Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [233]
‘Deaf?’ echoed Dr. Crowther, when she told him of her dreadful discovery. ‘Common symptom.’
‘But isn’t there anything to be done about it?’ she asked. The trap was closing on her again, the trap from which she had imagined herself free when that terrible screaming had quieted into silence.
Dr. Crowther shook his head, briskly, but only once each way. He did not speak. A foot-pound saved is a foot-pound gained.
‘But we can’t let him be deaf,’ she said, when the doctor was gone, appealing with a kind of incredulous despair to her husband. ‘We can’t let him be deaf.’ She knew he could do nothing; and yet she hoped. She realized the horror; but she refused to believe in it.
‘But if the doctor says there isn’t anything to be done…’
‘But deaf?’ she kept repeating, questioningly.’deaf, Phil? Deaf?’
‘Perhaps it’ll pass off by itself,’ he suggested consolingly and wondered, as he spoke the words, whether she still imagined that the child would recover.
Early next morning when, in her dressing-gown, she tiptoed upstairs for nurse’s report on the night, she found the child already awake. One eyelid was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.
‘He can’t open it,’ the nurse explained. ‘It’s paralysed.’
Between those long and curly lashes, which she had so often envied him, Elinor could see that the eyeball had rolled away to the exterior corner of the eye and was staring out sideways in a fixed unseeing squint.
‘Why the devil,’ said Cuthbert Arkwright, in the tone of one who has a personal grievance, ‘why the devil doesn’t Quarles come back to London?’ He hoped to extort from him a preface to his new illustrated edition of the Mimes of Herondas.
The rustication, Willie Weaver explained polysyllabically, was not voluntary. ‘His child’s ill,’ he added, uttering his little cough of self-applause; ‘it seems very reluctant, as they would say in Denmark, to absent itself from felicity much longer.’
‘Well, I wish it would hurry up about it,’ grumbled Arkwright. He frowned. ‘Perhaps I’d better try to get hold of someone else for my preface.’
At Gattenden the days had been like the successive stages of an impossibly horrible dream. When he had been deaf for a couple of days, little Phil ceased also to see. The squinting eyes were quite blind. And after nearly a week’s respite there was a sudden recurrence of the pain of the first days; he began to scream. Later he was seized several times with violent attacks of convulsions; it was as though a devil had entered into him and were torturing him from within. Then, one side of his face and half his body became paralysed and the flesh began to waste almost visibly from off his bones, like wax melting away in the heat of some inward and invisible fire. Trapped by her helplessness and by that horrible sense of guilt, which the news of Everard’s murder had enormously intensified, Elinor sat by her child’s bed and watched the phases of the malady succeeding one another—each one worse, it seemed to her, than the last, each more atrociously impossible. Yes, impossible. For such things could not, did not happen. Not to oneself at any rate. One’s own child was not gratuitously tortured and deformed before one’s eyes. The man who loved one and whom one had (oh wrongly, guiltily and as it had turned