Those Barren Leaves Aldous Huxley (best biographies to read txt) 📖

these are not the most healthy surroundings for a young fellow like Hovenden at the most impressionable period of his life. Be as paradoxical and ingenious as you like: you will not persuade me, I repeat.”

“No need to repeat, I assure you,” said Mr. Cardan, shaking his head. “Did you think I ever supposed I could persuade you? You don’t imagine I’d waste my time trying to persuade a full-grown man with fixed opinions of the truth of something he doesn’t already believe? If you were twelve years old, even if you were twenty, I might try. But at your age⁠—no, no.”

“Then why do you argue, if you don’t want to persuade?” asked Mr. Falx.

“For the sake of argument,” Mr. Cardan replied, “and because one must murder the time somehow.

Come ingannar questi noiosi e lenti
Giorni di vita cui si lungo tedio
E fastidio insoffribile accompagna
Or io t’insegnero.

I could write a better handbook of the art than old Parini.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Falx, “but I don’t know Italian.”

“Nor should I,” said Mr. Cardan, “if I had your unbounded resources for killing time. Unhappily, I was born without much zeal for the welfare of the working classes.”

“Working classes⁠ ⁠…” Mr. Falx swooped down on the words. Passionately he began to talk. What was that text, thought Mr. Cardan, about the measure with which ye mete? How fearfully applicable it was! For the last ten minutes he’d been boring poor old Mr. Falx. And now Mr. Falx had turned round and was paying him back with his own measure⁠—but, oh Lord, pressed down and, heaven help us! running over. He looked down over the balustrade. On the lower terraces the couples were still parading up and down. He wondered what they were saying; he wished he were down there to listen. Boomingly, Mr. Falx played his prophetic part.

III

It was a pity that Mr. Cardan could not hear what his hostess was saying. He would have been delighted; she was talking about herself. It was a subject on which he specially loved to hear her. There were few people, he used to say, whose Authorized Version of themselves differed so strikingly from that Revised, formed of them by others. It was not often, however, that she gave him a chance to compare them. With Mr. Cardan she was always a little shy; he had known her so long.

“Sometimes,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying, as she walked with Chelifer on the second of the three terraces, “sometimes I wish I were less sensitive. I feel everything so acutely⁠—every slightest thing. It’s like being⁠ ⁠… like being⁠ ⁠…” she fumbled in the air with groping fingers, feeling for the right word, “like being flayed,” she concluded triumphantly, and looked at her companion.

Chelifer nodded sympathetically.

“I’m so fearfully aware,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, “of other people’s thoughts and feelings. They don’t have to speak to make me know what they’ve got in their minds. I know it, I feel it just by seeing them.”

Chelifer wondered whether she felt what was going on in his mind. He ventured to doubt it. “A wonderful gift,” he said.

“But it has its disadvantages,” insisted Mrs. Aldwinkle. “For example, you can’t imagine how much I suffer when people round me are suffering, particularly if I feel myself in any way to blame. When I’m ill, it makes me miserable to think of servants and nurses and people having to sit up without sleep and run up and down stairs, all because of me. I know it’s rather stupid; but, do you know, my sympathy for them is so⁠ ⁠… so⁠ ⁠… profound, that it actually prevents me from getting well as quickly as I should.⁠ ⁠…”

“Dreadful,” said Chelifer in his polite, precise voice.

“You’ve no idea how deeply all suffering affects me.” She looked at him tenderly. “That day, that first day, when you fainted⁠—you can’t imagine⁠ ⁠…”

“I’m sorry it should have had such a disagreeable effect on you,” said Chelifer.

“You would have felt the same yourself⁠—in the circumstances,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, uttering the last words in a significant tone.

Chelifer shook his head modestly. “I’m afraid,” he answered, “I’m singularly stoical about other people’s sufferings.”

“Why do you always speak against yourself?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle earnestly. “Why do you malign your own character? You know you’re not what you pretend to be. You pretend to be so much harder and dryer than you really are. Why do you?”

Chelifer smiled. “Perhaps,” he said, “it’s to reestablish the universal average. So many people, you see, try to make themselves out softer and damper than they are. Don’t they?”

Mrs. Aldwinkle ignored his question. “But you,” she insisted, “I want to know about you.” She stared into his face. Chelifer smiled and said nothing. “You won’t tell me?” she went on. “But it doesn’t matter. I know already. I have an intuition about people. It’s because I’m so sensitive. I feel their character. I’m never wrong.”

“You’re to be envied,” said Chelifer.

“It’s no good thinking you can deceive me,” she went on. “You can’t. I understand you.” Chelifer sighed, inwardly; she had said that before, more than once. “Shall I tell you what you are really like?”

“Do.”

“Well, to begin with,” she said, “you’re sensitive, just as sensitive as I am. I can see that in your face, in your actions. I can hear it when you speak. You can pretend to be hard and⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠… armour-plated, but I⁠ ⁠…”

Wearily, but with patience, Chelifer listened. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s hesitating voice, moving up and down from note to unrelated note, sounded in his ears. The words became blurred and vague. They lost their articulateness and sense. They were no more than the noise of the wind, a sound that accompanied, but did not interrupt his thoughts. Chelifer’s thoughts, at the moment, were poetical. He was engaged in putting the finishing touches to a little “Mythological Incident,” the idea of which had recently occurred to him and to which, during the last two days, he had been giving its definite form. Now it was finished; a little polishing, that was all it needed now.

Through the pale skeleton of woods
Orion walks. The north wind lays
Its