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

Confused, Rosie felt herself blushing. “Only because it’s rather unpl⁠—leasant. I don’t know why. But it is.”

“What a reason for immediately falling into my arms!” said Coleman. “To be kissed by a beard is bad enough at any time. But by a bloody beard⁠—imagine!”

Rosie shuddered.

“After all,” he said, “what interest or amusement is there in doing the ordinary things in the obvious way? Life au naturel.” He shook his head. “You must have garlic and saffron. Do you believe in God?”

“Not m⁠—much,” said Rosie, smiling.

“I pity you. You must find existence dreadfully dull. As soon as you do, everything becomes a thousand times life-size. Phallic symbols five hundred feet high,” he lifted his hand. “A row of grinning teeth you could run the hundred yards on.” He grinned at her through his beard. “Wounds big enough to let a coach-and-six drive into their purulent recesses. Every slightest act eternally significant. It’s only when you believe in God, and especially in hell, that you can really begin enjoying life. For instance, when in a few moments you surrender yourself to the importunities of my bloody beard, how prodigiously much more you’d enjoy it if you could believe you were committing the sin against the Holy Ghost⁠—if you kept thinking calmly and dispassionately all the time the affair was going on: All this is not only a horrible sin, it is also ugly, grotesque, a mere defæcation, a⁠—”

Rosie held up her hand. “You’re really horrible,” she said. Coleman smiled at her. Still, she did not go.

“He who is not with me is against me,” said Coleman. “If you can’t make up your mind to be with, it’s surely better to be positively against than merely negatively indifferent.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Rosie feebly.

“When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the penknife into my arm.”

“Well, do you enjoy it?” asked Rosie.

“Piercingly,” he answered. “It is at once sordid to the last and lowest degree and infinitely and eternally significant.”

Coleman was silent and Rosie too said nothing. Futilely she wished it had been Toto instead of this horrible, dangerous Cossack. Mr. Mercaptan ought to have warned her. But then, of course, he supposed that she already knew the creature. She looked up at him and found his bright eyes fixed upon her; he was silently laughing.

“Don’t you want to know who I am?” she asked. “And how I got here?”

Coleman blandly shook his head. “Not in the very least,” he said.

Rosie felt more helpless, somehow, than ever. “Why not?” she asked as bravely and impertinently as she could.

Coleman answered with another question. “Why should I?”

“It would be natural curiosity.”

“But I know all I want to know,” he said. “You are a woman, or, at any rate, you have all the female stigmata. Not too sumptuously well-developed, let me add. You have no wooden legs. You have eyelids that flutter up and down over your eyes like a moving shutter in front of a signalling lamp, spelling out in a familiar code the letters: A.M.O.R., and not, unless I am very much mistaken, those others: C.A.S.T.I.T.A.S. You have a mouth that looks as though it knew how to taste and how to bite. You.⁠ ⁠…”

Rosie jumped up. “I’m going away,” she said.

Coleman leaned back in his chair and hallooed with laughter. “Bite, bite, bite,” he said. “Thirty-two times.” And he opened and shut his mouth as fast as he could, so that his teeth clicked against one another with a little dry, bony noise. “Every mouthful thirty-two times. That’s what Mr. Gladstone said. And surely Mr. Gladstone”⁠—he rattled his sharp, white teeth again⁠—“surely Mr. Gladstone should know.”

“Goodbye,” said Rosie from the door.

“Goodbye,” Coleman called back; and immediately afterwards jumped to his feet and made a dash across the room towards her.

Rosie uttered a cry, slipped through the door and, slamming it behind her, ran across the vestibule and began fumbling with the latches of the outer door. It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t open. She was trembling; fear made her feel sick. There was a rattling at the door behind her. There was a whoop of laughter, and then the Cossack’s hands were on her arms, his face came peering over her shoulder, and the blond beard dabbled with blood prickled against her neck and face.

“Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!” she implored, turning away her head. Then all at once she began violently crying.

“Tears!” exclaimed Coleman in rapture, “genuine tears!” He bent eagerly forward to kiss them away, to drink them as they fell. “What an intoxication,” he said, looking up to the ceiling like a chicken that has taken a sip of water; he smacked his lips.

Sobbing uncontrollably, Rosie had never in all her life felt less like a great, fastidious lady.

“Well,” said Gumbril, “here I am again.”

“Already?” Mrs. Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest. She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramidon and now she was lying down on the Dufy-upholstered sofa at the foot of her full-length portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche. Her head was not much better, but she was bored. When the maid had announced Gumbril, she had given word that he was to be let in. “I’m very ill,” she went on expiringly. “Look at me,” she pointed to herself, “and me again.” She waved her hand towards the sizzling brilliance of the portrait. “Before and after. Like the advertisements, you know. Every picture tells a story.” She laughed faintly, then made a little grimace and, sucking in the breath between her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.

“My poor Myra.” Gumbril pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like a doctor at his patient’s bedside. “But before and after what?” he asked, almost professionally.

Mrs. Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Not influenza, I hope?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Not love, by