Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online

something of the kind, and she was to answer, ‘Do I?’ and then there was to be a pregnant silence. And now she had got in first with the trousers. It was provoking; his pride was hurt.
    That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace to the pool had a beauty which did not depend on colour so much as on forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun. The silver of water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It was a landscape in black and white. For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour. The July borders blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour.
    Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion. ‘It’s like passing from a cloister into an Oriental palace,’ he said, and took a deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air. ‘“In fragrant volleys they let fly . . .” How does it go?
    â€˜â€œWell shot, ye firemen! O how sweet
    And round your equal fires do meet;
    Whose shrill report no ear can tell,
    But echoes to the eye and smell . . .”’
    â€˜You have a bad habit of quoting,’ said Anne. ‘As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating.’
    Denis apologized. ‘It’s the fault of one’s education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else’s ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words – Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you’ve clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That’s what comes of the higher education.’
    â€˜You may regret your education,’ said Anne; ‘I’m ashamed of my lack of it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren’t they magnificent?’
    â€˜Dark faces and golden crowns – they’re kings in Ethiopia. And I like the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy from the ground. Do they look up in envy? That’s the literary touch, I’m afraid. Education again. It always comes back to that.’ He was silent.
    Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple tree. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.
    He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the bench, gesticulating a little as he talked. ‘Books,’ he said – ‘books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You’ve no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one’s pushed out into the world.’
    He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a moment, and then talked on. He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture. He was a nice boy, and today he looked charming – charming!
    One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit life. . . . Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he stretched