After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Page 7

  “Cripes!” Jeremy said to himself; and then: “Golly!” He smiled ruefully at the thought that he hoped to talk to this imbecile about the relation between Keats and Brighton Pavilion.

  Peter Boone found himself separated from Virginia by the blonder of her two young friends from Hollywood, so that he could only look at her past a foreground of rouge and eyelashes, of golden curls and a thick, almost visible perfume of gardenias. To any one else, this foreground might have seemed a bit distracting; but for Pete it was of no more significance than the equivalent amount of mud. He was interested only in what was beyond the foreground—in that exquisitely abbreviated upper lip, in the little nose that made you want to cry when you looked at it, it was so elegant and impertinent, so ridiculous and angelic; in that long Florentine bob of lustrous auburn hair; in those wide-set, widely opened eyes with their twinkling surface of humour and their dark blue depths of what he was sure was an infinite tenderness, a plumbless feminine wisdom. He loved her so much that, where his heart should have been, he could feel only an aching breathlessness, a cavity which she alone could fill.

  Meanwhile, she was talking to the blonde Foreground about that new job which the Foreground had landed with Cosmopolis-Perimutter Studios. The picture was called Say It with Stockings and the Foreground was to play the part of a rich debutante who runs away from home to make a career of her own, becomes a strip-tease dancer in a Western mining camp and finally marries a cowpuncher, who turns out to be the son of a millionaire.

  “Sounds like a swell story,” said Virginia. “Don’t you think so, Pete?”

  Pete thought so; he was ready to think almost anything if she wanted him to.

  “That reminds me of Spain,” Virginia announced. And while Jeremy, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation, frantically tried to imagine what train of associations had taken her from Say It with Stockings to the Civil War—whether it had been Cosmopolis-Perimutter, Anti-Semitism, Nazis, Franco—or débutante, class war, Moscow, Negrin; or strip-tease, mo dernity, radicalism, Republicans—while he was vainly speculating thus, Virginia went on to ask the young man to tell them about what he had done in Spain; and when he demurred, insisted—because it was so thrilling, because the Foreground had never heard about it, because, finally, she wanted him to.

  Pete obeyed. Only half articulately, in a vocabulary composed of slang and cliches, and adorned by expletives and grunts—the vocabulary, Jeremy reflected as he listened surreptitiously through the booming of Dr. Mulge’s eloquence, the characteristically squalid and poverty-stricken vocabulary to which the fear of being thought unsocially different or undemocratically superior, or unsportingly highbrow, condemns most young Englishmen and Americans—he began to describe his experiences as a volunteer in the International Brigade during the heroic days of 1937. It was a touching narrative. Through the hopelessly inadequate language, Jeremy could divine the young man’s enthusiasm for liberty and justice; his courage; his love for his comrades; his nostalgia, even in the neighbourhood of that short upper lip, even in the midst of an absorbing piece of scientific research, for the life of men united in devotion to a cause, made one in the face of hardship and shared danger and impending death.

  “Gee,” he kept repeating, “they were swell guys.”

  They were all swell—Knud, who had saved his life one day, up there in Aragon; Anton and Chuck and poor little Dino, who had been killed. André, who had lost a leg; Jan, who had a wife and two children; Fritz, who’d had six months in a Nazi concentration camp; and all the others—the finest bunch of boys in the world. And what did he do but go and get rheumatic fever on them, and then myocarditis—which meant no more active service; no more anything except sitting around. That was why he was here, he explained apologetically. But, gee, it had been good while it lasted! That time, for example, when he and Knud had gone out at night and climbed a precipice in the dark and taken a whole platoon of Moors by surprise and killed half a dozen of them and come back with a machine gun and three prisoners . . .

  “And what is your opinion of Creative Work, Mr, Pordage?”

  Surprised in flagrant inattention, Jeremy started guiltily. “Creative work?” he mumbled, trying to gain a little time. “Creative work? Well, of course one’s all for it. Definitely,” he insisted.

  “I’m glad to hear you say so,” said Dr. Mulge. “Because that’s what I want at Tarzana. Creative Work—ever more and more Creative. Shall I tell you what is my highest ambition?” Neither Mr. Stoyte nor Jeremy made any reply. But Dr. Mulge proceeded, nevertheless, to tell them. “It is to make of Tarzana the living Centre of the New Civilization that is coming to blossom here in the West.” He raised a large fleshy hand in solemn asseveration. “The Athens of the twentieth century is on the point of emerging here, in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. I want Tarzana to be its Parthenon and its Academe, its Stoa and its Temple of the Muses. Religion, Art, Philosophy, Science—I want them all to find their home in Tarzana, to radiate their influence from our campus, to . . .”

  In the middle of his story about the Moors and the precipice, Pete became aware that only the Foreground was listening to him. Virginia’s attention had wandered, surreptitiously at first, then frankly and avowedly—had wandered to where, on her left, the less blonde of her two friends was having something almost whispered to her by Dr. Obispo.

  “What’s that?” Virginia asked.

  Dr. Obispo leaned towards her and began again. The three heads, the oil-smooth black, the elaborately curly brown, the lustrous auburn, were almost touching. By the expression on their faces Pete could see that the doctor was telling one of his dirty stories. Alleviated for a moment by the smile she had given him when she asked him to tell them about Spain, the anguish in that panting void where his heart ought to have been came back with redoubled intensity. It was a complicated pain, made up of jealousy and a despairing sense of loss and personal unworthiness, of a fear that his angel was being corrupted and another, deeper fear, which his conscious mind refused to formulate, a fear that there wasn’t much further corruption to be done, that the angel was not as angelic as his love had made him assume. The flow of his narrative suddenly dried up. He was silent.

  “Well, what happened then?” the Foreground inquired with an eagerness and an expression of hero worshipping admiration that any other young man would have found delightfully flattering.

  He shook his head. “Oh, nothing much.”

  “But those Moors . . .”

  “Hell,” he said impatiently, “what does it matter, anyhow?”

  His words were drowned by a violent explosion of laughter that sent the three conspiratorial heads, the black, the brown, the lovely auburn, flying apart from one another. He looked up at Virginia and saw a face distorted with mirth. At what? he asked himself in agony, trying to measure the extent of her corruption; and a kind of telescoped and synthetic memory of all the schoolboy stories, all the jokes and Limericks he had ever heard rushed in upon him. Was it at that one that she was laughing? Or at that? Or, God, perhaps at that? He hoped and prayed it wasn’t at that; and the more he hoped and prayed, the more insanely sure he became that that was the one it had been.

  “. . . above all,” Dr. Mulge was saying, “Creative Work in the Arts. Hence the crying need for a new Art School, an Art School worthy of Tarzana, worthy of the highest traditions of . . .”

  The girls’ shrill laughter exploded with a force of hilarity proportionate to the strength of the surrounding social taboos. Mr. Stoyte turned sharply in the direction from which the noise had come.

  “What’s the joke?” he asked suspiciously. He wasn’t going to have his Baby listen to smut. He disapproved of smut in mixed company almost as whole-heartedly as his grandmother, the Plymouth Sister, had done. “What’s all that noise about?”

  It was Dr. Obispo who answered. He’d been telling them a funny story he’d heard over the radio, he explained with that suave politeness that was like a sarcasm. Something delightfully amusing. Perh
aps Mr. Stoyte would like to have him repeat it.

  Mr. Stoyte grunted ferociously and turned away.

  A glance at his host’s scowling face convinced Dr. Mulge that it would be better to postpone discussion of the Art School to another, more propitious occasion. It was disappointing; for it seemed to him that he had been making good progress. But, therel Such things would happen. Dr. Mulge was a college president chronically in quest of endowments; he knew all about the rich. Knew, for example, that they were like gorillas, creatures not easily domesticated, deeply suspicious, alternately bored and bad tempered. You had to approach them with caution, to handle them gently and with a boundless cunning. And even then they might suddenly turn savage on you and show their teeth. Half a life-time of experience with bankers and steel magnates and retired meat packers had taught Dr. Mulge to take such little set-backs as today’s with a truly philosophic patience. Brightly, with a smile on his large, imperial-Roman face, he turned to Jeremy. “And what do you think of our California weather, Mr. Pordage?” he asked.

  Meanwhile, Virginia had noticed the expression on Pete’s face and immediately divined the causes of his misery. Poor Pete! I But really if he thought she had nothing better to do than always be listening to his talk about that silly old war in Spain—or if it wasn’t Spain, it was the laboratory; and they did vivisection there, which was just awful; because, after all, when you were hunting, the animals had a chance of getting away, particularly if you were a bad shot, like she was; besides, hunting was full of thrills and you got such a kick from being up there in the mountains in the good air; whereas Pete cut them up underground in that cellar place. . . . No, if he thought she had nothing better to do than that, he made a big mistake. All the same he was a nice boy; and talk about being in love! It was nice having people around who felt that way about you; made you feel kind of good. Though it could be rather a nuisance sometimes. Because they got to feel they had some claim on you; they figured they had a right to tell you things and interfere. Pete didn’t do that in so many words; but he had a way of looking at you—like a dog would do if it suddenly started criticizing you for taking another cocktail. Saying it with eyes, like Hedy Lamarr—only it wasn’t the same thing as Hedy was saying with her eyes; in fact, just the opposite. It was just the opposite now—and what had she done? Got bored with that silly old war and listened in to what Sig was saying to Mary Lou. Well, all she could say was that she wasn’t going to have any one interfering with the way she chose to live her own life. That was her business. Why, he was almost as bad, the way he looked at her, as Uncle Jo, or her mother, or Father O’Reilly. Only, of course, they didn’t just look; they said things. Not that he meant badly, of course, poor Pete; he was just a kid, just unsophisticated and, on top of everything, in love the way a kid is—like the high-school boy in Deanna Durbin’s last picture. Poor Pete, she thought again. It was tough luck on him; but the fact was she never had been attracted by that big, fair, Cary Grant sort of boy. They just didn’t appeal to her; that was all there was to it. She liked him; and she enjoyed his being in love with her. But that was all.

  Across the corner of the table she caught his eye, gave him a dazzling smile and invited him, if he had half an hour to spare after lunch, to come and teach her and the girls how to pitch horseshoes.

  Chapter VII

  THE meal was over at last; the party broke up. Dr. Mulge had an appointment in Pasadena to see a rubber goods manufacturer’s widow, who might perhaps give fifty thousand dollars for a new girls’ dormitory. Mr. Stoyte drove into Los Angeles for his regular Friday afternoon board meetings and business consultations. Dr. Obispo was going to operate on some rabbits and went down to the laboratory to prepare his instruments. Pete had a batch of scientific journals to look at, but gave himself, meanwhile, a few minutes of happiness in Virginia’s company. And for Jeremy, of course, there were the Hauberk Papers. It was with a sense of almost physical relief, a feeling that he was going home to where he belonged, that he returned to his cellar. The afternoon slipped past—how delightfully, how profitably! Within three hours, another batch of letters from Molinos had turned up among the account books and the business correspondence. So had the third and fourth volumes of “Félicia.” So had an illustrated edition of “Le Portier des Carmes”; and, bound like a prayer book, so had a copy of that rarest of all works of the Divine Marquis, “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.” What a treasure! What unexpected fortune! Or perhaps, Jeremy reflected, not so unexpected if one remembered the history of the Hauberk family. For the date of the books made it likely that they had been the property of the Fifth Earl—the one who had held the title for more than half a century and died at more than ninety, under William IV, completely unregenerate. Given the character of that old gentleman, one had no reason to feel surprised at the finding of a store of pornography—one had every reason, indeed, to hope for more.

  Jeremy’s spirits mounted with each new discovery. Always, with him, a sure sign of happiness, he began to hum the tunes that had been popular during his childhood. Molinos evoked “Tara-rara Boom-de-ay!” “Félicia” and the “Portier des Carmes” shared the romantic lilt of “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” As for the “Cent-Vingt Jours,” which he had never previously read or even seen a copy of—the finding of that delighted him so much that when, as a matter of bibliographical routine, he raised the ecclesiastical cover and, expecting the Anglican ritual, found instead the coldly elegant prose of the Marquis de Sade, he broke out into that rhyme from “The Rose and the Ring,” the rhyme his mother had taught him to repeat when he was only three years old and which had remained with him as the symbol of child-like wonder and delight, as the only completely adequate reaction to any sudden blessing, any providentially happy surprise:

  Oh, what fun to have a plum bun!

  How I wish it never was done!

  And fortunately it wasn’t done, wasn’t even begun; the book was still unread, the hours of entertainment and instruction still lay before him. Remembering that pang of jealousy he had felt up there, in the swimming pool, he smiled indulgently. Let Mr. Stoyte have all the girls he wanted; a well-written piece of eighteenth-century pornography was better than any Maunciple. He closed the volume he was holding. The tooled morocco was austerely elegant; on the back, the words “The Book of Common Prayer” were stamped in a gold which the years had hardly tarnished. He put it down with the other curiosa on a corner of the table. When he had finished for the afternoon, he would take the whole collection up to his bedroom.

  “Oh, what fun to have a plum bun,” he chanted to himself, as he opened another bundle of papers, and then, “On a summer’s afternoon, where the honeysuckles bloom and all Nature seems at rest.” That Wordsworthian touch about Nature always gave him a special pleasure. The new batch of papers turned out to be a correspondence between the Fifth Earl and a number of prominent Whigs regarding the enclosure, for his benefit, of three thousand acres of common land in Nottinghamshire. Jeremy slipped them into a file, wrote a brief preliminary description of the contents on a card, put the file in a cupboard and the card in its cabinet, and, dipping again into the bran pie, reached down for another bundle. He cut the string. “You are my honey, honey, honeysuckle, I am the bee.” What would Dr. Freud have thought of that, he wondered? Anonymous pamphlets against deism were a bore; he threw them aside. But here was a copy of Law’s “Serious Call” with manuscript notes by Edward Gibbon; and here were some accounts rendered to the Fifth Earl by Mr. Rogers of Liverpool; accounts of the expenses and profits of three slave trading expeditions which the earl had helped to finance. The second voyage, it appeared, had been particularly auspicious; less than a fifth of the cargo had perished on the way, and the prices realized at Savannah were gratifyingly high. Mr. Rogers begged to enclose his draft for seventeen thousand two hundred and twenty-four pounds, eleven shillings and fourpence. Written from Venice, in Italian, another letter announced to the same Fifth Earl the appearance upon the market of a half length Mary Magdal
en by Titian, at a price which his correspondent described as derisory. Other offers had already been made; but out of respect for the not less learned than illustrious English cognoscente, the vendor would wait until a reply had been received from his lordship. In spite of which, his lordship would be well advised not to delay too long; for otherwise . . .