After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Page 6

  Not that he was doing anything spectacular with the old buzzard at the moment. Just keeping his weight down; and taking care of his kidneys; and pepping him up with periodical shots of synthetic sex hormone; and watching out for those arteries. The ordinary, common-sense treatment for a man of Jo Stoyte’s age and medical history. Meanwhile, however, he was on the track of something new, something that promised to be important. In a few months, perhaps in a few weeks, he’d be in a position to make a definite pronouncement.

  “That’s very interesting,” said Jeremy with hypocritical politeness.

  They were walking along a narrow corridor, whitewashed and bleakly illuminated by a series of electric bulbs. Through open doors, Jeremy had occasional glimpses of vast cellars crammed with totem poles and armour, with stuffed orang-utans and marble groups by Thorwaldsen, with gilded Bodhisattvas and early steam engines, with lingams and stage coaches and Peruvian pottery, with crucifixes and mineralogical specimens.

  Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, had begun to talk again about longevity. The subject, he insisted, was still in the pre-scientific stage. A lot of observations without any explanatory hypothesis. A mere chaos of facts. And what odd, what essentially eccentric facts! What was it, for example, that made a cicada live as long as a bull? Or a canary outlast three generations of sheep? Why should dogs be senile at fourteen and parrots sprightly at a hundred? Why should female humans become sterile in the forties, while female crocodiles continued to lay eggs into their third century? Why in heaven’s name should a pike live to two hundred without showing any signs of senility? Whereas poor old Jo Stoyte . . .

  From a side passage two men suddenly emerged carrying between them on a stretcher a couple of mummified nuns. There was a collision.

  “Damned fools!” Dr. Obispo shouted angrily.

  “Damned fool yourself!”

  “Can’t you look where you’re going?”

  “Keep your face shut!”

  Dr. Obispo turned contemptuously away and walked on.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” they called after him.

  Jeremy meanwhile had been looking with lively curiosity at the mummies. “Discalced Carmelites,” he said to nobody in particular; and enjoying the flavour of that curious combination of syllables, he repeated them with a certain emphatic relish. “Discalced Carmelites.”

  “Discalce your ass,” said the foremost of the two men, turning fiercely upon this new antagonist.

  Jeremy gave one glance at that red and angry face, then, with ignominious haste, hurried after his guide.

  Dr. Obispo halted at last. “Here we are,” he said, opening a door. A smell of mice and absolute alcohol floated out into the corridor. “Come on in,” he said cordially.

  Jeremy entered. There were the mice all right—cage upon cage of them, in tiers along the wall directly in front of him. To the left, three windows, hewn in the rock, gave on to the tennis court and a distant panorama of orange trees and mountains. Seated at a table in front of one of these windows, a man was looking through a microscope. He raised his fair, tousled head as they approached and turned towards them a face of almost child-like candour and openness. “Hullo, doc,” he said with a charming smile.

  “My assistant,” Dr. Obispo explained, “Peter Boone. Pete, this is Mr. Pordage.” Pete rose and revealed himself an athletic young giant.

  “Call me Pete,” he said, when Jeremy had called him Mr. Boone. “Everyone calls me Pete.”

  Jeremy wondered whether he ought to invite the young man to call him Jeremy—but wondered, as usual, so long that the appropriate moment for doing so passed, irrevocably.

  “Pete’s a bright boy,” Dr. Obispo began again in a tone that was affectionate in intention, but a little patronizing in fact. “Knows his physiology. Good with his hands, too. Best mouse surgeon I ever saw.” He patted the young man on the shoulder.

  Pete smiled—a little uncomfortably, it seemed to Jeremy, as though he found it rather difficult to make the right response to the other’s cordiality.

  “Takes his politics a bit too seriously,” Dr. Obispo went on. “That’s his only defect. I’m trying to cure him of that. Not very successfully so far, I’m afraid. Eh, Pete?”

  The young man smiled again, more confidently; this time he knew exactly where he stood and what to do.

  “Not very successfully,” he echoed. Then, turning to Jeremy, “Did you see the Spanish news this morning?” he asked. The expression on his large, fair, open face changed to one of concern.

  Jeremy shook his head.

  “It’s something awful,” said Pete gloomily. “When I think of those poor devils without planes or artillery or . . .”

  “Well, don’t think of them,” Dr. Obispo cheerfully advised. “You’ll feel better.”

  The young man looked at him, then looked away again without saying anything. After a moment of silence he pulled out his watch. “I think I’ll go and have a swim before lunch,” he said and walked towards the door.

  Dr. Obispo picked up a cage of mice and held it within a few inches of Jeremy’s nose. “These are the sex-hormone boys,” he said with a jocularity that the other found curiously offensive. The animals squeaked as he shook the cage. “Lively enough while the effect lasts. The trouble is that the effects are only temporary.”

  Not that temporary effects were to be despised, he added, as he replaced the cage. It was always better to feel temporarily good than temporarily bad. That was why he was giving old Jo a course of that testosterone stuff. Not that the old bastard had any great need of it with that Maunciple girl around . . .

  Dr. Obispo suddenly put his hand over his mouth and looked round towards the window. “Thank God,” he said, “he’s out of the room. Poor old Pete!” A derisive smile appeared on his face. “Is he in love?” He tapped his forehead. “Thinks she’s like something in the works of Tennyson. You know, chemically pure. Last month he nearly killed a man for suggesting that she and the old boy . . . Well, you know. God knows what he figures the girl is doing here. Telling Uncle Jo about the spiral nebulae, I suppose. Well, if it makes him happy to think that way, I’m not the one that’s going to spoil his fun.” Dr. Obispo laughed indulgently. “But to come back to what I was saying about Uncle Jo . . .”

  Just having that girl around the house was the equivalent of a hormone treatment. But it wouldn’t last. It never did. Brown-Sequard and Voronoff and all the rest of them—they’d been on the wrong track. They’d thought that the decay of sexual power was the cause of senility. Whereas it was only one of the symptoms. Senescence started somewhere else and involved the sex mechanism along with the rest of the body. Hormone treatments were just palliatives and pick-me-ups. Helped you for a time, but didn’t prevent your growing old.

  Jeremy stifled a yawn.

  For example, Dr. Obispo went on, why should some animals live much longer than human beings and yet show no signs of old age? Somehow, somewhere we had made a biological mistake. Crocodiles had avoided that mistake; so had tortoises. The same was true of certain species of fish.

  “Look at this,” he said; and, crossing the room, he drew back a rubber curtain, revealing as he did so the glass front of a large aquarium recessed into the wall. Jeremy approached and looked in.

  In the green and shadowy translucence, two huge fish hung suspended, their snouts almost touching, motionless except for the occasional ripple of a fin and the rhythmic panting of their gills. A few inches from their staring eyes, a rosary of bubbles streamed ceaselessly up towards the light and all around them the water was spasmodically silver with the dartings of smaller fish. Sunk in their mindless ecstasy, the monsters paid no attention.

  Carp, Dr. Obispo explained; carp from the fishponds of a castle in Franconia—he had forgotten the name; but it was somewhere near Bamberg. The family was impoverished; but the fish were heirlooms, unpurchasable. Jo Stoyte had had to spend a lot of money to have these two stolen and smuggled out of the country in a specially constructed automobile wit
h a tank under the back seats. Sixty pounders they were; over four feet long; and those rings in their tails were dated 1761.

  “The beginning of my period,” Jeremy murmured in a sudden access of interest. 1761 was the year of “Fingal.” He smiled to himself; the juxtaposition of carp and Ossian, carp and Napoleon’s favourite poet, carp and the first premonitions of the Celtic Twilight, gave him a peculiar pleasure. What a delightful subject for one of his little essays! Twenty pages of erudition and absurdity—of sacrilege in lavender—of a scholar’s delicately canaille irreverence for the illustrious or unillustrious dead.

  But Dr. Obispo would not allow him to think his thoughts in peace. Indefatigably riding his own hobby, he began again. There they were, he said, pointing at the huge fish; nearly two hundred years old; perfectly healthy; no symptoms of senility; no apparent reason why they shouldn’t go on for another three or four centuries. There they were; and here were you. He turned back accusingly towards Jeremy. Here were you! no more than middle-aged, but already bald, already longsighted and short-winded; already more or less edentate; incapable of prolonged physical exertion; chronically constipated (could you deny it?); your memory already not so good as it was; your digestion capricious; your potency falling off, if it hadn’t, indeed, already disappeared for good.

  Jeremy forced himself to smile and, at every fresh item, nodded his head in what was meant to look like an amused assent. Inwardly, he was writhing with a mixture of distress at this all too truthful diagnosis and anger against the diagnostician for the ruthlessness of his scientific detachment. Talking with a humorous self-deprecation about one’s own advancing senility was very different from being bluntly told about it by someone who took no interest in you except as an animal that happened to be unlike a fish. Nevertheless, he continued to nod and smile.

  Here you were, Dr. Obispo repeated at the end of his diagnosis, and there were the carp. How was it that you didn’t manage your physiological affairs as well as they did? Just where and how and why did you make the mistake that had already robbed you of your teeth and hair and would bring you in a very few years to the grave?

  Old Metchnikoff had asked those questions and made a bold attempt to answer. Everything he said happened to be wrong; phagocytosis didn’t occur; intestinal autointoxication wasn’t the sole cause of senility; neurono-phages were mythological monsters; drinking sour milk didn’t materially prolong life; whereas the removal of the large gut did materially shorten it. Chuckling, he recalled those operations that were so fashionable just before the War—old ladies and gentlemen with their colons cut out, and in consequence being forced to evacuate every few minutes, like canaries! All to no purpose, needless to say; because of course the operation that was meant to make them live to a hundred killed them all off within a year or two. Dr. Obispo threw back his glossy head and uttered one of those peals of brazen laughter which were his regular response to any tale of human stupidity resulting in misfortune. Poor old Metchnikoff, he went on, wiping the tears of merriment from his eyes. Consistently wrong. And yet almost certainly not nearly so wrong as people had thought. Wrong, yes, in supposing that it was all a matter of intestinal stasis and auto-intoxication. But probably right, in thinking that the secret was somewhere down there, in the gut. Somewhere in the gut, Dr. Obispo repeated; and, what was more, he believed that he was on its track.

  He paused and stood for a moment in silence, drumming with his fingers on the glass of the aquarium. Poised between mud and air, the two obese and aged carps hung in their greenish twilight, serenely unaware of him. Dr. Obispo shook his head at them. The worst experimental animals in the world, he said in a tone of resentment mingled with a certain gloomy pride. Nobody had a right to talk about technical difficulties who hadn’t tried to work with fish. Take the simplest operation; it was a nightmare. Had you ever tried to keep its gills properly wet while it was anaesthetized on the operating table? Or, alternatively, to do your surgery under water? Had you ever set out to determine a fish’s basal metabolism, or take an electro-cardiograph of its heart action, or measure its blood pressure? Had you ever wanted to analyse its excreta? And, if so, did you know how hard it was even to collect them? Had you ever attempted to study the chemistry of a fish’s digestion and assimilation? To determine its blood picture under different conditions? To measure the speed of its nervous reactions?

  No, you had not, said Dr. Obispo contemptuously. And until you had, you had no right to complain about anything.

  He drew the curtain on his fish, took Jeremy by the arm and led him back to the mice.

  “Look at those,” he said, pointing to a batch of cages on an upper shelf.

  Jeremy looked. The mice in question were exactly like all other mice. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.

  Dr. Obispo laughed. “If those animals were human beings,” he said dramatically, “they’d all be over a hundred years old.”

  And he began to talk, very rapidly and excitedly, about fatty alcohols and the intestinal flora of carp. For the secret was there, the key to the whole problem of senility and longevity. There, between the sterols and the peculiar flora of the carp’s intestine.

  Those sterols! (Dr. Obispo frowned and shook his head over them.) Always linked up with senility. The most obvious case, of course, was cholesterol. A senile animal might be defined as one with an accumulation of cholesterol in the walls of its arteries. Potassium thiocyanate seemed to dissolve those accumulations. Senile rabbits would show signs of rejuvenation under a treatment with potassium thiocyanate. So would senile humans. But, again, not for very long. Cholesterol in the arteries was evidently only one of the troubles. But then cholesterol was only one of the sterols. They were a closely related group, those fatty alcohols. It didn’t take much to transform one into another. But if you’d read old Schneeglock’s work and the stuff they’d been publishing at Upsala, you’d know that some of the sterols were definitely poisonous—much more than cholesterol, even in large accumulations. Longbotham had even sug gested a connexion between fatty alcohols and neoplasms. In other words, cancer might be regarded, in a final analysis, as a symptom of sterol-poisoning. He himself would go even further and say that such sterol-poisoning was responsible for the entire degenerative process of senescence in man and the other mammals. What nobody had done hitherto was to look into the part played by fatty alcohols in the life of such animals as carp. That was the work he had been doing for the last year. His researches had convinced him of three things: first, that the fatty alcohols in carp did not accumulate in excessive quantity; second, that they did not undergo transformation into the more poisonous sterols; and third, that both of these immunities were due to the peculiar nature of the carp’s intestinal flora. What a flora! Dr. Obispo cried enthusiastically. So rich, so wonderfully varied! He had not yet succeeded in isolating the organism responsible for the carp’s immunity to old age, nor did he fully understand the nature of the chemical mechanisms involved. Nevertheless, the main fact was certain. In one way or another, in combination or in isolation, these organisms contrived to keep the fish’s sterols from turning into poisons. That was why a carp could live a couple of hundred years and show no signs of senility.

  Could the intestinal flora of a carp be transferred to the gut of a mammal? And, if transferable, would it achieve the same chemical and biological results? That was what he had been trying, for the past few months, to discover. With no success, to begin with. Recently, however, they had experimented with a new technique—a technique that protected the flora from the processes of digestion, gave it time to adapt itself to the unfamiliar conditions. It had taken root. The effect on the mice had been immediate and significant. Senescence had been halted, even reversed. Physiologically, the animals were younger than they had been for at least eighteen months—younger at the equivalent of a hundred than they had been at the equivalent of sixty.

  Outside in the corridor an electric bell began to ring. It was lunch time. The two men left the room and walked towar
ds the elevator. Dr. Obispo went on talking. Mice, he said, were apt to be a bit deceptive. He had now begun to try the thing out on larger animals. If it worked all right on dogs and baboons, it ought to work on Uncle Jo.

  Chapter VI

  IN THE small dining-room, most of the furnishings came from the Pavilion at Brighton. Four gilded dragons supported the red lacquered table and two more served as caryatids on either side of a chimney piece in the same material. It was the Regency’s dream of the Gorgeous East. The kind of thing, Jeremy reflected, as he sat down on his scarlet and gold chair, the kind of thing that the word “Cathay” would have conjured up in Keats’s mind, for example, or Shelley’s, or Lord Byron’s—just as that charming Leda by Etty, over there, next to the Fra Angelico Annunciation, was an accurate embodiment of their fancies on the subject of pagan mythology; was an authentic illustration (he chuckled inwardly at the thought) to the Odes to Psyche and the Grecian Urn, to “Endymion” and “Prometheus Unbound.” An age’s habits of thought and feeling and imagination are shared by all who live and work within that age—by all, from the journeyman up to the genius. Regency is always Regency, whether you take your sample from the top of the basket or from the bottom. In 1820, the man who shut his eyes and tried to visualize magic casements opening on the foam of faery seas would see—what? The turrets of Brighton Pavilion. At the thought, Jeremy smiled to himself with pleasure. Etty and Keats, Brighton and Percy Bysshe Shelley—what a delightful subject! Much better than carp and Ossian; better inasmuch as Nash and the Prince Regent were funnier than even the most aged fish. But for conversational purposes and at the luncheon table, even the best of subjects is worthless if there is nobody to discuss it with. And who was there, Jeremy asked himself, who was there in this room desirous or capable of talking with him on such a theme? Not Mr. Stoyte; not, certainly, Miss Maunciple, nor the two young women who had come over from Hollywood to have lunch with her; not Dr. Obispo, who cared more for mice than books; nor Peter Boone who probably didn’t even know that there were any books to care for. The only person who might conceivably be expected to take an interest in the manifestations of the later-Georgian time spirit was the individual who had been introduced to him as Dr. Herbert Mulge, Ph.D., D.D., Principal of Tarzana College. But at the moment Dr. Mulge was talking in a rich vein of something that sounded almost like pulpit eloquence about the new Auditorium which Mr. Stoyte had just presented to the College and which was shortly to be given its formal opening. Dr. Mulge was a large and handsome man with a voice to match—a voice at once sonorous and suave, unctuous and ringing. The flow of his language was slow, but steady and apparently stanchless. In phrases full of the audible equivalents of Capital Letters, he now went on to assure Mr. Stoyte and any one else who cared to listen that it would be a Real Inspiration for the boys and girls of Tarzana to come together in the beautiful new building for their Com munity Activities. For Non-Denominational Worship, for example; for the Enjoyment of the Best in Drama and Music. Yes, what an inspiration! The name of Stoyte would be remembered with love and reverence by successive generations of the College’s Alumni and Alumnae—would be remembered, he might say, for ever; for the Auditorium was a monumentum aere perennius, a Footprint on the Sand of Time—definitely a Footprint. And now, Dr. Mulge continued, between the mouthfuls of creamed chicken, now Tarzana’s Crying Need was for a new art school. Because, after all, Art, as we were now discovering, was one of the most potent of educational forces. Art was the aspect under which, in this twentieth century of ours, the Religious Spirit most clearly manifested itself. Art was the means by which Personalities could best achieve Creative Self-Expression and . . .