After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (7 page)

“Ready,” he called at last.

Obediently and in silence, like a trained elephant, Mr. Stoyte rolled over on to his stomach.

J
EREMY
had dressed again and was sitting in the subterranean store-room that was to serve as his study. The dry acrid dust of old documents had gone to his head, like a kind of intoxicating snuff. His face was flushed as he prepared his files and sharpened his pencils; his bald head shone with perspiration; behind their bifocal lenses, his eyes were bright with excitement.

There! Everything was ready. He turned round in his swivel chair and sat for a little while quite still, voluptuously savouring his anticipations. Tied up in innumerable brown paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader. Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was to be their Bluebeard. Thousands of brides of quietness accumulated through centuries by successive generations of indefatigable Hauberks. Hauberk after Hauberk; barony after knighthood; earldom after barony; and then Earl of Gonister after Earl of Gonister down to the last, the eighth. And, after the eighth, nothing but death duties and an old house and two old spinster ladies, sinking ever deeper into solitude and eccentricity, into poverty and family pride, but finally, poor pets! more deeply into poverty than pride. They had sworn they would never sell; but in the end they had accepted Mr. Stoyte's offer. The papers had been shipped to California. They would be able, now, to buy themselves a couple of really sumptuous funerals. And that would be the end of the Hauberks. Delicious fragments of English history! Cautionary perhaps, or perhaps, and more probably, merely senseless, merely a tale told by an idiot. A tale of cutthroats and conspirators, of patrons of learning and shady speculators, of bishops and kings' catamites and minor poets, of admirals and pimps, of saints and heroines and nymphomaniacs, of imbeciles and prime ministers, of art collectors and sadists. And here was all that remained of them, in twenty-seven crates, higgledy-piggledy, never catalogued, never even looked at, utterly virgin. Gloating over his treasure, Jeremy forgot the fatigues of the journey, forgot Los Angeles and the chauffeur, forgot the cemetery and the castle, forgot even Mr. Stoyte. He had the Hauberk Papers, had them all to himself. Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string. What rich confusion awaited him within! A book of household accounts for the year 1576 and 1577; a narrative by some Hauberk cadet of Sir Kenelm Digby's expedition to Scanderoon; eleven letters in Spanish from Miguel de Molinos to that Lady Hauberk who had scandalized her family by turning papist; a collection, in early eighteenth-century handwriting, of sickroom recipes; a copy of Drelincourt's “On Death”; and an odd volume of Andréa de Nerciat's “Felicia, ou Mes Fredaines.” He had just cut the string of the second bundle and was wondering whose was the lock of pale brown hair preserved between the pages of the Third Earl's holograph, “Reflections of the Late Popish Plot,” when there was a knock at the door. He looked up and saw a small, dark man in a white overall advancing towards him. The stranger smiled, said, “Don't let me disturb you,” but nevertheless disturbed him. “My name's Obispo,” he went on, “Dr. Sigmund Obispo. Physician in ordinary to His Majesty King Stoyte the First—and let's hope also the last.”

Evidently delighted by his own joke, he broke into a peal of startlingly loud, metallic laughter. Then, with the elegantly fastidious gesture of an aristocrat in a dust heap, he picked up one of Molinos's letters and started, slowly, and out loud, to decipher the first line of the flowing seventeenth-century calligraphy that met his eyes. “
‘Ame a Dios como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imaginacion
.' ” He looked up at Jeremy with an amused smile. “Easier said than done, I should think. Why, you can't even love a woman as she is in herself; and after all, there is some sort of objective physical basis for the phenomenon we call a female. A pretty nice basis in some cases. Whereas poor old Dios is only a spirit—in other words, pure imagination. And here's this idiot, whoever he is, telling some other idiot that people mustn't love God as He is in their imagination.” Once again self-consciously the aristocrat, he threw down the letter with a contemptuous flick of the wrist. “What drivel it all is!” he went on. “A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they'll murder their neighbours for using a word they don't happen to like. A word that probably doesn't mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach.
‘Ame a Dios como es en si
,' ” he repeated derisively. “It's about as sensible as saying ‘hiccough
a
hiccough
como es en
hiccough.' I don't know how you
litterae humaniores
boys manage to stand it. Don't you pine for some sense once in a while?”

Jeremy smiled with an expression of nervous apology. “One doesn't bother too much about the meanings,” he said. Then, anticipating further criticism by disparaging himself and the things he loved most dearly, “One gets a lot of fun, you know,” he went on; “just scrabbling about in the dust heaps.” Dr. Obispo laughed and patted Jeremy encouragingly on the shoulder. “Good for you!” he said. “You're frank. I like that. Most of the Ph.D. boys one meets are such damned Pecksniffs. Trying to pull that high-moral culture stuff on you! You know: wisdom rather than knowledge; Sophocles instead of science. ‘Funny,' I always say to them when they try that on me, ‘funny that the thing you get your income from should happen to be the thing that's going to save humanity.' Whereas you don't try to glorify your little racket. You're honest. You admit you're in the thing merely for the fun of it. Well, that's why I'm in
my
little racket. For the fun. Though of course if you'd given me any of that Sophocles stuff, I'd just have let you have my piece about science and progress, science and happiness, even science and ultimate truth, if you'd been obstinate.” He showed his white teeth in a happy derision of everybody.

His amusement was infectious. Jeremy also smiled. “I'm glad I wasn't obstinate,” he said in a tone whose fluty demureness implied how much he objected to disquisitions on ultimate truth.

“Mind you,” Dr. Obispo went on, “I'm not entirely blind to the charms of your racket. I'd draw the line at Sophocles, of course. And I'd be deadly bored with this sort of stuff.” He nodded towards the twenty-seven crates. “But I must admit,” he concluded handsomely, “I've had a lot of fun out of old books in my time. Really, a lot of fun.”

Jeremy coughed and caressed his scalp; his eyes twinkled in anticipation of the deliciously dry little jokes he was just about to make. But unfortunately Dr. Obispo gave him no time. Serenely unaware of Jeremy's preparations he looked at his watch; then rose to his feet. “I'd like to show you my laboratory,” he said. “There's plenty of time before lunch.”

“Instead of asking if I'd like to see his bloody laboratory,” Jeremy protested inwardly, as he swallowed his joke; and it had been such a good onel He would have liked, of course, to go on unpacking the Hauberk Papers; but, lacking the courage to say so, he rose obediently and followed Dr. Obispo towards the door.

Longevity, the doctor explained, as they left the room. That was his subject. Had been ever since he left medi cal school. But of course, so long as he was in practice, he hadn't been able to do any serious work on it. Practice was fatal to serious work, he added parenthetically. How could you do anything sensible when you had to spend all your time looking after patients? Patients belonged to three classes: those that imagined they were sick, but weren't; those that were sick, but would get well anyhow; those that were sick and would be much better dead. For anybody capable of serious work to waste his time with patients was simply idiotic. And, of course, nothing but economic pressure would ever have driven him to do it. And he might have gone on in that groove for ever. Wasting himself on morons. But then, quite suddenly, his luck had turned. Jo Stoyte had come to consult him. It had been positively providential.

“Most awfully a godsend,” Jeremy murmured, quoting his favourite phrase of Coleridge.

Jo Stoyte, Dr. Obispo repeated, Jo Stoyte on the verge of breaking up completely. Forty pounds overweight and having had a stroke. Not a bad one, luckily; but enough to put the old bastard into a sweat. Talk of being scared of death! (Dr. Obispo's white teeth flashed again in wolfish good humour.) In Jo's case it had been a panic. Out of that panic had come Dr. Obispo's liberation from his patients; had come his income, his laboratory for work on the problems of longevity, his excellent assistant; had come, too, the financing of that pharmaceutical work at Berkeley, of those experiments with monkeys in Brazil, of that expedition to study the tortoises on the Galapagos Islands. Everything a research worker could ask for, with old Jo himself thrown in as the perfect guinea-pig—ready to submit to practically anything short of vivisection without anaesthetics, provided it offered some hope of keeping him above ground a few years longer.

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.