Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (100 books to read txt) 📕

“It’s such ages since I saw you.” Then turning with a look of suspicion to Miss Thriplow. “How long has he been here?” she asked.

“Since before tea,” said Miss Thriplow.

“Before tea?” Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed shrilly, as though outraged. “But why didn’t you let me know in time when you were coming?” she went on, turning to Calamy. The thought that he had arrived when she was not there, and that he had, moreover, spent all this time talking with Mary Thriplow, annoyed her. Mrs. Aldwinkle was perpetually haunted by the fear that she was missing something. For a number of years now the universe had always seemed to be conspiring to keep her away from the places where the exciting things were happening and the wonderful words being said. She had been loth enough, this morning, to leave Miss Thriplow behind at the palace; Mrs. Aldwinkle didn’t want her guests to lead independent existences out of her sight. But if she had known, if she had had the slightest suspicion, that Calamy was going to arrive while she was away, that he would spend hours en tête à tête with Mary Thriplow⁠—why then she would never have gone down to the sea at all. She’d have stayed at home, however tempting the prospect of a bathe.

“You seem to have made yourself extremely smart for the occasion,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, looking at Miss Thriplow’s pearls and her black silk with the white piping round the flounces.

Miss Thriplow looked at the view and pretended not to have heard what her hostess had said. She had no wish to engage in a conversation on this particular subject.

“Well now,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle to her new guest, “I must show you the view and the house and all that.”

“Miss Thriplow’s already very kindly been doing that,” said Calamy.

At this piece of information Mrs. Aldwinkle looked extremely annoyed. “But she can’t have shown you everything,” she said, “because she doesn’t know what there is to show. And besides, Mary knows nothing about the history of the place, or the Cybo Malaspinas, or the artists who worked on the palace, or⁠ ⁠…” she waved her hand with a gesture indicating that, in fine, Mary Thriplow knew nothing whatever and was completely incapable of showing anyone round the house and its gardens.

“In any case,” said Calamy, doing his best to say the right thing, “I’ve seen enough already to make me think the place perfectly lovely.”

But Mrs. Aldwinkle was not content with this spontaneous and untutored admiration. She was sure that he had not really seen the beauty of the view, that he had not understood it, not known how to analyse it into its component charms. She began to expound the prospect.

“The cypresses make such a wonderful contrast with the olives,” she explained, prodding the landscape with the tip of her parasol, as though she were giving a lantern lecture with coloured slides.

She understood it all, of course; she was entirely qualified to appreciate it in every detail. For the view was now her property. It was therefore the finest in the world; but at the same time, she alone had the right to let you know the fact.

We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to us. Provincial picture galleries are always stuffed with Raphaels and Giorgiones. The most brilliant metropolis in Christendom, according to its inhabitants, is Dublin. My gramophone and my Ford car are better than yours. And how pathetically boring are those poor but cultured tourists who show us their collection of picture postcards with as much pride as if they had been the original paintings themselves.

With the palace Mrs. Aldwinkle had purchased vast domains unmentioned in the contract. She had bought, to begin with, the Cybo Malaspina and their history. This family, whose only claim to fame is to have produced, a little before its extinction, that Prince of Massa Carrara to whom the Old Woman in Candide⁠—when she was young and a Pope’s ravishing daughter⁠—was once engaged to be married, had now become for Mrs. Aldwinkle as splendid as the Gonzaga, the Este, the Medici, or the Visconti. Even the dull Dukes of Modena, the tenants of the palace (except during the brief Napoleonic interlude) between the extinction of the Cybo Malaspina and the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy, even the Dukes of Modena had so far profited by their connection with the place that for Mrs. Aldwinkle they were now patrons of letters and fathers of their people. And Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciochi, who had, while Princess of Lucca, passed more than one hot summer on these heights, had come to be credited by the present owner with an unbounded enthusiasm for the arts and, what in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes was almost more splendid, an unbounded enthusiasm for love. In Elisa Bonaparte-Bacciochi Mrs. Aldwinkle had acquired a sister soul, whom she alone understood.

It was the same with the landscape. It was hers down to the remote horizon, and nobody but she could really give it its due. And then, how she appreciated the Italians! Ever since she had bought a house in Italy, she had become the one foreigner who knew them intimately. The whole peninsula and everything it contained were her property and her secret. She had bought its arts, its music, its melodious language, its literature, its wine and cooking, the beauty of its women and the virility of its Fascists. She had acquired Italian passion: cuore, amore and dolore were hers. Nor had she forgotten to buy the climate⁠—the finest in Europe⁠—the fauna⁠—and how proud she was when she read in her morning paper that a wolf had devoured a Pistoiese sportsman within fifteen miles of home!⁠—the flora⁠—especially the red anemones and the wild tulips⁠—the volcanoes⁠—still so wonderfully active⁠—the earthquakes.⁠ ⁠…

“And now,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she had polished off the view, “now we must look at the house.”

She turned her back on the view. “This part of the palace,” she said, continuing her lecture, “dates