After Many a Summer, Huxley Aldous
Contents
PART I
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
PART II
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
PART III
Chapter I
Chapter II
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
PART I
Chapter I
IT HAD all been arranged by telegram; Jeremy Pordage was to look out for a coloured chauffeur in a grey uniform with a carnation in his button-hole; and the coloured chauffeur was to look out for a middle-aged Englishman carrying the Poetical Works of Wordsworth. In spite of the crowds at the station, they found one another without difficulty.
“Mr. Stoyte’s chauffeur?”
“Mr. Pordage, sah?”
Jeremy nodded and, his Wordsworth in one hand, his umbrella in the other, half extended his arms in the gesture of a self-deprecatory mannequin exhibiting, with a full and humorous consciousness of their defects, a deplorable figure accentuated by the most ridiculous clothes. “A poor thing,” he seemed to be implying, “but myself.” A defensive and, so to say, prophylactic disparagement had become a habit with him. He resorted to it on every sort of occasion. Suddenly a new idea came into his head. Anxiously, he began to wonder whether, in this democratic Far West of theirs, one shook hands with the chauffeur—particularly if he happened to be a blackamoor, just to demonstrate that one wasn’t a pukka sahib even if one’s country did happen to be bearing the White Man’s burden. In the end he decided to do nothing. Or, to be more accurate, the decision was forced upon him—as usual, he said to himself, deriving a curious wry pleasure from the recognition of his own shortcomings. While he was hesitating what to do, the chauffeur took off his cap and, slightly over-acting the part of an old-world Negro retainer, bowed, smiled toothily and said:
“Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Pordage, sah!” Then, changing the tone of his chanting drawl from the dramatic to the confidential, “I should have knowed you by your voice, Mr. Pordage,” he went on, “even without the book.”
Jeremy laughed a little uncomfortably. A week in America had made him self-conscious about that voice of his. A product of Trinity College Cambridge, ten years before the War, it was a small, fluty voice, suggestive of evensong in an English cathedral. At home, when he used it, nobody paid any particular attention. He had never had to make jokes about it, as he had done, in self-protection, about his appearance, for example, or his age. Here, in America, things were different. He had only to order a cup of coffee or ask the way to the lavatory (which, anyhow, wasn’t called the lavatory in this disconcerting country) for people to stare at him with an amused and attentive curiosity, as though he were a freak on show in an amusement park. It had not been at all agreeable.
“Where’s my porter?” he said fussily in order to change the subject.
A few minutes later they were on their way. Cradled in the back seat of the car, out of range, he hoped, of the chauffeur’s conversation, Jeremy Pordage abandoned himself to the pleasure of merely looking. Southern California rolled past the windows; all he had to do was to keep his eyes open.
The first thing to present itself was a slum of Africans and Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. And what permutations and combinations of black, yellow and brown! What complex bastardies! And the girls—how beautiful in their artificial silk! “And Negro ladies in white muslin gowns.” His favourite line in The Prelude. He smiled to himself. And meanwhile the slum had given place to the tall buildings of a business district. The population took on a more Caucasian tinge. At every corner there was a drug-store. The newspaper boys were selling headlines about Franco’s drive on Barcelona. Most of the girls, as they walked along, seemed to be absorbed in silent prayer; but he supposed, on second thought, it was only gum that they were thus incessantly ruminating. Gum, not God. Then suddenly the car plunged into a tunnel and emerged into another world, a vast, untidy, suburban world of filling stations and billboards, of low houses in gardens, of vacant lots and waste paper, of occasional shops and office buildings and churches—primitive Methodist churches built, surprisingly enough, in the style of the Cartuja at Granada, Catholic churches like Canterbury Cathedral, synagogues disguised as Hagia Sophia, Christian Science churches with pillars and pediments, like banks. It was a winter day and early in the morning; but the sun shone brilliantly, the sky was without a cloud. The car was travelling westwards and the sunshine, slanting from behind them as they advanced, lit up each building, each sky sign and billboard as though with a spot-light, as though on purpose to show the new arrival all the sights.
EATS. COCKTAILS. OPEN NITES.
JUMBO MALTS.
DO THINGS, GO PLACES WITH CONSOL SUPER-GAS!
AT BEVERLY PANTHEON FINE FUNERALS ARE NOT EXPENSIVE.
The car sped onwards, and here in the middle of a vacant lot was a restaurant in the form of a seated bulldog, the entrance between the front paws, the eyes illuminated.
“Zoomorph,” Jeremy Pordage murmured to himself, and again, “zoomorph.” He had the scholar’s taste for words. The bulldog shot back into the past.
ASTROLOGY, NUMEROLOGY, PSYCHIC READINGS.
DRIVE IN FOR NUTBURGERS—whatever they were. He resolved at the earliest opportunity to have one. A nut-burger and a jumbo malt.
STOP HERE FOR CONSOL SUPER-GAS.
Surprisingly, the chauffeur stopped. “Ten gallons of Super-Super,” he ordered; then, turning back to Jeremy, “This is our company,” he added. “Mr. Stoyte, he’s the president.” He pointed to a billboard across the street. CASH LOANS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, Jeremy read; CONSULT COMMUNITY SERVICE FINANCE CORPORATION. “That’s another of ours,” said the chauffeur proudly.
They drove on. The face of a beautiful young woman, distorted, like a Magdalene’s, with grief, stared out of a giant billboard, BROKEN ROMANCE, proclaimed the caption. SCIENCE PROVES THAT 73 PER CENT OF ALL ADULTS HAVE HALITOSIS.
IN TIME OF SORROW LET BEVERLY PANTHEON BE YOUR FRIEND.
FACIALS, PERMANENTS, MANICURES.
BETTY’S BEAUTY SHOPPE.
Next door to the beauty shoppe was a Western Union office. That cable to his mother . . . Heavens, he had almost forgotten! Jeremy leaned forward and, in the apologetic tone he always used when speaking to servants, asked the chauffeur to stop for a moment. The car came to a halt. With a preoccupied expression on his mild, rabbit-like face, Jeremy got out and hurried across the pavement, into the office.
“Mrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England,” he wrote, smiling a little as he did so. The exquisite absurdity of that address was a standing source of amusement. “The Araucarias, Woking.” His mother, when she bought the house, had wanted to change the name, as being too ingenuously middle-class, too much like a joke by Hilaire Belloc “But that’s the beauty of it,” he had protested. “That’s the charm.” And he had tried to make her see how utterly right it would be for them to live at such an address. The deliciously comic incongruity between the name of the house and the nature of its occupants! And what a beautiful, topsyturvy appositeness in the fact that Oscar Wilde’s old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage, should write her sparkling letters from The Araucarias, and that from these same Araucarias, these Araucarias, mark you, at Woking, should come the works of mingled scholarship and curiously rarefied wit for which her son had gained his reputation. Mrs. Pordage had almost instantly seen what he was driving at. No need, thank goodness, to labour your points where she was concerned. You could talk entirely in hints and anacoluthons; she could be relied on to understand. The Araucarias had remained The Araucarias.
Having written the address, Jeremy paused, pensively frowned and initiated the familiar gesture of biting his pencil—only to find, disconcertingly, that this particular pencil was tipped with brass and fastened to a chain. “Mrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England,” he read out loud, in the hope that the words would inspire him to compose the right, the perfect message—the message his mother expected of him, at once tender and witty, charged with a genuine devotion ironically worded, acknowledging her maternal domination, but at the same time making fun of it, so that the old lady could salve her conscience by pretending that her son was entirely free, and herself, the least tyrannical of mothers. It wasn’t easy—particularly with this pencil on a chain. After several abortive essays, he decided, though it was definitely unsatisfactory, on: “Climate being subtropical shall break vow re underclothes. Stop. Wish you were here my sake not yours as you would scarcely appreciate this unfinished Bournemouth indefinitely magnified. Stop.”
“Unfinished what?” questioned the young woman on the further side of the counter.
“B-o-u-r-n-e-m-o-u-t-h,” Jeremy spelled out. He smiled; behind the bifocal lenses of his spectacles his blue eyes twinkled, and, with a gesture of which he was quite unconscious, but which he always automatically made when he was about to utter one of his little jokes, he stroked the smooth bald spot on the top of his head. “You know,” he said, in a particularly fluty tone, “the bourne to which no traveller goes, if he can possibly help it.”
The girl looked at him blankly then, inferring from his expression that something funny had been said and remembering that Courteous Service was Western Union’s slogan, gave the bright smile for which the poor old chump was evidently asking, and went on reading: “Hope you have fun at Grasse. Stop. Tendresses. Jeremy.”
It was an expensive message; but luckily, he reflected, as he took out his pocketbook, luckily Mr. Stoyte
