Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [214]
In the interval Philip limped out for a smoke in the bar. A hand plucked at his sleeve.
‘The melomaniac discovered!’ said a familiar voice. He turned and saw Willie Weaver twinkling all over with good-humour, kindliness and absurdity. ‘What did you think of our modemrn Orpheus?’
‘If you’re referring to Tolley, I don’t think he can conduct Beethoven.’
‘A shade too light and fantastic for old man Ludwig’s portentosities?’ suggested Willie.
‘That’s about it,’ said Philip smiling. ‘Not up to him.’
‘Or too far up. Portentosity belongs to the prepositivistic epoch. It’s bourgeois as Comrade Lenin would say. Tolley’s nothing if not contemporaneous. Didn’t you like him in the Satie? Or did you,’ he went on, in response to Philip’s contemptuous shrug, ‘did you wish he’d committed it?’ He coughed his own appreciation of the pun.
‘He’s almost as modern as the Irish genius whose works I discovered this evening.’ Philip took out his pocket-book and, after a word of explanation, read aloud. ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo…’ At the foot of the page were his own comments of an hour before. ‘The text of the whole sermon. The final word about life.’ He did not read them out. He happened to be thinking quite differently now. ‘The difference between portentosity and Satiecum-Tolleyism,’ he said, ‘ is the same as the difference between the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin, and this bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo.’
He was blankly contradicting himself. But, after all, why not?
Illidge wanted to go home and to bed; but Spandrell had insisted that he should spend at least an hour or two at Tantamount House.
‘You must get yourself seen,’ he said. ‘For the sake of the alibi. I’m going on to Sbisa’s. There’ll be a dozen people to vouch for me.’
Illidge agreed only under the threat of violence. He dreaded the ordeal of talking with anyone—even with someone so incurious, preoccupied and absent as Lord Edward. ‘I shan’t be able to stand it,’ he kept repeating, almost in tears. They had had to carry the body, trussed into the posture of a child in the womb—carry it amorously pressed in a close and staggering embrace—out of the door, down the steps into the roadway. A single greenish gas-lamp under the archway threw but a feeble light up the mews; enough, however, to have betrayed them, if anyone had happened to be passing the entrance as they carried their burden out and lifted it into the car. They had begun by dumping the thing on its back on the floor; but the up-drawn knees projected above the level of the carriage-work. Spandrell had to climb into the car and push and lug the heavy body on to its side, so that the knees rested on the edge of the back seat. They’ shut the doors, pulled the cover over and fastened it tautly into place. ‘Perfect,’ said Spandrell. He took his companion by the elbow. ‘You need a little more brandy,’ he added. But in spite of the brandy Illidge was still faint and tremulous when they drove away. Nor was Spandrell’s bungling with the mechanism of the unfamiliar car at all calculated to soothe his nerves. They had begun by backing violently into the wall at the end of the mews; and before he discovered the secret of the gears, Spandrell twice inadvertently stopped the engine. He relieved his irritation by a few curses and laughed. But to Illidge these little mishaps, entailing as they did a minute