Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley Page B

her.
    â€˜Meaning what I say. Do you think
I
should be here – the real I?’
    â€˜Real I!’ he mocked. ‘You’re talking like a theosophist.’
    â€˜And you’re talking like a fool,’ she said. ‘On purpose. Because, of course, you aren’t one.’ There was a long silence. I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price? Yes, above all, at what price? Those Cavells and Florence Nightingales. But it was impossible, that sort of thing; it was, above all, ridiculous. She frowned to herself, she shook her head; then, opening her eyes, which had been shut, looked for something in the external world to distract her from these useless and importunate thoughts within. The foreground was all Anthony. She looked at him for a moment; then reaching out with a kind of fascinated reluctance, as though towards some irresistibly strange but distasteful animal, she touched the pink crumpled skin of the great scar that ran diagonally across his thigh, an inch or two above the knee. ‘Does it still hurt?’ she asked.
    â€˜When I’m run down. And sometimes in wet weather.’ He raised his head a little from the mattress and, at the same time bending his right knee, examined the scar. ‘A touch of the Renaissance,’ he said reflectively. ‘Slashed trunks.’
    Helen shuddered. ‘It must have been awful!’ Then, with a sudden vehemence, ‘How I hate pain!’ she cried, and her tone was one of passionate, deeply personal resentment. ‘Hate it,’ she repeated for all the Cavells and Nightingales to hear.
    She had pushed him back into the past again. That autumn day at Tidworth eighteen years before. Bombing instruction. An imbecile recruit had thrown short. The shouts, his panic start, the blow. Oddly remote it all seemed now, and irrelevant, like something seen through the wrong end of atelescope. And even the pain, all the months of pain, had shrunk almost to non-existence. Physically, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him – and the lunatic in charge of his memory had practically forgotten it.
    â€˜One can’t remember pain,’ he said aloud.
    â€˜
I
can.’
    â€˜No, you can’t. You can only remember its occasion, its accompaniments.’
    Its occasion at the midwife’s in the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, its accompaniments of squalor and humiliation. Her face hardened as she listened to his words.
    â€˜You can never remember its actual quality,’ he went on. ‘No more than you can remember the quality of a physical pleasure. Today, for example, half an hour ago – you can’t
remember
. There’s nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky.’ He was smiling now. ‘Think, if one could fully remember perfumes or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be! And what woman with a memory would ever have more than one baby?’
    Helen stirred uneasily. ‘I can’t imagine how any woman ever does,’ she said in a low voice.
    â€˜As it is,’ he went on, ‘the pains and pleasures are new each time they’re experienced. Brand new. Every gardenia is the first gardenia you ever smelt. And every confinement . . .’
    â€˜You’re talking like a fool again,’ she interrupted angrily. ‘Confusing the issue.’
    â€˜I thought I was clarifying it,’ he protested. ‘And anyhow, what
is
the issue?’
    â€˜The issue’s me, you, real life, happiness. And you go chattering away about things in the air. Like a fool!’
    â€˜And what about you?’ he asked. ‘Are you such a clever one at real life? Such an expert in happiness?’
    In the mind of each of them his words evoked the image of a timorous figure, ambushed behind spectacles.
    That marriage! What on earth could have induced her? Old Hugh, of course, had been sentimentally in love. But was that a sufficient reason? And, afterwards, what