Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [161]
Philip shook his head. ‘A little too subtle for me.’
‘But just imagine yourself in the presence of a man you respect and like and admire more than you’ve ever admired and liked anyone before.’
Philip nodded. But in point of fact, he reflected, he had never deeply and whole-heartedly admired anyone. Theoretically, yes; but never in practice, never to the point of wanting to make himself a disciple, a follower. He had adopted other people’s opinions, even their modes of life—but always with the underlying conviction that they weren’t really his, that he could and certainly would abandon them as easily as he had taken them up. And whenever there had seemed any risk of his being carried away, he had deliberately resisted, had fought or fled for his liberty.
‘You’re overcome with your feeling for him,’ Spandrell continued. ‘And you go towards him with outstretched hands, offering your friendship and devotion. His only response is to put his hands in his pockets and turn away. What would you do then? ‘ Philip laughed. ‘I should have to consult Vogue’s Book of Etiquette.’
‘You’d knock him down. At least that’s what I would do. It would be a point of honour. And the more you’d admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcase. That’s why the whores and the alcohol weren’t avoidable. On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them. That life in France was like the life I’d been leading before the War—only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature. And after a year of it, I was desperately wangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death. Augustine was right, I tell you,; we’re damned or saved in advance. The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.’
‘Providential balderdash!’ said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second oldest Judge of the High Court just behind him. Twenty years before the odds against, his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at the rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one. But there, all the same, he was. He took another draught of claret.
And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and cars laid back; and how it suddenly started forward, dragging the carter along with it; and the rumble of the wheels; and, ‘Aie!’ his own scream; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.
And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount’s drawing-room. ‘Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.’
‘But what’s her secret?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Why should he have gone mad about her? Because he has gone mad. Literally.’
‘Isn’t it rather an obvious secret?’ said Elinor. What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should ever have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘Lucy’s very amusing and alive. And besides,’ she added, remembering Philip’s exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, ‘she has a bad reputation.’
‘But is that attractive? A bad reputation?’ The tea-pot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.
‘Of course. It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible. No sugar, thanks.’
‘But surely,’ said Marjorie, handing her the cup, men don’t want to share their mistress with other lovers.’
‘Perhaps not. But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope. “Where others have succeeded, I can succeed.” That’s the man’s argument. And at the same time a bad reputation makes