Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘What a panorama of space and time!’ he said. ‘So many miles, such an expanse of centuries! You can still walk on the paved road that led to the temple here. The generals used to march up sometimes in triumph. With elephants.’
The silence enveloped them again, bringing them together; and they were alone and as though conspiratorially isolated in an atmosphere of solemn amorousness.
‘I signori son serviti,’ said a slightly ironic voice behind them.
‘That’s our drinks,’ said Fanning. ‘Perhaps we’d better . . .’ He got up and, as he unbent them, his knees cracked stiffly. He stooped to rub them, for they ached; his joints were old. ‘Fool!’ he said to himself, and decided that tomorrow he’d go to Venice. She was too young, too dangerously and perversely fresh.
They drank their lemonade in silence. Pamela’s face wore an expression of grave serenity which it touched and flattered and moved him to see. Still, he was a fool to be touched and flattered and moved.
‘Let’s go for a bit of a stroll,’ he said, when they had slaked their thirst. She got up without a word, obediently, as though she had become his slave.
It was breathless under the trees and there was a smell of damp, hot greenness, a hum and flicker of insects in the probing slants of sunlight. But in the open spaces the air of the heights was quick and nimble, in spite of the sun; the broom-flower blazed among the rocks; and round the bushes where the honeysuckle had clambered, there hung invisible islands of perfume, cool and fresh in the midst of the hot sea of bracken smell. Pamela moved here and there with little exclamations of delight, pulling at the tough sprays of honeysuckle. ‘Oh, look!’ she called to him in her rapturous voice. ‘Come and look!’
‘I’m looking,’ he shouted back across the intervening space. ‘With a telescope. With the eye of faith,’ he corrected; for she had moved out of sight. He sat down on a smooth rock and lighted a cigarette. Venice, he reflected, would be rather boring at this particular season. In a few minutes Pamela came back to him, flushed, with a great bunch of honeysuckle between her hands.
‘You know, you ought to have come,’ she said reproachfully. ‘There were such lovely pieces I couldn’t reach.’
Fanning shook his head. ‘He also serves who only sits and smokes,’ he said, and made room for her on the stone beside him. ‘And what’s more,’ he went on, ‘ ”let Austin have his swink to him reserved”. Yes, let him. How wholeheartedly I’ve always agreed with Chaucer’s Monk! Besides, you seem to forget, my child, that I’m an old, old gentleman.’ He was playing the safe, the prudent part. Perhaps if he played it hard enough, it wouldn’t be necessary to go to Venice.
Pamela paid no attention to what he was saying. ‘Would you like this one for your buttonhole, Miles?’ she asked, holding up a many-trumpeted flower. It was the first time she had called him by his Christian name, and the accomplishment of this much-meditated act of daring made her blush. ‘I’ll stick it in,’ she added, leaning forward, so that he shouldn’t see her reddened cheeks, till her face was almost touching his coat.
Near and thus offered (for it was an offer, he had no doubt of that, a deliberate offer) why shouldn’t he take this lovely, this terribly and desperately tempting freshness? It was a matter of stretching out one’s hands. But no; it would be too insane. She was near, this warm young flesh, this scent of her hair, near and offered — with what an innocent perversity, what a touchingly ingenuous and uncomprehending shamelessness! But he sat woodenly still, feeling all of a sudden as he had felt when, a lanky boy, he had been too shy, too utterly terrified, in spite of his longings, to kiss that Jenny — what on earth was her name? — that Jenny Something-or-Other he had danced the polka with at Uncle Fred’s one Christmas, how many centuries ago! — and yet only yesterday, only this instant.
‘There!’ said Pamela, and drew back. Her cheeks had had time to cool a little.
‘Thank you.’ There was a silence.
‘Do you know,’ she said at last, efficiently, ‘you’ve got a button loose on your coat.’
He fingered the hanging button. ‘What a damning proof of celibacy!’
‘If only I had a needle and thread . . .’
‘Don’t make your offer too lightly. If you knew what a quantity of unmended stuff I’ve got at home . . .’
‘I’ll come and do it all tomorrow,’ she promised, feeling delightfully protective and important.
‘Beware,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you at your word. It’s sweated labour.’
‘I don’t mind. I’ll come.’
‘Punctually at ten-thirty, then.’ He had forgotten about Venice. ‘I shall be a ruthless taskmaster.’
Nemi was already in shadow when they walked back; but the higher slopes were transfigured with the setting sunlight. Pamela halted at a twist of the path and turned back towards the western sky. Looking up, Fanning saw her standing there, goldenly flushed, the colours of her skin, her hair, her dress, the flowers in her hands, supernaturally heightened and intensified in the almost level light.
‘I think this is the most lovely place I’ve ever seen.’ Her voice was solemn with a natural piety. ‘But you’re not looking,’ she added in a different tone, reproachfully.
‘I’m looking at you,’ he answered. After all, if he stopped in time, it didn’t matter his behaving like a fool — it didn’t finally matter and, meanwhile, was very agreeable.
An expression of impertinent mischief chased away the solemnity from her face. ‘Trying to see my ears again?’ she asked; and, breaking off a honeysuckle blossom, she threw it down in his face, then turned and ran up the steep path.
‘Don’t imagine I’m going to pursue,’ he called after her. ‘The Pan and Syrinx business is a winter pastime. Like football.’
Her laughter came down to him from among the trees; he followed the retreating sound. Pamela waited for him at the top of the hill and they walked back together towards the inn.
‘Aren’t there any ruins here?’ she asked. ‘I mean, for my education.’
He shook his head. ‘The Young Pretender’s brother pulled them all down and built a monastery with them. For the Passionist Fathers,’ he added after a little pause. ‘I feel rather like a Passionist Father myself at the moment.’ They walked on without speaking, enveloped by the huge, the amorously significant silence.
But a few minutes later, at the dinner table, they were exuberantly gay. The food was well cooked, the wine an admirable Falernian. Fanning began to talk about his early loves. Vaguely at first, but later, under Pamela’s questioning, with an ever-increasing wealth of specific detail. They were indiscreet, impudent questions, which at ordinary times she couldn’t have uttered, or at least have only despairingly forced out, with a suicide’s determination. But she was a little tipsy now, tipsy with the wine and her own laughing exultation; she rapped them out easily, without a tremor. ‘As though you were the immortal Sigmund himself,’ he assured her, laughing. Her impudence and that knowledgeable, scientific ingenuousness amused him, rather perversely; he told her everything she asked.
When she had finished with his early loves, she questioned him about the opium. Fanning described his private universes and that charming nurse who had looked after him while he was being disintoxicated. He went on to talk about the black poverty he’d been reduced to by the drug. ‘Because you can’t do journalism or write novels in the other world,’ he explained. ‘At least I never could.’ And he told her of the debts he still owed and of his present arrangements with his publishers.
Almost suddenly the night was cold and Fanning became aware that the bottle had been empty for a long time. He threw away the stump of his cigar. ‘Let’s go.’ They took their seats and the car set off, carrying with it the narrow world of form and colour created by its head-lamps. They were alone in the darkness of their padded box. An hour before Fanning had decided that he would take this opportunity to kiss her. But he was haunted suddenly by the memory of an Australian who had once complained to him of the sufferin
gs of a young colonial in England. ‘In Sydney,’ he had said, ‘when I get into a taxi with a nice girl, I know exactly what to do. And I know exactly what to do when I’m in an American taxi. But when I apply my knowledge in London — God, isn’t there a row!’ How vulgar and stupid it all was! Not merely a fool, but a vulgar, stupid fool. He sat unmoving in his corner. When the lights of Rome were round them, he took her hand and kissed it.
‘Good night.’
She thanked him. ‘I’ve had the loveliest day.’ But her eyes were puzzled and unhappy. Meeting them, Fanning suddenly regretted his self-restraint, wished that he had been stupid and vulgar. And, after all, would it have been so stupid and vulgar? You could make any action seem anything you liked, from saintly to disgusting, by describing it in the appropriate words. But his regrets had come too late. Here was her hotel. He drove home to his solitude feeling exceedingly depressed.
6
June 14th. Spent the morning with M., who lives in a house belonging to a friend of his who is a Catholic and lives in Rome, M. says, because he likes to get his popery straight from the horse’s mouth. A nice house, old, standing just back from the Forum, which I said I thought was like a rubbish heap and he agreed with me, in spite of my education, and said he always preferred live dogs to dead lions and thinks it’s awful the way the Fascists are pulling down nice ordinary houses and making holes to find more of these beastly pillars and things. I sewed on a lot of buttons, etc., as he’s living in only two rooms on the ground floor and the servants are on their holiday, so he eats out and an old woman comes to clean up in the afternoons, but doesn’t do any mending, which meant a lot for me, but I liked doing it, in spite of the darning, because he sat with me all the time, sometimes talking, sometimes just working. When he’s writing or sitting with his pen in his hand thinking, his face is quite still and terribly serious and far, far away, as though he were a picture, or more like some sort of not human person, a sort of angel, if one can imagine them without nightdresses and long hair, really rather frightening, so that one longed to shout or throw a reel of cotton at him so as to change him back again into a man. He has very beautiful hands, rather long and bony, but strong. Sometimes, after he’d sat thinking for a long time, he’d get up and walk about the room, frowning and looking kind of angry, which was still more terrifying — sitting there while he walked up and down quite close to me, as though he were absolutely alone. But one time he suddenly stopped his walking up and down and said how profusely he apologized for his toes, because I was darning, and it was really very wonderful to see him suddenly changed back from that picture-angel sort of creature into a human being. Then he sat down by me and said he’d been spending the morning wrestling with the problem of speaking the truth in books; so I said, but haven’t you always spoken it? because that always seemed to me the chief point of M.’s books. But he said, not much, because most of it was quite unspeakable in our world, as we found it too shocking and humiliating. So I said, all the same I didn’t see why it shouldn’t be spoken, and he said, nor did he in theory, but in practice he didn’t want to be lynched. And he said, look for example at those advertisements in American magazines with the photos and life stories of people with unpleasant breath. So I said, yes, aren’t they simply too awful. Because they really do make one shudder. And he said, precisely, there you are, and they’re so successful because everyone thinks them so perfectly awful. They’re outraged by them, he said, just as you’re outraged, and they rush off and buy the stuff in sheer terror, because they’re so terrified of being an outrage physically to other people. And he said, that’s only one small sample of all the class of truths, pleasant and unpleasant, that you can’t speak, except in scientific books, but that doesn’t count, because you deliberately leave your feelings outside in the cloakroom when you’re being scientific. And just because they’re unspeakable, we pretend they’re unimportant, but they aren’t, on the contrary, they’re terribly important, and he said, you’ve only got to examine your memory quite sincerely for five minutes to realize it, and of course he’s quite right. When I think of Miss Poole giving me piano lessons — but no, really, one can’t write these things, and yet one obviously ought to, because they are so important, the humiliating physical facts, both pleasant and unpleasant (though I must say, most of the ones I can think of seem to be unpleasant), so important in all human relationships, he says, even in love, which is really rather awful, but of course one must admit it. And M. said it would take a whole generation of being shocked and humiliated and lynching the shockers and humiliators before people could settle down to listening to that sort of truth calmly, which they did do, he says, at certain times in the past, at any rate much more so than now. And he says that when they can listen to it completely calmly, the world will be quite different from what it is now, so I asked, in what way? but he said he couldn’t clearly imagine, only he knew it would be different. After that he went back to his table and wrote very quickly for about half an hour without stopping, and I longed to ask him if he’d been writing the truth, and if so, what about, but I didn’t have the nerve, which was stupid.
We lunched at our usual place, which I really don’t much like, as who wants to look at fat businessmen and farmers from the country simply drinking spaghetti? even if the spaghetti is good, but M. prefers it to the big places, because he says that in Rome one must do as the Romans do, not as the Americans. Still, I must say I do like looking at people who dress well and have good manners and nice jewels and things, which I told him, so he said all right, we’d go to Valadier tomorrow to see how the rich ate macaroni, which made me wretched, as it looked as though I’d been cadging, and of course that’s the last thing in the world I meant to do, to make him waste a lot of money on me, particularly after what he told me yesterday about his debts and what he made on the average, which still seems to me shockingly little, considering who he is, so I said no, wouldn’t he lunch with me at Valadier’s, and he laughed and said it was the first time he’d heard of a gigolo of fifty being taken out by a woman of twenty. That rather upset me — the way it seemed to bring what we are to each other on to the wrong level, making it all a sort of joke and sniggery, like something in Punch. Which is hateful, I can’t bear it. And I have the feeling that he does it on purpose, as a kind of protection, because he doesn’t want to care too much, and that’s why he’s always saying he’s so old, which is all nonsense, because you’re only as old as you feel, and sometimes I even feel older than he does, like when he gets so amused and interested with little boys in the street playing that game of sticking out your fingers and calling a number, or when he talks about that awful old Dickens. Which I told him, but he only laughed and said age is a circle and you grow into a lot of the things you grew out of, because the whole world is a fried whiting with its tail in its mouth, which only confirms what I said about his saying he was old being all nonsense. Which I told him and he said, quite right, he only said he felt old when he wished that he felt old. Which made me see still more clearly that it was just a defence. A defence of me, I suppose, and all that sort of nonsense. What I’d have liked to say, only I didn’t, was that I don’t want to be defended, particularly if being defended means his defending himself against me and making stupid jokes about gigolos and old gentlemen. Because I think he really does rather care underneath — from the way he looks at me sometimes — and he’d like to say so and act so, but he won’t on principle, which is really against all his principles, and some time I shall tell him so. I insisted he should lunch with me and in the end he said he would, and then he was suddenly very silent and, I thought, glum and unhappy, and after coffee he said he’d have to go home and write all the rest of the day. So I came back to the hotel and had a rest and wrote this, and now it’s nearly seven and I feel terribly sad, almost like crying. Next day. Rang up Guy and had less difficulty than I expected getting him to forgive me for yesterday, in fact he almost apologized himself. Danced till 2.15.
June 15th. M. still sad an
d didn’t kiss me when we met, on purpose, which made me angry, it’s so humiliating to be defended. He was wearing an open shirt, like Byron, which suited him; but I told him, you look like the devil when you’re sad (which is true, because his face ought to move, not be still), and he said that was what came of feeling and behaving like an angel; so of course I asked why he didn’t behave like a devil, because in that case he’d look like an angel, and I preferred his looks to his morals, and then I blushed, like an idiot. But really it is too stupid that women aren’t supposed to say what they think. Why can’t we say, I like you, or whatever it is, without being thought a kind of monster, if we say it first, and even thinking ourselves monsters? Because one ought to say what one thinks and do what one likes, or else one becomes like Aunt Edith, hippo-ish and dead inside. Which is after all what M.’s constantly saying in his books, so he oughtn’t to humiliate me with his beastly defendings. Lunch at Valadier’s was really rather a bore. Afterwards we went and sat in a church, because it was so hot, a huge affair full of pink marble and frescoes and marble babies and gold. M. says that the modern equivalent is Lyons’ Corner House, and that the Jesuits were so successful because they gave the poor a chance of feeling what it was like to live in a palace, or something better than a palace, because he says the chief difference between a Corner House and the state rooms at Buckingham Palace is that the Corner House is so much more sumptuous, almost as sumptuous as these Jesuit churches. I asked him if he believed in God and he said he believed in a great many gods, it depended on what he was doing, or being, or feeling at the moment. He said he believed in Apollo when he was working, and in Bacchus when he was drinking, and in Buddha when he felt depressed, and in Venus when he was making love, and in the Devil when he was afraid or angry, and in the Categorical Imperative when he had to do his duty. I asked him which he believed in now and he said he didn’t quite know, but he thought it was the Categorical Imperative, which really made me furious, so I answered that I only believed in the Devil and Venus, which made him laugh, and he said I looked as though I were going to jump off the Eiffel Tower, and I was just going to say what I thought of his hippo-ishness, I mean I’d really made up my mind, when a most horrible old verger rushed up and said we must leave the church, because it seems the Pope doesn’t allow you to be in a church with bare arms, which is really too indecent. But M. said that after all it wasn’t surprising, because every god has to protect himself against hostile gods, and the gods of bare skin are hostile to the gods of souls and clothes, and he made me stop in front of a shop window where there were some mirrors and said, you can see for yourself, and I must say I really did look very nice in that pale green linen which goes so awfully well with the skin, when one’s a bit sunburnt. But he said, it’s not merely a question of seeing, you must touch too, so I stroked my arms and said yes; they were nice and smooth, and he said, precisely, and then he stroked my arm very lightly, like a moth crawling, agonizingly creepy but delicious, once or twice, looking very serious and attentive, as though he were tuning a piano, which made me laugh, and I said I supposed he was experimenting to see if the Pope was in the right, and then he gave me the most horrible pinch and said, yes, the Pope was quite right and I ought to be muffled in Jaeger from top to toe. But I was so angry with the pain, because he pinched me really terribly, that I just rushed off without saying anything and jumped into a cab that was passing and drove straight to the hotel. But I was so wretched by the time I got there that I started crying in the lift and the lift man said he hoped I hadn’t had any dispiacere di famiglia, which made me laugh and that made the crying much worse, and then I suddenly thought of Clare and felt such a horrible beast, so I lay on my bed and simply howled for about an hour, and then I got up and wrote a letter and sent one of the hotel boys with it to M.’s address, saying I was so sorry and would he come at once. But he didn’t come, not for hours and hours, and it was simply too awful, because I thought he was offended, or despising, because I’d been such a fool, and I wondered whether he really did like me at all and whether this defending theory wasn’t just my imagination. But at last, when I’d quite given him up and was so miserable I didn’t know what I should do, he suddenly appeared — because he’d only that moment gone back to the house and found my note — and was too wonderfully sweet to me, and said he was so sorry, but he’d been on edge (though he didn’t say why, but I know now that the defending theory wasn’t just imagination) and I said I was so sorry and I cried, but I was happy, and then we laughed because it had all been so stupid and then M. quoted a bit of Homer which meant that after they’d eaten and drunk they wept for their friends and after they’d wept a little they went to sleep, so we went out and had dinner and after dinner we went and danced, and he dances really very well, but we stopped before midnight, because he said the noise of the jazz would drive him crazy. He was perfectly sweet, but though he didn’t say anything sniggery, I could feel he was on the defensive all the time, sweetly and friendlily on the defensive, and when he said good night he only kissed my hand.