Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [215]
‘No, I can’t, I really can’t,’ he protested when Spandrell had told him that he must spend the evening at Tantamount House.
‘All the same,’ said the other, ‘you’re damned well going to,’ and he headed the car into the Mall. ‘I ‘1 drop you at the door.’
‘No, really!’
‘And if necessary kick you in.’
‘But I couldn’t stand being there, I couldn’t stand it.’
‘This is an extremely nice car,’ said Spandrell pointedly changing the subject.’delightful to drive.’
‘I couldn’t stand it,’ Illidge whimperingly repeated.
‘I believe the makers guarantee a hundred miles an hour on the track.’
They turned up past St. James’s Palace into Pall Mall.
‘Here you are,’ said Spandrell, drawing up at the kerb. Obediently, Illidge got out, crossed the pavement, climbed the steps and rang the bell. Spandrell waited till the door had closed behind him, then drove on into St. James’s Square. Twenty or thirty cars were parked round the central gardens. He backed in among them, stopped the engine, got out and walked up to Piccadilly Circus. A penny’bus-ride took him to the top of the Charing Cross Road. The trees of Soho Square shone green in the lamplight at the end of the narrow lane between the factory buildings. Two minutes later he was at Sbisa’s, apologizing to Burlap and Rampion for being so late.
‘Ah, here you are,’ said Lord Edward.’so glad you’ve come.’
Illidge mumbled vague apologies for not having come sooner. An appointment with a man. About business. But suppose, he wondered in terror while he spoke, suppose Lord Edward should ask what man, what business? He wouldn’t know what to answer; he would utterly break down. But the Old Man seemed not even to have heard his excuses.
‘Afraid I must ask you to do a little arithmetic for me,’ he said in his deep blurred voice. Lord Edward had made himself a tolerably good mathematician; but ‘sums’ had always been beyond his powers. He had never been able to multiply correctly. And as for long division—it was fifty years since he had even attempted it. ‘I’ve got the figures here.’ He tapped the notebook that lay open in front of him on the desk. ‘It’s for the chapter on phosphorus. Human interference with the cycle. How much P2 05 did we find out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?’ He turned a page. ‘Four hundred thousand tons. That was it. Practically irrecoverable. Just thrown away. Then there’s the stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three-quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide in every body. Restored to the earth, you may say.’ Lord Edward was ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut, every shift of advocacy. ‘But how inadequately!’ he swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to bits. ‘Huddling bodies together in cemeteries! How can you expect the phosphorus to get distributed? It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency. Now, given three-quarters of a kilo of P2 05. for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an average deathrate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored every year to the earth? You can do sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.’ Illidge sat in silence, shielding his face with his hand. ‘But then one has to remember,’ the Old Man continued, ‘ that there are a lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that the phosphorus is taken out of circulation. Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick vaults. The only people more wasteful than we are the Indians. Burning bodies and throwing the ashes into rivers! But the Indians are stupid about everything. The way they burn all the cow-dung instead of putting it back on the land. And then they’re surprised that half the population hasn’t enough to eat. We shall have to make a separate calculation about the Indians. I haven’t got the figures, though. But meanwhile will you work out the grand total for the world? And another, if you don