Read Online Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley - Free Book Online

brown, lay a selection of revolting viscera. And among the viscera a hook – a big steel S, still stained, at one of its curving tips, with the blood of whatever drawn and decapitated corpse had hung from it. She glanced round. It seemed a good moment – the butcher wasweighing her steak, his assistant was talking to that disgusting old woman like a bulldog, the girl at the cash desk was deep in her accounts. Aloof and dissociated in the doorway, Joyce was elaborately overacting the part of one who interrogates the sky and wonders if this drizzle is going to turn into something serious. Helen took three quick steps, picked up the hook, and was just lowering it into her basket when, full of solicitude, ‘Look out, Miss,’ came the butcher’s voice, ‘you’ll get yourself dirty if you touch those hooks.’
    That start of surprise was like the steepest descent of the Scenic Railway – sickening! Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood! She tried to laugh.
    â€˜I was just looking.’ The hook clanked back on to the marble.
    â€˜I wouldn’t like you to spoil your clothes, Miss.’ His smile was fatherly. More than ever like Mr Baldwin.
    Nervously, for lack of anything better to do or say, Helen laughed again, and, in the process, drew another deep breath of corpse. Ugh! She fortified her nose once more with
Quelque Fleurs
.
    â€˜One pound and eleven ounces, Miss.’
    She nodded her assent. But what could she take? And how was she to find the opportunity?
    â€˜Anything more this morning?’
    Yes, that was the only thing to do – to order something more. That would give her time to think, a chance to act. ‘Have you any . . .’ she hesitated ‘. . . any sweetbreads?’
    Yes, Mr Baldwin did have some sweetbreads, and they were on the shelf with the other viscera. Near the hook. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, when he asked her how much she needed. ‘Just the ordinary amount, you know.’
    She looked about her while he was busy with the sweetbreads, despairingly. There was nothing in this beastly shop, nothing except the hook, that she
could
take. And now thathe had seen her with it in her hands, the hook was out of the question. Nothing whatever. Unless . . . That was it! A shudder ran through her. But she frowned, she set her teeth. She was determined to go through with it.
    â€˜And now,’ when he had packed up the sweetbreads, ‘now,’ she said, ‘I must have some of those!’ She indicated the packets of pale sausages piled on a shelf at the other end of the shop.
    â€˜I’ll do it while his back is turned,’ she thought. But the girl at the cash desk had emerged from her accounts and was looking round the shop. ‘Oh, damn her, damn her!’ Helen fairly screamed in her imagination, and then, ‘Thank goodness!’ the girl had turned away. A hand shot out; but the averted glance returned, ‘
Damn
her!’ The hand dropped back. And now it was too late. Mr Baldwin had got the sausages, had turned, was coming back towards her.
    â€˜Will that be all, Miss?’
    â€˜Well, I wonder?’ Helen frowned uncertainly, playing for time. ‘I can’t help thinking there was something else . . . something else . . .’ The seconds passed; it was terrible; she was making a fool of herself, an absolute idiot. But she refused to give up. She refused to acknowledge defeat.
    â€˜We’ve some beautiful Welsh mutton in this morning,’ said the butcher in that artist’s voice of his, as though he were talking of the Georgics.
    Helen shook her head: she really couldn’t start buying mutton now.
    Suddenly the girl at the cash desk began to write again. The moment had come. ‘No,’ she said with decision, ‘I’ll take another pound of those sausages.’
    â€˜Another?’ Mr Baldwin looked