After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Page 28

  “Canned beef!” said Mr. Stoyte in astonishment, as he ran the beam of his lantern over the rows of tins and jars on the shelves of a tall dresser that occupied almost the whole of one of the sides of the room. “Biloxi Shrimps. Sliced Pineapple. Boston Baked Beans,” he read out, then turned towards Dr. Obispo. “I tell you, Obispo, I don’t like it.”

  The Baby had taken out a handkerchief saturated in “Shocking” and was holding it to her nose. “The smell!” she said indistinctly through its folds, and shuddered with disgust. “The smell!”

  Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, was trying his keys on the lock of the other door. It opened at last. A draught of warm air flowed in, and at once the little room was filled with an intolerable stench. “Christ!” said Mr. Stoyte, and behind her handkerchief the Baby let out a scream of nauseated horror.

  Dr. Obispo made a grimace and advanced along the stream of foul air. At the end of a short corridor was a third door, of iron bars, this time, like the door (Dr. Obispo reflected) of a death cell in a prison. He flashed his lantern between the bars, into the foetid darkness beyond.

  From the little room Mr. Stoyte and the Baby suddenly heard an astonished exclamation and then, after a moment’s silence, a violent, explosive guffaw, succeeded by peal after peal of Dr. Obispo’s ferocious metallic laughter. Paroxysm upon uncontrollable paroxysm, the noise reverberated back and forth in the confined space. The hot, stinking air vibrated with a deafening and almost maniacal merriment.

  Followed by Virginia, Mr. Stoyte crossed the room and hastened through the open door into the narrow tunnel beyond. Dr. Obispo’s laughter was getting on his nerves. “What the hell . . .” he shouted angrily as he advanced; then broke off in the middle of the sentence. “What’s that?” he whispered.

  “A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.

  “Holy Mary,” the Baby whispered through her handkerchief.

  Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.

  “A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.

  Suddenly, out of the black darkness, another simian face emerged into the beam of the lantern—a face only slightly hairy, so that it was possible to see, not only the ridge above the eyes, but also the curious distortions of the lower jaws, the accretions of bone in front of the ears. Clothed in an old check ulster and some glass beads, a body followed the face into the light.

  “It’s a woman,” said Virginia, almost sick with the horrified disgust she felt at the sight of those pendulous and withered dugs.

  The doctor exploded into even noisier merriment.

  Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.

  Dr. Obispo wiped his eyes and drew a deep breath; the storm of his laughter was flattened to a heaving calm. As he opened his mouth to answer Mr. Stoyte’s question, the creature in the shirt suddenly turned upon the creature in the ulster and hit out at her head. The palm of the enormous hand struck the side of the face. The creature in the ulster uttered a scream of pain and rage, and shrank back out of the light. From the shadow came a shrill, furious gibbering that seemed perpetually to tremble on the verge of articulate blasphemy.

  “The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.”

  “But what’s happened to them?”

  “Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.

  “Time?”

  “I don’t know how old the female is,” Dr. Obispo went on. “But the Earl there—let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”

  From the shadows the shrill voice continued to scream its all but articulate abuse. Impassibly the Fifth Earl scratched the sore on his leg and stared at the light.

  Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution • . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . senility and sterol poisoning , , . the intestinal flora of the carp . . . the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery ... no sterol poisoning, no senility ... no death, perhaps, except through an accident . . . but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known.

  Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor. A shriller chattering arose from the darkness. He turned in the direction from which it came and bellowed the guttural distortions of almost forgotten obscenities.

  “No need of any further experiment,” Dr. Obispo was saying. “We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,” he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.

  Mr. Stoyte said nothing.

  On the other side of the bars, the Fifth Earl rose to his feet, stretched, scratched, yawned, then turned and took a couple of steps towards the boundary that separated the light from the darkness. His housekeeper’s chattering became more agitated and rapid. Affecting to pay no attention, the Earl halted, smoothed the broad ribbon of his order with the palm of his hand, then fingered the jewel at his neck, making as he did so a curious humming noise that was like a simian memory of the serenade in “Don Giovanni.” The creature in the ulster whimpered apprehensively, and her voice seemed to retreat further into the shadows. Suddenly, with a ferocious yell, the Fifth Earl sprang forward, out of the narrow universe of lantern light into the darkness beyond. There was a rush of footsteps, a succession of yelps; then a scream and the sound of blows and more screams; then no more screams, but only a stertorous growling in the dark and little cries.

  Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?” he said in a slow hesitating voice. “I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once . . . there’d be a long time while a person . . . well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock—well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?” he Insisted.

  Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again.

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