After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (35 page)

“But do you think hell's possible?” Mr. Stoyte began again.

“Everything is possible,” said Dr. Obispo cheerfully. He cocked an ear to listen to what the old hags were yelling back there behind the door.

“Do you think there's one chance in a thousand it may be true? Or one in a million?”

Grinning, Dr. Obispo shrugged his shoulders. “Ask Pascal,” he suggested.

“Who's Pascal?” Mr. Stoyte inquired, clutching despairingly at any and every straw.

“He's dead,” Dr. Obispo positively shouted in his glee. “Dead as a door nail. And now, for God's sake.” He seized Uncle Jo by the arm and fairly dragged him along the passage.

The terrible word reverberated through Mr. Stoyte's imagination. “But I want to be certain,” he protested.

“Certain about what you can't know!”

“There
must
be a way.”

“There isn't. No way except dying and then seeing what happens. Where the hell is that child?” he added in another tone, and called, “Millie!”

Her face smeared with chocolate, the little girl popped up from behind an umbrella stand in the lobby. “Did you see ‘em?” she asked with her mouth full.

Dr. Obispo nodded. “They thought I was the Air Raid Precautions.”

“That's it!” the child cried excitedly. “That was the one that made her break the lamp.”

“Come here, Millie,” Dr. Obispo commanded. The child came. “Where's the door to the cellar?”

An expression of fear passed over Millie's face. “It's locked,” she answered.

Dr. Obispo nodded. “I know it,” he said. “But Lady Jane gave me the keys.” He pulled out of his pocket a ring on which were suspended three large keys.

“There's bogies down there,” the child whispered.

“We don't worry about bogies.”

“Granny says they're awful,” Millie went on. “She says they're something chronic.” Her voice broke into a whimper. “She says if I don't go somewhere more regular-like, the bogies will come after me. But I can't ‘elp it.” The tears began to glow. “It isn't my fault.”

“Of course it isn't,” said Dr. Obispo impatiently. “Nothing is ever anybody's fault. Even constipation. But now I want you to show us the door of the cellar.”

Still in tears, Millie shook her head. “I'm frightened.”

“But you won't have to go down into the cellar. Just show us where the door is, that's all.”

“I don't want to.”

“Won't you be a nice little girl,” Dr. Obispo wheedled, “and take us to the dopr?”

Stubborn with fear, Millie continued to shake her head.

Dr. Obispo's hand shot out and snatched the box of chocolates out of the child's grasp. “If you don't tell me, you won't have any candies,” he said, and added, irritably, “sweets, I mean.”

Millie let out a scream of anguish and tried to get back at the box; but he held it high up, beyond her reach. “Only when you show us the door of the cellar,” he said; and to show that he was in earnest, he opened the box, took a handful of chocolates and popped them one after another into his mouth. “Aren't they good!” he said, as he munched. “Aren't they just wonderful! Do you know, I'm glad you won't show us the door, because then I can eat them all.” He took another bite, made a grimace of ecstasy. “Ooh, goody, goody!” He smacked his lips. “Poor little Millie! She isn't going to get any more of them.” He helped himself again.

“Oh, don't, don't!” the child entreated each time she saw one of the brown nuggets of bliss disappearing between Dr. Obispo's jaws. Then a moment came when greed was stronger than fear. “I'll show you where it is,” she screamed, like a victim succumbing to torture and promising to confess.

The effect was magical. Dr. Obispo replaced in the box the three chocolates he was still holding and closed the lid. “Come on,” he said, and held out his hand for the child to take.

“Give me the box,” she demanded.

Dr. Obispo, who understood the principles of diplomacy, shook his head. “Not till you've taken us to the door,” he said.

Millie hesitated for a moment; then, resigned to the hard necessity of keeping to her side of the bargain, took his hand.

Followed by Uncle Jo and the Baby, they made their way out of the lobby, back through the drawing-room, along the passage, past the map of the Crimea and across the billiard room, along another passage and into a large library. The red plush curtains were drawn; but a little light filtered between them. All round the room the brown and blue and crimson strata of classic literature ran up to within three feet of the high ceiling, and at regular intervals along the mahogany cornice stood busts of the illustrious dead. Millie pointed to Dante. “That's Lady Jane,” she whispered confidentially.

“For Christ's sake.” Mr. Stoyte broke out startlingly. “What's the big idea? What the hell do you figure we're doing?”

Dr. Obispo ignored him. “Where's the door?” he asked.

The child pointed.

“What do you mean?” he started angrily to shout. Then he saw that what he had taken for just another section of the book-filled shelves was in fact a mere false front of wood and leather simulating thirty-three volumes of the Collected Sermons of Archbishop Stilling-fleet and (he recognized the Fifth Earl's touch) the Complete Works, in seventy-seven volumes, of Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade. A key-hole revealed itself to a closer scrutiny.

“Give me my sweets,” the child demanded.

But Dr. Obispo was taking no risks, “Not till we see if the key fits.”

He tried and, at the second attempt, succeeded. “There you are.” He handed Millie her chocolates and at the same time opened the door. The child uttered a scream of terror and rushed away.

“What's the big idea?” Mr. Stoyte repeated uneasily.

“The big idea,” said Dr. Obispo, as he looked down the flight of steps that descended, after a few feet, into an impenetrable darkness, “the big idea is that you may not have to find out whether there's such a place as hell. Not yet awhile, that's to say; not for a very long time maybe. Ah, thank God,” he added, “we shall have some light.”

Two old-fashioned bull's-eye lanterns were standing on a shelf just inside the door. Dr. Obispo picked one of them up, shook it, held it to his nose. There was oil in it. He lit them both, handed one to Mr. Stoyte and, taking the other himself, led the way cautiously down the stairs.

A long descent; then a circular chamber cut out of the yellow sandstone. There were four doorways. They chose one of them and passed, along a narrow corridor, into a second chamber with two more doorways. A blind alley first; then another flight of steps leading to a cave full of ancient refuse. There was no second issue; laboriously, with two wrong turnings on the way, they retraced their steps to the circular chamber from which they had started, and made trial of its second doorway. A flight of descending steps; a succession of small rooms. One of these had been plastered and upon its walls early eighteenth-century hands had scratched obscene
graffiti.
They hurried on, down another short flight of steps into a large square room with an air shaft leading at an angle through the rock to a tiny, far-away ellipse of white light. That was all. They turned back again. Mr. Stoyte began to swear; but the doctor insisted on going on. They tried the third doorway. A passage, a suite of three rooms. Two outlets from the last, one mounting, but walled up with masonry after a little way; the other descending to a corridor on a lower level. Thirty or forty feet brought them to an opening on the left. Dr. Obispo turned his lantern into it, and the light revealed a vaulted recess, at the end of which, on a stuccoed pedestal, stood a replica in marble of the Medici Venus.

“Well, I'm damned!” said Mr. Stoyte, and then, on second thought, was seized with a kind of panic. “How the hell did
that
get here, Obispo?” he said, running to catch up with the doctor.

Dr. Obispo did not answer, but hurried impatiently forward.

“It's crazy,” Mr. Stoyte went on apprehensively, as he trotted behind the doctor. “It's downright crazy. I tell you, I don't like it.”

Dr. Obispo broke his silence. “We might see if we can get her for the Beverly Pantheon,” he said with a wolfish joviality. “Hullo, what's this?” he added.

They emerged from the tunnel into a fair-sized room. At the centre of the room was a circular drum of masonry, with two iron uprights rising from either side of it, and a cross-piece, from which hung a pulley.

“The well!” said Dr. Obispo, remembering a passage in the Fifth Earl's note-book.

He almost ran towards the tunnel on the further side of the room. Ten feet from the entrance, his progress was barred by a heavy, nail-studded oak door. Dr. Obispo took out his bunch of keys, chose at random and opened the door at the first trial. They were on the threshold of a small oblong chamber. His bull's-eye revealed a second door on the opposite wall. He started at once towards it.

“Canned beef!” said Mr. Stoyte in astonishment, as he ran the beam of his lantern over the rows of tins and jars on the shelves of a tall dresser that occupied almost the whole of one of the sides of the room. “Biloxi Shrimps. Sliced Pineapple. Boston Baked Beans,” he read out, then turned towards Dr. Obispo. “I tell you, Obispo, I don't like it.”

The Baby had taken out a handkerchief saturated in “Shocking” and was holding it to her nose. “The smell!” she said indistinctly through its folds, and shuddered with disgust. “The smell!”

Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, was trying his keys on the lock of the other door. It opened at last. A draught of warm air flowed in, and at once the little room was filled with an intolerable stench. “Christ!” said Mr. Stoyte, and behind her handkerchief the Baby let out a scream of nauseated horror.

Dr. Obispo made a grimace and advanced along the stream of foul air. At the end of a short corridor was a third door, of iron bars, this time, like the door (Dr. Obispo reflected) of a death cell in a prison. He flashed his lantern between the bars, into the foetid darkness beyond.

From the little room Mr. Stoyte and the Baby suddenly heard an astonished exclamation and then, after a moment's silence, a violent, explosive guffaw, succeeded by peal after peal of Dr. Obispo's ferocious metallic laughter. Paroxysm upon uncontrollable paroxysm, the noise reverberated back and forth in the confined space. The hot, stinking air vibrated with a deafening and almost maniacal merriment.

Followed by Virginia, Mr. Stoyte crossed the room and hastened through the open door into the narrow tunnel beyond. Dr. Obispo's laughter was getting on his nerves. “What the hell . . .” he shouted angrily as he advanced; then broke off in the middle of the sentence. “What's that?” he whispered.

“A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.

“Holy Mary,” the Baby whispered through her handkerchief.

Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.

“A foetal ape that's had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It's
too
good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.

Suddenly, out of the black darkness, another simian face emerged into the beam of the lantern—a face only slightly hairy, so that it was possible to see, not only the ridge above the eyes, but also the curious distortions of the lower jaws, the accretions of bone in front of the ears. Clothed in an old check ulster and some glass beads, a body followed the face into the light.

“It's a woman,” said Virginia, almost sick with the horrified disgust she felt at the sight of those pendulous and withered dugs.

The doctor exploded into even noisier merriment.

Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.

Dr. Obispo wiped his eyes and drew a deep breath; the storm of his laughter was flattened to a heaving calm. As he opened his mouth to answer Mr. Stoyte's question, the creature in the shirt suddenly turned upon the creature in the ulster and hit out at her head. The palm of the enormous hand struck the side of the face. The creature in the ulster uttered a scream of pain and rage, and shrank back out of the light. From the shadow came a shrill, furious gibbering that seemed perpetually to tremble on the verge of articulate blasphemy.

“The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he's the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other's his housekeeper.”

“But what's happened to them?”

“Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.

“Time?”

“I don't know how old the female is,” Dr. Obispo went on. “But the Earl there—let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”

From the shadows the shrill voice continued to scream its all but articulate abuse. Impassibly the Fifth Earl scratched the sore on his leg and stared at the light.