Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [62]
For Rampion, there was also a kind of moral compulsion to live the life of the poor. Even when he was making quite a reasonable income, they kept only one maid and continued to do a great part of the housework themselves. It was a case, with him, of noblesse obligeor rather roture oblige. To live like the rich, in a comfortable abstraction from material cares would be, he felt, a kind of betrayal of his class, his own people. If he sat still and paid servants to work for him, he would somehow be insulting his mother’s memory, he would be posthumously telling her that he was too good to lead the life she had led.
There were occasions when he hated this moral compulsion, because he felt that it was compelling him to do foolish and ridiculous things; and hating, he would try to rebel against it. How absurdly shocked he had been, for example, by Mary’s habit of lying in bed of a morning. When she felt lazy, she didn’t get up; and there was an end of it. The first time it happened, Rampion was really distressed.
‘But you can’t stay in bed all the morning,’ he protested.
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? But because you can’t.’
‘But I can,’ said Mary calmly. ‘And I do.’
It shocked him. Unreasonably, as he perceived when he tried to analyse his feelings. But all the same, he was shocked. He was shocked because he had always got up early himself, because all his people had had to get up early. It shocked him that one should lie in bed while other people were up and working. To get up late was somehow to add insult to injury. And yet, obviously, getting up early oneself, unnecessarily, did nothing to help those who had to get up early. Getting up, when one wasn’t compelled to get up, was just a tribute of respect, like taking off one’s hat in a church. And at the same time it was an act of propitiation, a sacrificial appeasement of the conscience
‘One oughtn’t to feel like that,’ he reflected. ‘Imagine a Greek feeling like that!’
It was unimaginable. And yet the fact remained that, however much he might disapprove of the feeling, he did in fact feel like that.
‘Mary’s healthier than I am,’ he thought; and he remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals. ‘They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.’ Mary was like that and it was good. To be a perfect animal and a perfect human—that was the ideal. All the same, he was shocked when she didn’t get up in the morning. He tried not to be; but he was shocked. Rebelling, he would sometimes lie in bed himself till noon, on principle. It was a duty not to be a barbarian of the conscience. But it was a very long time before he could genuinely enjoy his laziness.
Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him. During those first months of their marriage he was often, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her. Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly. The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.
‘You’re such an absurd old puritan,’ she told him.
The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded. By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he was half a puritan. His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being. Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice. The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself. Theoretically, he approved of Mary’s easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification.