Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [124]
The stranger ordered another whiskey. ‘But joking apart,’ he said, ‘the sacrament of marriage…’
‘But why should two people be unhappy? ‘ persisted the barmaid. ‘When it isn’t necessary?’
‘Why shouldn’t they be unhappy?’ Spandrell enquired. ‘Perhaps it’s what they’re here for. How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?’
A positivist, the barmaid laughed. ‘What rot!’
‘But the Anglicans don’t regard it as a sacrament,’ Spandrell continued.
The choirboy writhed indignantly. ‘Do you take me for an Anglican?’
The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation. Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously. In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalents of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy, of poetry and a week-end with Cleopatra, of big-game hunting and music. The choirboy ordered another drink.
‘What an age we live in!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Barbarous. Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.’
‘Not to mention hygienic truths,’ said Spandrell. ‘These damp clothes! And not a window.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.
The choirboy shuddered and held up his hands. ‘But what a handkerchief!’ he exclaimed, ‘what a horror!’
Spandrell held it out for inspection. ‘It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,’ he said. It was a silk bandana, red with bold patterns in black and pink. ‘Extremely expensive, I may add.’
‘But the colour, my dear sir. The colour!’
‘I like it.’
‘But not at this. season of the year. Not between Easter and Whitsun. Impossible! The liturgical colour is white.’ He pulled out his own handkerchief. It was snowy. ‘And my socks.’ He lifted a foot.
‘I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.’
‘White, white,’ said the choirboy. ‘It’s prescribed. Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white. Not to mention the fact that to-day’s the feast of St. Natalia the Virgin. And white’s the colour for all virgins who aren’t also martyrs.’
‘I should have thought they were all martyrs,’ said Spandrell. ‘That is, if they’ve been virgins long enough.’
The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. Outside was loneliness and the damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact. The choirboy began to talk of little St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin-miners. He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.
‘Another wet Derby,’ prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company and with fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls. The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever,—a steam of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening. Into Spandrell’s face the withered choirboy breathed alcohol and poetry.
‘To and fro, to and fro,
Piran of Perranzabuloe,’
he intoned. Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacing. He had lost his selfconsciousness. The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep. A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.
‘Walked weightless,’
he continued,
‘Walked weightless on the heaving seas
Among the Cassiterides.’
‘That was Piran’s chief miracle,’ he explained; ‘walking from Land’s End to the Scilly Islands.’
‘Pretty nearly the world’s record, I should think,’ said Spandrell.
The other shook his head. ‘There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales. But I can’t remember his name. Miss!’ he called. ‘Here! Another whiskey, please.’
‘I must say,’ said Spandrell, ‘you seem to make the best