Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [84]
‘But if none of them are either right or wrong—which is what you seem to feel—what’s the point?’
‘The point? But they might be amusing, they might be exciting.’
‘They could never be very exciting if you didn’t feel they were wrong.’ Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city. ‘Some people,’ he went on meditatively, trying to formulate the vague obscurities of his own feelings,’some people can only realize goodness by offending against it.’ But when the old offences have ceased to be felt as offences, what then? The argument pursued itself internally. The only solution seemed to be to commit new and progressively more serious offences, to have all the experiences, as Lucy would say in her jargon. ‘One way of knowing God,’ he concluded slowly, ‘is to deny Him.’
‘My good Maurice!’ Lucy protested.
‘I ‘1 stop.’ He laughed. ‘But really, if it’s a case of “my good Maurice”’ (he imitated her tone), ‘if you’re equally unaware of goodness and offence against goodness, what is the point of having the sort of experiences the police interfere with?’
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Curiosity. One’s bored.’
‘Alas, one is.’ He laughed again. ‘All the same, I do think the cobbler should stick to his last.’
‘But what is my last?’
Spandrell grinned. ‘Modesty,’ he began, ‘forbids…’
CHAPTER XIII
Walter travelled down to Fleet Street feeling not exactly happy, but at least calm—calm with the knowledge that everything was now settled. Yes, everything had been settled; everything—for in the course of last night’s emotional upheaval, everything had come to the surface. To begin with, he was never going to see Lucy again; that was definitely decided and promised, for his own good as well as for Marjorie’s. Next he was going to spend all his evenings with Marorie. And finally he was going to ask Burlap for more money. Everything was settled. The very weather seemed to know it. It was a day of white insistent mist, so intrinsically calm that all the noises of London seemed an irrelevance. The traffic roared and hurried, but somehow without touching the essential stillness and silence of the day. Everything was settled; the world was starting afresh—not very exultantly, perhaps, not at all brilliantly, but with resignation, with a determined calm that nothing could disturb.
Remembering the incident of the previous evening, Walter had expected to be coldly received at the office. But on the contrary, Burlap was in one of his most genial moods. He too remembered last night and was anxious that Walter should forget it. He called Walter ‘old man’ and squeezed his arm affectionately, looking up at him from his chair with those eyes that expressed nothing, but were just holes into the darkness inside his skull. His mouth, meanwhile, charmingly and subtly smiled. Walter returned the ‘old man’ and the smile, but with a painful consciousness of insincerity. Burlap always had that effect on him; in his presence, Walter never felt quite honest or genuine. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. With Burlap he was always, in some obscure fashion, a liar and a comedian. And at the same time all that he said, even when he was speaking his innermost convictions, became a sort of falsehood.
‘I liked your article on Rimbaud,’ Burlap declared, still pressing Walter’s arm, still smiling up at him from his tilted swivel chair.
‘I’m glad,’ said Walter, feeling uncomfortably that the remark wasn’t really addressed to him, but to some part of Burlap’s own mind which had whispered, ‘You ought to say something nice about his article,’ and was having its demands duly satisfied by another part of Burlap’s mind.
‘What a man!’ exclaimed Burlap. ‘That was someone who believed in Life, if you like!’
Ever since Burlap had taken over the editorship, the leaders of the Literary World had almost weekly proclaimed the necessity of believing in Life. Burlap’s belief in Life was one of the things Walter found most disturbing. What did the words mean? Even now he hadn