Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [123]
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because I’m committed to it. Because in some way it’s my destiny. Because that’s what life finally is—hateful and boring; that’s what human beings are, when they’re left to themselves—hateful and boring again. Because, once one’s damned, one ought to damn oneself doubly. Because…yes, because I really like hating and being bored.’
He liked it. The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone. The concert season was in full swing, there was opera at Covent Garden, all the theatres were open; but Spandrell only read the advertisements—the Eroica at the Queen’s Hall, Schnabel playing Op. 106 at the Wigmore, Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Little Tich at the Alhambra, Othello at the Old Vic, Charlie Chaplin at Marble Arch—read them very carefully and stayed at home. There was a pile of music on the piano, his shelves were full of books, all the London Library was at his disposal; Spandrell read nothing but magazines and the illustrated weeklies and the morning and evening papers. The rain went sliding incessantly down the dirty glass of the windows; Spandrell turned the enormous crackling pages of the Times. ‘The Duke of York,’ he read, having eaten his way, like a dung beetle’s maggot in its native element, through Births, Deaths and the Agony Column, through Servants and Real Estate, through Legal Reports, through Imperial and Foreign News, through Parliament, through the morning’s history, through the five leading articles, through Letters to the Editor, as far as Court and Personal and the little clerical essay on The Bible in Bad Weather,’ the Duke of York will be presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers Company on Monday next. His Royal Highness will take luncheon with the Master and Wardens of the Company after the presentation.’ Pascal and Blake were within reach, on the bookshelf. But ‘Lady Augusta Crippen has left England on the Berengaria. She will travel across America to visit her brother-in-law and sister, the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Spandrell laughed, and the laughter was a liberation, was a source of energy. He got up; he put on his mackintosh and went out. ‘The Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Still smiling, he turned into the public-house round the comer. It was early; there was only one other drinker in the bar.
‘But why should two people stay together and be unhappy?’ the barmaid was saying. ‘Why? When they can get a divorce and be happy?’
‘Because marriage is a sacrament,’ replied the stranger.
‘Sacrament yourself!’ the barmaid retorted contemptuously. Catching sight of Spandrell, she nodded and smiled. He was a regular customer.
‘Double brandy,’ he ordered, and leaning against the bar examined the stranger. He had a face like a choirboy’s—but a choirboy suddenly overwhelmed by middle age; chubby, prettily doll-like, but withered. The mouth was horribly small, a little slit in a rosebud. The cherub’s cheeks had begun to sag and were grey, like the chin, with a day’s beard.
‘Because,’ the stranger went on—and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of selfconsciousness, ‘because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. One flesh,’ he repeated and accompanied the wdrds by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter. He caught Spandrell’s eye, blushed, and to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.
‘What do you think, Mr. Spandrell?’ asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.
‘Of what? Of being one flesh?’ The barmaid nodded. ‘H’m. As a matter of fact, I was just envying the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter