Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [179]
Philip looked at her with a kind of anxiety. His eyes seemed to implore. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be touched. She had allowed herself to be touched too often. He had exploited her love, systematically underpaid her and, whenever she threatened rebellion, had turned suddenly rather pathetic and helpless, appealing to her better feelings. This time she was going to be hard. He might look as imploring and anxious as he liked, but she wouldn’t take any notice. It only served him right. All the same she felt rather guilty. And yet it was his own fault. Why couldn’t he love her actively, articulately, outright? When she gave him her love, he took it for granted, he accepted it passively as his right. And when she stopped giving it, he looked dumbly anxious and imploring. But as for saying anything, as for doing anything…
The seconds passed. Elinor waited, pretending to read. If only he’d speak or move! She longed for an excuse to love him again. As for Everard—why, Everard simply didn’t count. To the deep instinctive core of her being he really didn’t matter and if Philip would only take the trouble to love her a little, he wouldn’t matter any more even to the conscious part of her that was trying to love him—to love him on principle, so to speak, to love him deliberately, of set purpose. But the seconds passed in silence. And at last, with a little sigh (for he too would have liked to say something, to do something; only it was impossible, because the something said or done would have to be personal), Philip picked up his book and, in the interests of the zoological novelist in his novel, went on reading about the possessive instinct in birds. Reading again. He wasn’t going to say anything after all. Oh, very well; if he wanted her to become Everard’s mistress, then he’d have only himself to blame. She tried to shrug her shoulders and feel truculently. But the threat, she inwardly felt, was directed against herself rather than against Philip. It was she, not he, who was being condemned. Condemned to be Everard’s mistress.
Taking a lover had seemed to Elinor, thoeretically and in advance, a matter of no great difficulty. Morally wrong she did not think it. All the fuss that Christians and the heroines of novels managed to make about it! It was incomprehensible. ‘If people want to go to bed with one another,’ she would say, ‘why can’t they do it quite simply and straightforwardly, without tormenting themselves and everyone else within range?’ Nor had she any fear of the social consequences of taking a lover. The people who, if they knew, would object, were precisely the people she herself had always objected to. By refusing to meet her, they would be doing her a favour. As for Phil, he would have deserved it. He had had it in his power to prevent any such thing happening. Why couldn’t he have come nearer, given a little more of himself? She had begged for love; but what he had given her was a remote impersonal benevolence. Mere warmth, that was all she wanted; mere humanity. It was not much to ask. And she had warned him so often of what would happen if he didn’t give it.
Didn’t he understand? Or was it that he simply didn’t care? Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt him at all; the punishment wouldn’t punish. That would be humiliating. But after all, she would go on to remind herself, whenever she had arrived (yet once more) at this point in her inward argument, after all it wasn’t only or mainly to punish Philip, it wasn’t primarily to teach him humanity by pain and jealousy, that she was going to take a lover. It was in the interest of her own happiness. (She would try to forget how very wretched the pursuit of her own happiness made her.) Her own independent happiness. She had grown accustomed to think and act too exclusively in relation to Philip. Even when she planned to take a lover, it was still of him that she thought. Which was absurd, absurd.
But these self-reminders of her right, her intention to be independently happy, had to be constantly repeated. Her natural and habitual mode of thinking even about a possible lover was still in terms of her husband