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

came running out of the gate to meet him. The gaudy upholstery material blazed up as she passed out of the shade of the house into the sunlight, her coloured beads flashed. Uttering shrill little cries and laughing, she ran towards him. Mr. Cardan watched her as she came on. He had seen frightened cormorants bobbing their heads in a ludicrous anxiety from side to side. He had seen penguins waving their little flappers, scuttling along, undignified, on their short legs. He had seen vultures with trailing wings hobbling and hopping, ungainly, over the ground. Memories of all these sights appeared before his mind’s eye as he watched Miss Elver’s approach. He sighed profoundly.

“I’m so glad you’ve come back,” Miss Elver cried breathlessly, as she approached, “I was really afraid you were going right away.” She shook his hand earnestly and looked up into his face. “You’ve not forgotten about the monkeys and the Shetland ponies, have you?” she added, rather anxiously.

Mr. Cardan smiled. “Of course not,” he answered; and he added gallantly: “How could I forget anything that gives you pleasure?” He squeezed her hand and, bending down, kissed it.

Miss Elver’s face flushed very red, then, the moment after, became exceedingly pale. Her breath came quickly and unsteadily. She shut her eyes. A shuddering ran through her; she wavered on her feet, she seemed on the point of falling. Mr. Cardan caught her by the arm and held her up. This was going to be worse, he thought, than he had imagined; more Stavroginesque. To faint when he kissed her hand⁠—kissed it almost ironically⁠—that was too much. But probably, he reflected, nothing of the kind had ever happened to her before. How many men had ever so much as spoken to her? It was understandable.

“My good child⁠—really now.” He slightly shook her arm. “Pull yourself together. If you’re going to faint like this I shall never be able to trust you with a bear. Come, come.”

Still, the understanding of a thing does not alter it. It remains what it was when it was still uncomprehended. Seventeen hundred and fifty per annum⁠—but at this rate it looked as though that would hardly be enough.

Miss Elver opened her eyes and looked at him. Into their blankness had come that look of anxious, unhappy love with which a child looks at his mother when he thinks that she is going to leave him. Mr. Cardan could not have felt more remorseful if he had committed a murder.

What every weakness, every vice?
Tom Cardan, all were thine.

All the same, there were certain things the doing of which one felt to be an outrage. Still, one had to think of those seventeen hundred and fifty pounds; one had to think of old age in solitude and poverty.

Leaving Miss Elver to play by herself in the garden, Mr. Cardan went indoors. He found his host sitting behind closed jalousies in a greenish twilight, his head on his hand.

“Feeling better?” asked Mr. Cardan cheerfully; and getting no answer, he went on to tell a long, bright story of how he had searched for the grocer’s brother, only to find, at last, that he was away from home and would be away till tomorrow. “So I hope you won’t mind,” he concluded, “if I trespass on your charming hospitality for another night. Your sister has most kindly told me that I might.”

Mr. Elver turned on him a glance of concentrated loathing and averted his eyes. He said nothing.

Mr. Cardan drew up a chair and sat down. “There’s a most interesting little book,” he said, looking at his host with a genial twinkling expression, “by a certain Mr. W. H. S. Jones called ‘Malaria: a factor in the history of Greece and Rome,’ or some such title. He shows how the disease may quite suddenly obtain a footing in countries hitherto immune and in the course of a few generations bring a whole culture, a powerful empire to the ground. Conversely he shows how it is got rid of. Drainage, quinine, wire-netting⁠ ⁠…” The other stirred uneasily in his chair; but Mr. Cardan went on ruthlessly. When the bell rang for luncheon he was talking to Mr. Elver about the only way in which the Yellow Peril might be permanently averted.

“First,” he said, laying the forefinger of his right hand against the thumb of his left, “first you must introduce malaria into Japan. Japan’s immune, so far; it’s a crying scandal. You must start by remedying that. And secondly,” he moved on to the index, “you must see that the Chinese never have a chance to stamp out the disease in their country. Four hundred million malarial Chinamen may be viewed with equanimity. But four hundred million healthy ones⁠—that’s a very different matter. The spread of malaria among the yellow races⁠—there’s a cause,” said Mr. Cardan, rising from his chair, “a cause to which some good European might profitably devote himself. You, who take so much interest in the subject, Mr. Elver, you might find a much worse vocation. Shall we go into lunch?” Mr. Elver rose, totteringly. “I have a tremendous appetite,” his guest went on, patting him on his bent back. “I hope you have too.”

Mr. Elver at last broke silence. “You’re a damned bully,” he whispered in a passion of misery and futile rage, “a damned stinking bully.”

“Come, come,” said Mr. Cardan. “I protest against ‘stinking.’ ”

IX

Early the next morning Mr. Cardan and his hostess left the house and walked rapidly away through the fields in the direction of the lake. They had told the old woman that they would be back to a late breakfast. Mr. Elver was not yet awake; Mr. Cardan had left instructions that he was not to be called before half-past nine.

The ground was still wet with dew when they set out; the poplar trees threw shadows longer than themselves. The air was cool; it was a pleasure to walk. Mr. Cardan strode along at four miles an hour; and like a diver out of water, like a soaring bird reduced to walk the earth, Miss