Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [68]
So she’d written to tell him to meet her here, thought Walter. That vulgar, stupid lout.
Willie Weaver was shaking hands with Mary Rampion and Mark. ‘I had no idea I was to meet the great,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the fair.’ He bowed towards Mary, who broke into loud and masculine laughter. Willie Weaver was rather pleased than offended. ‘Positively the Mermaid Tavern!’ he went on.
‘Still busy with the bric-a-brac?’ asked Spandrell, leaning across the table to address Peter Slipe, who had taken the seat next to Walter’s. Peter was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.
‘But why in pencil, why in pencil?’ Cuthbert was roaring.
‘I get my fingers so dirty when I use a pen.’
‘I’ll kiss the ink away,’ protested Cuthbert, and bending over the hand he was still holding, he began to kiss the thin fingers.
Lucy laughed. ‘I think I’d rather buy a stylo,’ she said.
Walter looked on in misery. Was it possible? A gross and odious clown like that?’
Ungrateful!’ said Cuthbert. ‘But I simply must talk to Rampion.’
And turning away, he gave Rampion a clap on the shoulder and simultaneously waved his other hand at Mary.
‘What an agape!’ Willie Weaver simmered on, like a tea kettle. The spout was now turned towards Lucy, ‘what a symposium! What a—’ he hesitated for a moment in search of the right, the truly staggering phrase—’what Athenian enlargements! What a more than Platonic orgy!’
‘What is an Athenian enlargement?’ asked Lucy. Willie sat down and began to explain. ‘Enlargements, I mean, by contrast with our bourgeois and Pecksniffian smuggeries…’
‘Why don’t you give me something of yours to print?’ Cuthbert was persuasively enquiring.
Rampion looked at him with distaste. ‘Do you think I’m ambitious of having my books sold in the rubber shops?’
‘They’d be in good company,’ said Spandrell. ‘_The Works of Aristotle_…’ Cuthbert roared in protest.
‘Compare an eminent Victorian with an eminent Periclean,’ said Willie Weaver. He smiled, he was happy and eloquent.
On Peter Slipe the burgundy had acted as a depressant, not a stimulant. The wine had only enhanced his native dimness and melancholy.
‘What about Beatrice?’ he said to Walter, ‘Beatrice Gilray?’ he hiccoughed and tried to pretend that he had coughed. ‘I suppose you see her often, now that she works on the Literary World.’
Walter saw her three times a week and always found her well.
‘Give her my love, when you see her next,’ said Slipe.
‘The stertorous borborygms of the dyspeptic Carlyle!’ declaimed Willie Weaver, and beamed through his spectacles. The mot, he flattered himself, could hardly have been more exquisitely juste. He gave the little cough which was his invariable comment on the best of his phrases. ‘I would laugh, I would applaud,’ the little cough might be interpreted; ‘but modesty forbids.’
‘Stertorous what?’ asked Lucy. ‘Do remember that I’ve never been educated.’
‘Warbling your native woodnotes wild!’ said Willie. ‘May I help myself to some of that noble brandy? The blushful Hippocrene.’
‘She treated me badly, extremely badly.’ Peter Slipe was plaintive. ‘But I don’t want her to think that I bear her any grudge.’
Willie Weaver smacked his lips over the brandy. ‘Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion’s children know,’ he misquoted and repeated his little cough of selfsatisfaction.
‘The trouble with Cuthbert,’ Spandrell was saying, ‘is that he’s never quite learnt to distinguish art from pornography.’
‘Of course,’ continued Peter Slipe, ‘she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own house. But to turn me out at such short notice.’
At another time Walter would have been delighted to listen to poor little Slipe’s version of that curious story. But with Lucy on his other hand, he found it difficult to take much interest.
‘But I sometimes wonder if the Victorians didn’t have more fun than we did,’ she was saying. ‘The more prohibitions, the greater the fun. If you want to see people drinking with real enjoyment, you must go to America. Victorian England was dry in every department. For example, there was a nineteenth