Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [37]
‘How can he be so cruel? ‘ she wondered.
‘How can he, deliberately? Walter?’ Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good. It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having ‘those’ desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live together. She had loved even the weak and unadmirable manifestations of his considerateness; had loved him even when he let himself be overcharged by cabmen and porters, when he gave handfuls of silver to tramps with obviously untrue stories about jobs at the other end of the country and no money to pay the fare. He was too sensitively quick to see the other person’s point of view. In his anxiety to be just to others he was often prepared to be unjust to himself. He was always ready to sacrifice his own rights rather than run any risk of infringing the rights of others. It was a considerateness, Marjorie realized, that had become a weakness, that was on the point of turning into a vice; a considerateness, moreover, that was due to his timidity, his squeamish and fastidious shrinking from every conflict, even every disagreeable contact. All the same, she loved him for it, loved him even when it led him to treat her with something less than justice. For having come to regard her as a being on the hither side of the boundary between himself and the rest of the world, he had sometimes in his excessive considerateness for the rights of others, sacrificed not only his own rights, but also hers. How often, for example, she had told him that he was being underpaid for his work on the Literary World! She thought of the latest of their conversations on what was to him the most odious of topics.
‘Burlap’s sweating you, Walter,’ she had said.
‘The paper’s very hard up.’ He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people towards himself.
‘But why should you let yourself be swindled?’
‘I’m not being swindled.’ There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong. ‘And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh. After all, it’s my business.’
‘And mine!’ She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began. ‘If you knew the price of vegetables!’
He had flushed up and left the room without answering. The conversation, the case were typical of many others. Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself. She had never resented these injustices. They proved how closely he associated her with himself. But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness. The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else—somebody ruthless and full of hate—was deliberately making her suffer.
Lady Edward laughed. ‘One wonders what he saw in her, if she’s so deplorable as you make out.’
‘What does one ever see in anyone?’ John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone. Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill. An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccough. It often happened now. Just after eating. Bicarbonate didn’t seem to do much good. ‘In these matters,’ he added, ‘we’re all equally insane.’
‘Thanks!’ said Lady Edward, laughing.
Making an essay to be gallant, ‘Present company excepted,’ he said with a smile and a little bow. He stifled another hiccough. How miserable he was feeling! ‘ Do you mind if I sit down? ‘ he asked. ‘All this standing about…’ He dropped heavily into a chair.
Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing. She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.
‘It must