Read Online After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley - Free Book Online

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 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 “Felicia, 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 of 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 si y no como se lo dice y forma su imaginacion .’ ” 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 si ,’ ” 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 shoulder. “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;