After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (33 page)

They crossed the hall. Mr. Propter's car was standing outside the front door. He took the wheel; Jeremy got in beside him. They drove off, down the curving road, past the baboons, past Giambologna's nymph, past the Grotto, under the portcullis and across the drawbridge.

“I so often think of that poor boy,” said Mr. Propter, breaking a long silence. “Dying so suddenly.”

“I'd no idea his heart was as bad as that,” said Jeremy.

“In a certain sense,” Mr. Propter went on, “I feel responsible for what happened. I asked him to help me in the carpenter's shop. Made him work too hard, I guess—though he insisted it was all right for him. I ought to have realized that he had his pride—that he was young enough to feel ashamed of admitting he couldn't take it. One's punished for being insensitive and unaware. And so are the people one's insensitive about.”

They drove past the hospital and through the orange groves in silence. “There's a kind of pointlessness about sudden and premature death,” said Jeremy at last. “A kind of specially acute irrelevance . . .”

“Specially acute?” Mr. Propter questioned. “No, I shouldn't say so. It's no more irrelevant than any other human event. If it seems more irrelevant, that's only because, of all possible events, premature death is the most glaringly out of harmony with what we imagine ourselves to be.”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.

Mr. Propter smiled. “I mean what I presume
you
mean,” he answered. “If a thing seems irrelevant, there must be something it's irrelevant to. In this case, that something is our conception of what we are. We think of ourselves as free, purposive beings. But every now and then, things happen to us that are incompatible with this conception. We speak of them as accidents; we call them pointless and irrelevant. But what's the criterion by which we judge? The criterion is the picture we paint of ourselves in our own fancy—the highly flattering portrait of the free soul making creative choices and being the master of its fate. Unfortunately, the picture bears no resemblance to ordinary human reality. It's the picture of what we'd like to be, of what, indeed, we might become if we took the trouble. To a being who is in fact the slave of circumstance there's nothing specially irrelevant about premature death. It's the sort of event that's characteristic of the universe in which he actually lives—though not, of course, of the universe he foolishly imagines he lives in. An accident is the collision of a train of events on the level of determinism with another train of events on the level of freedom. We imagine that our life is full of accidents, because we imagine that our human existence is passed on the level of freedom. In fact, it isn't. Most of us live on the mechanical level, where events happen in accordance with the laws of large numbers. The things we call accidental and irrelevant belong to the very essence of the world in which we elect to live,”

Annoyed at having, by an inconsidered word, landed himself in a position which Mr, Propter could show to be unwarrantably “idealistic,” Jeremy was silent. They drove on for a time without speaking.

“That funeral!” Jeremy said at last; for his chronically anecdotal mind had wandered back to what was concrete, particular and odd in the situation under discussion. “Like something out of Ronald Firbank!” He giggled. “I told Mr. Habakkuk he ought to put steam heat into the statues. They're dreadfully unlifelike to the
touch.”
He moved his cupped hand over an imaginary marble protuberance.

Mr. Propter, who had been thinking about liberation, nodded and politely smiled.

“And Dr. Mulge's reading of the service!” Jeremy went on. “Talk of unction! It couldn't have been oilier even in an English cathedral. Like vaseline with a flavour of port wine. And the way he said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life'—as though he really meant it, as though he, Mulge, could personally guarantee it, in writing, on a money-back basis: the entire cost of the funeral refunded if the next world fails to give complete satisfaction.”

“He probably even believes it,” said Mr. Propter meditatively. “In some curious Pickwickian way, of course. You know: it's true, but you consistently act as though it weren't; it's the most important fact in the universe, but you never think about it if you can possibly avoid it.”

“And how do
you
believe in it?” Jeremy asked. “Pick-wickianly or un-Pickwickianly?” And when Mr. Propter answered that he didn't believe in that sort of resurrection and life, “Oho!” he went on in the tone of an indulgent father who has caught his son kissing the housemaid. “Oho! So there's also a Pickwickian resurrection?”

Mr. Propter laughed. “I think there may be,” he said.

“In which case what has become of poor Pete?”

“Well, to start with,” said Mr. Propter slowly, “I should say that Pete,
qua
Pete, doesn't exist any longer.”

“Super-Pickwickian!” Jeremy interjected.

“But Pete's ignorance,” Mr. Propter went on, “Pete's fears and cravings—well, I think it's quite possible that they're still somehow making trouble in the world. Making trouble for everything and everyone, especially for themselves. Themselves in whatever form they happen to be taking.”

“And if by any chance Pete hadn't been ignorant and concupiscent, what then?”

“Well, obviously,” said Mr. Propter, “there wouldn't be anything to make further trouble.” After a moment's silence, he quoted Tauler's definition of God. “ ‘God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.' ”

He turned the car off the main road, into the avenue of pepper trees that wound across the green lawns of the Tarzana campus. The new Auditorium loomed up, austerely romanesque. Mr. Propter parked his old Ford among the lustrous Cadillacs and Chryslers and Packards already lined up in front of it, and they entered. The press photographers at the entrance looked them over, saw at a glance that they were neither bankers, nor movie stars, nor corporation lawyers, nor dignitaries of any church, nor Senators, and turned away contemptuously.

The students were already in their places. Under their stares, Jeremy and Mr. Propter were ushered down the aisle to the rows of seats reserved for distinguished guests. And what distinction! There, in the front row, was Sol R. Katzenblum, the President of Abraham Lincoln Pictures; there, beside him, was the Bishop of Santa Monica; there too was Mr. Pescecagniolo, of the Bank of the Far West. The Grand Duchess Eulalie was sitting next to Senator Bardolph; and in the next row were two of the Engels Brothers and Gloria Bossom, who was chatting with Rear-Admiral Shotover. The orange robe and permanently waved beard belonged to Swami Yogalinga, founder of the School of Personality. Beside him sat the Vice-President of Consol Oil and Mrs. Wagner. . . .

Suddenly the organ burst out, full blast, into the Tarzana Anthem. The academic procession filed in. Two by two, in their gowns and hoods and tasselled mortar boards, the Doctors of Divinity, of Philosophy, of Science, of Law, of Letters, of Music, shuffled down the aisle and up the steps on to the platform, where their seats had been prepared for them in a wide arc close to the back drop. At the centre of the stage stood a reading desk and at the reading desk stood Dr. Mulge. Not that he did any reading, of course; for Dr. Mulge prided himself on being able to speak almost indefinitely without a note. The reading desk was there to be intimately leaned over, to be caught hold of and passionately leaned back from, to be struck emphatically with the palm of the hand, to be dramatically walked away from and returned to.

The organ was silent. Dr. Mulge began his address—began it with a reference, of course, to Mr. Stoyte. Mr. Stoyte whose generosity . . . The realization of a Dream . . . This embodiment of an ideal in stone . . . Without Vision the people perish . . . But this Man had had Vision . . . The Vision of what Tarzana was destined to become . . . The centre, the focus, the torch bearer . . . California . . . New Culture, richer science, higher spirituality . . . (Dr. Mulge's voice modulated from bassoon to trumpet. From vaseline with a mere flavour of port wine to undiluted fatty alcohol.) But, alas (and here the voice subsided pathetically into saxophone and lanoline), alas . . . Unable to be with us today ... A sudden distressing event . . . Carried off on the threshold of life ... A young collaborator in those scientific fields which he ventured to say were as close to Mr. Stoyte's heart as the fields of social service and culture . . . The shock . . . The exquisitely sensitive heart under the sometimes rough exterior . . . His physician had ordered a complete and immediate change of scene . . . But in spite of physical absence, his spirit . . . We feel it among us today . . . An inspiration to all, young and old alike . . . The torch of Culture . . . The Future . . . The Ideal . . . The spirit of man . . . Great things already accomplished . . . Strengthened and guided . . . Forward . . . Onward . . . Upward . . . Faith and Hope . . . Democracy . . . Freedom . . . The imperishable heritage of Washington and Lincoln . . . The glory that was Greece reborn beside the waters of the Pacific . . . The flag . . . The mission . . . The manifest destiny . . . The will of God . . . Tarzana . . .

It was over at last. The organ played. The academic procession filed back up the aisle. The distinguished guests straggled after it.

Outside in the sunshine, Mr. Propter was buttonholed by Mrs. Pescecagniolo.

“I thought that was a wonderfully inspirational address,” she said with enthusiasm.

Mr. Propter nodded. “Almost the most inspirational address I ever listened to. And God knows,” he added, “I've heard a lot of them in the course of my life.”

E
VEN
in London there was a little diluted sunshine—sunshine that brightened and grew stronger as they drove through the diminishing smoke of the outer suburbs, until at last, somewhere near Esher, they had travelled into the most brilliant of early spring mornings.

Under a fur rug, Mr. Stoyte sprawled diagonally across the rear seat of the car. More for his own good, this time, than for his physician's, he was back again on sedatives, and found it hard, before lunch, to keep awake. With a fitful stertorousness he had dozed almost from the moment they drove away from the Ritz.

Pale and with sad eyes, silently ruminating an unhappiness which five days of rain on the Atlantic and three more of London gloom had done nothing to alleviate, Virginia sat aloof in the front seat.

At the wheel (for he had thought it best to take no chauffeur on this expedition) Dr. Obispo whistled to himself and, occasionally, even sang aloud—sang
“Stretti, stretti, nell-estasí d'amor” ;
sang “Do you think a 1-ittle drink'U do us any harm?”; sang “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.” It was partly the fine weather that made him so cheerful—spring-time, he said to himself, the only merry ring-time, not to mention the lesser celandines, the wind flowers, whatever they might be; the primroses in the copse. And should he ever forget his bewilderment when English people had started talking about cops in the singular and in contexts where policemen seemed deliriously out of place? “Let's go and pick some primroses in the cops.” Surprising intestinal flora! Better even than the carp's. Which brought him to the second reason for his satisfaction with life. They were on their way to see the two old Hauberk ladies—on their way, perhaps, to finding something interesting about the Fifth Earl, something significant about the relationship between senility and sterols and the intestinal flora o£ the carp.

With mock-operatic emphasis he burst again into song. “I drea-heamt I dwe-helt in mar-harble halls,” he proclaimed, “with vas-s-als and serfs at my si-hi-hide. And of all who assembled with-hin those walls, that I was the hope and the pri-hi-hide.”

Virginia, who had been sitting beside him, stony with misery, turned round in sudden exasperation. “Oh, for heaven's sake!” she almost screamed, breaking a silence that had lasted all the way from Kingston-on-Thames. “Can't you be quiet?”

Dr. Obispo ignored her protests. “I had riches,” he sang on (and reflected, with an inward chuckle of satisfaction as he did so, that the statement now happened to be true); “I had riches too grea-heat to cou-hount.” No; that was an exaggeration. Not at all too great to count. Just a nice little competence. Enough to give him security and the means to continue his researches without having to waste his time on a lot of sick people who ought to be dead. Two hundred thousand dollars in cash and forty-five hundred acres of land in the San Felipe Valley—land that Uncle Jo had positively sworn was just on the point of getting its irrigation water. (And if it didn't get it, God! how he'd twist the old buzzard's tail for him!) “Heart failure due to myocarditis of rheumatic origin.” He could have asked a lot more than two hundred thousand for that death certificate. Particularly as it hadn't been his only service. No, sir! There had been all the mess to clear up. (The ninety-five dollar, fawn-coloured suit was ruined after all.) There had been the servants to keep away; the Baby to put to bed with a big shot of morphia; the permission to cremate the body to be obtained from the next of kin, who was a sister, living, thank God, in straitened circumstances, and at Pensacola, Florida, so that she fortunately couldn't afford to come out to California for the funeral. And then (most ticklish of all) there had been the search for a dishonest undertaker; the discovery of a possible crook; the interview, with its veiled hints of an unfortunate accident to be hushed up, of money that was, practically speaking, no object; then, when the fellow had fired off his sanctimonious little speech about its being a duty to help a leading citizen to avoid unpleasant publicity, the abrupt change of manner, the business-like statement of the unavoidable facts and the necessary fictions, the negotiations as to price. In the end, Mr. Pengo had agreed not to notice the holes in Pete's skull for as little as twenty-five thousand dollars.