CHAPTER FIVE

 

Jeremy had dressed again and was sitting in the subterranean store-room that was to serve as his study.  The dry acrid dust of old documents had done to his head, like a kind of intoxicating snuff.  His face was flushed as he prepared his files and sharpened his pencils; his bald head shone with perspiration; behind their bifocal lenses his eyes were bright with excitement.

      There!  Everything was ready.  He turned round in his swivel-chair and sat for a little while quite still, voluptuously savouring his anticipations.  Tied up in innumerable brown-paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader.  Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness.  He smiled to himself at the thought that he was to be their Bluebeard.  Thousands of brides of quietness accumulated through centuries by successive generations of indefatigable Hauberks.  Hauberk after Hauberk; barony after knighthood; earldom after barony; and then Earl of Gonister after Earl of Gonister down to the last, the eighth.  And, after the eighth, nothing but death-duties and an old house and two old spinster ladies, sinking ever deeper into solitude and eccentricity, into poverty and family pride, but finally, poor pets! more deeply into poverty than pride.  They had sworn they would never sell; but in the end they had accepted Mr Stoyte's offer.  The papers had been shipped to California.  They would be able, now, to buy themselves a couple of really sumptuous funerals.  And that would be the end of the Hauberks.  Delicious fragment of English history!  Cautionary perhaps, or perhaps, and more probably, merely senseless, merely a tale told by an idiot.  A tale of cut-throats and conspirators, of patrons of learning and shady speculators, of bishops and kings' catamites and minor poets, of admirals and pimps, of saints and heroines and nymphomaniacs, of imbeciles and prime ministers, of art collectors and sadists.  And here was all that remained of them, in twenty-seven crates, higgledy-piggledy, never catalogued, never even looked at, utterly virgin.  Gloating over his treasure, Jeremy forgot the fatigues of the journey, forgot Los Angeles and the chauffeur, forgot the cemetery and the castle, forgot even Mr Stoyte.  He had the Hauberk Papers, had them all to himself.  Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown-paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string.  What rich confusion awaited him within!  A book of household accounts for the year 1576 and 1577; a narrative by some Hauberk cadet of Sir Kenelm Digby's expedition to Scanderoon; eleven letters in Spanish from Miguel de Molinos to that Lady Ann Hauberk who had scandalized her family by turning papist; a collection, in early eighteenth-century handwriting, of sickroom recipes, a copy of Drelincourt's On Death; and an odd volume of Andréa de Nerciat's Félicia, ou Mes Fredaines.  He had just cut the string of the second bundle and was wondering whose was the lock of pale brown hair preserved between the pages of the Third Earl's holograph Reflections on the Late Popish Plot, when there was a knock at the door.  He looked up and saw a small, dark man in a white overall advancing towards him.  The stranger smiled, said 'Don't let me disturb you,' but nevertheless disturbed him.  'My name's Obispo,' he went on, 'Dr Sigmund Obispo: Physician in ordinary to His Majesty King Stoyte the First - and let's hope also the last.'

      Evidently delighted by his own joke, he broke into a peal of startlingly loud metallic laughter.  Then, with the elegantly fastidious gesture of an aristocrat in a dust-heap, he picked up one of Molinos's letters and started, slowly, and out loud, to decipher the first line of the flowing seventeenth-century calligraphy that met his eyes.  '"Ame a Dios como es en sî y no como se lo dice y forma su imaginación."'  He looked up at Jeremy with an amused smile.  'Easier said than done, I should think.  Why, you can't even love a woman as she is in herself; and after all, there is some sort of objective physical basis for the phenomenon we call a female.  A pretty nice basis in some cases.  Whereas poor old Dios is only a spirit - in other words, pure imagination.  And here's this idiot, whoever he is, telling some other idiot that people mustn't love God as he is in their imagination.'  Once again self-consciously the aristocrat, he threw down the letter with a contemptuous flick of the wrist.  'What drivel it all is!' he went on.  'A string of words called religion.  Another string of words called philosophy.  Half a dozen other strings called political ideals.  And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless.  And people getting so excited about them they'll murder their neighbours for using a word they don't happen to like.  A word that probably doesn't mean as much as a good belch.  Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach.  "Ame a Dios como es en sî,"' he repeated derisively.  'It's about as sensible as saying "hiccough a hiccough como es en hiccough."  I don't know how you litterae humaniores boys manage to stand it.  Don't you pine for some sense once in a while?'

      Jeremy smiled with an expression of nervous apology.  'One doesn't bother too much about the meanings,' he said.  Then, anticipating further criticism by disparaging himself and the things he loved most dearly, 'One gets a lot of fun, you know,' he went on, 'just scrabbling about in the dust-heaps.'

      Dr Obispo laughed and patted Jeremy encouragingly on the shoulders.  'Good for you!' he said.  'You're frank.  I like that.  Most of the Ph.D. boys one meets are such damned Pecksniffs.  Trying to pull that high-moral culture stuff on you!  You know: wisdom rather than knowledge; Sophocles instead of science.  "Funny," I always say to them when they try that on me, "funny that the thing you get your income from should happen to be the thing that's going to save humanity."  Whereas you don't try to glorify your little racket.  You're honest.  You admit you're in the thing merely for the fun of it.  Well, that's why I'm in my little racket.  For the fun.  Though, of course, if you'd given me any of that Sophocles stuff, I'd just have let you have my piece about science and progress, science and happiness, even science and ultimate truth, if you'd been obstinate.'  He showed his white teeth in a happy derision of everybody.

      His amusement was infectious.  Jeremy also smiled.  'I'm glad I wasn't obstinate,' he said in a tone whose fluty demureness implied how much he objected to disquisitions on ultimate truth.

      'Mind you,' Dr Obispo went on, 'I'm not entirely blind to the charms of your racket.  I'd draw the line at Sophocles, of course.  And I'd be deadly bored with this sort of stuff' - he nodded towards the twenty-seven crates.  'But I must admit,' he concluded handsomely, 'I've had a lot of fun out of old books in my time.  Really, a lot of fun.'

      Jeremy coughed and caressed his scalp; his eyes twinkled in anticipation of the deliciously dry little joke he was just about to make.  But, unfortunately, Dr Obispo gave him no time.  Serenely unaware of Jeremy's preparations he looked at his watch; then rose to his feet.  'I'd like to show you my laboratory,' he said.  'There's plenty of time before lunch.'

      'Instead of asking if I'd like to see his bloody laboratory,' Jeremy protested inwardly, as he swallowed his joke; and it had been such a good one!  He would have liked, of course, to go on unpacking the Hauberk Papers; but, lacking the courage to say so, he rose obediently and followed Dr Obispo towards the door.

      Longevity, the doctor explained, as they left the room.  That was his subject.  Had been ever since he left medical school.  But, of course, so long as he was in practice he hadn't been able to do any serious work on it.  Practice was fatal to serious work, he added parenthetically.  How could you do anything sensible, when you had to spend all your time looking after patients?  Patients belonged to three classes: those that imagined they were sick, but weren't; those that were sick, but would get well anyhow; those that were sick and would be much better dead.  For anybody capable of serious work to waste his time with patients was simply idiotic.  And, of course, nothing but economic pressure would ever have driven him to do it.  And he might have gone on in that groove for ever.  Wasting himself on morons.  But then, quite suddenly, his luck had turned.  Jo Stoyte had come to consult him.  It had been positively providential.

      'Most awfully a godsend,' Jeremy murmured, quoting his favourite phrase of Coleridge.

      Jo Stoyte, Dr Obispo repeated, Jo Stoyte on the verge of breaking up completely.  Forty pounds overweight and having had a stroke.  Not a bad one, luckily; but enough to put the old bastard into a sweat.  Talk of being scared to death!  (Dr Obispo's white teeth flashed again in wolfish good-humour.)  In Jo's case it had been a panic.  Out of that panic had come Dr Obispo's liberation from his patients; had come his income, his laboratory for work on the problems of longevity, his excellent assistant; had come, too, the financing of that pharmaceutical work at Berkeley, of those experiments with monkeys in Brazil, of that expedition to study the tortoises on the Galapagos Islands.  Everything a research worker could ask for, with old Jo himself thrown in as the perfect guinea-pig - ready to submit to practically anything short of vivisection without anaesthetics, provided it offered him some hope of keeping him above ground a few years longer.

      Not that he was doing anything spectacular with the old buzzard at the moment.  Just keeping his weight down; and taking care of his kidneys; and pepping him up with periodical shots of synthetic sex hormone; and watching out for those arteries.  The ordinary, common-sense treatment for a man of Jo Stoyte's age and medical history.  Meanwhile, however, he was on the track of something new, something that promised to be important.  In a few months, perhaps in a few weeks, he'd be in a position to make a definite pronouncement.

      'That's very interesting,' said Jeremy with hypocritical politeness.

      They were walking along a narrow corridor, white-washed and bleakly illuminated by a series of electric bulbs.  Through open doors Jeremy had occasional glimpses of vast cellars crammed with totem poles and armour, with stuffed orang-utans and marble groups by Thorwaldsen, with gilded Bodhisattvas and early steam-engines, with lingams and stagecoaches and Peruvian pottery, with crucifixes and mineralogical specimens.

      Dr Obispo, meanwhile, had begun to talk again about longevity.  The subject, he insisted, was still in the pre-scientific stage.  A lot of observations without any explanatory hypothesis.  A mere chaos of facts.  And what odd, what essentially eccentric facts!  What was it, for example, that made a cicada live as long as a bull? or a canary outlast three generations of sheep?  Why should dogs be senile at fourteen and parrots sprightly at a hundred?  Why should female humans become sterile in the forties, while female crocodiles continued to lay eggs into their third century?  Why in heaven's name should a pike live to two hundred without showing any signs of senility?  Whereas poor old Jo Stoyte ...

      From a side passage two men suddenly emerged carrying between them on a stretcher a couple of mummified nuns.  There was a collision.

      'Damned fools!' Dr Obispo shouted angrily.

      'Damned fool yourself!'

      'Can't you look where you're going?'

      'Keep your face shut!'

      Dr Obispo turned contemptuously away and walked on.

      'Who the hell do you think you are?' they called after him.

      Jeremy meanwhile had been looking with lively curiosity at the mummies.  'Discalced Carmelites,' he said to nobody in particular; and enjoying the flavour of that curious combination of syllables, he repeated them with a certain emphatic relish.  'Discalced Carmelites.'

      'Discalced your ass,' said the foremost of the two men, turning fiercely upon this new antagonist.

      Jeremy gave one glance at that red and angry face, then, with ignominious haste, hurried after his guide.

      Dr Obispo halted at last.  'Here we are,' he said, opening a door.  A smell of mice and absolute alcohol floated out into the corridor.  'Come on in,' he said cordially.

      Jeremy entered.  There were the mice all right - cage upon cage of them, in tiers along the wall directly in front of him.  To the left, three windows, hewn in the rock, gave on to the tennis-court and a distant panorama of orange trees and mountains.  Seated at a table in front of one of these windows, a man was looking through a microscope.  He raised his fair, tousled head as they approached, and turned towards them a face of almost child-like candour and openness.  'Hullo, doc,' he said with a charming smile.

      'My assistant,' Dr Obispo explained.  'Peter Boone.  Pete, this is Mr Pordage.'  Pete rose and revealed himself an athletic young giant.

      'Call me Pete,' he said, when Jeremy had called him Mr Boone.  'Everyone calls me Pete.'

      Jeremy wondered whether he ought to invite the young man to call him Jeremy - but wondered, as usual, so long that the appropriate moment for doing so passed, irrevocably.

      'Pete's a bright boy,' Dr Obispo began again in a tone that was affectionate in intention, but a little patronizing too.  'Knows his physiology.  Good with his hands, too.  Best mouse surgeon I ever saw.'  He patted the young man on the shoulder.

      Pete smiled - a little uncomfortably, it seemed to Jeremy, as though he found it rather difficult to make the right response to the other's cordiality.

      'Takes his politics a bit too seriously,' Dr Obispo went on.  'That's his only defect.  I'm trying to cure him of that.  Not very successfully so far, I'm afraid.  Eh, Pete?'

      The young man smiled again, more confidently; this time he knew exactly where he stood and what to do.

      'Not very successfully,' he repeated.  Then, turning to Jeremy, 'Did you see the Spanish news this morning?' he asked.  The expression on his large, fair, open face changed to one of concern.

      Jeremy shook his head.

      'It's something awful,' said Pete gloomily.  'When I think of those poor devils without planes or artillery or ...'

      'Well, don't think of them,' Dr Obispo cheerfully advised.  'You'll feel better.'

      The young man looked at him, then looked away again without saying anything.  After a moment of silence he pulled out his watch.  'I think I'll go and have a swim before lunch,' he said, and walked towards the door.

      Dr Obispo picked up a cage of mice and held it within a few inches of Jeremy's nose.  'These are the sex-hormone boys,' he said with a jocularity that the other found curiously offensive.  The animals squeaked as he shook the cage.  'Lively enough while the effect lasts.  The trouble is that the effects are only temporary.'

      Not that temporary effects were to be despised, he added, as he replaced the cage.  It was always better to feel temporarily good than temporarily bad.  That was why he was giving old Jo a course of that testosterone stuff.  Not that the old bastard had any great need of it with that Maunciple girl around....

      Dr Obispo suddenly put his hand over his mouth and looked round towards the window.  'Thank God,' he said, 'he's out of the room.  Poor old Pete!'  A derisive smile appeared on his face.  'Is he in love!'  He tapped his forehead.  'Thinks she's like something in the Works of Tennyson.  You know, chemically pure.  Last month he nearly killed a man for suggesting that she and the old boy ... Well, you know.  God knows what he figures the girl is doing here.  Telling Uncle Jo about the spiral nebulae, I suppose.  Well, if it makes him happy to think that way, I'm not the one that's going to spoil his fun.'  Dr Obispo laughed indulgently.  'But to come back to what I was saying about Uncle Jo....'

      Just having that girl around the house was the equivalent of a hormone treatment.  But it wouldn't last.  It never did.  Brown-Séquard and Voronoff and all the rest of them - they'd been on the wrong track.  They'd thought that the decay of sexual power was the cause of senility.  Whereas it was only one of the symptoms.  Senescence started somewhere else and involved the sex mechanism along with the rest of the body.  Hormone treatments were just palliatives and pick-me-ups.  Helped you for a time, but didn't prevent your growing old.

      Jeremy stifled a yawn.

      For example, Dr Obispo went on, why should some animals live much longer than human beings and yet show no signs of old age?  Somehow, somewhere we had made a biological mistake.  Crocodiles had avoided that mistake; so had tortoises.  The same was true of certain species of fish.

      'Look at this,' he said; and, crossing the room, he drew back a rubber curtain, revealing as he did so the glass front of a large aquarium recessed into the wall.  Jeremy approached and looked in.

      In the green and shadowy translucence, two huge fish hung suspended, their snouts almost touching, motionless except for the occasional ripple of a fin and the rhythmic panting of their gills.  A few inches from their staring eyes a rosary of bubbles streamed ceaselessly up towards the light, and all around them the water was spasmodically silver with the dartings of smaller fish.  Sunk in their mindless ecstasy, the monsters paid no attention.

      Carp, Dr Obispo explained; carp from the fishponds of a castle in Franconia - he had forgotten the name; but it was somewhere near Bamberg.  The family was impoverished; but the fish were heirlooms, unpurchasable.  Jo Stoyte had had to spend a lot of money to have these two stolen and smuggled out of the country in a specially constructed automobile with a tank under the back seats.  Sixty-pounds they were; over four feet long; and those rings in their tails were dated 1761.

      'The beginning of my period,' Jeremy murmured in a sudden access of interest.  1761 was the year of Fingal.  He smiled to himself; the juxtaposition of carp and Ossian, carp and Napoleon's favourite poet, carp and the first premonitions of the Celtic Twilight, gave him a peculiar pleasure.  What a delightful subject for one of his little essays!  Twenty pages of erudition and absurdity - of sacrilege in lavender - of a scholar's delicately canaille irreverence for the illustrious or unillustrious dead.

      But Dr Obispo would not allow him to think his thoughts in peace.  Indefatigably riding his own hobby, he began again.  There they were; and there were you.  He turned back accusingly towards Jeremy.  Here were you; no more than middle-aged, but already bald, already long-sighted and short-winded; already more or less edentate; incapable of prolonged physical exertion; chronically constipated (could you deny it?); your memory already not so good as it was; your digestion capricious; your potency falling off - if it hadn't, indeed, already disappeared for good.

      Jeremy forced himself to smile, and at every fresh item nodded his head in what was meant to look like an amused assent.  Inwardly, he was writhing with a mixture of distress at this all too truthful diagnosis and anger against the diagnostician for the ruthlessness of his scientific detachment.  Talking with a humorous self-deprecation about one's own advancing senility was very different from being bluntly told about it by someone who took no interest in you except as an animal that happened to be unlike a fish.  Nevertheless, he continued to nod and smile.

      Here you were, Dr Obispo repeated at the end of his diagnosis, and there were the carp.  How was it that you didn't manage your physiological affairs as well as they did?  Just where and how and why did you make the mistake that had already robbed you of your teeth and hair and would bring you in a very few years to the grave?

      Old Metchnikoff had asked those questions and made a bold attempt  to answer.  Everything he said happened to be wrong: phagocytosis didn't occur; intestinal autointoxication wasn't the sole cause of senility; neuronophags were mythological monsters; drinking sour milk didn't materially prolong life; whereas the removal of the large gut did materially shorten it.  Chuckling, he recalled those operations that were so fashionable just before the War!  Old ladies and gentlemen with their colons cut out, and in consequence being forced to evacuate every few minutes, like canaries!  All to no purpose, needless to say; because of course the operation that was meant to make them live to a hundred killed them all off within a year or two.  Dr Obispo threw back his glossy head and uttered one of those peals of brazen laughter which were his regular response to any tale of human stupidity resulting in misfortune.  Poor old Metchnikoff, he went on, wiping the tears of merriment from his eyes.  Consistently wrong.  And yet almost certainly not nearly so wrong as people had thought.  Wrong, yes, in supposing that it was all a matter of intestinal stasis and autointoxication.  But probably right in thinking that the secret was somewhere down there, in the gut.  Somewhere in the gut, Dr Obispo repeated; and, what was more, he believed that he was on its track.

      He paused and stood for a moment in silence, drumming with his fingers on the glass of the aquarium.  Poised between mud and air, the two obese and aged carps hung in their greenish twilight, serenely unaware of him.  Dr Obispo shook his head at them.  The worst experimental animals in the world, he said in a tone of resentment mingled with a certain gloomy pride.  Nobody had a right to talk about technical difficulties who hadn't tried to work with fish.  Take the simplest operation; it was a nightmare.  Had you ever tried to keep its gills properly wet while it was anaesthetized on the operating-table?  Or, alternatively, to do your surgery under water?  Had you ever set out to determine a fish's basal metabolism, or take an electro-cardiograph of its heart action, or measure its blood-pressure?  Had you ever wanted to analyse its excreta?  And, if so, did you know how hard it was even to collect them?  Had you ever attempted to study the chemistry of a fish's digestion and assimilation?  To determine its blood-pressure under different conditions?  To measure the speed of its nervous reactions?

      No, you had not, said Dr Obispo contemptuously.  And until you had, you had no right to complain about anything.

      He drew the curtain on his fish, took Jeremy by the arm and led him back to the mice.

      'Look at those,' he said, pointing to a batch of cages on an upper shelf.

      Jeremy looked.  The mice in question were exactly like all other mice.  'What's wrong with them?' he asked.

      Dr Obispo laughed.  'If those animals were human beings,' he said dramatically, 'they'd all be over a hundred years old.'

      And he began to talk, very rapidly and excitedly, about fatty alcohols and the intestinal flora of carp.  For the secret was there, the key to the whole problem of senility and longevity.  There, between the sterols and the peculiar flora of the carp's intestine.

      Those stools!  (Dr Obispo frowned and shook his head over them.)  Always linked up with senility.  The most obvious case, of course, was cholesterol.  A senile animal might be defined as one with an accumulation of cholesterol in the walls of its arteries.  Potassium thiocyanate seemed to dissolve those accumulations.  Senile rabbits would show signs of rejuvenation under a treatment with potassium thiocyanate.  So would senile humans.  But, again, not for very long.  Cholesterol in the arteries was evidently only one of the troubles.  But then cholesterol was only one of the sterols.  They were a closely related group, those fatty alcohols.  It didn't take much to transform one into another.  But if you'd read old Schneeglock's work and the stuff they'd been publishing at Upsala, you'd know that some of the sterols were definitely poisonous - much more than cholesterol, even in large accumulations.  Longbotham had even suggested a connection between fatty alcohols and neoplasms.  In other words, cancer might be regarded, in a final analysis, as a symptom of sterol-poisoning.  He himself would go even further and say that such sterol-poisoning was responsible for the entire degenerative process of senescence in man and the other mammals.  What nobody had done hitherto was to look into the part played by fatty alcohols in the life of such animals as carp.  That was the work he had been doing for the last year.  His researches had convinced him of two or three things: first, that the fatty alcohols in carp did not accumulate in excessive quantity; second, that they did not undergo transformation into the more poisonous sterols; and third, that both these immunities were due to the peculiar nature of the carp's intestinal flora.  What a flora! Dr Obispo cried enthusiastically.  So rich, so wonderfully varied.  He had not yet succeeded in isolating the organism responsible for the carp's immunity to old age, nor did he fully understand the nature of the chemical mechanisms involved.  Nevertheless, the main fact was certain.  In one way or another, in combination or in isolation, these organisms contrived to keep the fish's sterols from turning into poisons.  That was why a carp could live a couple of hundred years and show no signs of senility.

      Could the intestinal flora of a carp be transferred to the gut of a mammal?  And, if transferable, would it achieve the same chemical and biological results?  That was what he had been trying, for the past few months, to discover.  With no success, to begin with.  Recently, however, they had experimented with a new technique - a technique that protected the flora from the process of digestion, gave it time to adapt itself to the unfamiliar conditions.  It had taken root.  The effect on the mice had been immediate and significant.  Senescence had been halted, even reversed.  Physiologically, the animals were younger than they had been for at least eighteen months - younger at the equivalent of a hundred than they had been at the equivalent of sixty.

      Outside in the corridor an electric bell began to ring.  It was lunch-time.  The two men left the room and walked towards the elevator.  Dr Obispo went on talking.  Mice, he said, were apt to be a bit deceptive.  He had now begun to try the thing out on larger animals.  If it worked all right on dogs and baboons, it ought to work on Uncle Jo.