Free After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley Page B

effective because, after all, she’s her mother’s daughter and probably resembles her mother, congenitally. But consciously, on the surface, she knows she doesn’t want to live as though she were in a novel. And yet can’t help it, because that’s her nature, that’s how she was brought up. But she’s miserable, because she realizes that fiction-life is fiction. Miserable and very anxious to get out—out through the covers of the novel into the real world.”
    â€œAnd are you her idea of the real world?” Dodo enquired.
    He laughed, “Yes, I’m the real world. Strange as it may seem. And also, of course, pure fiction. The Writer, the Great Man—the Official Biographer’s fiction, in a word. Or, better still, the autobiographer’s fiction. Chateaubriand, shall we say. And her breaking out—that’s fiction too. A pure Miles Fanningism, if ever there was one. And, poor child, she knows it. Which makes her so cross with herself. Cross with me too, in a curious obscure way. But at the same time she’s thrilled. What a thrilling situation! And herselfwalking about in the middle of it. She looks on and wonders and wonders what the next instalment of the feuilleton’s going to contain.”
    â€œWell, there’s one thing we’re quite certain it’s not going to contain, aren’t we? Remember your promise, Miles.”
    â€œI think of nothing else,” he bantered.
    â€œSeriously, Miles, seriously.”
    â€œI think of nothing else,” he repeated in a voice that was the parody of a Shakespearean actor’s.
    Dodo shook her finger at him. “Mind,” she said, “mind!” Then, pushing back her chair, “Let’s move into the drawing-room,” she went on. “We shall be more comfortable there.”

IV
    A ND TO THINK,” PAMELA WAS WRITING IN HER diary, “how nervous I’d been beforehand, and the trouble I’d taken to work out the whole of our first meeting, question and answer, like the Shorter Catechism, instead of which I was like a fish in water, really at home, for the first time in my life, I believe. No, perhaps not more at home than with Ruth and Phyllis, but then they’re girls, so they hardly count. Besides, when you’ve once been at home in the sea, it doesn’t seem much fun being at home in a little glass bowl, which is rather unfair to Ruth and Phyllis, but after all it’s not their fault and they can’t help being little bowls, just as M. F. can’t help being a sea, and when you’ve swum about a bit in all that intelligence and knowledge and really devilish understanding, well, you find the bowls rather narrow, though of course they’re sweet little bowls and I shall always be very fond of them, especially Ruth. Which makes me wonder if what he said about Clare and me—unnatural by nature—is always true, because hasn’t every unnatural person got somebody she can be natural with, or even that she can’t help being natural with, like oxygen and that otherstuff making water? Of course it’s not guaranteed that you find the other person who makes you natural, and I think perhaps Clare never did find her person, because I don’t believe it was Daddy. But in my case there’s Ruth and Phyllis and now to-day M. F.; and he really proves it, because I was natural with him more than with any one, even though he did say I was unnatural by nature. No, I feel that if I were with him always, I should always be my real self, just kind of easily spouting, like those lovely fountains we went to look at this afternoon, not all tied up in knots and squirting about vaguely in every kind of direction, and muddy at that, but beautifully clear in a big gushing spout, like what Joan in The Return of Eurydice finally became when she’d escaped from that awful, awful man and found Walter. But does that mean I’m in love with