After the Fireworks Page 8

  “I resign myself,” said Pamela, laughing. His words had made her feel happy and excited. “You can begin.” And in a theatrical voice, like that which used to make Ruth go off into such fits of laughter, “I am all ears,” she added, “as they say in the Best Books.” She pulled off her hat and shook out the imprisoned hair.

  To Fanning, as he watched her, the gesture brought a sudden shock of pleasure. The impatient, exuberant youthfulness of it! And the little head, so beautifully shaped, so gracefully and proudly poised on its long neck! And her hair was drawn back smoothly from the face to explode in a thick tangle of curls on the nape of the neck. Ravishing!

  “All ears,” she repeated, delightedly conscious of the admiration she was receiving.

  “All ears.” And almost meditatively. “But do you know,” he went on, “I’ve never even seen your ears. May I?” And without waiting for her permission, he lifted up the soft, goldy-brown hair that lay in a curve, drooping, along the side of her head.

  Pamela’s face violently reddened; but she managed none the less to laugh. “Are they as long and furry as you expected?” she asked.

  He allowed the lifted hair to fall back into its place and, without answering her question, “I’ve always,” he said, looking at her with a smile which she found disquietingly enigmatic and remote, “I’ve always had a certain fellow-feeling for those savages who collect ears and thread them on strings, as necklaces.”

  “But what a horror!” she cried out.

  “You think so?” He raised his eyebrows.

  But perhaps, Pamela was thinking, he was a sadist. In that book of Krafft-Ebbing’s there had been a lot about sadists. It would be queer, if he were . . .

  “But what’s certain,” Fanning went on in another, business-like voice, “what’s only too certain is that ears aren’t culture. They’ve got too much to do with us. With me, at any rate. Much too much.” He smiled at her again. Pamela smiled back at him, fascinated and obscurely a little frightened; but the fright was an element in the fascination. She dropped her eyes. “So don’t let’s waste any more time,” his voice went on. “Culture to right of us, culture to left of us. Let’s begin with this culture on the left. With the vases. They really have absolutely nothing to do with us.”

  He began and Pamela listened. Not very attentively, however. She lifted her hand and, under the hair, touched her ear. “A fellow-feeling for those savages.” She remembered his words with a little shudder. He’d almost meant them. And “ears aren’t culture. Too much to do with us. With me. Much too much.” He’d meant that too, genuinely and wholeheartedly. And his smile had been a confirmation of the words; yes, and a comment, full of mysterious significance. What had he meant? But surely it was obvious what he had meant. Or wasn’t it obvious?

  The face she turned towards him wore an expression of grave attention. And when he pointed to a vase and said, “Look,” she looked, with what an air of concentrated intelligence! But as for knowing what he was talking about! She went on confusedly thinking that he had a fellow-feeling for those savages, and that her ears had too much to do with him, much too much, and that perhaps he was in love with her, perhaps also that he was like those people in Krafft-Ebbing, perhaps . . . ; and it seemed to her that her blood must have turned into a kind of hot, red soda-water, all fizzy with little bubbles of fear and excitement.

  She emerged, partially at least, out of this bubbly and agitated trance to hear him say, “Look at that, now.” A tall statue towered over her. “The Apollo of Veii,” he explained. “And really, you know, it is the most beautiful statue in the world. Each time I see it, I’m more firmly convinced of that.”

  Dutifully, Pamela stared. The God stood there on his pedestal, one foot advanced, erect in his draperies. He had lost his arms, but the head was intact and the strange Etruscan face was smiling, enigmatically smiling. Rather like him, it suddenly occurred to her.

  “What’s it made of?” she asked; for it was time to be intelligent.

  “Terracotta. Originally coloured.”

  “And what date?”

  “Late sixth century.”

  “B.C.?” she queried, a little dubiously, and was relieved when he nodded. It really would have been rather awful if it had been A.D. “Who by?”

  “By Vulca, they say. But as that’s the only Etruscan sculptor they know the name of . . .” He shrugged his shoulders, and the gesture expressed a double doubt—doubt whether the archæologists were right and doubt whether it was really much good talking about Etruscan art to some one who didn’t feel quite certain whether the Apollo of Veii was made in the sixth century before or after Christ.

  There was a long silence. Fanning looked at the statue. So did Pamela, who also, from time to time, looked at Fanning. She was on the point, more than once, of saying something; but his face was so meditatively glum that, on each occasion, she changed her mind. In the end, however, the silence became intolerable.

  “I think it’s extraordinarily fine,” she announced in the rather religious voice that seemed appropriate. He only nodded. The silence prolonged itself, more oppressive and embarrassing than ever, She made another and despairing effort. “Do you know, I think he’s really rather like you. I mean, the way he smiles. . . .”

  Fanning’s petrified immobility broke once more into life. He turned towards her, laughing. “You’re irresistible, Pamela.”

  “Am I?” Her tone was cold; she was offended. To be told you were irresistible always meant that you’d behaved like an imbecile child. But her conscience was clear; it was a gratuitous insult—the more intolerable since it had been offered by the man who, a moment before, had been saying that he had a fellow-feeling for those savages and that her ears had altogether too much to do with him.

  Fanning noticed her sudden change of humour and obscurely divined the cause. “You’ve paid me the most irresistible compliment you could have invented,” he said, doing his best to undo the effect of his words. For after all what did it matter, with little breasts like that and thin brown arms, if she did mix up the millenniums a bit? “You could hardly have pleased me more if you’d said I was another Rudolph Valentino.”

  Pamela had to laugh.

  “But seriously,” he said, “if you knew what this lovely God means to me, how much . . .”

  Mollified by being once more spoken to seriously, “I think I can understand,” she said in her most understanding voice.

  “No, I doubt if you can.” He shook his head. “It’s a question of age, of the experience of a particular time that’s not your time. I shall never forget when I came back to Rome for the first time after the War and found this marvellous creature standing here. They only dug him up in ’sixteen, you see. So there it was, a brand new experience, a new and apocalyptic voice out of the past. Some day I shall try to get it on to paper, all that this God has taught me.” He gave a little sigh; she could see that he wasn’t thinking about her any more; he was talking for himself. “Some day,” he repeated. “But it’s not ripe yet. You can’t write a thing before it’s ripe, before it wants to be written. But you can talk about it, you can take your mind for walks all round it and through it.” He paused and, stretching out a hand, touched a fold of the God’s sculptured garment, as though he were trying to establish a more intimate, more real connection with the beauty before him. “Not that what he taught me was fundamentally new,” he went on slowly. “It’s all in Homer, of course. It’s even partially expressed in the archaic Greek sculpture. Partially. But Apollo here expresses it wholly. He’s all Homer, all the ancient world, concentrated in a single lump of terracotta. That’s his novelty. And then the circumstances gave him a special point. It was just after the War that I first saw him—just after the apotheosis and the logical conclusion of all the things Apollo didn’t stand for. You can imagine how marvellously new he seemed by contrast. After that horrible enormity, he was a lovely symbol of the small, the local, the kindly. After all that extravagance of beastliness—yes, and all that
extravagance of heroism and self-sacrifice—he seemed so beautifully sane. A God who doesn’t admit the separate existence of either heroics or diabolics, but somehow includes them in his own nature and turns them into something else—like two gases combining to make a liquid. Look at him,” Fanning insisted. “Look at his face, look at his body, see how he stands. It’s obvious. He’s neither the God of heroics, nor the God of diabolics. And yet it’s equally obvious that he knows all about both, that he includes them, that he combines them into a third essence. It’s the same with Homer. There’s no tragedy in Homer. He’s pessimistic, yes; but never tragic. His heroes aren’t heroic in our sense of the word; they’re men.” (Pamela took a very deep breath; if she had opened her mouth, it would have been a yawn.) “In fact, you can say there aren’t any heroes in Homer. Nor devils, nor sins. And none of our horrible, nauseating disgusts—because they’re the complement of being spiritual, they’re the tails to its heads. You couldn’t have had Homer writing ‘the expensive spirit in a waste of shame.’ Though, of course, with Shakespeare it may have been physiological; the passion violent and brief, and then the most terrible reaction. It’s the sort of thing that colours a whole life, a whole work. Only of course one’s never allowed to say so. All that one isn’t allowed to say!” He laughed. Pamela also laughed. “But physiology or no physiology,” Fanning went on, “he couldn’t have written like that if he’d lived before the great split—the great split that broke life into spirit and matter, heroics and diabolics, virtue and sin and all the other accursed antitheses. Homer lived before the split; life hadn’t been broken when he wrote. They’re complete, his men and women, complete and real; for he leaves nothing out, he shirks no issue, even though there is no tragedy. He knows all about it—all.” He laid his hand again on the statue. “And this God’s his portrait. He’s Homer, but with the Etruscan smile. Homer smiling at the sad, mysterious, beautiful absurdity of the world. The Greeks didn’t see that divine absurdity as clearly as the Etruscans. Not even in Homer’s day; and by the time you get to any sculptor who was anything like as accomplished as the man who made this, you’ll find that they’ve lost it altogether. True, the earliest Greek Gods used to smile all right—or rather grin; for subtlety wasn’t their strong point. But by the end of the sixth century they were already becoming a bit too heroic; they were developing those athlete’s muscles and those tiresomely noble poses and damned superior faces. But our God here refused to be a prize-fighter or an actor-manager. There’s no terribiltà about him, no priggishness, no sentimentality. And yet without being in the least pretentious, he’s beautiful, he’s grand, he’s authentically divine. The Greeks took the road that led to Michelangelo and Bernini and Thorwaldsen and Rodin. A rake’s progress. These Etruscans were on a better track. If only people had had the sense to follow it! Or at least get back to it. But nobody has, except perhaps old Maillol. They’ve all allowed themselves to be lured away. Plato was the arch-seducer. It was he who first sent us whoring after spirituality and heroics, whoring after the complementary demons of disgust and sin. We needs must love—well, not the highest, except sometimes by accident—but always the most extravagant and exciting. Tragedy was much more exciting than Homer’s luminous pessimism, than this God’s smiling awareness of the divine absurdity. Being alternately a hero and a sinner is much more sensational than being an integrated man. So as men seem to have the Yellow Press in the blood, like syphilis, they went back on Homer and Apollo; they followed Plato and Euripides. And Plato and Euripides handed them over to the Stoics and the Neo-Platonists. And these in turn handed humanity over to the Christians. And the Christians have handed us over to Henry Ford and the machines. So here we are.”

  Pamela nodded intelligently. But what she was chiefly conscious of was the ache in her feet. If only she could sit down!

  But, “How poetical and appropriate,” Fanning began again, “that the God should have risen from the grave exactly when he did, in 1916! Rising up in the midst of the insanity, like a beautiful, smiling reproach from another world. It was dramatic. At least I felt it so, when I saw him for the first time just after the War. The resurrection of Apollo, the Etruscan Apollo. I’ve been his worshipper and self-appointed priest ever since. Or at any rate I’ve tried to be. But it’s difficult.” He shook his head. “Perhaps it’s even impossible for us to recapture . . .” He left the sentence unfinished and, taking her arm, led her out into the great courtyard of the Villa. Under the arcades was a bench. Thank goodness, said Pamela inwardly. They sat down.

  “You see,” he went on, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped, “you can’t get away from the things that God protests against. Because they’ve become a part of you. Tradition and education have driven them into your very bones. It’s a case of what I was speaking about just now—of the things that have nothing to do with you coming by force of habit to have everything to do with you. Which is why I’d like you to get Apollo and his Etruscans into your system while you’re still young. It may save you trouble. Or on the other hand,” he added with a rueful little laugh, “it may not. Because I really don’t know if he’s everybody’s God. He may do for me—and do, only because I’ve got Plato and Jesus in my bones. But does he do for you? Chi lo sa?* The older one grows, the more often one asks that question. Until, of course, one’s arteries begin to harden, and then one’s opinions begin to harden too, harden till they fossilize into certainty. But meanwhile, chi lo sa? chi lo sa?† And after all it’s quite agreeable, not knowing. And knowing, and at the same time knowing that it’s no practical use knowing—that’s not disagreeable either. Knowing, for example, that it would be good to live according to this God’s commandments, but knowing at the same time that one couldn’t do it even if one tried, because one’s very guts and skeleton are already pledged to other Gods.”

  “I should have thought that was awful,” said Pamela.

  “For you, perhaps. But I happen to have a certain natural affection for the accomplished fact. I like and respect it, even when it is a bit depressing. Thus, it’s a fact that I’d like to think and live in the unsplit, Apollonian way. But it’s also a fact—and the fact as such is lovable—that I can’t help indulging in aspirations and disgusts; I can’t help thinking in terms of heroics and diabolics. Because the division, the splitness, has been worked right into my bones. So has the microbe of sensationalism; I can’t help wallowing in the excitements of mysticism and the tragic sense. Can’t help it.” He shook his head. “Though perhaps I’ve wallowed in them rather more than I was justified in wallowing—justified by my upbringing, I mean. There was a time when I was really quite perversely preoccupied with mystical experiences and ecstasies and private universes.”

  “Private universes?” she questioned.

  “Yes, private, not shared. You create one, you live in it, each time you’re in love, for example.” (Brightly serious, Pamela nodded her understanding and agreement; yes, yes, she knew all about that.) “Each time you’re spiritually exalted,” he went on, “each time you’re drunk, even. Everybody has his own favourite short cuts to the other world. Mine, in those days, was opium.”

  “Opium?” She opened her eyes very wide. “Do you mean to say you smoked opium?” She was thrilled. Opium was a vice of the first order.

  “It’s as good a way of becoming supernatural,” he answered, “as looking at one’s nose or one’s navel, or not eating, or repeating a word over and over again, till it loses its sense and you forget how to think. All roads lead to Rome. The only bother about opium is that it’s rather an unwholesome road. I had to go to a nursing home in Cannes to get disintoxicated.”

  “All the same,” said Pamela, doing her best to imitate the quiet casualness of his manner, “it must be rather delicious, isn’t it? Awfully exciting, I mean,” she added, forgetting not to be thrilled.

  “Too exciting.” He shook his head. “That’s the trouble. We needs must love the excitingest when we see it. The supernatural is exciting. But I don
’t want to love the supernatural, I want to love the natural. Not that a little supernaturalness isn’t, of course, perfectly natural and necessary. But you can overdo it. I overdid it then. I was all the time in ’tother world, never here. I stopped smoking because I was ill. But even if I hadn’t been, I’d have stopped sooner or later for aesthetic reasons. The supernatural world is so terribly baroque—altogether too Counter-Reformation and Bernini. At its best it can be Greco. But you can have too much even of Greco. A big dose of him makes you begin to pine for Vulca and his Apollo.”

  “But doesn’t it work the other way too?” she asked. “I mean, don’t you sometimes long to start smoking again?” She was secretly hoping that he’d let her try a pipe or two.

  Fanning shook his head. “One doesn’t get tired of very good bread,” he answered. “Apollo’s like that. I don’t pine for supernatural excitements. Which doesn’t mean,” he added, “that I don’t in practice run after them. You can’t disintoxicate yourself of your culture. That sticks deeper than a mere taste for opium. I’d like to be able to think and live in the spirit of the God. But the fact remains that I can’t.”

  “Can’t you?” said Pamela with a polite sympathy. She was more interested in the opium.

  “No, no, you can’t entirely disintoxicate yourself of mysticism and the tragic sense. You can’t take a Turvey treatment for spirituality and disgust. You can’t. Not nowadays. Acceptance is impossible in a split world like ours. You’ve got to recoil. In the circumstances it’s right and proper. But absolutely it’s wrong. If only one could accept as this God accepts, smiling like that . . .”

  “But you do smile like that,” she insisted.

  He laughed and, unclasping his hands, straightened himself up in his seat. “But unhappily,” he said, “a man can smile and smile and not be Apollo. Meanwhile, what’s becoming of your education? Shouldn’t we . . . ?”