After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Page 4

  “What for?” asked Mr. Stoyte, who had a professional interest in human nature. “Gambling? Women?”

  Clancy shook his head. “Doctors” he explained. “He’s got a kid that’s paralysed.”

  “Paralysed?” Mr. Stoyte echoed in a tone of genuine sympathy. “That’s too bad.” He hesitated for a moment; then, in a sudden burst of generosity, “Tell him to send the kid here,” he went on, making a large gesture towards the hospital. “Best place in the State for infantile paralysis, and it won’t cost him anything. Not a red cent.”

  “Hell, that’s kind of you, Mr. Stoyte,” said Clancy admiringly. “That’s real kind.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Mr. Stoyte, as he moved towards his car. “I’m glad to be able to do it. Remember what it says in the Bible about children. You know,” he added, “I get a real kick out of being with those poor kids in there. Makes you feel kind of warm inside.” He patted the barrel of his chest. “Tell Tittelbaum to send in an application for the kid. Send it to me personally. I’ll see that it goes through at once.” He climbed into the car and shut the door after him; then, catching sight of Jeremy, opened it again without a word. Mumbling apologetically, Jeremy scrambled in. Mr. Stoyte slammed the door once more, lowered the glass and looked out.

  “So long,” he said. “And don’t lose any time about that San Felipe business. Make a good job of it, Clancy, and I’ll let you have ten per cent of all the acreage over twenty thousand.” He raised the window and signalled to the chauffeur to start. The car swung out of the drive and headed towards the castle. Leaning back in his seat, Mr. Stoyte thought of those poor kids and the money he would make out of the San Felipe business. “God is love,” he said yet once more, with momentary conviction and again, in a whisper that was audible to his companion. “God is love.” Jeremy felt more uncomfortable than ever.

  The drawbridge came down as the blue Cadillac approached, the chromium portcullis went up, the gates of the inner rampart rolled back to let it pass. On the concrete tennis court, the seven children of the Chinese cook were roller-skating. Below, in the sacred grotto, a group of masons were at work. At the sight of them, Mr. Stoyte shouted to the chauffeur to stop.

  “They’re putting up a tomb for some nuns,” he said to Jeremy as they got out of the car.

  “Some nuns?” Jeremy echoed in surprise.

  Mr. Stoyte nodded and explained that his Spanish agents had bought some sculpture and iron work from the chapel of a convent that had been wrecked by the anarchists at the beginning of the civil war. “They sent some nuns along too,” he added. “Embalmed, I guess. Or maybe just sun-dried. I don’t know. Anyhow, there they are. Luckily I happened to have something nice to put them in.” He pointed to the monument which the masons were in process of fixing to the south wall of the grotto. On a marble shelf above a large Roman sarcophagus were the statues by some nameless Jacobean stonemason of a gentleman and lady, both in ruffs, kneeling, and behind them in three rows of three, nine daughters diminishing from adolescence to infancy. “Hie jacet Carolus Franciscus Beals, Armiger . . .” Jeremy began to read.

  “Bought it in England, two years ago,” said Mr. Stoyte, interrupting him. Then, turning to the workmen, “When will you boys be through?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow noon. Maybe tonight.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” said Mr. Stoyte, and turned away. “I must have those nuns taken out of storage,” he said, as they walked back to the car.

  They drove on. Poised on the almost invisible vibration of its wings, a humming bird was drinking at the jet that spouted from the left nipple of Giambologna’s nymph. From the enclosure of the baboons came the shrill noise of battle and copulation. Mr. Stoyte shut his eyes. “God is love,” he repeated, trying deliberately to prolong the delightful condition of euphoria into which those poor kids and Clancy’s good news had plunged him. “God is love. There is no death.” He waited to feel that sense of inward warmth, like the after-effect of whisky, which had followed his previous utterance of the words. Instead, as though some immanent fiend were playing a practical joke on him, he found himself thinking of the shrunken leathery corpses of those nuns, and of his own corpse, and of judgment and the flames. Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist; but Joseph Budge Stoyte, his father, had been a Sandemanian; and Letitia Morgan, his maternal grandmother, had lived and died a Plymouth Sister. Over his cot in the attic room of the little frame house in Nashville, Tennessee, had hung the text, in vivid orange on a black background: “IT IS A TERRIBLE THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD.” “God is love,” Mr.Stoyte desperately reaffirmed. “There is no death.” But for sinners, such as himself, it was only the worm that never died.

  “If you’re always scared of dying,” Obispo had said, “you’ll surely die. Fear’s a poison; and not such a slow poison either.”

  Making another enormous effort, Mr. Stoyte suddenly began to whistle. The tune was “I’m making hay in the moonlight in my baby’s arms,” but the face which Jeremy Pordage saw and, as though from some horrible and indecent secret, immediately averted his eyes from, was the face of a man in the condemned cell.

  “Old sour-puss,” the chauffeur muttered to himself, as he watched his employer get out of the car and walk away.

  Followed by Jeremy, Mr. Stoyte hurried in silence through the Gothic portal, crossed a pillared Romanesque lobby like the Lady Chapel at Durham and, his hat still pulled down over his eyes, stepped into the cathedral twilight of the great hall.

  A hundred feet overhead, the sound of the two men’s footsteps echoed in the vaulting. Like iron ghosts, the suits of armour stood immobile round the walls. Above them, sumptuously dim, the fifteenth-century tapestries opened windows upon a leafy world of phantasy. At one end of the cavernous room, lit by a hidden searchlight, El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter blazed out in the darkness like the beautiful revelation of something incomprehensible and profoundly sinister. At the other, no less brilliantly illuminated, hung a full-length portrait of Hélène Fourment, dressed only in a bearskin cape. Jeremy looked from one to the other—from the ectoplasm of the inverted saint to the unequivocal skin and fat and muscle which Rubens had so loved to see and touch; from unearthly flesh tints of green-white ochre and carmine, shadowed with transparent black, to the creams and warm pinks, the nacreous blues and greens of Flemish nudity. Two shining symbols, incomparably powerful and expressive—but of what, of what? That, of course, was the question.

  Mr. Stoyte paid attention to none of his treasures, but strode across the hall, inwardly cursing his buried wife for having made him think about death by insisting that there wasn’t any.

  The door of the elevator was in an embrasure between pillars. Mr. Stoyte opened it, and the light came on revealing a Dutch lady in blue satin sitting at a harpsichord—sitting, Jeremy reflected, at the very heart of an equation, in a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had become one. With what intention? To express, symbolically, what truths about the nature of things? Again, that was the question. Where art was concerned, Jeremy said to himself, that was always the question.

  “Shut the door,” Mr. Stoyte ordered; then when it was done, “We’ll have a swim before lunch,” he added, and pressed the topmost of a long row of buttons.

  Chapter IV

  MORE than a dozen families of transients were already at work in the orange grove, as the man from Kansas, with his wife and his three children and his yellow dog, hurried down the line towards the trees which the overseer had assigned to him. They walked in silence, for they had nothing to say to one another and no energy to waste on words.

  Only half a day, the man was thinking; only four hours till work would be stopped. They’d be lucky if they made as much as seventy-five cents. Seventy-five cents. Seventy-five cents; and that right front tire wasn’t going to last much longer. If they meant to get up to Fresno and then Salinas, they’d just have to get a better one. But even the rottenest old second-
hand tire cost money. And money was food. And did they eat! he thought with sudden resentment. If he were alone, if he didn’t have to drag the kids and Minnie around, then he could rent a little place somewhere. Near the highway, so that he could make a bit extra by selling eggs and fruit and things to the people that rode past in their automobiles, sell a lot cheaper than the markets and still make good money. And then, maybe, he’d be able to buy a cow and a couple of hogs; and then he’d find a girl—one of those fat ones; he liked them rather fat; fat and young, with . . .

  His wife started coughing again; the dream was shattered. Did they eat! More than they were worth. Three kids with no strength in them. And Minnie going sick on you half the time so that you had to do her work as well as yours I

  The dog had paused to sniff at a post. With sudden and surprising agility, the man from Kansas took two quick steps forward and kicked the animal squarely in the ribs. “You goddam dog!” he shouted. “Get out of the way!” It ran off, yelping. The man from Kansas turned his head in the hope of catching in his children’s faces an expression of disapproval or commiseration. But the children had learnt better than to give him an excuse for going on from the dog to themselves. Under the tousled hair, the three pale, small faces were entirely blank and vacant. Disappointed, the man turned away grumbling indistinctly that he’d belt the hell out of them if they weren’t careful. The mother did not even turn her head. She was feeling too sick and tired to do anything but walk straight on. Silence settled down again over the party.

  Then, suddenly, the youngest of the three children let out a shrill cry. “Look there!” she pointed. In front of them was the castle. From the summit of its highest tower rose a spidery metal structure, carrying a succession of platforms to a height of twenty or thirty feet above the parapet. On the highest of these platforms, black against the shining sky, stood a tiny human figure. As they looked, the figure spread its arms and plunged head foremost out of sight behind the battlements. The children’s shrill outcry of astonishment gave the man from Kansas the pretext which, a moment before, they had denied him. He turned on them furiously. “Stop that yellin’,” he yelled; then rushed at them, hitting out—a slap on the side of the head for each of them. With an enormous effort, the woman lifted herself from the abyss of fatigue into which she had fallen; she halted, she turned, she cried out protestingly, she caught her husband’s arm. He pushed her away, so violently that she almost fell.

  “You’re as bad as the kids,” he shouted at her. “Just layin’ around and eatin’. Not worth a damn. I tell you, I’m just sick and tired of the whole lot of you. Sick and tired,” he repeated. “So you keep your mouth shut, see!” He turned away and, feeling a good deal better for his outburst, walked briskly on, at a rate which he knew his wife would find exhausting, between the rows of loaded orange trees.

  From that swimming pool at the top of the donjon the view was prodigious. Floating on the translucent water, one had only to turn one’s head to see, between the battlement, successive vistas of plain and mountain, of green and tawny and violet and faint blue. One floated, one looked and one thought, that is, if one were Jeremy Pordage, of that tower in Epipsychidion, that tower with its chambers

  Looking towards the golden Eastern air

  And level with the living winds.

  Not so, however, if one were Miss Virginia Maunciple. Virginia neither floated, nor looked, nor thought of Epipsychidion, but took another sip of whisky and soda, climbed to the highest platform of the diving tower, spread her arms, plunged, glided under water and, coming up immediately beneath the unsuspecting Pordage, caught him by the belt of his bathing pants and pulled him under.

  “You asked for it,” she said, as he came up again, gasping and spluttering, to the surface. “Lying there without moving, like a silly old Buddha.” She smiled at him with an entirely good-natured contempt.

  These people that Uncle Jo kept bringing to the castle! An Englishman with a monocle to look at the armour; a man with a stammer to clean the pictures; a man who couldn’t speak anything but German to look at some silly old pots and plates; and today this other ridiculous Englishman with a face like a rabbit’s and a voice like Songs without Words on the saxophone.

  Jeremy Pordage blinked the water out of his eyes and, dimly, since he was presbyopic and without his spectacles, saw the young laughing face very close to his own, the body foreshortened and wavering uncertainly through the water. It was not often that he found himself in such proximity to such a being. He swallowed his annoyance and smiled at her.

  Miss Maunciple stretched out a hand and patted the bald patch at the top of Jeremy’s head. “Boy,” she said, “does it shine! Talk of billiard balls. I know what I shall call you: Ivory. Good-bye, Ivory.” She turned, swam to the ladder, climbed out, walked to the table on which the bottles and glasses were standing, drank the rest of her whisky and soda, then went and sat down on the edge of the couch on which, in black spectacles and bathing drawers, Mr. Stoyte was taking his sun bath.

  “Well, Uncle Jo,” she said in a tone of affectionate playfulness, “feeling kind of good?”

  “Feeling fine, baby,” he answered. It was true; the sun had melted away his dismal forebodings; he was living again in the present, that delightful present in which one brought happiness to sick children; in which there were Tittelbaums prepared, for five hundred bucks, to give one information worth at the very least a million; in which the sky was blue and the sunshine a caressing warmth upon the stomach; in which finally, one stirred out of a delicious somnolence to see little Virginia smiling down at one as though she really cared for her old Uncle Jo, and cared for him, what was more, not merely as an old uncle—no, sir; because when all’s said and done, a man is only as old as he feels and acts; and where his baby was concerned did he feel young? did he act young? Yes, sir. Mr. Stoyte smiled to himself, a smile of triumphant self-satisfaction.

  “Well, baby,” he said aloud, and laid a square, thick-fingered hand on the young woman’s bare knee.

  Through half-closed eyelids, Miss Maunciple gave him a secret and somehow indecent look of understanding and complicity; then uttered a little laugh and stretched her arms. “Doesn’t the sun feel good!” she said; and, closing her lids completely, she lowered her raised arms, clasped her hands behind her neck and threw back her shoulders. It was a pose that lifted the breasts, that emphasized the inward curve of the loins and the contrary swell of the buttocks—the sort of pose that a new arrival in the seraglio would be taught by the eunuchs to assume at her first interview with the sultan; the very pose, Jeremy recognized, as he had chanced to look her way, of that quite particularly unsuitable statue on the third floor of the Beverly Pantheon.

  Through his dark glasses, Mr. Stoyte looked up at her with an expression of possessiveness at once gluttonous and paternal. Virginia was his baby, not only figuratively and colloquially, but also in the literal sense of the word. His sentiments were simultaneously those of the purest father-love and the most violent eroticism.

  He looked up at her. By contrast with the shiny white satin of her breech clout and brassière the sunburnt skin seemed more richly brown. The planes of the young body flowed in smooth continuous curves, effortlessly solid, three-dimensional without accent or abrupt transition. Mr. Stoyte’s regard travelled up to the auburn hair and came down by way of the rounded forehead, of the wide-set eyes, and small, straight, impudent nose to the mouth. That mouth—it was her most striking feature. For it was to the mouth’s short upper lip that Virginia’s face owed its characteristic expression of child-like innocence—an expression that persisted through all her moods, that was noticeable whatever she might be doing, whether it was telling smutty stories or making conversation with the Bishop, taking tea in Pasadena or getting tight with the boys, enjoying what she called “a bit of yum-yum” or attending Mass. Chronologically, Miss Maunciple was a young woman of twenty-two; but that abbreviated upper lip gave her, in all circumstances, an air of being hardly adolescent, of n
ot having reached the age of consent. For Mr. Stoyte, at sixty, the curiously perverse contrast between childishness and maturity, between the appearance of innocence and the fact of experience, was intoxicatingly attractive. It was not only so far as he was concerned that Virginia was both kinds of baby; she was also both kinds of baby objectively, in herself.

  Delicious creature! The hand that had lain inert, hitherto, upon her knee slowly contracted. Between the broad spatulate thumb and the strong fingers, what smoothness, what a sumptuous and substantial resilience!

  “Jinny,” he said. “My baby!”

  The baby opened her large blue eyes and dropped her arms to her sides. The tense back relaxed, the lifted breasts moved downwards and forwards like soft living creatures sinking to repose. She smiled at him.

  “What are you pinching me for, Uncle Jo?”

  “I’d like to eat you,” her Uncle Jo replied in a tone of cannibalistic sentimentality.

  “I’m tough.”

  Mr. Stoyte uttered a maudlin chuckle. “Little tough kid!” he said.

  The tough kid stooped down and kissed him.

  Jeremy Pordage who had been quietly looking at the panorama and continuing his silent recitation of Epipsychidion, happened at this moment to turn once more in the direction of the couch and was so much embarrassed by what he saw that he began to sink and had to strike out violently with arms and legs to prevent himself from going under. Turning round in the water, he swam to the ladder, climbed out and, without waiting to dry himself, hurried to the elevator.

  “Really,” he said to himself as he looked at the Vermeer. “Really!”

  “I did some business this morning,” said Mr. Stoyte when the baby had straightened herself up again.

  “What sort of business?”

  “Good business,” he answered. “Might make a lot of money. Real money,” he insisted.

  “How much?”

  “Maybe half a million,” he said cautiously understating his hopes; “maybe a million; maybe even more.”