Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [63]
‘She had no right to bring me up like that,’ he said. ‘Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree. No right.’
And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary. He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery. Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.
‘Living comes to you too easily,’ he tried to explain. ‘You live by instinct. You know what to do quite naturally, like an insect when it comes out of the pupa. It’s too simple, too simple.’ He shook his head. ‘You haven’t earned your knowledge; you’ve never realized the alternatives.’
‘In other words,’ said Mary, ‘I’m a fool.’
‘No, a woman.’
‘Which is your polite way of saying the same thing. But I’d like to know,’ she went on with an irrelevance that was only apparent, ‘where you’d be without me. I’d like to know what you’d be doing if you’d never met me.’ She moved from stage to stage of an emotionally coherent argument.
‘I’d be where I am and be doing exactly what I’m doing now.’ He didn’t mean it, of course; for he knew, better than anyone, how much he owed to her, how much he had learnt from her example and precept. But it amused him to annoy her.
‘You know that’s not true,’ Mary was indignant.
‘It is true.’
‘It’s a lie. And to prove it,’ she added, ‘I’ve a very good mind to go away with the children and leave you for a few months to stew in your own juice. I’d like to see how you get on without me.’
‘I should get on perfectly well,’ he assured her with exasperating calmness.
Mary flushed; she was beginning to be genuinely annoyed.’very well then,’ she answered, ‘ I’ll really go. This time I really will.’ She had made the threat before; they quarrelled a good deal, for both were quick-tempered.
‘Do,’ said Rampion. ‘But remember that two can play at that going-away game. When you go away from me, I go away from you.’
‘We’ll see how you get on without me,’ she continued menacingly.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘What about me?’
‘Do you imagine you can get on any better without me than I can get on without you?’
They looked at one another for a little time in silence and then, simultaneously, burst out laughing.
CHAPTER X
A regular technique,’ Spandrell repeated. ‘One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking they’re dmes incomprises.’ He was boastfully generalizing from the case of poor little Harriet Watkins. If he had just baldly recounted his affair with Harriet, it wouldn’t have sounded such a very grand exploit. Harriet was such a pathetic, helpless little creature; anybody could have done her down. But generalized like this, as though her case was only one of hundreds, told in a language of the cookery book (‘one chooses them unhappy’—it was one of Mrs. Beeton’s recipes), the history sounded, he thought, most cynically impressive. ‘And one starts by being very, very kind, and so wise, and perfectly pure, an elder brother, in fact. And they think one’s really wonderful, because, of course, they’ve never met anybody who wasn’t just a city man, with city ideas and city ambitions. Simply wonderful, because one knows all about art and has met all the celebrities and doesn’t think exclusively about money and