Lilian by Arnold Bennett

Author:Arnold Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781634213998
Publisher: Duke Classics

VIII - Philosophy of the Grey-Haired

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The evening and all Lilian's emotions seemed to start afresh. The look of the restaurant was changed. The tables had been cleared of the grosser apparatus of eating, and showed white cloths with only white plates, fruit, small glasses, small cups, ash-trays. Most of the waiters had vanished; the remainder stood aside, moveless, inobtrusive, watchful. The diners had abandoned themselves to intimacy or the sweet coma of digestion. Some talked rather loudly, others in a murmur. Women leaned back, or put their elbows on the table, letting cigarette smoke float upwards across their eyes. A few tables were already deserted, and the purity of their emptiness seemed bafflingly to demonstrate that events may happen and leave behind absolutely no trace. Without consulting Lilian Mr. Grig gave an order and two small glasses were slowly filled to the brim with a green liquid. Lilian recognized it for the very symbol of delicate licence. She was afraid to sip, lest she might be disillusioned concerning it, and also lest the drinking of it might malignly hasten the moment of departure of the last train for Brighton.

Mr. Grig was of those who murmured. His wrists lay one over the other on the table and his face was over the table; and it seemed strange, so low and even was his speech, that Lilian could catch every word, as she did. The people at the next table could have heard nothing. All the animation and variety were in his features, none in his tone. He had been telling her about Brighton. He saw the town of Brighton as a living, developing whole, discussing it as a single organism, showing how its evolution was still in active process, and making the small group of men who were exploiting it and directing it appear like creative giants and the mass of inhabitants like midgets utterly unconscious of their own manipulation. And in his account of the vast affair there was no right and no wrong; there were merely the dark aims and the resolution of the giants determined to wax in power and to imprint themselves on the municipality. Lilian had never heard such revealing talk; she could not follow all of it, but she was fascinated, wonderstruck; profoundly impressed by the quality of the brain opposite to her and the contemptibleness of her own ignorance of life; amazed and enraptured that this brain could be interested in herself. Mr. Grig related the story of the middle-aged proprietor of one of the chief hotels who had married a young wife.

"He had broken up his family, and the family is the real unit of society—and there was no need for it! No need at all! But then, you see, he'd never had time in his existence to understand that a middle-aged man who has already had experience of marriage and marries a girl young enough to be his daughter is either a coward or a fool or without taste. He would only do it because he's mad for her, and that's the very reason for not doing it.

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