Read Online After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley - Free Book Online Page A

warned, I’m the one who’s in danger. But I shall be firm, Dodo—a rock. I won’t allow her to seduce me.”
    â€œYou’re incorrigible, Miles. But mind, if you dare. . . .”
    â€œBut I won’t. Definitely.” His tone was reassuring. “Meanwhile I must hear something about the mother.”
    The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. “A woman who couldn’t live on top gear. You’ve really said the last word.”
    â€œBut I want first words,” he answered. “It’s not the verdict that’s interesting. It’s the whole case, it’s all the evidence. You’re sub-poenaed, my dear. Speak up.”
    â€œPoor Clare!”
    â€œOh, nil nisi bonum * , of course, if that’s what disturbs you.”
    â€œShe’d have so loved it to be not bonum, poor dear!” saidthe marchesa, tempering her look of vague condolence with a little smile. “That was her great ambition—to be thought rather wicked. She’d have liked to have the reputation of a vampire. Not a spiritual one, mind you. The other sort. Lola Montes—that was her ideal.”
    â€œIt’s an ideal,” said Fanning, “that takes some realizing, I can tell you.”
    Dodo nodded. “And that’s what she must have found out, pretty soon. She wasn’t born to be a fatal woman; she lacked the gifts. No staggering beauty, no mysterious fascination or intoxicating vitality. She was just very charming, that was all; and at the same time rather impossible and absurd. So that there weren’t any aspiring victims to be fatal to. And a vampire without victims is—well, what? ”
    â€œCertainly not a vampire,” he concluded.
    â€œExcept, of course, in her own imagination, if she chooses to think so. In her own imagination Clare certainly was a vampire.”
    â€œReduced, in fact, to being her own favourite character in fiction.”
    â€œPrecisely. You always find the phrase.”
    â€œOnly too fatally!” He made a little grimace. “I often wish I didn’t. The luxury of being inarticulate! To be able to wallow indefinitely long in every feeling and sensation, instead of having to clamber out at once on to a hard, dry, definite phrase. But what about your Clare?”
    â€œWell, she started, of course, by being a riddle to me. Unanswerable, or rather answerable, answered, but so very strangely that I was still left wondering. I shall never forget the first time Filippo and I went to dine there. Poor RogerTarn was still alive then. While the men were drinking their port, Clare and I were alone in the drawing-room. There was a little chit-chat, I remember, and then, with a kind of determined desperation, as though she’d that second screwed herself up to jumping off the Eiffel Tower, suddenly, out of the blue, she asked me if I’d ever had one of those wonderful Sicilian peasants—I can’t possibly reproduce the tone, the expression—as a lover. I was a bit taken aback, I must confess. ‘But we don’t live in Sicily,’ was the only thing I could think of answering—too idiotically! ‘Our estates are all in Umbria and Tuscany.’ ‘But the Tuscans are superb creatures too,’ she insisted. Superb, I agreed. But, as it happens, I don’t have affairs with even the superbest peasants. Nor with anybody else, for that matter. Clare was dreadfully disappointed. I think she’d expected the most romantic confidences—moonlight and mandolins and stretti, stretti, nell’ estasì d’amor. * She was really very ingenuous. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve really never . . . ?’ she insisted. I ought to have got angry, I suppose; but it was all so ridiculous, that I never thought of it. I just said, ‘Never,’ and felt as though I were refusing her a favour. But she made up for my churlishness by being lavish to herself. But lavish! You can’t imagine