Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [60]
‘Teaching,’ he repeated with emphatic horror, ‘teaching! Does it surprise you that I should feel depressed?’ But his misery had other causes besides the prospect of having to teach. ‘Would she laugh at me, if I asked her? ‘ he was wondering. He didn’t think she would. But if she wasn’t going to refuse, was it fair on his part to ask? Was it fair to let her in for the kind of life she would have to lead with him? Or perhaps she had money of her own; and in that case his own honour would be involved.
‘Do you see me as a pedagogue?’ he asked aloud. The pedagogue was his scapegoat.
‘But why should you be a pedagogue, when you can write and draw? You can live on your wits.’
‘But can I? At least pedagogy’s safe.’
‘What do you want to be safe for?’ she asked, almost contemptuously.
Rampion laughed. ‘You wouldn’t ask if you’d had to live on a weekly wage, subject to a week’s notice. Nothing like money for promoting courage and selfconfidence.’
‘Well then, to that extent money’s a good thing. Courage and selfconfidence are virtues.’
They walked on for a long time in silence. ‘Well, well,’ said Rampion at last, looking up at her, ‘you’ve brought it on yourself.’ He made an attempt at laughter. ‘Courage and selfconfidence are virtues; you said so yourself. I’m only trying to live up to your moral standards. Courage and selfconfidence! I’m going to tell you that I love you.’ There was another long silence. He waited; his heart was beating as though with fear.
‘Well?’ he questioned at last. Mary turned towards him and, taking his hand, lifted it to her lips.
Before and after their marriage Rampion had many occasions of admiring those wealth-fostered virtues. It was she who made him give up all thought of teaching and trust exclusively to his wits for a career. She had confidence for both.
‘I’m not going to marry a schoolmaster,’ she insisted. And she didn’t; she married a dramatist who had never had a play performed, except at the Stanton-in-Teesdale church bazaar, a painter who had never sold a picture.
‘We shall starve,’ he prophesied. The spectre of hunger haunted him; he had seen it too often to be able to ignore its existence.
‘Nonsense,’ said Mary, strong in the knowledge that people didn’t starve. Nobody that she knew had ever been hungry. ‘Nonsense.’ She had her way in the end.
What made Rampion the more reluctant to take the unsafe course was the fact that it could only be taken at Mary’s expense.
‘I can’t live on you,’ he said. ‘I can’t take your money.’
‘But you’re not taking my money,’ she insisted, ‘you’re simply an investment. I’m putting up capital in the hope of getting a good return. You shall live on me for a year or two, so that I may live on you for the rest of my life. It’s business; it’s positively sharp practice.
He had to laugh.
‘And in any case,’ she continued, ‘you won’t live very long on me. Eight hundred pounds won’t last for ever.’
He agreed at last to borrow her eight hundred pounds at the current rate of interest. He did it reluctantly, feeling that he was somehow betraying his own people. To start life with eight hundred pounds—it was too easy, it was a shirking of difficulties, a taking of unfair advantages. If it had not been for that sense of responsibility which he felt towards his own talents, he would have refused the money and either desperately risked the career of literature without a penny, or gone the safe and pedagogical way. When at last he consented to take the money, he made it a condition that she should never accept anything from her relations. Mary agreed.
‘Not that they’ll be very anxious to give me anything,’ she added with a laugh.
She was right. Her father’s horror at the misalliance was as profound as she had expected. Mary was in no danger, so far as he was concerned, of becoming rich.
They were married in August and immediately went abroad. They took the train as far as Dijon and from there began to walk south-east, towards Italy. Rampion had never been