Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [178]
‘Which is exactly what I am,’ said Philip. ‘You’ve made me tired of myself. Sick to death.’ Still irritated, he rose to take his leave.
‘Is that an insult?’ she asked, looking up at him. ‘Why have I made you tired of yourself?’
Philip shook his head. ‘I can’t explain. I’ve given up explaining.’ He held out his hand. Still looking enquiringly into his face, Molly took it. ‘If you weren’t one of the vestal virgins of civilization,’ he went on, ‘you’d understand without any explaining. Or rather, there wouldn’t be any explaining to do. Because you wouldn’t have made me feel tired of myself. And let me add, Molly, that if you were really and consistently civilized, you’d take steps to make yourself less desirable. Desirability’s barbarous. It’s as savage as pouncing and clawing. You ought to look like George Eliot. Goodbye.’ And giving her hand a final shake, he limped out of the room. In the street he gradually recovered his temper. He even began to smile to himself. For it was a joke. The spectacle of a biter being bitten is always funny, even when the bitten biter happens to be oneself. Conscious and civilized, he had been defeated by someone even more civilized than himself. The justice was poetic. But what a warning! Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms. In Molly he perceived a kind of Max Beerbohm version of himself. The spectacle was alarming. Having smiled, he became pensive.
‘I must be pretty awful,’ he thought.
Sitting on a chair in the Park, he considered his shortcomings. He had considered them before, often. But he had never done anything about them. He knew in advance that he wouldn’t do anything about them this time. Poor Elinor! That rigmarole of Molly’s about platonic relations and Paul Bourget gave him a notion of what she had to put up with. He decided to tell her of his adventure with Molly—comically, for it was always easier to talk unseriously—and then go on to talk about themselves. Yes, that was what he’d do. He ought to have spoken before. Elinor had been so strangely and unnaturally silent of late, so far away. He had been anxious, had wanted to speak, had felt he ought to have spoken. But about what? The ridiculous episode with Molly provided him with an opening gambit.
‘I saw Molly d’Exergillod this afternoon,’ he began, when he saw Elinor. But the tone of her ‘Did you?’ was so coldly uninterested, that he went no further. There was a silence. Elinor went on with her reading. He glanced at her surreptitiously over the top of his book. Her pale face wore an expression of calm remoteness. He felt a renewal of that uneasy anxiety which had come upon him so often during the last few weeks.
‘Why don’t you ever talk now?’ he screwed up the courage to ask her that evening after dinner.
Elinor looked up at him from her book. ‘Don’t I ever talk?’ she said, ironically smiling. ‘Well, I suppose there’s nothing of any particular interest to say.’
Philip recognized one of the answers he was in the habit of making to her reproaches, and was abashed into silence. And yet it was unfair of her to retort it upon him. For in his case it was true: there really wasn’t anything of interest to say. By dint of being secretive about them, he had almost abolished his intimate feelings. Very little seemed to go on in the unintellectual part of his mind—very little, at any rate, that wasn’t either trivial or rather discreditable. Whereas Elinor always had a mass of things to say. Things that said themselves, that came out of their own accord from the depths of her being. Philip would have liked to explain this to her; but somehow it was difficult, he couldn’t.
‘All the same,’ he brought himself to say, after a pause, ‘you used to talk much more. It’s only in these last days…’
‘I suppose I’m rather tired of talking, that’s all.’
‘But why should you be tired?’
‘Mayn’t one be tired sometimes?’ She uttered a rather resentful little laugh. ‘You seem to be permanently tired.