Complete Works of Aldous Huxley, page 48
Calamy, meanwhile, was laughing. ‘I remember making the same discovery myself,’ he said. ‘It’s rather painful at first. One feels as though one has been somehow swindled and done in. You remember what Beethoven said: “that he seldom found in the playing of the most distinguished virtuosi that excellence which he supposed he had a right to expect.” One has a right to expect celebrated people to live up to their reputations; they ought to be interesting.’
Miss Thriplow leaned forward again, nodding her assent with a child-like eagerness. ‘I know lots of obscure little people,’ she said, ‘who are much more interesting and much more genuine, one somehow feels, than the celebrated ones. It’s genuineness that counts, isn’t it?’
Calamy agreed.
‘I think it’s difficult to be genuine,’ Miss Thriplow went on, ‘if one’s a celebrity or a public figure, or anything of that sort.’ She became very confidential indeed. ‘I get quite frightened when I see my name in the papers and photographers want to take pictures of me and people ask me out to dinner. I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.’ How little and obscure she was! How poor and honest, so to speak. Those roaring lions at Lady Trunion’s, those boring lion huntresses . . . they had no hope of passing through the needle’s eye.
‘I’m delighted to hear you saying all this,’ said Calamy. ‘If only all writers felt as you do!’
Miss Thriplow shook her head, modestly declining the implied compliment. ‘I’m like Jehovah,’ she said; ‘I just am that I am. That’s all. Why should I make believe that I’m somebody else? Though I confess,’ she added, with a greatly daring candour, ‘that I was intimidated by your reputation into pretending that I was more mondaine than I really am. I imagined you as being so tremendously worldly and smart. It’s a great relief to find you’re not.’
‘Smart?’ repeated Calamy, making a grimace.
‘You sounded so dazzlingly social from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s accounts.’ And as she spoke the words she felt herself becoming correspondingly obscurer and littler.
Calamy laughed. ‘Perhaps I was that sort of imbecile once,’ he said. ‘But now — well, I hope all that’s over now.’
‘I pictured you,’ Miss Thriplow went on, straining, in spite of her obscurity, to be brilliant, ‘I pictured you as one of those people in the Sketch— “walking in the Park with a friend,” you know; a friend who would turn out at the least to be a duchess or a distinguished novelist. Can you wonder that I was nervous?’ She dropped back into the depths of her chair. Poor little thing! But the pearls, though not marine, were still rather an embarrassment.
CHAPTER II
MRS. ALDWINKLE, WHEN she returned, found them on the upper terrace, looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza at their feet was already eclipsed by the shadow of the great bluff which projected, on the further side of the westernmost of the two valleys, into the plain. But, beyond, the plain was still bright. It lay, stretched out beneath them like a map of itself — the roads marked in white, the pinewoods dark green, the streams as threads of silver, ploughland and meadowland in chequers of emerald and brown, the railway a dark brown line ruled along it. And beyond its furthest fringes of pinewoods and sand, darkly, opaquely blue, the sea. Towards this wide picture, framed between the projecting hills, of which the eastern was still rosily flushed with the light, the western profoundly dark, a great flight of steps descended, past a lower terrace, down, between columnar cypresses, to a grand sculptured gateway half-way down the hill.
They stood there in silence, leaning their elbows on the balustrade. Ever since she had jettisoned the Guardswoman they had got on, Miss Thriplow thought, most awfully well. She could see that he liked her combination of moral ingenuousness and mental sophistication, of cleverness and genuineness. Why she had ever thought of pretending she was anything but simple and natural she couldn’t now imagine. After all, that was what she really was — or at least what she had determined that she ought to be.
From the entrance court on the west flank of the palace came the hoot of a motor horn and the sound of voices.
‘There they are,’ said Miss Thriplow.
‘I rather wish they weren’t,’ he said, and sighing he straightened himself up and turned round, with his back to the view, towards the house. ‘It’s like heaving a great stone into a calm pool — all this noise, I mean.’
Mentally cataloguing herself among the tranquil charms of evening, Miss Thriplow took the remark to be complimentary to herself. ‘What smashings of crystal one has to put up with,’ she said. ‘Every other moment, if one’s at all sensitive.’
Through the huge echoing saloons of the palace the sound of an approaching voice could be heard. ‘Calamy,’ it called, ‘Calamy!’ mounting through the syllables of the name from a low to a much higher note, not, however, through any intervals known to music, but in a succession of uncertain and quite unrelated tones. ‘Calamy!’ It was as vague and tuneless as the call of an articulate wind. There were hurrying footsteps, a rustling of draperies. In the huge pompous doorway at the head of the steps leading down from the house to the terrace appeared the figure of Mrs. Aldwinkle.
‘There you are!’ she called in a rapture. Calamy walked to meet her.
Mrs. Aldwinkle was one of those large, handsome, old-masterish women who look as though they had been built up from sections of two different people — such broad shoulders they have, so Junonian a form; and growing from between the shoulders such a slender neck, such a small, compact and childish head. They look their best between twenty-eight and, shall we say, five-and-thirty, when the body is in its perfect maturity and the neck, the little head, the unravaged features seem still to belong to a young girl. Their beauty is made the more striking, the more attractive by the curious incongruousness of its components.
‘At thirty-three,’ Mr. Cardan used to say of her, ‘Lilian Aldwinkle appealed to all the instinctive bigamist in one. She was eighteen in the attics and widow Dido on the floors below. One had the impression of being with two women at the same time. It was most stimulating.’
He spoke, alas, in the past tense; for Mrs. Aldwinkle was no longer thirty-three, nor had been these twelve, these fifteen years or more. The Junonian form — that was still stately and as yet not too massive. And from behind, it is true, the head still looked like a child’s head set on those broad shoulders. But the face, which had once been so much the younger member of the partnership, had outstripped the body in the race through time and was old and worn beyond its years. The eyes were the youngest feature. Large, blue and rather prominent, they stared very glitteringly and intently out of the face. But the setting of them was pouchy and crow’s-footed. There were a couple of horizontal wrinkles across the broad forehead. Two deep folds ran down from the corner of the nose, past the mouth, where they were partially interrupted by another system of folds that moved with the movements of the lips, to the lower edge of the jaw, forming a sharp line of demarcation between the sagging cheeks and the strong, prominent chin. The mouth was wide, with lips of rather vague contour, whose indefiniteness was enhanced by Mrs. Aldwinkle’s very careless reddening of them. For Mrs. Aldwinkle was an impressionist; it was the effect at a distance, the grand theatrical flourish that interested her. She had no patience, even at the dressing-table, for niggling pre-Raphaelite detail.
She stood there for a moment at the top of the steps, an imposing and majestic figure. Her long and ample dress of pale green linen hung down in stiff fluted folds about her. The green veil tied round her wide straw hat floated airily over her shoulders. She carried a large reticule over one arm and from her waist there dangled at the end of little chains a whole treasury of gold and silver objects.
‘There you are!’ she smiled at the approaching Calamy, smiled what had once been a smile of piercing sweetness, of alluring enchantment. Its interest now, alas, was chiefly historical. With a gesture at once theatrically exaggerated and inexpressive, Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly stretched out both her hands in welcome and ran down the steps to meet him. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s movements were as inharmonious and uncertain as her voice. She moved awkwardly and stiffly. The majesty of her repose was dissipated.
‘Dear Calamy,’ she cried, and embraced him. ‘I must kiss you,’ she said. ‘It’s such ages since I saw you.’ Then turning with a look of suspicion to Miss Thriplow. ‘How long has he been here?’ she asked.
‘Since before tea,’ said Miss Thriplow.
‘Before tea?’ Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed shrilly, as though outraged. ‘But why didn’t you let me know in time when you were coming?’ she went on, turning to Calamy. The thought that he had arrived when she was not there, and that he had, moreover, spent all this time talking with Mary Thriplow, annoyed her. Mrs. Aldwinkle was perpetually haunted by the fear that she was missing something. For a number of years now the universe had always seemed to be conspiring to keep her away from the places where the exciting things were happening and the wonderful words being said. She had been loth enough, this morning, to leave Miss Thriplow behind at the palace; Mrs. Aldwinkle didn’t want her guests to lead independent existences out of her sight. But if she had known, if she had had the slightest suspicion, that Calamy was going to arrive while she was away, that he would spend hours en tête à tête with Mary Thriplow — why then she would never have gone down to the sea at all. She’d have stayed at home, however tempting the prospect of a bathe.
‘You seem to have made yourself extremely smart for the occasion,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, looking at Miss Thriplow’s pearls and her black silk with the white piping round the flounces.
Miss Thriplow looked at the view and pretended not to have heard what her hostess had said. She had no wish to engage in a conversation on this particular subject.
‘Well now,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle to her new guest, ‘I must show you the view and the house and all that.’
‘Miss Thriplow’s already very kindly been doing that,’ said Calamy.
At this piece of information Mrs. Aldwinkle looked extremely annoyed. ‘But she can’t have shown you everything,’ she said, ‘because she doesn’t know what there is to show. And besides, Mary knows nothing about the history of the place, or the Cybo Malaspinas, or the artists who worked on the palace, or . . .’ she waved her hand with a gesture indicating that, in fine, Mary Thriplow knew nothing whatever and was completely incapable of showing any one round the house and its gardens.
‘In any case,’ said Calamy, doing his best to say the right thing, ‘I’ve seen enough already to make me think the place perfectly lovely.’
But Mrs. Aldwinkle was not content with this spontaneous and untutored admiration. She was sure that he had not really seen the beauty of the view, that he had not understood it, not known how to analyse it into its component charms. She began to expound the prospect.
‘The cypresses make such a wonderful contrast with the olives,’ she explained, prodding the landscape with the tip of her parasol, as though she were giving a lantern lecture with coloured slides.
She understood it all, of course; she was entirely qualified to appreciate it in every detail. For the view was now her property. It was therefore the finest in the world; but at the same time, she alone had the right to let you know the fact.
We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to us. Provincial picture galleries are always stuffed with Raphaels and Giorgiones. The most brilliant metropolis in Christendom, according to its inhabitants, is Dublin. My gramophone and my Ford car are better than yours. And how pathetically boring are those poor but cultured tourists who show us their collection of picture postcards with as much pride as if they had been the original paintings themselves.
With the palace Mrs. Aldwinkle had purchased vast domains unmentioned in the contract. She had bought, to begin with, the Cybo Malaspina and their history. This family, whose only claim to fame is to have produced, a little before its extinction, that Prince of Massa Carrara to whom the Old Woman in ‘Candide’ — when she was young and a Pope’s ravishing daughter — was once engaged to be married, had now become for Mrs. Aldwinkle as splendid as the Gonzaga, the Este, the Medici, or the Visconti. Even the dull Dukes of Modena, the tenants of the palace (except during the brief Napoleonic interlude) between the extinction of the Cybo Malaspina and the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy, even the Dukes of Modena had so far profited by their connection with the place that for Mrs. Aldwinkle they were now patrons of letters and fathers of their people. And Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciochi, who had, while Princess of Lucca, passed more than one hot summer on these heights, had come to be credited by the present owner with an unbounded enthusiasm for the arts and, what in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes was almost more splendid, an unbounded enthusiasm for love. In Elisa Buonaparte-Bacciochi Mrs. Aldwinkle had acquired a sister soul, whom she alone understood.
It was the same with the landscape. It was hers down to the remote horizon, and nobody but she could really give it its due, And then, how she appreciated the Italians! Ever since she had bought a house in Italy, she had become the one foreigner who knew them intimately. The whole peninsula and everything it contained were her property and her secret. She had bought its arts, its music, its melodious language, its literature, its wine and cooking, the beauty of its women and the virility of its Fascists. She had acquired Italian passion: cuore, amore and dolore were hers. Nor had she forgotten to buy the climate — the finest in Europe — the fauna — and how proud she was when she read in her morning paper that a wolf had devoured a Pistoiese sportsman within fifteen miles of home! — the flora — especially the red anemones and the wild tulips — the volcanoes — still so wonderfully active — the earthquakes. . . .
‘And now,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she had polished off the view, ‘now we must look at the house.’
She turned her back on the view. ‘This part of the palace,’ she said, continuing her lecture, ‘dates from about 1630.’ She pointed upwards with her parasol; the coloured slides were now architectural. ‘A very fine specimen of early baroque. What remains of the old castle, with the tower, constitutes the eastern wing of the present house. . . .’
Miss Thriplow, who had heard all this before, listened none the less with the rapt expression of interest that one sees on the faces of children at Royal Institution lectures; partly to atone in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes for the offence of having been at home when Calamy arrived, and partly to impress Calamy himself with her capacity for being frankly, totally and uncritically absorbed in the little affairs of the moment.
‘Now I’ll show you the inside of the palace,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, mounting the steps that led from the terrace to the house; her treasures jingled at the end of their chains. Obediently Miss Thriplow and Calamy followed in her wake.
‘Most of the paintings,’ proclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, ‘are by Pasquale da Montecatini. A great painter — dreadfully underrated.’ She shook her head.
Miss Thriplow was somewhat embarrassed when, at this remark, her companion turned to her and made a hardly perceptible grimace. Whether to smile confidentially and ironically back, whether to ignore the grimace and preserve the Royal Institution expression — that was the question. In the end she decided to ignore the tacit confidence.
On the threshold of the great saloon they were met by a young girl dressed in a frock of pale pink linen, with a very young round face (otherwise ingenuous than Miss Thriplow’s) looking out of a rectangular window cut in a short smooth bell of copper-coloured hair. A pair of wide-open pale blue eyes looked out from beneath the straight metallic fringe. Her nose was small and delicately snubby. A short upper lip made her look at once pathetic and merry, like a child. It was Mrs. Aldwinkle’s niece, Irene.
She shook hands with Calamy.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that I ought to tell you that you’ve grown up tremendously since I saw you last. But the truth is that I don’t think you have at all.’
‘I can’t help my appearance,’ she answered. ‘But inside . . .’ Inside Irene was older than the rocks on which she sat. It was not for nothing that she had passed the five most impressionable years of her life under her Aunt Lilian’s guardianship.
Mrs. Aldwinkle impatiently cut short the conversation. ‘I want you to look at this ceiling,’ she said to Calamy. Like hens drinking they stared up at the rape of Europa. Mrs. Aldwinkle lowered her gaze. ‘And the rustic work with the group of marine deities.’ In a pair of large niches, lined with shell-work and sponge-stone, two fishy groups furiously writhed. ‘So delightfully seicento,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle.
