Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [111]
‘Why shouldn’t he suck?’ retorted Mark. ‘He doesn’t do me any harm, and he amuses me.’
‘I believe he tickles your vanity,’ said Mary. ‘It’s flattering to have parasites. It’s a compliment to the quality of your blood.’
‘And besides,’ Rampion went on, he has something in him.’
‘Of course he has something in him,’ Mary answered. ‘He has your blood in him, among other things. And the blood of all the other people he feeds on.’
‘Now, don’t exaggerate, don’t be romantic.’ Rampion objected to all hyperboles that weren’t his own.
‘Well, all I can say is that I don’t like parasites.’ Mary spoke with finality. ‘And next time he comes I shall try sprinkling a little Keating’s powder on him, just to see what happens. So there.’
However, the next time had arrived, and here she was opening the door for him and telling him to find his own way to the studio, as if he were a welcome guest. Even in atavistic Mary the force of polite habit was stronger than her desire to sprinkle Keating’s.
Burlap’s thoughts, as he found his own way to the studio, were still of financial matters. The memory of what he had paid for lunch continued to rankle.
‘Not only does Rampion pay no rent,’ he was thinking; ‘he has hardly any expenses. Living as they do with only one servant, doing most of the housework themselves, having no car, they really must spend ridiculously little. True, they have two children to educate.’ But Burlap managed by a kind of mental conjuring trick, at which he was extremely adept, to make the two children disappear out of his field of consciousness. ‘And yet Rampion must make quite a lot. He sells his pictures and drawings very decently. And he has a regular market for anything he chooses to write. What does he do with all his money? ‘ Burlap wondered rather resentfully, as he knocked at the studio door. ‘Does he hoard it up? Or what?’
‘Come in,’ called Rampion’s voice from the other side of the door.
Burlap adjusted his face to a smile and opened.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ said Rampion. ‘Can’t shake hands at the moment, I’m afraid.’ He was cleaning his brushes. ‘How are you?’
Burlap shook his head and said that he needed a holiday but couldn’t afford to take it. He walked round the studio looking reverentially at the paintings. St. Francis would hardly have approved of most of them. But what life, what energy, what imagination! Life, after all, was the’important thing. ‘I believe in life.’ That was the first article of one’s creed.
‘What’s the title of this?’ he asked, coming to a halt in front of the canvas on the easel.
Wiping his hands as he came, Rampion crossed the room and stood beside him. ‘That?’ he said. ‘Well, “_Love_,” I suppose, is what you‘d call it.’ He laughed; he had worked well that afternoon and was in the best of humours. ‘But less refined and soulful people might prefer something less printable.’ Grinning, he suggested a few of the less printable alternatives. Burlap’s smile was rather sickly. ‘I don’t know if you can think of any others,’ Rampion concluded maliciously. When Burlap was in the neighbourhood it amused him, and at the same time he felt it positively a duty, to be shocking.
It was a smallish painting, in oils. Low down in the left-hand corner of the canvas, set in a kind of recess between a foreground of dark rocks and tree trunks and a background of precipitous crags, and arched over by a mass of foliage, two figures, a man and a woman, lay embraced. Two naked bodies, the woman’s white, the man’s a red brown. These two bodies were the source of the whole illumination of the picture. The rocks and tree trunks in the foreground were silhouetted against the light that issued from them. The precipice behind them was golden with the same light. It touched the lower surface of the leaves above, throwing shadows up into a thickening darkness of greenery. It streamed out of the recess in which they lay, diagonally into and across the picture, illuminating and, one felt, creating by its radiance an astounding flora of gigantic roses and zinnias and tulips, with horses and leopards and little antelopes coming and going between the huge flowers, and beyond, a green landscape deepening, plane after plane, into blue, with a glimpse of the sea between the hills and over it the shapes of huge, heroic clouds in the blue sky.