Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [81]
‘Walter!’
It was with the feelings of a condemned criminal when the warders come to wake him on the morning of his execution that he answered, putting an imitation of astonishment into his voice: ‘Are you awake, Marjorie?’ He got up and walked, as though from the condemned cell to the scaffold, into her room.
‘Do you want to make me die, Walter?’
Like a dog in a ditch, alone. He made as if to take her in his arms. Marjorie pushed him away. Her misery had momentarily turned to anger, her love to a kind of hatred and resentment. ‘Don’t be a hypocrite on top of everything else,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you tell me frankly that you hate me, that you’d like to get rid of me, that you’d be glad if I died? Why can’t you be honest and tell me?’
‘But why should I tell you what isn’t true?’ he protested.
‘Are you going to tell me that you love me, then?’ she asked sarcastically.
He almost believed it while he said so; and besides it was true, in a way.
‘But I do, I do. This other thing’s a kind of madness. I don’t want to. I can’t help it. If you knew how wretched I felt, what an unspeakable brute.’ All that he had ever suffered from thwarted desire, from remorse and shame and self-hatred seemed to be crystallized by his words into a single agony. He suffered and he pitied his own sufferings. ‘If you knew, Marjorie.’ And suddenly something in his body seemed to break. An invisible hand took him by the throat, his eyes were blinded with tears and a power within him that was not himself shook his whole frame and wrenched from him, against his will, a muffled and hardly human cry.
At the sound of this dreadful sobbing in the darkness beside her, Marjorie’s anger suddenly fell. She only knew that he was unhappy, that she loved him. She even felt remorse for her anger, for the bitter words she had spoken.
‘Walter. My darling.’ She stretched out her hands, she drew him down towards her. He lay there like a child in the consolation of her embrace.
‘Do you enjoy tormenting him?’ Spandrell enquired, as they walked towards the Charing Cross Road.
‘Tormenting whom? ‘ said Lucy. ‘Walter? But I don’t.’
‘But you don’t let him sleep with you?’ said Spandrell. Lucy shook her head. ‘And then you say you don’t torment him! Poor wretch!’
‘But why should I have him, if I don’t want to?’
‘Why indeed? Meanwhile, however, keeping him dangling’s mere torture.’
‘But I like him,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s such good company. Too young, of course; but really rather perfect. And I assure you, I don’t torment him. He torments himself.’
Spandrell delayed his laughter long enough to whistle for the taxi he had seen at the end of the street. The cab wheeled round and came to a halt in front of them. He was still silently laughing when they climbed in. ‘Still, he only gets what’s due to him,’ Spandrell went on from his dark corner. ‘He’s the real type of murderee.’
‘Murderee?’
‘It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cutthroats are born to be hanged. You can see it in their faces. There’s a victim type as well as a criminal type. Walter’s the obvious victim; he fairly invites maltreatment.’
‘Poor Walter!’
‘And it’s one’s duty,’ Spandrell went on, ‘to see that he gets it.’
‘Why not to see that he doesn’t get it, poor lamb?’
‘One should always be on the side of destiny. Walter’s manifestly born to catch it. It’s one’s duty to give his fate a helping hand. Which I’m glad to see you’re already doing.’
‘But I tell you, I’m not. Have you a light?’ Spandrell struck a match. The cigarette between her thin lips, she leaned forward to drink the flame. He had seen her leaning like this, with the same swift, graceful and ravenous movement, leaning towards him to drink his kisses. And the face that approached him now was focussed and intent on the flame, as he had seen it focussed and intent upon the inner illumination of approaching pleasure. There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half a dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings. She drew back; Spandrell threw the match out of the window. The red cigarette end brightened and faded in the darkness.