Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley Page A

little comforted. That frockcoat, for example. It was like something in a very modern picture – such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts! Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured.
    â€˜I want you,’ he said at last, clearing his throat importantly, ‘to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification of my own. It’s a new idea.’ And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.
    Mr Bojanus listened with attention.
    â€˜I can make them for you,’ he said, when the description was finished. ‘I can make them for you – if you
really
wish, Mr Gumbril,’ he added.
    â€˜Thank you,’ said Gumbril.
    â€˜And do you intend, may I ask, Mr Gumbril, to
wear
these . . . these garments?’
    Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. ‘Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.’
    â€˜Commercially? I see, Mr Gumbril.’
    â€˜Perhaps you would like a share,’ suggested Gumbril.
    Mr Bojanus shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr Gumbril. You could ‘ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.’
    â€˜Couldn’t you?’
    Mr Bojanus went on shaking his head. ‘I know them,’ he said, ‘I know the Best People. Well.’ And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, ‘Between ourselves, Mr Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin . . .’
    â€˜So am I,’ said Gumbril, ‘theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois – oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr Bojanus . . .’
    Mr Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world bows.
    â€˜. . . you would be among the first to suffer if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.’
    â€˜There, Mr Gumbril, if I may be allowed to say so, you are wrong.’ Mr Bojanus removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the points of his discourse. ‘When the revolution comes, Mr Gumbril – the great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it – it won’t be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be his class-habits, Mr Gumbril, his class-speech, his class-education. It’ll be Shibboleth all over again, Mr Gumbril; mark my words. The Red Guards will stop people in the street and ask them to say some such word as “towel”. If they call it “towel”, like you and your friends, Mr Gumbril, why then . . .’ Mr Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing a rifle and pulling the trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth to symbolize the report . . . ‘That’ll be the end of them. But if they say “tèaul”, like the rest of us, Mr Gumbril, it’ll be: “Pass Friend and Long Live the Proletariat.” Long live Tèaul.’
    â€˜I’m afraid you may be right,’ said Gumbril.
    â€˜I’m convinced of it,’ said Mr Bojanus. ‘It’s my clients, Mr Gumbril, it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their confidence, their ease, it’s the habit their money and their position give them of ordering people about, it’s the way they take their place in the world for granted, it’s their prestige, which the other people would like to deny, but can’t – it’s all that, Mr Gumbril, that’s so galling.’
    Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends their power of ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that really well, one must always have lived in a large house full of clockwork servants; one must never have been short of money, never at a