Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [215]
‘I’m stupid,’ she said apologetically. ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s so horrible to see him suffer. Helplessly. It’s dreadful. Even if one knows that it’ll be all right in the end.’
Mrs. Bidlake sighed. ‘Dreadful,’ she echoed,’dreadful,’ and closed her eyes in a meditative perplexity. There was a silence. ‘By the way,’ she went on, opening them again to look at her daughter, ‘I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don’t know whether her influence is always entirely good.’
‘Miss Fulkes’s influence?’ said Elinor, opening her eyes in astonishment. ‘But she’s the nicest, the most conscientious…’
‘Oh, not that, not that!’ said Mrs. Bidlake hastily. ‘Her artistic influence, I mean. When I went up to see Phil the day before yesterday I found her showing him such dreadfully vulgar pictures of a dog.’
‘Bonzo?’ suggested Elinor.
Her mother nodded. ‘Yes, Bonzo.’ She pronounced the word with a certain distaste. ‘If he wants pictures of animals, there are such excellent reproductions of Persian miniatures at the British Museum. It’s so easy to spoil a child’s taste…. But Elinor! My dear!’
Suddenly and uncontrollably, Elinor had begun to laugh. To laugh and to cry, uncontrollably. Grief alone she had been able to master. But grief allied with Bonzo was irresistible. Something broke inside her and she found herself sobbing with a violent, painful and hysterical laughter.
Mrs. Bidlake helplessly patted her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ she kept repeating. ‘Elinor!’
Roused from uneasy and nightmarish dozing, John Bidlake shouted furiously from the library. ‘Stop that cackling,’ commanded the angry-plaintive voice. ‘For God’s sake.’
But Elinor could not stop.
‘Screaming like parrots,’ John Bidlake went on muttering to himself.
‘Some idiotic joke. When one isn’t well…’
‘Now, for God’s sake,’ said Spandrell roughly, ‘pull yourself together.’
Illidge pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; he was afraid of being sick. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a moment,’ he whispered. But when he tried to walk, it was as though his legs were dead under him. It might have been a paralytic who dragged himself to the sofa.
‘What you need is a mouthful of spirits,’ said Spandrell. He crossed the room. A bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard, and from the kitchen he returned with glasses. He poured out two fingers of the spirit. ‘Here. Drink this.’ Illidge took and sipped. ‘One would think we were crossing the Channel,’ Spandrell went on with ferocious mockery, as he helped himself to brandy. ‘Study in green and ginger—that’s how Whistler would have described you now. Apple-green. Moss-green.’
Illidge looked at him for a moment, then turned away, unable to face the steady glance of those contemptuous grey eyes. He had never felt such hatred as he now felt for Spandrell.
‘Not to say frog-green, slime-green, scum-green,’ the other went on.
‘Oh shut up!’ cried Illidge in a voice that had recovered some of its resonance and hardly wavered. Spandrell’s mockery had steadied his nerves. Hate, like brandy, is a stimulant. He took another burning gulp. There was a silence.
‘When you feel like it,’ said Spandrell, putting down his emptied glass, ‘you can come and help me clear up.’ He rose and walked round the screen, out of sight.
Everard Webley’s body was lying where it had fallen, on its side, with the arms reaching out across the floor. The chloroform-soaked handkerchief still covered the face. Spandrell bent down and twitched it away. The temple which had been struck was against the floor; seen from above the face seemed unwounded.
His hands