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

curve of the loins and the contrary swell of the buttocks—the sort of pose that a new arrival in the seraglio would be taught by the eunuchs to assume at her first interview with the sultan; the very pose, Jeremy recognized, as he had chanced to look her way, of that quite particularly unsuitable statue on the third floor of the Beverly Pantheon.
    Through his dark glasses, Mr. Stoyte looked up at her with an expression of possessiveness at once gluttonous and paternal. Virginia was his baby, not only figuratively and colloquially, but also in the literal sense of the word. His sentiments were simultaneously those of the purest father-love and the most violent eroticism.
    He looked up at her. By contrast with the shiny white satin of her breech clout and brassière the sunburnt skin seemed more richly brown. The planes of the young body flowed in smooth continuous curves, effortlessly solid, three-dimensional without accent or abrupt transition. Mr. Stoyte’s regard travelled up to the auburn hair and came down by way of the rounded forehead, of the wide-set eyes, and small, straight, impudent nose to the mouth. That mouth—it was her most striking feature. For it was to the mouth’s short upper lip that Virginia’s face owed its characteristic expression of child-like innocence—an expression that persisted through all her moods, that was noticeable whatever she might be doing, whether it was telling smutty stories or making conversation with the Bishop, taking tea in Pasadena or getting tight with the boys, enjoying what she called “a bit of yum-yum” or attending Mass. Chronologically, Miss Maunciple was a young woman of twenty-two; but that abbreviated upper lip gave her, in all circumstances, an air of being hardly adolescent, of not having reached the age of consent. For Mr. Stoyte, at sixty, the curiously perverse contrast between childishness and maturity, between the appearance of innocence and the fact of experience, was intoxicatingly attractive. It was not only so far as he was concerned that Virginia was both kinds of baby; she was also both kinds of baby objectively, in herself.
    Delicious creature! The hand that had lain inert, hitherto, upon her knee slowly contracted. Between the broad spatulate thumb and the strong fingers, what smoothness, what a sumptuous and substantial resilience!
    â€œJinny,” he said. “My baby!”
    The baby opened her large blue eyes and dropped her arms to her sides. The tense back relaxed, the lifted breasts moved downwards and forwards like soft living creatures sinking to repose. She smiled at him.
    â€œWhat are you pinching me for, Uncle Jo?”
    â€œI’d like to eat you,” her Uncle Jo replied in a tone of cannibalistic sentimentality.
    â€œI’m tough.”
    Mr. Stoyte uttered a maudlin chuckle. “Little tough kid!” he said.
    The tough kid stooped down and kissed him.
    Jeremy Pordage who had been quietly looking at the panorama and continuing his silent recitation of Epipsychidion, happened at this moment to turn once more in the direction of the couch and was so much embarrassed by what he saw that he began to sink and had to strike out violently with arms and legs to prevent himself from going under. Turning round in the water, he swam to the ladder, climbed out and, without waiting to dry himself, hurried to the elevator.
    â€œReally,” he said to himself as he looked at the Vermeer. “Really!”
    â€œI did some business this morning,” said Mr. Stoyte when the baby had straightened herself up again.
    â€œWhat sort of business?”
    â€œGood business,” he answered. “Might make a lot of money. Real money,” he insisted.
    â€œHow much?”
    â€œMaybe half a million,” he said cautiously understating his hopes; “maybe a million; maybe even more.”
    â€œUncle Jo,” she said, “I think you’re wonderful.” Her voice had the ring