Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [6]
‘And what about me?’ he suddenly thought.
He knew that the moment the door had shut behind him, Marorie had started to cry. Carling at least had the excuse of whiskey. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. He himself was never anything but sober. At this moment, he knew, she was crying.
‘I ought to go back,’ he said to himself. But instead, he quickened his pace till he was almost running down the street. It was a flight from his conscience and at the same time a hastening towards his desire.
‘I ought to go back, I ought.’
He hurried on, hating her because he had made her so unhappy.
A man looking into a tobacconist’s window suddenly stepped backwards as he was passing. Walter violently collided with him.
‘Sorry,’ he said automatically, and hurried on without looking round.
‘Where yer going?’ the man shouted after him angrily. ‘Wotcher think you’re doing? Being a bloody Derby winner?’
Two loitering street boys whooped with ferociously derisive mirth.
‘You in yer top ‘at,’ the man pursued contemptuously, hating the uniformed gentleman.
The right thing would have been to turn round and give the fellow back better than he gave. His father would have punctured him with a word. But for Walter there was only flight. He dreaded these encounters, he was frightened of the lower classes. The noise of the man’s abuse faded in his ears.
Odious! He shuddered. His thoughts returned to Marorie.
‘Why can’t she be reasonable? ‘ he said to himself. ‘Just reasonable. If only at least she had something to do, something to keep her occupied.’
She had too much time to think, that was the trouble with Marjorie. Too much time to think about him. Though after all it was his fault; it was he who had robbed her of her occupation and made her focus her mind exclusively on himself. She had taken a partnership in a decorator’s shop when he first knew her; one of those lady-like, artistic, amateurish decorating establishments in Kensington. Lampshades and the companionship of the young women who painted them and above all devotion to Mrs. Cole, the senior partner, were Marjorie’s compensations for a wretched marriage. She had created a little world of her own, apart from Carling; a feminine world, with something of the girl’s school about it, where she could talk about clothes and shops, and listen to gossip, and indulge in what schoolgirls call a ‘ pash’ for an elder woman, and imagine in the intervals that she was doing part of the world’s work and helping on the cause of Art.
Walter had persuaded her to give it all up. Not without difficulty, however. For her happiness in being devoted to Mrs. Cole, in having a sentimental ‘pash’ for her, was almost a compensation for her misery with Carling. But Carling turned out to be more than Mrs. Cole could compensate for. Walter offered what the lady perhaps could not, and certainly did not wish to, provide—a place of refuge, protection, financial support. Besides, Walter was a man, and a man ought, by tradition, to be loved, even when, as Walter had finally concluded about Marjorie, one doesn’t really like men and is only naturally attuned to the company of women. (The effect of literature again! He remembered Philip Quarles’s comments on the disastrous influence which art can exercise on life.) Yes, he was a man; but ‘different,’ as she had never tired of telling him, from ordinary men. He had accepted his ‘ difference’ as a flattering distinction, then. But was it? He wondered. Anyhow, ‘different’ she had then found him and so was able to get the best of both worlds—a man who yet wasn’t a man. Charmed by Walter’s persuasions, driven by Carling’s brutalities, she had consented to abandon the shop and with it Mrs. Cole, whom Walter detested as a bullying, slave-driving, blood-sucking embodiment of female will.
‘You’re too good to be an amateur upholsterer,’ he had flattered