Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [159]
‘Give us the credit of coming down heads,’ said Philip laughing. ‘We’re the intelligentsia, remember.’ Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity, as an irrelevance. The subject for him was a serious one. ‘When I think of myself,’ he said, ‘I feel sure that everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance. As a young boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something entirely different from this actual Me.’
‘A little angel, what?’ said Illidge.
Spandrell ignored the interruption. ‘But from the time that I was fifteen onwards, things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.’ He was silent.
‘And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings. A sad story. Has it ever struck you,’ Illidge went on, turning towards Walter, ‘you who are an expert on art, or at least ought to be—has it ever struck you that the paintings of angels are entirely incorrect and unscientific?’ Walter shook his head. ‘A seventy-kilogram man, if he developed wings, would have to develop colossal muscles to work them. And big flying muscles would mean a correspondingly large sternum, like a bird’s. A ten-stone angel, if he wanted to fly as well as a duck, would have to have a breastbone projecting at least four or five feet. Tell your father that, next time he wants to paint a picture of the Annunciation. All the existing Gabriels are really shockingly improbable.’
Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and how they were all—the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the spectacle of a flower or a landscape—in some way bound up with his sentiment for his mother, somehow rooted and implied in it. He remembered that Girls’ School in Paris, those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets. The book had been written in the age when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic fashion, when ‘kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt.’ The seductive and priapic major’s moustaches had been long, curly and waxed. What shame he had felt and what remorse! Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for strength! And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother. To resist temptation was to be worthy of her. Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God. He had begun to triumph. And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. Major Knoyle’s moustaches were also curly.
‘Augustine and the Calvinists were right,’ he said aloud, breaking in on the discussion of Seraphim’s breastbones.
‘Still harping?’ said Illidge.
‘God means to save some people and damn others.’
‘Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation, and (c)…’
‘When I think of the War,’ Spandrell went on, interrupting him, ‘what it might have been for me and what in fact it was…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, Augustine was right.’
‘Well, I must say,’ said Philip, ‘I’ve always been very grateful to Augustine, or whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg. It prevented me from being a hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.’
Spandrell looked at him; the corers of his wide mouth ironically twitched. ‘Your accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life. In other words, the event was like you. Just as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me. I’d been up at Oxford a year, when it began,’ he went on.
‘The dear old College, what?’ said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some derisive comment.
‘Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs—discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination. Such an apocalypse, the first real