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

a moment since had seemed an uproarious joke now presented itself to his thoughts as appalling. He felt a great need to unburden himself, to transfer responsibilities on to other shoulders, to get advice that should confirm him in his course. Furtively, for a glimpse only, he looked at his guest. How abstractedly and regardlessly he was staring into vacancy! Not a thought, no sympathy for poor Philip Elver. Ah, if he only knew.⁠ ⁠…

He broke silence at last. “Tell me,” he said abruptly, and it seemed to his drunken mind that he was displaying an incredible subtlety in his method of approaching the subject; “do you believe in vivisection?”

Mr. Cardan was surprised by the question. “Believe in it?” he echoed. “I don’t quite know how one can believe in vivisection. I think it useful, if that’s what you mean.”

“You don’t think it’s wrong?”

“No,” said Mr. Cardan.

“You think it doesn’t matter cutting up animals?”

“Not if the cutting serves some useful human purpose.”

“You don’t think animals have got rights?” pursued Mr. Elver with a clarity and tenacity that, in a drunken man, surprised Mr. Cardan. This was a subject, it was clear, on which Mr. Elver must long have meditated. “Just like human beings?”

“No,” said Mr. Cardan. “I’m not one of those fools who think that one life is as good as another, simply because it is a life; that a grasshopper is as good as a dog and a dog as good as a man. You must recognize a hierarchy of existences.”

“A hierarchy,” exclaimed Mr. Elver, delighted with the word, “a hierarchy⁠—that’s it. That’s exactly it. A hierarchy. And among human beings too?” he added.

“Yes, of course,” Mr. Cardan affirmed. “The life of the soldier who killed Archimedes isn’t worth the life of Archimedes. It’s the fundamental fallacy of democracy and humanitarian Christianity to suppose that it is. Though of course,” Mr. Cardan added pensively, “one has no justifying reason for saying so, but only one’s instinctive taste. For the soldier, after all, may have been a good husband and father, may have spent the nonprofessional, unsoldierly portions of his life in turning the left cheek and making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. If, like Tolstoy, your tastes run to good fatherhood, left cheeks and agriculture, then you’ll say that the life of the soldier is worth just as much as the life of Archimedes⁠—much more, indeed; for Archimedes was a mere geometrician, who occupied himself with lines and angles, curves and surfaces, instead of with good and evil, husbandry and religion. But if, on the contrary, one’s tastes are of a more intellectual cast, then one will think as I think⁠—that the life of Archimedes is worth the lives of several billion of even the most amiable soldiers. But as for saying which point of view is right⁠—” Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Partner, I leave it to you.”

Mr. Elver seemed rather disappointed by the inconclusive turn that his guest’s discourse had taken. “But still,” he insisted, “it’s obvious that a wise man’s better than a fool. There is a hierarchy.”

“Well, I personally should say there was,” said Mr. Cardan. “But I can’t speak for others.” He saw that he had been carried away by the pleasures of speculation into saying things his host did not want to hear. To almost all men, even when they are sober, a suspense of judgment is extraordinarily distasteful. And Mr. Elver was far from sober; moreover, Mr. Cardan began to suspect, this philosophic conversation was a tortuous introduction to personal confidences. If one wanted the confidences one must agree with the would-be confider’s opinion. That was obvious.

“Good,” said Mr. Elver. “Then you’ll admit that an intelligent man is worth more than an imbecile, a moron; ha ha, a moron.⁠ ⁠…” And at this word he burst into violent and savage laughter, which, becoming more and more extravagant as it prolonged itself, turned at last into an uncontrollable screaming and sobbing.

His chair turned sideways to the table, his legs crossed, the fingers of one hand playing caressingly with his wine glass, the other manipulating his cigar, Mr. Cardan looked on, while his host, the tears streaming down his cheeks, his narrow face distorted almost out of recognition, laughed and sobbed, now throwing himself back in his chair, now covering his face with his hands, now bending forward over the table to rest his forehead on his arms, while his whole body shook and shook with the repeated and uncontrollable spasms. A disgusting sight, thought Mr. Cardan; and a disgusting specimen too. He began to have an inkling of what the fellow was up to. Translate “intelligent man” and “moron” into “me” and “my sister’⁠—for the general, the philosophical in any man’s conversation must always be converted into the particular and personal if you want to understand him⁠—interpret in personal terms what he had said about vivisection, animal rights and the human hierarchy, and there appeared, as the plain transliteration of the cipher⁠—what? Something that looked exceedingly villainous, thought Mr. Cardan.

“Then I suppose,” he said in a very cool and level voice, when the other had begun to recover from his fit, “I suppose it’s your sister who has the liberating cash.”

Mr. Elver glanced at him, with an expression of surprise, almost of alarm, on his face. His eyes wavered away from Mr. Cardan’s steady, genial gaze. He took refuge in his tumbler. “Yes,” he said, when he had taken a gulp. “How did you guess?”

Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Purely at random,” he said.

“After my father died,” Mr. Elver explained, “she went to live with her godmother, who was the old lady at the big house in our parish. A nasty old woman she was. But she took to Grace, she kind of adopted her. When the old bird died at the beginning of this year, Grace found she’d been left twenty-five thousand.”

For all comment, Mr. Cardan clicked his tongue against his palate and slightly raised his eyebrows.

“Twenty-five thousand,” the other repeated. “A half-wit, a moron! What can she do with it?”

“She can take you to Italy,” Mr. Cardan suggested.

“Oh, of course we can