After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley Page B

gives them significance, it satisfies their parasitic will to power. In the past they could have gone to religion—fastened themselves on the nearest priest (that’s what thepriest was there for), or sucked the spiritual blood of some saint. Nowadays they’ve got no professional victims; only a few charlatans and swamis and higher-thought-mongers. Or alternatively the artists. Yes, the artists. They find our souls particularly juicy. What I’ve suffered! Shall I ever forget that American woman who got so excited by my book on Blake that she came specially to Tunis to see me? She had an awful way of opening her mouth very wide when she talked, like a fish. You were perpetually seeing her tongue; and, what made it worse, her tongue was generally white. Most distressing. And how the tongue wagged! In spite of its whiteness. Wagged like mad, and mostly about the Divine Mind.”
    â€œThe Divine Mind?”
    He nodded. “It was her specialty. In Rochester, N. Y., where she lived, she was never out of touch with it. You’ve no idea what a lot of Divine Mind there is floating about in Rochester, particularly in the neighbourhood of women with busy husbands and incomes of over fifteen thousand dollars. If only she could have stuck to the Divine Mind! But the Divine Mind has one grave defect: it won’t make love to you. That was why she’d come all the way to Tunis in search of a merely human specimen.”
    â€œAnd what did you do about it?”
    â€œStood it nine days and then took the boat to Sicily. Like a thief in the night. The wicked flee, you know. God, how they can flee!”
    â€œAnd she?”
    â€œWent back to Rochester, I suppose. But I never opened any more of her letters. Just dropped them into the fire whenever I saw the writing. Ostrichism—it’s the only rational philosophy of conduct. According to the Freudians we’re all unconsciously trying to get back to . . .”
    â€œBut poor woman!” Dodo burst out. “She must have suffered.”
    â€œNothing like what I suffered. Besides she had the Divine Mind to go back to; which was her version of the Freudians’ pre-natal . . .”
    â€œBut I suppose you’d encouraged her to come to Tunis?”
    Reluctantly, Fanning gave up his Freudians. “She could write good letters,” he admitted. “Inexplicably good, considering what she was at close range.”
    â€œBut then you treated her abominably.”
    â€œBut if you’d seen her, you’d realize how abominably she’d treated me.”
    â€œYou?”
    â€œYes, abominably—by merely existing. She taught me to be very shy of letters. That was why I was so pleasantly surprised this morning when my latest correspondent suddenly materialized at Cook’s. Really ravishing. One could forgive her everything for the sake of her face and that charming body. Everything, even the vamping. For a vamp I suppose she is, even this one. That is, if a woman can be a spiritual adventuress when she’s so young and pretty and well-made. Absolutely and sub specie æternitatis * , I suppose she can. But from the very sublunary point of view of the male victim, I doubt whether, at twenty-one . . .”
    â€œOnly twenty-one?” Dodo was disapproving. “But Miles!”
    Fanning ignored her interruption. “And another thing you must remember,” he went on, “is that the spiritual vampwho’s come of age this year is not at all the same as the spiritual vamp who came of age fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago. She doesn’t bother much about Mysticism, or the Lower Classes, or the Divine Mind, or any nonsense of that sort. No, she goes straight to the real point—the point which the older vamps approached in such a tiresomely circuitous fashion—she goes straight to herself. But straight!” He stabbed the air with his fruit-knife. “A bee-line. Oh, it has a certain charm that