Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [157]
Marjorie shook her head and sighed. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said with a conviction that struck Elinor as rather ludicrous. ‘What sort of an opinion can she have of herself?’ she wondered. But Marjorie’s good opinion was not for herself so much as for virtue. She had been brought up to believe in the ugliness of vice and the animal part of human nature, the beauty of virtue and the spirit. And cold by nature, she had the cold woman’s utter incomprehension of sensuality. That Walter should suddenly cease to be the Walter she had known and behave ‘like a pig,’ as Elinor rather crudely put it, was to her really extraordinary, quite apart from any personal considerations of her own attractiveness.
‘And then you must remember,’ Elinor said aloud, ‘Lucy has another advantage where men like Walter are concerned. She’s one of those women who have the temperament of a man. Men can get pleasure out of casual encounters. Most women can’t; they’ve got to be in love, more or less. They’ve got to be emotionally involved. All but a few of them. Lucy’s one of the few. She has the masculine detachment. She can separate her appetite from the rest of her soul.’
‘What a horror!’ Marjorie shuddered.
Elinor observed the shudder and was annoyed by it into contradiction.
‘Do you think so? It seems to me sometimes rather an enviable talent.’ She laughed and Marjorie was duly shocked by her cynicism. ‘For a boy with Walter’s shyness and timidity,’ she went on, ‘there’s something very exciting about that kind of bold temperament. It’s the opposite of his. Reckless, without scruple, wilful, unconscientious. I can so well understand its going to his head.’ She thought of Everard Webley. ‘Force is always attractive,’ she added. ‘Particularly if one lacks it oneself, as Walter does. Lucy’s obviously a force. You may not like that kind of force.’ She herself didn’t much like Webley’s energetic ambition. ‘But you can’t help admiring the force in itself. It’s like Niagara. Fine, even though you mayn’t want to be standing underneath. May I take another piece of bread and butter?’ She helped herself. Out of politeness Marjorie also took another slice. ‘Delicious brown bread,’ Elinor commented and wondered how Walter could have lived with anyone who crooked the little finger of the hand that held the tea-cup and who took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea-pig—as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.
‘But what do you think I ought to do?’ Marjorie brought herself finally to ask.
Elinor shrugged her shoulders. ‘What can you do, but hope he’ll get what he wants and soon be sick of it.’
It was obvious; but Marjorie thought her rather unfeeling, hard and cruel to have said it.
In London the Quarleses sketchily inhabited what had once been the last of a row of stables in a Belgravian mews. You passed under an archway. A cliff of cream-coloured stucco rose sheer on your left—windowless, for the Belgravians had declined to be aware of the squalid domesticity of their dependants. On the right stretched the low line of stables with the single storey of living rooms above, tenanted now by enormous Daimlers and the families of their chauffeurs. The mews ended in a wall, over the top of which you could see the waving planetrees of Belgravian gardens. The Quarleses doorstep lay in the shadow of this wall. Set between the gardens and the sparsely inhabited mews, the little house was very quiet. The coming and going of limousines and the occasional yelling of a child were the only disturbances.
‘But fortunately,’ Philip had remarked, ‘the rich can afford to buy silent cars. And there’s something about internal combustion engines that makes for birth control. Who ever heard of a chauffeur with eight children?’ Coach-house and horse-boxes had been knocked together in the reconstruction of the stable, into a single spacious living-room. Two screens hinted at a division. Behind the screen on the right, as you entered, was the drawing-room end of the apartment