After the Fireworks Page 5

  “In which case,” said Dodo, “tails must also be heads. So that if you want to make intellectual or spiritual progress, you must behave like a beast—is that it?”

  Fanning held up his hand. “Not at all. If you rush too violently towards the tail, you run the risk of shooting down the whiting’s open mouth into its stomach, and even further. The wise man . . .”

  “So the whitings are fried without being cleaned?”

  “In parables,” Fanning answered reprovingly, “whitings are always fried that way. The wise man, as I was saying, oscillates lightly from head to tail and back again. His whole existence—or shall we be more frank and say ‘my’ whole existence?—is one continual oscillation. I am never too consistently sensible, like you; or too consistently feather-headed like some of my other friends. In a word,” he wagged a finger, “I oscillate.”

  Tired of generalizations, “And where exactly,” Dodo enquired, “have you oscillated to at the moment? You’ve left me without your news so long. . . .”

  “Well, at the moment,” he reflected aloud, “I suppose you might say I was at a dead point between desire and renunciation, between sense and sensuality.”

  “Again?” She shook her head. “And who is she this time?”

  Fanning helped himself to asparagus before replying. “Who is she?” he echoed. “Well, to begin with, she’s the writer of admiring letters.”

  Dodo made a grimace of disgust. “What a horror!” For some reason she felt it necessary to be rather venomous about this new usurper of Fanning’s heart. “Vamping by correspondence—it’s really the lowest. . . .”

  “Oh, I agree,” he said. “On principle and in theory I entirely agree.”

  “Then why,” she began, annoyed by his agreement; but he interrupted her.

  “Spiritual adventuresses,” he said. “That’s what they generally are, the women who write you letters. Spiritual adventuresses. I’ve suffered a lot from them in my time.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “They’re a curious type,” he went on, ignoring her sarcasms. “Curious and rather horrible. I prefer the good old-fashioned vampire. At least one knew where one stood with her. There she was—out for money, for power, for a good time, occasionally, perhaps, for sensual satisfactions. It was all entirely above-board and obvious. But with the spiritual adventuress, on the contrary, everything’s most horribly turbid and obscure and slimy. You see, she doesn’t want money or the commonplace good time. She wants Higher Things—damn her neck! Not large pearls and a large motor-car, but a large soul—that’s what she pines for: a large soul and a large intellect, and a huge philosophy, and enormous culture, and out sizes in great thoughts.”

  Dodo laughed. “You’re fiendishly cruel, Miles.”

  “Cruelty can be a sacred duty,” he answered. “Besides, I’m getting a little of my own back. If you knew what these spiritual vamps had done to me! I’ve been one of their appointed victims. Yes, appointed; for, you see, they can’t have their Higher Things without attaching themselves to a Higher Person.”

  “And are you one of the Higher People, Miles?”

  “Should I be dining here with you, my dear, if I weren’t?” And without waiting for Dodo’s answer, “They attach themselves like lice,” he went on. “The contact with the Higher Person makes them feel high themselves; it magnifies them, it gives them significance, it satisfies their parasitic will to power. In the past they could have gone to religion—fastened themselves on the nearest priest (that’s what the priest was there for), or sucked the spiritual blood of some saint. Nowadays they’ve got no professional victims; only a few charlatans and swamis and higher-thought-mongers. Or alternatively the artists. Yes, the artists. They find our souls particularly juicy. What I’ve suffered! Shall I ever forget that American woman who got so excited by my book on Blake that she came specially to Tunis to see me? She had an awful way of opening her mouth very wide when she talked, like a fish. You were perpetually seeing her tongue; and, what made it worse, her tongue was generally white. Most distressing. And how the tongue wagged! In spite of its whiteness. Wagged like mad, and mostly about the Divine Mind.”

  “The Divine Mind?”

  He nodded. “It was her specialty. In Rochester, N. Y., where she lived, she was never out of touch with it. You’ve no idea what a lot of Divine Mind there is floating about in Rochester, particularly in the neighbourhood of women with busy husbands and incomes of over fifteen thousand dollars. If only she could have stuck to the Divine Mind! But the Divine Mind has one grave defect: it won’t make love to you. That was why she’d come all the way to Tunis in search of a merely human specimen.”

  “And what did you do about it?”

  “Stood it nine days and then took the boat to Sicily. Like a thief in the night. The wicked flee, you know. God, how they can flee!”

  “And she?”

  “Went back to Rochester, I suppose. But I never opened any more of her letters. Just dropped them into the fire whenever I saw the writing. Ostrichism—it’s the only rational philosophy of conduct. According to the Freudians we’re all unconsciously trying to get back to . . .”

  “But poor woman!” Dodo burst out. “She must have suffered.”

  “Nothing like what I suffered. Besides she had the Divine Mind to go back to; which was her version of the Freudians’ pre-natal . . .”

  “But I suppose you’d encouraged her to come to Tunis?”

  Reluctantly, Fanning gave up his Freudians. “She could write good letters,” he admitted. “Inexplicably good, considering what she was at close range.”

  “But then you treated her abominably.”

  “But if you’d seen her, you’d realize how abominably she’d treated me.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, abominably—by merely existing. She taught me to be very shy of letters. That was why I was so pleasantly surprised this morning when my latest correspondent suddenly materialized at Cook’s. Really ravishing. One could forgive her everything for the sake of her face and that charming body. Everything, even the vamping. For a vamp I suppose she is, even this one. That is, if a woman can be a spiritual adventuress when she’s so young and pretty and well-made. Absolutely and sub specie æternitatis*, I suppose she can. But from the very sublunary point of view of the male victim, I doubt whether, at twenty-one . . .”

  “Only twenty-one?” Dodo was disapproving. “But Miles!”

  Fanning ignored her interruption. “And another thing you must remember,” he went on, “is that the spiritual vamp who’s come of age this year is not at all the same as the spiritual vamp who came of age fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago. She doesn’t bother much about Mysticism, or the Lower Classes, or the Divine Mind, or any nonsense of that sort. No, she goes straight to the real point—the point which the older vamps approached in such a tiresomely circuitous fashion—she goes straight to herself. But straight!” He stabbed the air with his fruit-knife. “A bee-line. Oh, it has a certain charm that directness. But whether it won’t be rather frightful when they’re older is another question. But then almost everything is rather frightful when people are older.”

  “Thank you,” said Dodo. “And what about you?”

  “Oh, an old satyr,” he answered with that quick, brilliantly mysterious smile of his. “A superannuated faun. I know it; only too well. But at the same time, most intolerably, a Higher Person. Which is what draws the spiritual vamps. Even the youngest ones. Not to talk to me about the Divine Mind, of course, or their views about Social Reform. But about themselves. Their Individualities, their Souls, their Inhibitions, their Unconsciouses, their Pasts, their Futures. For them, the Higher Things are all frankly and nakedly personal. And the function of the Higher Person is to act as a sort of psychoanalytical father confessor. He exists to tell them all about their strange and wonderful psyches. And meanwhile, of course, his friendship inflates their egotism. And if there should be any question of love, what a personal triumph!”


  “Which is all very well,” objected Dodo. “But what about the old satyr? Wouldn’t it also be a bit of a triumph for him? You know, Miles,” she added gravely, “it would really be scandalous if you were to take advantage. . . .”

  “But I haven’t the slightest intention of taking any advantages. If only for my own sake. Besides, the child is too ingenuously absurd. The most hair-raising theoretical knowledge of life, out of books. You should hear her prattling away about inverts and perverts and birth control—but prattling from unplumbed depths of innocence and practical ignorance. Very queer. And touching too. Much more touching than the old-fashioned innocences of the young creatures who thought babies were brought by storks. Knowing all about love and lust, but in the same way as one knows all about quadratic equations. And her knowledge of the other aspects of life is really of the same kind. What she’s seen of the world she’s seen in her mother’s company. The worst guide imaginable, to judge from the child’s account. (Dead now, incidentally.) The sort of woman who could never live on top gear, so to speak—only at one or two imaginative removes from the facts. So that, in her company, what was nominally real life became actually just literature—yet more literature. Bad, inadequate Balzac in flesh and blood instead of genuine, good Balzac out of a set of nice green volumes. The child realizes it herself. Obscurely, of course; but distressfully. It’s one of the reasons why she’s applied to me: she hopes I can explain what’s wrong. And correct it in practice. Which I won’t do in any drastic manner, I promise you. Only mildly, by precept—that is, if I’m not too bored to do it at all.”

  “What’s the child’s name?” Dodo asked.

  “Pamela Tarn.”

  “Tarn? But was her mother by any chance Clare Tarn?”

  He nodded. “That was it. She even made her daughter call her by her christian name. The companion stunt.”

  “But I used to know Clare Tarn quite well,” said Dodo in an astonished, feeling voice. “These last years I’d hardly seen her. But when I was more in London just after the War . . .”

  “But this begins to be interesting,” said Fanning. “New light on my little friend. . . .”

  “Whom I absolutely forbid you,” said Dodo emphatically, “to . . .”

  “Tamper with the honour of,” he suggested. “Let’s phrase it as nobly as possible.”

  “No, seriously, Miles. I really won’t have it. Poor Clare Tarn’s daughter. If I didn’t have to rush off to-morrow I’d ask her to come and see me, so as to warn her.”

  Fanning laughed. “She wouldn’t thank you. And besides if any one is to be warned, I’m the one who’s in danger. But I shall be firm, Dodo—a rock. I won’t allow her to seduce me.”

  “You’re incorrigible, Miles. But mind, if you dare. . . .”

  “But I won’t. Definitely.” His tone was reassuring. “Meanwhile I must hear something about the mother.”

  The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. “A woman who couldn’t live on top gear. You’ve really said the last word.”

  “But I want first words,” he answered. “It’s not the verdict that’s interesting. It’s the whole case, it’s all the evidence. You’re sub-poenaed, my dear. Speak up.”

  “Poor Clare!”

  “Oh, nil nisi bonum*, of course, if that’s what disturbs you.”

  “She’d have so loved it to be not bonum, poor dear!” said the marchesa, tempering her look of vague condolence with a little smile. “That was her great ambition—to be thought rather wicked. She’d have liked to have the reputation of a vampire. Not a spiritual one, mind you. The other sort. Lola Montes—that was her ideal.”

  “It’s an ideal,” said Fanning, “that takes some realizing, I can tell you.”

  Dodo nodded. “And that’s what she must have found out, pretty soon. She wasn’t born to be a fatal woman; she lacked the gifts. No staggering beauty, no mysterious fascination or intoxicating vitality. She was just very charming, that was all; and at the same time rather impossible and absurd. So that there weren’t any aspiring victims to be fatal to. And a vampire without victims is—well, what?”

  “Certainly not a vampire,” he concluded.

  “Except, of course, in her own imagination, if she chooses to think so. In her own imagination Clare certainly was a vampire.”

  “Reduced, in fact, to being her own favourite character in fiction.”

  “Precisely. You always find the phrase.”

  “Only too fatally!” He made a little grimace. “I often wish I didn’t. The luxury of being inarticulate! To be able to wallow indefinitely long in every feeling and sensation, instead of having to clamber out at once on to a hard, dry, definite phrase. But what about your Clare?”

  “Well, she started, of course, by being a riddle to me. Unanswerable, or rather answerable, answered, but so very strangely that I was still left wondering. I shall never forget the first time Filippo and I went to dine there. Poor Roger Tarn was still alive then. While the men were drinking their port, Clare and I were alone in the drawing-room. There was a little chit-chat, I remember, and then, with a kind of determined desperation, as though she’d that second screwed herself up to jumping off the Eiffel Tower, suddenly, out of the blue, she asked me if I’d ever had one of those wonderful Sicilian peasants—I can’t possibly reproduce the tone, the expression—as a lover. I was a bit taken aback, I must confess. ‘But we don’t live in Sicily,’ was the only thing I could think of answering—too idiotically! ‘Our estates are all in Umbria and Tuscany.’ ‘But the Tuscans are superb creatures too,’ she insisted. Superb, I agreed. But, as it happens, I don’t have affairs with even the superbest peasants. Nor with anybody else, for that matter. Clare was dreadfully disappointed. I think she’d expected the most romantic confidences—moonlight and mandolins and stretti, stretti, nell’ estasì d’amor.* She was really very ingenuous. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve really never . . . ?’ she insisted. I ought to have got angry, I suppose; but it was all so ridiculous, that I never thought of it. I just said, ‘Never,’ and felt as though I were refusing her a favour. But she made up for my churlishness by being lavish to herself. But lavish! You can’t imagine what a tirade she let fly at me. How wonderful it was to get away from self-conscious, complicated, sentimental love! How profoundly satisfying to feel oneself at the mercy of the dumb, dark forces of physical passion! How intoxicating to humiliate one’s culture and one’s class feeling before some magnificent primitive, some earthly beautiful satyr, some divine animal! And so on, crescendo. And it ended with her telling me the story of her extraordinary affair with—was it a gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit-shooting in it, I know.”

  “It sounds like a chapter out of George Sand.”

  “It was.”

  “Or still more, I’m afraid,” he said, making a wry face “like a most deplorable parody of my Endymion and the Moon.”

  “Which I’ve never read, I’m ashamed to say.”

  “You should, if only to understand this Clare of yours.”

  “I will. Perhaps I’d have solved her more quickly, if I’d read it at the time. As it was I could only be amazed—and a little horrified. That rabbit-shooter!” She shook her head. “He ought to have been so romantic. But I could only think of that awful yellow kitchen soap he’d be sure to wash himself with, or perhaps carbolic, so that he’d smell like washed dogs—dreadful! And the flannel shirts, not changed quite often enough. And the hands, so horny, with very short nails, perhaps broken. No, I simply couldn’t understand her.”

  “Which is to your discredit, Dodo, if I may say so.”

  “Perhaps. But you must admit, I never pretended to be anything but what I am—a perfectly frivolous and respectable member of the upper classes. With a taste, I must confess, for the scandalous. Which was one of the reasons, I suppose, why I became so intimate with poor Clara. I was really fascinated by her confidences.”

  “Going on the tiles vicariously, eh?”

  “Well, if y
ou choose to put it grossly and vulgarly. . . . .”

  “Which I do choose,” he interposed. “To be tactfully gross and appositely vulgar—that, my dear, is one of the ultimate artistic refinements. One day I shall write a monograph on the aesthetics of vulgarity. But meanwhile shall we say that you were inspired by an intense scientific curiosity to . . .”

  Dodo laughed. “One of the tiresome things about you, Miles, is that one can never go on being angry with you.”

  “Yet another subject for a monograph!” he answered, and his smile was at once confidential and ironical, affectionate and full of mockery. “But let’s hear what the scientific curiosity elicited?”

  “Well, to begin with, a lot of really rather embarrassingly intimate confidences and questions, which I needn’t repeat.”

  “No, don’t. I know what those feminine conversations are. I have a native modesty. . . .”

  “Oh, so have I. And, strangely enough, so had Clare. But somehow she wanted to outrage herself. You felt it all the time. She always had that desperate jumping-off-the-Eiffel-Tower manner, when she began to talk like that. It was a kind of martyrdom. But enjoyable. Perversely.” Dodo shook her head. “Very puzzling. I used to have to make quite an effort to change the conversation from gynaecology to romance. Oh, those lovers of hers! Such stories! The most fantastic adventures in East End opium dens, in aeroplanes, and even, I remember (it was that very hot summer of ’twenty-two), even in a refrigerator!”

  “My dear!” protested Fanning.

  “Honestly! I’m only repeating what she told me.”