Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [47]
‘That depends on one’s tastes,’ said Burlap, making his face look arch and subtle as though he had said something rather daring, witty and at the same time profound.
‘But I don’t feel that it’s even true,’ Molly went on. I don’t strike myself as at all elemental or fairy-like. I’ve always considered myself a perfectly simple, straightforward child of nature. A sort of peasant, really.’ At this point in Molly’s performance all her other auditors had burst into laughing protestation. Baron Benito Cohen had vehemently declared that she was ‘ one of Nature’th Roman Empreththeth.’
Burlap’s reaction was unexpectedly different from that of the others. He wagged his head, he smiled with a far-away, whimsical sort of expression. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think that’s true. A child of nature, malgre tout. You wear disguises, but the simple genuine person shows through.’
Molly was delighted by what she felt was the highest compliment Burlap could pay her. She had been equally delighted by the others’ denials of her peasanthood. Denial had been their highest compliment. The flattering intention, the interest in her personality were the things that mattered. About the actual opinions of her admirers she cared little.
Burlap, meanwhile, was developing Rousseau’s antithesis between the Man and the Citizen. She cut him short and brought the conversation back to the original theme.
‘Human beings and fairies—I think it’s a very good classification, don’t you?’ She leaned forward with offered face and bosom, intimately. ‘Don’t you?’ she repeated the rhetorical question.
‘Perhaps.’ Burlap was annoyed at having been interrupted.
‘The ordinary human—yes, let’s admit it—all too ‘human being on the one hand. And the elemental on the other. The one so attached and involved and sentimental—I’m terribly sentimental, I may say.’ (‘About ath the ntimental ath the Thirenth in the Odyththey,’ had been Baron Benito’s classical comment.) ‘The other, the elemental, quite free and apart from things, like a cat; coming and going—and going just as lightheartedly as it came; charming, but never charmed; making other people feel, but never really feeling itself. Oh, I envy them their free airiness.’
‘You might as well envy a balloon,’ said Burlap, gravely. He was always on the side of the heart.
‘But they have such fun.’
‘They haven’t got enough feelings to have fun with. That’s what I should have thought.’
‘Enough to have fun,’ she qualified; ‘but perhaps not enough to be happy. Certainly not enough to be unhappy. That’s where they’re so enviable. Particularly if they’re intelligent. Take Philip Quarles, for example. There’s a fairy if ever there was one.’ She launched into her regular description of Philip. ‘Zoologist of fiction,’, ‘learnedly elfish,’ ‘a scientific Puck’ were a few of her phrases. But the best of them had slipped her memory. Desperately she hunted it, but it eluded her. Her Theophrastian portrait had to go out into the world robbed this time of its most brilliantly effective passage, and a little marred as a whole by Molly’s consciousness of the loss and her desperate efforts, as she poured forth, to make it good. ‘Whereas his wife,’ she concluded, rather painfully aware that Burlap had not smiled as frequently as he should have done, ‘is quite the opposite of a fairy. Neither elfish, nor learned, nor particularly intelligent.’ Molly smiled rather patronizingly. ‘A man like Philip must find her a little inadequate sometimes, to say the least.’ The smile persisted, a smile now of selfsatisfaction. Philip had had a faible for her, still had. He wrote such amusing letters, almost as amusing as her own. (‘Quand je veux briller dans le monde,’ Molly was fond of quoting her husband’s compliments, ‘je cite des phrases de tes lettres.’) Poor Elinor! ‘A little bit of a bore sometimes,’ Molly went on. ‘But mind you, a most charming creature. I’ve known her since we were children together. Charming, but not exactly a Hypatia.’ Too much of a fool even to realize that Philip was bound to be attracted by a woman of his own mental stature, a woman he could talk to on equal terms. Too much of a fool to notice, when she had brought them together, how thrilled he had been. Too much of a fool to be jealous. Molly had felt the absence of jealousy as a bit of an insult. Not that she ever gave real cause for jealousy. She didn