After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (3 page)

These anxious questionings were interrupted by the noise of the horn, which the chauffeur was sounding with a loud and offensive insistence. Jeremy looked up. Fifty yards ahead, an ancient Ford was creeping tremulously along the road. It carried, lashed insecurely to roof and running boards and luggage rack, a squalid cargo of household goods—rolls of bedding, an old iron stove, a crate of pots and pans, a folded tent, a tin bath. As they flashed past, Jeremy had a glimpse of three dull-eyed, anaemic children, of a woman with a piece of sacking wrapped around her shoulders, of a haggard, unshaved man.

“Transients,” the chauffeur explained in a tone of contempt.

“What's that?” Jeremy asked.

“Why,
transients”
the Negro repeated, as though the emphasis were an explanation, “Guess that lot's from the dust bowl. Kansas licence plate. Come to pick our navels.”

“Come to pick your navels?” Jeremy echoed incredulously.

“Navel oranges,” said the chauffeur. “It's the season. Pretty good year for navels, I guess.”

They emerged once more into the open and there once more was the Object, larger than ever. Jeremy had time to study the details of its construction. A wall with towers encircled the base of the hill, and there was a second line of defence, in the most approved post-Crusades manner, half way up. On the summit stood the square keep, surrounded by subsidiary buildings.

From the donjon, Jeremy's eyes travelled down to a group of buildings in the plain, not far from the foot of the hill. Across the façade of the largest of them the words “Stoyte Home for Sick Children” were written in gilded letters. Two flags, one the stars and stripes, the other a white banner with the letter S in scarlet, fluttered in the breeze. Then a grove of leafless walnut trees shut out the view once again. Almost at the same moment the chauffeur threw his engine out of gear and put on the brakes. The car came gently to a halt beside a man who was walking at a brisk pace along the grassy verge of the road.

“Want a ride, Mr. Propter?” the Negro called.

The stranger turned his head, gave the man a smile of recognition and came to the window of the car. He was a large man, broad shouldered, but rather stooping, with brown hair turning grey and a face, Jeremy thought, like the face of one of those statues which Gothic sculptors carve for a place high up on a West front—a face of sudden prominences and deeply shadowed folds and hollows, emphatically rough-hewn so as to be expressive even at a distance. But this particular face, he went on to notice, was not merely emphatic, not only for the distance; it was a face also for the near point, also for intimacy, a subtle face, in which there were the signs of sensibility and intelligence as well as of power, of a gentle and humorous serenity no less than of energy and strength.

“Hullo, George,” the stranger said, addressing the chauffeur; “nice of you to stop for me.”

“Well, I'm sure glad to see you, Mr. Propter,” said the Negro cordially. Then, he half turned in his seat, waved a hand towards Jeremy and with a florid formality of tone and manner, said, “I'd like to have you meet Mr. Pordage of England. Mr. Pordage, this is Mr. Propter.”

The two men shook hands, and, after an exchange of courtesies, Mr. Propter got into the car.

“You're visiting with Mr. Stoyte?” he asked, as the chauffeur drove on.

Jeremy shook his head. He was here on business; had come to look at some manuscripts—the Hauberk Papers, to be precise.

Mr. Propter listened attentively, nodded from time to time, and, when Jeremy had finished, sat for a moment in silence.

“Take a decayed Christian,” he said at last in a meditative tone, “and the remains of a Stoic; mix thoroughly with good manners, a bit of money and an old-fashioned education; simmer for several years in a university. Result: a scholar and a gentleman. Well, there were worse types of human being.” He uttered a little laugh. “I might almost claim to have been one myself, once, long ago.”

Jeremy looked at him inquiringly. “You're not
William
Propter, are you?” he asked. “Not ‘Short Studies in the Counter Reformation,' by any chance?”

The other inclined his head.

Jeremy looked at him in amazement and delight. Was it possible? he asked himself. Those “Short Studies” had been one of his favourite books—a model, he had always thought, of their kind.

“Well, I'm jiggered,” he said aloud, using the school boyish locution deliberately and as though between inverted commas. He had found that, both in writing and in conversation, there were exquisite effects to be obtained by the judicious employment, in a solemn or cultural context, of a phrase of slang, a piece of childish profanity or obscenity. “I'll be damned,” he exploded again, and his consciousness of the intentional silliness of the words made him stroke his bald head and cough.

There was another moment of silence. Then, instead of talking, as Jeremy had expected, about the “Short Studies,” Mr. Propter merely shook his head and said, “We mostly are.”

“Mostly are what?” asked Jeremy.

“Jiggered,” Mr. Propter answered. “Damned. In the psychological sense of the word,” he added.

The walnut trees came to an end and there once more, on the starboard bow, was the Object. Mr. Propter pointed in its direction. “Poor Jo Stoyte!” he said. “Think of having
that
millstone round one's neck. Not to mention, of course, all the other millstones that go with it. What luck we've had, don't you think?—we who've never been given the opportunity of being anything much worse than scholars and gentlemen!” After another little silence, “Poor Jo,” he went on with a smile, “he isn't either of them. You'll find him a bit trying. Because of course he'll want to bully you, just because tradition says that your type is superior to his type. Not to mention the fact,” he added, looking into Jeremy's face with an expression of mingled amusement and sympathy, “that you're probably the sort of person that invites persecution. A bit of a murderee, I'm afraid, as well as a scholar and gentleman.”

Feeling simultaneously annoyed by the man's indiscretion and touched by his friendliness, Jeremy smiled rather nervously and nodded his head.

“Maybe,” Mr. Propter went on, “maybe it would help you to be less of a murderee towards Jo Stoyte, if you knew what gave him the original impulsion to get damned in just
that
way”—and he pointed again towards the Object. “We were at school together, Jo and I; only nobody called him Jo in those days. We called him Slob, or Jelly-Belly. Because, you see, poor Jo was the local fat boy, the only fat boy in the school during those years.” He paused for a moment; then went on in another tone, “I've often wondered why people have always made fun of fatness. Perhaps there's something intrinsically wrong with fat. For example, there isn't a single fat saint—except, of course, old Thomas Aquinas; and I cannot see any reason to suppose that he was a real saint, a saint in the popular sense of the word, which happens to be the true sense. If Thomas is a saint, then Vincent de Paul isn't. And if Vincent's a saint, which he obviously is, then Thomas isn't. And perhaps that enormous belly of his had something to do with it. Who knows? But anyhow, that's by the way. We're talking about Jo Stoyte. And poor Jo, as I say, was a fat boy and, being fat, was fair game for the rest of us. God, how we punished him for his glandular deficiencies! And how disastrously he reacted to that punishment! Overcompensation . . . But here I am at home,” he added, looking out of the window as the car slackened speed and came to a halt in front of a small white bungalow set in the midst of a clump of eucalyptus trees. “We'll go on with this another time. But remember, if poor Jo gets too offensive, think of what he was at school and be sorry for him—and don't be sorry for yourself.” He got out of the car, closed the door behind him and, waving a hand to the chauffeur, walked quickly up the path and entered the little house.

The car rolled on again. At once bewildered and reassured by his encounter with the author of the “Short Studies,” Jeremy sat, inertly looking out of the window. They were very near the Object now; and suddenly he noticed, for the first time, that the castle hill was surrounded by a moat. Some few hundred yards from the water's edge, the car passed between two pillars, topped by heraldic lions. Its passage, it was evident, interrupted a beam of invisible light directed on a photoelectric cell; for no sooner were they past the lions than a draw-bridge began to descend. Five seconds before they reached the moat, it was in place; the car rolled smoothly across and came to a halt in front of the main gateway of the castle's outer walls. The chauffeur got out and, speaking into a telephone receiver concealed in a convenient loophole, announced his presence. The chromium-plated portcullis rose noiselessly, the double doors of stainless steel swung back. They drove in. The car began to climb. The second line of walls was pierced by another gate, which opened automatically as they approached. Between the inner side of this second wall and the slope of the hill a ferro-concrete bridge had been constructed, large enough to accommodate a tennis court. In the shadowy space beneath, Jeremy caught sight of something familiar. An instant later he had recognized it as a replica of the grotto of Lourdes.

“Miss Maunciple, she's a Catholic,” remarked the chauffeur, jerking his thumb in the direction of the grotto. “That's why he had it made for her. We's Presbyterians in
our
family,” he added.

“And who is Miss Maunciple?”

The chauffeur hesitated for a moment. “Well, she's a young lady Mr. Stoyte's kind of friendly with,” he explained at last; then changed the subject.

The car climbed on. Beyond the grotto all the hillside was a cactus garden. Then the road swung round to the northern slope of the bluff, and the cactuses gave place to grass and shrubs. On a little terrace, over-elegant like a fashion-plate from some mythological
Vogue
for goddesses, a bronze nymph by Giambologna spouted two streams of water from her deliciously polished breasts. A little further on, behind wire netting, a group of baboons squatted among the rocks or paraded the obscenity of their hairless rumps.

Still climbing, the car turned again and finally drew up on a circular concrete platform, carried out on cantilevers over a precipice. Once more the old-fashioned retainer, the chauffeur, taking off his cap, did a final impersonation of himself welcoming the young master home to the plantation, then set to work to unload the luggage.

Jeremy Pordage Walked to the balustrade and looked over. The ground fell almost sheer for about a hundred feet, then sloped steeply to the inner circle of walls and, below them, to the outer fortifications. Beyond lay the moat and, on the further side of the moat, stretched the orange orchards. “In dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,” he murmured to himself; and then: “He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night.” Marvell's rendering, he decided, was better than Goethe's. And, meanwhile, the oranges seemed to have become brighter and more significant. For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book. The oranges were beautifully pigeon-holed; but what about the castle? He turned round and, leaning back against the parapet, looked up. The Object impended, insolently enormous. Nobody had dealt poetically with
that.
Not Childe Roland, not the King of Thule, not Marmion, not the Lady of Shalott, not Sir Leoline. Sir Leoline, he repeated to himself with a connoisseur's appreciation of romantic absurdity, Sir Leoline, the baron rich, had—what? A toothless mastiff bitch. But Mr. Stoyte had baboons and a sacred grotto, Mr. Stoyte had a chromium portcullis and the Hauberk Papers, Mr. Stoyte had a cemetery like an amusement park and a donjon like . . .

There was a sudden rumbling sound; the great nail-studded doors of the Early English entrance porch rolled back and from between them, as though propelled by a hurricane, a small, thick-set man, with a red face and a mass of snow white hair, darted out on to the terrace and bore down upon Jeremy, His expression, as he advanced, did not change. The face wore that shut, unsmiling mask which American workmen tend to put on in their dealings with strangers—in order to prove, by not making the ingratiating grimaces of courtesy, that theirs is a free country and you're not going to come it over
them.

Not having been brought up in a free country, Jeremy had automatically begun to smile as this person, whom he guessed to be his host and employer, came hurrying towards him. Confronted by the unwavering grimness of the other's face, he suddenly became conscious of this smile—conscious that it was out of place, that it must be making him look a fool. Profoundly embarrassed, he tried to readjust his face.

“Mr. Pordage?” said the stranger in a harsh, barking voice. “Pleased to meet you. My name's Stoyte.” As they shook hands, he peered, still unsmiling, into Jeremy's face. “You're older than I thought,” he added.

For the second time that morning, Jeremy made his mannequin's gesture of apologetic self-exhibition.

“The sere and withered leaf,” he said. “One's sinking into senility. One's . . .”

Mr. Stoyte cut him short. “What's your age?” he asked in a loud peremptory tone, like that of a police sergeant interrogating a captured thief.

“Fifty-four.”

“Only fifty-four?” Mr. Stoyte shook his head. “Ought to be full of pep at fifty-four. How's your sex life?” he added disconcertingly.

Jeremy tried to laugh off his embarrassment. He twinkled; he patted his bald head.
“Mon beau printemps et mon iti ont fait le saut par la fenitre”
he quoted.

“What's that?” said Mr. Stoyte frowning. “No use talking foreign languages to me. I never had any education.” He broke into a sudden braying of laughter. “I'm head of an oil company here,” he said. “Got two thousand filling stations in California alone. And not one man in any of those filling stations that isn't a college graduate!” He brayed again, triumphantly. “Go and talk foreign languages to
them”
He was silent for a moment; then, pursuing an unexplicit association of ideas, “My agent in London,” he went on, “the man who picks up things for me there—he gave me your name. Told me you were the right man for those—what do you call them? You know, those papers I bought this summer. Roebuck? Hobuck?”