Those Barren Leaves
Copyright© 2025 by Aldous Huxley
Chapter 1
“What are you thinking of?”
“Nothing,” said Calamy.
“Yes, you were. You must have been thinking about something.”
“Nothing in particular,” he repeated.
“Tell me,” Mary insisted. “I want to know.”
“Well, if you really want to know,” Calamy began slowly...
But she interrupted him. “And why did you hold up your hand like that? And spread out the fingers? I could see it, you know; against the window.” Pitch dark it was in the room, but beyond the unshuttered windows was a starlit night.
Calamy laughed—a rather embarrassed laugh. “Oh, you saw it, did you—the hand? Well, as a matter of fact, it was precisely about my hand that I was thinking.”
“About your hand?” said Mary incredulously. “That seems a queer thing to think about.”
“But interesting if you think about it hard enough.”
“Your hands,” she said softly, in another voice, “your hands. When they touch me...” With a feminine movement of gratitude, of thanks for a benefit received, she pressed herself more closely against him; in the darkness she kissed him. “I love you too much,” she whispered, “too much.” And at the moment it was almost true. The strong complete spirit, she had written in her note-book, must be able to love with fury, savagely, mindlessly. Not without pride, she had found herself complete and strong. Once, at a dinner party, she had been taken down by a large black and lemon coloured Argentine; unfolding his napkin, he had opened the evening’s conversation, in that fantastic trans-Pyrenean French which was his only substitute for the Castilian, by saying, with a roll of his black eyes and a flashing ivory smile: “Jé vois qué vous avez du temmperramenk.” “Oh, à revendre,” she had answered gaily, throwing herself into the light Parisian part. How marvellously amusing! But that was Life—Life all over. She had brought the incident into a short story, long ago. But the Argentine had looked with an expert’s eye; he was right. “I love you too much,” she whispered in the darkness. Yes, it was true, it was nearly true, at the moment, in the circumstances. She took his hand and kissed it. “That’s all I think about your hand,” she said.
Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently possible gently withdrew it. Invisibly, in the darkness, he made a little grimace of impatience. He was no longer interested in kisses, at the moment. “Yes,” he said meditatively, “that’s one way of thinking of my hand, that’s one way in which it exists and is real. Certainly. And that was what I was thinking about—all the different ways in which these five fingers”—he held them up again, splayed out, against the window’s oblong of paler darkness—”have reality and exist. All the different ways,” he repeated slowly. “If you think of that, even for five minutes, you find yourself plunged up to the eyes in the most portentous mysteries.” He was silent for a moment; then added in a very serious voice. “And I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking really hard about one thing—this hand, for example—really hard for several days, or weeks, or months, one might be able to burrow one’s way right through the mystery and really get at something—some kind of truth, some explanation.” He paused, frowning. Down and down, through the obscurity, he was thinking. Slowly, painfully, like Milton’s Devil, pushing his way through chaos; in the end, one might emerge into the light, to see the universe, sphere within sphere, hanging from the floor of heaven. But it would be a slow, laborious process; one would need time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom.
“Why don’t you think about me?” Mary Thriplow asked. She propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over him; with her other hand she ruffled his hair. “Don’t I bear thinking about?” she asked. She had a fistful of his thick hair in her hand; softly she tugged at it, testingly, as though she were preparing for something worse, were assuring her grip for a more violent pull. She felt a desire to hurt him. Even in her arms, she was thinking, he escaped her, he simply wasn’t there. “Don’t I bear thinking about?” she repeated, tugging a little harder at his hair.
Calamy said nothing. The truth was, he was reflecting, that she didn’t bear thinking about. Like a good many other things. All one’s daily life was a skating over thin ice, was a scampering of water-beetles across the invisible skin of depths. Stamp a little too hard, lean a shade too heavily and you were through, you were floundering in a dangerous and unfamiliar element. This love business, for example—it simply couldn’t be thought of; it could only support one on condition that one never stopped to think. But it was necessary to think, necessary to break through and sink into the depths. And yet, insanely and desperately, one still went skating on.
“Do you love me?” asked Mary.
“Of course,” he said; but the tone of his voice did not carry much conviction.
Menacingly she tugged at the tuft of hair she held twined round her fingers. It angered her that he should escape her, that he should not give himself up completely to her. And this resentful feeling that he did not love her enough produced in her a complementary conviction that she loved him too much. Her anger combined with her physical gratitude to make her feel, for the moment, peculiarly passionate. She found herself all at once playing the part of the grande amoureuse, the impassioned de Lespinasse, playing it spontaneously and without the least difficulty. “I could hate you,” she said resentfully, “for making me love you so much.”
“And what about me?” said Calamy, thinking of his freedom. “Haven’t I a right to hate too?”
“No. Because you don’t love so much.”
“But that’s not the question,” said Calamy, neglecting to record his protest against this damning impeachment. “One doesn’t resent love for its own sake, but for the sake of what it interferes with.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mary bitterly. She was too deeply wounded even to desire to pull his hair. She turned her back on him. “I’m sorry I should have got in the way of your important occupations,” she said in her most sarcastic voice. “Such as thinking about your hand.” She laughed derisively. There was a long silence. Calamy made no attempt to break it; he was piqued by this derisive treatment of a subject which, for him, was serious, was in some sort sacred. It was Mary who first spoke.
“Will you tell me, then, what you were thinking?” she asked submissively, turning back towards him. When one loves, one swallows one’s pride and surrenders. “Will you tell me?” she repeated, leaning over him. She took one of his hands and began to kiss it, then suddenly bit one of his fingers so hard that Calamy cried out in pain.
“Why do you make me so unhappy?” she asked between clenched teeth. She saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed, desperately sobbing. It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy.
“Make you unhappy?” echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still smarting with the pain of that bite. “But I don’t. I make you uncommonly happy.”
“You make me miserable,” she answered.
“Well, in that case,” said Calamy, “I’d better go away and leave you in peace.” He slipped his arm from under her shoulders, as though he were really preparing to go.
But Mary enfolded him in her arms. “No, no,” she implored. “Don’t go. You mustn’t be cross with me. I’m sorry. I behaved abominably. Tell me, please, what you were thinking about your hand. I really am interested. Really, really.” She spoke eagerly, childishly, like the little girl at the Royal Institution lecture.
Calamy couldn’t help laughing. “You’ve succeeded in rather damping my enthusiasm for that subject,” he said. “I’d find it difficult to begin now, in cold blood.”
“Please, please,” Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon, she who cajoled. When one loves...
“You’ve made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,” Calamy objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. Embarrassed, rather awkwardly—for the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath—he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was somehow conscious.
“Well, you see,” he started hesitatingly, “it’s like this. I was thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist—my hand for example.”
“I see,” said Mary Thriplow sympathetically and intelligently. She was almost too anxious to prove that she was listening, that she was understanding everything; she saw before there was anything to see.
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