Read Online Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley - Free Book Online Page B

And dear Webley hasn’t got much sense of humour. He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation.’ (The r’s roared like lions.) ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean. As a great historical character. I can never remember, when I see him, that he’s really Alexander the Great. I always make the mistake of thinking it’s just Webley.’
    Illidge laughed. He found himself positively liking Lady Edward. She had the right feelings about things. She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.
    ‘Not but what his Freemen aren’t a very good thing,’ Lady Edward went on. Illidge’s sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up.’don’t you think so, Mr. Babbage?’
    He made a little grimace. ‘Well…’ he began.
    ‘By the way,’ said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment of Webley’s Freemen, ‘you must really be careful coming down those stairs. They’re terribly slippery.’
    Illidge blushed. ‘Not at all,’ he muttered and blushed still more deeply—a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair—as he realized the imbecility of what he had said. His sympathy declined still further.
    ‘Well, rather slippery all the same,’ Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat. ‘What were you working at with Edward this evening? ‘ she went on. ‘It always interests me so much.’
    Illidge smiled. ‘Well, if you really want to know,’ he said, ‘we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.’ Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.
    ‘Newts? Those things that swim?’ Illidge nodded. ‘But how do they lose their parts? ‘
    ‘Well, in the laboratory,’ he explained, ‘they lose them because we cut them off.’
    ‘And they grow again?’
    ‘They grow again.’
    ‘Dear me,’ said Lady Edward. ‘I never knew that. How fascinating these things are. Do tell me some more.’
    She wasn’t so bad after all. He began to explain. Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward. He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings—the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg—when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.
    ‘Come with me,’ she said, ‘and I’ll introduce you to General Knoyle. Such an amusing old man—if only unintentionally sometimes.’
    Illidge’s exposition froze suddenly in his throat. He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention. Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.
    General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman. His voice was martial and asthmatic.‘“My dear fellow,” I said to him’ (they heard him as they approached), ‘“my dear fellow, don’t enter the horse now. It would be a crime,” I said. “It would be sheer madness. Scratch him,” I said, “scratch him.” And he scratched him.’
    Lady Edward made her presence known. The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.
    ‘I chose the Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,’ said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.
    ‘Well—er—really, that was very kind of you.’ General Knoyle’s confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.
    ‘I hesitated,’ Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, ‘between Handel’s Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni. Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.’ Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General’s ruddy face.
    ‘That was very kind of you,’ he protested. ‘Not that I can pretend to understand much about music. But I know what I like, I know what