Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [103]
Miss Fulkes sat by the window, looking out at the sunny garden, but not consciously seeing it. What she saw was behind the eyes, in a fanciful universe. She saw herself—herself in that lovely Lanvin frock that had been illustrated last month in Vogue, with pearls, dancing at Ciro’s, which looked (for she had never been at Ciro’s) curiously like the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where she had been. ‘How lovely she looks!’ all the people were saying. She walked swayingly, like that actress she had seen at the London Pavilion—what was her name? She held out her white hand; it was young Lord Wonersh who kissed it, Lord Wonersh, who looked like Shelley and lived like Byron and owned half Oxford Street and had come to the house last February with old Mr. Bidlake and had perhaps spoken to her twice. And then, all at once, she saw herself riding in the Park. And a couple of seconds later she was on a yacht in the Mediterranean. And then in a motor car. Lord Wonersh had just taken his seat beside her, when the noise of T’ang’s shrill barking startlingly roused her to consciousness of the lawn, the gay tulips, the Wellingtonia and, on the other side, the schoolroom. Miss Fulkes felt guilty, she had been neglecting her charge.
‘Well, Phil,’ she asked, turning round briskly to her pupil, ‘what are you drawing?’
‘Mr. Stokes and Albert pulling the mow-lawner,’ Phil answered, without looking up from his paper.
‘Lawn-mower,’ Miss Fulkes corrected.
‘Lawn-mower,’ Phil dutifully repeated.
‘You never get your compound words right,’ Miss Fulkes continued. ‘Mow-lawner, hopgrasser, crack-nutter—it’s a sort of mental defect, like mirror-writing, I suppose.’ Miss Fulkes had taken a course in educational psychology. ‘You must’really try to correct it, Phil,’ she added, earnestly. After so long and flagrant a dereliction of duty (at Ciro’s, on horseback, in the limousine with Lord Wonersh) Miss Fulkes felt it incumbent upon her to be particularly solicitous, scientifically so: she was a very conscientious young woman. ‘Will you try?’ she insisted.
‘Yes, Miss Fulkes,’ the child answered. He had no idea what she wanted him to try to do. But it would keep her quiet if he said yes. He was busy on a particularly difficult bit of his drawing.
Miss Fulkes sighed and looked out of the window again. This time she consciously perceived what her eyes saw. Mrs. Bidlake wandered among the tulips, dressed flowingly in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, a sort of Pre-Raphaelitic ghost. Every now and then she paused and looked at the sky. Old Mr. Stokes the gardener, passed carrying a rake; the tips of his white beard fluttered gently in the breeze. The village clock struck the half-hour. The garden, the trees, the fields, the wooded hills in the distance were always the same. Miss Fulkes felt all at once so hopelessly sad that she could have cried.
‘Do mow-lawners, I mean lawn-mowers, have wheels?’ asked little Phil, looking up with a frown of effort and perplexity wrinkling his forehead. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Yes. Or let me think…’ Miss Fulkes also frowned; ‘no. They have rollers.’
‘Rollers! ‘ cried Phil. ‘That’s it.’ He attacked his drawing again with fury.
Always the same. There seemed to be no escape, no prospect of freedom. ‘If I had a thousand pounds,’ thought Miss Eulkes, ‘a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds.’ The words were magical. ‘A thousand pounds.’
‘There!’ cried Phil. ‘Come and look.’ He held up his paper. Miss Fulkes got up and crossed to the table. ‘What a lovely drawing!’ she said.
‘That’s all the little bits of grass flying up,’ said Phil, pointing to a cloud of dots and dashes in the middle