Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [37]
‘Really, my darling,’ he protested. He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals. But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically. It was the same with the food. There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish. But he had managed, none the less, to eat it. Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind driving it away,’ she whispered. Her face expressed her inward agony. ‘You know how much I detest them.’
Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr. Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda. With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform. It flopped down heavily into the garden below. Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems. The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky. Not a leaf stirred. It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced. Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it. But this stifling darkness…Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.
‘You were saying, Mr. Sita Ram?’
But Mr. Sita Ram’s first fine careless rapture had evaporated. ‘I was re-reading some of de works of Morley to-day,’ he announced
‘Golly! ‘ said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang. It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.
But Mr. Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that ‘ Golly.’ ‘What a tinker!’ he pursued. ‘What a great tinker! And de style is so chaste.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘Dere are some good phrases,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on ‘I wrote dem down.’ He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘But dey were good phrases. Sometimes one reads a whole book widout finding a single phrase one can remember or quote. What’s de good of such a book, I ask you?’
‘What indeed?’
Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates. A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance. Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr. Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat. Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom. They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea. The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats—large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.
Under the influence of the champagne, Mr. Sita Ram recovered his eloquence. His latest oration re-uttered itself.
‘Dere is one law for de English,’ he said, ‘and anoder for de Indians, one for de oppressors and anoder for de oppressed. De word justice has eider disappeared from your vocab’lary, or else it has changed its meaning.’
‘I’m inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,’ said Philip.
Mr. Sita Ram paid no attention. He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent. ‘Consider de case,’ he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control), ‘of de unfortunate station-master of Bhowanipore.’
But Philip refused to consider it. He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning. Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country. It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.
The station-master of Bhowanipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.
‘But why don’t you teach them birth control, Mr. Sita Ram? ‘ Elinor had asked. These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince. She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born. And after all, she had had chloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet. Whereas the wife of the station-master of Bhowanipore… She had heard accounts of Indian midwives. She shuddered. ‘Isn’t it the only hope for India?’
Mr. Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government. He went on with the station-master