Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [131]
‘Like the Sleeping Beauty,’ she said. But even as she spoke the words, the spell was broken. Suddenly, as though the ringing glass had called the house back to life, there was sound and movement. Somewhere upstairs a door opened, through the sanitary noise of rushing water came the sound of Phil’s piercing young voice; small feet thudded along the carpet of the corridor, clattered like little hoofs on the naked oak of the stairs. At the same moment a door on the ground floor flew open and the enormous form of Dobbs, the parlourmaid, hastened into the hall.
‘Why, Miss Elinor, I never heard you…’
Little Phil rounded the last turn of the staircase. At the sight of his parents he gave a shout, he quickened his pace; he almost slid from step to step.
‘Not so fast, not so fast!’ his mother called anxiously and ran towards him.
‘Not so fast!’ echoed Miss Fulkes hurrying down the stairs behind. And suddenly, from the morningroom, which had a door leading out into the garden, Mrs. Bidlake appeared, white and silent and with floating veils, like an imposing phantom. In a little basket she carried a bunch of cut tulips; her gardening scissors dangled at the end of a yellow ribbon. T’ang the Third followed her, barking. There was a confusion of embracing and handshaking. Mrs. Bidlake’s greetings had the majesty of ritual, the solemn grace of an ancient and sacred dance. Miss Fulkes writhed with shyness and excitement, stood first on one leg and then on the other, went into the attitudes of fashion-plates and mannequins and from time to time piercingly laughed. When she shook hands with Philip, she writhed so violently that she almost lost her balance.
‘Poor creature!’ Elinor had time to think between the answering and asking of questions. ‘How urgently she needs marrying! Much worse than when we left.’
‘But how he’s grown!’ she said aloud. ‘And how he’s ‘changed!’ She held the child at arm’s length with the gesture of a connoisseur who stands back to examine a picture. ‘He used to be the image of Phil. But now…’ She shook her head. Now the broad face had lengthened, the short straight nose (the comical ‘cat’s nose’ which in Philip’s face she had always laughed at and so much loved) had grown finer and faintly aquiline, the hair had darkened. ‘Now he’s exactly like Walter. Don’t you think so?’ Mrs. Bidlake remotely nodded. ‘Except when he laughs,’ she added. ‘His laugh’s pure Phil.’
‘What have you brought me?’ asked little Phil almost anxiously. When people went away and came back again, they always brought him something. ‘Where’s my present?’
‘What a question!’ Miss Fulkes protested, blushing with vicarious shame, and writhing.
But Elinor and Philip only laughed.
‘He’s Walter when he’s serious,’ said Elinor.
‘Or you.’ Philip looked from one to the other.
‘The first minute your father and mother arrive!’ Miss Fulkes continued her reproaches.
‘Naughty!’ the child retorted and threw back his head with a little movement of anger and pride.
Elinor, who had been looking at him, almost laughed aloud. That sudden lifting of the chin—why it was the parody of old Mr. Quarles’s gesture of superiority. For a moment the child was her father-in-law, her absurd deplorable father-in-law, caricatured and in miniature. It was comic, but at the same time it was somehow no joke. She wanted to laugh, but she was oppressed by a sudden realization of the mysteries and complexities of life, the terrible inscrutabilities of the future. Here was her child—but he was also Philip, he was also herself, he was also Walter, her father, her mother; and now, with that upward tilting of the chin, he had suddenly revealed himself as the deplorable Mr. Quarles. And he might be hundreds of other people too. Might be? He certainly was. He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. Phil, little Phil