CHAPTER TWO
An hour later, they were on their way again, having
seen everything. Everything. The sloping lawns, like a green oasis in the
mountain desolation. The
groves of trees. The tombstones in the grass.
The Pets' Cemetery, with its marble group after Landseer's 'Dignity and Impudence.' The tiny Church of the Poet - a miniature reproduction
of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon complete with Shakespeare's tomb and a
twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual
Wurlitzer and broadcast by concealed loudspeakers all over the cemetery.
Then,
leading out of the vestry, the Bride's Apartment (for one was married at the
Tiny Church as well as buried from it) - the Bride's Apartment that had just
been redecorated, said the chauffeur, in the style of Norma Shearer's boudoir
in Marie Antoinette. And next to
the Bride's Apartment, the exquisite black marble Vestibule of Ashes, leading
to the Crematorium, where three super-modern oil-burning mortuary furnaces were
always under heat and ready for any emergency.
Accompanied
wherever they went by the tremolos of the Perpetual Wurlitzer, they had driven
next to look at the Tower of Resurrection - from the outside only; for it
housed the executive offices of the West Coast Cemeteries Corporation. Then the Children's Corner with its statues
of Peter Pan and the Infant Jesus, its groups of alabaster babies playing with
bronze rabbits, its lily pool and an apparatus labelled The Fountain of Rainbow
Music, from which there spouted simultaneously water, coloured lights and the
inescapable strains of the Perpetual Wurlitzer.
Then, in rapid succession, the Garden of Quiet, the Tiny Taj Mahal, the Old World
Mortuary. And,
reserved by the chauffeur to the last, as the final and crowning proof of his
employer's glory, the Pantheon itself.
Was it
possible, Jeremy asked himself, that such an object
existed? It was certainly not
probable. The Beverly Pantheon lacked
all verisimilitude, was something entirely beyond his powers to invent. The fact that the idea of it was now in his
mind proved, therefore, that he must really have seen it. He shut his eyes against the landscape and
recalled to his memory the details of that incredible reality. The external architecture, modelled on that
of Boecklin's 'Toteninsel.' The circular vestibule. The replica of Rodin's
'Le Baiser,' illuminated by concealed pink
floodlights. With its
flights of black marble stairs. The seven-story columbarium, the endless galleries, its tiers on
tiers of slab-sealed tombs. The
bronze and silver urns of the cremated, like athletic trophies. The stained-glass windows
after Burne-Jones. The texts
inscribed on marble scrolls. The Perpetual Wurlitzer crooning on every floor. The sculpture ...
That was
the hardest to believe, Jeremy reflected, behind closed eyelids. Sculpture almost as
ubiquitous as the Wurlitzer. Statues wherever you turned your eyes. Hundreds of them, bought wholesale, one would
guess, from some monumental masonry concern at Carrara
or Pietrasanta.
All nudes, all female, all exuberantly nubile. The sort of statues one would expect to see
in the reception room of a high-class brothel in Rio de Janeiro. 'Oh, Death,' demanded a marble scroll at the
entrance to every gallery, 'where is thy sting?' Mutely, but eloquently, the statues gave
their reassuring reply. Statues of young
ladies in nothing but a very tight belt imbedded, with Bernini-like
realism, in the Parian flesh. Statues of young ladies
crouching; young ladies using both hands to be modest; young ladies stretching,
writhing, callipygously stooping to tie their
sandals, reclining. Young ladies with doves, with panthers, with other young ladies,
with upturned eyes expressive of the soul's awakening. 'I am the Resurrection and the Life,'
proclaimed the scrolls. 'The Lord is my
shepherd; therefore I shall want nothing.'
Nothing, not even Wurlitzer, not even girls in tightly
buckled belts. 'Death is
swallowed up in victory' - the victory no longer of the spirit but of the body,
the well-fed body, for ever youthful, immortally athletic, indefatigably
sexy. The Moslem paradise had had
copulations six centuries long. In this
new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would have stepped up the period to a
millennium and added the joys of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming.
All at once
the car began to descend. Jeremy opened
his eyes again, and saw that they had reached the further edge of the range of
hills, among which the Pantheon was built.
Below lay a
great tawny plain, chequered with patches of green and dotted with white
houses. On its further side, fifteen or
twenty miles away, ranges of pinkish mountains fretted the horizon.
'What's
this?' Jeremy asked.
'The San
Fernando Valley,' said the chauffeur. He
pointed into the middle distance.
'That's where Groucho Marx has his place,' he
said. 'Yes, sir.'
At the
bottom of the hill the car turned to the left along a wide road that ran, a
ribbon of concrete and suburban buildings, through the plain. The chauffeur put on speed; sign succeeded
sign with bewildering rapidity. MALTS CABIN DINE AND DANCE AT THE CHATEAU HONOLULU SPIRITUAL HEALING AND COLONIC IRRIGATION BLOCKLONG HOT DOGS BUY YOUR DREAM HOME NOW. And behind the signs the mathematically
planted rows of apricot and walnut trees flicked past - a succession of
glimpsed perspectives preceded and followed every time by fan-like approaches
and retirements.
Dark-green
and gold, enormous orange orchards manoeuvred, each one a mile-square regiment
glittering in the sunlight. Far off, the
mountains traced their uninterpretable graph of boom
and slump.
'Tarzana,'
said the chauffeur startlingly; there, sure enough, was the name suspended, in
white letters, across the road. 'There's
Tarzana College,' the man went on, pointing to a group of Spanish-Colonial
palaces clustering round a Romanesque basilica.
'Mr Stoyte, he's just given them an
auditorium.'
They turned
to the right along a less important road.
The orange groves gave place for a few miles to huge fields of alfalfa
and fusty grass, then returned again more luxuriant than ever. Meanwhile the mountains on the northern edge
of the valley were approaching and, slanting in from the west, another range
was looming up to the left. They drove
on. The road took a sudden turn, aiming,
it seemed, at the point where the two ranges must come together. All at once, through a gap between two
orchards, Jeremy Pordage saw a most surprising
sight. About half a mile from the foot
of the mountains, like an island off a cliff-bound coast, a rocky hill rose
abruptly, in places almost precipitously, from the plain. On the summit of the bluff and as though
growing out of it in a kind of efflorescence, stood a castle. But what a castle! The donjon was like a skyscraper, the
bastions plunged headlong with the effortless swoop of concrete dams. The thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial -
doubly baronial, Gothic with a Gothicity
raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the
thirteenth century. For this ... this
Object, as Jeremy was reduced to calling it, was mediaeval, not out of vulgar
historical necessity, like Coucy, say, or Alnwick, but out of pure fun and wantonness, platonically,
one might say. It was mediaeval as only
a witty and irresponsible modern architect would wish to be mediaeval, as only
the most competent modern engineers are technically equipped to be.
Jeremy was
startled into speech. 'What on earth is
that?' he asked, pointing at the nightmare on the hilltop.
'Why,
that's Mr Stoyte's place,' said the retainer; and
smiling yet once more with the pride of vicarious ownership, he added: 'It's a
pretty fine home, I guess.'
The orange
groves closed in again; leaning back in his seat, Jeremy Pordage
began to wonder, rather apprehensively, what he had let himself in for when he
accepted Mr Stoyte's offer. The pay was princely; the work, which was to
catalogue the almost legendary Hauberk Papers, would be delightful. But that cemetery, this ... Object - Jeremy
shook his head. He had known, of course,
that Mr Stoyte was rich, collected pictures, owned a
showplace in California. But no-one had
ever led him to expect this. The
humorous puritanism of his good taste was shocked; he
was appalled at the prospect of meeting the person capable of committing such
an enormity. Between that person and
oneself, what contact, what community of thought or feeling could possibly
exist? What had he sent for one? For it was obvious that he couldn't
conceivably like one's books. But had he
even read one's books? Did he have the
faintest idea of what one was like?
Would he be capable, for example, of understanding why one had insisted
on the name of The Araucarias remaining unchanged? Would he appreciate one's point of view about ...?
These
anxious questionings were interrupted by the noise of the horn, which the
chauffeur was sounding with a loud and offensive insistence. Jeremy looked up. Fifty yards ahead, an ancient Ford was
creeping tremulously along the road. It
carried, lashed insecurely to roof and running-boards and luggage-rack, a
squalid cargo of household goods - rolls of bedding, an old iron stove, a crate
of pots and pans, a folded tent, a tin bath.
As they flashed past, Jeremy had a glimpse of three dull-eyed anaemic
children, of a woman with a piece of sacking wrapped around her shoulders, of a
haggard, unshaved man.
'Transients,'
the chauffeur explained in a tone of contempt.
'What's
that?' Jeremy asked.
'Why, transients,'
the Negro repeated, as though the emphasis were an explanation. 'Guess that lot's from the dust bowl. Kansas licence plate. Come to pick our navels.'
'Come to
pick your navels?' Jeremy echoed incredulously.
'Navel
oranges,' said the chauffeur. 'It's the
season. Pretty good year for navels, I
guess.'
They
emerged once more into the open, and there once more was the Object, larger
than ever. Jeremy had time to study the
details of its construction. A wall with
towers encircled the base of the hills, and there was a second line of defence,
in the most approved post-Crusades manner, half-way up. On the summit stood the
square keep, surrounded by subsidiary buildings.
From the
donjon, Jeremy's eyes travelled down to a group of buildings in the plain, not
far from the foot of the hill. Across
the façade of the largest of them the words, 'Stoyte
Home for Sick Children,' were written in guilded
letters. Two flags, one the stars and
stripes, the other a white banner with the letter S in scarlet, fluttered in
the breeze. Then a grove of leafless
walnut trees shut out the view once again.
Almost at the same moment the chauffeur threw his engine out of gear and
put on the brakes. The car came gently
to a halt beside a man who was walking at a brisk pace along the grassy very of
the road.
'Want a
ride, Mr Propter?' the Negro called.
The
stranger turned his head, gave the man a smile of recognition and came to the
window of the car. He was a large man,
broad-shouldered, but rather stooping, with brown hair turning grey and a face,
Jeremy thought, like the face of one of those statues which Gothic sculptors carved
for a place high up on the West front - a face of sudden prominences and deeply
shadowed folds and hollows, emphatically rough-hewn so as to be expressive even
at a distance. But this particular face,
he went on to notice, was not merely emphatic, not only for the distance; it
was a face also for the near point, also for intimacy, a subtle face, in which
there were the signs of sensibility and intelligence as well as of power, of a
gentle and humorous serenity no less than of energy and strength.
'Hullo,
George,' the stranger said, addressing the chauffeur; 'nice of you to stop for
me.'
'Well, I'm
sure glad to see you, Mr Propter,' said the Negro
cordially. Then he half-turned in his
seat, waved a hand towards Jeremy, and with a florid formality of tone and
manner said, 'I'd like to have you meet Mr Pordage of
England. Mr Pordage,
this is Mr Propter.'
The two men
shook hands, and, after an exchange of courtesies, Mr Propter
got into the car.
'You're
visiting Mr Stoyte?' he asked, as the chauffeur drove
on.
Jeremy
shook his head. He was here on business;
had come to look at some manuscripts - the Hauberk Papers, to be precise.
Mr Propter listened attentively, nodded from time to time and,
when Jeremy had finished, sat for a moment in silence.
'Take a
decayed Christian,' he said at last in a meditative tone, 'and the remains of a
Stoic; mix thoroughly with good manners, a bit of money and an old-fashioned
education; simmer for several years in a university. Result: a scholar and a gentleman. Well, there were worse types of human being.' He uttered a little laugh. 'I might almost claim to have been one
myself, once, long ago.'
Jeremy
looked at him enquiringly. 'You're not William
Propter, are you?' he asked. 'Not Short Studies in the
Counter-Reformation, by any chance?'
The other
inclined his head.
Jeremy
looked at him in amazement and delight.
Was it possible? he asked himself. Those Short Studies had been one of
his favourite books - a model, he had always thought, of their kind.
'Well, I'm
jiggered!' he said aloud, using the schoolboyish
locution deliberately and as though between inverted commas. He had found that, both in writing and in
conversation, there were exquisite effects to be obtained by the judicious
employment, in a solemn or cultural context, of a phrase of slang, a piece of
childish profanity or obscenity. 'I'll
be damned!' he exploded again, and his consciousness
of the intentional silliness of the words made him stroke his bald head and
cough.
There was
another moment of silence. Then, instead
of talking, as Jeremy had expected, about the Short Studies, Mr Propter merely shook his head and said, 'We mostly are.'
'Mostly are
what?' asked Jeremy.
'Jiggered,'
Mr Propter answered.
'Damned.
In the psychological sense of that word,' he added.
The walnut
trees came to an end, and there once more, on the starboard bow, was the
Object. Mr Propter
pointed in its direction. 'Poor Jo Stoyte!' he said.
'Think of having that millstone round one's neck. Not to mention, of course, all the other
millstones that go with it. What luck
we've had, don't you think? - we who've never been given the
opportunity of being anything much worse than scholars and gentlemen!' After another little silence, 'Poor Jo,' he
went on with a smile, 'he isn't either of them.
You'll find him a bit trying.
Because of course he'll want to bully you, just because tradition says
that your type is superior to his type.
Not to mention the fact,' he added, looking into Jeremy's face with an
expression of mingled amusement and sympathy, 'that you're probably the sort of
person that invites persecution. A bit
of a murderee, I'm afraid, as well as a scholar and
gentleman.'
Feeling
simultaneously annoyed by the man's indiscretion and touched by his
friendliness, Jeremy smiled rather nervously and nodded his head.
'Maybe,' Mr
Propter went on, 'maybe it would help you to be less
of a murderee towards Jo Stoyte
if you knew what gave him the original impulsion to get damned in just that way'
- and he pointed again towards the Object.
'We were at school together, Jo and I - only nobody called him Jo in
those days. We called him Slob, or
Jelly-Belly. Because, you se,, poor Jo was the local fat-boy, the only fat-boy in the
school during those years.' He paused
for a moment; then went on in another tone, 'I've often wondered why people
have always made fun of fatness. Perhaps
there's something intrinsically wrong with fat.
For example, there isn't a single fat saint - except, of course, old
Thomas Aquinas; and I cannot see any reason to suppose that he was a real
saint, a saint in the popular sense of the word, which happens to be the true
sense. If Thomas is a saint, then
Vincent de Paul isn't. And if Vincent's
a saint, which he obviously is, then Thomas
isn't. And perhaps that enormous belly
of his had something to do with it. Who
knows? But anyhow, that's by the
way. We're talking about Jo Stoyte. And poor Jo,
as I say, was a fat-boy and, being fat, was fair game for the rest of us. God, how we punished him for his glandular
deficiencies! And how disastrously he
reacted to that punishment!
Over-compensation.... But here I am at home,' he added, looking out of
the window as the car slackened speed and came to a halt in front of a small
white bungalow set in the midst of a clump of eucalyptus trees. 'We'll go on with this another time. But remember, if poor Jo gets too offensive,
think of what he was at school and be sorry for him - and don't be sorry for
yourself.' He got out of the car, closed
the door behind him and, waving a hand to the chauffeur, walked quickly up the
path and entered the little house.
The car
rolled on again. At once bewildered and
reassured by his encounter with the author of the Short Studies, Jeremy
sat, inertly looking out of the window.
They were very near the Object now; and suddenly he noticed, for the
first time, that the castle hill was surrounded by a moat. Some few hundred yards from the water's edge,
the car passed between two pillars, topped by heraldic lions. Its passage, it was evident, interrupted a
beam of invisible light directed on a photo-electric cell; for no sooner were
they past the lions than a drawbridge began to descend. Five seconds before they reached the moat, it
was in place; the car rolled smoothly across and came to a halt in front of the
main gateway of the castle's outer walls.
The chauffeur got out and, speaking into a telephone-receiver concealed
in a convenient loophole, announced his presence. The chromium-plated portcullis rose noiselessly, the double doors of stainless steel swung
back. They drove in. The car began to climb. The second line of walls was pierced by
another gate, which opened automatically as they approached. Between the inner side of this second wall
and the slope of the hill a ferro-concrete bridge had
been constructed, large enough to accommodate a tennis-court. In the shadowy space beneath, Jeremy caught
sight of something familiar. An instant
later he had recognized it as a replica of the grotto of Lourdes.
'Miss Maunciple, she's a Catholic,' remarked the chauffeur,
jerking his thumb in the direction of the grotto. 'That's why he had it made for her. We's
Presbyterians in our family,' he added.
'And who is
Miss Maunciple?'
The
chauffeur hesitated for a moment. 'Well,
she's a young lady Mr Stoyte's kind of friendly
with,' he explained at last; then changed the subject.
The car
climbed on. Beyond the grotto all the
hillside was a cactus garden. Then the
road swung round to the northern slope of the bluff, and the cactuses gave place
to grass and shrubs. On a little
terrace, over-elegant like a fashion-plate from some mythological Vogue
for goddesses, a bronze nymph of Giambologna spouted
two streams of water from her deliciously polished breasts. A little further on, behind wire netting, a
group of baboons squatted among the rocks or paraded the obscenity of their
hairless rumps.
Still
climbing, the car turned again and finally drew up on a circular concrete
platform, carried out on cantilevers over a precipice. Once more the old-fashioned retainer, the
chauffeur taking off his cap, did a final impersonation of himself welcoming
the young master home to the plantation, then set to work to unload the
luggage.
Jeremy Pordage walked to the balustrade and looked over. The ground fell almost sheer for about a
hundred feet, then sloped steeply to the inner circle
of walls and, below them, to the outer fortifications. Beyond lay the moat,
and on the further side of the moat stretched the orange orchards, 'Im dunklen Laub
die goldn' Orangen glühen,' he murmured to himself; and then: 'He hangs in
shades the orange bright. Like golden
lamps in a green night.' Marvell's
rendering, he decided, was better than Goethe's. And, meanwhile, the oranges seemed to have
become brighter and more significant.
For Jeremy, direct, unmeditated experience was
always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning,
only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers
of a book. The oranges were beautifully
pigeonholed; but what about the castle?
He turned round and, leaning back against the parapet, looked up. The Object impended, insolently enormous. Nobody had dealt poetically with that. Not Childe Roland, not the King of Thule, not
Marmion, not the Lady of Shalott,
not Sir Leoline.
Sir Leoline, he repeated to himself, with a
connoisseur's appreciation of romantic absurdity, Sir Leoline,
the baron rich who had - what? A toothless mastiff bitch. But Mr Stoyte had
baboons and a sacred grotto, Mr Stoyte had a chromium
portcullis and the Hauberk Papers, Mr Stoyte had a
cemetery like an amusement park and a donjon like ...
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, thickset 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 dealing 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 été ont fait le sault par la fenêtre,' he quoted.
'What's
that?' said Mr Stoyte, frowning. 'No use talking foreign languages to me. I never had any education.' He broke into sudden braying of laughter. 'I'm head of an oil company here,' he
said. 'Got two
thousand filling-stations in
'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 wont' 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 ...' 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.