Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [52]
‘The process of infection. I’d always stopped this side of the registry office. But I’ll cross the threshold next time.’ He drank some more brandy. ‘I’m like Socrates,’ he went on. ‘I’m divinely appointed to corrupt the youth, the female youth more particularly. I have a mission to educate them in the way they shouldn’t go.’ He threw back his head to emit that voiceless laugh of his. Rampion looked at him distastefully. So theatrical. It was as though the man were overacting in order to convince himself he was there at all.
‘But if you only knew what marriage could mean,’ Mary earnestly put in. ‘If you only knew…’
‘But, my dear woman, of course he knows,’ Rampion interrupted with impatience.
‘We’ve been married more than fifteen years now,’ she went on, the missionary spirit strong within her. ‘And I assure you…’
‘I wouldn’t waste my breath, if I were you.’
Mary glanced enquiringly at her husband. Wherever human relationships were concerned, she had an absolute trust in Rampion’s judgment. Through those labyrinths he threaded his way with a sure tact which she could only envy, not imitate. ‘He can smell people’s souls,’ she used to say of him. She herself had but an indifferent nose for souls. Wisely then, she allowed herself to be guided by him. She glanced at him. Rampion was staring into his coffee cup. His forehead was puckered into a frown; he had evidently spoken in earnest. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said and lit another cigarette.
Spandrell looked from one to the other almost triumphantly. ‘I have a regular technique with the young ones,’ he went on in the same too cynical manner. Mary shut her eyes and thought of the time when she and Rampion had been young.
CHAPTER IX
‘What a blotch!’ said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley. Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke. The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach. The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows. ‘Our poor view! It oughtn’t to be allowed. It really oughtn’t.’
‘Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,’ quoted her brother George.
The other young man was more practically minded. ‘If one could plant a battery here,’ he suggested, ‘and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place…’
‘It would be a good thing,’ said Mary emphatically. ‘A really good thing.’
Her approval filled the military young man with happiness. He was desperately in love. ‘Heavy, howitzers,’ he added, trying to improve on his suggestion. But George interrupted him.
‘Who the devil is that?’ he asked.
The others looked round in the direction he was pointing. A stranger was walking up the hill towards them.
‘No idea,’ said Mary, looking at him.
The stranger approached. He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind—for he wore no hat. He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey flannel trousers. His tie was red; he walked without a stick.
‘Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,’ said George.
And indeed, the young man was coming straight towards them. He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important business.
‘What an extraordinary face!’ thought Mary, as he approached. ‘But how ill he looks! So thin, so pale.’ But his eyes forbade her to feel pity. They were bright with power.
He came to a halt in front of them drawing up his thin body very rigidly, as though he were on parade. There was defiance in the attitude, an earnest defiance in the expression of his face. He looked at them fixedly with his bright eyes, turning from one to the other.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. It was costing him an enormous effort to speak. But speak he must, just because of that insolent unawareness in their blank rich faces.
Mary answered for the others. ‘Good afternoon.’
‘I’m trespassing here,’ said the stranger. ‘Do you mind?’ The seriousness of his defiance deepened. He looked at them sombrely. The young men were examining him from the other side of the bars, from a long way off, from the vantage ground of another class. They had noticed his clothes. There was hostility and contempt in their eyes. There was also a kind of fear.