After Many a Summer Dies the Swan Read Online Free PDF

shouted simultaneously. “Uncle Jo!”
    Starting out of sleep, the others took up the cry.
    â€œUncle Jo! Uncle Jo!”
    Mr. Stoyte was touched by the warmth of his reception. The face which Jeremy had found so disquietingly grim relaxed into a smile. In mock protest, he covered his ears with his hands. “You’ll make me deaf,” he cried. Then, in an aside to the nurse, “Poor kids,” he murmured. “Makes me feel I’d kind of like to cry,” His voice became husky with sentiment. “And when one thinks how sick they’ve been . . .” He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished; then, in another tone, “By the way,” he added, waving a large square hand in the direction of Jeremy Pordage, who had followed him into the ward and was standing near the door, wearing an expression of bewildered embarrassment, “This is Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Hell! I’ve forgotten your name.”
    â€œPordage,” said Jeremy, and reminded himself that Mr. Stoyte’s name had once been Slob.
    â€œPordage, that’s it. Ask him about history and literature,” he added derisively to the nurse. “He knows it all.”
    Jeremy was modestly protesting that his period was only from the invention of Ossian to the death of Keats, when Mr. Stoyte turned back to the children and in a voice that drowned the other’s faintly fluted disclaimers, shouted: “Guess what Uncle Jo’s brought you!”
    They guessed. Candies, bubble gum, balloons, guinea pigs. Mr. Stoyte continued triumphantly to shake his head. Finally, when the children had exhausted their powers of imagination, he dipped into the pocket of his old tweed jacket and produced, first, a whistle, then a mouth organ, then a small musical box, then a trumpet, then a wooden rattle, then an automatic pistol. This, however, he hastily put back.
    â€œNow play,” he said, when he had distributed the instruments. “All together. One, two, three.” And, beating time with both arms, he began to sing “Way down upon the Swanee River.”
    At this latest in a long series of shocks and surprises, Jeremy’s mild face took on an expression of more intense bewilderment.
    What a morning! The arrival at dawn. The Negro retainer. The interminable suburb. The Beverly Pantheon. The Object among the orange trees and his meeting with William Propter and this really dreadful Stoyte. Then, inside the castle, the Rubens and the great El Greco in the hall, the Vermeer in the elevator, the Rembrandt etchings along the corridors, the Winter-halter in the butler’s pantry.
    Then Miss Maunciple’s Louis XV boudoir, with the Watteau and the two Lancrets and the fully equipped soda fountain in a rococo embrasure, and Miss Maunciple herself, in an orange kimono, drinking a raspberry and peppermint ice cream soda at her own counter. He had been introduced, had refused the offer of a sundae and been hurried on again, always at top speed, always as though on the wings of a tornado, to see the other sights of the castle. The Rumpus Room, for example, with frescoes of elephants by Sert. The library with its woodwork by Grinling Gibbons, but with no books, because Mr. Stoyte had not yet brought himself to buy any. The small dining-room, with its Fra Angelico and its furniture from Brighton Pavilion. The large dining-room, modelled on the interior of the mosque at Fatehpur Sikri. The ballroom with its mirrors and coffered ceiling. The thirteenth-century stained glass in the eleventh-floor W.C. The morning room, with Boucher’s picture of La Petite Morphil bottom upwards on a pink satin sofa. The chapel, imported in fragments from Goa, with the walnut confessional used by St. Francois de Sales at Annecy. The functional billiard room. The indoor swimming pool. The Second Empire bar, with its nudes by Ingres. The two gymnasiums. The Christian Science Reading Room, dedicated to the memory of the late Mrs.