Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [70]
For Beatrice, however, that ‘awfully sweet’ sounded entirely natural and un-alien. She flushed with a younggirlishly timid pleasure. But, ‘Come in and shut the door,’ she rapped out commandingly. Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny; there was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient. ‘Sit down there,’ she ordered; and while she was briskly busy over the milk-jug, the saucepan, the gas-ring, she asked him if he had enjoyed the party.
Burlap shook his head. ‘_Fascinatio nugacitatis_,’ he said. ‘_Fascinatio nugacitatis_.’ He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from Piccadilly Circus.
Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words connoted disapproval. ‘Parties are rather a waste of time, aren’t they?’ she said.
Burlap nodded. ‘A waste of time,’ he echoed in his slow ruminant’s voice, keeping his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice’s left. ‘One’s forty, one has lived more than half one’s life, the world is marvellous and mysterious. And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount House. Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one? Is it some vague fantastic hope that one may meet the messianic person one’s always been looking for, or hear the revealing word?’ Burlap wagged his head as he spoke with a curious loose motion, as though the muscles of his neck were going limp. Beatrice was so familiar with the motion that she saw nothing strange in it any more. Waiting for the milk to boil, she listened admiringly, she watched him with a serious church-going face. A man whose excursions into the drawing-rooms of the rich were episodes in a lifelong spiritual quest might justifiably be regarded as the equivalent of Sunday morning church.
‘All the same,’ Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous, gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, ‘the champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.’ It was the demon that had suddenly interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations. Burlap had allowed him to speak out loud. Why not? It amused him to be baffling. He looked at Beatrice.
Beatrice was duly baffled. ‘I’m sure they were,’ she said, readjusting her church-going face to make it harmonize with the grin. She laughed rather nervously and turned away to pour out the milk into a cup. ‘Here’s your milk,’ she rapped out, taking refuge from her bafflement in officious command. ‘Mind you drink it while it’s hot.’
There was a long silence. Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly knew for what.
‘You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffet,’ said Burlap at last.
Beatrice smiled. ‘Luckily there’s no big spider.’
‘Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.’
‘Yes it is,’ said Beatrice. That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she reflected; he was so trustworthy. Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw you about and kiss you. Dreadful that was, quite dreadful. Beatrice had never really got over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie’s brother-in-law, whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a hansom. The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such a panic fear of being touched. She was over thirty now and had never allowed anyone to touch her. The soft