The Claxtons, Aldous Leonard Huxley
The Claxtons
In their little house on the common, how beautifully the Claxtons lived, how spiritually! Even the cat was a vegetarian—at any rate officially—even the cat. Which made little Sylvia’s behaviour really quite inexcusable. For after all little Sylvia was human and six years old, whereas Pussy was only four and an animal. If Pussy could be content with greens and potatoes and milk and an occasional lump of nut butter, as a treat—Pussy, who had a tiger in her blood—surely Sylvia might be expected to refrain from surreptitious bacon-eating. Particularly in somebody else’s house. What made the incident so specially painful to the Claxtons was that it had occurred under Judith’s roof. It was the first time they had stayed with Judith since their marriage. Martha Claxton was rather afraid of her sister, afraid of her sharp tongue and her laughter and her scarifying irreverence.
And on her own husband’s account she was a little jealous of Judith’s husband. Jack Bamborough’s books were not only esteemed; they also brought in money. Whereas poor Herbert . . . ‘Herbert’s art is too inward,’ his wife used to explain, ‘too spiritual for most people to understand.’ She resented Jack Bamborough’s success; it was too complete. She wouldn’t have minded so much if he had made pots of money in the teeth of critical contempt; or if the critics had approved and he had made nothing. But to earn praise and a thousand a year—that was too much. A man had no right to make the best of both worlds like that, when Herbert never sold anything and was utterly ignored. In spite of all which she had at last accepted Judith’s often repeated invitation. After all, one ought to love one’s sister and one’s sister’s husband. Also, all the chimneys in the house on the common needed sweeping, and the roof would have to be repaired where the rain was coming in. Judith’s invitation arrived most conveniently. Martha accepted it.
And then Sylvia went and did that really inexcusable thing. Coming down to breakfast before the others she stole a rasher from the dish of bacon with which her aunt and uncle unregenerately began the day. Her mother’s arrival prevented her from eating it on the spot; she had to hide it. Weeks later, when Judith was looking for something in the inlaid Italian cabinet, a little pool of dried grease in one of the drawers bore eloquent witness to the crime. The day passed; but Sylvia found no opportunity to consummate the outrage she had begun. It was only in the evening, while her little brother Paul was being given his bath, that she was able to retrieve the now stiff and clammy-cold rasher. With guilty speed she hurried upstairs with it and hid it under her pillow. When the lights were turned out she ate it. In the morning, the grease stains and a piece of gnawed rind betrayed her. Judith went into fits of inextinguishable laughter.
‘It’s like the Garden of Eden,’ she gasped between the explosions of her mirth. ‘The meat of the Pig of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But if you will surround bacon with categorical imperatives and mystery, what can you expect, my dear Martha?’
Martha went on smiling her habitual smile of sweet forgiving benevolence. But inside she felt extremely angry; the child had made a fool of them all in front of Judith and Jack. She would have liked to give her a good smacking. Instead of which—for one must never be rough with a child, one must never let it see that one is annoyed—she reasoned with Sylvia, she explained, she appealed, more in sorrow than in anger, to her better feelings.
‘Your daddy and I don’t think it’s right to make animals suffer when we can eat vegetables which don’t suffer anything.’
‘How do you know they don’t?’ asked Sylvia, shooting out the question malignantly. Her face was ugly with sullen ill-temper.
‘We don’t think it right, darling,’ Mrs Claxton went on, ignoring the interruption. ‘And I’m sure you wouldn’t either, if you realized. Think, my pet; to make that bacon, a poor little pig had to be killed. To be killed, Sylvia. Think of that. A poor innocent little pig that hadn’t done anybody any harm.’
‘But I hate pigs,’ cried Sylvia. Her sullenness flared up into sudden ferocity; her eyes, that had been fixed and glassy with a dull resentment, darkly flashed. ‘I hate them, hate them, hate them.’
‘Quite right,’ said Aunt Judith, who had come in most inopportunely in the middle of the lecture. ‘Quite right. Pigs are disgusting. That’s why people called them pigs.’
Martha was glad to get back to the little house on the common and their beautiful life, happy to escape from Judith’s irreverent laughter and the standing reproach of Jack’s success. On the common she ruled, she was the mistress of the family destinies. To the friends who came to visit them there she was fond of saying, with that smile of hers, ‘I feel that, in our way and on a tiny scale, we’ve built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’
It was Martha’s great-grandfather who started the brewery business. Postgate’s Entire was a household word in Cheshire and Derbyshire. Martha’s share of the family fortune was about seven hundred a year. The Claxtons’ spirituality and disinterestedness were the flowers of an economic plant whose roots were bathed in beer. But for the thirst of British workmen, Herbert would have had to spend his time and energies profitably doing instead of beautifully being. Beer and the fact that he had married Martha permitted him to cultivate the arts and the religions, to distinguish himself in a gross world as an apostle of idealism.
‘It’s what’s called the division of labour,’ Judith would laughingly say. ‘Other people drink. Martha and I think. Or at any rate we think we think.’
Herbert was one of those men who are never without a knapsack on their backs. Even in Bond Street, on the rare occasions when he went to London, Herbert looked as though he were just about to ascend Mont Blanc. The rucksack is a badge of spirituality. For the modern high-thinking, pure-hearted Teuton or Anglo-Saxon the scandal of the rucksack is what the scandal of the cross was to the Franciscans. When Herbert passed, long-legged and knickerbockered, his fair beard like a windy explosion round his face, his rucksack overflowing with the leeks and cabbages required in such profusion to support a purely graminivorous family, the street-boys yelled, the flappers whooped with laughter. Herbert ignored them, or else smiled through his beard forgivingly and with a rather studied humorousness. We all have our little rucksack to bear. Herbert bore his not merely with resignation, but boldly, provocatively, flauntingly in the faces of men; and along with the rucksack the other symbols of difference, of separation from ordinary, gross humanity—the concealing beard, the knickerbockers, the Byronic shirt. He was proud of his difference.
‘Oh, I know you think us ridiculous,’ he would say to his friends of the crass materialistic world, ‘I know you laugh at us for a set of cranks.’
‘But we don’t, we don’t,’ the friends would answer, politely lying.
‘And yet, if it hadn’t been for the cranks,’ Herbert pursued, ‘where would you be now, what would you be doing? You’d be beating children and torturing animals and hanging people for stealing a shilling, and doing all the other horrible things they did in the good old days.’
He was proud, proud; he knew himself superior. So did Martha. In spite of her beautiful Christian smile, she too was certain of her superiority. That smile of hers—it was the hall-mark of her spirituality. A more benevolent version of Mona Lisa’s smile, it kept her rather thin, bloodless lips almost chronically curved into a crescent of sweet and forgiving charitableness, it surcharged the natural sullenness of her face with a kind of irrelevant sweetness.
It was the product of long years of wilful self-denial, of stubborn aspirations towards the highest, of conscious and determined love for humanity and her enemies. (And for Martha the terms were really identical; humanity, though she didn’t of course admit it, was her enemy. She felt it hostile and therefore loved it, consciously and conscientiously; loved it because she really hated it.)
In the end habit had fixed the smile undetachably to her face. It remained there permanently shining, like the head-lamps of a motor-car inadvertently turned on and left to burn, unnecessarily, in the daylight. Even when she was put out or downright angry, even when she was stubbornly, mulishly fighting to have her own will, the smile persisted. Framed between its pre-Raphaelitic loops of mouse-coloured hair the heavy, sullen-featured, rather unwholesomely pallid face continued to shine incongruously with forgiving love for the whole of hateful, hostile humanity; only in the grey eyes was there any trace of the emotions which Martha so carefully repressed.
It was her great-grandfather and her grandfather who had made the money. Her father was already by birth and upbringing the landed gentleman. Brewing was only the dim but profitable background to more distinguished activities as a sportsman, an agriculturist, a breeder of horses and rhododendrons, a member of parliament and the best London clubs.
The fourth generation was obviously ripe for Art and Higher Thought. And duly, punctually, the adolescent Martha discovered William Morris and Mrs Besant, discovered Tolstoy and Rodin and Folk Dancing and Lao-Tzse. Stubbornly, with all the force of her heavy will, she addressed herself to the conquest of spirituality, to the siege and capture of the Highest. And
