Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [135]
‘Nobody to meet us,’ she said, and her tone was mournful.
‘You could hardly expect them to hang about, waiting,’ Philip replied. He hated anything in the nature of a fuss. For him, the perfect homecoming would have been in a cloak of invisibility. This was a good second best.
They got out of the car. The front door was open. They entered. In the silent, empty hall three and a half centuries of life had gone to sleep. The sunlight stared through flat-arched windows. The panelling had been painted pale green in the eighteenth century. All ancient oak and high-lights, the staircase climbed up, out of sight, towards the higher floors. A smell of potpourri faintly haunted the air; it was as though one apprehended the serene old silence through another sense.
Elinor looked round her, she took a deep breath, she drew her finger-tips along the polished walnut wood of a table, with the knuckle of a bent forefinger she rapped the round Venetian bowl that stood on it; the glassy bell-note lingered sweetly on the perfumed silence.
‘Like the Sleeping Beauty,’ she said. But even as she spoke the words, the spell was broken. Suddenly, as though the ringing glass had called the house back to life, there was sound and movement. Somewhere upstairs a door opened, through the sanitary noise of rushing water came the sound of Phil’s piercing young voice; small feet thudded along the carpet of the corridor, clattered like little hoofs on the naked oak of the stairs. At the same moment a door on the ground floor flew open and the enormous form of Dobbs, the parlourmaid, hastened into the hall.
‘Why, Miss Elinor, I never heard you…’
Little Phil rounded the last turn of the staircase. At the sight of his parents he gave a shout, he quickened his pace; he almost slid from step to step.
‘Not so fast, not so fast!’ his mother called anxiously and ran towards him.
‘Not so fast!’ echoed Miss Fulkes hurrying down the stairs behind. And suddenly, from the morningroom, which had a door leading out into the garden, Mrs. Bidlake appeared, white and silent and with floating veils, like an imposing phantom. In a little basket she carried a bunch of cut tulips; her gardening scissors dangled at the end of a yellow ribbon. T’ang the Third followed her, barking. There was a confusion of embracing and handshaking. Mrs. Bidlake’s greetings had the majesty of ritual, the solemn grace of an ancient and sacred dance. Miss Fulkes writhed with shyness and excitement, stood first on one leg and then on the other, went into the attitudes of fashion-plates and mannequins and from time to time piercingly laughed. When she shook hands with Philip, she writhed so violently that she almost lost her balance.
‘Poor creature!’ Elinor had time to think between the answering and asking of questions. ‘How urgently she needs marrying! Much worse than when we left.’
‘But how he’s grown!’ she said aloud. ‘And how he’s ‘changed!’ She held the child at arm’s length with the gesture of a connoisseur who stands back to examine a picture. ‘He used to be the image of Phil. But now…’ She shook her head. Now the broad face had lengthened, the short straight nose (the comical ‘cat’s nose’ which in Philip’s face she had always laughed at and so much loved) had grown finer and faintly aquiline, the hair had darkened. ‘Now he’s exactly like Walter. Don’t you think so?’ Mrs. Bidlake remotely nodded. ‘Except when he laughs,’ she added. ‘His laugh’s pure Phil.’
‘What have you brought me?’ asked little Phil almost anxiously. When people went away and came back again, they always brought him something. ‘Where’s my present?’
‘What a question!’ Miss Fulkes protested, blushing with vicarious shame, and writhing.
But Elinor and Philip only laughed.
‘He’s Walter when he’s serious,’ said Elinor.
‘Or you.’ Philip looked from one to the other.
‘The first minute your father and mother arrive!’ Miss Fulkes continued her reproaches.
‘Naughty!’ the child retorted and threw back his head with a little movement of anger and pride.
Elinor, who had