After the Fireworks

by Aldous Huxley

  “Miles!”

  Fanning started so violently that a drop of ink was jerked from his pen on to the paper. He felt as though his heart had fallen into an awful gulf of emptiness.

  “Miles!”

  He looked round. Two hands were clutching the bars of the unshuttered window and, as though desperately essaying to emerge from a subterranean captivity, the upper part of a face was peering in, over the high sill, with wide unhappy eyes.

  “But Pamela!” There was reproach in his astonishment.

  It was to the implied rebuke that she penitently answered. “I couldn’t help it, Miles,” she said; and, behind the bars, he saw her reddened eyes suddenly brighten and overflow with tears. “I simply had to come.” Her voice trembled on the verge of breaking. “Had to.”

  The tears, her words and that unhappy voice were moving. But he didn’t want to be moved, he was angry with himself for feeling the emotion, with her for inspiring it. “But, my dear child!” he began, and the reproach in his voice had shrilled to a kind of exasperation—the exasperation of one who feels himself hemmed in and helpless, increasingly helpless, against circumstances. “But I thought we’d settled,” he began and broke off. He rose, and walked agitatedly towards the fireplace, agitatedly back again, like a beast in a cage; he was caught, hemmed in between those tearful eyes behind the bars and his own pity, with all those dangerous feelings that have their root in pity. “I thought,” he began once more.

  But, “Oh!” came her sharp cry, and looking again towards the windows he saw that only the two small hands and a pair of straining wrists were visible. The tragical face had vanished.

  “Pamela?”

  “It’s all right.” Her voice came rather muffled and remote. “I slipped. I was standing on a little kind of ledge affair. The window’s so high from the ground,” she added plaintively.

  “My poor child!” he said on a little laugh of amused commiseration. The reproach, the exasperation had gone out of his voice. He was conquered by the comic patheticness of her. Hanging on to the bars with those small, those rather red and childishly untended hands! And tumbling off the perch she had had to climb on, because the window was so high from the ground! A wave of sentimentality submerged him. “I’ll come and open the door.” He ran into the hall.

  Waiting outside in the darkness, she heard the bolts being shot back, one by one . . . Clank, clank! and then “Damn!” came his voice from the other side of the door. “These things are so stiff. . . . I’m barricaded up as though I were in a safe.” She stood there waiting. The door shook as he tugged at the recalcitrant bolt. The waiting seemed interminable. And all at once a huge, black weariness settled on her. The energy of wrought-up despair deserted her and she was left empty of everything but a tired misery. What was the good, what was the good of coming like this to be turned away again? For he would turn her away; he didn’t want her. What was the good of renewing suffering, of once more dying?

  “Hell and Death!” On the other side of the door, Fanning was cursing like an Elizabethan.

  Hell and Death. The words reverberated in Pamela’s mind. The pains of Hell—the darkness and dissolution of Death. What was the good.

  Clank! Another bolt had gone back. “Thank goodness. We’re almost . . .” A chain rattled. At the sound, Pamela turned and ran in a blind terror down the dimly-lighted street.

  “At last!” The door swung back and Fanning stepped out. But the sentimental tenderness of his outstretched hands wasted itself on empty night. Twenty yards away a pair of pale legs twinkled in the darkness. “Pamela!” he called in astonishment. “What the devil . . . ?” The wasting on emptiness of his feelings had startled him into annoyance. He felt like one who has put forth all his strength to strike something and, missing his aim, swipes the unresisting air, grotesquely. “Pamela!” he called again, yet louder.

  She did not turn at the sound of his voice, but ran on. These wretched high-heeled shoes! “Pamela!” And then came the sound of his pursuing footsteps. She tried to run faster. But the pursuing footsteps came nearer and nearer. It was no good. Nothing was any good. She slackened her speed to a walk.

  “But what on earth?” he asked from just behind her, almost angrily. Pursuing, he called up within him the soul of a pursuer, angry and desirous. “What on earth?” And suddenly his hand was on her shoulder. She trembled a little at the touch. “But why?” he insisted. “Why do you suddenly run away?”

  But Pamela only shook her averted head. She wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t meet his eyes. Fanning looked down at her intently, questioningly. Why? And as he looked at that weary hopeless face, he began to divine the reason. The anger of the pursuit subsided in him. Respecting her dumb, averted misery, he too was silent. He drew her comfortingly towards him. His arm round her shoulders, Pamela suffered herself to be led back towards the house.

  Which would be best, he was wondering with the surface of his mind: to telephone for a taxi to take her back to the hotel, or to see if he could make up a bed for her in one of the upstairs rooms? But in the depths of his being he knew quite well that he would do neither of these things. He knew that he would be her lover. And yet, in spite of this deep knowledge, the surface mind still continued to discuss its little problem of cabs and bed-linen. Discussed it sensibly, discussed it dutifully. Because it would be a madness, he told himself, a criminal madness if he didn’t send for the taxi or prepare that upstairs room. But the dark certainty of the depths rose suddenly and exploded at the surface in a bubble of ironic laughter, in a brutal and cynical word. “Comedian!” he said to himself, to the self that agitatedly thought of telephones and taxis and pillow-slips. “Seeing that it’s obvious I’m going to have her.” And, rising from the depths, her nakedness presented itself to him palpably in an integral and immediate contact with his whole being. But this was shameful, shameful. He pushed the naked Anadyomene back into the depths. Very well, then (his surface mind resumed its busy efficient rattle), seeing that it was perhaps rather late to start telephoning for taxis, he’d rig up one of the rooms on the first floor. But if he couldn’t find any sheets . . . ? But here was the house, the open door.

  Pamela stepped across the threshold. The hall was almost dark. Through a curtained doorway on the left issued a thin blade of yellow light. Passive in her tired misery, she waited. Behind her the chain rattled, as it had rattled only a few moments before, when she had fled from the ominous sound, and clank, clank! the bolts were thrust back into place.

  “There,” said Fanning’s voice. “And now . . .” With a click, the darkness yielded suddenly to brilliant light.

  Pamela uttered a little cry and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, please,” she begged, “please.” The light hurt her, was a sort of outrage. She didn’t want to see, couldn’t bear to be seen.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and the comforting darkness returned. “This way.” Taking her arm he led her towards the lighted doorway on the left. “Shut your eyes,” he commanded, as they approached the curtain. “We’ve got to go into the light again; but I’ll turn it out the moment I can get to the switch. Now!” She shut her eyes and suddenly, as the curtain rings rattled she saw, through her closed eyelids, the red shining of transparent blood. Still holding her arm, he led her forward into the room.

  Pamela lifted her free hand to her face. “Please don’t look at me,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to see me like this. I mean, I couldn’t bear . . .” Her voice faded to silence.

  “I won’t look,” he assured her. “And anyhow,” he added, when they had taken two or three more steps across the room, “now I can’t.” And he turned the switch.

  The pale translucent red went black again before her eyes. Pamela sighed. “I’m so tired,” she whispered. Her eyes were still shut; she was too tired to open them.

  “Take off your coat.” A hand pulled at her sleeve. First one bare arm, then the other slipped out into the coolness.

  Fanning threw the coat over a chair. Turning back, he
could see her, by the tempered darkness that entered through the window, standing motionless before him, passive, wearily waiting, her face, her limp arms pale against the shadowy blackness.

  “Poor Pamela,” she heard him say, and then suddenly light finger-tips were sliding in a moth-winged caress along her arm. “You’d better lie down and rest.” The hand closed round her arm, she was pushed gently forward. That taxi, he was still thinking, the upstairs room . . . But his fingers preserved the silky memory of her skin, the flesh of her arm was warm and firm against his palm. In the darkness, the supernatural world was coming mysteriously, thrillingly into existence; he was once more standing upon its threshold.

  “There, sit down,” came his voice. She obeyed; a low divan received her. “Lean back.” She let herself fall on to pillows. Her feet were lifted on to the couch. She lay quite still. “As though I were dead,” she thought, “as though I were dead.” She was aware, through the darkness of her closed eyes, of his warm breathing presence, impending and very near. “As though I were dead,” she inwardly repeated with a kind of pleasure. For the pain of her misery had ebbed away into the warm darkness and to be tired, she found, to be utterly tired and to lie there utterly still were pleasures. “As though I were dead.” And the light reiterated touch of his finger-tips along her arm—what were those caresses but another mode, a soothing and delicious mode, of gently dying?

  In the morning, on his way to the kitchen to prepare their coffee, Fanning caught sight of his littered writing-table. He halted to collect the scattered sheets. Waiting for the water to boil, he read, “By the time you receive this letter, I shall be, no, not dead, Pamela . . .” He crumpled up each page as he had finished reading it and threw it into the dust-bin.

  IX

  THE ARCHITECTURAL BACKGROUND WAS LIKE something out of Alma Tadema. But the figures that moved across the sunlit atrium, that lingered beneath the colonnades and in the coloured shadow of the awnings, the figures were Hogarthian and Rowlandsonian, were the ferocious satires of Daumier and Rouveyre. Huge jellied females overflowed the chairs on which they sat. Sagging and with the gait of gorged bears, old men went slowly shambling down the porticoes. Like princes preceded by their outriders, the rich fat burgesses strutted with dignity behind their bellies. There was a hungry prowling of gaunt emaciated men and women, yellow-skinned and with tragical, blue-injected eyes. And, conspicuous by their trailing blackness, these bloated or cadaverous pencillings from an anti-clerical notebook were priests.

  In the midst of so many monsters Pamela was a lovely miracle of health and beauty. These three months had subtly transformed her. The rather wavering and intermittent savoirvivre,* the child’s forced easiness of manner, had given place to a woman’s certainty, to that repose even in action, that decision even in repose, which are the ordinary fruits of the intimate knowledge, the physical understanding of love.

  “For it isn’t only murder that will out,” as Fanning had remarked some few days after the evening of the fireworks. “It isn’t only murder. If you could see yourself, my child! It’s almost indecent. Any one could tell that you’d been in bed with your lover. Could tell in the dark even; you’re luminous, positively luminous. All shining and smooth and pearly with love-making. It’s really an embarrassment to walk about with you. I’ve a good mind to make you wear a veil.”

  She had laughed, delightedly. “But I don’t mind them seeing. I want them to see. I mean, why should one be ashamed of being happy?”

  That had been three months since. At present she had no happiness to be ashamed of. It was by no shining of eyes, no luminous soft pearliness of smoothed and rounded contour that she now betrayed herself. All that her manner, her pose, her gestures proclaimed was the fact that there had been such shinings and pearly smoothings, once. As for the present, her shut and sullen face announced only that she was discontented with it and with the man who, sitting beside her, was the symbol and the embodiment of that unsatisfactory present. A rather sickly embodiment at the moment, a thin and jaundiced symbol. For Fanning was hollow-cheeked, his eyes darkly ringed, his skin pale and sallow under the yellow tan. He was on his way to becoming one of those pump-room monsters at whom they were now looking, almost incredulously. For, “Incredible!” was Fanning’s comment. “Didn’t I tell you that they simply weren’t to be believed?”

  Pamela shrugged her shoulders, almost imperceptibly, and did not answer. She did not feel like answering, she wanted to be uninterested, sullen, bored.

  “How right old Butler was!” he went on, rousing himself by the stimulus of his own talk from the depression into which his liver and Pamela had plunged him. “Making the Erewhonians punish illness as a crime—how right! Because they are criminals, all these people. Criminally ugly and deformed, criminally incapable of enjoyment. Look at them. It’s a caution. And when I think that I’m one of them . . .” He shook his head. “But let’s hope this will make me a reformed character.” And he emptied, with a grimace of disgust, his glass of tepid salt water. “Revolting! But I suppose it’s right that Montecatini should be a place of punishment as well as cure. One can’t be allowed to commit jaundice with impunity. I must go and get another glass of my punishment—my purgatory, in every sense of the word,” he added, smiling at his own joke. He rose to his feet painfully (every movement was now a painful effort for him) and left her, threading his way through the crowd to where, behind their marble counters, the pump-room barmaids dispensed warm laxatives from rows of polished brass taps.

  The animation had died out of Fanning’s face, as he turned away. No longer distracted and self-stimulated by talk, he relapsed at once into melancholy. Waiting his turn behind two bulging monsignori at the pump, he looked so gloomily wretched, that a passing connoisseur of the waters pointed him out to his companion as a typical example of the hepatic pessimist. But bile, as a matter of fact, was not the only cause of Fanning’s depression. There was also Pamela. And Pamela—he admitted it, though the fact belonged to that great class of humiliating phenomena, whose existence we are always trying to ignore—Pamela, after all, was the cause of the bile. For if he had not been so extenuated by that crazy love-making in the narrow cells of the Passionist Fathers at Monte Cavo, he would never have taken chill and the chill would never have settled on his liver and turned to jaundice. As it was, however, that night of the full moon had finished him. They had gone out, groping their way through the terrors of the nocturnal woods, to a little grassy terrace among the bushes, from which there was a view of Nemi. Deep sunk in its socket of impenetrable darkness and more than half eclipsed by shadow, the eye of water gleamed up at them secretly, as though through eyelids almost closed. Under the brightness of the moon the hills, the woods seemed to be struggling out of ghostly greyness towards colour, towards the warmth of life. They had sat there for a while, in silence, looking. Then, taking her in his arms, “‘Ceda al tatto la vista, al labbro il lume*,’” he had quoted with a kind of mockery—mocking her for the surrender to which he knew he could bring her, even against her will, even though, as he could see, she had made up her mind to sulk at him, mocking himself at the same time for the folly which drove him, weary and undesiring, to make the gesture. “‘Al labbro il lume†,’” he repeated with that undercurrent of derision in his voice, and leaned towards her. Desire returned to him as he touched her and with it a kind of exultation, a renewal (temporary, he knew, and illusory) of all his energies.

  “No, Miles. Don’t. I don’t want . . .” And she had averted her face, for she was angry, resentful, she wanted to sulk. Fanning knew it, mockingly, and mockingly he had turned back her face towards him—“‘al labbro il lume’* ”—and had found her lips. She struggled a little in his arms, protested, and then was silent, lay still. His kisses had had the power to transform her. She was another person, different from the one who had sulked and been resentful. Or rather she was two people—the sulky and resentful one, with another person superimposed, a person who quiveringly sank and melted under his
kisses, melted and sank down, down towards that mystical death, that apocalypse, that almost terrible transfiguration. But beneath, to one side, stood always the angry sulker, unappeased, unreconciled, ready to emerge again (full of a new resentment for the way she had been undignifiedly hustled off the stage), the moment the other should have retired. His realization of this made Fanning all the more perversely ardent, quickened the folly of his passion with a kind of derisive hostility. He drew his lips across her cheek and suddenly their soft electrical touch on her ear made her shudder. “Don’t!” she implored, dreading and yet desiring what was to come. Gently, inexorably his teeth closed and the petal of cartilage was a firm elastic resistance between them. She shuddered yet more violently. Fanning relaxed the muscles of his jaws, then tightened them once more, gently, against that exquisite resistance. The felt beauty of rounded warmth and resilience was under his hand. In the darkness they were inhabitants of the supernatural world.

  But at midnight they had found themselves, almost suddenly, on earth again, shiveringly cold under the moon. Cold, cold to the quick, Fanning had picked himself up. They stumbled homewards through the woods, in silence. It was in a kind of trance of chilled and sickened exhaustion that he had at last dropped down on his bed in the convent cell. Next morning he was ill. The liver was always his weak point. That had been nearly three weeks ago.