Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [57]
‘But you’ll come again?’
‘Would there be much point in my coming again?’ he asked. ‘It’s rather like interplanetary visiting, isn’t it?
‘I hadn’t felt it like that,’ she answered, and added, after a little pause, ‘I suppose you find us all very stupid, don’t you?’ She looked at him. He had raised his eyebrows, he was about to protest. She wouldn’t allow him to be merely polite. ‘Because, you know, we are stupid. Terribly stupid.’ She laughed, rather ruefully. With people of her own kind stupidity was rather a virtue than a defect. To be too intelligent was to risk not being a gentleman. Intelligence wasn’t altogether safe. Rampion had made her wonder whether there weren’t better things than gentlemanly safety. In his presence she didn’t feel at all proud of being stupid.
Rampion smiled at her. He liked her frankness. There was something genuine about her. She hadn’t been spoilt—not yet, at any rate.
‘I believe you’re an agent provocateur,’ he bantered, ‘trying to tempt me to say rude and subversive things about my betters. But as a matter of fact, my opinions aren’t a bit rude. You people aren’t stupider than anyone else. Not naturally stupider. You’re victims of your way of living. It’s put a shell round you and blinkers over your eyes. By nature a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird. But you must admit that its way of living doesn’t exactly encourage intelligence.’
They met again several times in the course of that summer. Most often they walked together over the moors. ‘Like a force of nature,’ he thought as he watched her with bent head tunnelling her way through the damp wind. A great physical force. Such energy, such strength and health—it was magnificent. Rampion himself had been a delicate child, constantly ailing. He admired the physical qualities he did not himself possess. Mary was a sort of berserker Diana of the moors. He told her, as much one day. She liked the compliment.
‘_Wass fur ein Atavismus_! That was what my old German governess always used to say about me. She was right, I think. I am a bit of an Atavismus.’
Rampion laughed. ‘It sounds ridiculous in German. But it isn’t at all absurd in itself. An atavismus—that’s what we all ought to be. Atavismuses with all modern conveniences. Intelligent primitives. Big game with a soul.’
It was a wet cold summer. On the morning of the day fixed for their next meeting, Mary received a letter from him. ‘Dear Miss Felpham,’ she read, and this first sight of his handwriting gave her a strange pleasure. ‘I’ve idiotically gone and caught a chill. Will you be more forgiving than I am—for I can’t tell you how inexpressibly disgusted and angry I am with myself—and excuse me for putting you off till to-day week?’
He looked pale and thin, when she next saw him, and was still troubled by a cough. When she enquired about his health, he cut her short almost with anger. ‘I’m quite all right,’ he said sharply, and changed the subject.
‘I’ve been re-reading Blake,’ he said. And he began to speak about the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
‘Blake was civilized,’ he insisted, ‘_civilized_. Civilization is harmony and completeness. Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body—Blake managed to include and harmonize everything. Barbarism is being lopsided. You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body. A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality. Christianity made us barbarians of the soul, and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect. Blake was the last civilized man.’
He spoke of the Greeks and those naked sunburnt Etruscans in the sepulchral wall paintings. ‘You’ve seen the originals?’ he said. ‘My word, I envy you.’
Mary felt terribly ashamed. She had seen the painted tombs at Tarquinia; but how little she remembered of them! They had just been curious old works of art like all those other innumerable old works of art she had dutifully seen in company with her mother on their Italian journey the year before. They had really been wasted on her. Whereas if he could have afforded to go to Italy…
‘_They_ were civilized,