After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Page 25

  Walking at sunset up the castle hill, Pete kept thinking with a kind of tranquil exultation of all the things Mr. Propter had said to him. Barcelona had fallen. Spain, England, France, Germany, America—all were falling; falling even at such times as they seemed to be rising; destroying what they built in the very act of building. But any individual has it in his power to refrain from falling, to stop destroying himself. The solidarity with evil is optional, not compulsory.

  On their way out of the carpenter’s shop Pete had brought himself to ask Mr. Propter if he would tell him what he ought to do.

  Mr. Propter had looked at him intently. “If you want it,” he had said, “I mean, if you really want it . . .”

  Pete had nodded without speaking.

  The sun had set; and now the twilight was like the embodiment of peace—the peace of God, Pete said to himself, as he looked across the plain to the distant mountains, the peace that passes all understanding. To part with such loveliness was unbearable. Entering the castle, he went straight to the elevator, recalled the cage from somewhere up aloft, shut himself up with the Vermeer and pressed the highest of the buttons. Up there, at the top of the keep, he would be at the very heart of this celestial peace.

  The elevator came to a halt. He opened the gates and stepped out. The swimming pool reflected a luminous tranquillity. He turped his eyes from the water to the sky and from the sky to the mountains; then walked round the pool in order to look down over the battlements on the further side.

  “Go away!” a muffled voice suddenly said.

  Pete started violently, turned and saw Virginia lying in the shadow almost at his feet.

  “Go away,” the voice repeated. “I hate you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he stammered, “I didn’t know . . .”

  “Oh, it’s you.” She opened her eyes, and in the dim light he was able to see that she had been crying. “I thought it was Sig. He went to get a comb for my hair.” She was silent for a little; then suddenly she burst out, “I’m so unhappy, Pete.”

  “Unhappy?” The word and her tone had utterly shattered the peace of God. In an anguish of love and anxiety he sat down beside her on the couch. (Under her bath robe, he couldn’t help noticing, she didn’t seem to be wearing anything at all.) “Unhappy?”

  Virginia covered her face with her hands and began to sob. “Not even Our Lady,” she gasped in an inco-herency of grief. “I can’t even tell her. I feel so mean. . .”

  “Darling.” he said in a voice of entreaty, as though imploring her to be happy. He began to stroke her hair. “My darling.”

  Suddenly there was a violent commotion on the further side of the pool. A crash as the elevator gates were flung back; a rush of feet; an inarticulate yell of rage. Pete turned his head and was in time to see Mr. Stoyte rushing towards them, holding something in his hand, something that might almost have been an automatic pistol.

  He had half risen to his feet, when Mr. Stoyte fired.

  Arriving two or three minutes later with the comb for Virginia’s hair, Dr. Obispo found the old man on his knees, trying, with a pocket handkerchief, to staunch the blood that was still pouring out of the two wounds, one clean and small, the other cavernous, which the bullet had made as it passed through Pete’s head.

  Crouching in the shadow of the battlements, the Baby was praying. “Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen,” she repeated, again and again, as fast as her sobs would permit her. Every now and then she would be seized and shaken by an access of nausea, and the praying would be interrupted for a moment. Then it began again where she had left off: “. . . us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God . . .”

  Dr. Obispo opened his mouth to make an exclamation, then closed it again, whispered, “Christ!” and walked quickly and silently round the pool. Before making his presence known, he took the precaution of picking up the pistol and slipping it into his pocket. One never knew. Then he called Mr. Stoyte’s name. The old man started and a hideous expression of terror appeared on his face. Fear gave place to relief as he turned round and saw who it was that had spoken to him.

  “Thank God, it’s you,” he said; then suddenly remembered that this was the man he had meant to kill. But all that had been a million years ago, a million miles away. The near, immediate, urgent fact was not the Baby, not love or anger; it was fear and this thing that lay here on the ground.

  “You got to save him,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “We can say it was an accident. I’ll pay him anything he likes. Anything in reason,” an old reflex impelled him to add. “But you got to save him.” Laboriously, he heaved himself to his feet and motioned Dr. Obispo to his vacated place.

  The only movement Dr. Obispo made was one of withdrawal. The old man was covered with blood, and he had no wish to spoil a ninety-five dollar suit. “Save him?” he repeated. “You’re mad. Look at all the brain lying there on the floor.”

  From the shadows behind him, Virginia interrupted the sobbing mutter of her prayers to scream. “On the floor,” she kept wailing. “On the floor.”

  Dr. Obispo turned on her savagely. “Shut up, do you hear?”

  The screams abruptly ceased; but a few seconds later there was a sound of violent retching; then “Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners . . .”

  “If we’re going to try and save anybody” Dr. Obispo went on, “it had better be you. And believe me,” he added emphatically, throwing all his weight on his left leg and using the toe of his right shoe to point at the body, “you need some saving. It’s either the gas chamber or San Quentin for life.”

  “But it was an accident,” Mr, Stoyte began to protest with a breathless eagerness. “I mean, it was all a mistake. I never wanted to shoot him. I meant to . . .” He broke off and stood in silence, his mouth working, as though he were trying to swallow some unspoken word.

  “You meant to kill me,” said Dr. Obispo completing the sentence for him and smiling, as he did so, with the expression of wolfish good humour which was characteristic of him in any situation where the joke was at all embarrassing or painful. Secure in the knowledge that the old buzzard was much too scared to be angry and that anyhow the gun was in his own pocket, he prolonged the joke by saying, “Well,” sententiously, “that’s what comes of snooping.”

  “. . . now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen,” Virginia gabbled in the ensuing silence. “Holy-Mary-Mother . . .”

  “I never meant it,” Mr. Stoyte reiterated. “I just got mad. Guess I didn’t really figure out what I was doing . . .”

  “Tell that to the jury,” said Dr. Obispo sarcastically.

  “But I swear it: I didn’t really know,” Mr. Stoyte pro tested. His harsh voice broke grotesquely into a squeak. His face was white with fear.

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe,” he said. “But not knowing doesn’t make any difference to that.” He stood on one leg again to point an elegantly shod foot in the direction of the body.

  “But what shall I do?” Mr. Stoyte almost screamed in the anguish of his terror.

  “Don’t ask me.”

  Mr. Stoyte initiated the gesture of laying his hand imploringly on the other’s sleeve; but Dr. Obispo quickly drew back; “No, don’t touch me,” he said, “Just look at your hands.”

  Mr. Stoyte looked. The thick, carrot-like fingers were red; under the horny nails the blood was already caked and dry, like clay. “God!” he whispered. “Oh, my God!”

  “. . . and-at-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary . . .”

  At the word “death,” the old man started as though he had been struck with a whip. “Obispo,” he began again, breathless with apprehension, “Obispo! Listen here—you got to help me out of this. You got to help me,” he entreated.

  “After you did your best to do that to me?” The white-and-tan shoe shot out again.

  “You wouldn’t let th
em get me?” Mr. Stoyte wheedled, abject in his terror.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “But you can’t,” he almost shouted. “You can’t.”

  Dr. Obispo bent down to make quite sure, in the fading light, that there was no blood on the couch; then, pulling up his fawn-coloured trousers, sat down. “One gets tired of standing,” he said in a pleasant conversational tone.

  Mr. Stoyte went on pleading. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he said. “You can have anything you care to ask for. Anything,” he repeated without any qualifying reference, this time, to reason.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Obispo, “now you’re talking turkey.”

  “. . . Mother-of-God,” muttered the Baby, “pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now . . .”

  “You’re talking turkey,” Dr. Obispo repeated.

  PART III

  Chapter I

  THERE was a tap at the door of Jeremy’s work room; it was Mr. Propter who entered. He was wearing, Jeremy noticed, the same dark grey suit and black tie as he had worn at Pete’s funeral. The urban costume diminished him; he seemed smaller than in his working clothes and at the same time less himself. That weather-beaten, emphatically featured face of his—that face of a statue high up on the west front of a cathedral—looked curiously incongruous above a starched collar.

  “You’ve not forgotten?” he said, when they had shaken hands.

  For all reply, Jeremy pointed to his own black jacket and sponge-bag trousers. They were expected at Tarzana for the ceremonial opening of the new Stoyte Auditorium.

  Mr. Propter looked at his watch. “We’ve got another few minutes before we need think of starting.” He sat down. “What’s the news?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” Jeremy answered.

  Mr. Propter nodded. “Now that poor Jo and the others have gone, it must be quite agreeable here.”

  “All alone with twelve million dollars worth of bric-a-brac,” said Jeremy. “I have the most enormous fun.”

  “How little fun you’d be having,” said Mr. Propter meditatively, “if you’d been left in company with the people who actually made the bric-a-brac. With Greco, and Rubens, and Turner, and Fra Angelico.”

  “God preserve us!” said Jeremy, throwing up his hands.

  “That’s the charm of art,” Mr. Propter went on. “It represents only the most amiable aspects of the most talented human beings. That’s why I’ve never been able to believe that the art of any period threw much light on the life of that period. Take a Martian; show him a representative collection of Botticellis, Peruginos and Raphaels. Could he infer from them the conditions described by Machiavelli?”

  “No, he couldn’t,” Jeremy agreed. “But meanwhile, here’s another question. The conditions described by Machiavelli—were they the real conditions? Not that Machiavelli didn’t tell the truth. The things he described really happened. But did contemporaries think them as awful as they seem to us when we read about them now? We think they ought to have been miserable about what was happening. But were they?”

  “Were they?” Mr. Propter repeated. “We ask the historians; and of course they can’t answer—because obviously there’s no way of compiling statistics about the sum of happiness, nor any way of comparing the feelings of people living under one set of conditions with the feelings of people living under another and quite different set. The real conditions at any given moment are the subjective conditions of the people then alive. And the historian has no way of finding out what those conditions were.”

  “No way except through looking at works of art,” said Jeremy. “I’d say they do throw light on the subjective conditions. Take one of your examples. Perugino’s a contemporary of Machiavelli. That means that at least one person contrived to be cheerful all through an unpleasant period. And if one could be, why not many?” He cleared the way for a quotation with a little cough. “ ‘The state of the country never put a man off his dinner.’ ”

  “Massive wisdom!” said Mr. Propter. “But remember that the state of Dr. Johnson’s England was excellent, even at its worst. What about the state of a country like China, say, or Spain—a country where a man can’t be put off his dinner, for the simple reason that there isn’t any dinner? And conversely, what about all the losses of appetite at times when everything’s going well?” He paused, smiled inquiringly at Jeremy, then shook his head. “Sometimes there’s a lot of cheerfulness as well as a lot of misery; sometimes there seems to be almost nothing but misery. That’s all the historian can say insofar as he’s a historian. Insofar as he’s a theologian, of course, or a metaphysician, he can maunder on indefinitely, like Marx or St. Augustine or Spengler.” Mr. Propter made a little grimace of distaste. “God, what a lot of bosh we’ve managed to talk in the last few thousand years!” he said.

  “But it has its charm,” Jeremy insisted. “Really good bosh . . .”

  “I’m barbarous enough to prefer sense,” said Mr. Propter. “That’s why, if I want a philosophy of history, I go to the psychologist.”

  “ ‘Totem and Tabu?” Jeremy questioned in some astonishment.

  “No, no,” said Mr. Propter with a certain impatience. “Not that kind of psychologist. I mean the religious psychologist; the one who knows by direct experience that men are capable of liberation and enlightenment. He’s the only philosopher of history whose hypothesis has been experimentally verified; therefore the only one who can make a generalization that covers the facts.”

  “And what are his generalizations?” said Jeremy. “Just the usual thing?”

  Mr. Propter laughed. “Just the usual thing,” he answered. “The old, boring, inescapable truths. On the human level, men live in ignorance, craving and fear. Ignorance, craving and fear result in some temporary pleasures, in many lasting miseries, in final frustration. The nature of the cure is obvious; the difficulties in the way of achieving it, almost insuperable. We have to choose between almost insuperable difficulties on the one hand and absolutely certain misery and frustration on the other. Meanwhile, the general hypothesis remains as the intellectual key to history. Only the religious psychologist can make any sense of Perugino and Machia-velli, for example; or of all this.” He pointed towards the Hauberk Papers.

  Jeremy twinkled behind his glasses and patted his bald patch. “Your true scholar,” he fluted, “doesn’t even want to make sense of it.”

  “Yes, I always tend to forget that,” said Mr. Propter rather sadly.

  Jeremy coughed. “ ‘Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,’ ” he quoted from the “Grammarian’s Funeral.”

  “Gave it for his own sake,” said Mr. Propter, getting out of his chair. “Gave it regardless of the fact that the grammar he was studying was hopelessly unscientific, riddled with concealed metaphysics, utterly provincial and antiquated. Well,” he added, “that’s what one would expect, I suppose.” He took Jeremy’s arm, and they walked together towards the elevator. “What a curious figure old Browning is!” he continued, his mind harking back to the Grammarian. “Such a first-rate intelligence, and at the same time such a fool. All that preposterous stuff about romantic love! Bringing God into it, putting it into heaven, talking as though marriage and the higher forms of adultery were identical with the beatific vision. The silliness of it! But, again, that’s what one has to expect.” He sighed. “I don’t know why,” he added after a pause, “I often find myself remembering that rhyme of his—I can’t even recall which poem it comes from—the one that goes: ‘One night he kissed My soul out in a burning mist.’ My soul out in a burning mist, indeed!” he repeated. “Really, how much I prefer Chaucer on the subject. Do you remember? ‘Thus swivfèd is this carpenterès wife.’ So beautifully objective and unemphatic and free of verbiage! Browning was always rambling on about God; but I suspect he was much further away from reality than Chaucer was, even though Chaucer never thought about God, if he could possibly help it. Chaucer had nothing between himself and etern
ity but his appetites. Browning had his appetites, plus a great barrage of nonsense—nonsense, what’s more, with a purpose. For, of course, that bogus mysticism wasn’t merely gratuitous bosh. It had an object. It existed in order that Browning might be able to persuade himself that his appetites were identical with God. ‘Thus swivèd is this carpenterès wife,’ ” he repeated, as they entered the elevator and went up with Vermeer to the great hall. “ ‘My soul out in a burning mist.’ It’s extraordinary the way the whole quality of our existence can be changed by altering the words in which we think and talk about it. We float in language like icebergs—four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.”

  They crossed the hall. Mr. Propter’s car was standing outside the front door. He took the wheel; Jeremy got in beside him. They drove off, down the curving road, past the baboons, past Giambologna’s nymph, past the Grotto, under the portcullis and across the drawbridge.

  “I so often think of that poor boy,” said Mr. Propter, breaking a long silence. “Dying so suddenly.”