Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [91]
‘Is that you, Walter darling?’ The voice was Lucy’s.
His heart sank; he knew what was going to happen.
‘I’ve just woken up,’ she explained. ‘I’m all alone.’
She wanted him to come to tea. He refused. After tea, then.
‘I can’t,’ he persisted.
‘Nonsense! Of course you can.’
‘Impossible.’
‘But why? ‘
‘Work.’
‘But not after six. I insist.’
After all, he thought, perhaps it would be better to see her and explain what he had decided.
‘I’ll never forgive you if you don’t come.’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll make an effort. I’ll come if I possibly can.’
‘What a flirt you are!’ Beatrice mocked, as he hung up the receiver. ‘Saying no for the fun of being persuaded!’
And when, at a few minutes after five, he left the office on the pretext that he must get to the London Library before closing time, she sent ironical good wishes after him. ‘_Bon amusement!_’ were her last words.
In the editorial room. Burlap was dictating letters to his secretary. ‘Yours etcetera,’ he concluded and picked up another batch of papers. ‘Dear Miss Saville,’ he began, after glancing at them for a moment. ‘No,’ he corrected himself.’dear Miss Romola Saville. Thank you for your note and for the enclosed manuscripts.’ He paused and, leaning back in his chair, closed his eyes in brief reflection. ‘It is not my custom,’ he went on at last in a soft remote voice, ‘it is not my custom to write personal letters to unknown contributors.’ He reopened his eyes, to meet the dark bright glance of his secretary from across the table. The expression in Miss Cobbett’s eyes was sarcastic; the faintest little smile almost imperceptibly twitched the corners of her mouth. Burlap was annoyed; but he concealed his feelings and continued to stare straight in front of him as though Miss Cobbett were not there at all and he were looking absentmindedly at a piece of furniture. Miss Cobbett looked back at her notebook.
‘How contemptible!’ she said to herself. ‘How unspeakably vulgar!’
Miss Cobbett was a small woman, black-haired, darkly downy at the corners of her upper lip, with brown eyes disproportionately large for her thin, rather sickly little face. Sombre and passionate eyes in which there was, almost permanently, an expression of reproach that could flash up into sudden anger or, as at this moment, derision. She had a right to look reproachfully on the world. Fate had treated her badly. Very badly indeed. Born and brought up in the midst of a reasonable prosperity, her father’s death had left her, from one day to another, desperately poor. She got engaged to Harry Markham. Life promised to begin again. Then came the War. Harry joined up and was killed. His death condemned her to shorthand and typing for the rest of her natural existence. Harry was the only man who had ever loved her, who had been prepared to take the risk of loving her. Other men found her too disquietingly violent and impassioned and serious. She took things terribly seriously. Young men felt uncomfortable and silly in her company. They revenged themselves by laughing at her for having no’sense of humour,’ for being a pedant and, as time went on, for being an old maid who was longing for a man. They said she looked like a witch. She had often been in love, passionately, with a hopeless violence. The men had either not noticed; or, if they noticed, had fled precipitately, or had mocked, or, what was almost worse, had been patronizingly kind as though to a poor misguided creature who might be a nuisance but who ought, none the less, to be treated with charity. Ethel Cobbett had every right to look reproachful.
She had met Burlap because, as a girl, in the prosperous days, she had been at school