Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [138]
Meanwhile, how charming the kitchen is! How sympathetic its inhabitants. Mrs. Inman has been in the house as long as Elinor. A miracle of aged beauty. And how serene, how aristocratically commanding! When one has been monarch of all one surveys for thirty years, one looks the royal part, even when all one surveys is only the kitchen. And then there is Dobbs, the parlourmaid. Dobbs has only been in the house since a little before the War. An invention of Rabelais. Six feet high and proportionately thick. And the enormous body houses Gargantua’s spirit. What broad humours, what a relish for life, what anecdotes, what facile and enormous laughter! Dobbs’s laughter is almost terrifying. And on a shelf of the pantry dresser I noticed, when we went to pay our respects, a green bottle, half full of pills—but pills like good-sized marbles, such as one blows down the throats of horses from a rubber hose. What Homeric indigestions they imply!
The kitchen is good; but so is the drawing-room. We came in from our afternoon walk to find the vicar and his wife talking Art over the tea-cups. Yes, Art. For it was their first call since their visit to the Academy.
It is an annual affair. Every year on the day following Ascension Day they take the 8.52 to town and pay the tribute that even Religion owes to Art—Established Religion and Established Art. They scour every corner of Burlington House annotating the catalogue as they go round, humorously, wherever humour is admissible—for Mr. Truby (who looks rather like Noah in a child’s ark) is one of those facetious churchmen who crack jokes in order to show that, in spite of the black coat and the reversed collar, they are ‘human,’ ‘good chaps,’ etc.
Plumply pretty Mrs. Truby is less uproariously waggish than her husband, but is none the less what upper middle-class readers of Punch would call a ‘thoroughly cheery soul,’ up to any amount of innocent fun and full of quaint remarks. I looked on and listened, fascinated, while Elinor drew them out about the parish and the Academy, feeling like Fabre among the coleoptera. Every now and then some word of the conversation would cross the spiritual abysses separating Elinor’s mother from her surroundings, would penetrate her reverie and set up a curious reaction. Oracularly, disconcertingly, with a seriousness that was almost appalling in the midst of the Truby waggeries, she would speak out of another world. And outside, meanwhile, the garden is green and flowery. Old Stokes the gardener has a beard and looks like Father Time. The sky is pale blue. There is a noise of birds. The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment’s notice wherever the fancy may suggest—it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something—the house, Mrs. Inman, Dobbs, facetious Truby from the parsonage, the tulips in the garden, and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something-for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder?
Lord Edward and his brother were taking the air in Gattenden Park. Lord Edward took it walking. The fifth Marquess took it in a bath chair drawn by a large grey donkey. He was a cripple. ‘Which luckily doesn’t prevent the mind from running,’ he was fond of saying. It had been running, mazily, hither and thither all his life. Meanwhile, the grey