monstrous face of Hitler with his mouth open, yelling. And then the faces of assorted listeners. Huge idiot faces, blankly receptive. Faces of wide-eyed sleepwalkers. Faces of young Nordic angels rapt in the Beatific Vision. Faces of baroque saints going into ecstasy. Faces of lovers on the brink of orgasm. One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror music. Onward Nazi soldiers. Onward Marxists. Onward Christian soldiers, and Muslims. Onward every chosen people, every Crusader and Holy War maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death. And suddenly Will found himself looking at what the marching column would become when it had reached its destination—thousands of corpses in the Korean mud, innumerable packets of garbage littering the African desert. And here (for the scene kept changing with bewildering rapidity and suddenness), here were the five flyblown bodies he had seen only a few months ago, faces upwards and their throats gashed, in the courtyard of an Algerian farm. Here, out of a past almost twenty years earlier, was that old woman, dead and stark naked in the rubble of a stucco house in St. John’s Wood. And here, without transition, was his own gray and yellow bedroom, with the reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe door of two pale bodies, his and Babs’s, frantically coupling to the accompaniment of his memories of Molly’s funeral and the strains, from Radio Stuttgart, of the Good Friday music out of Parsifal.
The scene changed again and, festooned with tin stars and fairy lamps, Aunt Mary’s face smiled at him gaily and then was transformed before his eyes into the face of the whining, malignant stranger who had taken her place during those last dreadful weeks before the final transformation into garbage. A radiance of love and goodness, and then a blind had been drawn, a shutter closed, a key turned in the lock, and there they were—she in her cemetery and he in his private prison sentenced to solitary confinement and, one unspecified fine morning, to death. The Agony in the Bargain Basement. The Crucifixion among the Christmas-tree decorations. Outside or in, with the eyes open or with the eyes closed, there was no escape.
“No escape,” he whispered, and the words confirmed the fact, transformed it into a hideous certitude that kept opening out, opening down, into depth below depth of malignant vulgarity, hell beyond hell of utterly pointless suffering.
And this suffering (it came to him with the force of a revelation)—this suffering was not merely pointless; it was also cumulative, it was also self-perpetuating. Surely enough, frightfully enough, as it had come to Molly and Aunt Mary and