Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [61]
‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘It’s no use bothering. Let the boots bury their boots.’ He got quite angry with her. ‘Remember you’re not rich any more,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t afford to throw away a good pair of shoes. We shan’t be able to buy a new pair till we get home.’ They had taken a small sum with them for their journey and had vowed that in no circumstances would they spend more. ‘Not till we get home,’ he repeated.
‘I know, I know,’ she answered impatiently. ‘I shall learn to walk barefoot.’
And she did.
‘I was born to be a tramp,’ she declared one evening when they were lying on hay in a barn. ‘I can’t tell you how I enjoy not being respectable. It’s the Atavismus coming out. You bother too much, Mark. Consider the lilies of the field.’
‘And yet,’ Rampion meditated, ‘Jesus was a poor man. Tomorrow’s bread and boots must have mattered a great deal in his family. How was it that he could talk about the future like a millionaire?’
‘Because he was one of nature’s dukes,’ she answered. ‘That’s why. He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king. Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they’re terribly preoccupied about to-morrow. Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down. None of your titled financiers or soap boilers. A genuine aristocrat. And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius. He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and to-morrow.’ She was silent for a little and then added, as an afterthought: ‘And what’s more, he wasn’t respectable. He didn’t care about appearances. They have their reward. But I don’t mind if we do look like scarecrows.’
‘You’ve paid yourself a nice lot of compliments, said Rampion. But he meditated her words and her spontaneous, natural, untroubled way of living. He envied her her Atavismus.
It was not merely tramping that Mary liked. She got almost as much enjoyment out of the more prosaic settled life they led, when they returned to England. ‘Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon,’ was what Rampion called her, when he saw her cooking the dinner; she did it with such childlike enthusiasm.
‘Think carefully,’ he had warned her before they married
‘You’re going to be poor. Really poor; not poor on a thousand a year like your impecunious friends. There’ll be no servants. You’ll have to cook and mend and do housework. You won’t find it pleasant.’
Mary only laughed. ‘_You’ll_ be the one who won’t find it pleasant,’ she answered, ‘at any rate until I’ve learnt to cook.’
She had never so much as fried an egg when she married him.
Strangely enough that childlike, Marie-Antoinette-ish enthusiasm for doing things—for cooking on a real range, using a real carpet sweeper, a real sewing machine—survived the first novel and exciting months. She went on enjoying herself.
‘I could never go back to being a perfect lady,’ she used to say. ‘It would bore me to death. Goodness knows, housework and managing and looking after the children can be boring and exasperating enough. But being quite out of touch with all the ordinary facts of existence, living in a different planet from the world of daily, physical reality—that’s much worse.’
Rampion was of the same opinion. He refused to make art and thought excuses for living a life of abstraction. In the intervals of painting and writing he helped Mary with the housework.
‘You don’t expect flowers to grow in nice