Island - Aldous Huxley [53]
“And of course you wouldn’t enjoy being poor.”
“I certainly wouldn’t.”
There was a silence.
“Well,” said Susila at last, “let’s get back to Africa.”
“I’d been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line for Uncle Joe. It was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to her.”
“Next to the young woman you couldn’t have liked less?”
“Couldn’t have liked less,” he repeated, “or disapproved of more. But if you’re an addict you’ve got to have your dope—the dope that you know in advance is going to destroy you.”
“It’s a funny thing,” she said reflectively, “but in Pala we have hardly any addicts.”
“Not even sex addicts?”
“The sex addicts are also person addicts. In other words, they’re lovers.”
“But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love.”
“Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly—that’s part of the Art of Loving.”
As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before—the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to a higher power—Rachel squared, Rachel to the nth. And the unhappiness that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel. Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting, what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become more demanding, was claiming ever more and more of his time—time not only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and nightclubs, at her horrible friends’ cocktail parties, on weekends in the country. “Just you and me, darling,” she would say, “all alone together.” All alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the craving persisted. After one of those dreadful weekends, he was as hopelessly a Babs addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no less hopelessly a Will Farnaby addict. Hopelessly so far as he was concerned—for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the addiction was always and irrepressibly hopeful. She never ceased to expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind, unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her and going to live with Babs—it was only then that hope had finally given place to hopelessness. “Do you mean it, Will—do you really mean it?” “I really mean it.” It was in hopelessness, in utter hopelessness, that she had walked out to the car, had driven away into the rain—into her death. At the funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again. That evening, while he was sitting at his desk trying to write an article on “What’s Wrong with Youth,” trying not to remember the hospital, the open grave, and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of condolence,