Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [75]
‘I’ll deal with it,’ said Illidge jumping up from his place.
He put the receiver to his ear. ‘Hullo!’
‘Edward, is that you?’ said a deep voice, not unlike Lord Edward’s own. ‘This is me. Edward, I’ve just this moment discovered a most extraordinary mathematical proof of the existence of God, or rather of…’
‘But this isn’t Lord Edward,’ shouted Illidge. ‘Wait. I’ll ask him to come.’ He turned back to the Old Man. ‘It’s Lord Gattenden,’ he said. ‘He’s just discovered a new proof of the existence of God.’ He did not smile, his tone was grave. Gravity in the circumstances was the wildest derision. The statement made fun of itself. Laughing comment made it less, not more, ridiculous. Marvellous old imbecile! Illidge felt himself revenged for all the evening’s humiliations. ‘A mathematical proof,’ he added, more seriously than ever.
‘Oh dear!’ exclaimed Lord Edward, as though something deplorable had happened. Telephoning always made him nervous. He hurried to the instrument. ‘Charles, is that…’
‘Ah, Edward,’ cried the disembodied voice of the head of the family from forty miles away at Gattenden. ‘Such a really remarkable discovery. I wanted your opinion on it. About God. You know the formula, m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn’t that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn’t it?’ The diaphragm of the telephone receiver was infected by Lord Gattenden’s excitement, forty miles away. It talked with breathless speed; its questions were earnest and insistent. ‘Doesn’t it, Edward?’ All his life the fifth marquess had been looking for the absolute. It was the only sort of hunting possible to a cripple. For fifty years he had trundled in his wheeled chair at the heels of the elusive quarry. Could it be that he had now caught it, so easily, and in such an unlikely place as an elementary school-book on the theory of limits? It was something that justified excitement. ‘What’s your opinion, Edward?’
‘Well,’ began Lord Edward, and at the other end of the electrified wire, forty miles away, his brother knew, from the tone in which that single word was spoken, that it was no good. The Absolute’s tail was still unsalted.
‘Talking about elders,’ said Lucy,’did I ever tell either of you that really marvellous story about my father?’
‘Which story? ‘
‘The one about the conservatories.’ The mere thought of the story made her smile.
‘No, I never remember hearing about the conservatories,’ said Spandrell, and Walter also shook his head.
‘It was during the War,’ Lucy began. ‘I was getting on for eighteen, I suppose. Just launched. And by the way, somebody did almost literally break a bottle of champagne over me. Parties were rather feverish in those days, if you remember.’
Spandrell nodded and, though as a matter of fact he had been at school during the War, Walter also nodded, knowingly.
‘One day,’ Lucy continued, ‘I got a message: Would I go upstairs and see his Lordship? It was unprecedented. I was rather alarmed. You know how the old imagine one lives. And how upset they are when they discover they’ve been wrong. The usual Arab tea party.’ She laughed and, for Walter, her laughter laid waste to