After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley Page B

a kind of hot, red soda-water, all fizzy with little bubbles of fear and excitement.
    She emerged, partially at least, out of this bubbly and agitated trance to hear him say, “Look at that, now.” A tall statue towered over her. “The Apollo of Veii,” he explained. “And really, you know, it is the most beautiful statue in the world. Each time I see it, I’m more firmly convinced of that.”
    Dutifully, Pamela stared. The God stood there on his pedestal, one foot advanced, erect in his draperies. He had lost his arms, but the head was intact and the strange Etruscan face was smiling, enigmatically smiling. Rather like him, it suddenly occurred to her.
    â€œWhat’s it made of?” she asked; for it was time to be intelligent.
    â€œTerracotta. Originally coloured.”
    â€œAnd what date?”
    â€œLate sixth century.”
    â€œB.C.?” she queried, a little dubiously, and was relieved when he nodded. It really would have been rather awful if it had been A.D. “Who by?”
    â€œBy Vulca, they say. But as that’s the only Etruscan sculptor they know the name of . . .” He shrugged his shoulders, and the gesture expressed a double doubt—doubt whether the archæologists were right and doubt whether it was really much good talking about Etruscan art to someone who didn’t feel quite certain whether the Apollo of Veii was made in the sixth century before or after Christ.
    There was a long silence. Fanning looked at the statue. So did Pamela, who also, from time to time, looked at Fanning. She was on the point, more than once, of saying something; but his face was so meditatively glum that, on each occasion, she changed her mind. In the end, however, the silence became intolerable.
    â€œI think it’s extraordinarily fine,” she announced in the rather religious voice that seemed appropriate. He only nodded. The silence prolonged itself, more oppressive and embarrassing than ever, She made another and despairing effort. “Do you know, I think he’s really rather like you. I mean, the way he smiles. . . .”
    Fanning’s petrified immobility broke once more into life. He turned towards her, laughing. “You’re irresistible, Pamela.”
    â€œAm I?” Her tone was cold; she was offended. To be told you were irresistible always meant that you’d behaved like an imbecile child. But her conscience was clear; it was a gratuitous insult—the more intolerable since it had been offered by the man who, a moment before, had been saying that he had a fellow-feeling for those savages and that her ears had altogether too much to do with him.
    Fanning noticed her sudden change of humour and obscurely divined the cause. “You’ve paid me the most irresistible compliment you could have invented,” he said, doing his best to undo the effect of his words. For after all what did it matter, with little breasts like that and thin brown arms, if she did mix up the millenniums a bit? “You could hardly have pleased me more if you’d said I was another Rudolph Valentino.”
    Pamela had to laugh.
    â€œBut seriously,” he said, “if you knew what this lovely God means to me, how much . . .”
    Mollified by being once more spoken to seriously, “I think I can understand,” she said in her most understanding voice.
    â€œNo, I doubt if you can.” He shook his head. “It’s a question of age, of the experience of a particular time that’s not your time. I shall never forget when I came back to Rome for the first time after the War and found this marvellous creature standing here. They only dug him up in ’sixteen, you see. So there it was, a brand new experience, a new and apocalyptic voice out of the past. Some day I shall try to get it on to paper, all that this God has taught me.” He gave a little sigh; she could see that he wasn’t thinking about her any more; he was