Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [209]
‘Incredibly little blood,’ said Spandrell aloud.
At the sound of his calm voice Illidge violently started.
Spandrell withdrew his supporting foot. The dead face fell back with a little thump on to its side.
‘It’s a complete justification for Bishop Odo’s mace,’ he went on dispassionately. That he should find himself recalling, at this of all moments, the comical prancings of that conscientious churchman in the Bayeux tapestry—that too was part of the essential horror. The frivolousness of the human mind! The wandering irrelevance! Evil might have a certain dignity. But silliness…
Illidge heard him walk into the kitchen. There was the gradually sharpening note of water running into a pail. The tap was turned off; there were foot-falls; the bucket was set down with a metallic clink.
‘Luckily,’ Spandrell went on, in comment on his last remark. ‘Or else I don’t know what we should have done about the mess.’
Illidge listened with a strained and horrified attention to the sounds that came to him from the other side of the screen. A limp and meaty thud; was that an arm lifted and dropped? The sibilant sliding of a soft and heavy object across the floor. Then the splash of water, the homely noise of scrubbing. And at these sounds, so incomparably more horrible, more profoundly significant than any words, however brutal, however calmly cynical, that Spandrell could say, he felt a recrudesence of that sinking, that heart-fluttering faintness of the first minutes, when the dead man was lying there, still twitching, at his feet. He remembered, he lived over again those moments of breathless and sick anticipation before the horrible event. The noise of the car backing down the street; the gritty scrape of feet on the doorstep, and then the knock, and then a long, long silence of heart-beats and visceral creepings and imaginative forebodings, of justifying thoughts of revolution and the future, justifying hatred of oppression and the vileness of wealth. And at the same time ridiculous, incongruous recollections, as he crouched behind the screen, of those childish games of hide-and-seek on school-treat days, among the gorse and juniper bushes of the common. ‘One, two, three…’; the seekers covered their faces and began to count their hundred, aloud; the hiders scattered. You thrust yourself into a prickly bush, you lay in the bracken. Then came the shout of ‘ninety-nine, a hundred, Cooee!’; and the seekers were off, were after you. And the excitement was so painfully intense, as you crouched or squatted in your lair, peeping, listening for a chance to make a bolt for Home, that you felt an almost irrepressible desire to’do something,’ though something had been done, behind the junipers, only five minutes before. Absurd memories! And because absurd, dreadful! For the hundredth time he felt in his pocket to make sure that the bottle of chloroform was still there and safely corked. The second knock startlingly resounded and, with it, the whistle and that humorous call (you could hear, from the tone of his voice, that he was smiling) of ‘Friend!’ Behind his screen Midge had shuddered. ‘Friend!’ And remembering now, he shuddered again, more violently, with all the shame and horror and humiliation which he had had no time then to feel. No time; for before his mind could realize all the implications upon implications of that laughing call, the door had creaked on its hinges, there was the noise of feet on the boards, and Webley was shouting Elinor’s name. (Illidge suddenly found himself wondering if he had been in love with her.) ‘Elinor!’ There followed a silence; Webley had seen the note. Illidge had heard his breathing, only a foot or two away, on the other side of the screen. And then there was the rustle of a quick movement, the beginning of an exclamation and that sudden dry concussion, like the noise of a slap, but duller, deader and at the same time much louder. There followed a fraction of a second’s silence, then the noise of falling—not a single sound, but a series of noises spread over an appreciable period of time; the bony collapse of the knees, the scrape of shoes sliding away across the polished floor, the muffled thud of the body and arms, and the sharp hard rap of the head against the boards.