Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [113]
‘But what have I got?’ Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes
‘What have I got?’ Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes. ‘What have I got?’
Lucy still frowned. ‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ she demanded, as though she were delivering an ultimatum. Walter did not answer, did not stir. ‘Oh, very well.’ She pushed him away. ‘Two can play at that game.’
Repelled, Walter anxiously bent down to kiss her. Her voice had been hard with menace; he was terrified of losing her. ‘I’m a fool,’ he said.
‘You are.’ Lucy averted her face.
‘I’m sorry.’
But she would not make peace. ‘No, no,’ she said, and when, with a hand under her cheek, he tried to turn her face back towards his kisses, she made a quick fierce movement and bit him in the ball of the thumb. Full of hatred and desire, he took her by force.
‘Still bothering about love?’ she asked at last, breaking the silence of that languid convalescence which succeeds the fever of accomplished desires.
Reluctantly, almost with pain, Walter roused himself to answer. Her question in that deep silence was like the spurt of a match in the darkness of the night. The night is limitless, enormous, pricked with stars. The match is struck and all the stars are instantly abolished; there are no more distances and profundities. The universe is reduced to a little luminous cave scooped out of the solid blackness, crowded with brightly lit faces, with hands and bodies and the near familiar objects of common life. In that deep night of silence Walter had been happy. Convalescent after the fever, he held her in his arms, hating no more, but filled with a drowsy tenderness. His spirit seemed to float in the warm serenity between being and annihilation. She stirred within his arms, she spoke, and that marvellous unearthly serenity wavered and broke like a smooth reflecting surface of water suddenly disturbed.
‘I wasn’t bothering about anything.’ He opened his eyes to find her looking at him, amused and curious. Walter frowned. ‘Why do you stare at me? ‘ he asked.
‘I didn’t know it was prohibited.’
‘Have you been looking at me like that all this time?’ The idea was strangely unpleasant to him.
‘For hours,’ Lucy answered. ‘But admiringly, I assure you. I thought you looked really charming. Quite a sleeping beauty.’ She was smiling, mockingly; but she spoke the truth. Aesthetically, with a connoisseur’s appreciation, she had really been admiring him as he lay there, pale, with closed eyes and as though dead, at her side.
Walter was not mollified by the flattery. ‘I don’t like you to exult over me,’ he said, still frowning.
‘Exult?’
‘As though you’d killed me.’
‘What an incorrigible romantic!’ She laughed. But it was true, all the same. He had looked dead; and death, in these circumstances, had something slightly ridiculous and humiliating about it. Herself alive, wakefully and consciously alive, she had studied his beautiful deadness. Admiringly, but with amused detachment, she had looked at this pale exquisite creature which she had used for her delight and which was now dead. ‘What a fool!’ she had thought. And ‘why do people make themselves miserable, instead of taking the fun that comes to them? ‘ She had expressed her thoughts in the mocking question which recalled Walter from his eternity. Bothering about love—what a fool!
‘All the same,’ insisted Walter, ‘you were exulting.’
‘Romantic, romantic!’ she jeered. ‘You think in such an absurdly unmodern way about everything. Killing and exulting over corpses and love and all the rest of it. It’s absurd. You might as well walk about in a stock and a swallow-tail coat. Try to be a little more up to date.’
‘I prefer to be human.’
‘Living modernly’s living quickly,’ she went on. ‘You can’t cart a waggon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days. When you travel by aeroplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind. The good old-fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly. But it’s too ponderous nowadays. There