Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [17]
Lord Edward took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it, looking meditatively meanwhile at the newt. ‘Interesting to see what happens this time,’ he said in his profound indistinct voice. ‘I should think we must be just about on the border line between…’ He left the sentence unfinished: it was always difficult for him to find the words to express his meaning. ‘The bud will have a difficult choice.’
‘To be or not to be,’ said Illidge facetiously, and started to laugh; but seeing that Lord Edward showed no signs of having been amused, he checked himself. Almost put his foot in it again. He felt annoyed with himself and also, unreasonably, with the Old Man.
Lord Edward filled his pipe. ‘Tail becomes leg,’ he said meditatively. ‘What’s the mechanism? Chemical peculiarities in the neighbouring…? It can’t obviously be the blood. Or do you suppose it has something to do with the electric tension? It does vary, of course, in different parts of the body. Though why we don’t all just vaguely proliferate like cancers… Growing in a definite shape is very unlikely, when you come to think of it. Very mysterious and…’ His voice trailed off into a deep and husky murmur.
Illidge listened disapprovingly. When the Old Man started off like this about the major and fundamental problems of biology, you never knew where he’d be getting to. Why, as likely as not he’d begin talking about God. It really made one blush. He was determined to prevent anything so discreditable happening this time. ‘The next step with these newts,’ he said in his most briskly practical tone, ‘is to tinker with the nervous system and see whether that has any influence on the grafts. Suppose, for example, we excised a piece of the spine…’
But Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant. He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side. He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something. He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened. A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.
‘Bach?’ said Lord Edward in a whisper.
Pongileoni’s blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward’s apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward’s membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered ‘Bach! ‘ He smiled with pleasure, his eyes lit up. The young girl was singing to herself in solitude under the floating clouds. And then the cloud-solitary philosopher began poetically to meditate. ‘We must really go downstairs and listen,’ said Lord Edward. He got up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Work can wait. One doesn’t hear this sort of thing every night.’
‘But what about clothes,’ said Illidge doubtfully. ‘I can’t come down like this.’ He looked down at himself. It had been a cheap suit at the best of times. Age had not improved it.
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’ A dog with the smell of rabbits in his nostrils could hardly have shown a more indecent eagerness than Lord Edward at the sound of Pongileoni’s flute. He took his assistant’s arm and hurried him out of the door, and along the corridor towards the stairs. ‘It’s just a little party,’ he went on. ‘I seem to remember my wife having said… Quite informal. And besides,’ he added, inventing new excuses to justify the violence of his musical appetite, ‘we can just slip in without… Nobody will notice.’
Illidge had his doubts. ‘I’m afraid it’s not a very small party,’ he began; he had seen the motors arriving.
‘Never mind, never mind,’ interrupted Lord Edward, lusting irrepressibly for Bach.