Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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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 bank-notes.
‘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 childlike 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 making 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 school-mistresses 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 everyone 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 everyone except Fanning, she had lost her embarrassment and her sense of guilt. The spiritual presences 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 Pa
radise.’
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 objected 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 fools’ paradises, ostriches’ 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 regularly offered a hundred and ninety million marks for a thought — yes, and gained on the exchange. But now. . . .’
‘Well, if you really want to know,’ said Pamela, deciding to be bold, ‘I was thinking how much my Aunt Edith disapproved of your books.’
‘Did she? I suppose it was only to be expected. Seeing that I don’t write for aunts — at any rate, not for aunts in their specifically auntly capacity. Though, of course, when they’re off duty. . . .’
‘Aunt Edith’s never off duty.’
‘And I’m never on. So you see.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But I’m sure,’ he added, ‘you never paid much attention to her disapproval.’
‘None,’ she answered, playing the un-good part for all it was worth. ‘I read Freud this spring,’ she boasted, ‘and Gide’s autobiography, and Krafft-Ebbing. . . .’
‘Which is more than I’ve ever done,’ he laughed.
The laugh encouraged her. ‘Not to mention all your books, years ago. You see,’ she added, suddenly fearful lest she might have said something to offend him, ‘my mother never minded my reading your books. I mean, she really encouraged me, even when I was only seventeen or eighteen. My mother died last year,’ she explained. There was a silence. ‘I’ve lived with Aunt Edith ever since,’ she went on. ‘Aunt Edith’s my father’s sister. Older than he was. Father died in 1923.’
‘So you’re all alone now?’ he questioned. ‘Except, of course, for Aunt Edith.’
‘Whom I’ve now left.’ She was almost boasting again. ‘Because when I was twenty-one . . .’
‘You stuck out your tongue at her and ran away. Poor Aunt Edith!’
‘I won’t have you being sorry for her,’ Pamela answered hotly. ‘She’s really awful, you know. Like poor Joan’s husband in The Return of Eurydice.’ How easy it was to talk to him!
‘So you even know,’ said Fanning, laughing, ‘what it’s like to be unhappily married. Already. Indissolubly wedded to a virtuous aunt.’
‘No joke, I can tell you. I’m the one to be sorry for. Besides, she didn’t mind my going away, whatever she might say.’
‘She did say something, then?’
‘Oh yes. She always says things. More in sorrow than in anger, you know. Like headmistresses. So gentle and good, I mean. When all the time she really thought me too awful. I used to call her Hippo, because she was such a hypocrite — and so fat. Enormous. Don’t you hate enormous people? No, she’s really delighted to get rid of me,’ Pamela concluded, ‘simply delighted.’ Her face was flushed and as though luminously alive; she spoke with a quick eagerness.
‘What a tremendous hurry she’s in,’ he was thinking, ‘to tell me all about herself. If she were older or uglier, what an intolerable egotism it would be! As intolerable as mine would be if I happened to be less intelligent. But as it is . . .’ His face, as he listened to her, expressed a sympathetic attention.
‘She always disliked me,’ Pamela had gone on. ‘Mother too. She couldn’t abide my mother, though she was always sweetly hippo-ish with her.’
‘And your mother — how did she respond?’
‘Well, not hippo-ishly, of course. She couldn’t be that. She treated Aunt Edith — well, how did she treat Aunt Edith?’ Pamela hesitated, frowning. ‘Well, I suppose you’d say she was just natural with the Hippo. I mean . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Well, if she ever was really natural. I don’t know. Is anybody natural?’ She looked up questioningly at Fanning. ‘Am I natural, for example?’
Smiling a little at her choice of an example, ‘I should think almost certainly not,’ Fanning answered, more or less at random.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said despairingly, and her face was suddenly tragic, almost there were tears in her eyes. ‘But isn’t it awful? I mean, isn’t it simply hopeless?’
Pleased that his chance shot should have gone home, ‘At your age,’ he said consolingly, ‘you can hardly expect to be natural. Naturalness is somet
hing you learn, painfully, by trial and error. Besides,’ he added, ‘there are some people who are unnatural by nature.’
‘Unnatural by nature,’ Pamela nodded, as she repeated the words, as though she were inwardly marshalling evidence to confirm their truth. ‘Yes, I believe that’s us,’ she concluded. ‘Mother and me. Not hippos, I mean, not poseuses, but just unnatural by nature. You’re quite right. As usual,’ she added, with something that was almost resentment in her voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized.
‘How is it you manage to know so much?’ Pamela asked in the same resentful tone. By what right was he so easily omniscient, when she could only grope and guess in the dark?
Taking to himself a credit that belonged, in this case, to chance, ‘Child’s play, my dear Watson,’ he answered banteringly. ‘But I suppose you’re too young to have heard of Sherlock Holmes. And anyhow,’ he added, with an ironical seriousness, ‘don’t let’s waste any more time talking about me.’
Pamela wasted no more time. ‘I get so depressed with myself,’ she said with a sigh. ‘And after what you’ve told me I shall get still more depressed. Unnatural by nature. And by upbringing too. Because I see now that my mother was like that. I mean, she was unnatural by nature too.’