After Many a Summer Dies the Swan Page 3

  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?”

  “Hauberk,” said Jeremy, and with a gloomy satisfaction noted that he had been quite right. The man had never read one’s books, never even heard of one’s existence. Still, one had to remember that he had been called Jelly-Belly when he was young.

  “Hauberk,” Mr. Stoyte repeated with a contemptuous impatience. “Anyhow, he said you were the man.” Then, without pause or transition, “What was it you were saying, about your sex life, when you started that foreign stuff on me?”

  Jeremy laughed uncomfortably. “One was implying that it was normal for one’s age.”

  “What do you know about what’s normal at your age?” said Mr. Stoyte. “Go and talk to Dr. Obispo about it. It won’t cost you anything. Obispo’s on salary. He’s the house physician.” Abruptly changing the subject, “Would you like to see the castle?” he asked. “I’ll take you round.”

  “Oh, that’s very kind of you,” said Jeremy effusively. And for the sake of making a little polite conversation, he added: “I’ve already seen your burial ground.”

  “Seen my burial ground?” Mr. Stoyte repeated in a tone of suspicion: suspicion turned suddenly to anger. “What the hell do you mean?” he shouted.

  Quailing before his fury, Jeremy stammered something about the Beverly Pantheon and that he had understood from the chauffeur that Mr. Stoyte had a financial interest in the company.

  “I see,” said the other, somewhat mollified, but still frowning. “I thought you meant . . .” Mr. Stoyte broke off in the middle of the sentence, leaving the bewildered Jeremy to guess what he had thought. “Come on,” he barked; and, bursting into movement, he hurried towards the entrance to the house.

  Chapter III

  THERE was silence in Ward Sixteen of the Stoyte Home for Sick Children; silence and the luminous twilight of drawn Venetian blinds. It was the mid-morning rest period. Three of the five small convalescents were asleep. A fourth lay staring at the ceiling, pensively picking his nose. The fifth, a little girl, was whispering to a doll as curly and Aryan as herself. Seated by one of the windows, a young nurse was absorbed in the latest issue of True Confessions.

  “His heart gave a lurch,” she read. “With a strangled cry he pressed me closer. For months we’d been fighting against just this; but the magnet of our passion was too strong for us. The clamorous pressure of his lips had struck an answering spark within my melting body.

  ‘Germaine,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t make me wait. Won’t you be good to me now, darling?’

  He was so gentle, but so ruthless too—as a girl in love wants a man to be ruthless. I felt myself swept away by the rising tide of . . .”

  There was a noise outside in the corridor. The door of the ward flew open, as though before the blast of a hurricane, and someone came rushing into the room.

  The nurse looked up with a start of surprise which the completeness of her absorption in “The Price of a Thrill” rendered positively agonizing. Her almost immediate reaction to the shock was one of anger.

  “What’s the idea?” she began indignantly; then she recognized the intruder and her expression changed. “Why, Mr. Stoyte!”

  Disturbed by the noise, the young nose-picker dropped his eyes from the ceiling, the little girl turned away from her doll.

  “Uncle Jo!” they shouted simultaneously. “Uncle Jo!”

  Starting out of sleep, the others took up the cry.

  “Uncle Jo! Uncle Jo!”

  Mr. Stoyte was touched by the warmth of his reception. The face which Jeremy had found so disquietingly grim relaxed into a smile. In mock protest, he covered his ears with his hands. “You’ll make me deaf,” he cried. Then, in an aside to the nurse, “Poor kids,” he murmured. “Makes me feel I’d kind of like to cry,” His voice became husky with sentiment. “And when one thinks how sick they’ve been . . .” He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished; then, in another tone, “By the way,” he added, waving a large square hand in the direction of Jeremy Pordage, who had followed him into the ward and was standing near the door, wearing an expression of bewildered embarrassment, “This is Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Hell! I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Pordage,” said Jeremy, and reminded himself that Mr. Stoyte’s name had once been Slob.

  “Pordage, that’s it. Ask him about history and literature,” he added derisively to the nurse. “He knows it all.”

  Jeremy was modestly protesting that his period was only from the invention of Ossian to the death of Keats, when Mr. Stoyte turned back to the children and in a voice that drowned the other’s faintly fluted disclaimers, shouted: “Guess what Uncle Jo’s brought you!”

  They guessed. Candies, bubble gum, balloons, guinea pigs. Mr. Stoyte continued triumphantly to shake his head. Finally, when the children had exhausted their powers of imagination, he dipped into the pocket of his old tweed jacket and produced, first, a whistle, then a mouth organ, then a small musical box, then a trumpet, then a wooden rattle, then an automatic pistol. This, however, he hastily put back.

  “Now play,” he said, when he had distributed the instruments. “All together. One, two, three.” And, beating time with both arms, he began to sing “Way down upon the Swanee River.”

  At this latest in a long series of shocks and surprises, Jeremy’s mild face took on an expression of more intense bewilderment.

  What a morning! The arrival at dawn. The Negro retainer. The interminable suburb. The Beverly Pantheon. The Object among the orange trees and his meeting with William Propter and this really dreadful Stoyte. Then, inside the castle, the Rubens and the great El Greco in the hall, the Vermeer in the elevator, the Rembrandt etchings along the corridors, the Winter-halter in the butler’s pantry.

  Then Miss Maunciple’s Louis XV boudoir, with the Watteau and the two Lancrets and the fully equipped soda fountain in a rococo embrasure, and Miss Maunciple herself, in an orange kimono, drinking a raspberry and peppermint ice cream soda at her own counter. He had been introduced, had refused the offer of a sundae and been hurried on again, always at top speed, always as though on the wings of a tornado, to see the other sights of the castle. The Rumpus Room, for example, with frescoes of elephants by Sert. The library with its woodwork by Grinling Gibbons, but with no books, because Mr. Stoyte had not yet brought himself to buy any. The small dining-room, with its Fra Angelico and its furniture from Brighton Pavilion. The large dining-room, modelled on the interior of the mosque at Fatehpur Sikri. The ballroom with its mirrors and coffered ceiling. The thirteenth-century stained glass in the eleventh-floor W.C. The morning room, with Boucher’s picture of La Petite Morphil bottom upwards on a pink satin sofa. The chapel, imported in fragments from Goa, with the walnut confessional used by St. Francois de Sales at Annecy. The functional billiard room. The indoor swimming pool. The Second Empire bar, with its nudes by Ingres. The two gymnasiums. The Christian Science Reading Room, dedicated to the memory of the late Mrs. Stoyte. The dentist’s office. The Turkish bath. Then down, with Vermeer, into the bowels of the hill, to look at the cellar in which the Hauberk Papers had been stored. Down again yet deeper to the safe deposit vaults, the power house, the air-conditioning plant, the well and pumping station. Then up once more to ground level and the kitchens, where the Chinese chef had sho
wn Mr. Stoyte the newly arrived consignment of turtles from the Caribbean. Up again to the bedroom which Jeremy was to occupy during his stay. Then up another six storeys to the business office, where Mr. Stoyte gave orders to his secretary, dictated a couple of letters and had a long telephone conversation with his brokers in Amsterdam. And when that was finished, it had been time to go to the hospital.

  Meanwhile, in Ward Sixteen, a group of nurses had collected and were watching Uncle Jo, his white hair flying like Stokowski’s, frantically spurring his orchestra to yet louder crescendos of cacophony.

  “He’s like a great big kid himself,” said one of them, in a tone of almost tender amusement.

  Another, evidently with literary leanings, declared that it was like something in Dickens. “Don’t you think so?” she insisted to Jeremy.

  He smiled nervously and nodded a vague and noncommittal assent.

  More practical, a third wished she had her Kodak with her. “Candid Camera portrait of the President of Consol Oil, California Land and Minerals Corporation, Bank of the Pacific, West Coast Cemeteries, etc., etc. . . .” She reeled off the names of Mr. Stoyte’s chief companies, mock-heroically, indeed, but with admiring gusto, as a convinced legitimist with a sense of humour might enumerate the titles of a grandee of Spain. “The papers would pay you good money for a snap like that,” she insisted. And to prove that what she was saying was true, she went on to explain that she had a boy friend who worked with an advertising firm, so that he ought to know, and only the week before he had told her that . . .

  Mr. Stoyte’s knobbed face, as he left the hospital, was still illuminated with benevolence and happiness.

  “Makes you feel kind of good, playing with those poor kids,” he kept repeating to Jeremy.

  A wide flight of steps led down from the hospital entrance to the roadway. At the foot of these steps Mr. Stoyte’s blue Cadillac was waiting. Behind it stood another smaller car, which had not been there when they arrived. A look of suspicion clouded Mr. Stoyte’s beaming face as he caught sight of it. Kidnappers, blackmailers—one never knew. His hand went to the pocket of his coat. “Who’s there?” he shouted in a tone of such loud fury that Jeremy thought for a moment that the man must have suddenly gone mad.

  Moon-like, a large, snub-featured face appeared at the car window, smiling round the chewed butt of a cigar.

  “Oh, it’s you, Clancy,” said Mr. Stoyte. “Why didn’t they tell me you were here?” he went on. His face had flushed darkly; he was frowning and a muscle in his cheek had begun to twitch. “I don’t like having strange cars around. Do you hear, Peters?” he almost screamed at his chauffeur—not because it was the man’s business, of course; simply because he happened to be there, available. “Do you hear, I say?” Then, suddenly, he remembered what Dr. Obispo had said to him that time he had lost his temper with the fellow. “Do you really want to shorten your life, Mr. Stoyte?” The doctor’s tone had been one of cool amusement; he had smiled with an expression of politely sarcastic indulgence. “Are you absolutely bent on having a stroke? A second stroke, remember; and you won’t get off so lightly next time. Well, if so, then go on behaving as you’re doing now. Go on.” With an enormous effort of will, Mr. Stoyte swallowed his anger. “God is love,” he said to himself. “There is no death.” The late Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist. “God is love,” he said again, and reflected that, if people would only stop being so exasperating, he would never have to lose his temper. “God is love.” It was all their fault.

  Clancy, meanwhile, had left his car and, grotesquely pot-bellied over spindly legs, was coming up the steps, mysteriously smiling and winking, as he approached.

  “What is it?” Mr. Stoyte inquired, and wished to God the man wouldn’t make those faces. “Oh, by the way,” he added, “this is Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”

  “Pordage,” said Jeremy.

  Clancy was pleased to meet him. The hand he gave to Jeremy was disagreeably sweaty.

  “I got some news for you,” said Clancy in a hoarse conspiratorial whisper; and, speaking behind his hand, so that his words and the smell of cigar should be for Mr. Stoyte alone, “You remember Tittelbaum?” he added.

  “That chap in the City Engineer’s Department?”

  Clancy nodded. “One of the boys,” he affirmed enigmatically, and again winked.

  “Well, what about him?” asked Mr. Stoyte; and in spite of God’s being love, there was a note in his voice of renascent exasperation.

  Clancy shot a glance at Jeremy Pordage; then, with the elaborate by-play of Guy Fawkes talking to Catesby on the stage of a provincial theatre, he took Mr. Stoyte by the arm and led him a few feet away, up the steps. “Do you know what Tittelbaum told me today?” he asked rhetorically.

  “How the devil should I know?” (But no, no. God is love. There is no death.)

  Undeterred by the signs of Mr. Stoyte’s irritation, Clancy went on with his performance. “He told me what they’ve decided about . . .” he lowered his voice still further, “about the San Felipe Valley.”

  “Well, what have they decided?” Once more Mr. Stoyte was at the limits of his patience.

  Before answering, Clancy removed the cigar butt from his mouth, threw it away, produced another cigar out of his waistcoat pocket, tore off the cellophane wrapping and stuck it, unlighted, in the place occupied by the old one.

  “They’ve decided,” he said very slowly, so as to give each word its full dramatic effect, “they’ve decided to pipe the water into it.”

  Mr. Stoyte’s expression of exasperation gave place at last to one of interest. “Enough to irrigate the whole valley?” he asked.

  “Enough to irrigate the whole valley,” Clancy repeated with solemnity.

  Mr. Stoyte was silent for a moment. “How much time have we got?” he asked at last.

  “Tittelbaum thought the news wouldn’t break for another six weeks.”

  “Six weeks?” Mr. Stoyte hesitated for a moment; then made his decision. “All right. Get busy at once,” he said with the peremptory manners of one accustomed to command. “Go down yourself and take a few of the other boys along with you. Independent purchasers—interested in cattle raising; want to start a Dude Ranch. Buy all you can. What’s the price, by the way?”

  “Averages twelve dollars an acre.”

  “Twelve,” Mr. Stoyte repeated, and reflected that it would go to a hundred as soon as they started laying the pipe. “How many acres do you figure you can get?” he asked.

  “Maybe thirty thousand.”

  Mr. Stoyte’s face beamed with satisfaction. “Good,” he said briskly. “Very good. No mention of my name, of course,” he added, and then, without pause or transition: “What’s Tittelbaum going to cost?”

  Clancy smiled contemptuously. “Oh, I’ll give him four or five hundred bucks.”

  “That all?”

  The other nodded. “Tittelbaum’s in the bargain basement,” he said. “Can’t afford to ask any fancy prices. He needs the money—needs it awful bad,”