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

for the occasional ripple of a fin and the rhythmic panting of their gills. A few inches from their staring eyes, a rosary of bubbles streamed ceaselessly up towards the light and all around them the water was spasmodically silver with the dartings of smaller fish. Sunk in their mindless ecstasy, the monsters paid no attention.
    Carp, Dr. Obispo explained; carp from the fishponds of a castle in Franconia—he had forgotten the name; but it was somewhere near Bamberg. The family was impoverished; but the fish were heirlooms, unpurchasable. Jo Stoyte had had to spend a lot of money to have these two stolen and smuggled out of the country in a specially constructed automobile with a tank under the back seats. Sixty pounders they were; over four feet long; and those rings in their tails were dated 1761.
    â€œThe beginning of my period,” Jeremy murmured in a sudden access of interest. 1761 was the year of “Fingal.” He smiled to himself; the juxtaposition of carp and Ossian, carp and Napoleon’s favourite poet, carp and the first premonitions of the Celtic Twilight, gave him a peculiar pleasure. What a delightful subject for one of his little essays! Twenty pages of erudition and absurdity—of sacrilege in lavender—of a scholar’s delicately canaille irreverence for the illustrious or unillustrious dead.
    But Dr. Obispo would not allow him to think his thoughts in peace. Indefatigably riding his own hobby, he began again. There they were, he said, pointing at the huge fish; nearly two hundred years old; perfectly healthy; no symptoms of senility; no apparent reason why they shouldn’t go on for another three or four centuries. There they were; and here were you. He turned back accusingly towards Jeremy. Here were you! no more than middle-aged, but already bald, already longsighted and short-winded; already more or less edentate; incapable of prolonged physical exertion; chronically constipated (could you deny it?); your memory already not so good as it was; your digestion capricious; your potency falling off, if it hadn’t, indeed, already disappeared for good.
    Jeremy forced himself to smile and, at every fresh item, nodded his head in what was meant to look like an amused assent. Inwardly, he was writhing with a mixture of distress at this all too truthful diagnosis and anger against the diagnostician for the ruthlessness of his scientific detachment. Talking with a humorous self-deprecation about one’s own advancing senility was very different from being bluntly told about it by someone who took no interest in you except as an animal that happened to be unlike a fish. Nevertheless, he continued to nod and smile.
    Here you were, Dr. Obispo repeated at the end of his diagnosis, and there were the carp. How was it that you didn’t manage your physiological affairs as well as they did? Just where and how and why did you make the mistake that had already robbed you of your teeth and hair and would bring you in a very few years to the grave?
    Old Metchnikoff had asked those questions and made a bold attempt to answer. Everything he said happened to be wrong; phagocytosis didn’t occur; intestinal autointoxication wasn’t the sole cause of senility; neurono-phages were mythological monsters; drinking sour milk didn’t materially prolong life; whereas the removal of the large gut did materially shorten it. Chuckling, he recalled those operations that were so fashionable just before the War—old ladies and gentlemen with their colons cut out, and in consequence being forced to evacuate every few minutes, like canaries! All to no purpose, needless to say; because of course the operation that was meant to make them live to a hundred killed them all off within a year or two. Dr. Obispo threw back his glossy head and uttered one of those peals of brazen laughter which were his regular response to any tale of human stupidity resulting in misfortune. Poor old Metchnikoff, he