Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [129]
The two ladies advanced across the room. Burlap pretended to be so deeply immersed in composition that he had not heard the opening of the door. It was only when the ladies had come to within a few feet of his table that he looked up from the paper on which he had been furiously scribbling—with what a start of amazement, what an expression of apologetic embarrassment! He sprang to his feet.
‘I’m so sorry. Forgive…I hadn’t noticed. One gets so deeply absorbed.’ The n’s and m’s had turned to d’s and b’s. He had a cold.’so idvolved id ode’s work.’
He came round the table to meet them, smiling his subtlest and most spiritual Sodoma smile. But, ‘Oh God!’ he was inwardly exclaiming. ‘What appalling females!’
‘And which,’ he went on aloud, smiling from one to the other,’ which, may I venture to ask, is Miss Saville?’
‘Neither of us,’ said the portly lady in a rather deep voice, but playfully and with a smile.
‘Or both, if you like,’ said the other. Her voice was high and metallic and she spoke sharply, in little spurts, and with an extraordinary and vertiginous rapidity. ‘Both and neither.’
And the two ladies burst into simultaneous laughter. Burlap looked and listened with a sinking heart. What had he let himself in for? They were formidable. He blew his nose; he coughed. They were making his cold worse.
‘The fact is,’ said the portly lady, cocking her head rather archly on one side and affecting the slightest lisp, ‘the fact ith…’
But the thin one interrupted her. ‘The fact is,’ she said pouring out her words so fast that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to articulate them at all, ‘that we’re a partnership, a combination, almost a conspiracy.’ She uttered her sharp shrill laugh.
‘Yeth, a conthpirathy,’ said the portly one lisping from sheer playfulness.
‘We’re the two parts of Romola Saville’s dual personality.’
‘I being the Dr. Jekyll,’ put in the portly one, and both laughed yet once more.
‘A conspiracy,’ thought Burlap with a growing sense of horror. ‘I should think it was!’
‘Dr. Jekyll, alias Ruth Goffer. May I introduce you to Mrs. Goffer?’
‘While I do the same for Mr. Hyde, alias Miss Hignett?’
‘While together we introduce ourselves as the Romola Saville whose poor poems you said such very kind things about.’
Burlap shook hands with the two ladies and said something about his pleasure at beefing the authors of work he had so much adbired. ‘But how shall I ever get rid of them?’ he wondered. So much energy, such an exuberance of force and will! Getting rid of them would be no joke. He shuddered inwardly. ‘They’re like steam engines,’ he decided. And they’d pester him to go on printing their beastly verses. Their obscene verses—for that’s what they were, in the light of these women’s age and energy and personal appearance—just obscene. ‘The bitches!’ he said to himself, feeling resentfully that they’d got something out of him on false pretences, that they’d taken advantage of his innocence and swindled him. It was at this moment that he caught sight of Miss Cobbett. She held up her bundle of proofs enquiringly. He shook his head. ‘Later,’ he said to her, with a dignified and editorial expression. Miss Cobbett turned away, but not before he had remarked the look of derisive triumph on her face. Damn the woman! It was intolerable.
‘We were so thrilled and delighted by your kind letter,’ said the stouter of the ladies.
Burlap smiled Franciscanly. ‘One’s glad to be able to do something for literature.’
‘So few take any interest.’
‘Yes, so few,’ echoed Miss Hignett. And speaking with the rapidity of one who tries to say ‘ Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper ‘ in the shortest