Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [14]
‘Fanny Logan,’ Lady Edward whispered back. ‘But do keep quiet.’
‘People talk of the tribute vice pays to virtue,’ John Bidlake went on, incorrigibly. ‘But everything’s permitted nowadays-there’s no more need of moral hypocrisy. There’s only intellectual hypocrisy now. The tribute philistinism pays to art, what? Just look at them all paying it-in pious grimaces and religious silence!’
‘You can be thankful they payyou in guineas,’ said Lady Edward. ‘And now I absolutely insist that you should hold your tongue.’
Bidlake made a gesture of mock terror and put his hand over his mouth. Tolley voluptuously waved his arms; Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers scraped. And Bach, the poet, meditated of truth and beauty.
Fanny Logan felt the tears coming into her eyes. She was easily moved, especially by music; and when she felt an emotion, she did not try to repress it, but abandoned herself whole-heartedly to it. How beautiful this music was, how sad, and yet how comforting! She felt it within her, as a current of exquisite feeling, running smoothly but irresistibly through all the labyrinthine intricacies of her being. Even her body shook and swayed in time with the pulse and undulation of the melody. She thought of her husband; the memory of him came to her on the current of the music, of darling, darling Eric, dead now almost two years; dead, and still so young. The tears came faster. She wiped them away. The music was infinitely sad; and yet it consoled. It admitted everything, so to speak-poor Eric’s dying before his time, the pain of his illness, his reluctance to go-it admitted everything. It expressed the whole sadness of the world, and from the depths of that sadness it was able to affirm-deliberately, quietly, without protesting too much-that everything was in some way right, acceptable. It included the sadness within some vaster, more comprehensive happiness. The tears kept welling up into Mrs. Logan’s eyes; but they were somehow happy tears, in spite of her sadness. She would have liked to tell Polly, her daughter, what she was feeling. But Polly was sitting in another row. Mrs. Logan could see the back of her head, two rows further forward, and her slim little neck with the pearls that darling Eric had given her on her eighteenth birthday, only a few months before he died. And suddenly, as though she had felt that her mother was looking at her, as though she understood what she was feeling, Polly turned round and gave her a quick smile. Mrs. Logan’s sad and musical happiness was complete. Her mother’s were not the only eyes that looked in Polly’s direction. Advantageously placed behind and to one side of her, Hugo Brockle admiringly studied her profile. How lovely she was! He was wondering whether he would have the courage to tell her that they had played together in Kensington Gardens when they were children. He would come up to her when the music was over and boldly say: ‘We were introduced in our perambulators, you know.’ Or, if he wanted to be more unconventionally witty, ‘You’re the person who hit me on the head with a battledore.’
Looking restlessly round the room, John Bidlake had suddenly caught sight of Mary Betterton. Yes, Mary Betterton-that monster! He put his hand under his chair, he touched wood. Whenever John Bidlake saw something unpleasant, he always felt safer if he could touch wood. He didn’t believe in God, of course; he liked to tell disobliging stories about the clergy. But wood, wood-there was something about wood…. And to think that he had been in love with her, wildly, twenty, twenty-two, he dared not think how many years ago. How fat, how old and hideous! His hand crept down again to the chair leg. He averted his eyes and tried to think of something that wasn’t Mary Betterton. But the memories of the time when Mary had been young imposed themselves upon him. He still used to ride then. The image of himself on a black horse, of Mary on a bay, rose up before him. They had often gone riding in those days.