Those Barren Leaves
Copyright© 2025 by Aldous Huxley
Chapter 3
It was a pity that Mr. Cardan could not hear what his hostess was saying. He would have been delighted; she was talking about herself. It was a subject on which he specially loved to hear her. There were few people, he used to say, whose Authorised Version of themselves differed so strikingly from that Revised, formed of them by others. It was not often, however, that she gave him a chance to compare them. With Mr. Cardan she was always a little shy; he had known her so long.
“Sometimes,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying, as she walked with Chelifer on the second of the three terraces, “sometimes I wish I were less sensitive. I feel everything so acutely—every slightest thing. It’s like being ... like being...” she fumbled in the air with groping fingers, feeling for the right word, “like being flayed,” she concluded triumphantly, and looked at her companion.
Chelifer nodded sympathetically.
“I’m so fearfully aware,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, “of other people’s thoughts and feelings. They don’t have to speak to make me know what they’ve got in their minds. I know it, I feel it just by seeing them.”
Chelifer wondered whether she felt what was going on in his mind. He ventured to doubt it. “A wonderful gift,” he said.
“But it has its disadvantages,” insisted Mrs. Aldwinkle. “For example, you can’t imagine how much I suffer when people round me are suffering, particularly if I feel myself in any way to blame. When I’m ill, it makes me miserable to think of servants and nurses and people having to sit up without sleep and run up and down stairs, all because of me. I know it’s rather stupid; but, do you know, my sympathy for them is so ... so ... profound, that it actually prevents me from getting well as quickly as I should...”
“Dreadful,” said Chelifer in his polite, precise voice.
“You’ve no idea how deeply all suffering affects me.” She looked at him tenderly. “That day, that first day, when you fainted—you can’t imagine...”
“I’m sorry it should have had such a disagreeable effect on you,” said Chelifer.
“You would have felt the same yourself—in the circumstances,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, uttering the last words in a significant tone.
Chelifer shook his head modestly. “I’m afraid,” he answered, “I’m singularly stoical about other people’s sufferings.”
“Why do you always speak against yourself?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle earnestly. “Why do you malign your own character? You know you’re not what you pretend to be. You pretend to be so much harder and dryer than you really are. Why do you?”
Chelifer smiled. “Perhaps,” he said, “it’s to re-establish the universal average. So many people, you see, try to make themselves out softer and damper than they are. Don’t they?”
Mrs. Aldwinkle ignored his question. “But you,” she insisted, “I want to know about you.” She stared into his face. Chelifer smiled and said nothing. “You won’t tell me?” she went on. “But it doesn’t matter. I know already. I have an intuition about people. It’s because I’m so sensitive. I feel their character. I’m never wrong.”
“You’re to be envied,” said Chelifer.
“It’s no good thinking you can deceive me,” she went on. “You can’t. I understand you.” Chelifer sighed, inwardly; she had said that before, more than once. “Shall I tell you what you are really like?”
“Do.”
“Well, to begin with,” she said, “you’re sensitive, just as sensitive as I am. I can see that in your face, in your actions. I can hear it when you speak. You can pretend to be hard and ... and ... armour-plated, but I...”
Wearily, but with patience, Chelifer listened. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s hesitating voice, moving up and down from note to unrelated note, sounded in his ears. The words became blurred and vague. They lost their articulateness and sense. They were no more than the noise of the wind, a sound that accompanied, but did not interrupt his thoughts. Chelifer’s thoughts, at the moment, were poetical. He was engaged in putting the finishing touches to a little “Mythological Incident,” the idea of which had recently occurred to him and to which, during the last two days, he had been giving its definite form. Now it was finished; a little polishing, that was all it needed now.
Through the pale skeleton of woods
Orion walks. The north wind lays
Its cold lips to the twin steel flutes
That are his gun and plays.
Knee-deep he goes where, penny-wiser
Than all his kind who steal and hoard,
Year after year, some sylvan miser
His copper wealth has stored.
The Queen of Love and Beauty lays
In neighbouring beechen aisles her baits—
Bread-crumbs and the golden maize.
Patiently she waits.
And when the unwary pheasant comes
To fill his painted maw with crumbs,
Accurately the sporting Queen
Takes aim. The bird has been.
Secure, Orion walks her way.
The Cyprian loads, presents, makes fire.
He falls. ‘Tis Venus all entire
Attached to her recumbent prey.
Chelifer repeated the verses to himself and was not displeased. The second stanza was a little too “quaint,” perhaps; a little too—how should he put it?—too Walter-Crane’s-picture-book. One might omit it altogether, perhaps; or substitute, if one could think of it, something more perfectly in harmony with the silver-age, allusive elegance of the rest. As for the last verse, that was really masterly. It gave Racine his raison d’être; if Racine had never existed, it would have been necessary to invent him, merely for the sake of those last lines.
He falls. ‘Tis Venus all entire
Attached to her recumbent prey.
Chelifer lingered over them in ecstasy. He became aware, all at once, that Mrs. Aldwinkle was addressing herself to him more directly. From inharmoniously Aeolian, her voice became once more articulate.
“That’s what you’re like,” she was saying. “Tell me I’m right. Say I understand you.”
“Perhaps,” said Chelifer, smiling.
Meanwhile, on the terrace below, Calamy and Miss Thriplow strolled at leisure. They were discussing a subject about which Miss Thriplow professed a special competence; it was—to speak in the language of the examination room—her Special Subject. They were discussing Life. “Life’s so wonderful,” Miss Thriplow was saying. “Always. So rich, so gay. This morning, for instance, I woke up and the first thing I saw was a pigeon sitting on the window sill—a big fat grey pigeon with a captive rainbow pinned to his stomach.” (That phrase, peculiarly charming and felicitous, Miss Thriplow thought, had already been recorded for future reference in her note-books.) “And then high up on the wall above the washstand there was a little black scorpion standing tail-upwards, looking quite unreal, like something out of the signs of the Zodiac. And then Eugenia came in to call me—think of having one’s hot water brought by a maid called Eugenia to begin with!—and spent a quarter of an hour telling me about her fiancé. It seems that he’s so dreadfully jealous. So should I be, if I were engaged to a pair of such rolling eyes. But think of all that happening before breakfast, just casually! What extravagance! But Life’s so generous, so copious.” She turned a shining face to her companion.
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.