Point Counter Point

Point Counter Point

By Aldous Huxley.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. I
4. II
5. III
6. IV
7. V
8. VI
9. VII
10. VIII
11. IX
12. X
13. XI
14. XII
15. XIII
16. XIV
17. XV
18. XVI
19. XVII
20. XVIII
21. XIX
22. XX
23. XXI
24. XXII
25. XXIII
26. XXIV
27. XXV
28. XXVI
29. XXVII
30. XXVIII
31. XXIX
32. XXX
33. XXXI
34. XXXII
35. XXXIII
36. XXXIV
37. XXXV
38. XXXVI
39. XXXVII
40. Colophon
41. Uncopyright

Imprint

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I

“You won’t be late?” There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling’s voice, there was something like entreaty.

“No, I won’t be late,” said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice annoyed him. It drawled a little, it was too refined⁠—even in misery.

“Not later than midnight.” She might have reminded him of the time when he never went out in the evenings without her. She might have done so; but she wouldn’t; it was against her principles; she didn’t want to force his love in any way.

“Well, call it one. You know what these parties are.” But as a matter of fact, she didn’t know, for the good reason that, not being his wife, she wasn’t invited to them. She had left her husband to live with Walter Bidlake; and Carling, who had Christian scruples, was feebly a sadist and wanted to take his revenge, refused to divorce her. It was two years now, since they had begun to live together. Only two years; and now, already, he had ceased to love her, he had begun to love someone else. The sin was losing its only excuse, the social discomfort its sole palliation. And she was with child.

“Half-past twelve,” she implored, though she knew that her importunity would only annoy him, only make him love her the less. But she could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous. The words broke out in spite of her principles. It would have been better for her and perhaps for Walter, too, if she had had fewer principles and given her feelings the violent expression they demanded. But she had been well brought up in habits of the strictest self-control. Only the uneducated, she knew made “scenes.” An imploring “Half-past twelve, Walter,” was all that managed to break through her principles. Too weak to move him, the feeble outburst would only annoy. She knew it, and yet she could not hold her tongue.

“If I can possibly manage it.” (There; she had done it. There was exasperation in his tone.) “But I can’t guarantee it; don’t expect me too certainly.” For of course, he was thinking (with Lucy Tantamount’s image unexorcisably haunting him), it certainly wouldn’t be half-past twelve.

He gave the final touches to his white tie. From the mirror her face looked out at him, close beside his own. It was a pale face and so thin that the down-thrown light of the electric lamp hanging above them made a shadow in the hollows below the cheekbones. Her eyes were darkly ringed. Rather too long at the best of times, her straight nose protruded bleakly from the unfleshed face. She looked ugly, tired, and ill. Six months from now her baby would be born. Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man⁠—a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasite worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. A thing would grow into a person, a tiny lump of stuff would become a human body, a human mind. The astounding process of creation was going on within her; but Marjorie was conscious only of sickness and lassitude; the mystery for her meant nothing but fatigue and ugliness and a chronic anxiety about the future, pain of the mind as well as discomfort of the body. She had been glad, or at least she had tried to be glad, in spite of her haunting fears of physical and social consequences, when she first recognized the symptoms of her pregnancy. The child, she believed, would bring Walter closer. (He had begun to fade away from her even then.) It would arouse in him new feelings which would make