Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [127]
Discussing him with Elinor, ‘Philip was the last person,’ his mother had once said, ‘the very last person such an accident ought to have happened to. He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more, if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world. It meant no games, to begin with; and no games meant fewer contacts with other boys, more solitude, more leisure for books. And then (poor Phil!) it meant fresh causes for shyness. A sense of inferiority. Children can be so horribly ruthless; they used to laugh at him sometimes at school. And later, when girls began to matter, how I wish he’d been able to go to dances and tennis parties! But he couldn’t waltz or play. And of course he didn’t want to go as an onlooker and an outsider. His poor smashed leg began by keeping him at a physical distance from girls of his own age. And it kept him at a psychological distance, too. For I believe he was always afraid (secretly, of course, and without admitting it) that they might laugh at him, as some of the boys did; and he didn’t want to run the risk of being rejected in favour of someone who wasn’t handicapped as he was. Not that he’d ever have taken very much interest in girls,’ Mrs. Quarles had added.
And Elinor had laughed. ‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’
‘But he wouldn’t have got into such a habit of deliberately avoiding them. He wouldn’t have so systematically retired from all personal contacts—and not with girls only; with men, too. Intellectual contacts—those are the only ones he admits.’
‘It’s as though he only felt safe among ideas,’ Elinor had said.
‘Because he can hold his own there; because he can be certain of superiority. He’s got into the habit of feeling afraid and suspicious outside that intellectual world. He needn’t have. And I’ve always tried to reassure him and tempt him out; but he won’t let himself be tempted, he creeps back into his shell.’ And after a silence, ‘it’s had only one good result,’ she had added, ‘the accident, I mean. It saved him from going to the War, from being killed, probably. Like his brother.’
The launch began to move towards the shore. From being an impending wall of black iron, the liner, as they receded, became a great ship, seen in its entirety. Fixed motionless between the sea and the blue glare of the sky, it looked like the advertisement of tropical cruises in the window of a Cockspur Street shipping office.
‘It was an impertinence to ask,’ Philip was thinking. ‘What business was it of his whether I’d been damaged in the War? How they go on gloating over their War, those professional soldiers! Well, I can be thankful I kept out of the bloody business. Poor Geoffrey!’ He thought of his dead brother.
‘And yet,’ Mrs. Quarles had concluded after a pause, ‘in a certain sense I wish he had gone to the War. Oh, not for fire-eating patriotic reasons. But because, if one could have guaranteed that he wouldn’t have been killed or mangled, it would have been so good for him—violently good, perhaps; painfully good; but still good. It might have smashed his shell for him and set him free from his own prison. Emotionally free; for his intellect’s free enough already. Too free, perhaps, for my old-fashioned taste.’ And she had smiled rather sadly. ‘Free to come and go in the human world, instead of being boxed up in that indifference of his.’
‘But isn’t the indifference natural to him?’ Elinor had objected.
‘Partly. But in part it’s a habit. If he could break the habit, he’d be so much happier. And I think he knows it, but can’t