After the Fireworks Read online

  For Pamela, dinner in solitude, especially the public solitude of hotels, was a punishment. Companionlessness and compulsory silence depressed her. Besides, she never felt quite eye-proof; she could never escape from the obsession that every one was looking at her, judging, criticizing. Under a carapace of rather impertinent uncaringness she writhed distressfully. At Florence her loneliness had driven her to make friends with two not very young American women who were staying in her hotel. They were a bit earnest and good and dreary. But Pamela preferred even dreariness to solitude. She attached herself to them inseparably. They were touched. When she left for Rome, they promised to write to her, they made her promise to write to them. She was so young; they felt responsible; a steadying hand, the counsel of older friends. . . . Pamela had already received two steadying letters. But she hadn’t answered them, never would answer them. The horrors of lonely dining cannot be alleviated by correspondence.

  Walking down to her ordeal in the restaurant, she positively yearned for her dreary friends. But the hall was a desert of alien eyes and faces; and the waiter who led her through the hostile dining-room, had bowed, it seemed to her, with an ironical politeness, had mockingly smiled. She sat down haughtily at her table and almost wished she were under it. When the sommelier appeared with his list, she ordered half a bottle of something absurdly expensive, for fear he might think she didn’t know anything about wine.

  She had got as far as the fruit, when a presence loomed over her; she looked up. “You?” Her delight was an illumination; the young man was dazzled. “What marvellous luck!” Yet it was only Guy Browne, Guy whom she had met a few times at dances and found quite pleasant—that was all. “Think of your being in Rome!” She made him sit down at her table. When she had finished her coffee, Guy suggested that they should go out and dance somewhere. They went. It was nearly three when Pamela got to bed. She had had a most enjoyable evening.

  V

  BUT HOW UNGRATEFULLY SHE TREATED POOR GUY when, next day at lunch, Fanning asked her how she had spent the evening! True, there were extenuating circumstances, chief among which was the fact that Fanning had kissed her when they met. By force of habit, he himself would have explained, if any one had asked him why, because he kissed every presentable face. Kissing was in the great English tradition. “It’s the only way I can be like Chaucer,” he liked to affirm. “Just as knowing a little Latin and less Greek is my only claim to resembling Shakespeare and as lying in bed till ten’s the nearest I get to Descartes.” In this particular case, as perhaps in every other particular case, the force of habit had been seconded by a deliberate intention; he was accustomed to women being rather in love with him, he liked the amorous atmosphere and could use the simplest as well as the most complicated methods to create it. Moreover he was an experimentalist, he genuinely wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that Pamela was astonished, embarrassed, thrilled, delighted, bewildered. And what with her confused excitement and the enormous effort she had made to take it all as naturally and easily as he had done, she was betrayed into what, in other circumstances, would have been a scandalous ingratitude. But when one has just been kissed, for the first time and at one’s second meeting with him, kissed offhandedly and yet (she felt it) significantly, by Miles Fanning—actually Miles Fanning!—little men like Guy Browne do seem rather negligible, even though one did have a very good time with them the evening before.

  “I’m afraid you must have been rather lonely last night,” said Fanning, as they sat down to lunch. His sympathy hypocritically covered a certain satisfaction that it should be his absence that had condemned her to dreariness.

  “No, I met a friend,” Pamela answered with a smile which the inward comparison of Guy with the author of The Return of Eurydice had tinged with a certain amused condescendingness.

  “A friend?” He raised his eyebrows. “Amico or amica? Our English is so discreetly equivocal. With this key Bowdler locked up his heart. But I apologize. Co or ca?”

  “Co. He’s called Guy Browne and he’s here learning Italian to get into the Foreign Office. He’s a nice boy.” Pamela might have been talking about a favourite, or even not quite favourite, retriever. “Nice; but nothing very special. I mean, not in the way of intelligence.” She shook her head patronizingly over Guy’s very creditable First in History as a guttersnipe capriciously favoured by an archduke might learn in his protector’s company to shake his head and patronizingly smile at the name of a marquis of only four or five centuries’ standing. “He can dance, though,” she admitted.

  “So I suppose you danced with him?” said Fanning in a tone which, in spite of his amusement at the child’s assumption of an aged superiority, he couldn’t help making rather disobligingly sarcastic. It annoyed him to think that Pamela should have spent an evening, which he had pictured as dismally lonely, dancing with a young man.

  “Yes, we danced,” said Pamela, nodding.

  “Where?”

  “Don’t ask me. We went to about six different places in the course of the evening.”

  “Of course you did,” said Fanning almost bitterly. “Moving rapidly from one place to another and doing exactly the same thing in each—that seems to be the young’s ideal of bliss.”

  Speaking as a young who had risen above such things, but who still had to suffer from the folly of her unregenerate contemporaries, “It’s quite true,” Pamela gravely confirmed.

  “They go to Pekin to listen to the wireless and to Benares to dance the fox-trot. I’ve seen them at it. It’s incomprehensible. And then the tooting up and down in automobiles, and the roaring up and down in aeroplanes and the stinking up and down in motor-boats. Up and down, up and down, just for the sake of not sitting still, of never having time to think or feel. No, I give them up, these young of yours.” He shook his head. “But I’m becoming a minor prophet,” he added; his good humour was beginning to return.

  “But after all,” said Pamela, “we’re not all like that.”

  Her gravity made him laugh. “There’s at least one who’s ready to let herself be bored by a tiresome survivor from another civilization. Thank you, Pamela.” Leaning across the table, he took her hand and kissed it. “I’ve been horribly ungrateful,” he went on, and his face, as he looked at her was suddenly transfigured by the bright enigmatic beauty of his smile. “If you knew how charming you looked!” he said; and it was true. That ingenuous face, those impertinent little breasts—charming. “And how charming you were! But of course you do know,” a little demon prompted him to add: “no doubt Mr. Browne told you last night.”

  Pamela had blushed—a blush of pleasure, and embarrassed shyness, and excitement. What he had just said and done was more significant, she felt, even than the kiss he had given her when they met. Her cheeks burned; but she managed, with an effort, to keep her eyes unwaveringly on his. His last words made her frown. “He certainly didn’t,” she answered. “He’d have got his face smacked.”

  “Is that a delicate hint?” he asked. “If so,” and he leaned forward, “here’s the other cheek.”

  Her face went redder than ever. She felt suddenly miserable; he was only laughing at her. “Why do you laugh at me?” she said aloud, unhappily.

  “But I wasn’t,” he protested. “I really did think you were annoyed.”

  “But why should I have been?”

  “I can’t imagine.” He smiled. “But if you would have smacked Mr. Browne’s face. . . .”

  “But Guy’s quite different.”

  It was Fanning’s turn to wince. “You mean he’s young, while I’m only a poor old imbecile who needn’t be taken seriously?”

  “Why are you so stupid?” Pamela asked almost fiercely. “No, but I mean,” she added in quick apology, “I mean . . . well, I don’t care two pins about Guy. So you see, it would annoy me if he tried to push in, like that. Whereas with somebody who does mean something to me . . .” Pamela hesitated. “With you,” she specified in a rather harsh, strained voice and with jus
t that look of despairing determination, Fanning imagined, just that jumping-off-the-Eiffel-Tower expression, which her mother’s face must have assumed in moments such as this, “it’s quite different. I mean, with you of course I’m not annoyed. I’m pleased. Or at least I was pleased, till I saw you were just making a fool of me.”

  Touched and flattered, “But my dear child,” Fanning protested, “I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I meant what I said. And much more than I said,” he added, in the teeth of the warning and reproachful outcry raised by his common sense. It was amusing to experiment, it was pleasant to be adored, exciting to be tempted (and how young she was, how perversely fresh!). There was even something quite agreeable in resisting temptation; it had the charms of a strenuous and difficult sport. Like mountain climbing. He smiled once more, consciously brilliant.

  This time Pamela dropped her eyes. There was a silence which might have protracted itself uncomfortably, if the waiter had not broken it by bringing the tagliatelle. They began to eat. Pamela was all at once exuberantly gay.

  After coffee they took a taxi and drove to the Villa Giulia. “For we mustn’t,” Fanning explained, “neglect your education.”

  “Mustn’t we?” she asked. “I often wonder why we mustn’t. Truthfully now, I mean without any hippoing and all that—why shouldn’t I neglect it? Why should I go to this beastly museum?” She was preparing to play the cynical, boastfully unintellectual part which she had made her own. “Why?” she repeated truculently. Behind the rather vulgar low-brow mask she cultivated wistful yearnings and concealed the uneasy consciousness of inferiority. “A lot of beastly old Roman odds and ends!” she grumbled; that was one for Miss Figgis.

  “Roman?” said Fanning. “God forbid! Etruscan.”

  “Well, Etruscan then; it’s all the same anyhow. Why shouldn’t I neglect the Etruscans? I mean, what have they got to do with me—me?” And she gave her chest two or three little taps with the tip of a crooked forefinger.

  “Nothing, my child,” he answered. “Thank goodness, they’ve got absolutely nothing to do with you, or me, or anybody else.”

  “Then why . . .”

  “Precisely for that reason. That’s the definition of culture—knowing and thinking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with us. About Etruscans, for example; or the mountains on the moon; or cat’s cradle among the Chinese; or the Universe at large.”

  “All the same,” she insisted, “I still don’t see.”

  “Because you’ve never known people who weren’t cultured. But make the acquaintance of a few practical business-men—the kind who have no time to be anything but alternately efficient and tired. Or of a few workmen from the big towns. (Country people are different; they still have the remains of the old substitutes for culture—religion, folk-lore, tradition. The town fellows have lost the substitutes without acquiring the genuine article.) Get to know those people; they’ll make you see the point of culture. Just as the Sahara’ll make you see the point of water. And for the same reason: they’re arid.”

  “That’s all very well; but what about people like Professor Cobley?”

  “Whom I’ve happily never met,” he said, “but can reconstruct from the expression on your face. Well, all that can be said about those people is: just try to imagine them if they’d never been irrigated. Gobi or Shamo.”

  “Well, perhaps.” She was dubious.

  “And anyhow the biggest testimony to culture isn’t the soulless philistines—it’s the soulful ones. My sweet Pamela,” he implored, laying a hand on her bare brown arm, “for heaven’s sake don’t run the risk of becoming a soulful philistine.”

  “But as I don’t know what that is,” she answered, trying to persuade herself, as she spoke, that the touch of his hand was giving her a tremendous frisson—but it really wasn’t.

  “It’s what the name implies,” he said. “A person without culture who goes in for having a soul. An illiterate idealist. A Higher Thinker with nothing to think about but his—or more often, I’m afraid, her—beastly little personal feelings and sensation. They spend their lives staring at their own navels and in the intervals trying to find other people who’ll take an interest and come and stare too. Oh, figuratively,” he added, noticing the expression of astonishment which had passed across her face. “En tout bien, tout honneur*. At least, sometimes and to begin with. Though I’ve known cases . . .” But he decided it would be better not to speak about the lady from Rochester, N. Y. Pamela might be made to feel that the cap fitted. Which it did, except that her little head was such a charming one. “In the end,” he said, “they go mad, these soulful philistines. Mad with self-consciousness and vanity and egotism and a kind of hopeless bewilderment; for when you’re utterly without culture, every fact’s an isolated, unconnected fact, every experience is unique and unprecedented. Your world’s made up of a few bright points floating about inexplicably in the midst of an unfathomable darkness. Terrifying! It’s enough to drive any one mad. I’ve seen them, lots of them, gone utterly crazy. In the past they had organized religion, which meant that somebody had once been cultured for them, vicariously. But what with protestantism and the modernists, their philistinism’s absolute now. They’re alone with their own souls. Which is the worst companionship a human being can have. So bad, that it sends you dotty. So beware, Pamela, beware! You’ll go mad, if you think only of what has something to do with you. The Etruscans will keep you sane.”

  “Let’s hope so.” She laughed. “But aren’t we there?”

  The cab drew up at the door of the villa; they got out.

  “And remember that the things that start with having nothing to do with you,” said Fanning, as he counted out the money for the entrance tickets, “turn out in the long run to have a great deal to do with you. Because they become a part of you and you of them. A soul can’t know or fully become itself without knowing and therefore to some extent becoming what isn’t itself. Which it does in various ways. By loving, for example.”

  “You mean . . . ?” The flame of interest brightened in her eyes.

  But he went on remorselessly. “And by thinking of things that have nothing to do with you.”

  “Yes, I see.” The flame had dimmed again.

  “Hence my concern about your education.” He beckoned her through the turnstile into the museum. “A purely selfish concern,” he added, smiling down at her. “Because I don’t want the most charming of my young friends to grow into a monster, whom I shall be compelled to flee from. So resign yourself to the Etruscans.”