Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [157]
‘Very serious as far as Walter’s concerned. As for duration—who knows? But Lucy’s going abroad very soon.’
‘Thank heaven for small mercies! Ah, here you are!’ It was Walter. ‘And there’s Illidge.’ He waved his hand. The newcomers refused an aperitive. ‘Let’s come and eat at once, then,’ said Philip.
The dining-room at Philip’s club was enormous. A double row of stucco Corinthian pillars supported a gilded ceiling. From the pale chocolate-brown walls, the portraits of distinguished members, now deceased, glared down. Curtains of claretcoloured velvet were looped up at either side of the six windows, a claretcoloured carpet muffled the floor and in their claretcoloured liveries the waiters darted about almost invisibly, like leaf-insects in a forest.
‘I always like this room,’ said Spandrell as they entered. ‘It’s like a scene for Belshazzar’s feast.’
‘But a very Anglican Belshazzar,’ Walter qualified.
‘Gosh!’ exclaimed Illidge, who had been looking round
‘This is the sort of thing that really does make me feel pleb-ish.’
Philip laughed, rather uncomfortably. Changing the subject, he pointed out the protectively coloured waiters. They proved the Darwinian hypothesis. ‘Survival of the fittest,’ he said as they sat down at their appointed table. ‘The men in other colours must have been killed off by infuriated members.’ One of the claretcoloured survivors brought the fish. They began to eat.
‘It’s curious,’ said Illidge, pursuing the train of thought suggested by his first impressions of the room, ‘it’s really extraordinary that I should be here at all. Sitting with you, at any rate, as a guest. For there wouldn’t have been anything so very surprising about my being here in one of these wine-coloured coats. That at least would have been in harmony with what the parsons would call “my station in life.”’ He uttered a brief resentful laugh. ‘But to be sitting with you—that’s really almost incredible. And it’s all due to the fact that a Manchester shopkeeper had a son with tendencies to scrofula. If Reggie Wright had been normally healthy, I’d probably be cobbling shoes in Lancashire. But luckily Reggie had tubercle bacilli in his lymph-system. The doctors prescribed a country life. His father took a cottage in our village for his wife and child, and Reggie went to the village school. But his father was ambitious for Reggie. (What a disgusting little rat he was!) ‘ Illidge remarked parenthetically. ‘Wanted him to go to Manchester Grammar School, later on. With a scholarship. Paid our schoolmaster to give him special coaching. I was a bright boy; the master liked me. While he was coaching Reggie, he thought he might as well coach me. Gratis, what’s more. Wouldn’t let my mother pay a penny. Not that she could have done so very easily, poor woman. The time came, and it was I who got the scholarship. Reggie failed.’ Illidge laughed. ‘Miserable scrofulous little squit! But I’m eternally grateful to him and the busy bacilli in his glands. But for them I’d be carrying on my uncle’s cobbling business in a Lancashire village. And that’s the sort of thing one’s life hinges on—some absolutely absurd, million-to-one chance. An irrelevance, and youi life’s altered.’
‘Not an irrelevance,’ objected Spandrell. ‘Your scholarship wasn’t irrelevant; it was very much to the point, it was in harmony with you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have won it, you wouldn’t be here. I doubt if anything is really irrelevant. Everything that happens Jis intrinsically like the man it happens to.’
‘That’s a bit oracular, isn’t it?’ Philip objected. ‘Perceiving events, men distort them—put it like that—so that what happens seems to be like themselves.’
Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘There may be that sort of distortion. But I believe that events come ready-made to fit the people they happen to.’
‘What rot!’ said Illidge, disgustedly.
Philip dissented more politely. ‘But many people can be influenced by the same event in entirely different and characteristic ways.’
‘I know,’ Spandrell answered. ‘But in some indescribable way the event’s modified, qualitatively