Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [145]
‘I suppose they must be,’ said Gladys, thinking how funny he was.
‘Take down,’ commanded Mr. Quarles, to whom a pensee had suddenly occurred. He leaned back in his chair and, closing his eyes, pursued the elusive phrase.
Gladys waited, her fingers poised above the keyboard. She looked at the watch on her wrist. Ten past twelve. It would be lunch-time soon. A new watch—that would be the first thing she’d make him give her. The one she had was such a cheap, nasty-looking watch; and it kept such bad time.
‘Note for the volume of Reflections,’ said Mr. Quarles, without opening his eyes. The keys briefly rattled. ‘The ivory pinnacles of thought’—he repeated the words inwardly. They made a satisfying reverberation along the corridors of his mind. The phrase was caught. He sat up briskly and opened his eyes—to become aware that the lisle-thread top of one of Gladys’s sunburnt stockings was visible, from where he was sitting, to a considerable distance above the knee.
‘All my life,’ he dictated, his eyes fixed on the lisle thread, ‘I have suffered from the irrelevant—no, say “importunate”—interruptions of the wahld’s trivialitah, full stop. Some thinkers comma I know comma are able to ignore these interruptions comma to give them a fleeting but sufficient attention and return with a serene mind to higher things full stop.’
There was silence. Above the lisle thread, Mr. Quarles was thinking, was the skin,—soft, curving tightly over the firm curved flesh. To caress and, caressing, to feel the finger-tips silkily caressed; to squeeze a handful of elastic flesh. Even to bite. Like a round goblet, like a heap of wheat.
Suddenly conscious of the direction of his glances, Gladys pulled down her skirt.
‘Where was I?’ asked Mr. Quarles.
‘Higher things with a serene mind,’ Gladys g answered, reading from the page in front of her.
‘H’m.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘For me comma alas comma this serenitah has always been impossible semi-colon; my nahvous sensibilitah is too great full stop. Dragged down from the ivorah pinnacles of thought’ (he rolled out the phrase with relish) ‘into the common dust comma, I am exasperated comma, I lose my peace of mind and am unable to climb again into my tower.’
He rose and began to walk restlessly about the room.
‘That’s always been my trouble,’ he said. ‘Too much sensibilitah. A syahrious thinker ought to have no temperament, no nerves. He has no business to be passionate.’
The skin, he was thinking, the firm elastic flesh. He halted behind her chair. The little triangle of cropped hair pointed down along her spine. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent over her.
Gladys looked up, smiling impertinently, with triumph. ‘Well?’ she asked.
Mr. Quarles bent lower and kissed her neck. She giggled.
‘How you tickle!’
His hands explored her, sliding along her arms, pressing her body—the body of the species, of the entire sex. The individual Gladys continued to giggle.
‘Naughty!’ she said, and made a pretence of pushing his hands away. ‘Naughty!’
CHAPTER XXI
‘A month ago,’ said Elinor, as their taxi drove out of Liverpool Street Station, ‘we were in Udaipur.’
‘It certainly seems improbable,’ said Philip, agreeing with the implications of her remark.
‘These ten months of travel have been like an hour in a cinema. There’s the Bank. I begin to doubt whether I’ve ever been away.’ She sighed. ‘It’s rather a dreadful feeling.’
‘Is it?’ said Philip. ‘I suppose I’m used to it. I never do feel that anything has really happened before this morning.’ He craned his neck out of the window. ‘Why people should bother about the Taj Mahal when there’s St. Paul’s to look at, I can’t imagine. What a marvel!’
‘That wonderful black and white of the stone.’
‘As though it were an engraving. Doubly a work of art. Not merely architecture, but an etching of architecture.’ He leaned back.