Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [145]
‘And little Phil?’ she said, enquiring after her grandchild.
‘Radiant.’
‘Darling little man!’ The warmth of Mrs. Quarles’s affection enriched her voice and was visible as a light in her eyes. ‘You must have felt miserable, leaving him for such a long time.’
Elinor gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. ‘Well, I knew that Miss Fulkes and mother between them would look after him much better than I could do.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘I don’t believe nature ever meant me to have children. Either I’m impatient with them, or else I spoil them. Little Phil’s a pet, of course; but I know that a family would have driven me crazy.’
Mrs. Quarles’s expression changed. ‘But wasn’t it wonderful to see him again after all those months? ‘ The tone of the question was almost anxious. She hoped that Elinor would answer it with the enthusiastic affirmative which would have been natural in the circumstances to herself. But at the same time she was haunted by a fear lest the strange girl might answer (with the frankness which was so admirable a quality in her, but which was also so disquieting, in its revelation of unfamiliar and to Rachel incomprehensible states of soul) that she hadn’t been in the least pleased to see her child again. Elinor’s first words came to her as a relief.
‘Yes, it was wonderful,’ she said, but robbed the phrase of its full effect by adding. ‘I didn’t imagine I could be so glad to see him again. But it was really a wild excitement.’
There was a silence. ‘A queer girl,’ Mrs. Quarles was thinking; and her face reflected something of that bewilderment which she always felt in Elinor’s presence. She did her best to love her daughter-in-law; and up to a point she succeeded. Elinor had many excellent qualities. But something seemed to be lacking in her, something without which no human being could be entirely sympathetic to Rachel Quarles. It was as though she had been born without certain natural instincts. Not to have expected to feel happy when she saw her baby again—that was strange enough. But what Rachel found almost stranger was Elinor’s calm and casual admission of the fact. She herself would have blushed to make such an admission, even if it had been the truth. It would have seemed to her something shameful—a kind of blasphemy, a denial of what was holy. To Rachel the reverence for holy things came naturally. It was Elinor’s lack of this reverence, her inability even to realize that holy things were holy, which made it impossible for Mrs. Quarles to love her daughter-in-law as much as she would have liked.
On her side Elinor admired, respected and genuinely liked her husband’s mother. For her, the chronic difficulty was to establish effectual contact with a person whose ruling ideas and motives seemed to her so oddly incomprehensible and even so absurd. Mrs. Quarles was unobtrusively but ardently religious and lived to the best of her ability in accordance with her beliefs. Elinor admired, but felt that it was all rather absurd and superfluous. Her education had been orthodox. But she never remembered a time, even in her childhood, when she seriously believed what people told her about the other world and its inhabitants. The other world bored her; she was interested only in this. Confirmation had evoked in her no more enthusiasm than a visit to the theatre, indeed considerably less. Her adolescence had passed without the trace of a religious crisis.
‘It all seems to me just nonsense,’ she would say when the matter was discussed in her presence. And there was no affectation in her words, they were not uttered provocatively.