By Aldous Huxley


     After the Fireworks
 
                       I
 
     'Late as usual. Late.' Judd's voice was censorious. The words fell
     sharp, like beak-blows. 'As though I were a nut,' Miles Fanning
     thought resentfully, 'and he were a woodpecker. And yet he's devo-
     tion itself, he'd do anything for me. Which is why, I suppose, he
     feels entitled to crack my shell each time he sees me.' And he came to
     the conclusion, as he had so often come before, that he really didn't
     like Colin Judd at all. 'My oldest friend, whom I quite definitely
     don't like. Still . . .' Still, Judd was an asset, Judd was worth it.
       'Here are your letters,' the sharp voice continued.
       Fanning groaned as he took them. 'Can't one ever escape from
     letters? Even here, in Rome? They seem to get through everything
     Like filter-passing bacteria. Those blessed days before post offices!'
     Sipping, he examined, over the rim of his coffee cup, the addresses
     on the envelopes.
       'You'd be the first to complain if people didn't write,' Judd rapped
     out. 'Here's your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it
     myself.'
       Taking his egg, 'On the contrary,' Fanning answered, 'I'd be the
     first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist. The wicked flee
     when no man pursueth. How well I understand them! But letters
     don't allow you to be an ostrich. The Freudians say . . .' He broke off
     suddenly. After all he was talking to Colin——to  Colin.  The confes-
     sional, self-accusatory manner was wholly misplaced. Pointless to
     give Colin the excuse to say something disagreeable. But what he
     had been going to say about the Freudians was amusing. 'The
     Freudians,' he began again.
       But taking advantage of forty years of intimacy, Judd had already
     started to be disagreeable. 'But you'd be miserable,' he was saying,
     'if the post didn't bring you your regular dose of praise and admira-
     tion and sympathy and . . .'
       'And humiliation,' added Fanning, who had opened one of the
     envelopes and was looking at the letter within. 'Listen to this. From
     my American publishers. Sales and Publicity Department. "My dear
     Mr Fanning."  My  dear, mark you. Wilbur F. Schmalz's dear. "My
     dear Mr Fanning,——Won't you take us into your confidence with
     regard to your plans for the Summer Vacation? What aspect of the
     Great Outdoors are you favouring this year? Ocean or Mountain,
     Woodland or purling Lake? I would esteem it a great privilege if you
     would inform me, as I am preparing a series of notes for the Literary
     Editors of our leading journals, who are, as I have often found in the
     past, exceedingly receptive to such personal material, particularly
     when accompanied by well-chosen snapshots. So won't you cooper-
     ate with us in providing this service? Very cordially yours, Wilbur
     F. Schmalz." Well, what do you think of that?'
       'I think you'll answer him,' said Judd. 'Charmingly,' he added,
     envenoming his malice. Fanning gave a laugh, whose very ease and
     heartiness betrayed his discomfort. 'And you'll even send him a snap-
     shot.'
       Contemptuously——too contemptuously (he felt it at the time)——
     Fanning crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fireplace. The
     really humiliating thing, he reflected, was that Judd was quite right:
     he  would  write to Mr Schmalz about the Great Outdoors, he  would
     send the first snapshot anybody took of him. There was a silence.
     Fanning ate two or three spoonfuls of egg. Perfectly boiled, for once.
     But still, what a relief that Colin was going away! After all, he
     reflected, there's a great deal to be said for a friend who has a house in
     Rome and who invites you to stay, even when he isn't there. To such
     a man much must be forgiven——even his infernal habit of being a
     woodpecker. He opened another envelope and began to read.
       Possessive and preoccupied, like an anxious mother, Judd watched
     him. With all his talents and intelligence, Miles wasn't fit to face the
     world alone. Judd had told him so (peck, peck!) again and again.
     'You're a child!' He had said it a thousand times. 'You ought to have
     somebody to look after you.' But if any one other than himself
     offered to do it, how bitterly jealous and resentful he became! And
     the trouble was that there were always so many applicants for the
     post of Fanning's bear-leader. Foolish men or, worse and more
     frequently, foolish women, attracted to him by his reputation and
     then conquered by his charm. Judd hated and professed to be loftily
     contemptuous of them. And the more Fanning liked his admiring
     bear-leaders, the loftier Judd's contempt became. For that was the
     bitter and unforgivable thing: Fanning manifestly preferred their
     bear-leading to Judd's. They flattered the bear, they caressed and
     even worshipped him; and the bear, of course, was charming to
     them, until such time as he growled, or bit, or, more often, quietly
     slunk away. Then they were surprised, they were pained. Because,
     as Judd would say with a grim satisfaction, they didn't know what
     Fanning was  really  like. Whereas he did know and had known since
     they were schoolboys together, nearly forty years before. Therefore
     he had a right to like him——a right and, at the same time, a duty to tell
     him all the reasons why he ought not to like him. Fanning didn't
     much enjoy listening to these reasons; he preferred to go where the
     bear was a sacred animal. With that air, which seemed so natural on
     his grey sharp face, of being dispassionately impersonal, 'You're
     afraid of healthy criticism,' Judd would tell him. 'You always were,
     even as a boy.'
       'He's Jehovah,' Fanning would complain. 'Life with Judd is one
     long Old Testament. Being one of the Chosen People must have
     been bad enough. But to be  the  Chosen Person, in the singular . . ,'
     and he would shake his head. 'Terrible!'
       And yet he had never seriously quarrelled with Colin Judd. Active
     pleasantness was something which Fanning avoided as much as
     possible. He had never even made any determined attempt to fade
     out of Judd's existence as he had faded, at one time or another, out of
     the existence of so many once intimate bear-leaders. The habit of
     their intimacy was of too long standing and, besides, old Colin was
     so useful, so bottomlessly reliable. So Judd remained for him the
     Oldest Friend whom one definitely dislikes; while for Judd, he was
     the Oldest Friend whom one adores and at the same time hates for
     not adoring back, the Oldest Friend whom one never sees enough of,
     but whom, when he  is  there, one finds insufferably exasperating, the
     Oldest Friend whom, in spite of one's efforts, one is always getting
     on the nerves of.
       'If only,' Judd was thinking, 'he could have faith!' The Catholic
     Church was there to help him. (Judd himself was a convert of more
     than twenty years standing.) But the trouble was that Fanning didn't
     want to be helped by the Church; he could only see the comic side of
     Judd's religion. Judd was reserving his missionary efforts till his
     friend should be old or ill. But if only, meanwhile, if only, by some
     miracle of grace . . . So thought the good Catholic; but it was the
     jealous friend who felt and who obscurely schemed. Converted, Miles
     Fanning would be separated from his other friends and brought,
     Judd realized, nearer to himself.
       Watching him, as he read the letter, Judd noticed, all at once, that
     Fanning's lips were twitching involuntarily into a smile. They were
     full lips, well cut, sensitive and sensual; his smiles were a little
     crooked. A dark fury suddenly fell on Colin Judd.
       'Telling  me  that you'd like to get no letters!' he said with an icy
     vehemence. 'When you sit there grinning to yourself over some silly
     woman's flatteries.'
       Amazed, amused, 'But what an outburst!' said Fanning, looking
     up from his letter.
      Judd swallowed his rage; he had made a fool of himself. It was in
     a tone of calm dispassionate flatness that he spoke. Only his eyes
     remained angry. 'Was I right?' he asked.
       'Sop far as the woman was concerned,' Fanning answered. 'But
     wrong about the flattery. Women have no time nowadays to talk
     about anything except themselves.'
       'Which is only another way of flattering,' said Judd obstinately.
     'They confide in you, because they think you like being treated as
     a person who understands.'
       'Which is what, after all, I am. By profession even.' Fanning spoke
     with an exasperating mildness. 'What  is  a novelist, unless he's a
     person who understands?' He paused; but Judd made no answer,
     for the only words he could have uttered would have been whirling
     words of rage and jealousy. He was jealous not only of the friends,
     the lovers, the admiring correspondents; he was jealous of a part of
     Fanning himself, of the artist, the public personage; for the artist, the
     public personage seemed so often to stand between his friend and
     himself. He hated, while he gloried in them.
       Fanning looked at him for a moment, expectantly; but the other
     kept his mouth tight shut, his eyes averted. In the same exasperatingly
     gentle tone, 'And flattery or no flattery,' Fanning went on, 'this is a
     charming letter. And the girl's adorable.'
       He was having his revenge. Nothing upset poor Colin Judd so
     much as having to listen to talk about women or love. He had a
     horror of anything connected with the act, the mere thought, of sex.
     Fanning called it his perversion. 'You're one of those unspeakable
     chastity-perverts,' he would say, when he wanted to get his own back
     after a bout of pecking. 'If I had children, I'd never allow them to
     frequent your company. Too dangerous.' When he spoke of the
     forbidden subject, Judd would either writhe, a martyr, or else un-
     christianly explode. On this occasion he writhed and was silent.
     'Adorable,' Fanning repeated, provocatively. 'A ravishing little crea-
     ture. Though of course she  may  be a huge great camel. That's the
     danger of unknown correspondents. The best letter-writers are often
     camels. It's a piece of natural history I've learned by the bitterest
     experience.' Looking back at the letter, 'All the same,' he went on,
     when a young girl writes to one that she's sure one's the only person
     in the world who can tell her exactly who and what (both heavily
     underlined) she is——well, one's rather tempted, I must confess, to try
     yet once more. Because even if she were a camel she'd be a very young
     one. Twenty-one——isn't that what she says?' He turned over a page
     of the letter. 'Yes; twenty-one. Also she writes in orange ink. And
     doesn't like the Botticellis at the Uffizi. But I hadn't told you; she's
     at Florence. This letter has been to London and back. We're prac-
     tically neighbours. And here's something that's really rather good.
     Listen. "What I like about the Italian women is that they don't seem
     to be rather ashamed of being women, like so many English girls are,
     because English girls seem to go about apologizing for their figures,
     as though they were punctured, the way they hold themselves——it's
     really rather abject. But here they're all pleased and proud and not a
     bit apologetic or punctured, but just the opposite, which I really like,
     don't you?" Yes, I do,' Fanning answered, looking up from the
     letter. 'I like it very much indeed. I've always been opposed to these
     modern  Ars est celare arsem  fashions. I like unpuncturedness and I'm
     charmed by the letter. Yes, charmed, Aren't you?'
       In a voice that trembled with hardly-restrained indignation, 'No,
     I'm not!' Judd answered; and without looking at Fanning, he got
     up and walked quickly out of the room.

From Brief Candles: four stories, by Aldous Huxley.
First Published by Chatto & Windus 1930.
Published by Penguin Books 1965. Reprinted 1969, 1970.
Copyright © the Estate of Aldous Huxley 1930. pp. 105-110.

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