Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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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 anyone 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 motorboats. Up and down, up and down, just for the sake of not sitting still, of having never 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 just 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 lowbrow 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?’ A
nd 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 businessmen — 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 sensations. 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 anyone 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.’
‘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 sodawater, all fizzy with little bubbles of fear and e
xcitement.
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 archaeologists were right and doubt whether it was really much good talking about Etruscan art to someone 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.