Antic Hay Aldous Huxley (philippa perry book .TXT) 📖

more determined than ever, he seized her so violently by the throat, that a blood-vessel broke and she began coughing bright blood over the bedclothes. The amateur uncle had been reduced to send for a doctor and Emily had spent the next few weeks in a nursing home. That was four years ago; her husband had tried to induce her to come back, but Emily had refused. She had a little money of her own; she was able to refuse. The amateur uncle had consoled himself with other and more docile nieces.

“And has nobody tried to make love to you since then?” he asked.

“Oh, lots of them have tried.”

“And not succeeded?”

She shook her head. “I don’t like men,” she said. “They’re hateful, most of them. They’re brutes.”

“Anch’ io?”

“What?” she asked, puzzled.

“Am I a brute too?” And behind his beard, suddenly, he felt rather a brute.

“No,” said Emily, after a little hesitation, “you’re different. At least I think you are; though sometimes,” she added candidly, “sometimes you do and say things which make me wonder if you really are different.”

The Complete Man laughed.

“Don’t laugh like that,” she said. “It’s rather stupid.”

“You’re perfectly right,” said Gumbril. “It is.”

And how did she spend her time? He continued the exploration.

Well, she read a lot of books; but most of the novels she got from Boots’ seemed to her rather silly.

“Too much about the same thing. Always love.”

The Complete Man gave a shrug. “Such is life.”

“Well, it oughtn’t to be,” said Emily.

And then, when she was in the country⁠—and she was often in the country, taking lodgings here and there in little villages, weeks and months at a time⁠—she went for long walks. Molly couldn’t understand why she liked the country; but she did. She was very fond of flowers. She liked them more than people, she thought.

“I wish I could paint,” she said. “If I could, I’d be happy forever, just painting flowers. But I can’t paint.” She shook her head. “I’ve tried so often. Such dirty, ugly smudges come out on the paper; and it’s all so lovely in my head, so lovely out in the fields.”

Gumbril began talking with erudition about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchis and green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine growing, the best localities for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where you get wild daffodils. All this odd knowledge came spouting up into his mind from some underground source of memory. Flowers⁠—he never thought about flowers nowadays from one year’s end to the other. But his mother had liked flowers. Every spring and summer they used to go down to stay at their cottage in the country. All their walks, all their drives in the governess cart had been hunts after flowers. And naturally the child had hunted with all his mother’s ardour. He had kept books of pressed flowers, he had mummified them in hot sand, he had drawn maps of the country and coloured them elaborately with different coloured inks to show where the different flowers grew. How long ago all that was! Horribly long ago! Many seeds had fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild flowers.

“And if you want sundew,” he wound up, “you’ll find it in the Punch Bowl, under Hindhead. Or round about Frensham. The Little Pond, you know, not the Big.”

“But you know all about them,” Emily exclaimed in delight. “I’m ashamed of my poor little knowledge. And you must really love them as much as I do.”

Gumbril did not deny it; they were linked henceforth by a chain of flowers.

But what else did she do?

Oh, of course she played the piano a great deal. Very badly; but at any rate it gave her pleasure. Beethoven: she liked Beethoven best. More or less, she knew all the sonatas, though she could never keep up anything like the right speed in the difficult parts.

Gumbril had again shown himself wonderfully at home. “Aha!” he said. “I bet you can’t shake that low B in the last variation but one of Op. 106 so that it doesn’t sound ridiculous.”

And of course she couldn’t, and of course she was glad that he knew all about it and how impossible it was.

In the cab, as they drove back to Kew that evening, the Complete Man had decided it was time to do something decisive. The parting kiss⁠—more of a playful sonorous buss than a serious embracement⁠—that was already in the protocol, as signed and sealed before her departure by giggling Molly. It was time, the Complete Man considered, that this salute should take on a character less formal and less playful. One, two, three and, decisively, as they passed through Hammersmith Broadway, he risked the gesture. Emily burst into tears. He was not prepared for that, though perhaps he should have been. It was only by imploring, only by almost weeping himself, that Gumbril persuaded her to revoke her decision never, never to see him again.

“I had thought you were different,” she sobbed. “And now, now⁠—”

“Please, please,” he entreated. He was on the point of tearing off his beard and confessing everything there and then. But that, on second thoughts, would probably only make things worse.

“Please, I promise.”

In the end, she had consented to see him once again, provisionally, in Kew Gardens, on the following day. They were to meet at the little temple that stands on the hillock above the valley of the heathers.

And now, duly, they had met. The Complete Man had been left at home in the top right-hand drawer, along with the ties and collars. She would prefer, he guessed, the Mild and Melancholy one; he was quite right. She had thought him “sweeter” at a first glimpse.

“I forgive you,” he said, and