Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [25]
‘Dear Mrs. Betterton!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is delightful.’ But he disguised his repugnance very badly. And when she addressed him by his Christian name— ‘Now, John,’ she said, ‘you must give us an answer to our question,’ and she laid her hand on Lucy’s arm, so as to associate her in the demand—old Bidlake was positively indignant. Familiarity from a memento mori—it was intolerable. He’d give her a lesson. The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous. Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul. Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure. Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables. True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing. Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive. It was the same with women. He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality. It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts. He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane. When one is in high spirits, memento mori’s cease to remind.
‘John, you’re incorrigible,’ said Mrs. Betterton, indulgently. She turned to Lucy, smiling. ‘But he doesn’t mean a word he says.’
‘I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,’ objected Lucy. ‘I’ve noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.’
Old Bidlake laughed.
‘Because they’re the ones who know women most intimately.’
‘Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.’
‘But I assure you,’ Mrs. Betterton insisted, ‘he doesn’t mean it. I knew him before you were born, my dear.’
The gaiety went out of John Bidlake’s face. The memento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton’s flabby mask.
‘Perhaps he was different then,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose. We’re dangerous company, Uncle John. You ought to be careful.’
She had started one of Mrs. Betterton’s favourite hares. That lady dashed off in serious pursuit. ‘It’s the upbringing,’ she explained. ‘Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays. No wonder they’re cynical.’ She proceeded eloquently. Children were given too much, too early. They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle. ‘I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen’ she declared, with pride.
‘My poor dear lady!’
‘I began going when I was six,’ said Lucy.
‘And dances,’ Mrs. Betterton continued. ‘The hunt ball—what an excitement! Because it only happened once a year.’ She quoted Shakespeare.
‘Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since seldom coming, in the long year set,
Like stones of worth they thinly placed….
‘They’re a row of pearls nowadays.’
‘And false ones at that,’ said Lucy.
Mrs. Betterton was triumphant. ‘False ones-you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t “blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure” by daily wear. Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age. A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.’
‘And what’s your remedy? ‘ enquired John Bidlake. ‘If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,’ he added ironically.
‘Naughty!’ cried Mrs. Betterton with an appalling playfulness. Then, becoming serious, ‘The remedy,’ she went on, ‘is fewer diversions.’
‘But I don’t want them fewer,’ objected John Bidlake. ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘they must be strongerprogressively.’
‘Progressively?’ Mrs. Betterton repeated. ‘But where would that sort of progress end?