Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [118]
Burlap shook his head. ‘We must begin mildly,’ he said. He didn’t believe in Life to the point of taking any risks with the circulation.
‘Mildly, mildly,’ the other mockingly repeated. ‘You’re all the same, all you newspaper men. No jolts. Safety first. Painless literature. No prejudices extracted or ideas hammered in except under ail anaesthetic. Readers kept permanently in a state of twilight sleep. You’re hopeless, all of you.’
‘Hopeless,’ repeated Burlap penitently, ‘I know. But, alas, one simply must compromise a little with the world, the flesh and the devil.’
‘I don’t mind your doing that,’ Rampion answered. ‘What I resent is the disgusting way you compromise with heaven, respectability and Jehovah. Still, I suppose in the circumstances you can’t help it. Take what you want.’
Burlap made his selection. ‘I’ll take these,’ he said at last, holding up three of the least polemical and scandalous of the drawings. ‘Is that all right?’
Rampion glanced at them. ‘If you’d waited another week,’ he grumbled, ‘I’d have had that copy of Ary Scheffer ready for you.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Burlap with that wistfully spiritual expression which always came over his face when he began to speak about money, ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to pay much for them.’
‘Ah, well. I’m used to it,’ Rampion shrugged his shoulders. Burlap was glad he took it like that. And after all, he reflected, it was true. Rampion wasn’t used to being paid much. And with his way of living he did not need much. No car, no servants…
‘One wishes one could,’ he said aloud, drifting away into impersonality. ‘But the paper…’ He shook his head. ‘Trying to persuade people to love the highest when they see it doesn’t pay. One might manage four guineas a drawing.’
Rampion laughed. ‘Not exactly princely. But take them. Take them for nothing if you like.’
‘No, no,’ protested Burlap. ‘I wouldn’t do that. The World doesn’t live on charity. It pays for what it uses—not much, alas, but something, it pays something. I make a point of that,’ he went on, wagging his head, ‘even if I have to pay out of my own pocket. It’s a question of principle. Absolutely of principle,’ he insisted, contemplating with a thrill of justifiable satisfaction the upright and selfsacrificing Denis Burlap who paid contributors out of his own pocket and in whose existence he was beginning, as he talked, almost genuinely to believe. He talked on, and with every word the outlines of this beautifully poor but honest Burlap became clearer before his inward eyes; and at the same time the World crept closer and closer to the brink of insolvency, while the bill for lunch grew momently larger and larger, and his income correspondingly decreased. Rampion eyed him curiously. What the devil is he lashing himself up into a fury about this time? he wondered. A possible explanation suddenly occurred to him. When Burlap next paused for breath, he nodded sympathetically.
‘What you need is a capitalist,’ he said. ‘If I had a few hundreds or thousands to spare, I’d put them into the World. But alas, I haven’t. Not sixpence,’ he concluded, almost triumphantly, and the sympathetic expression turned suddenly into a grin.
That evening Burlap addressed himself to the question of Franciscan poverty. ‘Barefooted through the Umbrian hills she goes, the Lady Poverty.’ It was thus that he began his chapter. His prose, in moments of exaltation, was apt to turn into blank verse…. ‘Her feet are set on the white dusty roads that seem, to one who gazes from the walls of the little cities, taut stretched white ribbons in the plain below…’
There followed references to the gnarled olive trees, the vineyards, the terraced fields,’ the great white oxen with their curving horns,’ the little asses patiently carrying their burdens up the stony paths, the blue mountains, the hill towns in the distance, each like a little New Jerusalem in a picture book, the classical waters of Clitumnus and the yet more classical waters of Trasimene. ‘That was a land,’ continued Burlap, ‘and that a time when poverty