Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [186]
Didn’t he understand? Or was it that he simply didn’t care? Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt him at all; the punishment wouldn’t punish. That would be humiliating. But after all, she would go on to remind herself, whenever she had arrived (yet once more) at this point in her inward argument, after all it wasn’t only or mainly to punish Philip, it wasn’t primarily to teach him humanity by pain and jealousy, that she was going to take a lover. It was in the interest of her own happiness. (She would try to forget how very wretched the pursuit of her own happiness made her.) Her own independent happiness. She had grown accustomed to think and act too exclusively in relation to Philip. Even when she planned to take a lover, it was still of him that she thought. Which was absurd, absurd.
But these self-reminders of her right, her intention to be independently happy, had to be constantly repeated. Her natural and habitual mode of thinking even about a possible lover was still in terms of her husband—of his conversion, or his punishment. It was only by an effort, deliberately, that she could remember to forget him.
But anyhow, for whatever reasons she might do it, to take a lover had seemed, in advance, a matter of no great psychological difficulty. Particularly if the lover were to be Everard Webley. For she liked Everard, very much; she admired him; she felt herself strangely moved and thrilled by the power that seemed to radiate out of him. And yet, when it came to the point of physical contact with the man, what extraordinary difficulties at once arose! She liked to be with him, she liked his letters, she could imagine, when he did not touch her, that she was in love with him. But when, at their second meeting after her return, Everard took her in his arms and kissed her, she was seized with a kind of horror, she felt herself turning colk and stony in his embrace. It was the same horror, Ehe same coldness as she had felt, nearly a year before, when he had first tried to kiss her. The same, in spite of the fact she had prepared herself in the interval to feel differently, had accustomed her conscious mind to the idea of taking him as a lover. That horror, that wincing coldness were the spontaneous reactions of the instinctive and habitual part of her being. It was only her mind that had decided to accept. Her feelings, her body, all the habits of her instinctive self were in rebellion. What her intellect found harmless, her stiffened and shrinking body passionately disapproved. The spirit was a libertine, but the flesh and its affections were chaste.
‘Please, Everard,’ she begged, ‘please.’
He let her go. ‘Why do you hate me?’
‘But I don’t, Everard.’
‘I only give you the creeps, that’s all!’ he said with a savage derision. Hurt, he took a pleasure in opening his own wound. ‘I merely disgust you.’
‘But how can you say such a thing?’ She felt wretched and ashamed of her shrinking; but the sense of repulsion still persisted.
‘Because it happens to be true.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ At the words Everard stretched out his hands again. She shook her head. ‘But you mustn’t touch me,’ she begged. ‘Not now. It would spoil everything. I can’t explain why. I don’t know why. But not now. Not yet,’ she added, implicitly promising but meanwhile avoiding.
The implication of a promise revived his importunity. Elinor was half sorry that she had pronounced the words, half glad that she had, to this extent, committed herself. She was relieved to have escaped from the immediate menace of his bodily contact, and at the same time angry with