CROME YELLOW
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
CHAPTER I.
Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the
trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew
the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr,
Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.
Camlet was where he always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently
onward, goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of England.
They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station,
thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly
in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have
something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and
closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.
Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours
in which he might have done so much, so much--written the perfect poem,
for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which--his
gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be
done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of
hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious
minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the
spirit, condemned himself utterly with all his works. What right had he
to sit in the sunshine, to occupy corner seats in third-class carriages, to be
alive? None, none, none.
Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was
twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.
The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last. Denis
jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile of baggage,
leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter, seized a bag in either
hand, and had to put them down again in order to open the door. When at
last he had safely bundled himself and his baggage on to the platform, he
ran up the train towards the van.
"A bicycle, a bicycle!" he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt
himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued
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methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet.
"A bicycle!" Denis repeated. "A green machine, cross-framed, name of
Stone. S-T-O-N-E."
"All in good time, sir," said the guard soothingly. He was a large,
stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home, drinking tea,
surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that tone that he must have
spoken to his children when they were tiresome. "All in good time, sir."
Denis's man of action collapsed, punctured.
He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his bicycle.
He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It was part of
the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six o'clock and
pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon--anywhere. And within
a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches and Tudor
mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon's excursion. Somehow
they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle
was there, and that one fine morning one really might get up at six.
Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet station, he
felt his spirits mounting. The world, he found, was good. The far-away
blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along which
his road led him, the treeless sky-lines that changed as he moved--yes,
they were all good. He was overcome by the beauty of those deeply
embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves,
curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some term
in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves-- no, that was
inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the
achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle. What
was the word to describe the curves of those little valleys? They were as
fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety of
art...
Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de
ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase
didn't occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of
novelists. Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur:
vertu, volupte.
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But he really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little
valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman's breast; they
seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on
these hills. Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be
getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled--his mind
wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever
further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of
words.
Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on
the crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and straight, into a
considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up the
valley, stood Crome, his destination. He put on his brakes; this view of
Crome was pleasant to linger over. The facade with its three projecting
towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the garden. The
house basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily glowed. How ripe and
rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at the same time, how austere!
The hill was becoming steeper and steeper; he was gaining speed in spite
of his brakes. He loosed his grip of the levers, and in a moment was
rushing headlong down. Five minutes later he was passing through the
gate of the great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably open. He
left his bicycle leaning against the wall and walked in. He would take
them by surprise.
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CHAPTER II.
He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet;
Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the
familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life that lay
scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were all out; it was
amusing to wander through the house as though one were exploring a dead,
deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the excavator reconstruct from
these remains; how would he people these empty chambers? There was
the long gallery, with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one
couldn't publicly admit it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese
sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless furniture. There was the panelled
drawing- room, where the huge chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of
comfort among the austere flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the
morning-room, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and
rococo tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures. There was the library, cool,
spacious, and dark, book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous
folios. There was the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its
great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
eighteenth-century pictures--family portraits, meticulous animal paintings.
What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of Henry
Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne, perhaps,
in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of ten
generations the living had left but few traces.
Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems.
What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers
call "a slim volume." He read at hazard:
"...But silence and the topless dark Vault in the lights of Luna Park;
And Blackpool from the nightly gloom Hollows a bright tumultuous
tomb."
He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. "What genius I
had then!" he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months
since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never
write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it,
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he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she
had at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the
slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree
in the wind. "The Woman who was a Tree" was what he had called the
poem. He had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the
poem would tell her what he hadn't dared to say. She had never referred
to it.
He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying
into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in London-three
quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard with anxiety,
irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!
It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It
was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs. Wimbush's boudoir was in
the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase cork-screwed up to
it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. "Come in." Ah,
she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn't be. He opened the door.
Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on
her knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.
"Hullo," she said, looking up. "I'd forgotten you were coming."
"Well, here I am, I'm afraid," said Denis deprecatingly. "I'm awfully
sorry."
Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and
masculine. Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square,
middle-aged face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes,
the whole surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously
improbable shade of orange. Looking at her, Denis always thought of
Wilkie Bard as the cantatrice.
"That's why I'm going to Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra, Sing in op-poppop-
pop-pop-popera."
Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row
of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal
Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.
"What have you been doing all this time?" she asked. "Well," said
Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a tremendously
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amusing account of London and its doings all ripe and ready in his mind.
It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. "To begin with," he said...
But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush's question had been what the
grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little
conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.
"You find me busy at my horoscopes," she said, without even being
aware that she had interrupted him.
A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive
ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying "Oh?" rather
icily.
"Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this
year?" "Yes," he replied, still frigid and mono-syllabic. She must have
told him at least six times.
"Wonderful, isn't it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days,
before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose thousands. Now"--she
paused an instant--"well, look at that four hundred on the Grand National.
That's the Stars."
Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was
too discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of
a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla--not so old then, of course,
and sprightlier--had lost a great deal of money, dropped it in handfuls and
hatfuls on every race-course in the country. She had gambled too. The
number of thousands varied in the different legends, but all put it high.
Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his Primitives--a Taddeo da
Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five nameless Sienese--to the
Americans. There was a crisis. For the first time in his life Henry
asserted himself, and with good effect, it seemed.
Priscilla's gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end.
Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather ill-
defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the
Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a
kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting
money. Most of Priscilla's days were spent in casting the horoscopes of
horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars dictated.
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She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which she
registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the League.
The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one against the
other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between the Spurs
and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and so complicated
that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a mistake about
the outcome.
"Such a pity you don't believe in these things, Denis, such a pity," said
Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.
"I can't say I feel it so."
"Ah, that's because you don't know what it's like to have faith. You've
no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
It makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as
ditchwater, you'd think; but no, I don't find it so. I don't regret the Old
Days a bit. I have the Stars..." She picked up the sheet of paper that was
lying on the blotting- pad. "Inman's horoscope," she explained. "(I
