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

his outburst, walked briskly on, at a rate which he knew his wife would find exhausting, between the rows of loaded orange trees.
    From that swimming pool at the top of the donjon the view was prodigious. Floating on the translucent water, one had only to turn one’s head to see, between the battlement, successive vistas of plain and mountain, of green and tawny and violet and faint blue. One floated, one looked and one thought, that is, if one were Jeremy Pordage, of that tower in Epipsychidion, that tower with its chambers
    Looking towards the golden Eastern air
And level with the living winds.
    Not so, however, if one were Miss Virginia Maunciple. Virginia neither floated, nor looked, nor thought of Epipsychidion, but took another sip of whisky and soda, climbed to the highest platform of the diving tower, spread her arms, plunged, glided under water and, coming up immediately beneath the unsuspecting Pordage, caught him by the belt of his bathing pants and pulled him under.
    â€œYou asked for it,” she said, as he came up again, gasping and spluttering, to the surface. “Lying there without moving, like a silly old Buddha.” She smiled at him with an entirely good-natured contempt.
    These people that Uncle Jo kept bringing to the castle! An Englishman with a monocle to look at the armour; a man with a stammer to clean the pictures; a man who couldn’t speak anything but German to look at some silly old pots and plates; and today this other ridiculous Englishman with a face like a rabbit’s and a voice like Songs without Words on the saxophone.
    Jeremy Pordage blinked the water out of his eyes and, dimly, since he was presbyopic and without his spectacles, saw the young laughing face very close to his own, the body foreshortened and wavering uncertainly through the water. It was not often that he found himself in such proximity to such a being. He swallowed his annoyance and smiled at her.
    Miss Maunciple stretched out a hand and patted the bald patch at the top of Jeremy’s head. “Boy,” she said, “does it shine! Talk of billiard balls. I know what I shall call you: Ivory. Good-bye, Ivory.” She turned, swam to the ladder, climbed out, walked to the table on which the bottles and glasses were standing, drank the rest of her whisky and soda, then went and sat down on the edge of the couch on which, in black spectacles and bathing drawers, Mr. Stoyte was taking his sun bath.
    â€œWell, Uncle Jo,” she said in a tone of affectionate playfulness, “feeling kind of good?”
    â€œFeeling fine, baby,” he answered. It was true; the sun had melted away his dismal forebodings; he was living again in the present, that delightful present in which one brought happiness to sick children; in which there were Tittelbaums prepared, for five hundred bucks, to give one information worth at the very least a million; in which the sky was blue and the sunshine a caressing warmth upon the stomach; in which finally, one stirred out of a delicious somnolence to see little Virginia smiling down at one as though she really cared for her old Uncle Jo, and cared for him, what was more, not merely as an old uncle—no, sir; because when all’s said and done, a man is only as old as he feels and acts; and where his baby was concerned did he feel young? did he act young? Yes, sir. Mr. Stoyte smiled to himself, a smile of triumphant self-satisfaction.
    â€œWell, baby,” he said aloud, and laid a square, thick-fingered hand on the young woman’s bare knee.
    Through half-closed eyelids, Miss Maunciple gave him a secret and somehow indecent look of understanding and complicity; then uttered a little laugh and stretched her arms. “Doesn’t the sun feel good!” she said; and, closing her lids completely, she lowered her raised arms, clasped her hands behind her neck and threw back her shoulders. It was a pose that lifted the breasts, that emphasized the inward