Free Eyeless In Gaza by Aldous Huxley Page A

little smile of recognition and sympathy. Anthony smiled back, then looked away, blushing with an obscure discomfort as though he had been caught doing something wrong. The consciousness of his own magnanimity and the spectacle of Benger’s embarrassment restored Staithes to his good humour.
    â€˜Agnes!’ he shouted. ‘Agnes!’
    Large, chronically angry, Agnes came at last.
    â€˜More jam, please, Agnes.’
    â€˜Jore mam,’ cried Thompson. Everybody laughed again, not because the joke was anything but putrid, but simply because everybody wanted to laugh.
    â€˜And breadney.’
    â€˜Yes, more breaf.’
    â€˜More breaf, please, Agnes.’
    â€˜Breaf, indeed!’ said Agnes indignantly, as she picked up the empty bread-and-butter plate. ‘Why can’t you say what you mean?’
    There was a redoubling of the laughter. They couldn’t say what they meant – absolutely couldn’t, because to say ‘breaf’ or ‘breadney’ instead of bread was a Bulstrodian tradition and the symbol of their togetherness, the seal of their superiority to all the rest of the uninitiated world.
    â€˜More Pepin le Bref!’ shouted Staithes.
    â€˜Pepin le Breadney, le Breadney!’
    The laughter became almost hysterical. They all remembered the occasion last term, when they had come to Pepin le Bref in their European History. Pepin le Bref – le
Bref!
First Butterworth had broken down, then Pembroke-Jones, then Thompson – and finally the whole of Division II, Staithes with the rest of them, uncontrollably. Old Jimbug had got into the most appalling bait. Which made it, now, even funnier.
    â€˜Just a lot of silly babies!’ said Agnes; and, finding them still laughing when, a moment later, she came back with more bread. ‘Just babies!’ she repeated in a determined effort to be insulting. But her stroke did not touch them. They were beyond her, rapt away in the ecstasy of causeless laughter.
    Anthony would have liked to laugh with them, but somehow did not dare to do more than smile, distantly and politely, like someone in a foreign country, who does not understand the joke, but wants to show he has no objection to other people having a big of fun. And a moment later, feeling hungry, he found himself unexpectedly struck dumb above his empty plate. For to have asked for more breaf, or another chunk of breadney, would have been, for the sacred pariah he had now become, at once an indecency and an intrusion – an indecency, because a person who has been sanctified by his mother’s death should obviously not talk slang, and an intrusion, because an outsider has no right to use the special language reserved to the elect. Uncertainly, he hesitated. Then at last, ‘Pass me the bread, please,’ hemurmured; and blushed (the words sounded so horribly stupid and unnatural) to the roots of his hair.
    Leaning towards his neighbour on the other side, Thompson went on with his whispered recitation of the limerick. ‘. . . all over the ceiling,’ he concluded; and they shrieked with laughter.
    Thank goodness, Thompson hadn’t heard. Anthony felt profoundly relieved. In spite of his hunger, he did not ask again.
    There was a stir at the high table; old Jimbug rose to his feet. A hideous noise of chair-legs scraping across boards filled the hall, solidly, it seemed; then evaporated into the emptiness of complete silence. ‘For all that we have received . . .’ The talk broke out again, the boys stampeded towards the door.
    In the corridor, Anthony felt a hand on his arm. ‘Hullo, B-benger.’
    â€˜Hullo, Foxe.’ He did not say, ‘Hullo, Horse-Face,’ because of what had happened this morning. Horse-Face would be as inappropriate to the present circumstances as Breaf.
    â€˜I’ve got s-something to sh-show you,’ said Brian Foxe, and his melancholy, rather ugly face seemed suddenly to shine,