After the Fireworks Read online

  In a voice that trembled with hardly restrained indignation, “No, I’m not!” Judd answered; and without looking at Fanning, he got up and walked quickly out of the room.

  II

  JUDD HAD GONE TO STAY WITH HIS OLD AUNT CAROLINE at Montreux. It was an annual affair; for Judd lived chronometrically. Most of June and the first half of July were always devoted to Aunt Caroline and devoted, invariably, at Montreux. On the fifteenth of July, Aunt Caroline was rejoined by her friend Miss Gaskin and Judd was free to proceed to England. In England he stayed till September the thirtieth, when he returned to Rome—“for the praying season,” as Fanning irreverently put it. The beautiful regularity of poor Colin’s existence was a source of endless amusement to his friend. Fanning never had any plans. “I just accept what turns up,” he would explain. “Heads or tails—it’s the only rational way of living. Chance generally knows so much better than we do. The Greeks elected most of their officials by lot—how wisely! Why shouldn’t we toss up for Prime Ministers? We’d be much better governed. Or a sort of Calcutta Sweep for all the responsible posts in Church and State. The only horror would be if one were to win the sweep oneself. Imagine drawing the Permanent Under-Secretaryship for Education! Or the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Or the Viceroyalty of India! One would just have to drink weed-killer. But as things are, luckily . . .”

  Luckily, he was at liberty, under the present dispensation, to stroll, very slowly, in a suit of cream-coloured silk, down the shady side of the Via Condotti towards the Spanish Steps. Slowly, slowly. The air was streaked with invisible bars of heat and cold. Coolness came flowing out of shadowed doorways, and at every transverse street the sun breathed fiercely. Like walking through the ghost of a zebra, he thought.

  Three beautiful young women passed him, talking and laughing together. Like laughing flowers, like deer, like little horses. And of course absolutely unpunctured, unapologetic. He smiled to himself, thinking of the letter and also of his own reply to it.

  A pair of pink and white monsters loomed up, as though from behind the glass of an aquarium. But not speechless. For “Grossartig!”* fell enthusiastically on Fanning’s ear as they passed, and “Fabelhaft!”† These Nordics! He shook his head. Time they were put a stop to.

  In the looking-glasses of a milliner’s window a tall man in creamy-white walked slowly to meet him, hat in hand. The face was aquiline and eager, brown with much exposure to the sun. The waved, rather wiry hair was dark almost to blackness. It grew thickly, and the height of the forehead owed nothing to the approach of baldness. But what pleased Fanning most was the slimness and straightness of the tall figure. Those sedentary men of letters, with their sagging tremulous paunches—they were enough to make one hate the very thought of literature. What had been Fanning’s horror when, a year before, he had realized that his own paunch was showing the first preliminary signs of sagging! But Mr. Hornibrooke’s exercises had been wonderful. “The Culture of the Abdomen.” So much more important, as he had remarked in the course of the last few months at so many dinner tables, than the culture of the mind! For of course he had taken everybody into his confidence about the paunch. He took everybody into his confidence about almost everything. About his love-affairs and his literary projects; about his illnesses and his philosophy; his vices and his bank balance. He lived a rich and variegated private life in public; it was one of the secrets of his charm. To the indignant protests of poor jealous Colin, who reproached him with being an exhibitionist, shameless, a self-exploiter, “You take everything so moralistically,” he had answered. “You seem to imagine people do everything on purpose. But people do hardly anything on purpose. They behave as they do because they can’t help it; that’s what they happen to be like. ‘I am that I am’; Jehovah’s is the last word in realistic psychology. I am what I am—a sort of soft transparent jelly-fish. While you’re what you are—very tightly shut, opaque, heavily armoured: in a word, a giant clam. Morality doesn’t enter; it’s a case for scientific classification. You should be more of a Linnæus, Colin, and less the Samuel Smiles.” Judd had been reduced to a grumbling silence. What he really resented was the fact that Fanning’s confidences were given to upstart friends, to strangers even, before they were given to him. It was only to be expected. The clam’s shell keeps the outside things out as effectually as it keeps the inside things in. In Judd’s case, moreover, the shell served as an instrument of reproachful pinching.

  From his cool street Fanning emerged into the Piazza di Spagna. The sunlight was stinging hot and dazzling. The flower vendors on the steps sat in the midst of great explosions of colour. He bought a gardenia from one of them and stuck it in his buttonhole. From the windows of the English bookshop “The Return of Eurydice, by Miles Fanning” stared at him again and again. They were making a regular display of his latest volume in Tauchnitz. Satisfactory, no doubt; but also, of course, rather ridiculous and even humiliating, when one reflected that the book would be read by people like that estimable upper middle-class couple there, with their noses at the next window—that Civil Servant, he guessed, with the sweet little artistic wife and the artistic little house on Campden Hill—would be read by them dutifully (for of course they worked hard to keep abreast of everything) and discussed at their charming little dinner parties and finally condemned as “extraordinarily brilliant, but . . .” Yes, but, but, but. For they were obviously regular subscribers to Punch, were vertebrae in the backbone of England, were upholders of all that was depressingly finest, all that was lifelessly and genteelly best in the English upper-class tradition. And when they recognized him (as it was obvious to Fanning, in spite of their discreet politeness, that they did) his vanity, instead of being flattered, was hurt. Being recognized by people like that—such was fame! What a humiliation, what a personal insult!

  At Cook’s, where he now went to draw some money on his letter of credit, Fame still pursued him, trumpeting. From behind the brass bars of his cage the cashier smiled knowingly as he counted out the banknotes.

  “Of course your name’s very familiar to me, Mr. Fanning,” he said; and his tone was at once ingratiating and self-satisfied; the compliment to Fanning was at the same time a compliment to himself. “And if I may be permitted to say so,” he went on, pushing the money through the bars, as one might offer a piece of bread to an ape, “gratters on your last book. Gratters,” he repeated, evidently delighted with his very public-schooly colloquialism.

  “All gratitude for gratters,” Fanning answered and turned away. He was half amused, half annoyed. Amused by the absurdity of those more than Etonian congratulations, annoyed at the damned impertinence of the congratulator. So intolerably patronizing! he grumbled to himself. But most admirers were like that; they thought they were doing you an enormous favour by admiring you. And how much more they admired themselves for being capable of appreciating than they admired the object of their appreciation! And then there were the earnest ones who thanked you for giving such a perfect expression to their ideas and sentiments. They were the worst of all. For, after all, what were they thanking you for? For being their interpreter, their dragoman, for playing John the Baptist to their Messiah. Damn their impertinence! Yes, damn their impertinence!

  “Mr. Fanning.” A hand touched his elbow.

  Still indignant with the thought of damned impertinences, Fanning turned round with an expression of such ferocity on his face, that the young woman who had addressed him involuntarily fell back.

  “Oh . . . I’m so sorry,” she stammered; and her face, which had been bright, deliberately, with just such an impertinence as Fanning was damning, was discomposed into a child-like embarrassment. The blood tingled painfully in her cheeks. Oh, what a fool, she thought, what a fool she was making of herself! This idiotic blushing! But the way he had turned round on her, as if he were going to bite. . . . Still, even that was no excuse for blushing and saying she was sorry, as though she were still at school and he were Miss Huss. Idiot! she inwardly shouted at herself. And maki
ng an enormous effort, she readjusted her still scarlet face, giving it as good an expression of smiling nonchalance as she could summon up. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, in a voice that was meant to be light, easy, ironically polite, but which came out (oh, idiot, idiot!) nervously shaky and uneven. “I’m afraid I disturbed you. But I just wanted to introduce . . . I mean, as you were passing . . .”

  “But how charming of you!” said Fanning, who had had time to realize that this latest piece of impertinence was one to be blessed, not damned. “Charming!” Yes, charming it was, that young face with the grey eyes and the little straight nose, like a cat’s and the rather short upper lip. And the heroic way she had tried, through all her blushes, to be the accomplished woman of the world—that too was charming. And touchingly charming even were those rather red, large-wristed English hands, which she wasn’t yet old enough to have learnt the importance of tending into whiteness and softness. They were still the hands of a child, a tomboy. He gave her one of those quick, those brilliantly and yet mysteriously significant smiles of his; those smiles that were still so youthfully beautiful when they came spontaneously. But they could also be put on; he knew how to exploit their fabricated charm, deliberately. To a sensitive eye, the beauty of his expression was, on these occasions, subtly repulsive.

  Reassured, “I’m Pamela Tarn,” said the young girl, feeling warm with gratitude for the smile. He was handsomer, she was thinking, than in his photographs. And much more fascinating. It was a face that had to be seen in movement.

  “Pamela Tarn?” he repeated questioningly.

  “The one who wrote you a letter.” Her blush began to deepen again. “You answered so nicely. I mean, it was so kind . . . I thought . . .”

  “But of course!” he cried, so loudly, that people looked round, startled. “Of course!” He took her hand and held it, shaking it from time to time, for what seemed to Pamela hours. “The most enchanting letter. Only I’m so bad at names. So you’re Pamela Tarn.” He looked at her appraisingly. She returned his look for a moment, then flinched away in confusion from his bright dark eyes.

  “Excuse me,” said a chilly voice; and a very large suit of plus fours edged past them to the door.

  “I like you,” Fanning concluded, ignoring the plus fours; she uttered an embarrassed little laugh. “But then, I liked you before. You don’t know how pleased I was with what you said about the difference between English and Italian women.” The colour rose once more into Pamela’s cheeks. She had only written those sentences after long hesitation and had written them then recklessly, dashing them down with a kind of anger, just because Miss Huss would have been horrified by their unwomanliness, just because Aunt Edith would have found them so distressing, just because they had, when she spoke them aloud one day in the streets of Florence, so shocked the two schoolmistresses from Boston whom she had met at the pension and was doing the sights with. Fanning’s mention of them pleased her and at the same time made her feel dreadfully guilty. She hoped he wouldn’t be too specific about those differences; it seemed to her that every one was listening. “So profound,” he went on in his musical ringing voice. “But out of the mouths of babes, with all due respect.” He smiled again, “And ‘punctured’—that was really the mot juste. I shall steal it and use it as my own.”

  “Permesso.” This time it was a spotted muslin and brown arms and a whiff of synthetic carnations.

  “I think we’re rather in the way,” said Pamela, who was becoming more and more uncomfortably aware of being conspicuous. And the spirit presences of Miss Huss, of Aunt Edith, of the two American ladies at Florence seemed to hang about her, hauntingly. “Perhaps we’d better . . . I mean . . .” And turning, she almost ran to the door.

  “Punctured, punctured,” repeated his pursuing voice behind her. “Punctured with the shame of being warm-blooded mammals. Like those poor lank creatures that were standing at the counter in there,” he added, coming abreast with her, as they stepped over the threshold into the heat and glare. “Did you see them? So pathetic. But, oh dear!” he shook his head. “Oh dear, oh dear!”

  She looked up at him and Fanning saw in her face a new expression, an expression of mischief and laughing malice and youthful impertinence. Even her breasts he now noticed with an amused appreciation, even her breasts were impertinent. Small, but beneath the pale blue stuff of her dress, pointed, firm, almost comically insistent. No ashamed deflation here.

  “Pathetic,” she mockingly echoed, “but, oh dear, how horrible, how disgusting! Because they are disgusting,” she added defiantly, in answer to his look of humorous protest. Here in the sunlight and with the noise of the town isolating her from every one except Fanning, she had lost her embarrassment and her sense of guilt. The spiritual presence had evaporated. Pamela was annoyed with herself for having felt so uncomfortable among those awful old English cats at Cook’s. She thought of her mother; her mother had never been embarrassed, or at any rate she had always managed to turn her embarrassment into something else. Which was what Pamela was doing now. “Really disgusting,” she almost truculently insisted. She was reasserting herself, she was taking a revenge.

  “You’re very ruthless to the poor old things,” said Fanning. “So worthy in spite of their mangy dimness, so obviously good.”

  “I hate goodness,” said Pamela with decision, speeding the parting ghosts of Miss Huss and Aunt Edith and the two ladies from Boston.

  Fanning laughed aloud. “Ah, if only we all had the courage to say so, like you, my child!” And with a familiar affectionate gesture, as though she were indeed a child and he had known her from the cradle, he dropped a hand on her shoulder. “To say so and to act up to our beliefs. As you do, I’m sure.” And he gave the slim hard little shoulder a pat. “A world without goodness—it’d be Paradise.”

  They walked some steps in silence. His hand lay heavy and strong on her shoulder, and a strange warmth that was somehow intenser than the warmth of mere flesh and blood seemed to radiate through her whole body. Her heart quickened its beating; an anxiety oppressed her lungs; her very mind was as though breathless.

  “Putting his hand on my shoulder like that!” she was thinking. “It would have been cheek if some one else . . . Perhaps I ought to have been angry, perhaps . . .” No, that would have been silly. “It’s silly to take things like that too seriously, as though one were Aunt Edith.” But meanwhile his hand lay heavy on her shoulder, broodingly hot, its weight, its warmth insistently present in her consciousness.

  She remembered characters in his books. Her namesake Pamela in Pastures New. Pamela the cold, but for that very reason an experimenter with passion; cold and therefore dangerous, full of power, fatal. Was she like Pamela? She had often thought so. But more recently she had often thought she was like Joan in The Return of Eurydice—Joan, who had emerged from the wintry dark underworld of an unawakened life with her husband (that awful, good, disinterested husband—so like Aunt Edith) into the warmth and brilliance of that transfiguring passion for Walter, for the adorable Walter whom she had always imagined must be so like Miles Fanning himself. She was sure of it now. But what of her own identity? Was she Joan, or was she Pamela? And which of the two would it be nicer to be? Warm Joan, with her happiness—but at the price of surrender? Or the cold, the unhappy, but conquering, dangerous Pamela? Or wouldn’t it perhaps be best to be a little of both at once? Or first one and then the other? And in any case there was to be no goodness in the Aunt Edith style; he had been sure she wasn’t good.

  In her memory the voice of Aunt Edith sounded, as it had actually sounded, only a few weeks before, in disapproving comment on her reference to the passionless, experimental Pamela of Pastures New. “It’s a book I don’t like. A most unnecessary book.” And then, laying her hand on Pamela’s, “Dear child,” she had added, with that earnest, that dutifully willed affectionateness, which Pamela so bitterly resented, “I’d rather you didn’t read any of Miles Fanning’s books.”

  “Mother never objecte
d to my reading them. So I don’t see . . .” The triumphant consciousness of having at this very moment the hand that had written those unnecessary books upon her shoulder was promising to enrich her share of the remembered dialogue with a lofty impertinence which the original had hardly possessed. “I don’t see that you have the smallest right. . . .”

  Fanning’s voice fell startlingly across the eloquent silence. “A penny for your thoughts, Miss Pamela,” it said.

  He had been for some obscure reason suddenly depressed by his own last words. “A world without goodness—it’d be Paradise.” But it wouldn’t, no more than now. The only paradises were fool’s paradises, ostrich’s paradises. It was as though he had suddenly lifted his head out of the sand and seen time bleeding away—like the stabbed bull at the end of a bull-fight, swaying on his legs and soundlessly spouting the red blood from his nostrils—bleeding, bleeding away stanchlessly into the darkness. And it was all, even the loveliness and the laughter and the sunlight, finally pointless. This young girl at his side, this beautiful pointless creature pointlessly walking down the Via del Babuino. . . . The feelings crystallized themselves, as usual, into whole phrases in his mind, and suddenly the phrases were metrical.

  Pointless and arm in arm with pointlessness,

  I pace and pace the Street of the Baboon.

  Imbecile! Annoyed with himself, he tried to shake off his mood of maudlin depression, he tried to force his spirit back into the ridiculous and charming universe it had inhabited, on the whole so happily, all the morning.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” he said, with a certain rather forced jocularity, giving her shoulder a little clap. “Or forty centesimi, if you prefer them.” And, dropping his hand to his side, “In Germany,” he went on, “just after the War one could afford to be more munificent. There was a time when I regularily offered a hundred and ninety million marks for a thought—yes, and gained on the exchange. But now . . .”