Aldous Huxley Point Counter Point

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'It's a hard, dry sensation.' 'Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger.
'Beatrice is like that. She pecks; she enjoys pecking. But she can be very kind at the same
time. She insists on being kind in _her_ way, and she pecks if you don't like it. Pecking's
part of the kindness; so I always found. I never objected. But why should she have turned
me out of the house as though I were a criminal? And rooms are so difficult to find now. I
had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks. The food...' He shuddered.
Walter could not help smiling.
'She must have been in a great hurry to instal Burlap in your place.'
'But why in such a hurry as all that?'
'When it's a case of off with the old love and on with the new...'
'But what has love to do with it?' asked Slipe. 'In Beatrice's case.'
'A great deal,' Willie Weaver broke in. 'Everything. These superannuated virgins--
always the most passionate.'
'But she's never had a love affair in her life.'
'Hence the violence,' concluded Willie triumphantly. 'Beatrice has a nigger sitting
on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively
Phrynean. That's most sinister.'
'Perhaps she likes being well dressed,' suggested Lucy.
Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.
'That woman's unconscious as a black hole.' Willie hesitated a moment. 'Full of
batrachian grapplings in the dark,' he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate
his achievement.
* * * *
Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole. She was thirty-five, but
seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless. Her skin was clear and fresh. From shallow
and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining. In a sharp, determined way her face
was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and
tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the
pouting mouth and round defiant chin. But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set
of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking
and mischievously inquisitive.
She stitched away. The clock ticked. The moving instant which, according to Sir
Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advanced inexorably
through the dimension of time. Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was
every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man
might suck for ever at an unending piece of macaroni. Every now and then Beatrice
actualized a potential yawn. In a basket by the fireplace a black she-cat lay on her side
purring and suckling four blind and parti-coloured kittens. The walls of the room were
primrose yellow. On the top shelf of the bookcase the dust was thickening on the text-
books of Assyriology which she had bought when Peter Slipe was the tenant of her upper
floor. A volume of Pascal's _Thoughts_, with pencil annotations by Burlap, lay open on
the table. The clock continued to tick.
Suddenly the front door banged. Beatrice put down her pink silk camisole and
sprang to her feet.
'Don't forget that you must drink your hot milk, Denis,' she said, looking out into
the hall. Her voice was clear, sharp and commanding.
Burlap hung up his coat and came to the door. 'You oughtn't to have sat up for
me,' he said, with tender reproachfulness, giving her one of his grave and subtle Sodoma
smiles.
'I had some work I simply had to get finished,' Beatrice lied.
'Well, it was most awfully sweet of you.' These pretty colloquialisms, with which
Burlap liked to pepper his conversation, had for sensitive ears a most curious ring. 'He
talks slang,' Mark Rampion once said, 'as though he were a foreigner with a perfect
command of English--but a foreigner's command. I don't know if you've ever heard an
Indian calling anyone a "jolly good sport." Burlap's slang reminds me of that.'
For Beatrice, however, that 'awfully sweet' sounded entirely natural and un-alien.
She flushed with a young-girlishly timid pleasure. But, 'Come in and shut the door,' she
rapped out commandingly. Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny; there
was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient. 'Sit down there,' she ordered; and
while she was briskly busy over the milk-jug, the saucepan, the gas-ring, she asked him if
he had enjoyed the party.
Burlap shook his head. '_Fascinatio nugacitatis_,' he said. '_Fascinatio
nugacitatis_.' He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from
Piccadilly Circus.
Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words
connoted disapproval. 'Parties are rather a waste of time, aren't they?' she said.
Burlap nodded. 'A waste of time,' he echoed in his slow ruminant's voice, keeping
his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice's
left. 'One's forty, one has lived more than half one's life, the world is marvellous and
mysterious. And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount
House. Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the
triviality that draws one? Is it some vague fantastic hope that one may meet the messianic
person one's always been looking for, or hear the revealing word?' Burlap wagged his
head as he spoke with a curious loose motion, as though the muscles of his neck were
going limp. Beatrice was so familiar with the motion that she saw nothing strange in it
any more. Waiting for the milk to boil, she listened admiringly, she watched him with a
serious church-going face. A man whose excursions into the drawing-rooms of the rich
were episodes in a lifelong spiritual quest might justifiably be regarded as the equivalent
of Sunday morning church.
'All the same,' Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous,
gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, 'the
champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.' It was the demon that had suddenly
interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations. Burlap had allowed him to speak out
loud. Why not? It amused him to be baffling. He looked at Beatrice.
Beatrice was duly baffled. 'I'm sure they were,' she said, readjusting her church-
going face to make it harmonize with the grin. She laughed rather nervously and turned
away to pour out the milk into a cup. 'Here's your milk,' she rapped out, taking refuge
from her bafflement in officious command. 'Mind you drink it while it's hot.'
There was a long silence. Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated
on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly
knew for what.
'You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffet,' said Burlap at last.
Beatrice smiled. 'Luckily there's no big spider.'
'Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.'
'Yes it is,' said Beatrice. That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she
reflected; he was so trustworthy. Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw
you about and kiss you. Dreadful that was, quite dreadful. Beatrice had never really got
over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie's brother-in-law,
whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a
hansom. The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really
did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that
horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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