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

what a tirade she let fly at me. How wonderful it was to get away from self-conscious, complicated, sentimental love! How profoundly satisfying to feel oneself at the mercy of the dumb, dark forces of physical passion! How intoxicating to humiliate one’s culture and one’s class feeling before some magnificent primitive, some earthly beautiful satyr, some divine animal! And so on, crescendo. And it ended with her telling me the story of her extraordinary affair with—was ita gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit-shooting in it, I know.”
    â€œIt sounds like a chapter out of George Sand.”
    â€œIt was.”
    â€œOr still more, I’m afraid,” he said, making a wry face “like a most deplorable parody of my Endymion and the Moon. ”
    â€œWhich I’ve never read, I’m ashamed to say.”
    â€œYou should, if only to understand this Clare of yours.”
    â€œI will. Perhaps I’d have solved her more quickly, if I’d read it at the time. As it was I could only be amazed—and a little horrified. That rabbit-shooter!” She shook her head. “He ought to have been so romantic. But I could only think of that awful yellow kitchen soap he’d be sure to wash himself with, or perhaps carbolic, so that he’d smell like washed dogs—dreadful! And the flannel shirts, not changed quite often enough. And the hands, so horny, with very short nails, perhaps broken. No, I simply couldn’t understand her.”
    â€œWhich is to your discredit, Dodo, if I may say so.”
    â€œPerhaps. But you must admit, I never pretended to be anything but what I am—a perfectly frivolous and respectable member of the upper classes. With a taste, I must confess, for the scandalous. Which was one of the reasons, I suppose, why I became so intimate with poor Clara. I was really fascinated by her confidences.”
    â€œGoing on the tiles vicariously, eh?”
    â€œWell, if you choose to put it grossly and vulgarly. . . . .”
    â€œWhich I do choose,” he interposed. “To be tactfully gross and appositely vulgar—that, my dear, is one of the ultimate artistic refinements. One day I shall write a monograph on the aesthetics of vulgarity. But meanwhile shall wesay that you were inspired by an intense scientific curiosity to . . .”
    Dodo laughed. “One of the tiresome things about you, Miles, is that one can never go on being angry with you.”
    â€œYet another subject for a monograph!” he answered, and his smile was at once confidential and ironical, affectionate and full of mockery. “But let’s hear what the scientific curiosity elicited?”
    â€œWell, to begin with, a lot of really rather embarrassingly intimate confidences and questions, which I needn’t repeat.”
    â€œNo, don’t. I know what those feminine conversations are. I have a native modesty. . . .”
    â€œOh, so have I. And, strangely enough, so had Clare. But somehow she wanted to outrage herself. You felt it all the time. She always had that desperate jumping-off-the-Eiffel-Tower manner, when she began to talk like that. It was a kind of martyrdom. But enjoyable. Perversely.” Dodo shook her head. “Very puzzling. I used to have to make quite an effort to change the conversation from gynaecology to romance. Oh, those lovers of hers! Such stories! The most fantastic adventures in East End opium dens, in aeroplanes, and even, I remember (it was that very hot summer of ’twenty-two), even in a refrigerator!”
    â€œMy dear!” protested Fanning.
    â€œHonestly! I’m only repeating what she told me.”
    â€œBut do you mean to say you believed her?”
    â€œWell, by that time, I must admit, I was beginning to be rather sceptical. You see, I could never elicit the names of these creatures. Nor any detail. It was as though they didn’t exist outside the