Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [38]
‘Poor Walter!’ said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped. ‘And he has such a talent.’
John Bidlake snorted contemptuously. Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing—by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time. She changed the subject.
‘And Elinor?’ she asked. ‘When’s your Elinor coming home? Elinor and Quarles?’
‘Leaving Bombay to-morrow,’ John Bidlake answered telegraphically. He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.
CHAPTER VI
The Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India. One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose. It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments. There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it. At the word ‘fountain,’ it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr. Sita Ram’s plate.
‘Burke and Bacon,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on sonorously, ‘Milton and Macaulay…’
‘Oh, look!’ Elinor Quarles’s voice was shrill with alarm. She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backwards. Mr. Sita Ram turned towards her.
‘What’s de matter?’ he asked in a tone of annoyance. It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.
Elinor pointed. A very large grey toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda. In the silence its movements were audible—a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.
‘De toad can do no harm,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.
Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband. The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.
‘Really, my darling,’ he protested. He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals. But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically. It was the same with the food. There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish. But he had managed, none the less, to eat it. Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind driving it away,’ she whispered. Her face expressed her inward agony. ‘You know how much I detest them.’
Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr. Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda. With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform. It flopped down heavily into the garden below. Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems. The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky. Not a leaf stirred. It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced. Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it. But this stifling darkness…Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.
‘You were saying, Mr. Sita Ram?’
But Mr. Sita Ram’s first fine careless rapture had evaporated. ‘I was re-reading some of de works of Morley to-day,’ he announced
‘Golly! ‘ said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang. It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.
But Mr. Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that ‘ Golly.’ ‘What a tinker!’ he pursued. ‘What a great tinker! And de style is so chaste.’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘Dere are some good phrases,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on ‘I wrote dem down.’ He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘But dey were good phrases. Sometimes one reads a whole book widout finding a single phrase one can remember or quote. What’s de good of such a book, I ask you?’