Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [171]
‘One would think you were a blessed saint to hear you talk,’ said Gladys sarcastically, when he had paused for breath in the midst of one of his Corner House denunciations of the extravagant and greedy. ‘You!’ Her laughter was mockingly savage.
Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. He was used to being listened to respectfully, as an Olympian. Gladys’s tone was ribald and rebellious; he didn’t like it; it even alarmed him.
He raised his chin with dignity and fired a dropping shot of rebuke upon her head. ‘It isn’t a question of myah personalities,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s a question of general principles.’
‘I can’t see any difference,’ retorted Gladys, abolishing at one stroke all the solemn pretensions of all the philosophers and moralists, all the religious leaders and reformers and Utopia-makers from the beginning of human time.
What exasperated Gladys most was the fact that even in the world of the Maison Lyons and cheap seats, Mr. Quarles did not abandon his Olympian pretensions and his Olympian manners. His indignation, when one evening there was a crowd on the stairs leading to the Upper Circle was loud and righteous. ‘A ryahl scandal!’ he called it.
‘One would think you’d taken the royal box,’ said Gladys sarcastically.
And when, at a tea-shop, he complained that the one-and-fourpenny slice of salmon tasted as though it had come from British Columbia rather than from Scotland, she advised him to write to the Times about it. The discovery tickled her fancy and, after that, she was always ironically telling him to write to the Times. Did he complain, a noble and disillusioned philosopher, of the shallowness of politicians and the sordid triviality of political life, Gladys bade him write to the Times. He was eloquent about iniquitous Mrs. Grundy and English illiberality; let him write to the Times. It was a ryahl scandal that neither Sir Edward Grey nor Lloyd George should have been able to speak French; the Times again was indicated. Mr. Quarles was hurt and outraged. Nothing like this had ever happened before. In the company of his other mistresses the consciousness of his superiority had been a serene happiness. They had worshipped and admired; he had felt himself a god. And during the first days Gladys too had seemed a worshipper. But coming to pray, she had stayed to mock. His spiritual happiness was ruined. If it had not been for the bodily solace which the species in her provided, Mr. Quarles would have quickly exhausted the subject of local self-government under the Mauryas and stayed at home. But there was in Gladys a more than usually large admixture of undifferentiated species. It was too much for Mr. Quarles. The derisive individual in her pained and repelled him; but the attraction of what was generic, of the whole feminine species, the entire sex, was stronger than that individual repulsion. In spite of her mockery, Mr. Quarles returned. The claims of the Indians became increasingly peremptory.
Realizing her power, Gladys began to withhold what he desired. Perhaps he could be blackmailed into the generosity which it was not in his nature to display spontaneously. Returning from a very inexpensive evening at Lyons’ and the pictures, she pushed him angrily away when, in the taxi, he attempted the usual endearments.
‘Can’t you leave me in peace?’ she snapped. And a moment later, ‘Tell the driver to go to my place first and drop me.