Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley Page B

members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself – often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the newfangled thinker don’t inspire it with that fear, loathing, and disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of Poor Whites – colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport themselves – often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites,
en bons bourgeois,
lavish on anything that is wild or out of the ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations; the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then? Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile knowledge? Will Anne . . .’
    â€˜And you,’ said Anne, interrupting him, ‘will you be allowed to go on talking?’
    â€˜You may rest assured,’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘that I shall not, I shall have some Honest Work to do.’

CHAPTER XII
    â€˜ BLIGHT, MILDEW, AND Smut. . . .’ Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said was, ‘Squire, Binyon, and Shanks,’ or ‘Childe, Blunden, and Earp,’ or even ‘Abercrombie, Drink-water, and Rabindranath Tagore.’ Perhaps. But then her ears never did play her false. ‘Blight, Mildew, and Smut.’ The impression was distinct and ineffaceable. ‘Blight, Mildew . . .’ she was forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her attempt to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk seriously to a woman just because she was a woman – oh, impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more satisfactory. True, his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at least he was a serious worker, and it was with his work that she would associate herself. And Denis? After all, what
was
Denis? A dilettante, an amateur. . . .
    Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused granary that stood by itself in a green dose beyond the farmyard. It was a square brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in each of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the granary was perched above the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on four massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came slanting in at every hour of the day through one of the little windows was always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was pursuing something new, something terrific, if only he could catch it.
    During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the process of winning the war, he had worked his way industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by painting a formalized nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature intothe world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts, externalized in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind’s devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And then, quite suddenly, he grew