Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [80]
‘But Polly, Polly,’ she had said, ‘you really mustn’t say that people look like elephants.’
‘But Mrs. Betterton does look like an elephant,’ Polly had replied. ‘It’s the truth.’ And in her dramatic stage whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: ‘Even her nose is like a trunk.’
‘But she’s got a short nose.’
Polly’s whisper had become more gruesome. ‘An amputated trunk. They bit it off when she was a baby. Like puppies’ tails.’
CHAPTER XII
For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law. Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high. Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa’s.
It was about halfpast one—’only halfpast one,’ Lucy complained—when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.
‘Still young,’ was Spandrell’s comment on the night. ‘Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings—never interesting till they’re grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to halfpast. An hour later they’re growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middleaged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they’re not old. After four they’re in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire’s exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the death-bed scenes, I must confess,’ Spandrell added.
‘I’m sure you have,’ said Lucy.
‘And it’s only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles. The night has just come of age. It remains to be seen how it will die. Till then, we can’t judge it.’
Walter knew how it would die for him—in the midst of Marjorie’s tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel. He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already halfpast one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn’t returned.
At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and declared that he must go. What was the good of staying? Spandrell was immovable. There was no prospect of his having a moment alone with Lucy. He lacked even that justification for making Marjorie suffer. He was torturing her, not that he might be happy, but that he might feel bored, ill, exasperated, impatiently wretched.
‘I must really go,’ he had said, standing up.
But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded. In the end he sat down again. That had been more than half an hour ago and now they were out in Soho Square, and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.
‘I think it’s time,’ Spandrell had said to Lucy, ‘that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.’
Lucy demanded nothing better.
‘I belong to a sort of club,’ Spandrell explained. He offered to take them in with him.
‘There’ll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,’ he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness. ‘Good fellows mostly. But absurdly childish. Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier. It’s charming, it’s positively touching.’ He uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘But I’m an aesthete in these matters. Dynamite for dynamite’s sake.’
‘But what’s the point of dynamite, if you don’t believe in Utopia?’ asked Lucy.
‘The point? But haven’t you eyes?’
Lucy looked round her. ‘I see nothing particularly frightful.’
‘They have eyes and see not.’ He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square. ‘The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa’s; the publishers of Who’s Who. And once,’ he added, ‘the Duke of Monmouth’s palace. You