Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [211]
Illidge turned over the advertisement pages of Vogue. A young lady in a fur coat priced at two hundred guineas was stepping into a motor car; on the opposite page another young lady in nothing but a towel was stepping out of a bath impregnated with Dr. Verbruggen’s Reducing Salts. There followed a still-life of scent bottles containing Songe Negre and the maker’s latest creation, Relent d’Amour. The names of Worth, Lanvin, Patou sprawled across three more pages. Then there was a picture of a young lady in a rubber reducing belt, looking at herself in the glass. A group of young ladies admired one another’s slumber wear from Crabb and Lushington’s lingerie department. Opposite them another young lady reclined on a couch at Madame Adrena’s Beauty Laboratory, while the hands of a masseuse stroked the menace of a double chin. Then followed a still-life of rolling pins and rubber strigils for rolling and rubbing away young ladies’ superfluous fat, and another still-life of jars and gallipots containing skin foods to protect their faces from the ravages of time and the weather.
‘Revolting!’ Illidge said to himself as he turned the pages. ‘Criminal!’ And he cherished his indignation, he cultivated it. To be angry was a distraction, and at the same time a justification. Raging at plutocratic callousness and frivolity, he could half forget and half excuse to himself the horrible thing that had happened. Webley’s body was lying on the other side of the screen. But there were women who paid two hundred guineas for a fur coat. Two hundred guineas! His Uncle Joseph would have thought himself happy if he could have made as much in eighteen months of cobbling. And they bought scent at twentyfive shillings the quarter-pint. He remembered the time when his little brother Tom had had pneumonia after influenza. Ghastly! And when he was convalescent, the doctor had said he ought to go away to the sea for a few weeks. They hadn’t been able to afford it. Tom’s lungs had never been too strong after that. He worked in a motor factory now (making machines for those bitches in twohundred-guinea coats to sit in); Illidge had paid for him to go to a technical school—paid, he reflected, beating up his anger, that the boy might have the privilege of standing eight hours a day in front of a milling machine. The air of Manchester wasn’t doing Tom any good. There was no superfluous fat to be rolled off him, poor devil. Swinish guzzling! Why couldn’t they do a little useful work instead of squeegeeing their hams and bellies? That would take the fat off all right. If they worked as his mother had done…. She had no fat to rub off with rolling-pins, or sweat off under a rubber belt, or stew off in hot baths and brine. He thought indignantly of that endless dreary labour of housework. Day after day, year after year. Making beds, that they might be unmade. Cooking to fill bellies eternally empty. Washing up what the next meal was to make dirty again. Scrubbing the floor for muddy boots to defile. Darning and patching that yet more holes might be made. It was like the labouring of Sisyphus and the Danaids, hopeless and interminable—or would have been interminable (except by his mother’s death), if he hadn’t been able to send her those two pounds a week out of his salary. She could get a girl in now to help with the hardest work. But she still did more than enough to make rubber belts unnecessary. What a life! And in the world of fur coats and Songe Negre they complained of boredom and fatigue, they had to retire into nursing homes for rest cures. If they could lead her life for a bit! And perhaps they