Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [172]
‘But, my dyah child! Mr. Quarles protested. Hadn’t she promised to come back with him?
‘I’ve changed my mind. Tell the driver.’
The thought that, after three days of fervid anticipation, he would have to pass the evening in solitude was agonizing. ‘But, Gladys, my darling…’
‘Tell the driver.’
‘But it’s ryahly too cruel; you’re too unkind.’
‘Better write to the Times about it,’ was all her answer. ‘I’ll tell the driver myself.’
After a night of insomnia and suffering Mr. Quarles went out as soon as the shops were open and bought a fourteen-guinea wrist watch.
The advertisement was for a dentifrice. But as the picture represented two fox-trotting young people showing their teeth at one another in an amorous and pearly smile and as the word began with a D, little Phil unhesitatingly read ‘dancing.’
His father laughed. ‘You old humbug!’ he said. ‘I thought you said you could read.’
‘But they are dancing,’ the child protested.
‘Yes, but that isn’t what the word says. Try again.’ He pointed.
Little Phil glanced again at the impossible word and took a long look at the picture. But the fox-trotting couple gave him no help. ‘Dynamo,’ he said at last in desperation. It was the only other word beginning with a D that he could think of at the moment.
‘Or why not dinosaurus, while you’re about it?’ mocked his father. ‘Or dolicocephalous? Or dicotyledon?’ Little Phil was deeply offended; he could not bear to be laughed at. ‘Try again. Try to read it this time. Don’t guess.’
Little Phil turned his head away. ‘It bores me,’ he said. His vanity made him reluctant to attempt what he could not achieve successfully. Miss Fulkes, who believed in teaching by rational persuasion and with the reasoned consent of the taught (she was still very young), had lectured him on his own psychology, in the hope that, once he had realized his defects, he would mend them. ‘You’ve got the wrong sort of pride,’ she had told him. ‘You’re not ashamed of being a dunce and not knowing things. But you are ashamed of making mistakes. You’d rather not do a thing at all than do it badly. That’s quite wrong.’ Little Phil would nod his head and say ‘Yes, Miss Fulkes’ in the most rational and understanding way imaginable. But he continued to prefer doing things not at all to doing them with difficulty and badly. ‘It bores me,’ he repeated. ‘But would you like me to make you a drawing?’ he suggested, turning back to his father with a captivating smile. He was always ready to draw; he drew well.
‘No thanks. I’d like you to read,’ said Philip.
‘But it bores me.’
‘Never mind. You must try.’
‘But I don’t want to try.’
‘But I want you to. Try.’
Little Phil burst into tears. Tears, he knew, were an irresistible weapon. And, sure enough, they proved their value yet once more.
Elinor looked up from where she was sitting, dissociated, book in hand, at the other end of the room. ‘Don’t make him cry,’ she called. ‘It’s so bad for him.’
Philip shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you imagine that’s the way to educate a child…’ he said with a bitterness that the occasion did not justify, a bitterness gradually accumulated during the past weeks of silence and distant hostility, of self-questioning and ineffective self-reproach, and finding now an almost irrelevant expression.
‘I don’t imagine anything,’ said Elinor in a cold hard voice. ‘I only know that I don’t want him to cry.’ Little Phil redoubled his noise. She called him to her and took him on to her knee.
‘But seeing that he has the misfortune to be an only child, one really ought to make the effort not to spoil him.’
Elinor pressed her cheek against the boy’s hair.’seeing that he is an only child,’ she said, ‘ I don’t see why he shouldn’t be treated as one.’
‘You’re hopeless,’ said Philip. ‘It’s high time we settled down, so that the boy can have a chance of being brought up rationally.’
‘And who’s going to do the rational upbringing?’ asked Elinor. ‘You?’ She laughed sarcastically. ‘At the end of a week you’d be so bored that you’d either commit suicide or take the first aeroplane to Paris and not come