Birth, Growth, Fullness, Decay, Dissolution, Death; the inevitable progress of all things created - including us. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stop at fullness. Jo Stoyte thought so. He had a full-time doctor working on preserving his stroke-prone aging body. He also set up a private research facility dedicated to stopping the aging process; or maybe even reversing it. Dr. Obispo was in charge of both projects.
Work was slow and uncertain.
At long last, a breakthrough. A number of research subjects: rats; dogs; baboons, seemed to be no longer aging. Some appeared to be growing younger. Was it due to the injections of the intestinal flora of carp that Dr. Obispo had been experimenting with, or some other procedure?
Research continued.
Research was about to be significantly advanced by serendipity.
Beside investing in new potentialities for the old dream of Ponce de Leon’s, Jo Stoyte also invested in Great Art & Literature, philanthropy, multiple corporations, funeral parks, and the cornucopia of plastic kitsch produced by the dreamers of American Industrialism – some of which he ordered to custom specification for his themed funeral park: The Beverly Pantheon.
Mr. Stoyte was blessed with considerably more money than taste, or good sense.
He had recently invested in the mysteriously important Hauberk Papers. Jo Stoyte hadn’t the slightest idea why the papers were important. He did understand they were valuable. That’s why he bought them. He also bought (Mr. Stoyte saw no difference between buying and hiring) an academic, Mr. Jeremy Pordage, to catalogue and explain them. Jeremy arrived in California for a stay of unknown duration from his quiet home in Araucarias, Woking, England. The ride through 1939 Hollywood to Stoyte’s castle gave Jeremy time and cause to wonder what he had gotten himself into. Well, no matter, ‘tis the work that matters.
He immediately set to work on the papers.
The Hauberk Papers were acquired from two elderly spinster ladies: the last of several generations of successive, successful Hauberks. They didn’t want to sell. Penury insisted. The twenty-seven crates of dusty papers had lain unread, probably for a century or more.
Jeremy patiently sorted through the motley collection of ancient invoices, letters, private reflections, proclamations, etc. All bundled, “higgledy-piggledy”, as Jeremy put it. The Hauberk family seemed to have been involved at one point or another with most of the most prominent figures of several centuries of European history; Dukes, Bishops, Prime Ministers, Admirals, Buccaneers, Adventurers, Notable Writers, Artists, and so on. The earliest of the papers were dated 1576. They continued to . . . well, Jeremy would find out.
By far, the most interesting writings were penned by the Fifth Earl of Gonister. He was a man of prodigious learning and intellectual curiosity. He was also a sadistic libertine, as despicable in general morality as he was elevated in matters of the mind. He wrote voluminously about all that interested him, and almost everything interested him. One subject of vital interest to him was also of vital interest to Jo Stoyte - longevity.
1794 – The Fifth Earl laments his condition; “old, weak, shrunken , , , only a memory of the being I once was”. Centuries later Jo Stoyte obsesses about the same problem. The Fifth Earl casts about for a solution. He tries many cures, including, “King David’s remedy”. All to no avail. Pages of musings roll by, then, an insight.
The Fifth Earl reflects that the fish-ponds at Gonister were dug in the days of his Great, Great Grandfather. Great, Great, Grandfather had also caused small metal disks to be attached to the tails-fins of the fifty carp fishes placed in the pond. One hundred-plus years later, twenty still lived, large, healthy, vigorous. Why? How?
After much scientific pondering, the Fifth Earl comes to the same conclusion Dr. Obispo reaches in 1939. Something in the intestinal tracts of the carp is responsible. Dr. Obispo is trying to develop an extract that can be injected. The Fifth Earl settles for ingestion.
Does eating fish guts sound disgusting. Of course it does. It is disgusting. Nonetheless, the Fifth Earl chops up six ounces of carp guts, and swallows. He promptly vomits. Resolute, he continues until his stomach learns to accept the nasty medicine.
In the next weeks and months, he grows steadily more vigorous. He renews his studies of Greek literature, and remarks upon recent, “conquests”, he had made that Spring, at Bath. Then he apparently stops writing.
Jeremy thinks Dr. Obispo might want to know about the Fifth Earl’s experiments.
Dr. Obispo certainly does want to know. He wants to know much more, quite a lot more. Disappointed at the break in the story, he impatiently pushes Jeremy to keep digging. “Humph”! Jeremy is a scholar, he requires no pushing to keep, “digging”.
1820 – A brief statement that at age eighty-three, the Fifth Earl has sired three illegitimate children. 1826 – He has taken up a re-perusal of Theocritus and a fresh perusal of a young female named, Kate, whom he also made his housekeeper. Kate is put on the carp-gut regimen. So it goes: ongoing philosophical and scientific studies; State dinners with various dignitaries- a speech before the House of Lords; etc. - all buffered with scandalous liaisons in between. Oh, and he has also had a large chamber carved out of the sandstone labyrinth beneath his manor at Farnham, Selford House.
The purpose of the chamber is not recorded.
March 1834 – “By the criminal negligence of Kate, Priscilla has been allowed to escape the subterranean place of confinement”. “Bearing on her body, as she does, the marks of my investigations, she holds in her hands my reputation. . . perhaps even my liberty and life”.
The Magistrates agree.
Execution, or life-long internment, in an institution for the criminally insane. The Fifth Earl considers this a choice between death, or, death. He finagles a way out. He conducts a sort of fire-sale of ,”securities, jewels, plate, and works of art”, raising two hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Grumping the while, that given more time he could have raised three hundred thousand pounds. Ah well, it will be, “amply sufficient for my purpose”.
He proposes a deal to his nephew, and his nephew’s wife, both of whom he despises as much as they despise him. They will fake his death; made convincing complete with a purchased corpse and a very expensive funeral. In return, the nephew will inherit the Earldom along with all the wealth, titles, and estates that go with it. The Fifth Earl will retire to the comforts of his subterranean retreat. He will take Kate - and the two hundred eighty thousand pounds with him to the, “cellarage”.
“On the first of June, for so long as I live, five thousand pounds in cash will be delivered to my nephew and his wife by Mr. Parsons”. An unnoted amount will be paid to Parsons, the Earl’s trusted, long-time henchman. Further, “Selford House will remain forever untenanted, except for Parsons, who will serve as caretaker, and supplier of our wants. This arrangement will be passed on, in perpetuity, to all heirs”.
The Fifth Earl is confident his deal will hold because of, ”cupidity and fear”. His nephew, his nephew’s wife, and Parsons are now all co-conspirators in criminality. If they break faith by bringing the tale to authorities, they will be liable for prosecution - and they will forfeit their generous monthly stipend.
The entry ends with no more disclosed.
It’s a tight deal. It might last forever.
Jeremy recites all this to a very excited Dr Obispo. “Damn”! Do you suppose old carp-guts is still alive? “Don’t know”, says Jeremy, “perhaps the ladies. . .”. Dr. Obispo immediately books A flight to Farnham, England for himself and his employer, Jo Stoyte. When they reach Selford House, Dr. Obispo duplicitously contrives to get the keys to the cellarage from the two Hauberk spinster ladies.
They descend with oil torches into the dark fetid chambers of the labyrinth.
Imagine foreboding music swelling up at this point.
After many false turns, dead-end tunnels, and empty chambers they reach a door of iron bars. An intolerable stench floats from beyond the gate. A shambling ape-like creature covered with coarse reddish hair emerges from the shadows.
It screams and gibbers with the cadence of cursing, but without the words. It is clothed in tatters of what once must have been
a shirt. Around its neck is a faded blue silk ribbon. Suspended from the ribbon is a gold and enamel medallion with an image of St. George & the Dragon.
“What the . . . what . . . what . . . is that”! gasped Jo Stoyte.
Dr. Obispo coolly replies, “That’s the Order of the Garter hung ‘round the neck of what was once the Fifth Earl of Gonister - a foetal ape that’s had time to grow up. I reckon he is now two hundred and one years old.
Suddenly, another simian face appears; scraps of what had once been a dress indicated this ape was female. “Ah, that must be the housekeeper, Kate. The Fifth Earl brutally slaps Kate and chases her into the shadows. More slaps, hoots, grunts and the sounds of bestial intercourse ensue.
Jo Stoyte asks, What happened to them”?
“Just time”, answers Dr. Obispo.
“No need for further experiment. Now that we know it works, we can start you on daily injections right away”
Stoyte is quiet for a while.
Finally in a slow hesitating voice he says, “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like this? I mean . . . it wouldn’t happen all at once . . . it’d be a lot of years before . . . well . . . well . . . they did look like they were having a pretty good time. . . I mean in their own way of course . . . don’t you think so, Obispo”?
Dr. Obispo laughs.
Painting (detail) by: Em Schogut
Exegesis: So ends Aldous Huxley’s novel: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. It is a story based on the notion of neoteny. Neoteny was an idea much discussed the first part of the twentieth century. It’s based on a theorized evolutionary mechanism: the birth of a new species due to the retention of juvenile characteristics in the mature adult.
Some think the transition from ape to human is the result of neoteny. They think we are apes that die before we grow up. Huxley wonders, if that’s true, what would happen if an elixir of immortality allowed us enough time to reach full growth.