Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [94]
Miss Cobbett allowed herself to be persuaded. She came. If Burlap had hoped to slide by gradual stages and almost imperceptibly into Ethel’s bed, he was disappointed. A broken-hearted child in need of consolation, he would have liked to lure his consoler, ever so spiritually and platonically, into a gentle and delicious incest. But to Ethel Cobbett the idea was unthinkable; it never entered her head. She was a woman of principles, as passionate and violent in her moral loyalties as in her love. She had taken Burlap’s grief seriously and literally. When they had agreed, with tears, to found a kind of private, cult for poor Susan, to raise and keep perpetually illumined and adorned an inward altar to her memory, Ethel had imagined that they were meaning what they were saying. She meant it in any case. It never occurred to her that Burlap did not. His subsequent behaviour had astonished and shocked her. Was this the man, she asked herself as she watched him living his life of disguised and platonic and slimily spiritual promiscuities, was this the man who had vowed to keep the candles for ever burning in front of poor little Susan’s altar? She looked, she spoke her disapproval. Burlap cursed himself for his foolishness in having lured her away from the insurance office, his double-dyed idiocy in promising her permanence of tenure. If only she’d go of her own accord! He tried to make her life a misery for her by treating her with a cold, superior impersonality, as though she were just a machine for taking down letters and copying articles. But Ethel Cobbett grimly stuck to her job, had stuck to it for eighteen months now and showed no signs of giving notice. It was intolerable; it couldn’t go on. But how should he put an end to it? Of course, he wasn’t legally bound to keep her for ever. He had never put down anything in black and white. If the worst came to the worst…
Stonily ignoring the look in Ethel Cobbett’s eyes, the almost imperceptible smile of irony, Burlap went on with his dictation. One doesn’t deign to notice machines; one uses them. But still, this sort of thing simply could not go on.
‘It is not my custom to write personal letters to unknown contributors,’ he repeated in a firm, determined tone. ‘But I cannot refrain from telling you—no, no—from thanking you for the great pleasure your poems have given me. The lyrical freshness of your work, its passionate sincerity, its untamed and almost savage brilliance have come as a surprise and a refreshment to me. An editor must read through such quantities of bad literature, that he is almost pathetically grateful to those who—no; say: to the rare and precious spirits who offer him gold instead of the customary dross. Thank you for the gift of…’ he looked again at the papers, ‘of “Love in the Greenwood” and “Passion Flowers.” Thank you for their bright and turbulent verbal surface. Thank you also for the sensitiveness…no, the quivering sensibility, the experience of suffering, the ardent spirituality which a deeper insight detects beneath that surface. I am having both poems set up at once and hope to print them early next month.
‘Meanwhile, if you ever happen to be passing in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street, I should esteem it a great honour to hear from you personally some account of your poetical projects. The literary aspirant, even of talent, is often balked by material difficulties which the professional man of letters knows how to circumvent. I have always regarded it as one of my greatest privileges and duties as a critic and editor to make smooth the way for literary talent. This must be my excuse for writing to you at such length. Believe me, yours very truly.’
He looked again at the typewritten poems and read a line or two. ‘Real talent,’ he said to himself several times, ‘real talent.’ But ‘one’s devil’ was thinking that the girl was remarkably outspoken, must have a