Those Barren Leaves
Copyright© 2025 by Aldous Huxley
Chapter 7
No escape ... But I was still tipsy enough not seriously to desire escape. My premonition of sobriety had been no more than a momentary flash. It came and it passed again, almost immediately, as I became once more absorbed in what seemed to me the endless and lovely comedy that was being acted all around me. It was enough for me that I existed and that things were happening to me. I was carried by two or three young giants to the hotel, I was dressed, my clothes were packed for me. In the entrance hall, while I was waiting for Mrs. Aldwinkle to come and fetch me, I made some essays at walking; the feebleness of my legs was a source to me of delighted laughter.
Dressed in pale yellow tussore with a large straw hat on her head, Mrs. Aldwinkle finally appeared. Her guests, she explained, had gone home in another machine; I should be able to lie flat, or very nearly, in her empty car. And in case I felt bad—she shook a silver brandy flask at me. Escape? I did not so much as think of it, I was enchanted.
Luxuriously I reclined among the cushions. Mrs. Aldwinkle tapped the forward-looking window. The chauffeur languidly moved his hand and the machine rolled forward, nosing its way through the crowd of admiring car-fanciers which, in Italy, collects as though by magic round every stationary automobile. And Mrs. Aldwinkle’s was a particularly attractive specimen. Young men called to their friends: “Venite. È una Ro-Ro.” And in awed voices little boys whispered to one another: “Una Ro-Ro.” The crowd reluctantly dispersed before our advance; we glided away from before the Grand Hotel, turned into the main street, crossed the piazza, in the centre of which, stranded high and dry by the receding sea, stood the little pink fort which had been built by the Princes of Massa Carrara to keep watch on a Mediterranean made dangerous by Barbary pirates, and rolled out of the village by the road leading across the plain towards the mountains.
Shuffling along in a slowly moving cloud of dust, a train of white oxen advanced, shambling and zig-zagging along the road to meet us. Eight yoke of them there were, a long procession, with half a dozen drivers shouting and tugging at the leading ropes and cracking their whips. They were dragging a low truck, clamped to which was a huge monolith of flawless white marble. Uneasily, as we crawled past them, the animals shook their heads, turning this way and that, as though desperately seeking some way of escape. Their long curving horns clashed together; their soft white dewlaps shook; and into their blank brown eyes there came a look of fear, an entreaty that we should take pity on their invincible stupidity and remember that they simply could not, however hard they tried, get used to motor cars.
Mrs. Aldwinkle pointed at the monolith. “Imagine what Michelangelo could have made out of that,” she said. Then, noticing that her pointing hand still grasped the silver flask, she became very solicitous. “You’re sure you wouldn’t like a sip of this?” she asked, leaning forward. The twin blue danger signals glittered in my face. Her garments exhaled a scent in which there was ambergris. Her breath smelt of heliotrope cachous. But even now I did not take fright; I made no effort to escape. Guided by their invincible stupidity, the white oxen had behaved more sensibly than I.
We rolled on. The hills came nearer. The far-away peaks of bare limestone were hidden by the glowing mass of the tilled and wooded foothills. Happily I looked at those huge hilly forms. “How beautiful!” I said. Mrs. Aldwinkle seemed to take my words as a personal compliment.
“I’m so glad you think so. So awfully...” she replied in the tone of an author to whom you have just said that you enjoyed his last book so much.
We drew nearer; the hills towered up, they opposed themselves like a huge wall. But the barrier parted before us; we passed through the gates of a valley that wound up into the mountain. Our road now ran parallel with the bed of a torrent. In the flanks of the hill to our right a marble quarry made a huge bare scar, hundreds of feet long. The crest of the hill was fringed with a growth of umbrella pines. The straight slender tree trunks jetted up thirty feet without a branch; their wide-spreading flattened domes of foliage formed a thin continuous silhouette, between which and the dark mass of the hill one could see a band of sky, thinly barred by the bare stems. It was as though, to emphasise the outlines of his hills, an artist had drawn a fine and supple brush stroke parallel with the edge of the silhouette and a little apart from it.
We rolled on. The high road narrowed into the squalid street of a little town. The car crept along, hooting as it went.
“Vezza,” Mrs. Aldwinkle explained. “Michelangelo used to come here for his marbles.”
“Indeed?” I was charmed to hear it.
Over the windows of a large shop filled with white crosses, broken columns and statues, I read the legend: “Anglo-American Tombstone Company.” We emerged from the narrow street on to an embankment running along the edge of a river. From the opposite bank the ground rose steeply.
“There,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle on a note of triumph as we crossed the bridge, “that’s my house.” She pointed up. From the hill-top a long façade stared down through twenty windows; a tall tower pricked the sky. “The palace was built in 1630,” she began. I even enjoyed the history lesson.
We had crossed the bridge, we were climbing by a steep and winding road through what was almost a forest of olive trees. The abrupt grassy slope had been built up into innumerable little terraces on which the trees were planted. Here and there, in the grey luminous shadow beneath the trees, little flocks of sheep were grazing. The barefooted children who attended them came running to the side of the road to watch us passing.
“I like to think of these old princely courts,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying. “Like abbeys of ... abbeys of...” She shook her brandy flask impatiently. “You know ... in Thingumy.”
“Abbeys of Thelema,” I suggested.
“That’s it,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Sort of retiring-places where people were free to live intelligently. That’s what I want to make this house. I’m so delighted to have met you like this. You’re exactly the sort of person I want.” She leaned forward, smiling and glittering. But even at the prospect of entering the Abbey of Thelema I did not blench.
At this moment the car passed through a huge gateway. I caught a glimpse of a great flight of steps, set between cypresses, mounting up past a series of terraced landings to a carved doorway in the centre of the long façade. The road turned, the car swung round and the vista was closed. By an ilex avenue that wound round the flank of the hill we climbed more gradually towards the house, which we approached from the side. The road landed us finally in a large square court opposite a shorter reproduction of the great façade. At the head of a double flight of steps, curving horse-shoe fashion from the landing at its threshold, a tall pompous doorway surmounted by a coat of arms cavernously invited. The car drew up.
And about time too, as I notice on re-reading what I have written. Few things are more profoundly boring and unprofitable than literary descriptions. For the writer, it is true, there is a certain amusement to be derived from the hunt for apt expressive words. Carried away by the excitement of the chase he dashes on, regardless of the poor readers who follow toilsomely through his stiff and clayey pages like the runners at the tail of a hunt, seeing nothing of the fun. All writers are also readers—though perhaps I should make exceptions in favour of a few of my colleagues who make a specialty of native wood-notes—and must therefore know how dreary description is. But that does not prevent them from inflicting upon others all that they themselves have suffered. Indeed I sometimes think that some authors must write as they do purely out of a desire for revenge.
Mrs. Aldwinkle’s other guests had arrived and were waiting for us. I was introduced and found them all equally charming. The little niece rushed to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s assistance; the young man who had rowed the patino rushed in his turn to the little niece’s and insisted on carrying all the things of which she had relieved her aunt. The old man with the red face, who had talked about the clouds, looked on benevolently at this little scene. But another elderly gentleman with a white beard, whom I had not seen before, seemed to view it with a certain disapproval. The young lady who had talked about the whiteness of her legs and who turned out to be my distinguished colleague, Miss Mary Thriplow, was now dressed in a little green frock with a white turned-down collar, white cuffs and buttons, which made her look like a schoolgirl in a comic opera by Offenbach. The brown young man stood near her.
I got out of the car, refused all proffered assistance and contrived, a little wamblingly, it is true, to mount the steps.
“You must be very careful for a little,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle with a maternal solicitude. “These,” she added, waving her hand in the direction of a vista of empty saloons, the entrance to which we were just then passing, “these are the apartments of the Princesses.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.