Young Archimedes - Aldous Huxley

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Young Archimedes BY ALDOUS HUXLEY IT WAS the view which finally made us take the place. True, the house had its disadvantages. It was a long way out of town and had no tele- phone. The rent was unduly high, the drainage system poor. On windy nights, when the ill-fitting panes were rattling so furiously in the win- dow frames that you could fancy yourself in an hotel omnibus, the electric light, for some mysterious reason, used invariably to go out and leave you in the noisy dark. There was a splendid bathroom; but the electric pump, which was supposed to send up water from the rain- water tanks in the terrace, did not work. Punctually every autumn the drinking well ran dry. And our land- lady was a liar and a cheat. But these are the little disadvan- tages of every hired house, all over the world. For Italy they were not really at all serious. I have seen plenty of houses which had them all and a hundred others, without pos- sessing the compensating advantages of ours—the southward-facing gar- den and terrace for the winter and spring, the large cool rooms against the midsummer heat, the hilltop air and freedom from mosquitoes, and finally the view. And what a view it was! Or rather, what a succession of views. For it was different every day; and with- out stirring from the house one had the impression of an incessant change of scene: all the delights of travel without its fatigues. There were autumn days when all the val- leys were filled with mist and the crest of the Apennines rose darkly out of a flat white lake. There were days when the mist invaded even our hilltop and we were enveloped in a soft vapor in which the mist- colored olive trees, that sloped away below our windows towards the val- ley, disappeared as though into their own spiritual essence; and the only firm and definite things in the small, dim world within which we found ourselves confined were the two tall black cypresses growing on a little projecting terrace a hundred feet down the hill. Black, sharp, and solid, they stood there, twin pillars of Hercules at the extremity of the known universe; and beyond them there was only pale cloud and round them only the cloudy olive trees. These were the wintry days; but there were days of spring and autumn, days unchallengingly cloud- less, or—more lovely still—made various by the huge floating shapes of vapor that, snowy above the TYom Young Archimedes and Other Stories by Aldous Huxley. By permission of Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1924, by Aldous Huxley. In Canada, from The Little Mexican, by permission Of Messrs. Chatto & Windus, London, and the Oxford University Press, Canadian Branch. 45° PRODUCED 2004 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

Transcript of Young Archimedes - Aldous Huxley

Page 1: Young Archimedes - Aldous Huxley

Young Archimedes

BY ALDOUS HUXLEY

IT WAS the view which finally madeus take the place. True, the househad its disadvantages. It was a longway out of town and had no tele-phone. The rent was unduly high,the drainage system poor. On windynights, when the ill-fitting paneswere rattling so furiously in the win-dow frames that you could fancyyourself in an hotel omnibus, theelectric light, for some mysteriousreason, used invariably to go out andleave you in the noisy dark. Therewas a splendid bathroom; but theelectric pump, which was supposedto send up water from the rain-water tanks in the terrace, did notwork. Punctually every autumn thedrinking well ran dry. And our land-lady was a liar and a cheat.

But these are the little disadvan-tages of every hired house, all overthe world. For Italy they were notreally at all serious. I have seenplenty of houses which had them alland a hundred others, without pos-sessing the compensating advantagesof ours—the southward-facing gar-den and terrace for the winter andspring, the large cool rooms againstthe midsummer heat, the hilltop airand freedom from mosquitoes, andfinally the view.

And what a view it was! Or rather,

what a succession of views. For itwas different every day; and with-out stirring from the house one hadthe impression of an incessantchange of scene: all the delights oftravel without its fatigues. Therewere autumn days when all the val-leys were filled with mist and thecrest of the Apennines rose darklyout of a flat white lake. There weredays when the mist invaded evenour hilltop and we were envelopedin a soft vapor in which the mist-colored olive trees, that sloped awaybelow our windows towards the val-ley, disappeared as though into theirown spiritual essence; and the onlyfirm and definite things in the small,dim world within which we foundourselves confined were the two tallblack cypresses growing on a littleprojecting terrace a hundred feetdown the hill. Black, sharp, andsolid, they stood there, twin pillarsof Hercules at the extremity of theknown universe; and beyond themthere was only pale cloud and roundthem only the cloudy olive trees.

These were the wintry days; butthere were days of spring andautumn, days unchallengingly cloud-less, or—more lovely still—madevarious by the huge floating shapesof vapor that, snowy above the

TYom Young Archimedes and Other Stories by Aldous Huxley. By permission of Harper &Brothers. Copyright, 1924, by Aldous Huxley. In Canada, from The Little Mexican, by permissionOf Messrs. Chatto & Windus, London, and the Oxford University Press, Canadian Branch.

45°

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Europeanfaraway, snow-capped mountains,gradually unfolded, against thepale bright blue, enormous heroicgestures. And in the height of thesky the bellying draperies, the swans,the aerial marbles, hewed and leftunfinished by gods grown tired ofcreation almost before they had be-gun, drifted sleeping along the wind,changing form as they moved. Andthe sun would come and go behindthem; and now the town in the val-ley would fade and almost vanishin the shadow, and now, like animmense fretted jewel between thehills, it would glow as though by itsown light. And looking across thenearer tributary valley that woundfrom below our crest down towardsthe Arno, looking over the low darkshoulder of hill on whose extremepromonotory stood the toweredchurch of San Miniato, one saw thehuge dome airily hanging on its ribsof masonry, the square campanile,the sharp spire of Santa Croce, andthe canopied tower of the Signoria,rising above the intricate maze ofhouses, distinct and brilliant, likesmall treasures carved out of preci-ous stones. For a moment only, andthen their light would fade awayonce more, and the traveling beamwould pick out, among the indigohill beyond, a single golden crest.

There were days when the air waswet with passed or with approachingrain, and all the distances seemedmiraculously near and clear. Theolive trees detached themselves onefrom another on the distant slopes;the faraway villages were lovely andpathetic like the most exquisitesmall toys. There were days in sum-mertime, days of impending thunderwhen, bright and sunlit against hugebellying masses of black and purple,the hills and the white houses shoneas it were precariously, in a dying

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splendor, on the brink of some fear-ful calamity.

How the hills changed and varied!Every day and every hour of theday, almost, they were different.There would be moments when,looking across the plains of Flor-ence, one would see only a dark bluesilhouette against the sky. The scenehad no depth; there was only ahanging curtain painted flatly withthe symbols of the mountains. Andthen, suddenly almost, with thepassing of a cloud, or when the sunhad declined to a certain level in thesky, the flat scene transformed itself;and where there had been only apainted curtain, now there wereranges behind ranges of hills, grad-uated tone after tone from brown,or gray, or a green gold to farawayblue. Shapes that a moment beforehad been fused together indiscrim-inately into a single mass now cameapart into their constituents. Fiesole,which had seemed only a spur ofMonte Morello, now revealed itselfas the jutting headland of anothersystem of hills, divided from thenearest bastions of its greater neigh-bor by a deep and shadowy valley.

At noon, during the heats of sum-mer, the landscape became dim,powdery, vague and almost colorlessunder the midday sun; the hills dis-appeared into the trembling fringesof the sky. But as the afternoon woreon the landscape emerged again, itdropped its anonymity, it climbedback out of nothingness into formand life. And its life, as the sun sankand slowly sank through the longafternoon, grew richer, grew moreintense with every moment. Thelevel light, with its attendant long,dark shadows, laid bare, so to speak,the anatomy of the land; the hills—each western escarpment shining,and each slope averted from the sun-

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light profoundly shadowed—becamemassive, jutty, and solid. Little foldsof dimples in the seemingly evenground revealed themselves. East-ward from our hilltop, across theplain of the Etna, a great bluff castsits ever-increasing shadow; in thesurrounding brightness of the valleya whole town lay eclipsed within it.And as the sun expired on the hori-zon, the further hills flushed in itswarm light, till their illumined flankswere the color of tawny roses; butthe valleys were already filled withthe blue mist of the evening. And itmounted, mounted; the fire went outof the western windows of the popu-lous slopes; only the crests were stillalight, and at last they too were allextinct. The mountains faded andfused together again into a flat paint-ing of mountains against the paleevening sky. In a little while it wasnight; and if the moon were full, aghost of the dead scene still hauntedthe horizons.

Changed in its beauty, this widelandscape always preserved a qualityof humanness and domesticationwhich made it, to my mind at anyrate, the best of all landscapes tolive with. Day by day one traveledthrough its different beauties; butthe journey, like our ancestors'Grand Tour, was always a journeythrough civilization. For all its moun-tains, its deep slopes and deep val-leys, the Tuscan scene is dominatedby its inhabitants. They have culti-vated every rood of ground that canbe cultivated; their houses are thicklyscattered even over the hills, andthe valleys are populous. Solitary onthe hilltop, one is not alone in awilderness. Man's traces are acrossthe country, and already—one feelsit with satisfaction as one looks outacross it—for centuries, for thou-sands of years; it has been his, sub-

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missive, tamed, and humanized. Thewide, blank moorlands, the sands,the forests of innumerable trees—these are places for occasional visita-tion, healthful to the spirit whichsubmits itself to them for not toolong. But fiendish influences as wellas divine haunt these total solitudes.The vegetative life of plants andthings is alien and hostile to thehuman. Men cannot live at easeexcept where they have masteredtheir surroundings and where theiraccumulated lives outnumber andoutweigh the vegetative lives aboutthem. Stripped of its dark wood,planted, terraced and tilled almostto the mountains' tops, the Tuscanlandscape is humanized and safe.Sometimes upon those who live inthe midst of it there comes a longingfor some place that is solitary, in-human, lifeless, or peopled onlywith alien life. But the longing issoon satisfied, and one is glad toreturn to the civilized and submissivescene.

I found that house on the hilltopthe ideal dwelling place. For there,safe in the midst of a humanizedlandscape, one was yet alone; onecould be as solitary as one liked.Neighbors whom one never sees atclose quarters are the ideal andperfect neighbors.

Our nearest neighbors, in terms ofphysical proximity, lived very near.We had two sets of them, as a mat-ter of fact, almost in the same housewith us. One was the peasant family,who lived in a long, low building,part dwelling house, part stables,storerooms and cow sheds, adjoin-ing the villa. Our other neighbors—intermittent neighbors, however, forthey only ventured out of town everynow and then, during the most flaw-less weather—were the owners ofthe villa, who had reserved for them-

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selves the smaller wing of the hugeL-shaped house—a mere dozenrooms or so—leaving the remainingeighteen or twenty to us.

They were a curious couple, ourproprietors. An old husband, gray,listless, tottering, seventy at least;and a signora of about forty, short,very plump, with tiny fat hands andfeet and a pair of very large, verydark black eyes, which she used withall the skill of a born comedian. Hervitality, if you could have harnessedit and made it do some useful work,would have supplied a whole townwith electric light. The physiciststalk of deriving energy from theatom; they would be more profitablyemployed nearer home—in discover-ing some way of tapping those enor-mous stores of vital energy whichaccumulate in unemployed womenof sanguine temperament and which,in the present imperfect state of so-cial and scientific organization, ventthemselves in ways that are generallyso deplorable in interfering withother people's affairs, in working upemotional scenes, in thinking aboutlove and making it, and in botheringmen till they cannot get on with theirwork.

Signora Bondi got rid of her super-fluous energy, among other ways, by"doing in" her tenants. The oldgentleman, who was a retired mer-chant with a reputation for the mostperfect rectitude, was allowed tohave no dealings with us. When wecame to see the house, it was thewife who showed us round. It wasshe who, with a lavish display ofcharm, with irresistible rollings ofthe eyes, expatiated on the merits ofthe place, sang the praises of theelectric pump, glorified the bathroom(considering which, she insisted, theTent was remarkably moderate), andwhen we suggested calling in a sur-

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 453veyor to look over the house, earn-estly begged us, as though our well-being were her only consideration,not to waste our money unnecessarilyin doing anything so superfluous."After all," she said, "we are honestpeople. I wouldn't dream of lettingyou the house except in perfect con-dition. Have confidence." And shelooked at me with an appealing,pained expression in her magnificenteyes, as though begging me not toinsult her by my coarse suspicious-ness. And leaving us no time to pur-sue the subject of surveyors anyfurther, she began assuring us thatour little boy was the most beautifulangel she had ever seen. By the timeour interview with Signora Bondiwas at an end, we had definitelydecided to take the house.

"Charming woman," I said, as weleft the house. But I think that Eliza-beth was not quite so certain of itas I.

Then the pump episode began.On the evening of our arrival in

the house we switched on the elec-tricity. The pump made a very pro-fessional whirring noise; but no watercame out of the taps in the bath-room. We looked at one anotherdoubtfully.

"Charming woman?" Elizabethraised her eyebrows.

We asked for interviews; butsomehow the old gentleman couldnever see us, and the Signora was in-variably out or indisposed. We leftnotes; they were never answered. Inthe end, we found that the onlymethod of communicating with ourlandlords, who were living in thesame house with us, was to go downinto Florence and send a registeredexpress letter to them. For this theyhad to sign two separate receiptsand even, if we chose to pay fortycentimes more, a third incriminating

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454document, which was then returnedto us. There could be no pretending,as there always was with ordinaryletters or notes, that the communica-tion had never been received. Webegan at last to get answers to ourcomplaints. The Signora, who wroteall the letters, started by telling usthat, naturally, the pump didn'twork, as the cisterns were empty,owing to the long drought. I had towalk three miles to the post officein order to register my letter remind-ing her that there had been a vio-lent thunderstorm only last Wednes-day, and that the tanks were con-sequently more than half full. Theanswer came back: bath water hadnot been guaranteed in the contract;and if I wanted it, why hadn't I hadthe pump looked at before I took thehouse? Another walk into town toask the Signora next door whethershe remembered her adjurations tous to have confidence in her, and toinform her, that the existence in ahouse of a bathroom was in itselfan implicit guarantee of bath water.The reply to that was that theSignora couldn't continue to havecommunications with people whowrote so rudely to her. After that Iput the matter into the hands of alawyer. Two months later the pumpwas actually replaced. But we hadto serve a writ on the lady before shegave in. And the costs were con-siderable.

One day, towards the end of theepisode, I met the old gentleman inthe road, taking his big Maremmandog for a walk—or being taken,rather, for a walk by the dog. Forwhere the dog pulled the old gentle-man had perforce to follow. Andwhen it stopped to smell, or scratchthe ground, or leave against a gate-post its visiting card or an offensivechallenge, patiently, at his end of the

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leash, the old man had to wait. Ipassed him standing at the side ofthe road, a few hundred yards belowour house. The dog was sniffing atthe roots of one of the twin cypresseswhich grew one on either side of theentry to a farm; I heard the beastgrowling indignantly to itself, asthough it scented an intolerable in-sult. Old Signor Bondi, leashed tohis dog, was waiting. The knees in-side the tubular gray trousers wereslightly bent. Leaning on his cane,he stood gazing mournfully andvacantly at the view. The whites ofhis old eyes were discolored, likeancient billiard balls. In the gray,deeply wrinkled face, his nose wasdyspeptically red. His white mus-tache, ragged and yellowing at thefringes, drooped in a melancholycurve. In his black tie he wore avery large diamond; perhaps thatwas what Signora Bondi had foundso attractive about him.

I took off my hat as I approached.The old man stared at me absently,and it was only when I was alreadyalmost past him that he recollectedwho I was.

"Wait," he called after me, "wait!"And he hastened down the road inpursuit. Taken utterly by surpriseand at a disadvantage—for it wasengaged in retorting to the affrontimprinted on the cypress roots—thedog permitted itself to be jerkedafter him. Too much astonished tobe anything but obedient, it followedits master. "Wait!"

I waited."My dear sir," said the old gentle-

man, catching me by the lapel of mycoat and blowing most disagreeablyin my face, "I want to apologize."He looked around him, as thoughafraid that even here he might beoverheard. "I want to apologize," hewent on, "about the wretched pump

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business. I assure you that, if it hadbeen only my affair, I'd have put thething right as soon as you asked.You were quite right: a bathroom isan implicit guarantee of bath water.I saw from the first that we shouldhave no chance if it came to court.And besides, I think one ought totreat one's tenants as handsomely asone can afford to. But my wife"—helowered his voice—"the fact is thatshe likes this sort of thing, evenwhen she knows that she's in thewrong and must lose. And besides,she hoped, I dare say, that you'd gettired of asking and have the jobdone yourself. I told her from thefirst that we ought to give in; butshe wouldn't listen. You see, sheenjoys it. Still, now she sees that itmust be done. In the course of thenext two or three days you'll be hav-ing your bath water. But I thoughtI'd just like to tell you how . . ."But the Maremmano, which had re-covered by this time from its sur-prise of a moment since, suddenlybounded, growling, up the road. Theold gentleman tried to hold the beast,strained at the leash, tottered un-steadily, then gave way and allowedhimself to be dragged off. ". . . howsorry I am," he went on, as he re-ceded from me, "that this little mis-understanding . . ." But it was nouse. "Good-by." He smiled politely,made a little deprecating gesture, asthough he had suddenly remembereda pressing engagement, and had notime to explain what it was. "Good-by." He took off his hat and aban-doned himself completely to the dog.

A week later the water really didbegin to flow, and the day after ourfirst bath Signora Bondi, dressed indove-gray satin and wearing all herpearls, came to call.

"Is it peace now?" she asked, with

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 455a charming frankness, as she shookhands.

We assured her that, so far as wewere concerned, it certainly was.

"But why did you write me suchdreadfully rude letters?" she said,turning on me a reproachful glancethat ought to have moved the mostruthless malefactor to contrition."And then that writ. How could you?To a lady . . ."

I mumbled something about thepump and our wanting baths.

"But how could you expect me tolisten to you while you were in thatmood? Why didn't you set aboutit differently—politely, charmingly?"She smiled at me and dropped herfluttering eyelids.

I thought it best to change theconversation. It is disagreeable, whenone is in the right, to be made toappear in the wrong.

A few weeks later we had a letter—duly registered and by expressmessenger—in which the Signoraasked us whether we proposed torenew our lease (which was only forsix montns), and notifying us that,if we did, the rent would be raisedtwenty-five per cent, in considerationof the improvements which had beencarried out. We thought ourselveslucky, at the end of much bargain-ing, to get the lease renewed for awhole year with an increase in therent of only fifteen per cent.

It was chiefly for the sake of theview that we put up with these in-tolerable extortions. But we hadfound other reasons, after a fewdays' residence, for liking the house.Of these the most cogent was that,in the peasant's youngest child, wehad discovered what seemed the per-fect playfellow for our own smallboy. Between little Guido—for thatwas his name—and the youngest ofhis brothers and sisters there was a

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gap of six or seven years. His twoolder brothers worked with theirfather in the fields; since the timeof the mother's death, two or threeyears before we knew them, theeldest sister had ruled the house,and the younger, who had just leftschool, helped her and in between-whiles kept an eye on Guido, whoby this time, however, needed verylooking after; for he was between sixand seven years old and as preco-cious, self-assured, and responsible asthe children of the poor, left as theyare to themselves almost from thetime they can walk, generally are.

Though fully two and a half yearsolder than little Robin—and at thatage thirty months are crammed withhalf a lifetime's experience—Guidotook no undue advantage of hissuperior intelligence and strength.I have never seen a child morepatient, tolerant, and untyrannical.He never laughed at Robin for hisclumsy efforts to imitate his ownprodigious feats; he did not tease orbully, but helped his small com-panion when he was in difficultiesand explained when he could notunderstand. In return, Robin adoredhim, regarded him as the model andperfect Big Boy, and slavishly imi-tated him in every way he could.

These attempts of Robin's to imi-tate his companion were often ex-ceedingly ludicrous. For by an ob-scure psychological law, words andactions in themselves quite seriousbecome comic as soon, as they arecopied; and the more accurately, ifthe imitation is a deliberate parody,the funnier—for an overloadedimitation of someone we know doesnot make us laugh so much as onethat is almost indistinguishably likethe original. The bad imitation isonly ludicrous when it is a piece ofsincere and earnest flattery which

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does not quite come off. Robin'simitations were mostly of this kind.His heroic and unsuccessful attemptsto perform the feats of strength andskill, which Guido could do withease, were exquisitely comic. Andhis careful, long-drawn imitations ofGuido's habits and mannerisms wereno less amusing. Most ludicrous ofall, because most earnestly under-taken and most incongruous in theimitator, were Robin's impersonationsof Guido in a pensive mood. Guidowas a thoughtful child given tobrooding and sudden abstractions.One would find him sitting in acorner by himself, chin in hand,elbow on knee, plunged, to all ap-pearances, in the profoundest medi-tation. And sometimes, even in themidst of his play, he would sud-denly break off, to stand, his handsbehind his back, frowning and star-ing at the ground. When this hap-pened, Robin became overawed anda little disquieted. In a puzzled sil-ence he looked at his companion."Guido," he would say softly,"Guido." But Guido was generallytoo much preoccupied to answer;and Robin, not venturing to insist,would creep near him, and throwinghimself as nearly as possible intoGuido's attitude—standing Napo-leonically, his hands clasped behindhim, or sitting in the posture ofMichelangelo's Lorenzo the Magnifi-cent—would try to meditate too.Every few seconds he would turnhis bright blue eyes towards theelder child to see whether he wasdoing it quite right. But at the endof a minute he began to grow im-patient; meditation wasn't his strongpoint. "Guido," he called again and,louder, "Guido!" And he would takehim by the hand and try to pull himaway. Sometimes Guido roused him-self from his reverie and went back

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Europeanto the interrupted game. Sometimeshe paid no attention. Melancholy,perplexed, Robin had to take him-self off to play by himself. AndGuido would go on sitting or stand-ing there, quite still; and his eyes,if one looked into them, were beau-tiful in their grave and pensive calm.

They were large eyes, set far apartand, what was strange in a dark-haired Italian child, of a luminouspale blue-gray color. They were notalways grave and calm, as in thesepensive moments. When he wasplaying, when he talked or laughed,they lit up; and the surface of thoseclear, pale lakes of thought seemed,as it were, to be shaken into bril-liant sun-flashing ripples. Abovethose eyes was a beautiful forehead,high and steep and domed in acurve that was like a subtle curve ofa rose petal. The nose was straight,the chin small and rather pointed,the mouth drooped a little sadly atthe corners.

I have a snapshot of the two chil-dren sitting together on the parapetof the terrace. Guido sits almostfacing the camera, but looking alittle to one side and downwards;his hands are crossed in his lap andhis expression, his attitude arethoughtful, grave, and meditative.It is Guido in one of those moods ofabstraction into which he would passeven at the height of laughter andplay—quite suddenly and com-pletely, as though he had all at oncetaken it into his head to go awayand left the silent and beautiful bodybehind, like an empty house, to waitfor his return. And by its side sitslittle Robin, turning to look up athim, his face half averted from thecamera, but the curve of his cheekshowing that he is laughing; onelittle raised hand is caught at thetop of a gesture, the other clutches

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 457at Guido's sleeves, as though he wereurging him to come away and play.And the legs dangling from theparapet have been seen by the blink-ing instrument in the midst of animpatient wriggle; he is on the pointof slipping down and running off toplay hide-and-seek in the garden. Allthe essential characteristics of boththe children are in that little snap-shot.

"If Robin were not Robin," Eliza-beth used to say, "I could almostwish he were Guido."

And even at that time, when Itook no particular interest in thechild, I agreed with her. Guidoseemed to me one of the most charm-ing little boys I had ever seen.

We were not alone in admiringhim. Signora Bondi when, in thosecordial intervals between our quar-rels, she came to call, was con-stantly speaking of him. "Such abeautiful, beautiful child!" she wouldexclaim with enthusiasm. "It's reallya waste that he should belong topeasants who can't afford to dresshim properly. If he were mine, Ishould put him into black velvet; orlittle white knickers and a whiteknitted silk jersey with a red line atthe collar and cuffs; or perhaps awhite sailor suit would be pretty.And in winter a little fur coat, witha squirrelskin cap, and possibly Rus-sian boots . . ." Her imagination wasrunning away with her. 'And I'd lethis hair grow, like a page's, and haveit just curled up a little at the tips.And a straight fringe across his fore-head. Everyone would turn roundand stare after us if I took him outwith me in Via Tornabuoni."

What you want, I should haveliked to tell her, is not a child; it's aclockwork doll or a performingmonkey. But I did not say so—partlybecause I could not think of the

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Italian for a clockwork doll andpartly because I did not want to riskhaving the rent raised another fifteenper cent.

"Ah, if I only had a little boy likethat!" She sighed and modestlydropped her eyelids. "I adore chil-dren. I sometimes think of adoptingone—that is, if my husband wouldallow it."

I thought of the poor old gentle-man being dragged along at theheels of his big white dog and in-wardly smiled.

"But I don't know if he would,"the signora was continuing, "I don'tknow if he would." She was silentfor a moment, as though consideringa new idea.

A few days later, when we weresitting in the garden after luncheon,drinking our coffee, Guido's fatherinstead of passing with a nod and theusual cheerful good day, halted infront of us and began to talk. He wasa fine handsome man, not very tall,but well proportioned, quick andelastic in his movements, and full oflife. He had a thin brown face, fea-tured like a Roman's and lit by apair of the most intelligent-lookinggray eyes I ever saw. They exhibitedalmost too much intelligence when,as not infrequently happened, hewas trying, with an assumption ofperfect frankness and a childlike in-nocence, to take one in or get some-thing out of one. Delighting in itself,the intelligence shone there mis-chievously. The face might be in-genuous, impassive, almost imbecilein its expression; but the eyes onthese occasions gave him completelyaway. One knew, when they glit-tered like that, that one would haveto be careful.

Today, however, there was nodangerous light in them. He wantednothing out of us, nothing of any

value—only advice, which is a com-modity, he knew, that most peopleare only too happy to part with. Buthe wanted advice on what was, forus, rather a delicate subject: onSignora Bondi. Carlo had often com-plained to us about her. The oldman is good, he told us, very goodand kind indeed. Which meant, Idare say, among other things, thathe could easily be swindled. But hiswife. . . . Well, the woman was abeast. And he would tell us storiesof her insatiable rapacity: she wasalways claiming more than the halfof the produce which, by the lawsof the metayage systems, was theproprietor's due. He complained ofher suspiciousness: she was foreveraccusing him of sharp practices, ofdownright stealing—him, he struckhis breast, the soul of honesty. Hecomplained of her shortsighted ava-rice: she wouldn't spend enough onmanure, wouldn't buy him anothercow, wouldn't have electric light in-stalled in the stables. And we hadsympathized, but Cautiously, withoutexpressing too strong an opinion onthe subject. The Italians are wonder-fully noncommittal in their speech;they will give nothing away to aninterested person until they are quitecertain that it is right and neces-sary and, above all, safe to do so.We had lived long enough amongthem to imitate their caution. Whatwe said to Carlo would be sure,sooner or later, to get back to Sig-nora Bondi. There was nothing to begained by unnecessarily embitteringour relations with the lady—only an-other fifteen per cent, very likely, tobe lost.

Today he wasn't so much com-plaining as feeling perplexed. TheSignora had sent for him, it seemed,and asked him how he would like itif she were to make an offer—it was

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Europeanall very hypothetical in the cautiousItalian style—to adopt little Guido.Carlo's first instinct had been to saythat he wouldn't like it at all. Butan answer like that would have beentoo coarsely committal. He hadpreferred to say that he would thinkabout it. And now he was asking forour advice.

Do what you think best, was whatin effect we replied. But we gave itdistantly but distinctly to be under-stood that we didn't think that Sig-nora Bondi would make a very goodfoster mother for the child. AndCarlo was inclined to agree. Besideshe was very fond of the boy.

"But the thing is," he concludedrather gloomingly, "that if she hasreally set her heart on getting holdof the child, there's nothing shewon't do to get him—nothing."

He too, I could see, would haveliked the physicists to start on unem-ployed childless women of sanguinetemperament before they tried totackle the atom. Still, I reflected, asI watched him striding away alongthe terrace, singing powerfully froma brazen gullet as he went, therewas force there, there was lifeenough in those elastic limbs, be-hind those bright gray eyes, to putup a good fight even against the ac-cumulated vital energies of SignoraBondi.

It was a few days after this thatmy gramophone and two or threeboxes of records arrived from Eng-land. They were a great comfort tous on the hilltop, providing as theydid the only thing in which thatspiritually fertile solitude—otherwisea perfect Swiss Family Robinson'sisland—was lacking: music. Thereis not much music to be heard now-adays in Florence. The times whenDr. Burney could tour through Italy,listening to an unending succession

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 459of new operas, symphonies, quartets,cantatas, are gone. Gone are thedays when a learned musician, in-ferior only to the Reverend FatherMartini of Bologna, could admirewhat the peasants sang and thestrolling players thrummed andscraped on their instruments. I havetraveled for weeks through thepeninsula and hardly heard a notethat was not Salome or the Fascists'song. Rich in nothing else that makeslife agreeable or even supportable,the northern metropolises are rich inmusic. That is perhaps the only in-ducement that a reasonable man canfind for living there. The other at-tractions—organized gaiety, people,miscellaneous conversation, the so-cial pleasures—what are those, afterall, but an expense of spirit that buysnothing in return? And then thecold, the darkness, the molderingdirt, the damp and squalor. . . . No,where there is no necessity that re-tains, music can be the only induce-ment. And that, thanks to the in-genious Edison, can now be takenabout in a box and unpacked inwhatever solitude one chooses tovisit. One can live at Benin, orNuneaton, or Tozeur in the Sahara,and still hear Mozart quartets, andselections from The Well-TemperedClavichord, and the Fifth Symphony,and the Brahms clarinet quintet, andmotets by Palestrina.

Carlo, who had gone down to thestation with his mule and cart tofetch the packing case, was vastlyinterested in the machine.

"One will hear some music again,"he said, as he watched me unpack-ing the gramophone and the disks."It is difficult to do much oneself."

Still, I reflected, he managed to doa good deal. On warm nights weused to hear him, where he sat at thedoor of his house, playing his guitar

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460 ALDOUS HUXLEY

and softly singing; the eldest boyshrilled out the melody on themandolin and sometimes the wholefamily would join in, and the dark-ness would be filled with theirpassionate, throaty singing. Piedi-grotta songs they mostly sang; andthe voices drooped slurringly fromnote to note, lazily climbed or jerkedthemselves with sudden sobbingemphases from one tone to another.At a distance and under the starsthe effect was not unpleasing.

"Before the war," he went on, "innormal times" (and Carlo had ahope, even a belief, that the normaltimes were coming back and thatlife would soon be as cheap andeasy as it had been in the days beforethe flood), "I used to go and listento the operas at the Politeama. Ah,they were magnificent. But it costsfive lire now to get in."

"Too much," I agreed."Have you got Trovatore?" he

asked.I shook my head."Rigoletto?""I'm afraid not.""Boheme? Fanciulla del West?

Pagliacci?"I had to go on disappointing him."Not even Norma? Or the Bar-

biere?"I put on Battistini in "La ci darem"

out of Don Giovanni. He agreedthat the singing was good; but Icould see that he didn't much likethe music, Why not? He found itdifficult to explain.

"It's not like Pagliacci," he said atlast.

"Not palpitating?" I suggested,using a word with which I was surehe would be familiar; for it occursin every Italian political speech andpatriotic leading article.

"Not palpitating," he agreed.And I reflected that it is precisely

1894-by the difference between Pagliacciand Don Giovanni, between the pal-pitating and the nonpalpitating, thatmodern music taste is separated fromthe old. The corruption of the best,I thought, is the worst. Beethoventaught music to palpitate with hisintellectual and spiritual passion. Ithas gone on palpitating ever since,but with the passion of inferior men.Indirectly, I thought, Beethoven isresponsible for Parsifal, Pagliacci,and the Poem of Fire; still moreindirectly for Samson and Delilahand "Ivy, cling to me." Mozart'smelodies may be brilliant, memor-able, infectious; but they don't pal-pitate, don't catch you between windand water, don't send the listener offinto erotic ecstasies.

Carlo and his elder children foundmy gramophone, I am afraid, rathera disappointment. They were toopolite, however, to say so openly;they merely ceased, after the firstday or two, to take any interest inthe machine and the music it played.They preferred the guitar and theirown singing.

Guido, on the other hand, wasimmensely interested. And he liked,not the cheerful dance tunes, towhose sharp rhythms our little Robinloved to go stamping round andround the room, pretending that hewas a whole regiment of soldiers, butthe genuine stuff. The first recordhe heard, I remember, was that ofthe slow movement of Bach's Con-certo in D Minor for two violins.That was the disk I put on the turn-table as soon as Carlo had lef'. me.It seemed to me, so to speak, themost musical piece of music withwhich I would refresh my long-parched mind—the coolest and clear-est of all draughts. The movementhad just got under way and wasbeginning to unfold its pure and

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Europeanmelancholy beauties in accordancewith the laws of the most exactingintellectual logic, when the two chil-dren, Guido in front and little Robinbreathlessly following, came clatter-ing into the room from the loggia.

Guido came to a halt in front ofthe gramophone and stood there,motionless, listening. His pale blue-gray eyes opened themselves wide;making a little nervous gesture thatI had often noticed in him before,he plucked at his lower lip with histhumb and forefinger. He must havetaken a deep breath; for I noticedthat, after listening for a few seconds,he sharply expired and drew in afresh gulp of air. For an instant helooked at me—a questioning, aston-ished, rapturous look—gave a littlelaugh that ended in a kind of nervousshudder, and turned back towardsthe source of the incredible sounds.Slavishly imitating his elder com-rade, Robin had also taken up hisstand in front of the gramophone,and in exactly the same position,glancing at Guido from time to timeto make sure that he was doingeverything, down to plucking at hislip, in the correct way. But after aminute or so he became bored.

"Soldiers," he said, turning to me;"I want soldiers. Like in London."He remembered the ragtime and thejolly marches round and round theroom.

I put my fingers to my lips. "After-wards," I whispered.

Robin managed to remain silentand still for perhaps another twentyseconds. Then he seized Guido bythe arm, shouting, "Vieni, Guido!Soldiers. Soldati. Vieni giuocaresoldati."

It was then, for the first time, thatI saw Guido impatient. "Vail" hewhispered angrily, slapped at Robin'sclutching hand and pushed him

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 461

roughly away. And he leaned a littlecloser to the instrument, as thoughto make up by yet intenser listeningfor what the interruption had causedhim to miss.

Robin looked at him, astonished.Such a thing had never happenedbefore. Then he burst out crying andcame to me for consolation.

When the quarrel was made up—and Guido was sincerely repentant,was as nice as he knew how to bewhen the music had stopped and hismind was free to think of Robinonce more—I asked him how heliked the music. He said he thoughtit was beautiful. But hello in Italianis too vague a word, too easily andfrequently uttered, to mean verymuch.

"What did you like best?" I in-sisted. For he had seemed to enjoyit so much that I was curious to findout what had really impressed him.

He was silent for a moment, pen-sively frowning. "Well," he said atlast, "I liked the bit that went likethis." And he hummed a long phrase."And then there's the other thingsinging at the same time—but whatare those things," he interruptedhimself, "that sing like that?"

"They're called violins," I said."Violins." He nodded. "Well, the

other violin goes like this." Hehummed again. "Why can't one singboth at once? And what is in thatbox? What makes it make thatnoise?" The child poured out hisquestions.

I answered him as best I could,showing him the little spirals on thedisk, the needle, the diaphragm. Itold him to remember how the stringof the guitar trembled when oneplucked it; sound is a shaking in theair, I told him, and I tried to explainhow those shakings get printed onthe black disk. Guido listened to me

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very gravely, nodding from time totime. I had the impression that heunderstood perfectly well everythingI was saying.

By this time, however, poor Robinwas so dreadfully bored that in pityfor him I had to send the two chil-dren out into the garden to play.Guido went obediently; but I couldsee that he would have preferred tostay indoors and listen to more music.A little while later, when I lookedout, he was hiding in the dark re-cesses of the big bay tree, roaringlike a lion, and Robin laughing, buta little nervously, as though he wereafraid that the horrible noise mightpossibly turn out, after all, to be theroaring of a real lion, was beatingthe bush with a stick, and shouting,"Come out, come out! I want toshoot you."

After lunch, when Robin had goneupstairs for his afternoon sleep, hereappeared. "May I listen to musicnow?" he asked. And for an hour hesat there in front of the instrument,his head cocked slightly on one side,listening while I put on one diskafter another.

Thenceforward he came everyafternoon. Very soon he knew all mylibrary of records, had his prefer-ences and dislikes, and could ask forwhat he wanted by humming theprincipal theme.

"I don't like that one," he said ofStrauss's Till Eulenspiegel. "It's likewhat we sing in our house. Notreally like, you know. But somehowrather like, all the same. You under-stand?" He looked at us perplexedlyand appealingly, as though beggingus to understand what he meant andso save him from going on explain-ing. We nodded. Guido went on."And then," he said, "the end doesn'tseem to come properly out of thebeginning. It's not like the one you

ALDOUS HUXLEY 1894-

played the first time." He hummeda bar or two from the slow move-ment of Bach's D Minor Concerto.

"It isn't," I suggested, "like say-ing: All little boys like playing.Guido is a little boy. ThereforeGuido likes playing."

He frowned. "Yes, perhaps that'sit," he said at last. "The one youplayed first is more like that. But,you know," he added, with an ex-cessive regard for truth, "I don't likeplaying as much as Robin does."

Wagner was among his dislikes;so was Debussy. When I played therecord of one of Debussy's ara-besques, he said, "Why does he saythe same thing over and over again?He ought to say something new, or goon, or make the thing grow. Can'the think of anything different?" Buthe was less censorious about theApres-midi d'un faune. "The thingshave beautiful voices," he said.

Mozart overwhelmed him with de-light. The duet from Don Giovanni,which his father had found insuffi-ciently palpitating, enchanted Guido.But he preferred the quartets andthe orchestral pieces.

"I like music," he said, "better thansinging."

Most people, I reflected, like sing-ing better than music; are more in-terested in the executant than inwhat he executes, and find the im-personal orchestra less moving thanthe soloist. The touch of the pianistis the human touch, and the so-prano's high C is the personal note.It is for the sake of this touch, thatnote, that audiences fill the concerthalls.

Guido, however, preferred music.True, he liked "Let ci darem"; heliked "Deh vieni alia fineitra"; hethought "Che soave zefiretto" solovely that almost all our concertshad to begin with it. But he pre-

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Europeanferred the other things. The Figarooverture was one of his favorites.There is a passage not far from thebeginning of the piece, when thefirst violins suddenly go rocketing upinto the heights of loveliness; as themusic approached that point, I usedalways to see a smile developingand gradually brightening on Guido'sface, and when, punctually, thething happened, he clapped hishands and laughed aloud with pleas-ure.

On the other side of the samedisk, it happened, was recordedBeethoven's Egmont overture. Heliked that almost better than Figaro.

"It has more voices," he explained.And I was delighted by the acute-ness of the criticism; for it is pre-cisely in the richness of its orchestra-tion that Egmont goes beyondFigaro.

But what stirred him almost morethan anything was the Coriolan over-ture. The third movement of theFifth Symphony, the second move-ment of the Seventh, the slow move-ment of the Emperor Concerto—allthese things ran it pretty close. Butnone excited him so much as Cori-olan. One day he made me play itthree or four times in succession;then he put it away.

"I don't think I want to hear thatany more," he said.

"Why not?""It's too . . . too . . ." he hesitated,

"too big," he said at last. "I don'treally understand it. Play me theone that goes like this." He hummedthe phrase from the D Minor Con-certo.

"Do you like that one better?" Iasked.

He shook his head. "No, it's notthat exactly. But it's easier."

"Easier?" It seemed to me rathera queer word to apply to Bach.

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 463"I understand it better."One afternoon, while we were

in the middle of our concert, SignoraBondi was ushered in. She began atonce to be overwhelmingly affection-ate towards the child; kissed him,patted his head, paid him the mostoutrageous compliments on his ap-pearance. Guido edged away fromher.

"And do you like music?" sheasked.

The child nodded."I think he has a gift," I said. "At

any rate, he has a wonderful ear anda power of listening and criticizingsuch as I've never met with in achild of that age. We're thinking ofhiring a piano for him to learn on."

A moment later I was cursing my-self for my undue frankness in prais-ing the boy. For Signora Bondi be-gan immediately to protest that, ifshe could have the upbringing ofthe child, she would give him thebest masters, bring out his talent,make an accomplished maestro ofhim—and, on the way, an infantprodigy. And at that moment, I amsure, she saw herself sitting mater-nally, in pearls and black satin, in thelea of the huge Steinway, while anangelic Guido, dressed like littleLord Fauntleroy, rattled out Lisztand Chopin to the loud delight of athronged auditorium. She saw thebouquets and all the elaborate floraltributes, heard the clapping and thefew well-chosen words with whichthe veteran maestri, touched almostto tears, would hail the coming ofthe little genius. It became morethan ever important for her to ac-quire the child.

"You've sent her away fairly raven-ing," said Elizabeth, when SignoraBondi had gone. "Better tell hernext time that you made a mistake,

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ALDOUS HUXLEY 1S94-

and that the hoy's got no musicaltalent whatever."

In due course a piano arrived.After giving him the minimum ofpreliminary instruction, I let Guidoloose on it. He began by pickingout for himself, the melodies he hadheard, reconstructing the harmoniesin which they were embedded. Aftera few lessons, he understood therudiments of musical notation andcould read a simple passage atsight, albeit very slowly. The wholeprocess of reading was still strangeto him; he had picked up his letterssomehow, but nobody had yet taughthim to read whole words and sen-tences.

I took occasion, next time I sawSignora Bondi, to assure her thatGuido had disappointed me. Therewas nothing in his musical talent,really. She professed to be very sorryto hear it; but I could see that shedidn't for a moment believe me.Probably she thought that we wereafter the child too, and wanted tobag the infant prodigy for ourselves,before she could get in her claim,thus depriving her of what she re-garded almost as her feudal right.For, after all, weren't they herpeasants? If anyone was to profit byadopting the child it ought to beherself.

Tactfully, diplomatically, she re-newed her negotiations with Carlo.The boy, she put it to him, hadgenius. It was the foreign gentle-man who had told her so, and he wasthe sort of man, clearly, who knewabout such things. If Carlo wouldlet her adopt the child, she'd havehim trained. He'd become a greatmaestro and get engagements in theArgentine and the United States, inParis and London. He'd earn millionsand millions. Think of Caruso, for ex-ample. Part of the millions, she

explained, would of course come toCarlo. But before they began to rollin, those millions, the boy wouldhave to be trained. But training wasvery expensive. In his own interest,as well as that of his son, he ought tolet her take charge of the child. Carlosaid he would think it over, andagain applied to us for advice. Wesuggested that it would be best inany case to wait a little and see whatprogress the boy made.

He made, in spite of my assertionsto Signora Bondi, excellent progress.Every afternoon, while Robin wasasleep, he came for his concert andhis lesson. He was getting alongfamously with his reading; his smallfingers were acquiring strength andagility. But what to me was more in-teresting was that he had begun tomake up little pieces on his own ac-count. A few of them I took down ashe played them and I have themstill. Most of them, strangely enough,as I thought then, are canons. Hehad a passion for canons. When Iexplained to him the principles ofthe form he was enchanted.

"It is beautiful," he said, with ad-miration. "Beautiful, beautiful. Andso easy!"

Again the word surprised me. Thecanon is not, after all, so conspicu-ously simple. Thenceforward hespent most of his time at the pianoin working out little canons for hisown amusement. They were oftenremarkably ingenious. But in the in-vention of other kinds of music hedid not show himself so fertile as Ihad hoped. He composed and har-monized one or two solemn little airslike hymn tunes, with a fewsprightlier pieces in the spirit of themilitary march. They were extraor-dinary, of course, as being the in-ventions of a child. But a great manychildren can do extraordinary things;

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Europeanwe are all geniuses up to the age often. But I had hoped that Guido wasa child who was going to be a geniusat forty; in which case what wasextraordinary for an ordinary childwas not extraordinary enough forhim. "He's hardly a Mozart," weagreed, as we played his little piecesover. I felt, it must be confessed,almost aggrieved. Anything less thana Mozart, it seemed to me, washardly worth thinking about.

He was not a Mozart. No. But hewas somebody, as I was to find out,quite as extraordinary. It was onemorning in the early summer that Imade the discovery. I was sitting inthe warm shade of our westward-facing balcony, working. Guido andRobin were playing in the little en-closed garden below. Absorbed inmy work, it was only, I suppose,after the silence had prolonged it-self a considerable time that I be-came aware that the children weremaking remarkably little noise. Therewas no shouting, no running about;only a quiet talking. Knowing byexperience that when children arequiet it generally means that theyare absorbed in some delicious mis-chief, I got up from my chair andlooked over the balustrade to seewhat they were doing. I expected tocatch them dabbling in water, mak-ing a bonfire, covering themselveswith tar. But what I actually saw wasGuido, with a burnt stick in hishand, demonstrating on the smoothpaving stones of the path, that thesquare on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sumof the squares on the other twosides.

Kneeling on the floor, he wasdrawing with the point of hisblackened stick on the flagstones.And Robin, kneeling imitatively be-side him, was growing, I could

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 465see, rather impatient with this veryslow game.

"Guido," he said. But Guido paidno attention. Pensively frowning,he went on with his diagram."Guido!" The younger child bentdown and then craned round hisneck so as to look up into Guido'sface. "Why don't you draw a train?"

"Afterwards," said Guido. "But Ijust want to show you this first. It'sso beautiful," he added cajolingly.

"But I want a train," Robin per-sisted.

"In a moment. Do just wait a mo-ment." The tone was almost implor-ing. Robin armed himself with re-newed patience. A minute laterGuido had finished both his dia-grams.

"There!" he said triumphantly,and straightened himself up to lookat them. "Now I'll explain."

And he proceded to prove thetheorem of Pythagoras—not inEuclid's way, but by the simpler andmore satisfying method which was,in all probability, employed byPythagoras himself. He had drawn asquare and dissected it, by a pair ofcrossed perpendiculars, into twosquares and two equal rectangles.The equal rectangles he divided upby their diagonals into four equalright-angled triangles. The twosquares are then seen to be thesquares on the two sides of any ofthese triangles other than the hypot-enuse. So much for the first diagram.In the next he took the four right-angled triangles into which therectangles had been divided and re-arranged them round the originalsquare so that their right angles filledthe corners of the square, the hypot-enuses looked inwards, and thegreater and less sides of the triangleswere in continuation along the sidesof the squares (which are each equal

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ALDOUS HUXLEY

to the sum of these sides). In thisway the original square is redissectedinto four right-angled triangles andthe square on the hypotenuse. Thefour triangles are equal to the tworectangles of the original dissection.Therefore the square on the hypot-enuse is equal to the sum of the twosquares—the squares on the twoother sides—into which, with therectangles, the original square wasfirst dissected.

In very untechnical language, butclearly and with a relentless logic,Guido expounded his proof. Robinlistened, with an expression on hisbright, freckled face of perfect in-comprehension.

"Treno" he repeated from time totime. "Treno. Make a train."

"In a moment," Guido implored."Wait a moment. But do just look atthis. Do." He coaxed and cajoled."It's so beautiful. It's so easy."

So easy . . . The theorem of Pythag-oras seemed to explain for meGuido's musical predelictions. It wasnot an infant Mozart we had beencherishing; it was a little Archimedeswith, like most of his kind, an in-cidental musical twist.

"Treno, treno!" shouted Robin,growing more and more restless asthe exposition went on. And whenGuido insisted on going on withhis proof, he lost his temper. "Cat-tivo Guido," he shouted, and beganto hit out at him with his fists.

"All right," said Guido resignedly."Ill make a train." And with his stickof charcoal he began to scribble onthe stones.

I looked on for a moment insilence. It was not a very good train.Guido might be able to invent forhimself and prove the theorem ofPythagoras: but he was not muchof a draftsman.

"Guido!" I called. The two chil-

dren turned and looked up. "Whotaught you to draw those squares?"It was inconceivable, of course, thatsomebody might have taught him.

"Nobody." He shook his head.Then, rather anxiously, as thoughhe were afraid there might be some-thing wrong about drawing squares,he went on to apologize and explain."You see," he said, "it seemed to meso beautiful. Because those squares"—he pointed at the two small squaresin the first figure—"are just asbig as this one." And, indicating thesquare on the hypotenuse in thesecond diagram, he looked up atme with a deprecating smile.

I nodded. "Yes, it's very beauti-ful," I said—"it's very beautiful in-deed."

An expression of delighted reliefappeared on his face; he laughedwith pleasure. "You see it's like this,"he went on, eager to initiate me intothe glorious secret he had dis-covered. "You cut these two longsquares"—he meant the rectangles—"into two slices. And then thereare four slices, all just the same, be-cause, because Oh, I ought tohave said that before—because theselong squares are the same becausethose lines, you see . . ."

"But I want a train," protestedRobin.

Leaning on the rail of the balcony,I watched the children below. Ithought of the extraordinary thing Ihad just seen and of what it meant.

I thought of the vast differencesbetween human beings. We classifymen by the color of their eyes andhair, the shape of their skulls. Wouldit not be more sensible to dividethem up into intellectual species?There would be even wider gulfsbetween the extreme mental typesthan between a Bushman and aScandinavian. This child, I thought,

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Europeanwhen he grows up, will be to me,intellectually, what a man is to hisdog. And there are other men andwomen who are, perhaps, almost asdogs to me.

Perhaps the men of genius are theonly true men. In all the history ofthe race there have been only a fewthousand real men. And the rest ofus—what are we? Teachable ani-mals. Without the help of the realman, we should have found outalmost nothing at all. Almost all theideas with which we are familiarcould never have occurred to mindslike ours. Plant the seeds there andthey will grow; but our minds couldnever spontaneously have generatedthem.

There have been whole nations ofdogs, I thought; whole epochs inwhich no Man was born. From thedull Egyptians the Greeks took crudeexperience and rules of thumb andmade sciences. More than a thousandyears passed before Archimedes hada comparable successor. There hasbeen only one Buddha, one Jesus,only one Bach that we know of, oneMichelangelo.

Is it by a mere chance, I won-dered, that a Man is born fromtime to time? What causes a wholeconstellation of them to come con-temporaneously into being and fromout of a single people? Taine thoughtthat Leonardo, Michelangelo, andRaphael were born when they werebecause the time was ripe for greatpainters and the Italian scene con-genial. In the mouth of a rationaliz-ing nineteenth-century Frenchmanthe doctrine is strangely mystical; itmay be none the less true for that.But what of those born out of time?Blake, for example. What of those?

This child, I thought, has had thefortune to be born at a time when hewill be able to make good use of

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 467

his capacities. He will find the mostelaborate analytical methods lyingready to his hand; he will have aprodigious experience behind him.Suppose him born while Stonehengewas building; he might have spenta lifetime discovering the rudiments,guessing darkly where now he mighthave had a chance of proving. Bornat the time of the Norman Conquest,he would have had to wrestle withall the preliminary difficulties createdby an inadequate symbolism; itwould have taken him long years,for example, to learn the art ofdividing MMMCCCCLXXXVIII byMCMXIX. In five years, nowadays,he will learn what it took genera-tions of Men to discover.

And I thought of the fate of allthe Men born so hopelessly out oftime that they could achieve littleor nothing of value. Beethoven bornin Greece, I thought, would have hadto be content to play thin melodieson the flute or lyre; in those in-tellectual surroundings it wouldhardly have been possible for him toimagine the nature of harmony.

From drawing trains, the childrenin the garden below had gone ontoplaying trains. They were trottinground and round; with blown roundcheeks and pouting mouth like thecherubic symbol of a wind, Robinpuff-puffed and Guido, holding theskirt of his smoke, shuffled behindhim, tooting. They ran forward,backed, stopped at imaginary sta-tions, shunted, roared over bridges,crashed through tunnels, met withoccasional collisions and derailments.The young Archimedes seemed to bejust as happy as the little towheadedbarbarian. A few minutes ago he hadbeen busy with the theorem ofPythagoras. Now, tooting indefatig-ably along imaginary rails, he wasperfectly content to snuffle backwards

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and forwards among the flower beds,between the pillars of the loggia, inand out of the dark tunnels of thelaurel tree. The fact that one isgoing to be Archimedes does notprevent one from being an ordinarycheerful child meanwhile. I thoughtof this strange talent distinct andseparate from the rest of the mind,independent, almost, of experience.The typical child prodigies aremusical and mathematical; the othertalents ripen slowly under the in-fluence of emotional experience andgrowth. Till he was thirty Balzacgave proof ot nothing but ineptitude;but at four the young Mozart wasalready a musician, and some ofPascal's most brilliant work wasdone before he was out of his teens.

In the weeks that followed, Ialternated the daily piano lessonswith lessons in mathematics. Hintsrather than lessons they were; for Ionly made suggestions, indicatedmethods, and left the child himselfto work out the ideas in detail. ThusI introduced him to algebra by show-ing him another proof of the theoremof Pythagoras. In this proof onedrops a perpendicular from the rightangle on to the hypotenuse, andarguing from the fact that the twotriangles thus created are similar toone another and to the originaltriangle, and that the proportionswhich their corresponding sides bearto one another are therefore equal,one can show in algebraical formthat C2+D2 (the squares on theother two sides) are equal to A2+B2

(the squares on the two segments ofThe hypotenuses)+2AB; which last,it is easy to show geometrically, isequal to (A+B)2, or the square onthe hypotenuse. Cuido was as muchenchanted by the rudiments ofalgebra as he would have been if Ihad given him an engine worked

1894-by steam, with a methylated spiritlamp to heat the boiler; more en-chanted, perhaps—for the enginewould have got broken, and, remain-ing always itself, would in any casehave lost its charm, while the rudi-ments of algebra continued to growand blossom in his mind with anunfailing luxuriance. Every day hemade the discovery of somethingwhich seemed to him exquisitelybeautiful; the new toy was inex-haustible in its potentialities.

In the intervals of applying algebrato the second book of Euclid, weexperimented with circles; we stuckbamboos into the parched earth,measured their shadows at differenthours of the day, and drew excitingconclusions from our observations.Sometimes, for fun, we cut andfolded sheets of paper so as to makecubes and pyramids. One afternoonGuido arrived carrying carefully be-tween his small and rather grubbyhands a flimsy dodecahedron.

"E tanto bello!" he said, as heshowed us his paper crystal; andwhen I asked him how he had man-aged to make it, he merely smiledand said it had been so easy. Ilooked at Elizabeth and laughed.But it would have been more sym-bolically to the point, I felt, if I hadgone down on all fours, wagged thespiritual outgrowth of my os coccyx,and barked my astonished admira-tion.

It was an uncommonly hot sum-mer. By the beginning of July ourlittle Robin, unaccustomed to thesehigh temperatures, began to lookpale and tired; he was listless, hadlost his appetite and energy. Thedoctor advised mountain air. Wedecided to spend the next ten ortwelve weeks in Switzerland. Myparting gift to Guido was the firstsix books of Euclid in Italian. He

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Europeanturned over the pages, looking ecstat-ically at the figures.

"If only I knew how to read prop-erly," he said. "I'm so stupid. Butnow I shall really try to learn."

From our hotel near Grindelwaldwe sent the child, in Robin's name,various postcards of cows, alphorns,Swiss chalets, edelweiss, and thelike. We received no answers tothese cards; but then we did notexpect answers. Guido could notwrite, and there was no reason whyhis father or his sisters should takethe trouble to write for him. Nonews, we took it, was good news.And then one day, early in Septem-ber, there arrived at the hotel astrange letter. The manager had itstuck up on the glass-fronted noticeboard in the hall, so that all theguests might see it, and whoeverconscientiously thought that it be-longed to him might claim it. Pass-ing the board on the way in to lunch,Elizabeth stopped to look at it.

"But it must be from Guido," shesaid.

I came and looked at the en-velope over her shoulder. It was un-stamped and black with postmarks.Traced out in pencil, the big un-certain capital t letters sprawledacross its face. In the first line waswritten: AL BABBO DI KOBIN, andthere followed a travestied versionof the name of the hotel and theplace. Round the address bewilderedpostal officials had scrawled sug-gested emendations. The letter hadwandered for a fortnight at least,back and forth across the face ofEurope.

"Al Babbo di Robin. To Robin'sfather." I laughed. "Pretty smart ofthe postmen to have got it here atall." I went to the manager's office,set forth the justice of my claim tothe letter and, having paid the fifty-

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 469centime surcharge for the missingstamp, had the case unlocked andthe letter given me. We went in tolunch.

"The writing's magnificent," weagreed, laughing, as we examinedthe address at close quarters."Thanks to Euclid," I added. "That'swhat comes of pandering to theruling passion."

But when I opened the envelopeand looked at its contents I no longerlaughed. The letter was brief andalmost telegraphic in style, SONODALLA PADRONA, it r an , NON MI PIACEHA KUBATO IL MIO LIBRO NON VOGLIOSUONAHE PITT VOGLIO TORNARE A CASAVENGA SUBITO GUIDO.

"What is it?"I handed Elizabeth the letter.

"That blasted woman's got hold ofhim," I said.

Busts of men in Homburg hats,angels bathed in marble tears ex-tinguishing torches, statues of littlegirls, cherubs, veiled figures, alle-gories and ruthless realisms—thestrangest and most diverse idolsbeckoned and gesticulated as wepassed. Printed indelibly on tin andembedded in the living rock, thebrown photographs looked out,under glass, from the humblercrosses, headstones, and brokenpillars. Dead ladies in cubistic geo-metrical fashions of thirty years ago—two cones of black satin meetingpoint to point at the waist, and thearms: a sphere to the elbow, a pol-ished cylinder below—smiled mourn-fully out of their marble frames; thesmiling frames; the smiling faces, thewhite hands, were the only recogniz-ably human things that emergedfrom the solid geometry of theirclothes. Men with black mustaches,men with white beards, young clean-shaven men, stared or averted their

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gaze to show a Roman profile. Chil-dren in their stiff best opened widetheir eyes, smiled hopefully in antici-pation of the little bird that was toissue from the camera's muzzle,smiled skeptically in the knowledgethat it wouldn't, smiled laboriouslyand obediently because they hadbeen told to. In spiky Gothic cot-tages of marble the richer dead re-posed; through grilled doors onecaught a glimpse of pale Inconsol-ables weeping, of distraught Geniusesguarding the secret of the tomb. Theless prosperous sections of themajority slept in communities, close-crowded but elegantly housed undersmooth continuous marble floors,whose every flagstone was the mouthof a separate grave.

These Continental cemeteries, Ithought, as Carlo and I made ourway among the dead, are more fright-ful than ours, because these peoplepay more attention to their dead thanwe do. That primordial cult ofcorpses, that tender solicitude fortheir material well-being, which ledthe ancients to house their dead instone, while they themselves livedbetween wattles and under thatch,still lingers here; persists, I thought,more vigorously than with us. Thereare a hundred gesticulating statueshere for every one in an Englishgraveyard. There are more familyvaults, more "luxuriously appointed"(as they say of liners and hotels)than one would find at home. Andembedded in every tombstone thereare photographs to remind the pow-dered bones within what form theywill have to resume on the Day ofJudgment; beside each are littlehanging lamps to burn optimisticallyon All Souls' Day. To the Man whobuilt the Pyramids they are nearer,I thought, than we.

"If I had known," Carlo kept re-

1894-

peating, "if only I had known." Hisvoice came to me through my reflec-tions as though from a distance. "Atthe time he didn't mind at all. Howshould I have known that he wouldtake it so much to heart afterwards?And she deceived me, she lied tome."

I assured him yet once more thatit wasn't his fault. Though, of course,it was, in part. It was mine too, inpart; I ought to have thought of thepossibility and somehow guardedagainst it. And he shouldn't have letthe child go, even temporarily andon trial, even though the womanwas bringing pressure to bear onhim. And the pressure had been con-siderable. They had worked on thesame holding for more than a hun-dred years, the men of Carlo's fam-ily; and now she had made the oldman threaten to turn him out. Itwould be a dreadful thing to leavethe place; and besides, another placewasn't so easy to find. It was madequite plain, however, that he couldstay if he let her have the child. Onlyfor a little to begin with; just to seehow he got on. There would be nocompulsion whatever on him to stayif he didn't like it. And it would beall to Guido's advantage; and to hisfather's, too, in the 'end. All that theEnglishman had said about his notbeing such a good musician as hehad thought at first was obviouslyuntrue—mere jealousy and little-mindedness: the man wanted to takecredit for Guido himself, that wasall. And the boy, it was obvious,would learn nothing from him. Whathe needed was a real good professional master.

All the energy that, if the phy-sicists had known their business,would have been driving dynamos,went into this campaign. It beganthe moment we were out of the

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Europeanhouse, intensively. She would havemore chance of success, the Signoradoubtless thought, if we weren'tthere. And besides, it was essentialto take the opportunity when it of-fered itself and get hold of the childbefore we could make our bid—forit was obvious to her that we wantedGuido just as much as she did.

Day after day she renewed the as-sault. At the end of a week she senther husband to complain about thestate of the vines: they were in ashocking condition; he had decided,or very nearly decided, to give Carlonotice. Meekly, shamefacedly, inobedience to higher orders, the oldgentleman uttered his threats. Nextday Signora Bondi returned to theattack. The padrone, she declared,had been in a towering passion; butshe'd do her best, her very best,to mollify him. And after a signifi-cant pause she went on to talk aboutGuido.

In the end Carlo gave in. Thewoman was too persistent and sheheld too many trump cards. Thechild could go and stay with her fora month or two on trial. After that,if he really expressed a desire to re-main with her, she would formallyadopt him.

At the idea of going for a holidayto the seaside—and it was to the sea-side, Signora Bondi told him, thatthey were going—Guido was pleasedand excited. He had heard a lotabout the sea from Robin. "Tantaacqua!" It had sounded almost toogood to be true. And now he wasactually to go and see this marvel.It was very cheerfully that he partedfrom his family.

But after the holiday by the seawas over, and Signora Bondi hadbrought him back to her town housein Florence, he began to be home-sick. The Signora, it was true, treated

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 471

him exceedingly kindly, bought himnew clothes, took him out to tea inthe Via Tornabuoni and filled himup with cakes, iced strawberry-ade,whipped cream, and chocolates. Butshe made him practice the pianomore than he liked, and what wasworse, she took away his Euclid, onthe score that he wasted too muchtime with it. And when he said thathe wanted to go home, she put himoff with promises and excuses anddownright lies. She told him that shecouldn't take him at once, but thatnext week, if he were good andworked hard at his piano meanwhile,next week . . . And when the timecame she told him that his fatherdidn't want him back. And she re-doubled her petting, gave him ex-pensive presents, and stuffed himwith yet unhealthier foods. To nopurpose. Guido didn't like his newlife, didn't want to practice scales,pined for his book, and longed to beback with his brothers and sisters.Signora Bondi, meanwhile, continuedto hope that time and chocolateswould eventually make the childhers; and to keep his family at a dis-tance, she wrote to Carlo every fewdays letters which still purported tocome from the seaside (she took thetrouble to send them to a friend,who posted them back again toFlorence), and in which she paintedthe most charming picture of Guido'shappiness.

It was then that Guido wrote hisletter to me. Abandoned, as he sup-posed, by his family—for that theyshould not take the trouble to cometo see him when they were so nearwas only to be explained on thehypothesis that they really had givenhim up—he must have looked to meas his last and only hope. And theletter, with its fantastic address, hadbeen nearly a fortnight on its way. A

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fortnight—it must have seemed hun-dreds of years; and as the centuriessucceeded one another, gradually, nodoubt, the poor child became con-vinced that I too had abandonedhim. There was no hope left.

"Here we are," said Carlo.I looked up and found myself

confronted by an enormous monu-ment. In a kind of grotto hollowed inthe flanks of a monolith of graysandstone, Sacred Love, in bronze,•was embracing a funeral urn. Andin bronze letters riveted into thestone was a long legend to the effectthat the inconsolable Ernesto Bondihad raised this monument to thememory of his beloved wife, Anun-ziata, as a token of his undying lovefor one whom, snatched from himby a premature death, he hopedvery soon to join beneath this stone.The first Signora Bondi had died in1912. I thought of the old manleashed to his white dog; he mustalways, I reflected, have been amost uxorious husband.

"They buried him here."We stood there for a long time in

silence. I felt the tears coming intomy eyes as I thought of the poorchild lying there underground. Ithought of those luminous graveeyes, and the curve of that beautifulforehead, the droop of the melan-choly mouth, of the expression ofdelight which illumined his facewhen he learned of some new ideathat pleased him, when he heard apiece of music that he liked. Andthis beautiful small being was dead;and the spirit that inhabited thisform, the amazing spirit, that toohad been destroyed almost before ithad begun to exist.

And the unhappiness that musthave preceded the final act, thechild's despair, the conviction of his

ALDOUS HUXLEY 1894-

utter abandonment—those were ter-rible to think of, terrible.

"I think we had better come awaynow," I said at least, and touchedCarlo on the arm. He was standingthere like a blind man, his eyes shut,his face slightly lifted towards thelight; from between his closed eye-lids the tears welled out, hung fora moment, and trickled down hischeeks. His lips trembled and I couldsee that he was making an effortto keep them still. "Come away," Irepeated.

The face which had been still inits sorrow was suddenly convulsed;he opened his eyes, and through thetears they were bright with a violentanger. "I shall kill her," he said, "Ishall kill -ier. When I think of himthrowing himself out, falling throughthe air . . ." With his two hands hemade a violent gesture, bringingthem down from over his head andarresting them with a sudden jerkwhen they were on the level with hisbreast. "And then crash." He shud-dered. "She's as much responsible asthough she had pushed him downherself. I shall kill her." He clenchedhis teeth.

To be angry is easier than to besad, less painful. It is comforting tothink of revenge. "Don't talk likethat," I said. "It's no good. It'sstupid. And what would be thepoint?" He had had those fists be-fore, when grief became too painfuland he had tried to escape from it.Anger had been the easiest way ofescape. I had had, before this, topersuade him back into the harderpath of grief. "It's stupid to talk likethat," I repeated, and I led him awaythrough the ghastly labyrinth oftombs, where death seemed moreterrible even than it is.

By the time we had left the ceme-

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Europeantery, and were walking down fromSan Miniato towards the PiazzaleMichelangelo below, he had becomecalmer. His anger had subsided againinto the sorrow from which it hadderived all its strength and its bitter-ness. In the Piazzale we halted for amoment to look down at the city inthe valley below us. It was a day offloating clouds—great shapes, white,golden, and gray; and between thempatches of a thin, transparent blue.Its lantern level, almost, with our

YOUNG ARCHIMEDES 473eyes, the dome of the cathedral re-vealed itself in all its grandioselightness, its vastness and aerialstrength. On the innumerable brownand rosy roofs of the city the after-noon sunlight lay softly, sumptuously,and the towers were as thoughvarnished and enameled with an oldgold. I thought of all the Men whohad lived here and left the visibletraces of their spirit and conceivedextraordinary things. I thought of thedead child.

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Evelyn Waugh

1903-

EVELYN WATJGH is another of the "bright young men" of thepostwar world, the son of Arthur Waugh, critic and publisher,and brother of Alec Waugh, novelist. He scattered his talentsearly, teaching school and working on a newspaper, thenstudying, as he says, "carpentry and fashionable society." Inthe latter he succeeded brilliantly. It was the day of the Rivieraand the Lido, treasure hunts and yachts, escapades and casualinfidelities—the English counterpart of America's Jazz Age,with all the glitter and sophistication intensified. Waugh'snovels, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust,Decline and Fall, are the bitter, disillusioned, cynical buthighly amusing results of observation and experience. Duringthis time he himself married, was divorced, and became aCatholic. In a serious vein, he has written travel books onAbyssinia, Mexico, and India, and his latest novel, Brides-head Revisited, is a magnificent re-creation of that samebetween-wars England, now become a romantic memory andmisted over with the opal glow of Waugh's special Ca-tholicism.

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Bella Fleace Gave a Party

BY EVELYN WAUGH

BALLINGAR is four and a half hoursfrom Dublin if you catch the earlytrain from Broadstone Station andfive and a quarter if you wait untilthe afternoon. It is the market townof a large and comparatively well-populated district. There is a prettyProtestant Church in 1820 Gothicon one side of the square and a vast,unfinished Catholic cathedral op-posite it, conceived in that irrespon-sible medley of architectural ordersthat is so dear to the hearts of trans-montane pietists. Celtic lettering ofa sort is beginning to take the placeof the Latin alphabet on the shopfronts that complete the square.These all deal in identical goods invarying degrees of dilapidation;Mulligan's Store, Flannigans Store,Riley's Store, each sells thick blackboots, hanging in bundles, soapycolonial cheese, hardware and haber-dashery, oil and saddlery, and eachis licensed to sell ale and porter forconsumption on or off the premises.The shell of the barracks stands withempty window frames and blackenedinterior as a monument to emancipa-tion. A typical Irish town.

Fleacetown is fifteen miles fromBallingar, on a direct uneven roadthrough typical Irish country; vaguepurple hills in the far distance and

towards them, on one side of theroad, fitfully visible among driftingpatches of white mist, unbrokenmiles of bog, dotted with occasionalstacks of cut peat. On the other sidethe ground slopes up to the north,divided irregularly into spare fields;by banks and stone walls over whichthe Ballingar hounds have some oftheir most eventful hunting. Mosslies on everything; in a rough greenrug on the walls and banks, softgreen velvet on the timber—blurringthe transitions so that there is noknowing where the ground ends andtrunk and masonry begin. All theway from Ballingar there is a suc-cession of whitewashed cabins and adozen or so fair-size farmhouses; butthere is no gentleman's house, for allthis was Fleace property in the daysbefore the Land Commission. Thedemesne land is all that belongs toFleacetown now, and this is let forpasture to neighboring farmers. Onlya few beds are cultivated in thewalled kitchen garden; the rest hasrun to rot, thorned bushes barren ofedible fruit spreading everywhereamong weedy flowers revertingrankly to type. The hothouses havebeen drafty skeletons for ten years.The great gates set in their Georgianarch are permanently padlocked, the

From Mr. Lovejoy's Little Outing by Evelyn Waugh. By permission of Harold Matson. Pub-lished by Little, Brown & Co. Copyright, 1936, by Evelyn Waugh.

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