Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [190]
At Gattenden, meanwhile, the days passed gloomily.
‘Why don’t you do a little painting?’ Mrs. Bidlake suggested to her husband on the morning that followed his arrival.
Old John shook his head.
‘You’d enjoy it so much once you started,’ coaxed Elinor.
But her father would not allow himself to be persuaded. He didn’twant to paint, precisely because painting would have been so enjoyable. His very dread of pain, sickness and death made him perversely refuse to let his mind be distracted from their abhorred contemplation. It was as though some part of him obscurely desired to accept defeat and misery, were anxious to make abjection yet more abject. His courage, his Gargantuan power, his careless high spirits had been the fruits of a deliberate and lifelong ignorance. But now that to ignore was no longer possible, now that the enemy was installed in his very vitals, the virtue had gone out of him. He was afraid and could not conceal his terrors. He no longer even desired to conceal them. He somehow wanted to be abject. And abject he was. Mrs. Bidlake and Elinor did their best to rouse him from the apathetic misery in which he spent the greater part of his days at Gattenden. But he would not be roused except to complain and occasionally fly into a querulous rage.
‘Deplorable,’ wrote Philip in his notebook, ‘to see an Olympian reduced by a little tumour in his stomach to a state of subhumanness. But perhaps,’ he added a few days later as an afterthought, ‘he was always subhuman, even when he seemed most Olympian; perhaps being Olympian was just a symptom of subhumanity.’
It was only with little Phil that John Bidlake would occasionally rouse himself from his abjection. Playing with the child, he would sometimes forget for a little to be wretched.
‘Draw something for me,’ he would say.
And with his tongue between his teeth little Phil would draw a train, or a ship, or the stags in Gattenden Park fighting, or the old marquess in his donkey-drawn chair.
‘Now you draw me something, grandfather,’ he would say, when he was tired.
And the old man would take the pencil and make half a dozen marvellous little sketches of T’ang, the Pekingese dog, or Tompy, the kitchen cat. Or sometimes, in a fit of naughtiness, he would scribble a caricature of poor Miss Fulkes writhing. And sometimes, forgetting all about the child, he would draw for his own amusement—a group of bathers, two men wrestling, a dancer.
‘But why have they got no clothes on?’ the child would ask.
‘Because they’re nicer without.’
‘I don’t think so.’ And losing interest in drawings that had so little in the way of a story to tell him, he would ask for the pencil back again.
But it was not always that John Bidlake responded so happily to his grandson. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly wretched, he felt the child’s mere presence as an outrage, a kind of taunting. He would fly into a rage, would shout at the boy for making a noise and disturbing him.
‘Can’t I ever be left in peace?’ he would shout, and then would go on to complain with curses of the general inefficiency of everybody. The house was full of women, all supposed to be looking after that damned brat. But there he always was, rampaging round, kicking up hell’s own din, getting in the way. It was intolerable. Particularly when one wasn’t well. Absolutely intolerable. People were without any consideration. Flushed and writhing, poor Miss Fulkes would lead her howling charge back to the nursery.
The most trying scenes were at meal-times. For it was at meals (now reduced, so far as he was concerned, to broth and milk and Benger’s food) that John Bidlake was most disagreeably reminded of the state of his health. ‘Disgusting slops!’ he grumbled. But if he ate anything solid, the results were deplorable. Meal-times were the stormiest and most savage moments of John Bidlake’s day. He vented his anger on the child. Always a reluctant eater, little Phil was peculiarly difficult about his food all that spring and early summer. There were tears at almost every meal.