After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page B

can you be so disgustingly bourgeoisie, Pamela? So crass, so crawling?” Incensed by the heaping up of this abuse, “I think it’s stupid to do things one can’t afford,” the girl had answered; “stupid and vulgar.” Trembling with rage, Clare had risen to her feet. “I’ll never take you out again. Never.” (How often since then Pamela had recalled that terribly prophetic word!) “You’ll never understand life, you’ll never be anything but a sordid little middle-class Englishwoman. Never, never.” And she had swept out of the room, like an insulted queen. Overheard by Pamela, as she undignifiedly followed, “Gee!” an American voice had remarked, “it’s a regular cat fight.”
    The sound of another, real voice overlaid the remembered Middle Western accents.
    â€œBut after all,” Fanning was saying, “it’s better to be a good ordinary bourgeois than a bad ordinary bohemian, or a sham aristocrat, or a second-rate intellectual. . . .”
    â€œI’m not even third-rate,” said Pamela mournfully. There had been a time when, under the influence of the now abhorred Miss Huss, she had thought she would like to go up to Oxford and read Greats. But Greek grammar was so awful . . . “Not even fourth-rate.”
    â€œThank goodness,” said Fanning. “Do you know what third- and fourth-rate intellectuals are? They’re professors of philology and organic chemistry at the minor universities,they’re founders and honorary life presidents of the Nuneaton Poetry Society and the Baron’s Court Debating Society; they’re the people who organize and sedulously attend all those Conferences for promoting international goodwill and the spread of culture that are perpetually being held at Buda-Pesth and Prague and Stockholm. Admirable and indispensable creatures, of course! But impossibly dreary; one simply cannot have any relations with them. And how virtuously they disapprove of those of us who have something better to do than disseminate culture or foster goodwill—those of us who are concerned, for example, with creating beauty—like me; or, like you, my child, in deliciously being beauty.”
    Pamela blushed with pleasure and for that reason felt it necessary immediately to protest. “All the same,” she said, “it’s rather humiliating not to be able to do anything but be. I mean, even a cow can be.”
    â€œDamned well, too,” said Fanning. “If I were as intensely as a cow is, I’d be uncommonly pleased with myself. But this is getting almost too metaphysical. And do you realize what the time is?” He held out his watch; it was ten past one. “And where we are? At the Tiber. We’ve walked miles.” He waved his hand; a passing taxi swerved in to the pavement beside them. “Let’s go and eat some lunch. You’re free?”
    â€œWell . . .” She hesitated. It was marvellous, of course; so marvellous that she felt she ought to refuse. “If I’m not a bore. I mean, I don’t want to impose . . . I mean . . .”
    â€œYou mean you’ll come and have lunch. Good. Do you like marble halls and bands? Or local colour?”
    Pamela hesitated. She remembered her mother once saying that Valadier and the Ulpia were the only two restaurants in Rome.
    â€œPersonally,” Fanning went on, “I’m slightly avaricious about marble halls. I rather resent spending four times as much and eating about two-thirds as well. But I’ll overcome my avarice if you prefer them.”
    Pamela duly voted for local colour; he gave an address to the driver and they climbed into the cab.
    â€œIt’s a genuinely Roman place,” Fanning explained. “I hope you’ll like it.”
    â€œOh, I’m sure I shall.” All the same, she did rather wish they were going to Valadier’s.

III
    F ANNING’S OLD FRIEND, DODO