Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [15]
CHAPTER III
Two flights up, between the piano nobile and the servants’ quarters under the roof, Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory.
The younger Tantamounts were generally military. But the heir being a cripple, Lord Edward’s father had destined him for the political career, which the eldest sons had always traditionally begun in the Commons and continued majestically in the Lords. Hardly had Lord Edward come of age, when he was given a constituency to nurse. He nursed it dutifully. But oh, how he hated public speaking! And when one met a potential voter, what on earth was one to say? And he couldn’t even remember the main items in the Conservative party programme, much less feel enthusiastic about them. Decidedly, politics were not his line.
‘But what are you interested in? ‘ his father had asked. And the trouble was that Lord Edward didn’t know. Going to concerts was about the only thing he thoroughly enjoyed. But obviously, one couldn’t spend one’s life going to concerts. The fourth marquess could not conceal his anger and disappointment. ‘The boy’s an imbecile,’ he said, and Lord Edward himself was inclined to agree. He was good for nothing, a failure; the world had no place for him. There were times when he thought of suicide.
‘If only he’d sow a few wild oats!’ his father had complained. But the young man was, if possible, even less interested in debauchery than in politics. ‘And he’s not even a sportsman,’ the accusation continued. It was true. The massacre of birds, even in the company of the Prince of Wales, left Lord Edward quite unmoved, except perhaps by a faint disgust. He preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything. But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory. The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time. But what was the good of that? Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun. He might go on reading like this for the rest of his days; but it would never help him to achieve anything.
On the afternoon of April 18th, 1887, he was sitting in the library at Tantamount House, wondering whether life was worth living and whether drowning were preferable, as a mode of dying, to shooting. It was the day that the Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell’s, condoning the Phoenix Park murders. The fourth marquess had been in a state of apoplectic agitation ever since breakfast. At the clubs men talked of nothing else. ‘I suppose it’s very important,’ Lord Edward kept saying to himself. But he found it impossible to take much interest either in Parnellism or in crime. After listening for a little to what people were saying at the club, he went home in despair. The library door was open; he entered and dropped into a chair, feeling utterly exhausted as though he had come in from a thirty-mile walk. ‘I must be an idiot,’ he assured himself, when he thought of other people’s political enthusiasms and his own indifference. He was too modest to attribute the idiocy to the other people. ‘I’m hopeless, hopeless.’ He groaned aloud, and in the learned silence of the vast library the sound was appalling. Death; the end of everything; the river; the revolver…. Time passed. Even about death, Lord Edward found, he could not think consecutively and attentively. Even death was a bore. The current Quarterl1y lay on the table beside him. Perhaps it would bore him less than death was doing. He picked it up, opened it casually and found himself reading a paragraph in the middle of an article about someone called