Aldous Huxley - Island

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In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid
impossibilities.
ARISTOTLE
Island
by Aldous Huxley
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"Attention," a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had
suddenly become articulate. "Attention," it repeated in the same high, nasal
monotone. "Attention."
Lying there like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face
grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy, Will
Farnaby awoke with a start. Molly had called him. Time to get up. Time to
get dressed. Mustn't be late at the office.
"Thank you, darling," he said and sat up. A sharp pain stabbed at his
right knee and there were other kinds of pain in his back, his arms, his
forehead.
"Attention," the voice insisted without the slightest change of tone.
Leaning on one elbow, Will looked about him and saw with bewilderment,
not the gray wallpaper and yellow curtains of his London bedroom, but a
glade among trees and the long shadows and slanting lights of early
morning in a forest. "Attention"?
Why did she say, "Attention"?
"Attention. Attention," the voice insisted—how strangely, how
senselessly!
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Island
"Molly?" he questioned. "Molly?"
The name seemed to open a window inside his head. Suddenly, with
that horribly familiar sense of guilt at the pit of the stomach, he smelt
formaldehyde, he saw the small brisk nurse hurrying ahead of him along
the green corridor, heard the dry creaking of her starched clothes. "Number
fifty-five," she was saying, and then halted, opened a white door. He
entered and there, on a high white bed, was Molly. Molly with bandages
covering half her face and the mouth hanging cavernously open. "Molly,"
he had called, "Molly ..." His voice had broken, and he was crying, was
imploring now, "My darling!" There was no answer. Through the gaping
mouth the quick shallow breaths came noisily, again, again. "My darling,
my darling . . ." And then suddenly the hand he was holding came to life for
a moment. Then was still again.
"It's me," he said, "it's Will."
Once more the fingers stirred. Slowly, with what was evidently an
enormous effort, they closed themselves over his own, pressed them for a
moment and then relaxed again into lifelessness.
"Attention," called the inhuman voice. "Attention."
It had been an accident, he hastened to assure himself. The road was
wet, the car had skidded across the white line. It was one of those things
that happen all the time. The papers are full of them; he had reported them
by the dozen. "Mother and three children killed in head-on crash ..." But
that was beside the point. The point was that, when she asked him if it was
really the end, he had said yes; the point was that less than an hour after
she had walked out from that last shameful interview into the rain, Molly
was in the ambulance, dying.
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He hadn't looked at her as she turned to go, hadn't dared to look at
her. Another glimpse of that pale suffering face might have been too much
for him. She had risen from her chair and was moving slowly across the
room, moving slowly out of his
life. Shouldn't he call her back, ask her forgiveness, tell her that he still
loved her? Had he ever loved her?
For the hundredth time the articulate oboe called him to attention.
Yes, had he ever really loved her?
"Good-bye, Will," came her remembered whisper as she turned back
on the threshold. And then it was she who had said it—in a whisper, from
the depths of her heart. "I still love you, Will—in spite of everything."
A moment later the door of the flat closed behind her almost without a
sound. The little dry click of the latch, and she was gone.
He had jumped up, had run to the front door and opened it, had
listened to the retreating footsteps on the stairs. Like a ghost at cockcrow, a
faint familiar perfume lingered vanishingly on the air. He closed the door
again, walked into his gray-and-yellow bedroom and looked out the widow.
A few seconds passed, then he saw her crossing the pavement and getting
into the car. He heard the shrill grinding of the starter, once, twice, and after
that the drumming of the motor. Should he open the window? "Wait, Molly,
wait," he heard himself shouting in imagination. The window remained
unopened; the car began to move, turned the corner and the street was
empty. It was too late. Too late, thank God! said a gross derisive voice.
Yes, thank God! And yet the guilt was there at the pit of his stomach. The
guilt, the gnawing of his remorse—but through the remorse he could feel a
horrible rejoicing. Somebody low and lewd and brutal, somebody alien and
odious who was yet himself was gleefully thinking that now there was
nothing to prevent him from having what he wanted. And what he wanted
was a different perfume, was the warmth and resilience of a younger body.
"Attention," said the oboe. Yes, attention. Attention to Babs's musky
bedroom, with its strawberry-pink alcove and the two windows that looked
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Island
onto the Charing Cross Road and were looked into, all night long, by the
winking glare of the big sky sign for Porter's Gin on the opposite side of the
street. Gin in royal crimson—and for ten seconds the alcove was the
Sacred Heart, for ten miraculous seconds the flushed face so close to his
own glowed like a seraph's, transfigured as though by an inner fire of love.
Then came the yet profounder transfiguration of darkness. One, two, three,
four . . . Ah God, make it go on forever! But punctually at the count of ten
the electric clock would turn on another revelation—but of death, of the
Essential Horror; for the lights, this time, were green, and for ten hideous
seconds Babs's rosy alcove became a womb of mud and, on the bed, Babs
herself was corpse-colored, a cadaver galvanized into posthumous
epilepsy. When Porter's Gin proclaimed itself in green, it was hard to forget
what had happened and who one was. The only thing to do was to shut
one's eyes and plunge, if one could, more deeply into the Other World of
sensuality, plunge violently, plunge deliberately into those alienating
frenzies to which poor Molly— Molly ("Attention") in her bandages, Molly in
her wet grave at Highgate, and Highgate, of course, was why one had to
shut one's eyes each time when the green light made a corpse of Babs's
nakedness—had always and so utterly been a stranger. And not only Molly.
Behind his closed eyelids, Will saw his mother, pale like a cameo, her face
spiritualized by accepted suffering, her hands made monstrous and
subhuman by arthritis. His mother and, standing behind her wheelchair,
already running to fat and quivering like calf's-foot jelly with all the feelings
that had never found their proper expression in consummated love, was his
sister Maud.
"How can you, Will?"
"Yes, how can you?" Maud echoed tearfully in her vibrating contralto.
There was no answer. No answer, that was to say, in any words that
could be uttered in their presence, that, uttered,
those two martyrs—the mother to her unhappy marriage, the daughter to
filial piety—could possibly understand. No answer except in words of the
most obscenely scientific objectivity, the most inadmissible frankness. How
could he do it? He could do it, for all practical purposes was compelled to
do it, because . . . well, because Babs had certain physical peculiarities
which Molly did not possess and behaved at certain moments in ways
which Molly would have found unthinkable.
There had been a long silence; but now, abruptly, the strange voice
took up its old refrain.
"Attention. Attention."
Attention to Molly, attention to Maud and his mother, attention to Babs.
And suddenly another memory emerged from the fog of vagueness and
confusion. Babs's strawberry-pink alcove sheltered another guest, and its
owner's body was shuddering ecstatically under somebody else's caresses.
To the guilt in the stomach was added an anguish about the heart, a
constriction of the throat.
"Attention."
The voice had come nearer, was calling from somewhere over there to
the right. He turned his head, he tried to raise himself for a better view; but
the arm that supported his weight began to tremble, then gave way, and he
fell back into the leaves. Too tired to go on remembering, he lay there for a
long time staring up through half-closed lids at the incomprehensible world
around him. Where was he and how on earth had he got here? Not that this
was of any importance. At the moment nothing was of any importance
except this pain, this annihilating weakness. All the same, just as a matter
of scientific interest. . .
This tree, for example, under which (for no known reason) he found
himself lying, this column of gray bark with the groining, high up, of sun-
speckled branches, this ought by rights to be a beech tree. But in that
case—and Will admired himself for being so lucidly logical—in that case
the leaves had no right to
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Island
be so obviously evergreen. And why would a beech tree send its roots
elbowing up like this above the surface of the ground? And those
preposterous wooden buttresses, on which the pseudo-beech supported
itself—where did those fit into the picture? Will remembered suddenly his
favorite worst line of poetry. "Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days my
mind?" Answer: congealed ectoplasm, Early Dali. Which definitely ruled out
the Chilterns. So did the butterflies swooping out there in the thick buttery
sunshine. Why were they so large, so improbably cerulean or velvet black,
so extravagantly eyed and freckled? Purple staring out of chestnut, silver
powdered over emerald, over topaz, over sapphire.
"Attention."
"Who's there?" Will Farnaby called in what he intended to be a loud
and formidable tone; but all that came out of his mouth was a thin,
quavering croak.
There was a long and, it seemed, profoundly menacing silence. From
the hollow between two of the tree's wooden buttresses an enormous black
centipede emerged for a moment into view, then hurried away on its
regiment of crimson legs and vanished into another cleft in the lichen-
covered ectoplasm.
"Who's there?" he croaked again.
There was a rustling in the bushes on his left and suddenly, like a
cuckoo from a nursery clock, out popped a large black bird, the size of a
jackdaw—only, needless to say, it wasn't a jackdaw. It clapped a pair of
white-tipped wings and, darting across the intervening space, settled on the
lowest branch of a small dead tree, not twenty feet from where Will was
lying. Its beak, he noticed, was orange, and it had a bald yellow patch
under each eye, with canary-colored wattles that covered the sides and
back of its head with a thick wig of naked flesh. The bird cocked its head
and looked at him first with the right eye, then with the left. After which it
opened its orange bill, whistled ten or twelve
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notes of a little air in the pentatonic scale, made a noise like somebody
having hiccups, and then, in a chanting phrase, do do sol do, said, "Here
and now, boys; here and now, boys."
The words pressed a trigger, and all of a sudden he remembered
everything. Here was Pala, the forbidden island, the place no journalist had
ever visited. And now must be the morning after the afternoon when he'd
been fool enough to go sailing, alone, outside the harbor of Rendang-Lobo.
He remembered it all—the white sail curved by the wind into the likeness of
a huge magnolia petal, the water sizzling at the prow, the sparkle of
diamonds on every wave crest, the troughs of wrinkled jade. And
eastwards, across the Strait, what clouds, what prodigies of sculptured
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