After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (15 page)

There was silence. The sun had gone. Behind the mountains to the west, a pale yellow light faded through green into a blue that deepened as it climbed. At the zenith, it was all night. Pete sat quite still, staring into the dark but still transparent sky above the northern peaks. That voice, so calm at first and then at the end so powerfully resonant, those words, now mercilessly critical of all the things to which he had given his allegiance, now charged with the half comprehended promise of things incommensurably worthier of loyalty, had left him profoundly moved and at the same time perplexed and at a loss. Everything, he saw, would have to be thought out again, from the beginning—science, politics, perhaps even love, even Virginia. He was appalled by the prospect and yet, in another part of his being, attracted; he felt resentful at the thought of Mr. Propter, but at the same time loved the disquieting old man; loved him for what he did and, above all, for what he so admirably and, in Pete's own experience, uniquely was—disinterestedly friendly, at once serene and powerful, gentle and strong, self-effacing and yet intensely
there,
more present, so to speak, radiating more life than any one else.

Jeremy Pordage had also found himself taking an interest in what the old man said, had even, like Pete, experienced the stirrings of a certain disquiet—a disquiet none the less disquieting for having stirred in him before. The substance of what Mr. Propter had said was familiar to him. For, of course, he had read all the significant books on the subject—would have thought himself barbarously uneducated if he hadn't—had read Sankara and Eckhart, the Pali texts and John of the Cross, Charles de Condran and the Bardo and Patan-jali and the Pseudo-Dionysius. He had read them and been moved by them into wondering whether he oughtn't to do something about them; and, because he had been moved in this way, he had taken the most elaborate pains to make fun of them, not only to other people, but also and above all to himself. “You've never bought your ticket to Athens,” the man had said—damn his eyes! Why did he want to go putting these things over on one? All one asked was to be left in peace, to take things as they came. Things as they came—one's books, one's little articles, and Lady Fredegond's ear trumpet, and Palestrina, and steak and kidney pudding at the Reform, and Mae and Doris. Which reminded him that today was Friday; if he were in England it would be his afternoon at the flat in Maida Vale. Deliberately he turned his attention away from Mr. Propter and thought instead of those alternate Friday afternoons; of the pink lampshades; the smell of talcum powder and perspiration; the Trojan women, as he called them because they worked so hard, in their kimonos from Marks and Spencer's; the framed reproductions of pictures by Poynter and Alma Tadema (delicious irony that works which the Victorians had regarded as art should have come to serve, a generation later, as pornography in a trollop's bedroom!); and, finally, the erotic routine, so matter-of-factly sordid, so conscientiously and professionally low, with a lowness and a sordidness that constituted, for Jeremy, their greatest charm, that he prized more highly than any amount of moonlight and romance, any number of lyrics and
Lie-bestods.
Infinite squalor in a little room! It was the apotheosis of refinement, the logical conclusion of good taste.

T
HIS
Friday, Mr. Stoyte's afternoon in town had been exceptionally uneventful. Nothing untoward had occurred during the preceding week. In the course of his various meetings and interviews nobody had said or done anything to make him lose his temper. The reports on business conditions had been very satisfactory. The Japs had bought another hundred thousand barrels of oil. Copper was up two cents. The demand for bentonite was definitely increasing. True, applications for bank credit had been rather disappointing; but the influenza epidemic had raised the weekly turnover of the Pantheon to a figure well above the average.

Things went so smoothly that Mr. Stoyte was through with all his business more than an hour before he had expected. Finding himself with time to spare, he stopped, on the way home, at his agent's to find out what was happening on the estate. The interview lasted only a few minutes—long enough, however, to put Mr. Stoyte in a fury that sent him rushing out to the car.

“Drive to Mr. Propter's,” he ordered with a peremptory ferocity as he slammed the door.

What the hell did Bill Propter think he was doing? he kept indignantly asking himself. Shoving his nose into other people's business. And all on account of those lousy bums who had come to pick the oranges! All for those tramps, those stinking, filthy hoboes! Mr. Stoyte had a peculiar hatred for the ragged hordes of transients on whom he depended for the harvesting of his crops, a hatred that was more than the rich man's ordinary dislike of the poor. Not that he didn't experience that complex mixture of fear and physical disgust, of stifled compassion and shame transformed by repression into chronic exasperation. He did. But over and above this common and generic dislike for poor people, he was moved by other hatreds of his own. Mr. Stoyte was a rich man who had been poor. In the six years between the time when he ran away from his father and grandmother in Nashville and the time when he had been adopted by the black sheep of the family, his Uncle Tom, in California, Jo Stoyte had learnt, as he imagined, everything there was to be known about being poor. Those years had left him with an ineradicable hatred for the circumstances of poverty and at the same time an ineradicable contempt for all those who had been too stupid, or too weak, or too unlucky to climb out of the hell into which they had fallen or been born. The poor were odious to him, not only because they were potentially a menace to his position in society, not only because their misfortunes demanded a sympathy he did not wish to give, but also because they reminded him of what he himself had suffered in the past and at the same time because the fact that they were still poor was a sufficient proof of their contemptibleness and his own superiority. And since he had suffered what they were now suffering, it was only right that they should go on suffering what he had suffered. Also, since their continued poverty proved them contemptible, it was proper that he, who was now rich, should treat them in every way as the contemptible creatures they had shown themselves to be. Such was the logic of Mr. Stoyte's emotions. And here was Bill Propter, running counter to this logic by telling the agent that they oughtn't to take advantage of the glut of transient labour to force down wages; that they ought, on the contrary, to raise them—raise them, if you please, at a time when these bums were swarming over the state like a plague of Mormon crickets! And not only that; they ought to build accommodations for them—cabins, like the ones that crazy fool Bill had built for them himself; two-roomed cabins at six or seven hundred dollars apiece—for bums like that, and their women, and those disgusting children who were so filthy dirty, he wouldn't have them in his hospital; not unless they were really dying of appendicitis or something—you couldn't refuse them then, of course. But meanwhile, what the hell did Bill Propter think he was doing? And it wasn't the first time either that he'd tried to interfere. Gliding through the twilight of the orange groves, Mr. Stoyte kept striking the palm of his left hand with his clenched right fist.

“I'll let him have it,” he whispered to himself. “I'll let him have it.”

Fifty years before, Bill Propter had been the only boy in the school who, even though he was the older and stronger, didn't make fun of him for being fat. They had met again when Bill was teaching at Berkeley and he himself had made good in the real estate game and had just gone into oil. Partly in gratitude for the way Bill Propter had acted when they were boys, partly also in order to display his power, to redress the balance of superiority in his own favour, Jo Stoyte had wanted to do something handsome for the young Assistant Professor. But in spite of his modest salary and the two or three miserable thousand dollars a year his father had left him, Bill Propter hadn't wanted anything done for him. He had seemed genuinely grateful, he had been perfectly courteous and friendly; but he just didn't want to come in on the ground floor of Consol Oil—didn't want to because, as he kept explaining, he had all he needed and preferred not to have anything more. Jo's effort to redress the balance of superiority had failed. Failed disastrously, because by refusing his offer, Bill had done something which, though he called him a fool for doing it, compelled Jo Stoyte secretly to admire him more than ever. Extorted against his will, this admiration bred a corresponding resentment towards its object. Jo Stoyte felt aggrieved that Bill had given him so many reasons for liking him. He would have preferred to like him without a reason, in spite of his shortcomings. But Bill had few shortcomings and many merits, merits which Jo himself did not have and whose presence in Bill he therefore regarded as an affront. Thus it was that all the reasons for liking Bill Propter were also, in Jo's eyes, equally valid reasons for disliking him. He continued to call Bill a fool; but he felt him as a standing reproach. And yet the nature of this standing reproach was such that he liked to be in Bill's company. It was because Bill had settled down on a ten-acre patch of land in this part of the valley that Mr. Stoyte had decided to build his castle on the site where it now stood. He wanted to be near Bill Propter, even though, in practice, there was almost nothing that Bill could do or say that didn't annoy him. Today, this chronic exasperation had been fanned by Mr. Stoyte's hatred of the transients into a passion of fury.

“I'll let him have it,” he repeated again and again.

The car came to a halt and, before the chauffeur could open the door for him, Mr. Stoyte had darted out and was hurrying in his determined way, looking neither to right nor left, up the path that led from the road to his old friend's bungalow.

“Hullo, Jo,” a familiar voice called from the shadow under the eucalyptus trees.

Mr. Stoyte turned, peered through the twilight, then, without a word, hurried towards the bench on which the three men were sitting. There was a chorus of “Good evenings,” and, as he approached, Pete rose politely and offered him his place. Ignoring his gesture and his very presence, Mr. Stoyte addressed himself immediately to Bill Propter.

“Why the hell can't you leave my man alone?” he almost shouted.

Mr. Propter looked at him with only a moderate astonishment. He was used to these outbursts from poor Jo;
le
had long since divined their fundamental cause and knew by experience how to deal with them.

“Which man, Jo?” he asked.

“Bob Hansen, of course. What do you mean by going to him behind my back?”

“When I went to you,” said Mr. Propter, “you told me it was Hansen's business. So I went to Hansen.”

This was so infuriatingly true that Mr. Stoyte could only resort to roaring. He roared. “Interfering with him in his work! What's the idea?”

“Pete's offering you a seat,” Mr. Propter put in. “Or if you prefer it, there's an iron chair behind you. You'd better sit down, Jo.”

“I'm not going to sit down,” Mr. Stoyte bellowed. “And I want an answer. What's the idea?”

“The idea?” Mr. Propter repeated in his slow quiet way. “Well, it's quite an old one, you know, I didn't invent it.”

“Can't you answer me?”

“It's the idea that men and women are human beings. Not vermin.”

“Those bums of yours!”

Mr. Propter turned to Pete. “You may as well sit down again,” he said.

“Those lousy bums! I tell you I won't stand it,”

“Besides,” Mr. Propter went on, “I'm a practical man. You're not.”

“Me not practical?” Mr. Stoyte echoed with indignant amazement. “Not
practical?
Well, look at the place I live in and then look at this dump of yours.”

“Exactly. That proves the point. You're hopelessly romantic, Jo; so romantic, you think people can work when they haven't had enough to eat.”

“You're trying to make Communists of them.” The word Communist renewed Mr. Stoyte's passion and at the same time justified it; his indignation ceased to be merely personal and became righteous. “You're nothing but a Communist agitator.” His voice trembled, Mr. Propter sadly noticed, just as Pete's had trembled half an hour before, at the words “Fascist aggression.” He wondered if the boy had noticed or, having noticed, would take the hint. “Nothing but a Communist agitator,” Mr, Stoyte repeated with a crusader's zeal.

“I thought we were talking about eating,” said Mr. Propter.

“You're stalling!”

“Eating and working—wasn't that it?”

“I've put up with you all these years,” Mr. Stoyte went on, “for old times' sake. But now I'm through. I'm sick of you. Talking Communism to those bums! Making the place dangerous for decent people to live in.

“Decent?” Mr. Propter echoed, and was tempted to laugh, but immediately checked the impulse. Being laughed at in the presence of Pete and Mr. Pordage might goad the poor fellow into doing something irreparably stupid.

“I'll have you run out of the valley,” Mr. Stoyte was roaring. “I'll see that you're . . .” He broke off in the middle of the sentence and stood there for a few seconds in silence, his mouth still open and working, his eyes staring. That drumming in the ears, that tingling heat in the face—they had suddenly reminded him of his blood pressure, of Dr. Obispo, of death. Death and that flame-coloured text in his bedroom at home. Terrible to fall into the hands of the living God—not Prudence's God, of course; the other one, the
real
one, the God of his father and his grandmother.

Mr. Stoyte drew a deep breath, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his face and neck, then, without uttering another word, turned and began to walk away.