After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Page 5

  “Uncle Jo,” she said, “I think you’re wonderful.” Her voice had the ring of complete sincerity. She genuinely did think him wonderful. In the world in which she had lived it was axiomatic that a man who could make a million dollars must be wonderful. Parents, friends, teachers, newspapers, radio, advertisements—explicitly or by implication, all were unanimous in proclaiming his wonderfulness. And besides, Virginia was very fond of her Uncle Jo. He had given her a wonderful time, and she was grateful. Besides, she liked to like people if she possibly could; she liked to please them. Pleasing them made her feel good—even when they were elderly, like Uncle Jo, and when some of the ways in which she was called upon to please them didn’t happen to be very appetizing. “I think you’re wonderful,” she repeated.

  Her admiration gave him an intense satisfaction. “Oh, it’s quite easy,” he said with hypocritical modesty, angling for more.

  Virginia gave it him. “Easy, nothing!” she said firmly. “I say you are wonderful. So just keep your mouth shut.”

  Enchanted, Mr. Stoyte took another handful of firm flesh and squeezed it affectionately. “I’ll give you a present, if the deal goes through,” he said. “What would you like, baby?”

  “What would I like?” she repeated. “But I don’t want anything.”

  Her disinterestedness was not assumed. For it was true; she never did want things this way, in cold blood. At the moment a want occurred, for an ice cream soda, for example, for a bit of yum-yum, for a mink coat seen in a shop window—at such moments, she did want things, and wanted them badly, couldn’t wait to have them. But as for long-range wants, wants that had to be thought about in advance—no, she never had wanted like that. The best part of Virginia’s life was spent in enjoying the successive instants of present contentment of which it was composed; and if ever circumstances forced her out of this mindless eternity into the world of time, it was a narrow little universe in which she found herself, a world whose farthest boundaries were never more than a week or two away in the future. Even as a show-girl, at eighteen dollars a week, she had found it difficult to bother much about money and security and what would happen if you had an accident and couldn’t show your legs any more. Then Uncle Jo had come along, and everything was there, as though it grew on trees—a swimming-pool tree, a cocktail tree, a Schia-parelli tree. You just had to reach out your hand and there it was, like an apple in the orchard, back home in Oregon. So where did presents come in? Why should she want anything? Besides, it was obvious that Uncle Jo got a tremendous kick out of her not wanting things; and to be able to give Uncle Jo a kick always made her feel good. “I tell you, Uncle Jo, I don’t want anything”

  “Don’t you?” said a strange voice, startlingly close behind them. “Well, I do.”

  Dark-haired and dapper, glossily Levantine, Dr. Sig-mund Obispo stepped briskly up to the side of the couch.

  “To be precise,” he went on, “I want to inject one-point-five cubic centimetres of testosterone into the great man’s gluteus medius. So off you go, my angel,” he said to Virginia in a tone of derision, but with a smile of unabashed desire. “Hop!” He gave her a familiar little pat on the shoulder and another, when she got up to make room for him, on the white satin posterior.

  Virginia turned round sharply, with the intention of telling him not to be so fresh; then, as her glance travelled from that barrel of hairy flesh which was Mr. Stoyte to the other’s handsome face, so insultingly sarcastic and at the same time so flatteringly concupiscent, she changed her mind and, instead of telling him, loudly, just where he got off, she made a grimace and stuck out her tongue at him. What was begun as a rebuke had ended, before she knew it, as the acquiescence in an impertinence, as an act of complicity with the offender and of disloyalty to Uncle Jo. Poor Uncle Jo! she thought, with a rush of affectionate pity for the old gentleman. For a moment she felt quite ashamed of herself. The trouble, of course, was that Dr. Obispo was so handsome; that he made her laugh; that she liked his admiration; that it was fun to lead him on and see how he’d act. She even enjoyed getting mad at him, when he was rude, which he constantly was.

  “I suppose you think you’re Douglas Fairbanks, Junior,” she said, making an attempt to be scathing; then walked away with as much dignity as her two little strips of white satin would permit her to assume and, leaning against a battlement, looked down at the plain below. Ant-like figures moved among the orange trees. She wondered idly what they were doing; then her mind wandered to other, more interesting and personal matters. To Sig and the fact that she couldn’t help feeling rather thrilled when he was around, even when he acted the way he had done just now. Some day, maybe—some day, just to see what it was like and if things got a bit dull out here at the castle . . . Poor Uncle Jo! she reflected. But then what could he expect—at his age and at hers? The unexpected thing was that, in all these months, she hadn’t yet given him any reason for being jealous—unless, of course, you counted Enid and Mary Lou; which she didn’t; because she really wasn’t that way at all; and when it did happen, it was nothing more than a kind of little accident; nice, but not a bit important. Whereas with Sig, if it ever happened, the thing would be different; even though it wasn’t very serious; which it wouldn’t be—not like with Walt, for example, or even with little Buster back in Portland. It would be different from the accidents with Enid and Mary Lou, because, with a man, those things generally did matter a good deal, even when you didn’t mean them to matter. Which was the only reason for not doing them, outside of their being sins, of course; but somehow that never seemed to count very much when the boy was a real good looker (which one had to admit Sig was, even though it was rather in the style of Adolphe Menjou; but, come to think of it, it was those dark ones with oil on their hair that had always given her the biggest kick). And when you’d had a couple of drinks, maybe, and you felt you’d like some thrills, why then it never even occurred to you that it was a sin; and then one thing led to another and before you knew what had happened—well, it had happened; and really she just couldn’t believe it was as bad as Father O’Reilly said it was; and anyhow Our Lady would be a lot more understanding and forgiving than he was; and what about the way Father O’Reilly ate his food, whenever he came to dinner? like a hog, there wasn’t any other word for it; and wasn’t gluttony just as bad as the other thing? So who was he to talk like that?

  “Well, and how’s the patient?” Dr. Obispo inquired in the parody of a bedside manner, as he took Virginia’s place on the couch. He was in the highest of spirits. His work in the laboratory was coming along unexpectedly well; that new preparation of bile salts had done wonders for his liver; the rearmament boom had sent his aircraft shares up another three points; and it was obvious that Virginia wasn’t going to hold out much longer. “How’s the little invalid this morning?” he went on, enriching his parody with the caricature of an English accent; for he had done a year of postgraduate work at Oxford.

  Mr. Stoyte growled inarticulately. There was something about Dr. Obispo’s facetiousness that always enraged him. In some not easily definable way it had the quality of a deliberate insult. Mr. Stoyte was always made to feel that Obispo’s apparently good-natured banter was in reality the expression of a calculated and malignant contempt. The thought of it made Mr. Stoyte’s blood boil. But when his blood boiled, his blood pressure, he knew, went up, his life was shortened. He could not afford to be as angry with Obispo as he would have liked. And what was more, he couldn’t afford to get rid of the man. Obispo was an indispensable evil. “God is love; there is no death.” But Mr. Stoyte remembered with terror that he had had a stroke, that he was growing old. Obispo had put him on his feet again when he was almost dying, had promised him ten more years of life even if those researches didn’t work out as well as he hoped; and if they did work out—then more, much more. Twenty years, thirty, forty. Or it might even be that the loathsome little brute would find some way of proving that Mrs. Eddy was right, after all. Perhaps there really and truly wouldn’t
be any death—not for Uncle Jo, at any rate. Glorious prospect! Meanwhile . . . Mr. Stoyte sighed, resignedly, profoundly. “We all have our cross to bear,” he said to himself, echoing, across the intervening years, the words his grandmother used to repeat when she made him take castor oil.

  Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, had sterilized his needle, filed the top off a glass ampoule, filled his syringe. His movements, as he worked, were characterized by a certain studied exquisiteness, by a florid and self-conscious precision. It was as though the man were simultaneously his own ballet and his own audience—a sophisticated and highly critical audience, it was true; but then, what a ballet! Nijinsky, Karsavina, Pavlova, Massine—all on a single stage. However terrific the applause, it was always merited.

  “Ready,” he called at last.

  Obediently and in silence, like a trained elephant, Mr. Stoyte rolled over on to his stomach.

  Chapter V

  JEREMY had dressed again and was sitting in the subterranean store-room that was to serve as his study. The dry acrid dust of old documents had gone to his head, like a kind of intoxicating snuff. His face was flushed as he prepared his files and sharpened his pencils; his bald head shone with perspiration; behind their bifocal lenses, his eyes were bright with excitement.

  There! Everything was ready. He turned round in his swivel chair and sat for a little while quite still, voluptuously savouring his anticipations. Tied up in innumerable brown paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader. Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was to be their Bluebeard. Thousands of brides of quietness accumulated through centuries by successive generations of indefatigable Hauberks. Hauberk after Hauberk; barony after knighthood; earldom after barony; and then Earl of Gonister after Earl of Gonister down to the last, the eighth. And, after the eighth, nothing but death duties and an old house and two old spinster ladies, sinking ever deeper into solitude and eccentricity, into poverty and family pride, but finally, poor pets! more deeply into poverty than pride. They had sworn they would never sell; but in the end they had accepted Mr. Stoyte’s offer. The papers had been shipped to California. They would be able, now, to buy themselves a couple of really sumptuous funerals. And that would be the end of the Hauberks. Delicious fragments of English history! Cautionary perhaps, or perhaps, and more probably, merely senseless, merely a tale told by an idiot. A tale of cutthroats and conspirators, of patrons of learning and shady speculators, of bishops and kings’ catamites and minor poets, of admirals and pimps, of saints and heroines and nymphomaniacs, of imbeciles and prime ministers, of art collectors and sadists. And here was all that remained of them, in twenty-seven crates, higgledy-piggledy, never catalogued, never even looked at, utterly virgin. Gloating over his treasure, Jeremy forgot the fatigues of the journey, forgot Los Angeles and the chauffeur, forgot the cemetery and the castle, forgot even Mr. Stoyte. He had the Hauberk Papers, had them all to himself. Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string. What rich confusion awaited him within! A book of household accounts for the year 1576 and 1577; a narrative by some Hauberk cadet of Sir Kenelm Digby’s expedition to Scanderoon; eleven letters in Spanish from Miguel de Molinos to that Lady Hauberk who had scandalized her family by turning papist; a collection, in early eighteenth-century handwriting, of sickroom recipes; a copy of Drelincourt’s “On Death”; and an odd volume of Andréa de Nerciat’s “Felicia, ou Mes Fredaines.” He had just cut the string of the second bundle and was wondering whose was the lock of pale brown hair preserved between the pages of the Third Earl’s holograph, “Reflections of the Late Popish Plot,” when there was a knock at the door. He looked up and saw a small, dark man in a white overall advancing towards him. The stranger smiled, said, “Don’t let me disturb you,” but nevertheless disturbed him. “My name’s Obispo,” he went on, “Dr. Sigmund Obispo. Physician in ordinary to His Majesty King Stoyte the First—and let’s hope also the last.”

  Evidently delighted by his own joke, he broke into a peal of startlingly loud, metallic laughter. Then, with the elegantly fastidious gesture of an aristocrat in a dust heap, he picked up one of Molinos’s letters and started, slowly, and out loud, to decipher the first line of the flowing seventeenth-century calligraphy that met his eyes. “ ‘Ame a Dios como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imaginacion.’ ” He looked up at Jeremy with an amused smile. “Easier said than done, I should think. Why, you can’t even love a woman as she is in herself; and after all, there is some sort of objective physical basis for the phenomenon we call a female. A pretty nice basis in some cases. Whereas poor old Dios is only a spirit—in other words, pure imagination. And here’s this idiot, whoever he is, telling some other idiot that people mustn’t love God as He is in their imagination.” Once again self-consciously the aristocrat, he threw down the letter with a contemptuous flick of the wrist. “What drivel it all is!” he went on. “A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they’ll murder their neighbours for using a word they don’t happen to like. A word that probably doesn’t mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach. ‘Ame a Dios como es en si,’ ” he repeated derisively. “It’s about as sensible as saying ‘hiccough a hiccough como es en hiccough.’ I don’t know how you litterae humaniores boys manage to stand it. Don’t you pine for some sense once in a while?”

  Jeremy smiled with an expression of nervous apology. “One doesn’t bother too much about the meanings,” he said. Then, anticipating further criticism by disparaging himself and the things he loved most dearly, “One gets a lot of fun, you know,” he went on; “just scrabbling about in the dust heaps.” Dr. Obispo laughed and patted Jeremy encouragingly on the shoulder. “Good for you!” he said. “You’re frank. I like that. Most of the Ph.D. boys one meets are such damned Pecksniffs. Trying to pull that high-moral culture stuff on you! You know: wisdom rather than knowledge; Sophocles instead of science. ‘Funny,’ I always say to them when they try that on me, ‘funny that the thing you get your income from should happen to be the thing that’s going to save humanity.’ Whereas you don’t try to glorify your little racket. You’re honest. You admit you’re in the thing merely for the fun of it. Well, that’s why I’m in my little racket. For the fun. Though of course if you’d given me any of that Sophocles stuff, I’d just have let you have my piece about science and progress, science and happiness, even science and ultimate truth, if you’d been obstinate.” He showed his white teeth in a happy derision of everybody.

  His amusement was infectious. Jeremy also smiled. “I’m glad I wasn’t obstinate,” he said in a tone whose fluty demureness implied how much he objected to disquisitions on ultimate truth.

  “Mind you,” Dr. Obispo went on, “I’m not entirely blind to the charms of your racket. I’d draw the line at Sophocles, of course. And I’d be deadly bored with this sort of stuff.” He nodded towards the twenty-seven crates. “But I must admit,” he concluded handsomely, “I’ve had a lot of fun out of old books in my time. Really, a lot of fun.”

  Jeremy coughed and caressed his scalp; his eyes twinkled in anticipation of the deliciously dry little jokes he was just about to make. But unfortunately Dr. Obispo gave him no time. Serenely unaware of Jeremy’s preparations he looked at his watch; then rose to his feet. “I’d like to show you my laboratory,” he said. “There’s plenty of time before lunch.”

  “Instead of asking if I’d like to see his bloody laboratory,” Jeremy protested inwardly, as he swallowed his joke; and it had been such a good onel He would have liked, of course, to go on unpacking the Hauberk Papers; but, lacking the courage to say so, he rose obediently and followed Dr. Obispo towards the door.


  Longevity, the doctor explained, as they left the room. That was his subject. Had been ever since he left medi cal school. But of course, so long as he was in practice, he hadn’t been able to do any serious work on it. Practice was fatal to serious work, he added parenthetically. How could you do anything sensible when you had to spend all your time looking after patients? Patients belonged to three classes: those that imagined they were sick, but weren’t; those that were sick, but would get well anyhow; those that were sick and would be much better dead. For anybody capable of serious work to waste his time with patients was simply idiotic. And, of course, nothing but economic pressure would ever have driven him to do it. And he might have gone on in that groove for ever. Wasting himself on morons. But then, quite suddenly, his luck had turned. Jo Stoyte had come to consult him. It had been positively providential.

  “Most awfully a godsend,” Jeremy murmured, quoting his favourite phrase of Coleridge.

  Jo Stoyte, Dr. Obispo repeated, Jo Stoyte on the verge of breaking up completely. Forty pounds overweight and having had a stroke. Not a bad one, luckily; but enough to put the old bastard into a sweat. Talk of being scared of death! (Dr. Obispo’s white teeth flashed again in wolfish good humour.) In Jo’s case it had been a panic. Out of that panic had come Dr. Obispo’s liberation from his patients; had come his income, his laboratory for work on the problems of longevity, his excellent assistant; had come, too, the financing of that pharmaceutical work at Berkeley, of those experiments with monkeys in Brazil, of that expedition to study the tortoises on the Galapagos Islands. Everything a research worker could ask for, with old Jo himself thrown in as the perfect guinea-pig—ready to submit to practically anything short of vivisection without anaesthetics, provided it offered some hope of keeping him above ground a few years longer.