Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [223]
‘Look out,’ she warned. ‘I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.’ She took hold of one of his dark curls.
‘Pax, pax!’ he begged, reverting to the vocabulary of the preparatory school. ‘I’ll let go. The real reason,’ he added, ‘why little boys don’t like fighting with little girls is simply that little girls are so much more ruthless and ferocious.’
Beatrice laughed again. There was a silence. She felt a little breathless and fluttering, as one feels when one is anxiously expecting something to happen. ‘Head bad?’
she asked
‘Rather bad.’ She stretched out a hand and touched his forehead.
‘Your hand’s magical,’ he said. With a quick unexpected movement he wriggled round sideways under the sheets and laid his head on her lap. ‘There,’ he whispered and, with a sigh of contentment, closed his eyes.
For a moment Beatrice was taken aback, almost frightened. That dark head lying hard and heavy on her thighs—it seemed strange, terrifying. She had to suppress a little shudder before she could feel glad at the confiding childishness of his movement. She began stroking his forehead, stroking his scalp through the thick dark curls. Time passed. The soft warm silence enveloped them once more, the dumb intimacy of contact was reestablished. She was no longer domineering in her protective solicitude, only tender. The armour of her hardness was as though melted away from her, melted away in this warm intimacy along with the terrors which made it necessary.
Burlap sighed again. He was in a kind of blissful doze of sensual passivity.
‘Better?’ she asked in a soft whisper.
‘Still rather bad on the side,’ he whispered back. ‘Just over the ear.’ And he rolled his head over so that she could more easily reach the painful spot, rolled it over so that his face was pressed against her belly, her soft belly that stirred so livingly with her breathing, that was so warm and yielding against his face.
At the touch of his face against her body Beatrice felt a sudden renewal of those spasmodic creepings of apprehension. Her flesh was terrified by the nearness of that physical intimacy. But as Burlap did not stir, as he made no dangerous gesture, no movement towards a closer contact, the terrors died gradually down and their flutterings served only to enhance and intensify that wonderful warm emotion of tenderness which succeeded them. She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again. The warmth of his breathing was against her belly. She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with apprehensions and anticipations. Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through its terrors, timidly desired.
‘Better?’ she whispered again.
He made a little movement with his head and pressed his face closer to her soft flesh.
‘Shall I stop now?’ she went on, ‘shall I go away?’
Burlap raised his head and looked at her. ‘No, no,’ he implored. ‘Don’t go. Not yet. Don’t break the magic. Stay here for a moment longer. Lie down here for a moment under the quilt. For a moment.’
Without speaking she stretched herself out beside him and he drew the quilt over her, he turned out the light.
The fingers that caressed her arm under its wide sleeve touched delicately, touched spiritually and as it were disembodiedly, like the fingers of those inflated rubber gloves that brush so thrillingly against one’s face in the darkness of seances, bringing comfort from the Great Beyond and a message of affection from the loved ones who have passed over. To caress and yet be a spiritualized rubber glove at a seance, to make love but as though from the Great Beyond—that was Burlap’s talent. Softly, patiently, with an infinite disembodied gentleness he went on caressing. Beatrice’s armour was melted quite away. It was the soft younggirlish, tremulous core of her that Burlap caressed with that delicate touch of spirit fingers from the Great Beyond. Her armour was gone; but she felt so wonderfully safe with Denis. She felt no fears, or at least only such faint breathless flutterings of her still almost childish flesh as served to quicken her happiness. She felt so wonderfully safe even when