Antic Hay - Aldous Huxley (the red fox clan .txt) 📗

He could forgive her anything for the sake of those candid eyes, anything for the grave, serious mouth, anything for the short brown hair that curled⁠—oh, but never seriously, never gravely⁠—with such a hilarious extravagance round her head. He had met her, or rather the Complete Man, flushed with his commercial triumphs as he returned from his victory over Mr. Boldero, had met her at the National Gallery. “Old Masters, young mistresses;” Coleman had recommended the National Gallery. He was walking up the Venetian Room, feeling as full of swaggering vitality as the largest composition of Veronese, when he heard, gigglingly whispered just behind him his Open Sesame to new adventure, “Beaver.” He spun round on his tracks and found himself face to face with two rather startled young women. He frowned ferociously: he demanded satisfaction for the impertinence. They were both, he noticed, of gratifyingly pleasing appearance and both extremely young. One of them, the elder it seemed, and the more charming, as he had decided from the first, of the two, was dreadfully taken aback; blushed to the eyes, stammered apologetically. But the other, who had obviously pronounced the word, only laughed. It was she who made easy the forming of an acquaintance which ripened, half an hour later, over the teacups and to the strains of the most classy music on the fifth floor of Lyons’s Strand Corner House.

Their names were Emily and Molly. Emily, it seemed, was married. It was Molly who let that out, and the other had been angry with her for what was evidently an indiscretion. The bald fact that Emily was married had at once been veiled with mysteries, surrounded and protected by silences; whenever the Complete Man asked a question about it, Emily did not answer and Molly only giggled. But if Emily was married and the elder of the two, Molly was decidedly the more knowledgeable about life; Mr. Mercaptan would certainly have set her down as the more civilized. Emily didn’t live in London; she didn’t seem to live anywhere in particular. At the moment she was staying with Molly’s family at Kew.

He had seen them the next day, and the day after, and the day after that; once at lunch, to desert them precipitately for his afternoon with Rosie; once at tea in Kew Gardens; once at dinner, with a theatre to follow and an extravagant taxi back to Kew at midnight. The tame decoy allays the fears of the shy wild birds; Molly, who was tame, who was frankly a flirting little wanton, had served the Complete Man as a decoy for the ensnaring of Emily. When Molly went away to stay with friends in the country, Emily was already inured and accustomed to the hunter’s presence; she accepted the playful attitude of gallantry, which the Complete Man, at the invitation of Molly’s rolling eyes and provocative giggle, had adopted from the first, as natural and belonging to the established order of things. With giggling Molly to give her a lead, she had gone in three days much further along the path of intimacy than, by herself, she would have advanced in ten times the number of meetings.

“It seems funny,” she had said the first time they met after Molly’s departure, “it seems funny to be seeing you without Molly.”

“It seemed funnier with Molly,” said the Complete Man. “It wasn’t Molly I wanted to see.”

“Molly’s a very nice, dear girl,” she declared loyally. “Besides, she’s amusing and can talk. And I can’t; I’m not a bit amusing.”

It wasn’t difficult to retort to that sort of thing; but Emily didn’t believe in compliments; oh, quite genuinely not.

He set out to make the exploration of her; and now that she was inured to him, no longer too frightened to let him approach, now, moreover, that he had abandoned the jocular insolences of the Complete Man in favour of a more native mildness, which he felt instinctively was more suitable in this particular case, she laid no difficulties in his way. She was lonely, and he seemed to understand everything so well; in the unknown country of her spirit and her history she was soon going eagerly before him as his guide.

She was an orphan. Her mother she hardly remembered. Her father had died of influenza when she was fifteen. One of his business friends used to come and see her at school, take her out for treats and give her chocolates. She used to call him Uncle Stanley. He was a leather merchant, fat and jolly with a rather red face, very white teeth and a bald head that was beautifully shiny. When she was seventeen and a half he asked her to marry him, and she had said yes.

“But why?” Gumbril asked. “Why on earth?” he repeated.

“He said he’d take me round the world; it was just when the war had come to an end. Round the world, you know; and I didn’t like school. I didn’t know anything about it and he was very nice to me; he was very pressing. I didn’t know what marriage meant.”

“Didn’t know?”

She shook her head; it was quite true. “But not in the least.”

And she had been born within the twentieth century. It seemed a case for the textbooks of sexual psychology. “Mrs. Emily X., born in 1901, was found to be in a state of perfect innocence and ignorance at the time of the Armistice, 11th November 1918,” etc.

“And so you married him?”

She had nodded.

“And then?”

She had covered her face with her hands, she had shuddered. The amateur uncle, now professionally a husband, had come to claim his rights⁠—drunk. She had fought him, she had eluded him, had run away and locked herself into another room. On the second night of her honeymoon he gave her a bruise on the forehead and a bite on the left breast which had gone on septically festering for weeks. On the fourth,