Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [194]
‘Don’t they smell simply divine!’ she exclaimed, rapturously sniffing. ‘Too divine!’
The corners of Spandrell’s mouth twitched into a smile. It amused him to hear the cast-off locutions of duchesses in the mouth of this ageing prostitute. He looked at her. Poor Connie! She was a skeleton at the feast—more gruesomely deathly for being covered with so much loose and sagging flesh. Really gruesome. There was no other word. Here, in the sun, she was like a piece of stage scenery seen by daylight and from close at hand. That was why he had gone to the expense of hiring the Daimler and taking her out—just because the poor superannuated punk was so gruesome. He nodded. ‘Quite nice,’ he said. ‘But I prefer your scent.’
They walked on. A little uncertain already of the distinction between a second and a minor third, a cuckoo was calling. In the slanting corridors of sunlight tunnelled through the green and purple of the forest shadows the little flies jerkily danced and zigzagged. There was no wind, the leaves hung down heavy with greenness. The trees were as though gorged with sap and sunshine.
‘Lovely, lovely,’ was Connie’s refrain. The place, the day reminded her, she said, of her childhood in the country. She sighed.
‘And you wish you’d been a good girl,’ said Spandrell sarcastically. ‘“The roses round the door make me love mother more.” I know, I know.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What I hate about trees in the summer,’ he went on, ‘is their beastly fat complacency. Bulging—that’s what they are; like bloated great profiteers. Bulging with insolence, passive insolence.’
‘Oh, the foxgloves!’ cried Connie, who hadn’t even been listening. She ran towards them, grotesquely unsteady on her high heels. Spandrell followed her.
‘Pleasingly phallic,’ he said, fingering one of the spikes of unopened buds. And he went on to develop the conceit, profusely.
‘Oh, be quiet, be quiet,’ cried Connie. ‘How can you say such things?’ She was outraged, wounded. ‘How can you—here?’
‘In God’s country,’ he mocked. ‘How can I?’ And raising his stick he suddenly began to lay about him right and left, slash, slash, breaking one of the tall proud plants at every stroke. The ground was strewn with murdered flowers.
‘Stop, stop!’ She caught at his arm. Silently laughing, Spandrell wrenched himself away from her and went on beating down the plants. ‘Stop! Please! Oh, don’t, don’t.’ She made another dash at him. Still laughing, still laying about him with his stick, Spandrell dodged away from her.
‘Down with them,’ he shouted, ‘down with them.’ Flower after flower fell under his strokes. ‘There!’ he said at last, breathless with laughter and running and slashing. ‘There!’ Connie was in tears.
‘How could you?’ she said ‘How could you do it?’
He laughed again, silently, throwing back his head. ‘Serve them right,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m going to sit still and let myself be insulted? The insolence of the brutes! Ah, there’s another!’ He stepped across the glade to where one last tall foxglove stood as though hiding among the hazel saplings. One stroke was enough. The broken plant fell almost noiselessly.
‘Damn their insolence! It serves them right. Let’s come back to the car.’
CHAPTER XXX
Rachel Quarles had no sympathy with those sentiA mental philanthropists who blur the distinction between right and wrong, between wrong-doers and the righteous. Criminals, in her eyes, and not the society in which they lived, were responsible for their crimes. Sinners committed their own sins; their environment did not do it for them. There were excuses, of course, palliations, extenuating circumstances. But good was always good, bad remained bad. There were circumstances in which the choice of good was very difficult; but it was always the individual who made the choice and who, having made, must answer for it. Mrs. Quarles, in a word, was a Christian and not a humanitarian. As a Christian she thought that Marjorie had done wrong to leave her husband—even such a husband as Carling—for another