Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [210]
The sound of scrubbing was succeeded by the squelch of a wetted cloth.
‘There,’ said Spandrell, appearing round the screen. He was drying his hands on a duster. ‘And how’s the invalid?’ he added in the parody of a bedside manner, smiling ironically.
Illidge averted his face. The hatred flared up in him, expelling for the moment every other emotion. ‘I’m all right,’ he said curtly.
‘Just taking it easy while I do the dirty work. Is that it?’ Spandrell threw the duster on to a chair and began to turn down his shirt cuffs.
In two hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax only eight thousand times. The earth travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And the prickly pear has had time to invade only another hundred acres of Australian territory. Two hours are as nothing. The time to listen to the Ninth Symphony and a couple of the posthumous quartets, to fly from London to Paris, to transfer a luncheon from the stomach to the small intestine, to read Macbeth, to die of snake bite or earn one-and-eightpence as a charwoman. No more. But to Illidge, as he sat waiting, with the dead body lying there behind the screen, waiting for the darkness, they seemed unending.
‘Are you an idiot? asked Spandrell, when he had suggested that they should go away at once and leave the thing lying there. ‘Or are you particularly anxious to die of hanging?’ The sneer, the cool ironic amusement were maddening to Illidge. ‘It would be found to-night when Philip came home.’
‘But Quarles hasn’t got a key,’ said Illidge.
‘Then to-morrow, as soon as he’d got hold of a locksmith. And three hours later, when Elinor had explained what she had done with the key, the police would be knocking at my door. And I promise you, they’d knock at yours very soon afterwards.’ He smiled at Illidge, who averted his eyes. ‘No,’ Spandrell went on, ‘Webley’s got to be taken away. And with his car standing outside, it’s child’s play, if we wait till after dark.’
‘But it won’t be dark for another two hours.’ Illidge’s voice was shrill with anger and complaint.
‘Well, what of it?’
‘Why…’ Illidge began and checked himself; he realized that if he was going to answer truthfully, he would have to say that he didn’t want to stay those two hours because he was frightened. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s stay.’ Spandrell picked up the silver cigarette box, opened and sniffed. ‘They smell very nice,’ he said. ‘Have one.’ He pushed the box across the table. ‘And there are lots of books. And the Times And the New Statesman. And the latest number of Vogue. It’s positively a dentist’s waiting-room. And we might even make ourselves a cup of tea.’ The time of waiting began. Heart-beat followed heart-beat. Each second the earth travelled twenty miles and the prickly pears covered another five rods of Australian ground. Behind the screen lay the body. Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts—all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world