Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [51]
‘You just try. I’ll take you on with one hand tied behind my back.’
They all burst out laughing.
‘I put my money on Mary,’ said Spandrell, tilting back his chair. Smiling with a pleasure which he would have found it hard to explain, he looked from one to the other—from the thin, fierce, indomitable little man to the big golden woman. Each separately was good; but together, as a couple, they were better still. Without realizing it, he had quite suddenly begun to feel happy.
‘We’ll have it out one of these days,’ said Rampion and laid his hand for a moment on hers. It was a delicate hand, sensitive and expressive. An aristocrat’s hand if ever there was one, thought Spandrell. And hers, so blunt and strong and honest, was a peasant’s. And yet by birth it was Rampion who was the peasant and she the aristocrat. Which only showed what nonsense the genealogists talked.
‘Ten rounds,’ Rampion went on. ‘No gloves.’ He turned to Spandrell.
‘You ought to get married, you know,’ he said.
Spandrell’s happiness suddenly collapsed. It was as though he had come with a jolt to his senses. He felt almost angry with himself. What business had he to go and sentimentalize over a happy couple?’
I can’t box,’ he answered; and Rampion detected a bitterness in his jocularity, an inward hardening.
‘No, seriously,’ he said, trying to make out the expression on the other’s face. But Spandrell’s head was in the shadow, and the light of the interposed lamp on the table between them dazzled him.
‘Yes, seriously,’ echoed Mary. ‘You ought. You’d be a changed man.’
Spandrell uttered a brief and snorting laugh, and letting his chair fall back on to its four legs, leaned forward across the table. Pushing aside his coffee cup and his half-emptied liqueur glass, he planted his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. His face came into the light of the rosy lamp. Like a gargoyle, Mary thought, a gargoyle in a pink boudoir. There was one on Notre Dame in just that attitude, leaning forward with his demon’s face between his claws. Only the gargoyle was a comic devil, so extravagantly diabolical that you couldn’t take his devilishness very seriously. Spandrell was a real person, not a caricature; that was why his face was so much more sinister and tragical. It was a gaunt face. Cheekbone and jaw showed in hard outline through the tight skin. The grey eyes were deeply set. In the cadaverous mask only the mouth was fleshy—a wide mouth, with lips that stood out from the skin like two thick weals.
‘When he smiles,’ Lucy Tantamount had once said of him, ‘it’s like an appendicitis operation with ironical corners.’ The red scar was sensual, but firm at the same time and determined, as was the round chin below. There were lines round the eyes and at the corners of his lips. The thick brown hair had begun to retreat from the forehead.
‘He might be fifty, to look at him,’ Mary Rampion was thinking. ‘And yet, what is his age?’ She made calculations and decided that he couldn’t be more than thirty-two or thirty-three. Just the right age for settling down.
‘A changed man,’ she repeated.
‘But I don’t particularly want to be changed.’
Mark Rampion nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with you, Spandrell. You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice. You don’t want to be made healthy. You enjoy your unwholesomeness. You’re rather proud of it, even.’
‘Marriage would be the cure,’ persisted Mary, indefatigably enthusiastic in the cause of the sacrament to which she herself owed all her life and happiness.
‘Unless, of course, it merely destroyed the wife,’ said Rampion. ‘He might infect her with his own gangrene.’
Spandrell threw back his head and laughed profoundly, butt, as was his custom, almost inaudibly, a muted explosion. ‘Admirable!’ he said. ‘Admirable! The first really good argument in favour of matrimony I ever heard. Almost thou persuadest me, Rampion. I’ve never actually carried it as far as marriage.’
‘Carried what?’ asked Rampion, frowning a little. He disliked the other’s rather melodramatically cynical way of talking. So damned pleased with his naughtinesses! Like a stupid child, really.