Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [156]
‘You’d knock him down. At least that’s what I would do. It would be a point of honour. And the more you’d admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcase. That’s why the whores and the alcohol weren’t avoidable. On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them. That life in France was like the life I’d been leading before the War—only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature. And after a year of it, I was desperately wangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death. Augustine was right, I tell you,; we’re damned or saved in advance. The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.’
‘Providential balderdash!’ said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second oldest Judge of the High Court just behind him. Twenty years before the odds against, his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at the rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one. But there, all the same, he was. He took another draught of claret.
And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and cars laid back; and how it suddenly started forward, dragging the carter along with it; and the rumble of the wheels; and, ‘Aie!’ his own scream; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.
And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount’s drawing-room. ‘Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.’
‘But what’s her secret?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Why should he have gone mad about her? Because he has gone mad. Literally.’
‘Isn’t it rather an obvious secret?’ said Elinor. What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should ever have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘Lucy’s very amusing and alive. And besides,’ she added, remembering Philip’s exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, ‘she has a bad reputation.’
‘But is that attractive? A bad reputation?’ The tea-pot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.
‘Of course. It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible. No sugar, thanks.’
‘But surely,’ said Marjorie, handing her the cup, men don’t want to share their mistress with other lovers.’
‘Perhaps not. But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope. “Where others have succeeded, I can succeed.” That’s the man’s argument. And at the same time a bad reputation makes him immediately think of the woman in terms of love-making. It gives a twist to his imaginations about her. When you met Lola Montes, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms. You didn’t think of bedrooms when you met Florence Nightingale. Only sickrooms. Which are rather different,’ Elinor concluded.
There was a silence. It was horrid of her, Elinor was thinking, not to feel more sympathetic. But there it was; she didn’t. She reminded herself of the abominable life the poor woman had had—first with her husband, and now with Walter. Really abominable. But those dreadful, dangling, sham jade earrings! And the voice, the earnest manner…
Marjorie looked up. ‘But is it possible that men can be so easily taken in? By such a cheap bait? Men like Walter. Like Walter,’ she insisted. ‘Can men like that be such…such…’
‘Pigs?’ suggested Elinor. ‘Apparently they can. It seems odd, certainly.’ Perhaps it would be better, she reflected, if Philip were rather more of a pig and less of a hermit crab. Pigs are human—all too much so, perhaps; but still human. Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.