Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

Author:Aldous Huxley [Huxley, Aldous]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-03-28T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVIII

At Port Said they went ashore. The flank of the ship was an iron precipice. At its foot the launch heaved on a dirty and slowly wallowing sea; between its gunwale and the end of the ship’s ladder a little chasm alternately shrank and expanded. For a sound pair of legs the leap would have been nothing. But Philip hesitated. To jump with his game leg foremost might mean to collapse under the impact of arrival; and if he trusted to the game leg to propel him, he had a good chance of falling ignominiously short. He was delivered from his predicament by the military gentleman who had preceded him in the leap.

‘Here, take my hand,’ he called, noticing Philip’s hesitation and its cause.

‘Thanks so much,’ said Philip when he waa safely in the launch.

‘Awkward, this sort of thing,’ said the other. ‘Particularly if one’s short of a leg, what?’

‘Very.’

‘Damaged in the War?’

Philip shook his head. ‘Accident when I was a boy,’ he explained telegraphically, and the blood mounted to his cheeks. ‘There’s my wife,’ he mumbled, glad of an excuse to get away. Elinor jumped, steadied herself against him; they picked their way to seats at the other end of the launch.

‘Why didn’t you let me go first and help you over?’ she asked.

‘I was all right,’ he answered curtly and in a tone that decided her to say no snore. She wondered what was the matter. Something to do with his lameness? Why was he so queer about it?

Philip himself would have found it hard to explain what there was in the military gentleman’s question to distress him. After all there was nothing in the least discreditable in having been run over by a cart. And to have been rejected as totally unfit for military service was not in the least unpatriotic. And yet, quite unreasonably, the question had disturbed him, as all such questions, as any too overt reference to his lameness, unless deliberately prepared for by himself, invariably did.

Discussing him with Elinor, ‘Philip was the last person,’ his mother had once said, ‘the very last person such an accident ought to have happened to. He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more, if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world. It meant no games, to begin with; and no games meant fewer contacts with other boys, more solitude, more leisure for books. And then (poor Phil!) it meant fresh causes for shyness. A sense of inferiority. Children can be so horribly ruthless; they used to laugh at him sometimes at school. And later, when girls began to matter, how I wish he’d been able to go to dances and tennis parties! But he couldn’t waltz or play. And of course he didn’t want to go as an onlooker and an outsider.

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